The Refragmentation

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| January 2016One advantage of being old is that you can see change happen in
your lifetime. A lot of the change I've seen is fragmentation. US
politics is much more polarized than it used to be. Culturally we
have ever less common ground. The creative class flocks to a handful
of happy cities, abandoning the rest. And increasing economic
inequality means the spread between rich and poor is growing too.
I'd like to propose a hypothesis: that all these trends are instances
of the same phenomenon. And moreover, that the cause is not some
force that's pulling us apart, but rather the erosion of forces
that had been pushing us together.Worse still, for those who worry about these trends, the forces
that were pushing us together were an anomaly, a one-time combination
of circumstances that's unlikely to be repeated — and indeed, that
we would not want to repeat.The two forces were war (above all World War II), and the rise of
large corporations.The effects of World War II were both economic and social.
Economically, it decreased variation in income. Like all modern
armed forces, America's were socialist economically. From each
according to his ability, to each according to his need. More or
less. Higher ranking members of the military got more (as higher
ranking members of socialist societies always do), but what they
got was fixed according to their rank. And the flattening effect
wasn't limited to those under arms, because the US economy was
conscripted too. Between 1942 and 1945 all wages were set by the
National War Labor Board. Like the military, they defaulted to
flatness. And this national standardization of wages was so pervasive
that its effects could still be seen years after the war ended.
[1]Business owners weren't supposed to be making money either. FDR
said "not a single war millionaire" would be permitted. To ensure
that, any increase in a company's profits over prewar levels was
taxed at 85%. And when what was left after corporate taxes reached
individuals, it was taxed again at a marginal rate of 93%.
[2]Socially too the war tended to decrease variation. Over 16 million
men and women from all sorts of different backgrounds were brought
together in a way of life that was literally uniform. Service rates
for men born in the early 1920s approached 80%. And working toward
a common goal, often under stress, brought them still closer together.Though strictly speaking World War II lasted less than 4 years for
the US, its effects lasted longer. Wars make central governments
more powerful, and World War II was an extreme case of this. In
the US, as in all the other Allied countries, the federal government
was slow to give up the new powers it had acquired. Indeed, in
some respects the war didn't end in 1945; the enemy just switched
to the Soviet Union. In tax rates, federal power, defense spending,
conscription, and nationalism, the decades after the war looked more
like wartime than prewar peacetime.
[3]
And the social effects
lasted too. The kid pulled into the army from behind a mule team
in West Virginia didn't simply go back to the farm afterward.
Something else was waiting for him, something that looked a lot
like the army.If total war was the big political story of the 20th century, the
big economic story was the rise of a new kind of company. And this
too tended to produce both social and economic cohesion.
[4]The 20th century was the century of the big, national corporation.
General Electric, General Foods, General Motors. Developments in
finance, communications, transportation, and manufacturing enabled
a new type of company whose goal was above all scale. Version 1
of this world was low-res: a Duplo world of a few giant companies
dominating each big market.
[5]The late 19th and early 20th centuries had been a time of consolidation,
led especially by J. P. Morgan. Thousands of companies run by their
founders were merged into a couple hundred giant ones run by
professional managers. Economies of scale ruled the day. It seemed
to people at the time that this was the final state of things. John
D. Rockefeller said in 1880

The day of combination is here to stay. Individualism has gone,
never to return.

He turned out to be mistaken, but he seemed right for the next
hundred years.The consolidation that began in the late 19th century continued for
most of the 20th. By the end of World War II, as Michael Lind
writes, "the major sectors of the economy were either organized
as government-backed cartels or dominated by a few oligopolistic
corporations."For consumers this new world meant the same choices everywhere, but
only a few of them. When I grew up there were only 2 or 3 of most
things, and since they were all aiming at the middle of the market
there wasn't much to differentiate them.One of the most important instances of this phenomenon was in TV.
Here there were 3 choices: NBC, CBS, and ABC. Plus public TV for
eggheads and communists. The programs that the 3 networks offered were
indistinguishable. In fact, here there was a triple pressure toward
the center. If one show did try something daring, local affiliates
in conservative markets would make them stop. Plus since TVs were
expensive, whole families watched the same shows together, so they
had to be suitable for everyone.And not only did everyone get the same thing, they got it at the
same time. It's difficult to imagine now, but every night tens of
millions of families would sit down together in front of their TV
set watching the same show, at the same time, as their next door
neighbors. What happens now with the Super Bowl used to happen
every night. We were literally in sync.
[6]In a way mid-century TV culture was good. The view it gave of the
world was like you'd find in a children's book, and it probably had
something of the effect that (parents hope) children's books have
in making people behave better. But, like children's books, TV was
also misleading. Dangerously misleading, for adults. In his
autobiography, Robert MacNeil talks of seeing gruesome images that
had just come in from Vietnam and thinking, we can't show these to
families while they're having dinner.I know how pervasive the common culture was, because I tried to opt
out of it, and it was practically impossible to find alternatives.
outside source, that the ideas we were being fed on TV were crap,
and I stopped watching it.
[7]
But it wasn't just TV. It seemed
like everything around me was crap. The politicians all saying the
same things, the consumer brands making almost identical products
with different labels stuck on to indicate how prestigious they
were meant to be, the balloon-frame houses with fake "colonial"
skins, the cars with several feet of gratuitous metal on each end
that started to fall apart after a couple years, the "red delicious"
apples that were red but only nominally
apples. And in retrospect, it was crap.
[8]But when I went looking for alternatives to fill this void, I found
practically nothing. There was no Internet then. The only place
to look was in the chain bookstore in our local shopping mall.
[9]
There I found a copy of The Atlantic. I wish I could say it became
a gateway into a wider world, but in fact I found it boring and
incomprehensible. Like a kid tasting whisky for the first time and
pretending to like it, I preserved that magazine as carefully as
if it had been a book. I'm sure I still have it somewhere. But
though it was evidence that there was, somewhere, a world that
wasn't red delicious, I didn't find it till college.It wasn't just as consumers that the big companies made us similar.
They did as employers too. Within companies there were powerful
forces pushing people toward a single model of how to look and act.
IBM was particularly notorious for this, but they were only a little
more extreme than other big companies. And the models of how to

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