Steve Fraser

A groundbreaking investigation of how and why, from the 18th century to the present day, American resistance to our ruling elites has vanished. From the American Revolution through the Civil Rights movement, Americans have long mobilized against political, social, and economic privilege. Hierarchies based on inheritance, wealth, and political preferment were treated as obnoxious and a threat to democracy. Mass movements envisioned a new world supplanting dog-eat-dog capitalism. But over the last half-century that political will and cultural imagination have vanished. Why? THE AGE OF ACQUIESCENCE seeks to solve that mystery. Steve Fraser's account of national transformation brilliantly examines the rise of American capitalism, the visionary attempts to protect the democratic commonwealth, and the great surrender to today's delusional fables of freedom and the politics of fear. Effervescent and razorsharp, THE AGE OF ACQUIESCENCE will be one of the most provocative and talked-about books of the year.

The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power

The Age of Acquiescence

Bryan Alexander

How did Americans react to economic inequality in the past? Why do we not rise up in the present? Answering those questions is the task of The Age of Acquiescence.

The first two-thirds concern that first question. Fraser surveys how Americans perceived and often organized against economic inequality from the 1700s through the early 20th century.

This is useful stuff, a tour of labor movements, political parties, key thinkers, strikes, suppressions, and trials. We read of Haymarket and the Pullman utopia, Eugene Debs and Jane Adams. Again and again we see resistance to plutocracy - often failed, but ultimately leading to regulation and redistributive programs through the New Deal and Great Society.

The last part of The Age of Acquiescence is about how those gains were reversed, starting in the late 1970s. Fraser explores the mid-century labor settlements (such as the Treaty of Detroit) for the roots of how Reagan was able to start changing Americans' minds from opposing to acquiescing to, even celebrating oligarchy. Here we read about the rise of debt, the ascent of consumerism, the shift in anti-elite cultural politics, globalization, the decline of unions, the Democrats' turn to the right under the Clintons, financialization, etc.

Fraser's book has many strong points. He has a fine ear for primary source materials. He sticks to points and works them out at length, examining them through some degree of analytical variation. And he writes with passion, engagingly. If you are new to the subject, it's a gold mine.

Some of the arguments are very interesting. Fraser paints useful pictures of the transition of management styles. I know that sounds dull, but it's actually pretty explanatory to think of the mid 20th century transition from family-based companies to professional management (269), and the latter's supplanting by shareholder-driven management during the later 20th century.

I like the casting of late 19th-century anti-plutocracy politics as a culture war (102), since this lets us think of a variety of developments in a unified way: union activism, religious discourse, changing sexual mores, the Populist party. I also appreciated the book's account of dystopian and utopian literature around inequality (155ff), from Edward Bellamy to L. Frank Baum. (I'm looking forward to Caesar's Column (1890)).

However, The Age of Acquiescence isn't sure if it's history or polemic. It thrives on following events through time, seeking causes and effects, but its focus is too narrow. We see little of foreign policy (anti-imperialism being a significant cause; mobilization for WWII and the Cold War is vital for understanding economic transformation). The economic crises of the 1970s reduced the appeal of many aspects of liberalism and the left, as did the crime panic; these don't do much for Fraser. The fall of the Soviet Union and the capitalization of China helped discredit the left throughout the West, but that point is quiet in Fraser's account. 

Moreover, the appeal of the American Dream doesn't do much in this book, which saps its arguments. In fact, these arguments are largely one-sided. We don't really get to hear the opposition - which is par for the course for a polemic, but not too useful as history. We need to hear the arguments against Keynes, against FDR, against LBJ in ways other than cackling. 

Personally, I was disappointed on another front, as I already knew most of this stuff. The historical sections will be familiar to many on the left, or to readers of Howard Zinn. The explanations for our present plutocracy I've already studied, both in recent scholarship and in popular discussions. 

I would give this three stars, but award it a bonus star for style. I think he invented the word "housoleum", or at least gave it a political charge (210). Sometimes Fraser is just superbly clear:Leveraged by debt, consumer culture has helped make the state of permanent wage labor - even a declining, downwardly mobile one - tolerable. (310)
In this postindustrial world not only is the labor question no longer asked, not only is proletarian revolution passé, but the proletariat itself seems passé. (365)
If public life can suffer a metaphysical blow, the death of the labor question was that blow. For millions of working people, it amputated the will to resist. (374)
In short, read this is you're new to the subjects, or would like a refresher.

The Age of Acquiescence The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power

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