Guest Post by William Neil
Part Two: A Brief History of
Democracy and Capitalism: A Troubled
Relationship
Before I conduct an examination of the Maryland Democratic claim that “this is the best we could do,” which involves an assessment of the legislature and its leaders in Annapolis, as well as the forces operating upon them, “constraining” them, I want to brief my readers on what I have been reading and listening to (at the Real News network) as deeper background for this writing. I maintain that these sources form the intellectual basis for the quickening of the national left’s pulse and the talk of a new left “populism.” Those sources have in turn built their views upon the cruel foundation of facts of today’s American political economy, the great and growing inequalities of wealth and income, and the related power to twist and deform our democratic institutions to produce these terrible outcomes for the bottom 50% of the population, the working class (who admittedly may not see themselves that way), and increasingly, the 40% who make up the “middle class.” (That split follows the handling of data on wealth and income distribution by Thomas Piketty in “Capital in the 21st Century, who looks at the top 1% of earners, the top 10%, the 40% in the middle class, and the bottom 50%.)
I begin with Chris Hedges powerful and
moving speech, which I first saw in written form in January of this year, but
which launched in Santa Monica, California on October 13, 2013. It is entitled The Myth of Human Progress and the Collapse of Complex Societies. I
won’t even try to offer you a condensed version, my words would fall short of
the electricity and tensions contained within it, but I will say that Hedges
has written elsewhere that American is now a “tinderbox” for revolution, or
something close to it, which will most likely ignite from two of the most
unhappy and disenfranchised sources: the indebted college graduates who can’t
find any work, or who now make up a substantial portion of the 28 million I
have written about, working in the service/retail sector and displacing those
with less education, and the déclassé
intellectuals thrown out of journalism, publishing and teaching by the
vast changes in corporate forms, technology and education itself. Are they now obsolete? We shall see. I must
note from my readings that these types were not hard to find rising to
prominence in the early days of the French Revolution. Now for Mr. Hedges, in his own words, taken
from the very beginnings of his speech:
The
most prescient portrait of the American character and our ultimate fate as a
species is found in Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick.” Melville makes our murderous
obsessions, our hubris, violent impulses, moral weakness and inevitable
self-destruction visible in his chronicle of a whaling voyage. He is our foremost oracle. He is to us what William Shakespeare was to
Elizabethan England or Fyodor Dostoyevsky to czarist Russia…Yet we, like Ahab
and his crew, rationalize our collective madness. All calls for prudence, for halting the march
toward economic, political and environmental catastrophe, for sane limits on
carbon emissions, are ignored or ridiculed…The corporate assault on culture,
journalism, education, the arts and critical thinking has left those who speak
this truth marginalized and ignored, frantic Cassandras who are viewed as
slightly unhinged and depressingly apocalyptic.
We are consumed by a mania for hope, which our corporate masters lavishly
provide, at the expense of truth.
If readers need a confirmation of some
of Hedges more dire forebodings, consider the nature and fate of Wendell Berry’s
Jefferson Lecture, the nation’s highest honor in the humanities. He delivered It All Turns Upon Affection in April of 2012 at the Kennedy Center
in Washington, DC, and the nation’s intellectuals virtually ignored it, despite
the fact that Berry is neither frantic in style, or content, nor
depressed. But he was deeply critical of
the state of the economy, and agriculture, the implications of technology, and
the human costs of the character and pace of it, and, in his own way, patiently
apocalyptic, waiting to begin again in a radically re-organized, decentralized
local economy where things might, indeed, “all turn upon affection.”
Judge for yourself: here are the links:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAo7ky1kq-Q (The video is 53 minutes long.)
My next intellectual cold shower, an
online essay by University of Athens economics Professor Yanis Varoufakis,
appeared at Naked Capitalism in late February of this year. Given his vantage point in Athens
watching as the Greek people have seen
their own elected officials cede the determining voice in their economy to
neoliberal dominated external economic institutions – especially the European
Central Bank, the IMF…and the punitive mood in Berlin and Frankfurt…Professor
Varoufakis was prompted to wonder whether the magical powers of the Internet
might indeed reinvigorate the flagging state of democracies in the West, where
there has yet to be a political revolt that matched the intensity of the
suffering imposed by the dispensers of economic austerity: there is no revolt by the center-left, despite
the fact that conditions in Spain and Greece approach if not exceed those our
own in the Great Depression.
Indeed, the morning headlines in late
May are delivering the political ramifications of Europe’s economic troubles.
The populist Right has surged in the European Parliament elections held on May
26, 2014. In Greece the left Syriza
Party did very well, outpolling the governing “center-right” New Democracy
party according to the account in Andrew Higgin’s article “Populists’ Rise In
Europe Vote Shakes Leaders: ‘Painful’ Doubt is Cast on Political Order.” (New
York Times, May 27, 2014, Page A1.) What
also caught my attention in Higgin’s account, and something to keep in mind as
this essay’s theme unfolds, was the comment by Sigmar Gabriel, the Social
Democratic vice chancellor in Angela Merkel’s coalition: “ ‘Europe has grown far too far apart from its citizens.’”
I
was particularly drawn to this essay because the Professor’s questions led him
back to the ancient history of democracy, especially that of the Greeks,
Athenian democracy to be more specific, in the 5th century B.C. Varoufakis’ work also crossed paths with those
of someone I had been reading and writing about: the late Sir M.I. Finley (1912-1986), one of the
world’s most respected classical scholars, and one who had been driven from
teaching at Rutgers during the early days of the HUAC-McCarthy era. Ironically, for our own democracy perhaps, it
was the honor bestowed upon him by Rutgers itself – an apology, perhaps, for
voting to banish him in the first place – to deliver the first Mason Welch
Gross Lectures, which became his book Democracy.
Although
I had been reading Democracy: Ancient
and Modern (1973) and The Ancient
Economy (1973) and Varoufakis yet another of his works, our concerns about
democracy crossed the same paths, despite one ocean and one sea of separation
between us. Why no revolt in Greece; why
no revolt in the US; and why, when U.S. Democrats are worrying about apathy and
low turnout in the Congressional elections of 2014, and New York Times
columnist Charles Blow was writing on April 9, 2014 that “We Should Be in A
Rage,” do the vast majority of my fellow 28 million working poor continue to
just tread water, silently stewing – or lingering just below “simmer?” Here is M. I. Finley in Democracy going after “elite theories of democracy” and their
inclination to welcome the apathy of the masses:
My argument
is that, far from being a healthy necessary condition of democracy, apathy is a
withdrawal response to the imbalance in the access of different interest-groups
to those who make the decisions…If political apathy has not always been evident
on such a large scale in democratic societies, its current intensity must be
explained before it is either welcomed or despaired of. .. there is flawed
logic in a doctrine which denies large sectors of the population’s effective
participation in the decision-making process on the ground that their demands
are likely to be ‘extremist’ and then seizes on their lack of restraint as
proof of the rightness of their exclusion.
I think if we examined closely how it
was that between the Democratic Party, the AFL-CIO and the left think tanks
that they support, they all “arrived” at a minimum wage goal of $10.10 per
hour, we would find that there was little or no direct participation of the 28
million working for below $10.00 per hour in the determination process, a
process that as best I can judge, took place far from public scrutiny, rightly
or wrongly, out of sight. At least from the reaction of those that I work with,
they are not jumping with enthusiasm and ready to turn out in November of 2014
to say “Thank you Democratic Party, you changed my economic life.” As is so often the case, the policy
dimensions were set long before voters had a say on them, or in their formulation, and in the processes they will search in vain to find
traces of, “the who, why and when.” “Elite theory” of Democracy anyone, even
when the means of survival of the working poor are at issue? How did the SEIU feel about the sudden
“precipitation” around $10.10 per hour, when they had been sticking their necks
out, very publicly, for $15.00 per hour?
Coming back to our very contemporary
Greek economics’ Professor’s views, we find him asserting that
I believe
that a fair reading of liberal Democracy’s history confirms this is so. That the devaluation of citizenship is an
integral component of a ‘successful’ modern democracy, not a failure to be
corrected by technical means… the ‘free world,’
a term we often use interchangeably with ‘Western liberal Democracies,’
is free only in a limited sense: Citizenship (including formal liberties) is
distributed liberally to all citizens but its reach is confined to a small
political sphere; a sphere which is increasingly losing out to a separate
economic sphere where all the capacities to change people’s lives (for better
or worse) congregate but where citizenship is irrelevant.
No wonder that when the now lionized French
economist Thomas Piketty was on his first US book tour for his best -selling Capital in the 21st Century,
and was asked what he felt was his most important worry from his findings about
inequality, he said it was the impact of
that inequality upon the West’s
democratic institutions. Indeed.
Here is the link to Varoufakis’ essay:
Is there something special for political
aspirations, aside from the human species’ biological roots and urgings, in the
notion of “springtime?” That the first shots of the American Revolution were
fired at Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775; that the Estates General
convened in Versailles on May 5, 1789, that the French National Assembly was
born on June 17 followed by the clergy voting to support the Third Estate on
June 19th, and the Tennis Court Oaths sworn on June 20, 1789? That
the mass demonstration on May 15, 1848, in Paris, gave a European wide signal
for revolt, for that year of the “Springtime of Nations” (and which would be
crushed in Paris by the end of June)? That
Thomas Piketty was feted at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, DC on
April 15, 2014, on his first grand American tour, when he answered an audience
question with his worry about inequality’s threat to democratic
institutions? Or that dated April 9,
2014, the essay Testing Theories of
American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups and Average Citizens” appeared,
and quickly rocketed around the Internet?
This paper was written by Martin Gilens
of Princeton University and Benjamin Page of Northwestern, and in some ways it
is the political science equivalent of Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century, not only because of its
findings about inequality, but also
because it makes available troves of data on the outcomes of 1,779 policy
gambits launched between 1981-2002, which income groups (at the 90th,
50th and 10th percentiles of income distribution,
starting at the bottom) did or did not support them, and the polling data
behind their positions, which was correlated to income declarations of the respondents. This
study was able, through a new and complex mathematical model, to run many more
variables covering these essential factors than previous versions, and was
therefore also able to test the four leading theories of how democracy operates
in the United States. As the authors put
it, they were able to see “…which set of actors have how much influence over
public policy: average citizens, economic elites, and organized interest
groups, mass based or business oriented.”
So what did they find?
In our
1,779 policy cases, narrow pro-change majorities of the public got the policy
changes they wanted only about 30% of the time.
More strikingly, even overwhelmingly large pro-change majorities, with
80% of the public favoring a policy change, got that change only about 43% of
the time…
What do our
findings say about democracy in America?
They certainly constitute troubling news for advocates of ‘populistic’
democracy, who want governments to respond primarily or exclusively to the
preferences of their citizens. In the
United States, our findings indicate the majority does not rule at least not in
the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with
economic elites and or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo
bias built into the US political system, even when fairly large majorities of
Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.
So there are the major findings, but I
should add in one more twist to complicate matters just a little bit more for
an American left attempting to construct larger working majorities among the
citizens of the republic, and to others who are embarked upon building new
co-operative economic structures starting at the local level: “It turns out, in
fact, that the preferences of average citizens are positively and fairly highly
correlated, across issues, with the preferences of economic elites.” And here is the link to the study:
As I began reading Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century this March, I was simultaneously
in the home stretches of Ira Katznelson’s even longer volume, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins
of Our Time, which came out in 2013. It is a powerful and stimulating work,
the first major re-examination of the New Deal from the left in a very long
time. It has won deserved acclaim in
major reviews because of its radical shift in perspective, in two senses. First, as is fitting for a political
scientist (Katznelson is one at Columbia University), it looks to the national
legislature, Congress, as the center stage, core democratic process in the New
Deal, not the larger than life figure in the White House who has dominated most
of the previous accounts, and understandably so. Second, it places what happened in the U.S.
in direct comparison to the fates of national legislatures in Germany and
Italy, where they were crushed by the rise of the dictators, highlighting the
troubles that the Western democracies were having during the great strains of
the Depression years. And of course,
there was the Soviet model further to the East, a far left dictatorship almost
as evil as the right-wing one that came to power in Germany. Some would say it was worse, but the U.S.
made the decision, and rightly so during the war years, to make a pact with
that state to defeat Hitler. It was a
military necessity, whatever its moral costs - and they were high for the
peoples and nations of Eastern Europe.
The even greater fascination for me in Fear Itself (which is why my friend Bill
Wolfe recommended it) is that the grand legislative narrative about the New
Deal’s major accomplishments, and its limitations, turns upon the importance of
the American South, and the “pact”
which FDR had to make with it, with our own domestic racial and political
evils, again at a very high price, as we will see. That’s because the South was a virtual one
party region dominated by Democrats, also marked by low voter turnout, racial
apartheid/Jim Crow and the horrific stain of repeated lynching’s of black
people, 28 in 1933, including one in Princess Anne, Maryland. The South also was, by comparison with the
rest of the country, impoverished, with share cropping and tenant farming
keeping both poor whites and most blacks in a virtual debtor’s prison without
bars. Yet its elected national office
holders, building seniority decade by decade, held many powerful committee chairmanships
in Congress and formed a large enough voting bloc, should they decide to
withhold their votes, to prevent the Democratic party from turning its desired policies
into successful legislation.
Given these terrible Southern realities
and his international comparisons, Katznelson asks: was the Southern Democratic
Party a dictatorship of sorts itself, with its one party rule? His answer is direct, and more than a bit
problematic: that the party and the
region were too chaotic, anarchic and decentralized to be that, “but it had
powerful authoritarian tendencies and a strong exclusionary tilt.” Poll taxes were levied on both whites and
blacks, and indirectly led to the
corrupt buying of votes, while they also pushed voter turnout down to 20% or
less in some years – for example in the 1940 presidential election in four
states.
In brief, this was a region of enormous
contradictions, some of its major ones going back to the nation’s founding
aspirations as a democratic republic built on slavery and with a strong bias
towards rule by economic elites, the
white yeomanry be damned and contained.
When slaves were formally freed, the key control mechanism became
economic and voting repression, and Katznelson has a fine eye for the irony
that the South never hesitated in opposing the dictatorships abroad, including
the Nazi one built on fantasies of racial superiority, and did not share the
isolationist tendencies of the Midwest Republicans.
Yet, despite all these realities and
contradictions, this region’s elected Democrats were some of the New Deal’s
most passionate supporters from 1933 through 1935, what Katznelson describes in
Chapter 7 as its “Radical Moment.” How
could that be? The key to understanding
this riddle is that the South was poor, the nation’s poorest region by
far. Thus it still had more than just
traces of populism from the late 19th century, the agrarian
“populist” revolt, and even the economic elites, and their hoped for “New
South” industrial experiments, harbored deep resentments against the power of
northern industrialists and bankers. The heart of the South’s economy though, was
still agriculture, an agriculture built on cheap labor, and, in many cases, deeply
indebted labor. In the future, the South
hoped to compete for industry based on its long history of low wages. But it was not yet an industrial power, far
from it.
So that is the basis for the political
“pact” that allowed the South to support the New Deal’s most radical moment,
and Katznelson reminds us that he thinks its achievements were close to a small
“r” revolution in the American political economy, backed up by the judgment of
fellow political scientist Theodore Lowi, of Cornell, one of my own favorite
authors. Yet the price of this support
was high - and cruel. To keep Southern
support, both the National Labor Relations Act (better known as the Wagner Act,
after its chief architect, Senator Robert Wagner of New York) and the Social
Security Act, which were signed into law on July 5 and August 14, 1935, deliberately
left out domestic workers and agricultural workers, a huge omission and one
dictated by the South.
Ironically, it was the two Senators from
the state of Maryland, the senior Millard Tydings, and his junior partner, George
Radcliffe, who tried to out-South the deeper South in offering weakening
amendments to the Wagner Act, centering on the implications of the phrase “free
from coercion or intimidation of any source.”
Noble sounding words, out of context, but they would have been fatal to
the purposes of the bill in empowering unions, given the legal climate in the
courts of the day. Maryland’s senators
won the support of only five other southern Democrats, Katznelson tells us, and
the amendments failed.
Yet the political realities, the
compromises necessary to achieve the Wagner Act and Social Security caused a
good part of the American left, those to
the left of the New Deal that is, a great deal of anguish, because they rightly
saw that its promise was not going to be extended to the poorest of the
American poor, white or black, especially in the South, just as the AAA
agriculture price “support” payments (to prevent over-production and thus drive
down prices and incomes for all farmers) never reached the tenant farmers.
Editor’s
note: Although
Katznelson focuses mainly on the South’s protection of its cheap agricultural
work force from New Deal attempts to reach them, he only mentions the farm
support income payments in passing. Yet,
in another cruel asterisk to what democracy does or doesn’t mean, and who it
does or doesn’t include in its processes, the design of these price supports
were eminently decentralized and had to be voted on by the members of the organizations
that represented farmers in each state.
In the Midwest this meant one thing, with most able to participate,
including small farmers; in the South the structure of farm organizations left
the mass of tenant farmers out of the process – and the payments, despite the
best attempts by the federal designers to keep them in the system, never
reached the neediest. It’s a very good
example of the tensions which reside in the interactions between the two
interrelated spheres: the economic and the political, and just what type of
democracy will emerge, if any at all from the interplay of the two. And it is a reminder that the history of
democracy, from the time of Athens in the 5th century BC, through
the small city state republics of the Renaissance (Florence and Venice, in
particular) and the foundation of our own in the late 18th century
is laced with the tensions between elites and the demos, and arguments over
scale, decentralized face-to-face democracies versus the more distant and
impersonal “representative” democracies with their hoped for balance between competing
“interests.” We shall soon see how that
plays out in America.
The cautious, boundary ridden honeymoon
between the South and the rest of the New Deal did not last. Despite the largest landslide vote in
American history in the 1936 Presidential
elections, which told the whole world how the American people felt about FDR
and the New Deal, the Southern leadership in Congress was reaching its limits
to accommodate the leftward drift of American politics. It is amazing to me that the Wagner Act was
able to pass at all, and perhaps it was due simply to the fact that the South
wasn’t yet industrialized enough for it to fear the full implications of
labor’s empowerment. Labor’s most
powerful surge came after the act’s passage, in late 1935 and 1936, stamped
forever in our memory by the images of the famous sit down strikes. The South
came to understand that the CIO was to be taken seriously, and that it also
carried more than just the message of greater economic equality: it also had
powerful implications for the racial regime in the South.
It is one of the finest achievements of
this book to trace the gradual but eventual great turning of the Democratic South
against its own party and the New Deal itself, to see the very beginnings of
the future alliance with the Republican Party emerge from an as yet not fully
shared ideological schizophrenia. The
basis of that schizophrenia was the fear of a powerful federal government
acting in matters of the political economy, to nationalize the standards of the
labor market, especially; yet also, and perhaps even more fearfully, to do the
same in matters of racial equality. Yet at the same time, following upon the
great mobilization of World War II, and the beginnings of the Cold War, the federal government was given almost
unlimited powers, formally granted, it is true, and yet in many instances
informally carried far beyond the normal democratic practices and oversights,
to become a “crusading” power internationally, for better and worse. And Edward Snowden has brought that story
right up to date with our brave new cyber world.
Before I turn to the moving summary
judgments Katznelson issues in his Epilogue, about the way the New Deal, so
greatly shaped by the fears of the American South, altered our basic political
processes, I want to share the fate of one of the last monumental legislative
achievements of the era, the Fair Labor Standards Act, which passed in the
spring of 1938. This was the bill that
would gradually reduce the number of hours Americans worked each week, starting
at 44, and ending at the “40 hour work week,” and which also set and then
gradually increase the minimum wage at which they must be paid. Its ideas were in the Democratic Party
platform of 1936, in response to the Supreme Court destroying the National
Recovery Act’s attempt to grapple with the same issues. Yet it directly touched
upon “a cluster of issues concerning labor markets and labor unions that began
to divide the Democratic Party more decisively.” And it passed only after “‘one of the most
desperately fought battles ever waged on the floor of Congress.’” Once again,
the South led the attack on the bill’s attempt to create uniform and national
standards for wages and hours, in a land where one third of the workforce
earned less than thirty-three cents per hour.
And once again, as with the Wagner Act and Social Security Act, the
price of passage was to carve out exemptions for domestic servants and a vast
array of agricultural workers.
And this is when I came to realize where
that language for Maryland’s own agriculture exemptions came from, that I cited
in the very opening pages of this essay, as being part of the “ancient
exploitations.” Here is Katznelson from
page 271 of the Chapter “Radical Moment,” actually describing the “swan song”
of the early spirit of the New Deal:
Along the
way, the legislation underwent significant change to win southern, especially
border-state support. In the original bill, the extent of the agricultural
exemption had been vague, left to the interpretation of the proposed
administrative board in Washington, but ‘as the bill progressed the discretion
became more and more narrow and the specific exemptions became larger and
larger.’ Now including ‘farming in all its branches,’ this classification
incorporated every kind of work ‘in conjunction with farming operations,
including preparation for market, delivery to storage or to market or to
carriers for transportation to market.’ Not only was the definition of agriculture
broadened; so too, was the understanding of who could count as a ‘person
employed in agriculture,’ a category that expansively included any individual
involved in the ginning of or baling of cotton when the services of that person
were seasonal, a definition clearly tailored to affect southern black labor.
The South and its border allies also
played both sides of the national-regional adjustment see-saw. They accepted the national standards for
wages and hours, working to head off discretion by a board that might prove too
generous; then they eventually won “regional guidelines” language that industry
boards could apply to make sure the South could continue to work its cheap
labor advantage to maximum effect in attracting industry.
There is another very large and
important reason I have to elevate the importance of what Katznelson has
written, the history of how the South set the limits on the New Deal, and
foreshadowing the limits on the economic tools and interventions into the
economy that have so hamstrung us today. It is because I have written extensively about
the reasons for the legislative stalemate in the current Congress in these
matters, tracing its deeper causes to the spread of neoliberalism in economics
throughout both parties, but especially inside the Republican party, dominated
by the Right (and now including the old deep South, border states and parts of
the West), and comparing it to the congressional polarization in the 1850’s
over slavery. Today, however, the axis of disagreement is centered on the role
of the federal government and the nature and scope of its allowed interventions
into the economy, just as in the later days of the New Deal, after 1938. The South, I have written, is today’s most
fanatical defender of conservative (neoliberal) economics, although its
geographical base has widened considerably since the 1850’s – and the 1930’s,
has been universalized in a sense, and
what little work that does get done in
Washington on the economy does so on the basis of what centrist Democrats share
with the Right. There is no better
illustration of that shared ground than the policy curve of the two terms of
Bill Clinton’s administrations. The fact
that the old New Deal is a forbidden topic inside both parties is stark
testament to the depth of what is wrong today, in the economy and the impaired
functioning of our democracy. The inability of Cass Sunstein’s 2004 book The Second Bill of Rights: FDR’s Unfinished
Revolution and Why We Need It More Than Ever to gain even mild traction on
the left testifies to the common economic ground the Right and Center share.
The repercussions from the great
gridlock are so powerful that these New Deal problematics have also led to left
intellectuals like Bill Greider and Gar Alperovitz walking themselves away from
the idea that anything like a new New Deal could be repeated under today’s
political polarization – or that in some respects - even that it would be
desirable, although that is a more complex matter I will address shortly. It is clear that in matters of the political
economy, but also in matters of the imperial National Security State, American
politics has been “Southernized,” and, in the spirit of Barry Goldwater, also Westernized
more than a bit. In this sense too,
Lyndon Johnson can be seen as the last domestic New Dealer, whose good
intentions at home were swamped by what the National Security State had become
already in the Vietnam War: a massive anti-democratic surveillance and
disruption force at home, and a systematic executioner abroad (see esp. Project
Phoenix.)
So far, I have focused on the
contemporary economic implications of the limits put on the New Deal by
Southern Democrats. But Katznelson also
stresses the close relationship between the economic realm and the processes of
American democracy itself, and he does so especially well in Part IV,
“Democracy’s Price,” and in Chapter Ten, entitled Public Procedures, Private
Interests.” He does this by contrasting the fates of two agencies, the National
Resources Planning Board, and the Bureau of the Budget, which were moved into
the Executive Branch in 1939. The NRPB
had the longer history, although the author cautions that “in the main it did
not plan, but rather, called for planning by gathering information and offering
proposals,” and some of its last proposals before being put out of existence by
Southern Democrats allied with Republicans in 1943 (and Senator Millard Tydings
of Maryland helped drive in the final ideological stake), were to supply the
substance for FDR’s notion of that “Second Bill of Rights.” Yet although its chief mission and products
concerned plans for civilian life after the war was won, the NRPB managed also
to symbolize the best achievements of the most radical and decisive successes
of the New Deal, 1933-1935. At its best
the New Deal sided actively with workers, the unemployed and the pension-less aged,
and reigned in the worst of the economic excesses of Wall Street and
laissez-faire capitalism. It was morally
grounded, (FDR used Biblical analogies
and language in many of his Fireside Chats)
and worked to achieve a new economic ethic as well, as long as one
understands the Faustian bargain imposed by the nature of the American
South. In other words, it was for a time
a national government and a state with a clear direction and bias, although it
did not ever threaten capitalism’s basis in private property, which can be seen
in FDR’s failure to publicly endorse Upton Sinclair’s EPIC campaign in
California in 1934, which planned to utilize unused farms and factories in
cooperative efforts by the poor. One can
see, however, why the new conservative
alliance killed the NRPB but allowed the BOB to expand and thrive with its more
indirect and distant fiscal and budget tinkering with the business cycle,
utilizing the new Keynesian tools, which themselves today have become the very
devil’s playthings in the eyes of the Right.
Here is how Katznelson summarizes the
promise and the threat of our nation’s first and last attempt at “national
planning,” muted though it was:
Taken
together , the pamphlets and reports the board issued constituted an ambitious
effort to articulate a vision of how the national state should direct markets,
ensure high levels of employment, and provide comprehensive social welfare. In a credo issued in 1942, the board
announced the aim of cleansing capitalism from ‘irresponsible private power,
arbitrary public authority, and unregulated monopolies.’ Through planning, it insisted, the federal
government could help secure a greater freedom for the American people.
But that is not the nature of the national
state and the democratic processes that we ended up with after the end of the
New Deal and the rise of the National Security State. The termination of the NRPB and the passage
of the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947, over President Truman’s veto, were the
punctuation marks for a new system, of an ostensibly far more neutral federal
government overseeing a fierce competition among private interest groups: may
the best organized, and the best lobbyists win.
Katznelson is penetrating in his sketch of what this has meant for the
type of democracy we have, and his descriptions strongly echo the findings of
the Gilens and Page paper I summarized earlier in this essay, and seem to
prepare the way for Sheldon S. Wolin’s Democracy
Inc. and his story about the rise of
the corporate dominated state.
Here is how Katznelson frames the three
main “democracy” problems which emerged, slowly over time, in America’s post
New Deal world. From the Epilogue, with the highlights being mine, not his:
First is a
narrowing of politics to thin, confined, restricted, and potentially polarized
interests. This contraction of civic
sensibility to a politics without public purpose or norms can heighten
conflict over limited matters and lead to gridlock
or the rule of intense minorities…Second is how putatively neutral rules
favored those with more resources…A
state without substance is a state ripe for special interests to grab hold of
key elements of government. Although the procedural face of government did
not officially recognize particular private interests as more privileged than
any others, it effectively reduced the
scope of labor as a national class, and in so doing helped enhance the
power of capitalist firms and business ideology. This was quite an achievement, even a
surprising one, in light of how much the Depression had shattered business
prestige and had put market capitalism’s legitimacy in question. Especially with limits placed on organized
labor, indeed with the steady decline in union membership since the mid-1950’s,
the political system has failed to
counterbalance economic power…unless strong counter pressures can be
mobilized, inequality grows, poverty is
neglected, and equal citizenship is compromised…Third
is how, with ‘sovereignty…parceled out among groups’ and with public values
trumped by private-regarding goals and power, the procedural state generates recurring crises of public authority and
civic trust. Disillusionment and
cynicism result when a system declared to be impartial and just by definition
is found to be unfair. The result is either too little political
participation or episodic and volatile participation by enraged citizens who
are convinced that the putatively neutral rules of the game are rigged. Once
the New Deal’s more assertive projects for managing capitalism ended and the
prospects of a national labor movement diminished, both the result of actions
by fearful southern representatives, the longer-term prospects of American
democracy were sharply constrained, and the range of feasible options narrowed
to a conservative return to business capitalism or a liberal defense of the
fiscal policies that the New Deal ultimately fashioned.
Enter now Sheldon S. Wolin, who was in
his late eighties when he wrote his 2008 book Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted
Totalitarianism. He is thus no
newcomer to the field of political science, having reached a high place in his
career holding a professor emeritus of politics position at Princeton
University. What he has done in this
book is to sketch the outlines of our contemporary state of democracy,
especially in light of the directions it has taken after the two terms of
George W. Bush and the now perpetual war against terrorism, and the mighty
consolidation of the National Security State, already far too powerful by the
end of Katznelson’s saga, which carried the New Deal up to the beginning of
Eisenhower’s first term. In many ways,
Wolin’s conclusions seem to flow directly out of the Epilogue to Fear Itself. They also, but in a
darker, more contemporary and worrisome form, laced with global warming alarms,
connect directly to William Greider’s warning from his 1992 classic, Who Will Tell the People: The Betrayal of
American Democracy. In his now
famous chapter on “Citizen GE,” Greider anticipated that corporate America
would step into the vacuum created by the late New Deal’s “procedural state,”
the “state without substance” and a “politics without a public purpose” in
Katznelson’s terms. No “public interest”
in diverse America? Very well, corporate
America will be more than happy to fill in the blanks.
The state has been captured by corporate
interests, and it no longer has the dispositions of the best years of the New
Deal, 1933-1935. The state, whether
under Bush or Obama, draws its top policy making personnel from the corporate,
and especially today, from the financial world, and there is no better way to
summarize this than by watching where they land after they pass through the
revolving door, heading in either direction.
At the Federal Reserve, the various economic counsels to the President
and at Treasury, with few exceptions, this corporate state also draws upon the
“state” of knowledge and ideology in the economics profession. If you have followed
the tribulations of even a mildly liberal member of their own, one Paul
Krugman, you surely know by now that he has not been able to make much of a
dent in the consensus formed around neoliberalism’s anti-labor and anti-public
spending attitudes, which have come to be known as Austerity, and which
function much in the same way as the gold standard did in the first phase of
globalization in the 19th century: by limiting what governments could do about
the inequalities and crashes generated by capitalism. Wolin’s book is getting increasing attention
because everyone is worried about the impaired state of our democracy and the
power that corporate America wields over its processes, and indeed, as I was
anticipating writing this section, there was Chris Hedges recommending the book
in his weekly column here at Truthdig at the end of May: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/thomas_paine_our_contemporary_20140525
Wolin’s book also addresses something
which I have increasingly stressed in my writing over the past two years: how
the rising power of corporate capitalism has shaped our cultural landscape. It
is always pushing to privatize and to
encroach upon previously public domains, like research at universities, the NIH
itself, charter schools and the bad mouthing of public education (by hedge
funds especially) - essentially, in Wolin’s terms, by trying to destroy what
remains of the public “commons.” This is
a trend that has followed along with the rise of the Right and has become
thoroughly bi-partisan, especially through contracting out not only in defense
matters but all phases of formerly governmental functions, including social
service programs. And thanks, Al Gore
and Bill Clinton, for bragging about it so publicly while ignoring its deeper
consequences: breaking down the barriers between the public and private sector,
and helping the corporate state emerge in a new more intensely blended form.
There are other consequences flowing
from the accelerated rhythms of the economy of the corporate state. Besides a faster pace in the already relentless
pace of technology changes, there has
been an intensification of the work process: by pushing the workforce to expanded hours in the
middle and upper reaches of the professional segments, even as the 28 million
in the retail and service sector struggle for adequate hours, often having to
hold two jobs to obtain a 35-40 week, both sections of the workforce have therefore
been subtly undermined in their civic capacities, in what Wolin describes as
the most demanding job of all, that of “citizenship.” Leisure time has disappeared. And you know in which segments of society
there is still leisure time, and perhaps more importantly, the ability to make up
for its loss by the capacity to spend limitlessly into the political process. By reminding us of the high price to be paid in
human and democratic terms because of this accelerating pace of technology,
work and life, he reminds me, once again, of the warnings in Wendell Berry’s
Jefferson Lecture from 2012.
And that brings us back to the ancient
tensions between democracy and elitism and the elitism that goes hand and hand
with economic power. Here is Wolin at
his best in his final chapter, “Democracy’s Prospects,” with my own emphasis in
bold:
The
persisting conflict between democratic egalitarianism and an economic system that
has rapidly evolved into another inegalitarian regime is a reminder that capitalism is not solely a matter of
production, exchange and reward. It is a
regime in which culture, politics, and economy tend toward a seamless whole, a
totality. Like the regimes it had
displaced, the corporate regime manifests inequalities in every aspect of
social life and defends them as essential.
And like the old regimes, the structure of corporate organization
follows the hierarchical principle of graduations of authority, prerogative and
reward. It is undemocratic in its
structure and modus operandi and antidemocratic in its persistent efforts to
destroy or weaken unions, discourage minimum wage legislation, resist
environmental protections, and dominate the creation and dissemination of
culture (media foundations, education.)
In early March of this year I came
across a New York Times article which seems to confirm much of what
Wolin has written, not only about the seamlessness of the new corporate state,
but how it has managed to escape the checks and balances built into the
“foundational” structure of our government and Constitution. Granted, this starting framework was still
one which Wolin says favored an elite dominated republic, not a demos driven
democracy, but nonetheless, he maintains the founders would be shocked and disapproving
of the “Superpower” corporate state that has emerged. Indeed, I was so dumbfounded at what was in
this story that I clipped it and saved it for future reference.
The front page story headline, “U.S.
Hopes Boom in Natural Gas Can Curb Putin,” states the broad purpose, but not
the shock a citizen gets when the means to achieve that purpose emerge, the stories
buried within the story, fodder enough for a half- a- dozen books, each looking
at a different aspect of our new energy “diplomacy.” First is the complex tale
of our deep involvement in the Ukraine mess: is it all about helping democracy
emerge? No hint in this story that all
the competing brands, including the Russian one, are about oligarchical
economic power. No hint in this story
that the struggle over the shape of the Ukraine was the very last straw in our old
broken pledge to Gorbachev not to push NATO up to the borders of the old Soviet
Union. No sense that our intervention
into the Ukraine crossed an explicit Russian red line. No sense in this story that the fracking
method of producing our natural gas is very, very controversial among the citizens
of many states of our former republic, or that those most detailed in the fight
against global warming don’t believe it is the transition bridge to solar and
wind alternatives. In fact, they
maintain it is not going to reduce the carbon footprint, or be that cleaner
alternative to coal because we have significantly underestimated its methane
leakages, among its other types of significant pollutions and leakages. And they also maintain that the whole
fracking frenzy, which has come to resemble the energy equivalent of the 49ers
Gold Rush and other pre-bubble financial booms, is dramatically undercutting
the whole structure of price and policies that have propelled wind and solar.
And the final thrust of this story is that as the US looks to export its
supposedly vast reserves of natural gas by expediting the LNG permits needed for
shipping, we will transform our old identity from World War II’s “arsenal of
democracy” to the new “arsenal of energy.”
Maryland residents worriedly
contemplating our own possible venture into fracking, and the export of gas via
the as yet not approved facility at Cove Point, will appreciate how the
national groundwork for this was being laid.
I didn’t know, but learned in this article, that late in 2011, while
Hillary Clinton was still Secretary of State, she set up an 85 person Bureau of
Energy Resources, inside the State Department, headed by Carlos Pascual, who is
a former ambassador to the Ukraine. And
it is implied, but not clearly stated, that the governmental bureau is working
with some powerful corporate names in energy, such as Exxon Mobil, Shell, and
Halliburton, to expedite the search for energy in places like Poland and the
Ukraine. Here is the Times article link:
In mid-May of this year, there were
additional press accounts about energy doings in the Ukraine, with deep U.S.
ties, ties which are another illustration of Wolin’s thesis about the corporate
state. According to the Wall Street Journal version from May
13, the youngest son of Vice-President Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, will be joining
the friend and college (Yale) roommate - Devon Archer - of John Kerry’s
stepson, Christopher Heinz, on the board of Ukrainian gas producer Burisma
Holdings Ltd. Both Biden and Archer work
at a domestic US firm, Rosemont Capital.
Read the story at
As I was steadily working through this
background reading on the state of American democracy, and its fate at the
hands of the US economy, I was also listening to the interviews being conducted
with Chris Hedges, Ralph Nader and Gar Alperovitz at the Real News Network,
whose home link is here: http://therealnews.com/t2/
Because each of these public intellectuals was the focus of three or so
separate segments, half hour interviews with the skillful and knowledgeable host
Paul Jay, there are too many links to provide directly, but you can find them
using the “search” button at the top of the home website, by just typing in
their names. The interviews ran from
December through the late winter of 2014.
I wanted to use what was said in them (and also in Alperovitz’s
interesting book from 2013, What Then
Must We Do: Straight Talk About the Next American Revolution) to discuss
where the major fault lines in American politics lie, and how the left does or
does not address them.
I think that the central one which
emerges is the nature (and fate) of the great stalemate, the standoff in the
Congress between the Republican Right and the Democratic Centrists, like the
President. ( I do place the Libertarians firmly
inside the Right on most of the key issues of the political economy…are you
surprised to learn that the Koch Brothers are Libertarians? – see this review
of a book about them here http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/jun/19/billionaire-brothers-take-us/
)
When something does sneak through that
Congress, it is almost always because the Democrats have moved to the Right,
not the left, and still share, in economic matters, some substantial ground
with the Right along the lines of Bill Clinton’s announcement that the “era of
big government is over,” and due homage to “free markets.” Sometimes it is difficult to tell where the
Republican’s intense tactical opposition to President Obama begins, and where the
more fundamental, bedrock ideological opposition ends, but I seriously doubt
the result – gridlock – will be any different with a new Democratic personae in
the White House. And the bedrock nature of
the ideological differences have been dramatically illuminated for us by the
work of Ira Katznelson in Fear Itself. Although much has been written about the
racial progress made in the South, and there is much truth to it, in formal
terms, at least, the economic views of the South which helped usher them into
Barry Goldwater’s GOP after 1964, meeting George Wallace’s Democrats more than
half way, has led to the Southernization of the Republican Party, with an added
geographical base in some of the old border states and good parts of the West.
The whole Cliven Bundy package from
April of 2014, of armed defiance of federal authority, refusal to pay federal
grazing fees, and a return of the repressed thoughts about black people and
slavery, is not a bad illustration of the most extreme version of the
contemporary Right, where the old South meets the new Southwest. Yes his open racism was denounced by elected
Republican officials, yet the ideological intensity displayed was a good
illustration of how the Democratic Centrists in the joint “corporate state” react
when faced by the militant Right: they retreat.
After more than 20 years and repeatedly lost legal struggles by Bundy,
the federal government still has not collected its light grazing fees, cumulatively
now over $1 million dollars, still allows Bundy’s illegal cattle grazing to
continue, and withdrew from the armed pubic confrontation (probably a wise
tactical move but with terrible long term implications if nothing is done after
a cooling off period). Perhaps the
1850’s are not such a bad analogy after all.
A
little noted New York Times article from April 24, 2014, casts some
strong doubts upon the hopeful demographics the Democratic pollsters are always
talking about: the youthful browning of American - giving the Democrats a
long-term demographic edge, which is going to return the party to electoral
dominance. It certainly didn’t pan out
in 2010 and 2012, at least not in the South.
In those years, increased white voter turnout more than matched the
higher turnout of black voters in the South, and young and Hispanic voters in
other regions. And notice the framing in
this very interesting article by reporter Nate Cohn, summoning us back to the antebellum
era, more than a hundred years before the white South broke with the New Deal:
“While white southerners have been voting Republican for decades, the hugeness
of the gap was new. Mr. Obama often lost
more than 40 percent of Al Gore’s support among white voters south of the
historically significant line of the Missouri Compromise.” Here at http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/24/upshot/southern-whites-loyalty-to-gop-nearing-that-of-blacks-to-democrats.html?_r=0
This regional capture gives the
Republicans just over 40% of their total voters, but Cohn points out that in
the rest of the country, and for the crucial matter of the Electoral College
votes, the Republicans are losing ground.
He observes that “whatever is causing Republicans to excel in the South,
whether religion or race, just isn’t
helping them elsewhere.” Please notice
that he didn’t mention the South’s views on the economy, the political economy,
where the region’s visceral anti-government, anti-tax and anti-regulatory
positions sure sound a lot like the basic ingredients of global
neoliberalism. And isn’t it interesting
to note that the broader national Republican Party stands accused, most pointedly
by NY Times’ columnist Charles Blow in his April 9th column,
“We Should Be in a Rage,” of adopting a milder yet none the less real
voter suppression program aimed at keeping
poor people from voting. Isn’t
this more than just a faint echo of the not so long ago tactics of Jim Crow in
the post Reconstruction South? Is it
race or is it class voting patterns that the tactics are aimed at? In America, the two strands of analysis often
are hopelessly intertwined, with Hispanic immigrants now thrown into the older
dynamics to further complicate matters.
This is just background, however, to my
central assertion, that the economic and ideological divisions between the two
parties and the long standing stalemate in the Congress have created a deeply pessimistic
outlook among some of the most prominent thinkers on the left, especially about
the possibilities of ever obtaining a new New Deal adequate to our current
problems. And add to that the obvious
question/observation that the Democratic Centrists don’t really want another
one, do they? This factor, and the
dismal status of the fight against Global Warming (its standing in the polls as
well as in Congress) have helped shape a
powerful de-centralizing trend among leading thinkers on the left, turning
them towards local and state actions, and seemingly having had them give up on
the idea of again capturing the commanding heights marked by the control of
Congress and the White House. Going a
bit further, and this is especially true of Alperovitz and Naomi Klein, less
clear with Nader (though he leans toward decentralization in some of his
comments), but also true with Chris Hedges, because he constantly stresses the
ecological disaster we are headed for; these thinkers do not want to pursue a
traditional Keynesian demand led growth in the economy as it now stands because
of the calamitous global warming outcomes.
Lost or forgotten (or perhaps written in the Van Jones sage) in their assessments is the logic of a Green
New Deal, where it is the transformation of energy generation, buildings and transportation
- most of our infrastructure – that would form the basis for millions of new public
and private sector jobs and a new economic dynamic. Yet there would still be the objection, if
this would remain an otherwise neoliberal world economy, that most of the goods
purchased with the money earned through higher employment (and higher wages) would
still be produced by the dirtiest carbon intensive sources which are now in
Asia. So you can easily see how this
logic can drive the ecological left to deeper and more radical transformation
proposals for the economy: build it (grow it)
here, and build it local and carbon free.
My further observation is that,
especially after reading Sheldon Wolin’s book on Democracy Inc., and its “field demonstration” in the State
Department under Secretary Clinton, to make America the “arsenal of energy,’
the government that has been
“captured” by corporate and financial interests has “hardened” into something
“else,” a corporate state that
cannot be turned out of office easily just by electing a new Congress and a
very different President. Could an
election like 1800, 1828, 1860 or 1932 – the small “r” electoral revolutions of
our past, cure these almost structural pathologies, especially if it has to be
held under the terms of the “managed democracy” that Wolin thinks we now have?
I don’t know, the logic drives in that
direction but I am still reluctant to abandon the hope that the progressive
populist currents now building might spread well beyond the left, with
implications for three-quarters of the country, if not that last Southern
quarter. Katznelson’s work reminds us
that if we want to preserve a national democracy, as the New Deal did, we still
have to grapple with the reality of its central national operating mechanism,
the Congress, and the electoral races that legitimize its members. Wolin though, writing near the end of the two
Bush terms in 2007-2008, clearly has sided with the decentralizers. He says it is not possible to build a large
national public interest again, although there is a touch of ambiguity in his
last sentence below. I would remind him
and others that the New Deal drew upon not only the Progressive Era programs of
1900-1914, but also the social service experiments of New York state under both
Al Smith and FDR, and the state wide egalitarian movements of Huey Long, Dr. Francis Townsend, and Upton Sinclair (
whose End Poverty in California, EPIC program bears more than some resemblance
to the directions advocated by Alperovitz, who did not mention it in his book,
probably because it turned into too raucous of a high profile program and
campaign…to put it mildly…(See Upton Sinclair and the Other American Century by
Kevin Mattson (2006) and this Nation magazine article http://www.thenation.com/article/155381/upton-sinclairs-epic-campaign
) Here is Wolin:
The demos
will never dominate politically. In an
age where identities are potentially plural and changing, a unified demos is no
longer possible, or even desirable: instead of a demos, democratic
citizenries. Democratic political
consciousness, while it may emerge anywhere at any time is most likely to be
nurtured in local, small- scale settings, where both the negative consequences
of political powerlessness and the positive possibilities of political
involvement seem most evident. Further,
a vital local democracy can help to bridge the inevitable distance between the
representative government and its constituencies. There is a genuinely valuable
contribution which democracy can make to national politics, but it is dependent
upon a politics that is rooted locally, experienced daily, and practiced
regularly, not just mobilized spasmodically.
It has been fascinating to listen as
Ralph Nader thinks out loud, speaking to Paul Jay in these interviews. Nader has been having breakfast with
billionaires, trying first to raise a billion dollars from them to fund his
proposal to get a thousand volunteers to advocate for a set of core progressive
programs and watchdog the sitting Congressperson - in each of the congressional districts. There would have to be paid, experienced
staff directing each operation. At times
Nader tells the pubic that “folks, it’s easier than you think; for the time
some spend bird watching, or give to their other hobbies, if they would
redirect their energies we could do this…” Then he waxes nostalgic for the
heydays of his PIRG organizations, when the politicians of both parties really
could feel the “rumble of the people” in the streets and knocking on doors. Of course, that was a time when there were
still mildly progressive Republicans, in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. Then he wonders whether “the people” today
are still able to do this…which is a cultural as well as an economic and
political question, and that is one reason I have gone into some depth with the
authors who have spoken about the complex message of voter apathy. Is it indifference, or a rational judgment
about being locked out of determinative policy processes…before the elections
are held? Is it the rational response of
poor people with poor access, not enough money, and just as important, not
enough leisure time?
And then Nader has also been having additional
breakfasts with some more billionaires, he tells us – it’s not clear if these are
the same as the earlier ones – but the purpose is to convince one of the more
progressive ones to run for President, to shake up both parties, Ross Perot
style. I have jibed back that with a
billion dollars, Gar Alperovitz could really build a good running start for the
co-operative economic ventures he is advocating for, like the one put together
from many funding sources in Cleveland.
He might get the seed money for some public banks to be run along the
same lines. Utilities too. This would be a fruitful and more direct
alternative to the ways many of America’s top 1% currently give to NGOs and
their causes, which has been scathingly taken apart by Warren Buffett’s son,
Peter. He has described the foundations as trying to repair with the left hand
what the donor’s private sector activities have created with the right. I think, but am not entirely sure, that he
excluded his father from that syndrome.
Nader also has a new book out about the
coming merger of “left-right populism”: Unstoppable. Take a close look at where he thinks there
might be consensus, what issues. Perhaps
to break up the big banks, but will that transform the hedge fund-private
equity driven “shadow banking system,” or lower the interest rates charged to
consumers or approach Michael Hudson’s call for debt relief? On some banking matters, and the reform of
the National Security State, I agree tactical alliances are possible, even
plausible; but how about on a full employment program and a $15.00 minimum
wage, and a World War II type “mobilization” to fight global warming? I think at times Nader is driven too hard and
too implausibly by the terrible dilemmas thrown up by our democracy’s gridlock,
by that ideological roadblock in the national legislature. I call it “The Wall,” and it is vexing
everyone on the left, in one way or another. Citizens in the middle, as
well.
Who is correct on these very
consequential matters: of the left aiming
for the national commanding heights of the political system in order to reshape
the economy, or starting at the local level or state level in a long haul to
build new economic structures from the ground up? And how is that working out
in the dynamics between Mayor Bill De Blasio in New York City and Governor
Andrew Cuomo in Albany, Cuomo being the new poster boy for the neoliberal
Democratic “Centrist. And let’s throw in
Cuomo’s relationship to New York State’s Working Families Party, which is about
to expand into Maryland.
I
still lean towards the first, more traditional course of national action on two
grounds. The level of pain in the
economy right now is so great, the bottom half of the citizenry cannot wait
decades for relief, and the urgency to combat global warming also cannot wait 20
years to begin a slow transformation of ….well, just about the whole economy,
to put it bluntly. And there is
intellectual momentum building on the left, as I have tried to document in this
essay. Yet I am old enough to know that
the American left has always been diverse and fractious, in a very large and
diverse country whose institutions still have the skeletal structures of
federalism even if the ideology has coalesced in neoliberalism; so individuals
will follow their hearts’ and heads’ desires and best judgments and we will see
activity in both directions, with unknown outcomes and many unforeseen events
influencing us along the way. I can’t
close the door on either and we should live with the intellectual tensions
between them.
I experience these tensions along other
dimensions as well. I can look at Katznelson’s findings in Fear Itself, look at the alliance of Libertarians and the
Republican Right, and conclude, in matters of state and economy, that their
views, if usually at odds with the Democratic Center, will be even more so as the left moves that Center further in its
direction via the new populism, as some have called it. As things stand now, the main currents on the
political economy are irreconcilable, as great as between the abolitionists and
the slaveholding South in the 1850’s.
And more and more, global warming activists are describing their cause
in those terms, as another abolitionist movement, to abolish the old carbon
economy. We should remember though, that
the abolitionists never converted the South and we went to a Civil War after
the South seceded. Sometimes I think, to
listen to the decentralizers on the left today, that it is they who want to
secede from the Union. I don’t think
that will work, but more and more democracy is struggling in its current constrained
national forms. To succeed, the left,
including the ecological left, must find converts from the middle of the
spectrum in all parts of the country, and especially in all the swing states. An insistence on a national minimum wage of
$15.00 is a good issue to build around.
Even that can’t be done unless the 28 million see themselves as fully
worth that pay, and begin to assume more of the heavy burdens of citizenship
that Wolin describes. Upton Sinclair had
his 1934 EPIC program in California built around the poor and unemployed
creating their own economy from the discarded portions of the old, including
their own internal script currency.
Author Kevin Mattson tells us that Sinclair’s “production for use” was
Jefferson’s democratic dream merged with the cooperative movement. I invite my readers to learn from the good
and bad about that movement and all that took place in Sinclair’s run to be
Governor of California in 1934. What
happened to Sinclair in that race, the nature of the opposition, eerily
foreshadows much of what we don’t like about elections today.
Which leaves the South to discuss. Am I being too pessimistic about its future
voting behavior? That is the criticism that Nicholas Lemann, author of the
moving book The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and It Changed
America makes in his review of Fear
Itself, here at http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/sep/26/new-deal-we-didnt-know/ Lemann asks us to consider how much the South
has changed, moved closer in income and lifestyle to the rest of the country,
since the end of Jim Crow, and especially in racial matters. But does Lemann in turn underestimate the
same ideological factors bearing on the economy and the state that the author
of the New York Times article did? After all, the white “yeomen” of the South,
most of whom did not own slaves, followed the slave owning “gentry” right on
through to the Virginia led “Pickett’s Charge” on the last day of Gettysburg,
in July of 1863. Why would a Wal-Mart
worker in Alabama today, earning $8-9 dollars an hour continue to support the
political economy of Speaker John Boehner, who himself appears to have been an
exploited under-age worker in his family’s business? And now he’s taking it out on us, asking us all
to repeat his experience. That’s
character building, I guess.
Yet I felt, and saw the changes in
attitude towards the political economy inside the left, pre-Piketty; I have
been noting the shift at least since December when I first starting reading
Karen Garcia’s tough “fight back” comments in the New York Times, often
chiding Paul Krugman for not going further, and drawing, regularly, 1,000
“likes,” quite an initial surprise for me from the readers of the Gray Lady. But even if the left cannot convert the core
white voters of the South who are currently turning out, what about the large
numbers of poorer whites, and blacks who do not vote? We see the stirrings in the “Moral Mondays’ movement
in North Carolina: can it spread? Can the new Pope move some of the old Reagan
Democrats back into the spirit of the New Deal, whatever its modern
manifestations? I don’t know, but look
at the phenomenon of Thomas Piketty’s book, Capital in the 21st Century, which in the magical way of
“one book in a million,” including many written on the left, finds the perfect
timing of message and “national” mood and takes off, finally giving the left a
“text” to rally around, with its declaration in Chapter Seven, “Inequality and
Concentration: Preliminary Bearings” that “…what primarily characterizes the
United States at the moment is a record
level of inequality from income from labor (probably higher than in any other
society at any time in the past, anywhere in the world, including societies
in which skill disparities were extremely large)…” {My emphasis.}.
And locally in Maryland, some candidates
for the state Senate are sensing the change in mood. Hence Dana
Beyer’s gutsy challenge to sitting Senator Richard Madaleno, in District 18,
something of a “blue-stocking” district; perhaps the challenge had something to
do with his surprising vote against the bill to give estate tax relief to
Maryland’s millionaires, one of only ten to vote against it. Who would have figured that vote based on his
legislative record? Beyer got another
one of my $5.00 donations, one of my three this election cycle. Soon my name will be appearing alongside the
“Potomac” addresses in the national listings of big $ contributors.
(The conclusion of Bill's essay will appear tomorrow.)
(The conclusion of Bill's essay will appear tomorrow.)
1 comment:
And here is a "roundtable" of intellectuals and pollsters close to the Democratic Party and a few from the left wing of the party talking about what I did in sections 1 & 2, the white working class...and the South: they seemed to have used different sources...
http://thedemocraticstrategist-roundtables.com/
This just arrived in my mailbox today, June 4th...
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