After the Future

Worshipping in the Temple of the Invisible Hand

“I tend to think that most fears about A.I. are best understood as fears about capitalism,” Chiang told me. “And I think that this is actually true of most fears of technology, too. Most of our fears or anxieties about technology are best understood as fears or anxiety about how capitalism will use technology against us. And technology and capitalism have been so closely intertwined that it’s hard to distinguish the two.”

Let me offer an addendum here: There is plenty to worry about when the state controls technology, too. The ends that governments could turn A.I. toward — and, in many cases, already have — make the blood run cold.

I might, for that reason, alter Chiang’s comment one more time: Most fears about capitalism are best understood as fears about our inability to regulate capitalism.

--Ezra Klein

We Americans won't do anything do anything to constrain A.I. because Technocapitalism does not serve us, but we it. We Americans are worshippers in the cult of the Invisible Hand, and it is a jealous god that will have no other gods beside it. All our blessings derive from our being a Nation most servile to this god and so most favored by it. And we dare not risk angering it, for surely for such sacrilege we will be cast out of the Temple and be forever forsaken. 

Milton Friedman: Proto-Sociopath

But while economists still argue over Friedman’s theories, his hot take 50 years ago for nonspecialists — the Friedman doctrine — turned a capitalist truism (profits are essential) into a simple-minded, unhinged, socially destructive monomania (only profits matter). In “A Christmas Carol,” Scrooge is redeemed when he abandons his nasty profit-mad view of life — and his name became a synonym for miserliness. Likewise, a century later, in “It’s a Wonderful Life,” the banker Mr. Potter is the evil, unredeemable, un-American villain. Here was Milton Friedman telling businesspeople that they’d been tricked by the liberal elite, that Scrooge and Potter were heroes they ought to emulate.

Kurt Anderson, "How Liberals Opened the Door to [Crank] Libertarian Economics"

Milton Friedman was a crank, a fanatic Libertarian, whose views through much of his early career were relegated to the fringes. The Friedman Doctrine did not cause the problems we are dealing with now--Trumpism, huge economic inequality, intensified racial conflict--but legitimated the worst human impulses that led to their becoming as bad as they are now. Milton Friedman's ideas did not make men greedy; he legitimated greed. He removed the constraints and social norms that impeded people in business from giving their inner Scrooge or Mr. Potter free rein.

There's a direct line from Friedman to the corporate ethos that led to the 2008 meltdown and to the kind of mentality among many business types, especially on Wall Street, that leads them to embrace Trump. Like Friedman, Trump legitimates the worst human impulses. He brazenly acts out what normal people would feel ashamed to do, and so that makes people think he's honest or un-hypocritical. People see the president of the U.S. acting out their own secret, dark fantasies, and admire his "courage". But he's not courageous; he's a sociopath. 

The curious thing about Friedman is that he's an idealist about something that legitimates the worst impulses in human beings. That is a kind of sociopathy that he shares with most religious fanatics. His is a personal psychopathy that justifies Capitalist sociopathy. 

Libertarianism attracts a lot of smart people who are uncomfortable with complexity, who feel insecure at a deep ontological level, and so gravitate toward simplistic solutions that appear smart or edgy. It's the kind of thing that nerdy, emotionally stunted high schoolers get into, like reading Ayn Rand, as if she's really, really, you know, profound. But it's the kind of thing that if you don't outgrow it by your early twenties, you easily meld into the kind of sociopathic ethos that rules on Wall Street and shaped the ethos of Enron.  

Jesus said that the poor we shall have always with us. He forgot to mention that the sociopaths we shall have always with us, too. Unfortunately they're the ones who run things because normal, healthy people don't have their ruthlessness, monomania, and need to dominate. And most decent people tend to give even the worst people, if they're white and rich, the benefit of the doubt until it's too late. Any grifter or con artist understands this tendency among normal, decent human beings, and they know how to take advantage of it. 

The problem with America right now is that a grifter sociopath like Trump has shown other grifter sociopaths that there is a huge swath of the American public--40%+--who are ripe to be massively conned. Certainly more than I thought before Trump got elected--I would have guessed the number closer to 25%. There is nothing to hold back the next grifter sociopath to come along because Trump completed what Friedman began in destroying the decency norms that used to play a role in restraining what's worst in human nature. 

I assume that unless Trump stooges and the Russians are successful somehow in creating enough chaos and confusion to allow Trump to steal the election (a real possibility), Biden will win in November. But unless something even more unexpected happens, it's pretty clear that Biden and the Democrats haven't the imagination or strength of mind to fix what ails us. If 40%+ of the country prefers someone as comically crackpot as Trump now, 50%+ will prefer some future grifter selling the same snake oil but with more sophistication.

They'll find all kinds of crazy ways to justify their support for him or her, but it comes down to the con man's ability to persuade people that what they feel shameful about is really ok. As Gordon Gecko said echoing Friedman, "Greed is good... it captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, for knowledge has marked the upward surge of mankind." It's a great con because it makes you feel good about acting out what's worst. 

12/27/23 Update: I still think that the basic thrust of what I wrote here stands, but maybe softened somewhat by the more complex picture presented in Jennifer Burn's new book Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative. Read it and judge for yourself. Friedman, as were many other economists in the neoclassical school that became so influential in the late 20th century, was a true believer in the Cult of the Invisible Hand. He seemed to suffer from whatever the pathology is that leads people to join cults, and that cult produced beliefs and policies that, imo, are sociopathic. And is there any question that he was a fervent evangelist in the spreading of those beliefs and practices? Maybe that's too harsh. To what degree he is morally culpable is not for me to say. He started out as a New Dealer, but in later years he seemed oblivious of how his ideas had such negative impacts on the lives of ordinary people. He was in many ways just a man of his times, and when the times normalize sociopathy everybody shares in it some extent, me included. 

Stephanie Kelton, Big Gummint, Central Banks, and the American Future

An MMT view of the monetary system changes the way we think about what it means for currency-issuing nations to “live within their means.” It asks us to think in terms of real resource constraints—inflation—rather than perceived financial constraints. It teaches us to ask not “How will you pay for it?” but “How will you resource it?” It shows us that if we have the technological know-how and the available resources—the people, the factories, the equipment, and the raw materials—to put a man on the moon or embark on a Green New Deal to tackle climate change, then funding to carry out those missions can always be made available. Coming up with the money is the easy part. Managing the inflation risk is the critical challenge. More than any other economic approach, MMT places inflation at the center of the debate over spending limits. It also offers a more sophisticated array of techniques for managing inflationary pressures than what we have today.

Kelton The Deficit Myth (pp. 234-35). 

I've been reading Stephanie Kelton's The Deficit Myth, and it's one of the best things out there to clarify why Bernie was right and why the Clinton/Obama/Biden/Pelosi wing of the party was wrong--not to mention all Republicans of the Paul Ryan ilk. The federal deficit isn't really a deficit, and anybody who uses the term "deficit spending" pejoratively to justify cutting entitlements or to resist spending on programs like Medicare for All is either ignorant or cynical.

Every time some smart-ass journalist asks a Sanders or a Warren how they are going to "pay for it", they are asking a political, not an economic question. It's political because most Americans think that the federal budget is essentially the same as a business or family budget where expenses have to be covered by revenues. It's just not how it really works. But politicians need  to justify their programs in terms that economically unsophisticated Americans can feel comfortable with. So they feel compelled to come up with some pretext to justify their program by analogy to the household budget. 

The Republicans might come up with some ridiculous pretext to justify their tax cuts by saying that they will stimulate the economy, which in turn will increase tax revenues that will pay for them. But it's been proven time and again with Reagan, Bush, and now Trump that these cuts only increase the so-called deficit. But each time the Republicans want their tax cut, they bring out their demonstrably false trickle down argument. But even so, the problem with the Republican tax cuts is not that they increase the deficit, but that they aggravate egregious concentrations of wealth and power in the hands of so relatively few.

But even Democrats buy into the 'deficit myth'. Bill Clinton did when he worked so diligently to balance the budget by cutting entitlements, and even now we see the influence of this myth when Nancy Pelosi insists on  "PAYGO". The U.S. is not in debt to the Bank of China, as Obama once said. The U.S. is not Greece or Venezuela or Bangladesh. As long as the U.S. has a vibrant productive economy and it has what Kelton calls monetary sovereignty, the government cannot run out of money or default--unless it chooses to, by for instance not raising the debt limit. Everybody--Democrats included-- who thinks that we have a defecit problem or that we are burdening future generations with debt is buying into an ideology that makes no sense after the collapse of the Bretton-Woods system in 1971.

Since then, the U.S. and other countries with fiat currencies can print as much money as they want, and the only limiting factor is inflation. That's a real limiting factor, but running "deficits" is not inflationary if managed competently. China isn't going to call in its chits, and the government isn't going to default so long as the U.S economy remains vibrant and productive. There are no economic reasons for Social Security to run out of money or for not funding universal healthcare or a robust program to renew the national infrastructure. The obstacles for achieving all these things and more are political not economic. The challenge is not lack of money, but lack of imagination and political will. 

For many Fiscal Puritans, the phrase "fiat currency" connotes an immoral profligacy. You can't just create money out of thin air, right? Money has to be grounded in something, like gold. Just letting it be whatever a government wants it to be is just wrong. This kind of Fiscal Puritanism runs strong in the American collective psyche, but it is the primary cause of the aforementioned lack of imagination that insists on focusing on delusional moralistic problems rather than real ones. Running the federal government like a business is a false analogy; it simply does not reflect how the economy works in countries with strong economies like the U.S., Canada, Japan, Australia, the U.K. and others that have monetary sovereignty. 

I am not going to rehearse all Kelton's arguments here, but there is no more withering, easily understood critique than hers to be found of the Neoliberalism that has dominated the elite thinking of the Washington Consensus whose destructive ideology has played a major role in creating the conditions that allowed for the rise of Donald Trump.

I have some hope that in the post-Trump reconstruction of American political institutions that we will find a way to reset to pre-Reagan when there was actually a consensus built around the legitimacy of the New Deal. We actually had a social democracy there for a while, but after 1980 the Neoliberals came to dominate elite thinking, and everything went badly wrong. It is astonishing how many smart people who should have known better--and who I think wanted to act in good faith--could be taken in by the Neoliberal con. Hopefully books like Kelton's and the emergence of the Sanders/Warren/AOC wing of the party will change that permanently. 

The challenge for them is rhetorical rather than technical: how to persuade most Americans that deficit spending is ok. That's a heavy lift because it just seems wrong. It's counter-intuitive, and it goes against everybody's common sense and experience about how money works in their personal lives. If we as individual households, businesses, and even state and local governments have to balance our expenditures with revenues, why shouldn't the federal government? If it doesn't, it should. . .  right? That's one point of resistance. The other is Americans' mistrust of big government and their discomfort with giving it too much power. This is a legitimate concern, but big gummint--bigness in general--is here to stay. The question is whether in the future ordinary Americans can make bigness work in their interests rather than in the interests of the oligarchs. 

***

Anybody who has read this blog over the years knows that I like to frame issues in loosely dialectical terms, as presenting polarities and then seeking to reconcile them. The fundamental polarity at work in the American political psyche pertaining here is Jefferson vs. Hamilton. The Jeffersonian impulse was carried mainly by Democrats through the 19th century, and the Hamiltonian impulse was carried by the Federalists, then the Whigs, and finally by the Republicans. None of us is completely Jeffersonian or Hamiltonian, but we lean one way or the other with recessive traits of the other manifesting from time to time. Yankees lean toward Hamilton; Southerners toward Jefferson.

Jeffersonians define freedom primarily in terms of freedom from big government and big concentrations of wealth and power in institutions like central banks. Hamilton wanted the U.S. to be a world economic and military power, and he saw a strong central government and a central bank as playing a critical role in effecting this rise to power. Hamilton won early on, but the Jeffersonians dominated the decades in the early 19th Century running up to the Civil War--although among Southerners Hamiltonian recessive traits emerged with their support for the war with Mexico and their fantasies of imperial expansion into the rest of Latin America. The Hamiltonian legacy was developed by his Whig heirs Henry Clay and Daniel Webster.

I think of Lincoln, a Whig-turned-Republican, as a Hamilton-dominant politico with recessive Jeffersonian traits. His greatness lies in his efforts to reconcile both, as so beautifully articulated at Gettysburg, but after him, the Republican Party became the vehicle for Hamilton-dominant thinking between the Civil War and WWI. Equality ideals were forgotten as Social Darwinism took hold in the North and Jim Crowe in the South.

By the second decade of the 20th Century, the heretofore Jeffersonian southern Democrats like Woodrow Wilson morphed into Hamiltonians in supporting the WWI and in bringing back the one thing truly anathema to Jeffersonians--the central bank. The Federal Reserve was created on his watch in 1913. By the time FDR took office, the only members of the Democratic party interested in invoking Jefferson were southern segregationists who looked for any pretext to stymie the federal government from interfering with their post-reconstruction apartheid system. In the late 19th Century Republican phase, the U.S. became a world economic power; in the post-Wilson Democratic phase, it became both a world economic and military power. The Party of Jefferson had become assimilated into the Party of Hamilton. 

There were, of course, the cranks like those in the John Birch society who were ok with the big business part of the Hamiltonian legacy, but were appalled that big gummint accompanied it. They were Jeffersonians of convenience like the Southern oligarchs. They hated a big government that would restrict them with regulations and anti-trust laws from doing as they please. They were the country-club Hamiltonians who saw FDR as a traitor to his class. But nobody in the power establishment took those cranks seriously until Ronald Reagan made it ok to be a Neoliberal. And we came to see that crankiness normalized through the efforts of the Koch Brothers and others who fund right-wing think tanks whose sole goal is to give a kind of intellectual legitimacy to ideas that are crudely designed to justify the dominance of the 1%.

Jefferson's vision for America was obsoletized by the Industrial Revolution and by the emergence of the U.S. as a world military power after WWI, and yet his influence lingers in positive and negative ways. We are Jeffersonians when we feel inspired by the ideals articulated in the Declaration of Independence. We are Jeffersonians when we feel uncomfortable not just with how the central U.S. government has grown into this massive surveillance state with hundreds of military bases throughout the world, but also with the way Wall Street and huge concentrations of corporate power and wealth have come to dominate the economic sphere. And we are Jeffersonians when we are appalled at how huge concentrations of corporate power meld with political power.

But we are Jeffersonians in the negative sense when we think naively that our freedoms only thrive to the degree that big government stays out of our lives. Bigness in the private and public sectors is a real problem, but you deal with it by making it accountable, and big government is the only means to keep huge, amoral corporate powers in check. And that requires a vigilant citizenry, not the morally complacent citizenry that lets a quasi-authoritarian crackpot like Trump get elected. 

We need to keep those positive aspects of the Jeffersonian imagination of America alive, but we need to realize that we live in a world that is shaped primarily by forces that Hamilton celebrated and are now out of balance. The question before us now is how to effect a political coincidentia oppositorum, i.e., to achieve Jeffersonian ideals using Hamiltonian means. In other words bigness is here to stay, and to wish it away is delusional, and to the degree that bigness leads to greater levels of inequality and unfreedom, it must be resisted by harnessing it. For me the question is whether a new leadership can emerge from the Trump chaos that has an imagination of an American future that embodies what is best about both the Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian legacies. 

The challenge is to manage bigness in such a way that the huge concentrations of wealth and political power don't accrue to the 1%--or the 20% for that matter. The challenge before us is to harness American economic power to enact policies that solve the problems of inequality and concentrations of wealth and power--not just in this country, but throughout the world. Going forward, the only real solutions are global solutions.

That might seem kind of unrealistic because it seems to require a mentality and an imagination of future possibility that is so not  who we are now. But if we live in this Hamilton-dominant imagination of America at the moment, I believe that our recessive Jeffersonianism--the most positive aspects of it articulated in the Declaration--can emerge as a balancing, integrating factor. Right now we are in chaos; we are anything but integrated and balanced. The thing to be feared is that we will embrace any kind illiberal order as an alternative to the chaos, but that just creates other imbalances that kick the basic problem down the road.  

If there is not an aggressive assertion of political will from progressives, the illiberal Right will win by default. Obama was a decent president, but he was a timid technocrat, and his timidity and his acquiescence to the Washington Consensus aggravated the conditions that promoted Trump's emergence. If Biden is another Obama, expect someone to emerge on the Right who will have learned from Trump. He willl have learned how easy it is to do egregiously illegal, unconstitutional things that can be tied up in the courts for years while he bends government institutions to his authoritarian will. If the courts finally decide against him, he will ignore them as Andrew Jackson did. It doesn't matter what the courts decide if the executive branch won't enforce it. But there's a good chance courts will support a post-Trump authoritarianism because Mitch McConnell has been stacking the federal courts with right-wing ideologues. 

For now at least I'm going to allow myself to embrace the more optimistic possibilities for an American future, and hope that Trump's absurd, chaotic presidency has created a sense of urgency that make something new possible, and that out of his chaos something new and better can be born. I believe something better is possible even if such a possibly poses an enormous challenge to our collective political imagination.

As Kelton's book points out, we have the resources, the Hamiltonian means, to do very good things. The only question is whether we will be hamstrung by, on the one hand, a tight-assed Fiscal Puritanism, the kind we see on display with Mitch McConnell and the Republicans who just hate the idea of extending unemployment benefits during a pandemic; and on the other hand, by a widespread moral lassitude and ignorance among ordinary Americans that allowed a ridiculous figure like Trump to take the White House in the first place. 

State of the Race 1

Bernie Sanders' position in this cycle is a lot like Trump's in the last one. He has a solid, impassioned base of support that is dwarfed by the majority which is split among the rest of the field. Trump won because the opposition to him could not unify around another candidate to oppose him. This is how it usually works—impassioned, well-organized minorities beat majorities if the majority lacks passion and organization. And so as with Trump, it’s one thing to call Bernie out for some of the crazy stuff from his past, but it’s futile if there is no one else for his impassioned followers to embrace. That’s why Trump won in ’16—nobody emerged who could capture the passion of the base that was drawn to him and still is.

Now perhaps Buttigieg or Klobochar—or Bloomberg--can emerge with enough delegates to beat Bernie, but they won’t capture his base and its energy, and that would be a very bad thing for Democrats. I thought Warren might be able to do this, but it’s clear now she won’t unless something surprising happens. And this problem points to the underlying disadvantage of conventional, rank-and-file Dems, which is that because most of them don’t know what they believe or think, they cannot unite except around a No. They dither this way and that driven by anxiety and uncertainty. They are very good at finding fault, but not very good at affirming something as Good with impassioned commitment. That's how Bernie's supporters differ--they do affirm a vision--his vision--with impassioned commitment, and Democrats are foolish if they ignore or neutralize that.

If Dems nominate Buttigieg, Klobochar, or Bloomberg, they will do so not because they really like these people but because they will see one or the other of them as the most effective No to Trump, and even if that’s good enough in the short run to beat Trump, it won’t be in the long run. The Yes that Bernie supporters feel is an energy that needs to be valued and cultivated. 

Even though I doubt it will play out like this, the best possible scenario is for Dems to realize that their best chance is to unite around Sanders and soon. I would have preferred Warren to emerge because she is better suited to play this unifying role, but the Dems must learn from Trump's success in '16, and they won't learn that lesson if they elect another moderate technocrat. Since I don't think there's much there there with either Buttigieg or Klobuchar, I am inclined to think that Bloomberg will emerge as the main Bernie alternative.

If Bloomberg wins the nomination, it would be disaster for the future of the Democratic Party, even if he beats Trump. Too many Dems don't understand that Trump is not an aberration; he's a symptom of a deeper problem. If they think that just getting rid of Trump will return things to normal by electing someone they see as a moderate, establishment type, they are as delusional as the poor souls cheering Trump at his rallies. 

Bernie for all his limitations is the best choice for the American future. He's a risky choice, but the likelihood of his failing to beat Trump is multiplied the longer the Dems dither, or if they fail to unite around him when it becomes clear his path to the nomination is the strongest. I think Bloomberg could beat Trump, and I understand the temptation to want to use his money and other resources to do that, but choosing Bloomberg would be the worst possible outcome, short of Trump being re-elected. 

Zizek, McCain, Trump, and Big Daddy

I'm no expert on Slavoj Zizek, the Lacanian psychotherapist and edgy philosopher from Slovenia, but I find his distinction between the Oedipal Father Figure and the Primal Father Figure an interesting frame through which to observe the events surrounding the death of John McCain in the last week. Elites in the American media and political establishments leapt at the opportunity to lionize John McCain as an exemplar of an American code of honor and service that contrasted with Donald Trump's pettiness and self-serving venality. In Zizek's frame, McCain is an exemplar of an ethos dominated by the Oedipal Father, the mythological successor figure to the Primal Father figure for which Trump is an exemplar. These archetypes work in each of us, at levels of unconsciousness most people are unaware of. They have reality-defining power.

The Primal Father in Freud's and Zizek's mythos represents self-assertion in the service of self-gratification--the Primal Father is the crude bull moose who maintains by force a monopoly of access to the females in the herd; he has no rules, no honor except the prestige of being the herd alpha and doing as he pleases without constraint. Just try to stop him. The Oedipal father, on the other hand, represents duty in the service of group cohesiveness and a strict group code--honor, service.

The problem for Zizek is that both in their different ways create constructs that Freud called the Superego, that Zizek called the Big Other, and that I'm calling Big Daddy. The Superego works at an unconscious level to shape our feelings of guilt and of self worth insofar as we we live up to the behavior and attitudes the code demands. Our feelings of self-worth as successes or failures is determined by the Code. So in McCain's case, his sense of success as a human being depended on how well he measures up to the Oedipal superego, while Trump's sense of success depends on how well he measures up to the superego as defined by the Primal Father figure. 

In McCain's case, his family was military. His grandfather and father were both admirals. His family programmed his superego with an old-fashioned code of military stoicism, honor, service, and self-sacrifice. In many ways he lived that code, and in many ways he failed to. That's the way it is for most people for whom such a code is a strong influence in their acculturation. The superego, the internal Big Daddy, creates both an image of what one's ideal self should be, but it also represses energies that Zizek describes as perversions of the code, and are a source of continuous temptation to transgress the code. Jung calls these repressed aspects of the psyche the Shadow. 

It explains a lot of our everyday experience, for instance, why "good' girls" find "bad boys" so attractive. Bad boys represent the repressed energies that living in accordance with the Oedipal code produce. The more rigid the adherence to the code, the more repressed these energies. But one way or another they seek an outlet through transgression or 'sin'. The more repressed the dark energies, the more joyously liberated one feels when he or she transgresses them--until the guilt sets in.

But here's the thing, first noted by St. Paul in Romans 4:15: If there's no code, there's no transgression. If there's no law, there's no sin. So it follows that If there's no superego, there's no guilt. Getting rid of the superego is Zizek's project. And while Zizek sees the Church as the chief reinforcer of superego--the Church must have a law or code otherwise there would be no sinners, and if there were no sinners, there would be no need for redemption or for the Church to mediate that redemption. Well, ok, but Paul, of course, was arguing that he was liberated from the law by awakening to a deeper, transcendent source of order. But I agree with Zizek that the church often operates as if that 'awakening' had little to do with its raison d'être. 

So the Big Daddy operates in our psyche like a repressive dictator who punishes us with intense feelings of guilt and self-loathing when we fail to live up to its ideals, while at the same time it creates its perverse opposite, energies within the psyche that seek to subvert its rule and transgress its code in rebellious ways. McCain is a classic example of living the tension between being the good boy and the bad boy. His "maverickness" is related to the second, and In the past week we celebrated how he was an exemplar of the first. But we didn't talk about his partying, how he dumped his devoted first wife for a woman eighteen years younger, how he got involved in bank scandal that was related to his second wife's family's business, his ambivalent record and attitudes about race, etc. 

Very Trumpy stuff there, but the American establishment at this moment needs an exemplar of the Oedipal Big Daddy to contrast with someone who almost in every way transgresses its codes. McCain is honored for the ways in which he strove to act honorably, and he is forgiven for the ways that he failed. That's fine, so far as it goes. He's like most everybody else that way, and his eulogizers do what almost all eulogizers do, which is to celebrate how the eulogized embodied the community's values and to overlook the ways he or she failed to. He tried and sometimes succeeded--at least he tried. Trump doesn't bother to try even in the least degree. It would be shameful for him to be honorable because within the Primal Father archetype honor is complete b.s. and hypocrisy. Power and enjoyment are the only thing that matter.

Zizek says that the Oedipal--strict social norms--Father figure shaped American society until the 1960s when it was supplanted by a version of the Primal Father figure that has shaped since then what we think of as the postmodern. The postmodern ethos is shaped by a mandate to gratify one's appetites unconstrained by traditional repressive norms and traditions. The superego of people shaped by the Primal Big Daddy commands them to satisfy his or her appetites. It has little regard for the common good or commitments that would constrain the pursuit of those appetites. This is the 'code' that took hold in the 1970s, and has played a huge role in shaping popular and elite culture. It is the perfect ethos for consumer capitalism, and is justified by a neoliberal ideology in the political and economic spheres. And is there anybody who embodies it more fully and unambiguously than Donald Trump?

But Zizek points out that rather being truly psychically liberating, the Primal Big Daddy  'superego' comes with its own set of commands, which boil down to something like this: “Thou shalt satisfy your appetites. Thou must thereby enjoy and fulfill thyself in whatever way you see fit." And so it follows that any kind of self-denial or sacrifice for a higher good is repressive and alienating. [I should point out that Zizek is somewhat muddled (if not completely bonkers) in this regard when contrasting this kind of thralldom to superego with his idea about "desire" and  "immoral ethics", for whom someone like Robespierre was an exemplar, but I don't want to get too far afield here.]

But the problem with this new command lies in that it doesn't bring real enjoyment. At best it's a kind of sterile enjoyment. A more robust form of enjoyment was a possibility in the old Oedipal regime in a way it is not for those living under the rule of the Primal Father. Before there was a liberating joy in the transgressive act, but if the new rule is to transgress without there being a broadly respected repressive code to transgress, there’s no fun in it. Enjoyment becomes a grind. We have to find new traditional constraints and taboos to become liberated from. That's where the fun is--in identifying and breaking whatever unbroken taboos are left. 

Someone like McCain always honored the code of the militarist, authoritarian Big Daddy, even if he failed on occasion to live up to it. The Primal Big Daddy has no respect for the old codes, sees them as impediments to the fulfillment of his appetites, sees those who are constrained by them as repressed fools, and finds its sense of identity and moral mission in flouting whatever vestiges of that code remain.

And that's the difference between John McCain and Donald Trump. Trump is an exemplar of the Primal Big Daddy code. McCain saw himself as a rebel because he believed in the code, but Trump isn't a rebel because there are no codes he believes in. He is a bull moose for whom there  is no rule except to do whatever satisfies his appetites. He only feels a sense of self-loathing when he fails to get what he wants. There is no honor except the prestige that comes with power and humiliating one's foes. There is no sense whatsoever of the validity of the old Oedipal honor code that requires the repression of one's appetites for the good of the community. 

The larger question is whether any society worth living in can do away with an Oedipal Big Daddy. But Is it a question of getting rid of Big Daddy or finding a source of order that subverts his influence? Zizek would probably say that any source of order is a Big Daddy and the ideology that justifies his rule, and every Big Daddy is necessarily a source of repression for those who live under his rule. And repression is by definition a bad thing and liberation is by definition a good thing. But is it, or is it that we need to be liberated from the whole repressive/transgressive system. Is such a thing possible?

I think it is, but it requires a level of self-awareness and maturity that is simply too rare at this point in our collective development to have much of an influence in shaping a truly free and yet ordered i.e., just, society. I believe with MLK that the arc of history bends toward justice, so it's not that what we do now does not matter. We must do what's there for us to do, but we must also realize that the human being's capacity for self-absorption and self-delusion cannot be underestimated, and that most people snap out of their delusions only when reality whacks them upside the head one way or the other. The greater the level of delusion, the more violent is the whack required. In the short run all manner of whacks upside the head seem a necessary precondition for any real movement forward in American society.

Liberation does not come from just transgressing the old repressive codes. Liberation comes only if one can in some way transcend the code, not just transgress it--no matter which Big Daddy's code it is. The post-Axial spiritual traditions, particularly Pauline Christianity and Buddhism, teach that it is possible. Zizek thinks it's possible, too, through his Lacanian brand of psychoanalysis. Seeing similarities and differences here is something I hope to get into in future posts. 

So this past week we were continuously exposed to people praising McCain as an exemplar of the code of honor, service, and self-sacrifice for the greater good, i.e, the American nation state. It's clear that the elite establishment approves of McCain and has nothing but disdain for Trump. And at the same time, all the Trump supporters have nothing but disdain for the elites who eulogized him in the National Cathedral on Saturday.

But the underlying values of the establishment and of Trump's supporters are an incoherent hodgepodge--sometimes praising a code of discipline and sacrifice, other time celebrating an anything-goes code of sating one's appetites however one sees fit. That's what it means to be postmodern--thinking or believing contradictory things, because most are in thrall to contradictory unconscious organization of reality that sometimes celebrates repression and at other times desire, sometimes superego, other times transgression. Most postmoderns are oblivious of their self contradictions or why what they approve or disapprove this or that has any rhyme or reason. They just feel what they feel, and you've no right to judge them. And if they should become aware of their contradictions, they just shrug their shoulders, because there's no center, no ground on which to stand to make such comparisons and judgments. 

Trump is unusual in that he is so unambiguously one thing, so completely, predictably, guiltlessly a man of predatory appetite who is so blithely oblivious of any sense of the old honor codes. He's not conflicted the way most are. He's pure in a most remarkable way for a public figure. He takes the post-sixties ethos of appetite to its extreme, and this is why I think that his libidinal, norm-crashing presidency is not to be feared in itself, but is rather a precursor for an authoritarian backlash that celebrates honor, country, service to the state. The Trump supporters will get behind such an authoritarian regime and its leader because they are not that particular about their violent Big Daddies. They only care about strength, not whether it's honorable or not.

Trump is not the real threat because he is not really an authoritarian. He's too disorganized, impulsive, and self-absorbed to think beyond his own appetites. A real authoritarian is a disciplined true believer and expects others to believe what he does and to submit to his prescribed discipline for the greater good. Trump believes nothing, and is really more a creature of the anarchic Cultural Left in that sense, as are most neoliberal, cosmopolitan elites. But he is someone who provides a gateway for someone who will be a real threat. The violent, appetitive Primal Father eventually loses to the violent Oedipal Authoritarian Father, so the real danger lies in the emergence and popular embrace of an authoritarian Big Daddy who will reassert a repressive code that everybody better get in line with or else.

Elites will embrace the arrival of this kind of Big Daddy because they're tired of the chaos and how nothing works anymore, and because they have lost faith in a democracy that makes possible the presidency of a sleazy con man like Donald Trump. They will embrace any new Big Daddy who will tell them they're better than that and who can free them from their tortured ambiguity and normlessness.

There's a a reason why the military is the only institution that Americans have not lost faith in. So the Big Daddy to come will likely be  ex-military, someone like John McCain or John Kelly, someone disciplined and organized, someone admirable according to the old service-and-honor code, reasonable seeming, upright. But when push comes to shove he will impose their code on the rest of us for the 'greater good', and we will go along because who doesn't want the greater good, especially when things seem so frighteningly chaotic?

See also Moral vs. Moralistic.

 

Perlstein on Sanders

To me, this history reveals the frustrating paradox at the heart of Sanders’s success. The very thing that makes it so exciting—a Democrat dreaming big dreams and who’s rewarded with burgeoning political success beyond anyone’s prediction but his own—is also what makes for such a stark contrast with the rest of the Democratic Party. The fact is that Sanders is nearly alone. In our generation, the dreamers have been the conservatives in the Republican Party. As one of them, Milton Friedman, put it in a quote made famous by Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine, in a crisis, “the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.”

My point is not to complain that laws adequate to the crisis have not been passed. I know as well as anyone that the lunatics running the Republican Party have choked the life out of the legislative process. Passing ambitious laws is presently impossible.

My worry is that Democrats don’t even keep the big ideas lying around any more.

My fear is the fact that, on January 20, 2017, a President Sanders would be inaugurated politically naked and alone—commanding a party apparatus less prepared ideologically, institutionally, and legislatively to do great things than at any time in its history.

Immediately the reader thunders back at the historian: Don’t you understand what you’re asking? Don’t you understand how badly Washington is broken? Isn’t it a fantasy that if we just elect principled progressives they can break the legislative stalemate? Isn’t that “Green Lanternism”—the currently fashionable term for liberals demanding too much of their politicians, or for idealists who don’t understand, as New York Timescolumnist Paul Krugman recently put it, “How Change Happens”?

But change happens when it’s made to happen, and historians understand that sometimes history turns on a narrow pivot. (Source)

Green Lanternism is a way of mocking the idea that change comes if the president gets on his bully pulpit and fights for a particular policy. I think that Green Lanternism is a straw man. Sure, if you are in an ordinary political environment, where everyone is relatively sane in representing their competing interests, a politician needs to know how to compromise, make deals, etc., to get things done. But in moments of crisis more is possible. Obama's approach seemed to assume that we were not in crisis, that we were in a politics-as-usual situation, that compromise, making deals, etc., would work. But we were not in a politics-as-usual situation. We were in one of the worst economic crises since the 30s and the worst foreign policy debacles since Vietnam. The country was ready for a new approach; it was looking to him for leadership, and when he didn't offer any, the country went back to sleep, and the 'disaster of 2010' occurred. 

Criticizing Obama for not getting more done is not Green Lanternism because the basic criticism of Obama is not that he didn't try to do anything; it's that he tried to do things using the old ideas, the ideas that created the crises in the first place. I see now that he really wasn't intellectually or temperamentally capable of doing more, but his was nevertheless a missed opportunity. He was in the middle of a crisis caused by GOP Neoliberals and Neoconservatives, and instead of trying to change the basic ideas and assumptions at a moment when the country would have been most receptive to it, he continued to govern with Neoliberal and Neoconservative assumptions.

I argue that the country, if not Beltway insiders, would have been willing to support him if he was more aggressive in first condemning those ideas as having failed spectacularly, and then appealing to the ideas that shaped policy during the Trente Glorieuses. It wouldn't even have required introducing anything new and exotic; it could have been a conservative argument to return to time when America actually worked under Democratic leadership within a social democratic policy frame, in other words with the assumptions that made the New Deal possible. 

He tried hard to get healthcare reform, but the ACA is a Rube-Goldberg mess because it is a solution that makes no practical sense except within a Neoliberal frame. It doesn't begin to address the underlying problems with our dysfunctional health care system. I'd argue, following Perlstein's logic, that it would have been better for him to fight for a Medicare-for-all solution and fail than to have succeeded with the ACA. The first battle is the battle for ideas, and the success of a real solution requires the legitimation of a social democratic policy frame. It would have been better for him, in other words to make the argument for single payer because to do so he would have had to argue from social democratic assumptions rather than Neoliberal ones. Making that argument is the more important task right now than getting anything done. 

And so now we have this continuing healthcare mess to deal with, and Clinton is right when she criticizes Sanders's single payer ideas because it would require the dismantlement of Obamacare. What would have been already very difficult is now even more so. It's harder now to find a real solution than it was before the ACA because the ACA has created such a convoluted mess from which me must get disentangled. 

Perlstein seems to be arguing that it might be too late, and that's something that I've worried about and written about here as well. But that's also why after an initial stage of skepticism about Sanders's prospects, I became a more enthusiastic supporter. For me the question is not whether he will be able to accomplish what he says he can; the question is whether he will be able to change the ethos, the ideas environment. Even if he didn't pass one piece of legislation, I'd consider his presidency to be a success if (1) he could legitimate a basic social democratic policy ethos, and (2) create a political energy in which his efforts would galvanize the American public to support him by throwing out the obstructionists GOP--and corporate Dems--and to replace them with 'Sandersistas'. His presidency, in other words, would be a success if he could lay a foundation that Elizabeth Warren or someone like her could come in with a ruling majority in 2020 or 2024 to build on.

It's all about the long game now. Are there any influential progressives out there thinking in longer-range terms? The task now is to change the ethos in Washington and in legislatures throughout the country. Neoliberalism and Neoconservatism have been disastrous, and yet our political leaders persist in thinking in Neoliberal and Neoconservative terms because nobody in any real positions of power has robustly argued for an alternative. Clinton is not arguing for an alternative, but Sanders is, and that's why his candidacy is so important. It's not about whether he can get anything done; it's about whether he can change the ethos.

 

The Disaster of 2010

From Chapter 10 in Jane Mayer's Dark Money, "The Shellacking: Dark Money's Midterm Debut, 2010"

Lifting the donors' [Koch donors' network] spirits further was the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling, which had been handed down on January 21, [2010], two days after Scott Brown's victory in Massachusetts, and shortly before the Kochs' summit. Brown's race now seemed a promising dress rehearsal for even more outside money, which the Court had ennobled as free speech. So as the self-described "investors' came together to plan for the 2010 midterm elections, they were in a buoyant mood.

... Even before the Citizens United decision, Gillespie has been busy. While many other conservatives were despondent during the early months of the Obama administration, when the president's approval ratings were stratospherically high, Gillespie hadcome up with an ingenious plan to exploit the only opening he could see. With Obama dominating Washington, Gillespie looked to the states. He knew that 2011was a year in which many state legislatures would redraw the boundaries of their congressional districts based on anew census, a process that only took place once a decade. So he put together an ambitious strategy aimed at a Republican takeover of governorships and legislatures all across the country. Capturing them would enable Republicans to redraw their states congressional districts in order to favor their candidates.

... Gillespie called the plan "REDMAP", an acronym for Redistricting Majority Project. ...All he needed was enough money to put REDMAP into action. By the end of 2010, with the help off million-dollar donations from the tobacco companies Altria and Reynolds, as well as huge donations from Walmart, the pharmaceutical industry, and rich private donors like those at the Koch summit, the RSLC [Republican State Leadership Committee] would have $30 million, three times its Democratic counterpart.

...On November 2, 2010, the Democrats suffered massive defeats, losing control of the House of Representative. Just two short years after he soars to power amid predictions of a lasting realignment, Obama's party and his hopes of prevailing on any ambitious legislation were crushed. 

...The Democrats' setbacks were huge at almost every level, Republicans picked up half a dozen Senate seats at the state level, the Democratic losses were even more staggering. Across the country, Republicans gained 673 legislative seats. They won control of both the legislature and the governor's office in twenty one states; the Democrats had similar one-party rule in only eleven. The map looked red, with small islands of blue. 

As a consequence of their gains, Republicans now had four times as many districts to gerrymander as the Democrats. By creating reliably safe seats, they could build a firewall protecting the Republican control of Congress for the next decade. 

In the middle of all this, in March 2010, Obama got his one signature victory, the passage of the Affordable Care Act. Two cheers for Obama. But Obama and his people were apparently unaware of how the GOP was going about developing the infrastructure for obstructing anything else he might ever want to do:

By July [2010], Democratic strategists began to feel a strange undertow, as if an offshore tsunami were gathering force. One operative put together a chart compiling the ledger of midterm expenditures by ten Republican-aligned independent groups and was appalled to discover that this slice of the total spending alone would likely reach at least $200 million, Americans for Prosperity had pledged to spend $45 million. Karl Rove's group American Crossroads had pledged $32 million. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce had committed to spend $75 million. Countless other groups, including an unknown number of dark-money organizations loaded with secret funds were lined up to spend millions and millions more. A Democratic operative who saw the chart, which was passed around like samizdat within the party, admitted that it was "one hell of a wake-up call."

The numbers caught the Obama administration off guard. The former White House aide Anita Dunn admits, "It was clear that Citizens United was going to open the floodgates and it would be bad for the Democrats. But it exploded in 2010. The amount spent in those midterms probably surprised everyone."

As late as May, Axelrod had barely known who the Kochs were. When a reporter asked what he knew about them, he seemed unsure. Later, the Koch public relations team would suggest that press coverage of them was initiated by the White House. In truth Obama's political team was almost clueless. Only after Noble's team, working undercover, began launching attacks on Democrats all across the country did some in the White House start to sense something odd. As Axelrod recalls, "We began to wonder, where is all this money coming from?"

History will judge as to what degree the Obama administration's being blindsided by all this was unavoidable or was political malpractice. I don't have an opinion on that right now. He can't be blamed for Citizens United. But I blame him for playing the insiders' game once elected and thinking he could win it rather than looking for ways to mobilize outsiders' support from the electorate that so enthusiastically supported him during his campaign. He just didn't have the people around him who could even begin to imagine how to do that. 

Part of the reason the Democrats got shellacked by the GOP in the 2010 midterms lies in the way that Obama's playing the insiders' game in his first two years dismayed the base, especially young people, who went back to sleep when it became clear that Obama was not offering a real change, that he was just playing the insiders' game. Mayer's book makes clear, though, not just that the Right in this country has a lot of money to work with, but that it has far more talent and resourcefulness in playing the insiders' game. The Democrats have a chance only if they find a way to mobilize the outsiders, the people in the base that Obama's administration showed so much disdain for. 

Do I think that a Bernie Sanders-led team will do any better? I don't really know for sure. it could be that it's already too late to do anything. But he at least understands that the insiders' game is a losing one for Democrats and the Left. HRC presents herself as someone who knows how to play the insiders' game, and I just don't see her as having the imagination or moral resources to anything different than to play that losing game. Maybe I underestimate her--I hope I do--but I just see her as  too enmeshed in the decadent system to be able to offer an alternative to it. I also fear that we are now in a populist moment, and if the Democrats don't offer the American electorate a genuine populist on the Left, the country will choose the one from the Right. HRC represents at best a murky prolonging of the agony, and at worst a delivery of the country to a classical demagogue who with the support of the mob destroys what's left of our democracy. 

Mayer's Dark Money

I'm three or four chapters into reading Jane Mayer's Dark Money. Mayer is the Ida Tarbell of our generation, and to her we owe a huge debt of gratitude. If Tarbell exposed how the trusts work at the turn of the previous century, Mayer is now exposing how enormous amounts stealth money are working to bring into the mainstream extremist ideas that would remain at the fringes if there were not enormous amounts of money buying their legitimacy. It's one thing to suspect this kind of thing is happening; it's another to see it well researched and sourced.

This isn't just about the Kochs; it's about the Scaifes, the Olins, and many others in their networks that have found ways through their foundations to reshape American political culture in their image since the 1960s. It's just not their think tanks (like AEI, Heritage, Hoover, Cato, etc.), and the bought politicians, their infiltration of state legislatures with ALEC, and the funding astro-turf movements ; it's their concerted efforts to change the judiciary through  Law and Economy programs they have used to bribe law schools (starting with Harvard and then imitated everywhere) into introducing ideological indoctrination programs masquerading as dispassionate intellectual inquiry. It's their effort to change the judicial culture by providing lavish two-week junkets for federal judges over the last several where it's explained to them why environmental regulation and labor laws impinge Liberty. It's about their lavish funding not the Federalist Society. There is nothing like it on the Left.

I'll probably have more to say about this as I read on, but read Bill McKibben's review in NYRB to get a better overview now, and then go and read the book.

Here's an excerpt from near the end of McKibben's review:

As for Sanders, if every American were to somehow decide to devote the coming months to reading Mayer’s book, it seems a safe bet his argument about “the millionaires and the billionaires” would find even more adherents.

...In any event, the lasting contribution of the Kochs to our history will almost certainly be the introduction of truly huge money into the political process, vast funds coming from the tiniest sliver of the population. With each election cycle the resources they’ve assembled have grown, and this year, as I’ve said, they’ve announced plans to spend $889 million. About $300 million of that is slated to go directly into campaigns; the rest will pay for get-out-the-vote operations, their voter data project, and the like. “We’ve had money in the past, but this is so far beyond what anyone has thought of it’s mind-boggling,” Fred Wertheimer, the longtime head of Common Cause, told Mayer. “This is unheard of in the history of the country. There has never been anything that approaches this.” Thanks to Mayer, we are, at least, fully warned.

Jim Webb for President

There are things that Jim Webb has said and done over the years that have rubbed me the wrong way, but better him than Hillary. He's an economic populist who is to the left of Hillary's foreign policy and someone who resides in Glenn Greenwald's Hall of Fame for integrity. That alone makes him preferrable to HC, but he will be branded by the cultural left as a cultural conservative, a Reagan Democrat, which means that he's not really a member in good standing of the Democratic tribe. It's not a tribe that many people want to belong to or care about anymore. I certainly don't, anyway. 

I've written here with intense feelings of nausea ad nauseam about how the Democrats have alienated themselves from Main Street, from the people who talk about politics in churches and bars, in barber shops and union halls. In other words exactly who the Democrats have until recently represented against the interests of the moneyed elite. A guy like Jim Webb will have a lot of Main Street appeal, and he's right on the issues where HC just is not. HC is just another neoliberal elite. 

In other words Webb is exactly what the country needs, someone who can transcend the culture war and who points the country toward the real issues, not the distracting ones. He's a Democrat who can speak credibily to what is legitimate in populist resentments without being a Tea Party moron. 

Noah Millman has some intereesting things to say about how he might handle this kind of branding by the cultural left (my underscores):

So what can he do to make it more likely that he is read as challenging Clinton on foreign policy and economic policy primarily, which I believe is what he wants?

I think – and I admit, I’m in danger of committing the pundit’s fallacy here – that he needs to get out in front of this kind of positioning with counter-positioning.

He can’t simply disavow his past positions on these issues – first of all because in some cases he still believes them (in other cases, not), and second because that would vitiate a primary source of his appeal as someone who actually stands by what he believes. Rather, he needs to make it clear that he’s not running on them – that, in fact, he’s in part running against them as organizing principles of our politics.

He needs to say, in effect, that he used to be a Republican because the GOP seemed like the party of people like him: a Scots-Irish military man. But when he left the GOP, it wasn’t just because he’d decided its policies were wrong – though they were. He also left because he no longer was willing to respond to that kind of appeal, an appeal to identity. Because that appeal made it hard for him to see the ways in which the GOP’s actual policies were detrimental to ordinary Americans.

Heck, he can quote Thomas Frank if he likes. The point of saying all this is to say further: and I didn’t join the Democratic Party in order to adopt a new identity, or to keep fighting the culture war but now from the other side. There are issues, he can say, on which my views have changed. And there are issues where I respect that my party and I don’t agree 100%. And there are also issues where I will try to convince my party to change. (For that matter, there are issues where Webb didn’t need to change to be in the mainstream of the Democratic Party – like abortion – and issues where Webb is more liberal than many Democrats – like penal reform and executive power.) But I am not running to make the Democratic Party more appealing to people who look like me, or who have my cultural background. I became a Democrat because I realized that the Democratic Party already held the best promise of standing for ordinary Americans, and for rejecting the kinds of policies, foreign and domestic, that have done them so much harm. And I’m running for President to make sure the Democratic nominee keeps that promise.

Nothing is more important in our national politics than pushing back against the country's drift toward an authoritarian plutocracy. Elizabeth Warren is the political left's darling to play this role, and I would certainly vote for her before I would vote for HC if she should run. but even if EW were elected, she's an outsider, as Obama and Carter were, and would likely be as ineffective as they were. Webb understands how Washington works, and he will have credibility with the saner operatives in the Deep State in a way that Warren could not.

But too many Democrats in the primaries will think it's more important to get a woman in the oval office or that it's a step backward to get another white male in it when a qualified woman is available. That's what gets them juiced up--issues like wealth distribution, imperial foreign policy, and the surveillance state are important, but they are a snore compared to identity politics issues. That's precisely why the Democrats lose the "little" elections as they did earlier this month. The people on Main Street who actually vote don't like or identify with tribal Democrats. I usually vote for them because there is no saner alternative, but I don't identify with them.

I would love a gig as this guy's speechwriter. Or better Millman should apply for the job. And focus on the themes underscored above. If there were in the 80s Reagan Democrats, let's create a new political category for the next decade: Jim Webb Republicans, Republicans--even the saner Tea Party types--who find themselves supporting a straight-talking, populist Democrat. Now if some billionaire would adopt him, Webb just might have a chance. 

 

 

 

Lapham and Frank

A must read article, crackling with interesting ideas--too much to excerpt for a quote here, but I'll put this one up since it relates to something that came up here last week. A questioner in the audience asks:

A Russian scholar drew a map of the United States where it sort of dissolved into four or five regions, with the Northeast kind of drifting toward Canada because of shared interests. The idea of an empire collapsing under its own weight, is any version of that a plausible scenario to you?

Lapham answers:

To me that is an entirely plausible scenario. Actually, Kevin Phillips, the historian mentioned earlier by Tom, published an article in Harper’s Magazine in the ’70s called “The Balkanization of America.” He actually had the map and he had the way it would divide and why, and I see that as entirely possible. I do. Because Washington can’t govern the United States. They’re trapped inside the Beltway. They’re dysfunctional. Again, to answer the question, there’s a wonderful book that I just read which is influencing me because I’m very impressionable and I’m apt to parrot the last thing I read. This book is called “Immoderate Greatness.” And it’s short. It’s a hundred pages but it’s extremely persuasive as to what happens to civilizations when they become so big that they in fact must fail. The author goes into the laws of entropy and the laws of thermodynamics and the exponential growth and the environment. It brings all the angles to bear.

One more excerpt. Lapham says:

No, capitalism is a machinery. It’s neutral. It’s not an idea. It’s a mechanism.

Audience question: So we are up against an idea?

Well, no. We’re up against heavily entrenched interests.

Audience question: Which is the idea…

Well, I don’t think they even put it to themselves that way. The only idea that I can ever see in the minds of the moneyed interests is that money is good for rich people and bad for poor people. That’s about the beginning and end of their idea, I think.

Yes, and the long and the short of it. All the b.s. on Fox or being spouted by Paul Ryan and the Koch brothers is a smokescreen to obscure this central truth. It just shouldn't be that hard to build consensus around something that is this simple to understand.

Another approach to putting the predators back in their cages

 

Not clear what the criteria are to get to his goals, and who decides which candidates gets the thumbs up, but I'm for it until there's a reason I shouldn't be. A little quixotic, maybe, and I'm not given to the quixotic, but this is a walk I'd like to take--at least it gets people away from their screens and out of their heads. May not get immediate results, but it sends a message, and might even spark something surprising. 

Good opening story about Intel. Where's there's enough of an outcry, there's a way--and the money will be found. 

The Tea Party and the Mythos of 'Real' Americans

People in Red America are in pain, and it's deeper than just economic. I'd argue that a good deal of the pain comes from the disjunction between its mindset and the real world in which Red America lives. The world no longer makes sense for a mindset that was developed in the early 19th century. Rapid change and disruption have been normative in America at least since the 1860s, and the rhetoric we hear from the cultural right is rooted in ante-bellum commonplaces. But as Gordon Wood points out in his book The Radicalism of the American Revolution, even ante-bellum Americans were already highly mobile, individualistic, restless, and commerce driven--there was never a time when Americans were content Hobbits living in their respective edenic Shires.

In my post from which this quote is excerpted, "What's the Matter with Connecticut?", I responded to an article by Patrick Deneen in which he plays with two well-known books on America's class-driven politics--Tom Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas and Christopher Lasch's Revolt of the Elites. I want here first to challenge the idea that, except to some degree in the South, there ever was a traditional America in the post-Revolutionary era. If there is anything "traditional" about America it is its restless, uprooted, unruly drive to get ahead.

Gordon Wood argues that the radicalism of the revolution was social more than political because of its rejection of the traditional hierarchical structure that characterized pre-Revolutionary, monarchical American society. That pre-Revolutionary society persisted in the tidewater South--but less so further west, which was at this time far more egalitarian in its rough-and-ready, frontier ethos. The Cary Grant movie "The Howards of Virginia", although awkwardly cast, is interesting for the way it captures the difference between the settled, conservative, tidewater traditionalists and the striving, restless spirit of the frontiermen in the Shenandoah Valley. The dynamism of the first years of the Republic lay with the second group, which in every state developed a deep antipathy toward the first.

Jefferson's ideas about liberty and equality and the minimal role for central government in America made a certain kind of sense in the early decades of the new American republic. But as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. points out in The Age of Jackson, the anti-Hamiltonian Virginians--Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe--had become de facto Hamiltonians once faced with the exigencies of office. It was left to John Randolf, John Taylor, and their disciples to carry the anti-statist, anti-Big Money Jeffersonian flame. 

The Jeffersonians had legitimate concerns and well-thought-out arguments, but they were out of tune with the American reality as it was rapidly evolving beyond anybody's ability to control it. Even in the South, the original Jeffersonian concerns about the republic being destroyed by the marriage of Big Money and governmental power were pushed aside as a new class of cotton-growing oligarchs emerged who dominated the local governments and obsessed about preserving their slave society. They may have disliked industry-favoring tariffs and Biddle's Bank, but they didn't care at all about equality. 

Nevertheless, I think that we are all Jeffersonians today to the extent that we are dismayed at how the country has become the servant of Big Money. This is certainly a central Tea-Party concern in the high Jeffersonian tradition. The best Jeffersonians understood how money and power tend to aggregate in the hands of fewer and fewer people, and how its doing so destroys and corrupts governments. They were legitimately and presciently concerned about how industrialism was creating a new class of wage slaves. But their response was, to use an anachronism, Tolkienesque. They idealized Shire-like, agriculture-centered small towns, in which there was none of this infernal, greedy, powermad striving. The Jeffersonians hated industrialism, and just wanted it to go away, and if the North wanted to destroy itself, so be it, but leave them out of it. They would do everything they could to protect their verdant Shire from the soul-destroying forces being unleashed in the North.

I understand that motivation for anti-statist project to preserve local control, but once the industrial revolution was unleashed, such ideas were, and still are, quixotic--and the Shire in Tolkien's Middle Earth didn't have the ticking time bomb of chattel slavery. I think that it's also questionable how many southerners outside a small group of intellectuals really thought in Tolkien-esque terms, but rather were motivated more by their own economic interests in preserving their oligarchical slave society. But even grant the most noble motivations to the states' rights nullifiers, you cannot stand against a tsunami; the best you can do is ride it. This was the lesson learned in 1865, and then again in 1965, but there are always dead-enders, which are a nuisance, like the Basques in Spain. They become a more serious problem when they get support from Big Money to further the Big-Money agenda. 

Nevertheless, I am sympathetic to the feeling of loss of a more human, face-to-face America that people like Deneen and the crunchy cons at Front Porch Republic lament. And maybe there's some value in their attempt to keep the fantasy of that American past alive, because no matter how much or how little basis it has in the historical reality of the 19th century, our striving for a better future has to be framed by our imagination of what a better future will comprise, and the high Jeffersonian/Tolkienesque, small-is-beautiful imagination does have soulfulness and humanity that should play a part in our thinking our way forward.

The value of what the crunchy cons bring, though, lies not in some obsessive preservation of what does not exist. It lies rather in the inspiration it brings to people who are looking to experiment in living those values now, testing them against reality to see if they can withstand the the ripping forces in the world as it actually exists. I have no problem with the crunchy-con project--there's a lot I like about it; I just find crunchy cons annoying when they blame all the culture's woes on cosmopolitan Liberalism. They have yet to prove that they can live something that models a real possibility in the world as it exists. I love Wendell Berry, but his draft-horse, tobacco-farming monasticism is not a viable model for the rest of us--unless you believe (or hope) the whole globalizing system is going to come crashing down--or should.

***

Anyway, a strong argument can be made that the kind of thing that Deneen and the crunchy cons hate about Liberalism is really at the heart of what made the country interesting and dynamic in those first decades of the American experiment. The static, community-centered, face-to-face society they celebrate was very consciously rejected by the non-elites in that early generation precisely because it preserved the privileged society in which the pre-Revolutionary elites had unfair advantages. The personal, face-to-face society was more characteristic of the monarchical pre-Revolutionary ethos than that of the era after the Revolution when the unruly westerners insisted that democracy replace the oligarchy the eastern elites assumed would continue to shape American society.

A new democratic equality ideal took shape in the early Republic: the ambitious American aspired not to some elite status--to be the "gentleman" who no longer had to work to support himself and his family, but to be an independent thinker, well-informed, politically involved, clever and resourceful in practical matters, hard working.  And, sure, making money was important, but for a time, at least, wealth did not determine status. The main thing was not to be dependent, that is, to be self-reliant.

Dependency made the old monarchical system work. In the pre-Revolutionary system of dependencies everyone was part of an intricately woven, interdependent hierarchy in which everyone knew his place. In the old system, it was all about a web of face-to-face relationships; in the new system it was all about atomized, independent, individual exchanges. As Gordon Wood points out, this was supported by the introduction of paper money which replaced the old system of personal, face-to-face credit issued by the gentry to people whom they knew and judged trustworthy:

When "exchange" became the primary element of the economy. . . , then paper money became more important. "The rapidity and quick succession of exchanges" required increased quantities of money, and this paper money had democratizing effects. James Madison, like gentry creditors everywhere, may have earlier condemned paper money as destructive of "that confidence between man & man, by which the resources of one may be commanded by another." But now many were extolling that same destruction of confidence between one man and another, for such confidence was simply another name for authority and dependency. In a traditional intimate society it had been possible for a gentleman with a reputation and property to deal with everyone personally. But, said the physician Erick Bollman . . . in 1810, gentlemen could not relate to people in such a personal manner anymore.  When they wished, for example, to buy a turkey from a farmer, they could not say, as they had used to, "I own the big house at the corner of Ninth and Chestnut Street," and expect the farmer to tip his cap an deliver the turkey on credit. Now the farmer will say, "What is that to me!"  Proprietary wealth, conspicuous property, personal reputation, and genteel authority did not matter as they had in the past. What the farmer wanted now was ready money, and it did not matter from whom it came: "I want a dollar" says the farmer, "or else you cannot have my turkey."  Wood, p. 339-40.

Paper money was democratizing because with it one man's dollar was as good as another's. Exchange did not require being part of a local network of face-to-face relationships in which your reputation, good or bad, mattered in the transaction. Was something lost in this destruction of the old intimate economics?  Yes--it had a coarsening effect, an effect southern elites always bragged about resisting in southern society. "We have personal relationships with our poor whites and slaves; we understand one another: We're not coldly impersonal like those money-grubbing Yankees." But the exhilarating American experiment was all about freedom, and that meant, at least in the North, freedom from embeddedness in the old vertical system of dependencies. And capitalism was the primary engine for the destruction of that old system of face-to-face relationships that cultural conservatives get so nostalgic about.

This was a significant shift from the English system replicated in America in which everyone knew his place in the hierarchy. I already mentioned The Howards of Virginia as an easily accessible portrayal of the old system living uncomfortably with the emerging new. And you can't understand what's going on in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice if you don't have some sense of how the old system worked. D'Arcy's advice to Bingley to dump Jane was just common sense because of the Bennets' lower-gentry status--too big a jump for her, stooping too low for him. And later how shocking was the idea of Elizabeth's becoming the mistress of Pemberly?--an unthinkable jump from lower gentry to the pinnacle of the landed aristocracy. Just not done.

Pride & Prejudice was the early 19th-century's fantasy novel. It shows what ambitious English men and women aspired to--to climb vertically in the traditional aristocratic class hierarchy.  For Americans the fantasy was entrepreneurial--to become a millionaire, as the Cornelius Vanderbilt story exemplified. Vanderbilt hated the old aristocrats.

Here's Wood on the subject:

In the end, no banks, no government, no institutions could have created the American economic miracle of these years. America suddenly emerged a prosperous, scrambling, enterprising society not because the Constitution was created or because a few leaders formed a national bank, but because ordinary people, hundreds of thousands of them, began working harder to make money and "get ahead." Americans seemed to be a people totally absorbed in the individual pursuit of money. . . .

The American," foreigners said, "is always bargaining; he always has one bargain afoot, another just finished, and two or three he's thinking of.  All that he has, all that he sees, is merchandise in his eyes." English travelers were stunned to see Americans selling their landed estates in order to go into trade--the reverse of what Englishmen sought to do. [The English aspirational fantasy was to be Master or Mistress at Pemberly] (Wood p. 326)

We Americans now think of D'Arcy's early attitude as insufferable snobbery, and perhaps a more affable, if patronizing, show of manners to his social inferiors would have reflected better on his "character", but his attitude simply reflected how people in the old system were acculturated to think. It was as true in America before the Revolution as it was in England. The revolution in the title of Wood's book refers to the broad-based American rejection of all that after the revolution in a way that surprised and shocked the gentlemen founders who expected the old hierarchical system to remain intact. Wood suggests that America as it actually evolved after the Revolution was, from the perspective of the founders, largely an unintended consequence:

This democratic society was not the society the revolutionary leaders had wanted or expected. No wonder, then, that those of them who lived on into the early decades of the nineteenth century expressed anxiety over what they had wrought. Although they tried to put as good a face as they could on what had happened, they were bewildered, uneasy, and in many cases deeply disillusioned. Indeed, a pervasive pessimism, a fear that their revolutionary experiment in republicanism was not working out as they had expected, runs through the later writings of the founding fathers.  All the major revolutionary leaders died less than happy with the results of the Revolution. (Wood p. 365)

The founders had more in common with Jane Austen's world than with the crude, commerce-driven energies that characterized Cornelius Vanderbilt's. They (the Federalists more than the Jeffersonians) fantasized a future American Republic that would be a lot like the Roman Republic in which the rich, "noble" senatorial class dominated political life. But they unleashed democratic energies that destroyed that fantasy and the social order in which it subsisted. The new Democratic order was largely structured by market relationships, not face-to-face relationships. But . . .

Even Jefferson, sanguine and optimistic as he had always been, was reduced to despair in his last years. . . . He hated the democratic world he saw emerging in America--a world of speculation, banks, paper money, and evangelical Christianity that he thought he had laid to rest. . . .

But Jefferson lived too long, and the future and the coming generation were not what he had expected. Jefferson was frightened by the popularity of Andrew Jackson, regarding him as a man of violent passions and unfit for the presidency. He felt overwhelmed by the new paper-money business culture sweeping through the the country and never appreciated how much his democratic and egalitarian principles had contributed to its rise. Ordinary people, in whom Jefferson had placed so much confidence, more than had his friend Madison, were not becoming more enlightened after all. (Wood p. 367)

Old-system gentlemen like the founders were dismayed at what they saw as an orgy of greed and self-interest. They feared the country would devolve into chaos--without the old system and the old values, what would hold the country together?  Well it became clear in the second decade:

It was not that the past left nothing to cement the society together. The Revolution had not dissolved all the bonds of the old monarchical society; no revolution could.  People still looked after their families and kin; bank directors lent money mainly to themselves and the people they knew; and nearly everyone requested offices for relatives and friends, though now always adding that talent and merit were the prime considerations. Private patronage remained prevalent; only now there was not as much paternalism to clothe it: naked interest seemed to dominate. (Wood pp. 327-28)

What would be the glue that would hold the country together?  Would it be religion?

With individuals being told that each of them was "considered as possessing in himself or herself an original right to believe and speak as their own conscience, between themselves and God, may determine," religion in America became much more personal and voluntary than it ever had been; and people were freer to join and change religious associations whenever they wished. They thus moved from one religious group to another in a continual search for signs, prophets, or millennial promises that would make sense of their disrupted lives. With no church sure of holding its communicants, competition among the sects became fierce. . . . The result was a further fragmenting of Christianity. "All Christendom has been decomposed, broken in pieces: in this "fiery furnace of democracy," said a bewildered Harrison Gray Otis. . . .

Amid this religious fragmentation, Lyman Beecher and others came to realize that making each person alone responsible for his or her salvation left nothing holding "society against depravity with and temptation without" except the force of God's law "written upon the heart" of each individual. Only the self-restraint of individuals--their moral "character"--now remained, it seemed, to hold the burgeoning, unruly society together.  (Wood p. 332-33)

In other words, there were no longer any externally imposed social or legal constraints. It was up to the individual to constrain himself. But was religion enough to get the job done?  Not likely. Rather the new key would be the discipline of the market:

It was inevitable, therefore, that many came to conclude that this unruly society could tie itself together only by bonds that were in accord with the realities of American freedom and pursuits of happiness. Nothing less than interest itself--that "most powerful impulse of the human breast"--would do as an adhesive force in this dynamic, busy society. . . . They could not be controlled by force, or else they would have no liberty. But appeals to virtue could not contain these busy people either. Only interest could restrain them. Americans govern themselves, they said, because it was in their interest to do so. The desire to make money and get ahead helped them to develop habits of self-control. "The influence of money is wonderful, and the mind changes as the means of acquiring it are presented."  But the 1830s Tocqueville thought he saw what was holding this divers, rootless, restless people together.  "Interest," he concluded. "That is the secret. The private interest that breaks through at each moment, the interest that, moreover, appears openly and even proclaims itself as social theory." . . . (Wood p. 336)

According to French theorist Comte Destutt de Tracy

. . . the United States was "the hope and example of the world." There in the new Republic, he said, commerce had found its full identity with society. Indeed, commerce was society. "Society consists only in a continual succession of Exchanges," and thus "commerce and society are one and the same thing." . . . "Commerce, that is exchange, being in truth society itself, it is the only bond among men; the source of all their moral sentiments; and the first and most powerful cause of the improvement of their mutual sensibility and reciprocal benevolence." And nowhere more than in republican America had commerce been allowed such a full and fair play.

America, at a stroke it seemed, had overturned two millennia of Western history.

Market relationships defined social relationships--the old hierarchical, deferential society had been destroyed, and with it any hope of classical republican virtue shaping the new society. This is striving spirit of interest, to get ahead, is the essence of America and fundamental to understanding the American soul and its equality mythos:

If everyone in the society was involved in money making and exchanging, then to that extent they were all alike, all seeking their own individual interests and happiness, "The market house, like the grave, is a place of perfect equality," said Philip Freneau in bitter derision. But he was right.  All this commercial activity did promote equality, yet not, of course, equality of wealth.  Quite the contrary; wealth was far more unequally distributed in the decades following the Revolution than it had been before. Nonetheless, early-nineteenth-century Americans felt more equal, and for many of them that was what mattered. (Wood p. 340)

But the inequality in wealth was the fly in the ointment that would destroy this early celebration of democratic equality. This celebration could only last so long as it was possible for most Americans to be, or to aspire to be, self-reliant and economically independent. Industrialism and the new wage slave system destroyed that possibility for most Americans. And it was just a matter of time before the captains of these new industries constituted a new class of oligarchs that would dominate political and social life. But in the decades before the Civil War, except in the South, there was no real oligarchy in place--at least no oligarchy that had the kind of control that the new oligarchs would obtain at the end of the century. For a time most white Americans could truly believe that they were, or could be, free and equal citizens.

***

What are the takeaways here? First, that some nostalgic view of a stable, Shire-like, community-centered United States is largely a fiction. Early America, even in the urban East, was very like what we think of now as the rough-and-tumble wild west. The Revolution unleashed powerful, commerce-driven energies which largely destroyed the old social order and its traditional pieties and authorities. What we have come to think of as "traditional values" were largely invented in the early 19th century, and are a bizarre amalgam of free-market capitalism with evangelical Christianity, neither of which had much to do with the vision of the founders, who despaired as it became clear that economic "interest" and not gentlemanly republican virtue would largely shape the future of the country. 

The new American ideal held that citizens would be self-reliant and economically independent, free from the dependencies of the intensely hierarchical societies of the colonial era that continued to dominate society in England. Foreign visitors to the United States were often shocked at how ordinary working Americans did not know their place, and that was because these Americans did not think that people richer than they were any better than they. The early days of the Republic were largely about the widespread rejection of the old-world status system determined by hereditary wealth.

The American ethos was one in which everyone was expected to "get ahead" and the opportunities abounded for anyone with a lick of sense and an ounce of ambition to do it. Getting ahead meant going into business for oneself as a merchant, tradesman, artisan, or farmer.  Independence and equality were primarily rooted in that ability to make your own life without the benefits of inherited wealth, family connections, and the patronage system that determined status and the chances for success in the old system. Externally imposed social order or restraints were minimal. Social order largely derived from the discipline of the market and by an individualistic, conscience-centered, evangelical Christianity.

Sound familiar? This imagination of America is at the heart of the Tea Party movement. It doesn't have much to do with the founders' republican vision, and it doesn't have much to do with reality as it exists in America today, but these ideas define deep themes in the American soul, and in confusing times we revert to them for want of a better way to think about who we are and where we are going.

The country's center of gravity for a while did not lie with the very wealthy, but with the men on the make, the prospering, self-reliant, property-owning middle. That was the ideal, and for a while it seemed as though it had some relationship to reality, but the emergence of the cotton oligarchs in the South and later the industrial oligarch's in the North changed all that, and by 1900 the ideal no longer bore any relationship to the reality of American society. The fears of the Jeffersonians had become realized, and idealist Whiggish elites and populists joined forces in a new Progressive movement to redress the balance in what eventually emerged as the New Deal compromise. This compromise developed out of an acceptance that Bigness was our future, and that Big Business required Big Government to keep it in check if there was any hope of preserving either political or economic equality in this country.

The second takeaway: This early 19th-century mentality forms the foundation for the commonplaces of the Tea Party movement and are an essential part of the American mythos.  It's this aspect of the Tea Party movement that must be appreciated and respected by serious people on the Left. It's a mythos that is inadequate to deal with the complexity of our life now, but it has elements that we all should be able to work with to build something new. For me it's a question of who will own that mythos--the forces of regression or the forces that will move us forward.

None of us can stand against the tsunami force of historical change, but that does not mean we are simply to be swept away by it. We must learn to ride the wave and to use its energies, and to become skilled, i.e., resourceful and adaptive, and to me that means we need to rely less on what is outside and more on our own interior resources. The architecture of society does not matter so much as the architecture of our souls. And the architecture of our souls does not depend on society's promoting virtue so much as conservatives want us to think. Depending on priestly cultural authority was never very "American". Instead, we have one another, we have access to the great souls of the past, we have grace. That's plenty to work with, and working with all three has been what the American experiment when it's at its best has been about from the beginning.

[This post is a slightly revised "encore" repost of an September 2010 post entitled "Elitism and the American Equality Ideal."]

The Logic behind Vouchers, Charters, and Privatization in General

Today’s American right is an uneasy coalition among libertarian plutocrats and working-class and middle-class whites who depend on Social Security and Medicare and can’t afford to send their children to expensive private schools.  The need to win white middle American votes means that the right can’t simply promise to abolish public services, leaving the mass of Republican voters on their own.  In order to be electable, conservatives have to abandon pure libertarian principle and accept the idea of vouchers funded by taxation — even though this is really just “voucher socialism,” as hardcore libertarians sometimes point out.  But this doesn’t necessarily harm the right-plutocrats, particularly if they can invest in health insurance, private schooling or retirement savings companies that can vacuum up voucher money.  (Source)

This is  the logic of corporate education reform. It's the wolf of privatization cloaked in the sheepskin of consumer choice. Privatization, whether it's in education or in other public goods, is about letting markets rule rather than letting people rule themselves through the democratic process. It's a con because it seems to affirm our basic idea of freedom, but in the long run it undermines our freedom because when the market rules, those with the most market power control what there is to choose. 

Third Way vs. Elizabeth Warren

Alex Parene:

[Third Way is] not afraid that Warren will run for president, they’re afraid that she’ll be so popular that other senators to start acting like her. They’re worried that she’ll have money to direct to candidates who share her views. They’re worried that Warren might embarrass Democrats into passing stricter bank regulations. They’re worried that finance’s iron grip on the Democratic Party might weaken. The impetus for writing the editorial was Third Way’s realization that Warren was sabotaging the decades-long project that turned cutting Social Security into a bipartisan goal. A lot of money and time was spent encouraging elite consensus around “entitlement reform,” and suddenly a bunch of senators are talking about making the program more generous. That, of course, is a wildly popular idea, judging by all polling conducted on the subject, but the anti-populism backlash relies on reinforcing the common Washington idea that it is brave to oppose policies most people want and would benefit from. The bankers and CEOs who back Third Way understand that their policy preferences have won out in the Democratic Party in spite of popular opinion.

Conservatives understood this in 1964. They proceeded to take over the entire Republican Party. I think most Warren supporters understand that the goal of “economic populism” isn’t getting an economic populist into the White House, but rather to change the way economic arguments are conducted in Washington and by Democratic politicians. The point is to make sure Cory Bookers don’t happen anymore.

Parene is right, that it doesn't matter who's president. What matters far more now is who owns the congress, and who owns the dominant frame, aka "elite opinion". 

The media isn't interested in structural questions or underlying frame battles. It can only focus on personalities, and that's why Elizabeth Warren is important. She's a compelling personality who in drawing media attention to herself also draws attention to her challenge to the existing dominant neoliberal frame and her program to replace it with an economic populist frame. If a Clinton v. Warren media narrative is the way to keep this frame debate in the public eye, great. 

Elite consensus matters far more than public opinion. Public opinion doesn't matter at all unless it can be mobilized. Public opinion is 'Entish", to use a LOTR reference. It's slow to mobilize, and needs a catalyst. It will be interesting to see if  Elizabeth Warren can play the catalytic role that Third Way fears. I hope so, but I had hopes once  that Howard Dean could do it, and then there was Obama who talked about the need to change the rules. The powers that be have all kinds of ways to neutralize would-be frame crashers. I stay hopeful, but I'm not optimistic.

Surprising things can happen. I don't think anybody in Argentina expected that their Cardinal Bergoglio to turn into Pope Francis. I'm sensing a shift that's in the air regarding the way we frame the economic debate. Third Way seems worried about it. Whether it's deep or superficial remains to be seen. 

Sawant on Boeing

“If Boeing executives want to leave the state, they are welcome to do that,” she told a cheering crowd at Town Hall Seattle in 2012. “The fact is, the workers are here. The factories are here. ... We are therefore calling for the democratic, public ownership by workers and by the community of the workplaces of the big corporations.”

The Seattle Times does a nice profile of Sawant in todays' paper.

But why does her worker ownership idea seem so far fetched?

It comes down to what I was saying a few weeks ago in relation to the ACA about how we frame things. We are so inured to companies' being run for the benefit of stockholders and their executives that the idea of a worker-owned company just seems outlandish and subversive, no matter how much sense it makes. 

But if ours was a truly sane and decent society, it should make no sense to us--indeed, we should recoil in collective horror--that Boeing can just lay off thousands of well-paid, skilled workers and leave a city because it can improve its margins elsewhere. We're not talking about Boeing's survival--just its profitability. 

In other words, what's insane is the frame. The most insane, indecent things seem sane within an insane frame. And that insane frame is economic Liberalism, whether in its classic 19th century form or in its current Neoliberal form. It doesn't work, if by working we mean provisioning a sane, decent society. If you don't believe me, ask the Pope.

I'm ambivalent about socialism providing an adequeately sane counterframe, but we need somebody to push back, and if the socialists are the only ones willing to do it, I'm with them.