It takes a giant leap to go from “Fuel prices are too high” to “We should deregulate the entire airline industry and give it away to private capitalists.” But some people thought they could use the fuel crisis to pull it off. The cast of characters who pulled off the great corporate heist of our public air space could be plopped into an Ocean’s Eleven movie without the script missing a beat. They include the following characters:
The Orchestrator: Yale law professor Robert Bork. Bork, who is the founder of the conservative judicial philosophy known as originalism, basically invented the case for airline deregulation.
The Safecracker: Future Supreme Court justice Stephen Breyer. Breyer cowrote the Airline Deregulation Act and recharacterized the Republican calls for deregulation into something establishment Democrats could support.
The Expert: Future airline executive Phil Bakes. Bakes was a congressional staffer and the other author of the bill, who falsely sold deregulation as populism.
The Face Man: Consumer advocate Ralph Nader. Nader drummed up popular support for deregulation, arguing (rightly) that corporate capture of the CAB had led to industry-regulator collusion while making the case (wrongly) that it would somehow be better for consumers to have industry in charge of commercial air travel.
The mark for this con job, the dupe all these people had to gaslight into handing them the keys to the kingdom and ushering in the era of neoliberalism, was one of the most solidly liberal Democrats we’ve ever had in the US Senate: Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts. Democrats probably never would have turned their backs on a literal New Deal agency like the CAB without a Roosevelt Democrat (who was also functional political royalty) like Kennedy leading the way.
In 1976, with the Republican Party still reeling from the associated scandals of Watergate and President Gerald Ford’s pardoning of Nixon, Kennedy was eager to continue the family business of running for president. But Kennedy couldn’t run against Ford in 1976. Well, I mean, he could have, but in 1969 he had kinda, sorta, actually killed a woman, Mary Jo Kopechne, when he drove his car off a bridge in Chappaquiddick with her in it after a booze-filled party, escaped the submerged vehicle, and left her there without reporting the accident for hours. (He ultimately pleaded guilty to leaving the scene of an accident.) Kennedy was still too toxic to run in ‘76, clearing the way for Jimmy Carter to become president, but he was absolutely planning to challenge Carter in a primary in 1980. He was looking for a signature issue that he could push the Carter administration on and distinguish himself from the administration’s “malaise.” He realized, as everybody with half a brain realized, that the fuel crisis was Carter’s biggest weakness.