ROBERT LEKACH MAN
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1930s would never again be repeated. Everybody, except for
such traditional American losers as blacks and Puerto Ricans, got
something valuable out of the annual dividend of economic growth.
Prizes for all!
The postwar climate of diminished class warfare compelled
radical unions and socialist parties in Europe and Japan to scrap or
soften earlier programmatic emphases on redistributive taxation,
nationalization of private enterprise, and confiscatory inheritance
levies . It was perhaps a sign of the times that according to the
wisdom of the polls , George McGovern lost votes among factory
operatives and their wives by advocating redistributive negative
income taxes and serious levies upon inheritance . Daniel Bell's
celebrated speculations during the Eisenhower period concerning
the end of ideology were a generalization from the observed
decline in the capacity of Marxism as a fighting faith to attract mass
support in parliamentary democracies . Save in England, a special
case, unions began to move in the direction of strictly limited
business objectives-more money, shorter hours, and new fringe
benefits, that since the era of Samuel Gompers have comprised
the program of the official American labor movement .
England 's Labour party and Germany's Social Democrats
discovered that it was expedient if not essential that much traditional
ideological baggage be discarded. The electoral record seemed to
prove that before working class voters consented to place Harold
Wilson and Willy Brandt at the head of their respective political
tables, they demanded plausible reassurance that government by the
"left" would entail no disconcerting alterations in the arrangements
which generated floods of cars, appliances, and package tours of
Spain and Italy .
This generation of comparative social harmony was based upon
the reality, validated in rising paychecks, of dependable, long-term
economic growth. In Japan and West Germany, the process of post–
war reconstruction stimulated prosperity . So did the injection of
Marshall Plan aid and the movement of American capital into the
Common Market. Banking and budgetary policy were equally sup–
portive of good times. The Federal Reserve and the central banks
of other countries quietly agreed to validate dollar claims against
gross national product slightly in excess of their economies' capacity
to spew out new goods and services at current prices . -Although
corporate profit targets and union wage claims added to totals one,
