Air travel is unpleasant for many reasons, particularly in the post-9/11 age. Yet, blame for the cramped accommodations, bag fees, and lack of direct flights has to be assigned in part to the deregulation of the airline industry in the late 1970s. Airline deregulation and its consequences symbolize the ways in which neoliberal ideas and practices have come to shape economic policies as well as the daily lives of ordinary Americans.
Political historians have tended to treat deregulation as symptomatic of the inexorable march toward the right in the 1970s, which culminated in the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan and the dawn of a new age of conservatism and neoliberalism. Scholars like Meg Jacobs have looked to the example of the decade's energy crisis and how conservatives used the “panic at the pump” to implement a free-market, anti-statist, deregulatory agenda.Footnote 1 When airline deregulation comes up, it is usually in relation to Reagan's famous breaking of the air traffic strike in 1981.Footnote 2 Reuel Schiller's article refreshingly reveals that the deregulatory impulse of the late 1970s had roots as much, or even more, in the left as in the right. Schiller goes beyond the oft-forgotten fact that it was Jimmy Carter who initiated key deregulatory measures. Instead, he reveals a larger and more contingent story and he implicates a wider cast of characters, including such icons of liberalism and the left as Tom Hayden, Ralph Nader, Stephen Breyer, and Ted Kennedy. In doing so, he shifts both discussions of airline deregulation and the history of late twentieth-century political economy in two important ways.
First, while other historians have documented the pervasive antigovernment ethos that stretched across the political spectrum from the 1960s onward, much of their focus has been on the antipathy to abusive presidential power, emphasizing the Vietnam War and Watergate.Footnote 3 Schiller does not deny the importance of distrust in the presidency; however, he locates a deeper antipathy to the growing administrative agencies. He carefully explicates the work of a series of scholars such as C. Wright Mills, Gabriel Kolko, and Charles Reich and offers novel interpretations of their scholarship on administrative capture. Schiller spotlights Kolko's famous explanation of “regulatory capture” at the Interstate Commerce Commission and then provides a lengthy examination of Reich's bestselling The Greening of America, which he credits with popularizing the argument that regulation represented “the violent destruction of individual autonomy” and offered a catalogue of “abusive bureaucratic power[s]” (pp. 737, 738).
Second, by parsing the thinking of Reich, the counterculture, and especially Ralph Nader and his “Raiders,” Schiller shows that opposition to regulation and bureaucracy did not automatically equate to a faith in or promotion of the market, thereby breaking apart one of the core assumptions about neoliberal thought and policy. In fact, Schiller shows how, much to the chagrin of people like economist Alfred Kahn and future Supreme Court Justice Breyer, the dramatic congressional hearings on airline deregulation focused primarily on how the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB) served as a handmaiden to the airlines, rather than on Kahn and Breyer's argument that a more market-based approach would be more efficient and would help consumers and reduce inflation.
Schiller packs a great deal into the limited space of his article. However, he does miss an opportunity to further elucidate both the differences and the connections between the visions espoused by Breyer, Kahn, Reich, and Nader. This parsing might further clarify the distinction between liberal and left thinking about deregulation, the role of the state, and markets. There was also a chance to more thoroughly link the various figures and groups on the left. I wondered how much Nader's Unsafe at Any Speed and other advocacy pieces paved the way for the popularity of The Greening of America. And in turn, how many of Reich's Yale law students went to work at the Center for the Study of Responsive Law? Fleshing out these intellectual connections and political networks might deepen our understanding of both the development and impact of the fascinating forms of left anti-statist thought that Schiller identifies.
Schiller speeds through the passage of the Airline Deregulation Act in 1978 and its aftermath. However, I was curious as to if and how Nader and Reich responded to the outcome and consequences of their advocacy for deregulation. Did they have regrets or shift their position in later years? Even if they did not intend for it, this left form of anti-statism clearly informed and shaped not only the deregulatory impulses of Reagan and the Bushes but also Democratic administrations and politicians. It was, after all, Reich's student Bill Clinton who famously announced in the 1996 State of the Union “that the era of big government is over.” It was also Clinton who furthered deregulation in telecommunications, housing, and financial services on the grounds that competition would mitigate corruption, contribute to economic growth, and help middle-class consumers and the poor. While Barack Obama advocated for new regulation of the financial services and housing industries in the aftermath of the 2008 recession, his administration also allowed for the further consolidation of the major airlines so that by the end of his tenure, just a few airlines controlled the vast majority of the U.S. market. This oligopolistic concentration, it seems, was the very opposite of what people like Nader and even Breyer wanted.Footnote 4
Ultimately, “The Curious Origins of Airline Deregulation” has important implications for how we think about not just the past but the present as well. It is an important call to scholars of political economy to avoid seeing neoliberalism as a linear narrative and to expand their quest to understand its roots to include the entire political spectrum—including the left.
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Air travel is unpleasant for many reasons, particularly in the post-9/11 age. Yet, blame for the cramped accommodations, bag fees, and lack of direct flights has to be assigned in part to the deregulation of the airline industry in the late 1970s. Airline deregulation and its consequences symbolize the ways in which neoliberal ideas and practices have come to shape economic policies as well as the daily lives of ordinary Americans.
Political historians have tended to treat deregulation as symptomatic of the inexorable march toward the right in the 1970s, which culminated in the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan and the dawn of a new age of conservatism and neoliberalism. Scholars like Meg Jacobs have looked to the example of the decade's energy crisis and how conservatives used the “panic at the pump” to implement a free-market, anti-statist, deregulatory agenda.Footnote 1 When airline deregulation comes up, it is usually in relation to Reagan's famous breaking of the air traffic strike in 1981.Footnote 2 Reuel Schiller's article refreshingly reveals that the deregulatory impulse of the late 1970s had roots as much, or even more, in the left as in the right. Schiller goes beyond the oft-forgotten fact that it was Jimmy Carter who initiated key deregulatory measures. Instead, he reveals a larger and more contingent story and he implicates a wider cast of characters, including such icons of liberalism and the left as Tom Hayden, Ralph Nader, Stephen Breyer, and Ted Kennedy. In doing so, he shifts both discussions of airline deregulation and the history of late twentieth-century political economy in two important ways.
First, while other historians have documented the pervasive antigovernment ethos that stretched across the political spectrum from the 1960s onward, much of their focus has been on the antipathy to abusive presidential power, emphasizing the Vietnam War and Watergate.Footnote 3 Schiller does not deny the importance of distrust in the presidency; however, he locates a deeper antipathy to the growing administrative agencies. He carefully explicates the work of a series of scholars such as C. Wright Mills, Gabriel Kolko, and Charles Reich and offers novel interpretations of their scholarship on administrative capture. Schiller spotlights Kolko's famous explanation of “regulatory capture” at the Interstate Commerce Commission and then provides a lengthy examination of Reich's bestselling The Greening of America, which he credits with popularizing the argument that regulation represented “the violent destruction of individual autonomy” and offered a catalogue of “abusive bureaucratic power[s]” (pp. 737, 738).
Second, by parsing the thinking of Reich, the counterculture, and especially Ralph Nader and his “Raiders,” Schiller shows that opposition to regulation and bureaucracy did not automatically equate to a faith in or promotion of the market, thereby breaking apart one of the core assumptions about neoliberal thought and policy. In fact, Schiller shows how, much to the chagrin of people like economist Alfred Kahn and future Supreme Court Justice Breyer, the dramatic congressional hearings on airline deregulation focused primarily on how the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB) served as a handmaiden to the airlines, rather than on Kahn and Breyer's argument that a more market-based approach would be more efficient and would help consumers and reduce inflation.
Schiller packs a great deal into the limited space of his article. However, he does miss an opportunity to further elucidate both the differences and the connections between the visions espoused by Breyer, Kahn, Reich, and Nader. This parsing might further clarify the distinction between liberal and left thinking about deregulation, the role of the state, and markets. There was also a chance to more thoroughly link the various figures and groups on the left. I wondered how much Nader's Unsafe at Any Speed and other advocacy pieces paved the way for the popularity of The Greening of America. And in turn, how many of Reich's Yale law students went to work at the Center for the Study of Responsive Law? Fleshing out these intellectual connections and political networks might deepen our understanding of both the development and impact of the fascinating forms of left anti-statist thought that Schiller identifies.
Schiller speeds through the passage of the Airline Deregulation Act in 1978 and its aftermath. However, I was curious as to if and how Nader and Reich responded to the outcome and consequences of their advocacy for deregulation. Did they have regrets or shift their position in later years? Even if they did not intend for it, this left form of anti-statism clearly informed and shaped not only the deregulatory impulses of Reagan and the Bushes but also Democratic administrations and politicians. It was, after all, Reich's student Bill Clinton who famously announced in the 1996 State of the Union “that the era of big government is over.” It was also Clinton who furthered deregulation in telecommunications, housing, and financial services on the grounds that competition would mitigate corruption, contribute to economic growth, and help middle-class consumers and the poor. While Barack Obama advocated for new regulation of the financial services and housing industries in the aftermath of the 2008 recession, his administration also allowed for the further consolidation of the major airlines so that by the end of his tenure, just a few airlines controlled the vast majority of the U.S. market. This oligopolistic concentration, it seems, was the very opposite of what people like Nader and even Breyer wanted.Footnote 4
Ultimately, “The Curious Origins of Airline Deregulation” has important implications for how we think about not just the past but the present as well. It is an important call to scholars of political economy to avoid seeing neoliberalism as a linear narrative and to expand their quest to understand its roots to include the entire political spectrum—including the left.