18 January 12
n recent weeks Mitt Romney has become the poster child for unchecked capitalism, a role he seems to embrace with relish. Concerns about economic equality, he told Matt Lauer of NBC, were really about class warfare.
"When you have a president encouraging the idea of
dividing America based on the 99 percent versus 1 percent," he said,
"you have opened up a whole new wave of approach in this country which
is entirely inconsistent with the concept of one nation under God."
Mr. Romney was on to something, though perhaps not what he intended.
The concept of "one nation under God" has a noble
lineage, originating in Abraham Lincoln’s hope at Gettysburg that "this
nation, under God, shall not perish from the earth." After Lincoln,
however, the phrase disappeared from political discourse for decades.
But it re-emerged in the mid-20th century, under a much different guise:
corporate leaders and conservative clergymen deployed it to discredit
Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal.
During the Great Depression, the prestige of big
business sank along with stock prices. Corporate leaders worked
frantically to restore their public image and simultaneously roll back
the "creeping socialism" of the welfare state. Notably, the American
Liberty League, financed by corporations like DuPont and General Motors,
made an aggressive case for capitalism. Most, however, dismissed its
efforts as self-interested propaganda. (A Democratic Party official
joked that the organization should have been called "the American
Cellophane League" because "first, it’s a DuPont product and, second,
you can see right through it.") READ MORE
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