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| Myth of Liberal Ascendancy: Corporate Dominance from the Great Depression to the Great Recession
ISBN: 9781315633367
Platform/Publisher: Taylor & Francis / Routledge
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Unlimited; Download: Unlimited
Subjects: Social Sciences; Sociology & Social Policy;
Based on new archival research, G. Williams Domhoff challenges popular conceptions of the 1930's New Deal. Arguing instead that this period was one of increasing corporate dominance in government affairs, affecting the fate of American workers up to the present day. While FDR's New Deal brought sweeping legislation, the tide turned quickly after 1938. From that year onward nearly every major new economic law passed by Congress showed the mark of corporate dominance. Domhoff accessibly portrays documents of the Committee's vital influence in the halls of government, supported by his interviews with several of its key employees and trustees. Domhoff concludes that in terms of economic influence, liberalism was on a long steady decline, despite two decades of post-war growing equality, and that ironically, it was the successes of the civil rights, feminist, environmental, and gay-lesbian movements-not a new corporate mobilisation-that led to the final defeat of the liberal-labour alliance after 1968.
G. William Domhoff is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus and a Research Professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he has taught since 1965. He is the author or coauthor of fifteen books on power, politics, and social change in America, starting with Who Rules America? (1967) and The Higher Circles (1970), along with The Powers That Be (1979) and The Power Elite and the State (1990). His most recent books are The Leftmost City: Power and Progressive Politics in Santa Cruz (with Richard Gendron, 2009); Class and Power in the New Deal: Corporate Moderates, Southern Democrats, and the Liberal-Labor Coalition (with Michael J. Webber, 2011); The New CEOs: Women, African American, Latino, and Asian American Leaders of Fortune 500 Companies (with Richard L. Zweigenhaft, 2011); and Who Rules America? The Triumph of the Corporate Rich (seventh edition, 2013). |
