An Analysis of America’s History by Jefferson Cowie

Jefferson Cowie is a political historian and a social researcher who has focused on how inequity, work and class take part in shaping the American politics, capitalism and culture. He has simplified in details the attributes of the American politics during the twentieth century in his book; The Great Exception: The New Deal and the Limits of American Politics. With impressive eloquence and clarity, Cowie has expounded and shed light on the direction that America took in the previous century, and the projected destination of the nation in the future. He goes ahead and lays a field for American citizens, historians, political analysts, political commentators and activists to rethink and understand better the approach taken while tackling plutocracy.

Cowie argues that the calm eras of liberalism which were presided over by the likes of Roosevelt and JF Kennedy was not proper, and victories by the likes of Ronald Reagan and Gingrich were not revolutions but were more of actions taken to restore the country to where it should have been. For instance, Franklin Roosevelt promised to help those who had been forgotten at the bottom of the economic pyramid during the time that he was campaigning.

Roosevelt swore to bring about a united economic front through the New Deal only under one condition of the subordination of the nineteenth century individualism. The entire country was satisfied and felt hopeful like never before. From Cowie's perspective, this was the best of what our country could be as a nation, secure, caring, sharing, occasionally visionary and secure. The involvement of the United States in the world war two brought even more economic confidence and enfranchisement to its citizens.

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He links the past and he present in a catchy way and influences us to see and realize the New Deal, and view the post war era as an exception and not as the rule. He explains how a New Deal in from of reforms in the labor movement is no longer relevant. He goes further and insinuates that in case the movement was to come back, it would happen in a different manner. We should therefore be grateful and weary of what will come after our New Deal gridlock. In his arguments, Cowie tackles big issues that we cannot assume because they will take part in painting the picture of our country's history and make us rethink about what happened to imminent economic inequality that it once posed.

Taking the period between 1930s through to 1970s, Jefferson argues that our country built a unique, equitable period which is not in pattern with the deeper historical happenings of the country's cultural outlook, economic structure and most importantly political practice.

During those years, Cowie argues that the government used its resources for the sake of its working citizens in a manner that it has never done before, or even after. All these happened because of several reasons. Some of the reasons being that the value of the stock market dropped by almost ninety percent of its original value, in every four men, one had no job and so there was warrant for any kind of positive response of any magnitude by the government.

Here, Jefferson Cowie stretches his case when he insists that those people who are not employed needed a new set of rights and a soft political culture to remove them from despair. Cowie captures the years around the mid twentieth century as a time of impossibility, in the name of liberalism. By then, about thirty five percent of the country's labor force belonged to the then existing unions. This was a huge percentage. Cowie thinks of the situation as a time that brought more than a great economic depression, but a time that captured the national mood.

There were more expansive homes, more equity, more optimism, more leisure, more consumer goods and more education. Around this time, Ronald Reagan travelled to the southern part of the United States as a Governor and seconded the approval of states' rights. Cowie thinks that Reagan's remarks here were kind of racist.He goes ahead and mentions in his book that the phrase states' rightswas a phrase that,"worked like a dog whistle to rally those who had yet to give up formal and informal faith in white supremacy, or semi-independence of the South and it's values." This is the point where Cowie's era of collective rights ends. We have however been in a state of misery and inequity ever since, he says.

The crises which were brought along by the world war two compelled the relationship that existed between American politics and class to change. However, these changes were less a permanent victory of the state of welfare then the outcome of a temporary stoppage of unnecessary enduring tension that revolved around immigration, race, individualism, culture and class.

Against this bottleneck, Jefferson Cowie goes ahead and expounds further on to how and why any level-headed American should fight for an all-inclusive and collective economic rights, and the need to build on a proper understanding of how the New Deal came into being and how it ultimately became contrary to the economic, cultural and political patterns of the history of our country. Theoreticallycollective economic rightsrefer to everyone's inclusion in the rights, but in real sense, collective means rewarding a specific group or groups of interest as in Roosevelt's scenario. This way, Cowie strengthens the imagination of the work that lies ahead of us.

Jefferson Cowie's argument is not convincing enough. It is more of a slippery slope and a misjudged argument from the beginning. He insinuates that there was no need, seen by the citizens of the United States to prosper before 1930s. there was an equally powerful urge to prosper before the era that Cowie is talking about as opposed to the era that he is talking about. This is evident because similar economic empowerment programs that were in place as early as the 1920s had the same objectives as those that are seemingly valued more by Cowie, this was the need to have more education, more jobs, more facilities and more electric devices at the citizens' disposal.

As for the "Great Depression", it was an issue worth mentioning because of only one reason, that there was a wanting level of unemployment. Cowie goes ahead and approves that the remedy to this should has just been institutionalization and or codification of economic rights. Instead, growth that delivered the inadequacy of employment opportunities would have been the best antidote for the high level of joblessness.

Proposing that the unemployed or underemployed people before the world wars needed a new set of rights and a more accommodative political atmosphere, made it clearer that Cowie did not look at the problem from a perspective that would have brought permanent growthand development to the country but instead made an obvious suggestion that would have been considered by then.

Jefferson Cowie goes ahead and discusses the 1950s, an era that had high wages amidst real prosperity. High wages could come to be because the country engaged in several battleswith unionized workers or, the country lacked economic competition. This is reasonable because by then, Europe could have been best described as lying flat on its back and the entire continent of Asia were paying their employees as they wished because of their conditions. As soon as assembly lines in the countries oversees hummed, the luxury of high wages in the United States came to an end. Clearly, the remedies approved by Cowie were not actions that were more of long term solutions, but temporary because the created system could not survive independently until the foreign countries' patterns were considered.

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