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Add the fact that worker benefits are shrinking, particularly health-care coverage, and that Americans are working longer hours. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, by 1999, over one decade, the average work year has expanded by 184 hours. The typical American worked 350 hours more per year than the average European. Kevin Phillips writes, “Buffeted by these downcurrents—longer work hours, two-earner households, personal strain, and the increasing cultural and philosophic subordination of median households—the broad U.S. quality of life indexes began to decline in the 1970s. Until the seventies, social health and progress indicators in the United States had climbed upward alongside the gross domestic product. But once having turned, they continued to fall, continuing on a downslope in the eighties and most of the nineties as federal policy remained preoccupied with capital rather than with workers or social conditions.”

You want to know why? Because B Rapoport is one unusual millionaire. He gives money to politicians who care more about the people than they do about their rich donors. Most political contributors are in it for the money, and they are richly repaid with special tax breaks, anti-competitive measures, and government subsidies—at the expense of those who don’t contribute, don’t pay attention, and don’t vote.

There’s an old adage about government, that there are only three questions: (1) Who benefits, who profits? (2) Who rules the rulers? And (3) What the hell will they do to us next?

Those who rule the rulers are those who give large campaign contributions. Thomas Frank, the passionate populist and author of One Market Under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism, and the End of Economic Democracy, once started an essay with a quote from The New York Times:

Despite this, many economists still think that electricity deregulation will work. A product is a product, they say, and competition always works better than state control.

“I believe in that premise as a matter of religious faith,” said Philip J. Romero, dean of the business school at the University of Oregon and one of the architects of California’s deregulation plan.

—the new york times, FEBRUARY 4, 2001

Time was, the only place a guy could expound the mumbo jumbo of the free market was the country club locker room or the pages of Reader’s Digest. Spout off about it anywhere else and you’d be taken for a Bircher or some new strain of Jehovah’s Witness. After all, in the America of 1968, when the great backlash began, the average citizen, whether housewife or hard hat or salary-man, still had an all-too-vivid recollection of the Depression. Not to mention a fairly clear understanding of what social class was all about. Pushing laissez-faire ideology back then had all the prestige and credibility of hosting a Tupperware party.

But thirty-odd years of culture war have changed all that. Mention “elites” these days and nobody thinks of factory owners or gated-community dwellers. Instead they assume that what you’re mad as hell about is the liberal media, or the pro-criminal judiciary, or the tenured radicals, or the know-it-all bureaucrats.

For the guys down at the country club, all these inverted forms of class war worked spectacularly well. That is not to say the right-wing culture warriors ever outsmarted the liberal college professors or shut down the Hollywood studios or repealed rock ‘n’ roll. Shout though they might, they never quite got cultural history to stop. But what they did win was far more important: political power, a free hand to turn back the clock on such non-glamorous issues as welfare, taxes, OSHA, even the bankruptcy laws, for chrissake. Assuring their millionaire clients that culture war got the deregulatory job done, they simply averted their eyes as bizarre backlash variants flowered in the burned-over districts of conservatism: Posses Comitatus, backyard Confederacies mounting mini-secessions, crusades against Darwin.

Populists, as opposed to liberals, do not get particularly excited about culture wars. We do not