Beware of Rats - Really Big Rats

[Jack Sprat]

In November 1980, a former Union activist who fashioned a career as a successful screen actor, used his familiarity as a Conservative convert to begin dismantling the greatest middle class ever built, under the leadership of Franklin Roosevelt. The great American middle class, created by FDR's concept of utilizing the strength of government to reign in corporate greed in a time of depression, put Americans to work in building a powerful infrastructure and combining government and private sectors to arm the Allies in a World War against the Axis. In the years following, suburban America was populated by baby-boomers and young families who could anticipate a brighter future than any of their ancestors preceding them.

Enter the Big RAT Reagan, stage right: Reagan capitalized from a draw-down economic period immediately following the Vietnam war and a frenzy of white resentment that Democrats were now including blacks into that great middle-class structure. By the late 70s, all regions of the country felt the pinch of high interest rates, generated by inflation that did not exclude a spike in fuel costs as it would now, and a growing resentment over the strains of a newly integrated school system and society. The populist message of Reagan that portrayed the Government as the Cause of their woes, led many to cross the Great Divide and become "Reagan Democrats". These former Democrats, who had enjoyed the benefits of the FDR New Deal policies and Union solidarity, became a part of the Conservative machine that was designed to destroy them and the lives of their children, as well. Even some Labor organizations endorsed the Big Rat and soon learned that they had sealed their own fatal death at his hands. There are no doubt, some great beneficiaries of Reagan's great war on the middle-class that has empowered corporations with unbridled wealth, due to complete deregulation of any governmental restraints to reign in the always internal greed that is part of their being. But, there is also a pitiful, angry and deranged vestige of those former Reagan Democrats who lost all the prosperity and self-assuredness that their former lives as "FDR's New Deal Democrats" enjoyed. Their union jobs gone, their children and grandchildren facing an uncertain future of career choices, their savings exhausted by catastrophic college costs or hospital bills, these former Reagan Democrats have only their scars of racism left. Although the Johnson edicts of mandatory busing to achieve racial quotas aggravated a strain in a newly integrated society, the progressive move to equality was long overdue. So, the resentful majority of those resentful Reaganites not only resigned their own fate to the undoing of the last vestiges of the "Greatest middle-class in history", they also turned out the lights on the future promise of their children and grandchildren. They have allowed it to be destroyed, rather than share it with another ethnic group of Americans. It should make them cry. But, it has only made them what is now known as "embittered Republicans."

This is how I viewed history unfold in my lifetime and how I relate the story of the Biggest Rat in history to the Republican sheep in my family.