SEPARATE AND UNEQUAL
Thomas Edsall has reviewed a new book by noted
economist Joseph Stiglitz entitled The
Price of Inequality.
The book is, in Edsall’s opinion, “the single most
comprehensive counterargument to both Democratic neoliberalism and Republican
laissez-faire theories”. And there is much justification for that assessment.
But it’s also not the key to what has happened to Us
that has led – to use Edsall’s term – to
“our bleak present”.
Stiglitz – and rightly, I think – refuses to accept
the very widespread professional economist’s view that Our current mess is and
always has been “inevitable”, i.e. that megaforces both historical and economic have
simply dethroned the U.S. from its postwar (1945-1970) economic hegemony of the
planet, and thus that “our bleak present” is simply the result of all those forces (globalization,
automation, the easy movement of capital and goods around the planet) working
on Us and working through the rest of the economies on the planet.
And Stiglitz is surely correct to reject the
“inevitability” of the Bubbles (credit, mortgages) that – finally in 2008 –
burst and tore the bottom out of everybody’s boat. (The remaining two Bubbles –
U.S. government solvency and the status of the Dollar as the world’s reserve
currency - still have not burst, although the bankruptcy of an
increasing number of American municipalities and towns is ominous in that
regard, as are the increasing number of arrangements among governments in
various around the planet to trade among themselves in currencies other than
the Dollar).
But I can’t completely agree with Stiglitz’s
conclusions: that while what has happened to Us is not and cannot be ascribable
merely to “uncontrollable technological and social change”, but rather Our
current “two-tier society” is “the result of the exercise of political power by
moneyed interests over legislative and regulatory processing”.
This shades too closely, I would say, to being merely
a repetition of the dynamical explanation classically assigned to the First
Gilded Age (1880-1929, roughly).
“Politics shapes the market” as well as historical
and economic forces, says Stiglitz. Yes. But that’s precisely where things have
gone off the track, and while the bad Consequences of much of that political
maneuvering may not have been foreseen (I said “may not”) yet they were not considered with sufficient seriousness,
so eager was the Beltway to run a very dodgy and certainly highly-fraught
political strategy to ensure electoral viability since at least 1972.
As I have often said on this site, the Democrats in
the period 1965-1972 were first and foremost concerned for developing some
reliable electoral coalition of voters to replace the New Deal coalition of Southern
(and Jim Crow) interests and the blue-collar industrial workers in the Northern
and upper Mid-Western cities.
With an impressive practicality, the Dems worked
with the materials at hand. But they were unable to keep steady on the surf
board as the Wave began to take some very very torturous twists. Advocacy for
American blacks had with an alarming quickness dropped Martin Luther King’s
marvelous, sober, and almost Lincolnesque vision of blacks joining the
mainstream of American life through the liberation from the constraints of Jim
Crow (the stunning counterpoint of the Watts riots took place within ten days
of the passage of LBJ’s Voting Rights Act of 1965, fatally hampering his
ability – as that President realized instantly at the time – to get any further
major ‘civil-rights’ legislation passed). Replacing King’s vision was a
congeries of black separatism, anti-white sensibility, and even ‘revolutionary’
agitation that deranged even so seemingly worthwhile an impetus as the emphasis
on Black Pride.
But the Dems tried to work with what they had,
vowing to put the full weight and force of the government behind a
now-urgently-needed new ‘demographic’.
But the profound problem – in view of the
Constitutional and Framing Vision – was that while the Jim Crow South had
comprised a matrix of many (Southern) States’ unconstitutional race laws, which
clearly could be overridden by the Federal government, yet this was not true of
other regions of the country.
And even in the South, there remained the ominous
Question: once the Federal government had forced the abolition of those
matrices of race-laws, precisely how much further could it go without deranging
the entire balance of power (Federal vis-à-vis State and local government) and engorging
itself vastly in relation to government’s role in regard to not only political but
cultural and social dynamics? Was the Federal government really designed and
authorized to terraform the Southern culture and society, rather than merely
ensure that the matrix of laws in regard to racial relations was made
conformable to the Constitution? Would that not simultaneously engorge the
government and set it on a dangerously slippery slope?
This Question became even more vital – and, alas,
thus also even more un-disussable – as the civil-rights movement entered a
second phase (i.e. beyond King’s first phase) not only in the South but in
the rest of the country. Which immediately complicated matters even more
because there were no matrices of overt and clear Jim-Crow-type race laws in
the rest of the country that would justify the engorged and active power (such
as it might or might not legitimately be) of the Federal government to start
terraforming not simply the Southern Jim-Crow culture and society but the
national culture and society.
At this juncture, postwar French and German (the
Frankfurt School, as it is known) thought became useful. There are ‘structures’
in societies, cultures and civilizations; these
structures work at profoundly deep levels to accustom their peoples to see as
‘natural’ many inequalities and injustices (a stunningly complex and yet
vague concept, an empty suitcase waiting to be filled by whomever gets to it
first); these deep and preconscious forces exercise a profound and powerful
formative influence before the conscious
thought and will of individuals and even the formally-embraced principles of a
society and culture come into play; thus conventional (and traditional) political activity enters the picture
far too late to really have any worthwhile effect because by the time
people are ready to exercise Citizenship they are already mal-formed and
tainted; and so clearly the government (European revolutionary thought is
inevitably statist in this regard ,even when it seeks to be ‘revolutionary’ –
it doesn’t seek to simply overthrow government but to capture it and, more
specifically, its power and its capacity for expanding that power) must actually take it upon itself to profoundly
run the society, the culture, and the people (which is hell-and-gone from
the Framing Vision).
These ideas were developed partly by European
writers critiquing ‘colonialism’, which was still alive (barely) and kicking after
World War Two, and partly by transplanted German and other European writers who
had spent their formative or early-adult years under Hitler, had escaped in the
1930s or after the war and come here, and now hit the nails that their hammers
required: the U.S. was in its own way
also a ‘regime’ and demonstrated the power-patterns so monstrously demonstrated
by Hitler’s Reich. And consequently, but of course, steps have to be taken
…
And, of course, there were also numerous
intellectuals – native-born or otherwise – who still thought that Communism –
Marxist, Leninist, Stalinist, Maoist, or a misch of all of them – was The Way
Forward for the world and its peoples.
The Dems may not have wanted to be seen embracing
such an alien (and, in truth, profoundly anti-American and anti-Framing Vision)
set of dampdreams, but they were desperate. Perhaps they might ‘baptize’ all
the whackness while taking political advantage of the remarkably broad menu of
(statist) possibilities that was on offer in this panoply of concepts? Perhaps
they could graft some of the body-parts of the European Frankenstein onto the
(apparently diseased) American body politic?
And thus the Dems could somehow both create a new
demographic for themselves (the American blacks) while also hugely engorging
the power of the Federal government to terraform the country’s culture and
society in order to give this newly-‘empowered’ demographic everything its
self-proclaimed ‘official advocates’ desired and demanded.
Thus the American Federal government would start
down the road of so many European governments: actively arrogating to itself
the power to not merely tinker-with but to profoundly Shape and re-Shape the
minds and hearts, the thoughts and feelings, of its own Citizens – who in the
Constitutional and Framing Vision were The People, and who, acting in their
collective capacity as The People, were the governors of their own government
and the sole and indispensable source of its Sovereign authority … and
legitimacy.
You can see the problems here.
And then it dawned on the Dems that even at their
most numerous, their newly-valorized ‘black’ demographic would only constitute
nine percent of the population.
Thus baffled once again, the Dems were obviously
going to be open to any ‘solution’ pushed their way.
Feminism – most especially in its Radical variants, shrewdly
enamored of European and Euro-communist and structuralist thinking – offered
the jaw-dropping potential of a full fifty-one or fifty-two percent of the
population. This was a demographic to be sought at all costs and in the service
of whose agendas the pols would have to ‘do whatever it takes’.
It has taken quite a lot.
Especially when the Radical Feminists kicked their
more moderate sistern to the curb and then (without too much messy attribution)
shrewdly and slyly adopted the culture-war, culture-undermining strategy of early 20th-century
Italian communist thinker Antonio Gramsci. And his signature concerns were: hegemony,
dominance, oppression, and marginalization; his objective: to bring the marginalized into the center (of
political power, not of any moderate centrist political praxis) and thus
undermine the functioning democratic polities of the West and open the path for
Lenin’s version of communism.
The Dems figured they could baptize this into the
American Vision and in their lab on the Hill create some fresh new creature
that would combine all the best of Gramscian and Framing thought (with the indubitable
emphasis, of course, on their clients’ Gramscian bits).
Thus in a stroke the Dems a) ensured their political
‘success’, b) engorged the statist power of the Federal government, c) conceptually
doubled the workforce at a stroke (women needed jobs to be ‘independent’ and
shouldn’t have to spend their lives enserfed to families and raising kids and
having happiness-obstructing babies), and d) ignited a profound culture-war
(spun as merely backlashing by traditional power-holders who didn’t want to
share power) that then also e) served
to distract national attention from the hugely vital and increasingly urgent
Question of how to remain a powerful and productive and solvent economy in the
face of increasing competition from a Europe now recovered from World War Two’s
devastation and a Third World now able to begin emulating the West and
competing for production and business opportunities.
Quickly surfing in on the coat-tails of
‘structuralism’ came Victimism. This was an international movement that had
begun in the immediate postwar era, concerned for the innumerably and
monstrously demonstrated ways that people could be victimized by their own governments.
It quickly went viral here, under the eager
horticultural ministering of the pols. And mutated ominously: now ‘victims’
were not ‘victimized’ by their governments, but rather by the structures in their
culture and their society that ‘marginalized’ as well as ‘victimized’ them. A Problem
for which the government would, in the engorged plentitude of its power, ride
to their rescue, as if it were saving baby harp seals from evil predatory
hunters (formerly known as the Citizenry, now cast as the ‘dominant,
oppressive, hegemonic, marginalizing and backlashing’ evil power-holders).
Additional Identities were quickly embraced: Youth
being one of the largest (the Boomers clearly constituted a seductively huge
demographic and 18 year-olds were given the vote in 1972).
Immigrants were another: and a neat two-fer, since
you imported a vast amount of ready-made non-White Oppressor folks who would vote (somehow)
against all the ‘traditional’ arrangements while also undermining the well-paid
status of unionized blue-collar American labor (the iconic Archie Bunkers who
were destined now for the trash-bin of America’s History).
Neat again.
And if you added up all the Identities, and their
inevitable Necessary Oppressor-Monsters, you got an amalgam that could be
handily described as the White, Adult, Patriarchal, Sex-crazed (and later
Straight) Male, especially if he was Middle-Class or Working-Class; and thus conversely you got a Victimry (if I may) comprised of everybody
who, in whole or in part, was not
that.
Neat.
The problems this ‘strategy’ posed for a democratic
politics along the lines of the Framing Vision should have been as clear as a
fire in an oil refinery, but while the flames were acknowledged, they were
cheeribly asserted to be merely ‘creative destruction’ and ‘liberating
transgression’.
The Dems worked overtime in the lab up in the castle
on the Hill. By the presidential election of 1972 they were ready to unveil
their new Party to The People. They were rejected 49 states to one (Teddy K’s
Massachusetts). And then they got really dark. And decided that ‘traditional’
democratic politics were not The Way Forward.
Meanwhile, watching the Dems fabricate a new
Leviatha, the Republicans decided it was OK for them to bring back Leviathan –
that monstrously engorged and omnivorous government that had been caged so ably
by the Framers, and locked-lips with the Big Money interests.
This wasn’t such a big problem for the Dems, since
now both Parties were somehow indenturing themselves to not only their ‘special
interests’ (Identity-politics demands and Big Pain on the Left, Big Money on
the Right) but also to the Very Very Big Government necessary to ensure that
all the agendas, objectives, and demands of the various ‘special interests’
could be met.
And as Theodore Lowi observed as early as 1967, the
government had now solved the Problem of not-wanting to appear ‘coercive’ in
the immediate postwar era by allowing the ‘special interests’ of that era –
mostly Labor, Business, and Agriculture – to write their own laws, which the
pols would dutifully pass, or their own regulations – the authority for which
the pols ‘delegated’ to an increasing pandemonium of all-powerful regulatory Agencies.
Which, I would then add, was a dynamic monstrously engorged when the ‘special
interests’ were astronomically expanded to include the various Identities of
the Left and all their demands and their agendas and their objectives.
Meanwhile, the economy – and especially the Dollar –
was in as much trouble as were the Culture and the Framing Vision. Nixon had to
abrogate the 1946 Bretton Woods international financial arrangements and float
the Dollar in 1971. And nothing really worked right after that.
The Identities demanded all sorts of regulation and
policy and legislative ‘reforms’ that made hiring and keeping employees
increasingly onerous for employers large and small. Big Money and Big Capital
sensed that there were far less complicated sources of labor overseas. The
solution for the Beltway (now in a condition of abject but robust Indenture):
make American employees increasingly unattractive through various ‘protections’(ensuring
continued domestic political ‘success’) while simultaneously allowing Capital
and Production to go overseas (thus ensuring the satisfaction of Big Money and
Investment Capital).
Genuine domestic Productivity dropped at
intensifying rates.
The solution deviesd to handle that was to create government jobs
wherever possible; although government employment beyond a certain point is not
useful economically because it doesn’t create produced-materials for sale but
rather simply re-shuffles (and redistributes) public tax monies like the peanut in the proverbial
shell game. And to create an increasing panoply of ‘entitlements’ (so many
people were ‘victims’ and were being ‘structurally victimized', no?).
And in addition to all that, the intensifying sense
of ‘entitlement’ – coupled with the increasingly unreal environment of a
national life that offered few constructive employment opportunities for the
enterprising or the simply dutiful and responsible – did nothing to improve many folks’ sense of personal industriousness, productivity, and even
responsibility (which was itself kicked to the curb as being ‘oppressive’ and 'blaming the victim').
Meanwhile, and especially as actual Production
declined, the actual management of Big Money (the so called F.I.R.E interests:
finance, insurance, real estate) actually became the primary sources of such
wealth-generation as remained, and they had their own agendas and objectives
which the government (Executive as well as Legislative) could no longer ignore
… or even control: as regulations increased in the service of the Left, they
were increasingly removed in the service of the Right and Big Money.
And this led to an intensifying downward spiral of
smoke-and-mirror shows to try to keep up everybody’s confidence in the health
and wealth of the financial system and the economy: there was borrowing on the
authority of America’s (former) economic strength and hegemony – in Reagan’s
second administration the U.S. went for the first time ever from being a
creditor-nation to being a debtor-nation); diversification (corporations that
made machinery getting into cookie-manufacturing and such); and hostile-take-overs
(to simply lay off workers, drive up the stock price of the acquired business
and then sell it to whomever at a profit, where the process would be repeated);
out-sourcing (the jobs going overseas); off-shoring (not only the jobs but the
taxable profits going to the host country); and then finally a series of
Bubbles (about which you probably already know).
And, of course, extensive and habitual government
jiggering of official figures to make the whole thing look a lot less bad than
it was quickly becoming; while simultaneously everything was being spun as
‘liberating’ and proof that you can have ‘many revolutions at the same time’,
kill the Goose that laid the Golden Egg, and still keep up the world’s greatest
supply of Golden Eggs.
And then – even more ominously – as the tricks
finally ran out, there was a lethal turn to overseas military (mis-)adventure
to Go Out And Grab (GOAG) other people’s stuff. Which was cheeribly and nobly
spun as ‘liberation and thus We embraced the national strategy of Go Out And
Liberate And Grab (GOALAG), using – marvelously – the well-entrenched domestic trope
of ‘sensitive’ Liberation to justify ‘humanitarian interventions’ and the
regime-changing of whatever governments had lots of useful resources and couldn’t
fight back and had – by whatever standard was convenient to the case – an
‘oppressive’ government. (And of course, if you’re talking about ‘women’ being
‘oppressed’, then just about any other government on the planet could easily be
placed on the List.)
And yet these military (mis-)adventures cost the
lion’s share of whatever actual national wealth remained and required a huge
investment in the Pentagon operations.
(I pass over in silence the huge costs to military
operation efficiency imposed by the various Politically Correct impositions on
the military, and the catastrophic ill-consequences to the fighting forces of
not only those impositions, but then the experience of fighting un-winnable
military operations for years on end. We had been assured in the 1990s that
with the USSR gone We would have no peer-competitor in a military sense and that thus
We could afford to 'de-prioritize' military operational efficiency and competence,
and then that It Doesn’t Make Any Difference Anyway because computers and
whizz-bang technology would win all the wars and operations. And has any of that been working for Us?)
So then, I don’t think Stiglitz gets to the heart of
the matter by blaming everything on the Right and the rich – who, admittedly,
are now a ‘top-tier’ that approaches the obscenities of the First Gilded Age,
but at least back then We were a rising
nation whose potentials had not been fully tapped … which isn’t the case any
longer. Not hardly.
And thus too, “inequality” is not the heart of the
Problem now: just as the inequality of passenger classes on Titanic was not the core Problem facing
those hapless souls after she ripped herself open like a tuna can on the berg.
If for no other reason, there really isn’t any money
left to ‘equalize’ people; even if you took all the billions personally owned
by the ‘top-tier’ tomorrow and ‘redistributed’ it (the Big Lie seduction of the
past 40 Biblical years of the Left’s magic-act) you wouldn’t begin to make a
dent.
People need not only to ‘earn’ money, but they need
to feel like they are earning it through a useful and productive job: otherwise
you don’t create Citizens but only unripe and (dependably ) dependent ‘clients’, like the masses of ancient Rome
(and Czarist Russia’s serfs and proletariat). No democratic and Constitutional
republic can survive if it has to rely on material like that. As you perhaps
have begun to see.
Thus also I can’t fully credit that assertion that “inequality
violates moral values [and] … also interacts with a money-driven political
system to grant excessive power to the most affluent”.
In the first place, it hasn’t been just “money” that
has been driving the political system for the past 40 Biblical years – it has
been the agendas of the ‘special interests’ and organized Advocacies of the
Left’s Identity-Politics, whose lethally deforming influence has been exercised not through political
contributions of cash but through the power of votes – votes ‘bought’ with
the various schemes and stratagems of their pandering patrons in the Beltway.
Face it: individual ‘votes’ that have been ‘bought’
with the deliberately un-boundaried largesse of public tax monies are as
lethally deranging to the American Vision’s political dynamics as legislative
votes bought with corporate cash.
And face this: “dominant interests” cannot
accurately be defined today as merely the old bugaboo ‘special interests’ of
the First Gilded Age. Today’s dominant interests include those on the Left,
through Identity-Politics and the whole of that lethally misguided strategy.
If Big Money has “captured” regulatory authorities
and legislators, so has Big Identity – and if either of them are cause for
serious concern, then both of them working in tandem are cause for the most
vital and profound public alarm.
Nor is it enough for Stiglitz to lament – accurately
enough as far as it goes – that “lack of opportunity” means that the nation’s
“most valuable asset – its people – is not being fully used”.
Decades of the government operating as a snow-plow of
first-resort to clear the paths of Life that human beings vitally and
profoundly need to feel they have cleared for themselves have worked a horrible
and soul-stifling corrosion, as any sense of personal or communal enterprise and responsibility were baffled and choked away.
Nor is it completely relevant – although hardly
inaccurate – for Stiglitz to observe that “the rich”, needing fewer “public
services”, don’t want to pay for any. The rich need fire and police and highway
maintenance just like everybody else.
What’s more accurate is to acknowledge that what is
nowadays meant by “public services” is hell-and-gone beyond what that term has
usually meant in prior eras of American history: that term now means the entire
panoply of government largely and literally substituting itself for both individual
maturity and enterprise and effort and
local community concern and effort, and the ever-increasing pandemonium of
‘service providers’ that battens off the whole thing.
We have replaced the fiber and capacities of
individual human beings and communities, of Citizens and their
locally-administered polities, with blanket government imposition of tax monies
in the service of political convenience. And – who can be surprised? – the more
that such a dynamic undermines the competence of individuals and communities,
the more We ‘need’ the ever-engorging Feds and their government impositions. We
are well on the way to becoming soup-rabbits, caged in iron or velvet, awaiting
the Call to the Cook-Pot.
This
is the genuine fons et origo of Our
intensifying and expanding en-serfment, which is now no longer merely political (as if that weren’t bad
enough) but morale (used as an
adjective here; ‘moral’ has too many religious connotations, which are not
inapt but in this context, I think, distracting).
Avoiding that reality will do Us no more good than
having another glass of champagne or a quick shot of rot-gut or moving queasily
aft toward the still-dry fantail appeared as a good idea to the hapless and doomed souls aboard Titanic.
ADDENDUM
We approach – by coincidence – the 46th
anniversary (August 20, 1966) of Mao’s kick-off of the Cultural Revolution with
the campaign against “the Four Olds”: old Stories, old Customs, old Habits, old
Ideas. That ‘Revolution’ – as revolutions so often do because that’s what
revolutions do – wrecked so much of the matrix and fabric of Chinese history and
culture that almost half a century later China is still trying to repair what
damage can be repaired.
It is, however, more than a coincidence that at
precisely that point in time the Dems began to consider doing the same thing
here. Because if the demands and agendas of its soon-to-be-embraced Identities
and Advocacies were to be met, then huge and deeply-laid chunks of American
Tradition, Culture, Belief, and Ideas would have to be ripped out and tossed
away – under whatever ‘philosophical’ or legal or political pretexts could be
devised.
Neatly, the Advocacies pushed a whizzbang New Idea
their way: if you call all of our demands and agendas “rights”, then you pols
won’t have to worry about trying to explain anything or persuade the Citizenry –
you can just claim that this is ‘a matter of rights’ and so you don’t have any
choice but to give in and rip out the Old; you’ll be covered by the hallowed
American respect for “rights’ so you won’t even have to do much heavy political
lifting.
The Supreme Court had already beaten Mao to the
punch – without perhaps quite realizing it – when in 1965 it declared that it
had found more “rights” in “the penumbras of the Constitution”, which is to
say, in the shadows and darkling historical and conceptual fog surrounding the
actual document that the Framers wrote … where nobody had seen anything before.
Neat.
Then the structuralists got into the act and claimed
that since there were levels of ‘marginalization’ and ‘victimization’ so deep
that nobody even realized they were there, then – but of course – all such
marginalized and victimized persons (and groups and demographically valuable
groups) must – but of course – have some “rights” that required the government to
make all that marginalization and victimization go away. And the pols – and the
Supreme Court – were happy to agree and comply.
And the victimists certainly agreed with all that.
And so did the Gramscian-soused ‘radical feminists’
and the Eurocommunist ‘radical democrats’ (who really had no use for ‘democracy’
or ‘deliberative democratic politics’ at all).
And lubricating the friction of the whole queasy and
treacherous scheme was the general and specific frisson provided by Mao’s
then-current and then-imagined ‘success’ in imposing and unleashing the
Cultural Revolution against the Four Olds in Red China.
The Great Helmsman would rip out the framework of
the hull while the Great Vessel, loaded to the gunwales with ‘souls’ trying to
make it through Life, was far out on History’s sea, ploughing through the
mountainous waves and the not-infrequent storms and typhoons of modern History.
Labels: American political development since the Sixties, Joseph Stiglitz, modern American culture, the American Economy