II. The ratchet effect

The ratchet is a simple, ubiquitous, ancient bit of machinery. There’s one in your bicycle wheel (it allows you to coast without pedaling), there’s one in your watch (if you’re the old-fashioned type and have a mechanical watch) and there’s one in the jib sheet winches of your boat (if you’re a yachtsman; but then in that case you probably aren’t reading this book). What the ratchet does is permit rotation in one direction but not in the other. Here’s a diagram:

The American political system, since at least 1968, has been operating like a ratchet, and both parties — Republicans and Democrats — play crucial, mutually reinforcing roles in its operation.

The electoral ratchet permits movement only in the rightward direction. The Republican role is fairly clear; the Republicans apply the torque that rotates the thing rightward.The Democrats’ role is a little less obvious. The Democrats are the pawl. They don’t resist the rightward movement — they let it happen — but whenever the rightward force slackens momentarily, for whatever reason, the Democrats click into place and keep the machine from rotating back to the left.

Here’s how it works. In every election year, the Democrats come and tell us that the country has moved to the right, and so the Democratic Party has to move right too in the name of realism and electability. Gotta keep these right-wing madmen out of the White House, no matter what it takes.

(Actually, they don’t say they’re going to move to the right; they say they’re going to move to the center. But of course it amounts to the same thing, if you’re supposed to be left of center. It’s the same direction of movement.)

So now the Democrats have moved to the “center.” But of course this has the effect of shifting the “center” farther to the right.

Now, as a consequence, the Republicans suddenly don’t seem so crazy anymore — they’re closer to the center, through no effort of their own, because the center has shifted closer to them. So they can move even further right, and still end up no farther from the “center” than they were four years ago.

In fact, the Democrats’ rightward shift not only enables the Republicans to move farther right themselves; it actually compels them to do so, if they want to maintain their identity as the angry-white-guy party par excellence. (A great part of the Republicans’ hysterical hatred of Bill Clinton arose from this cause: with Democrats like Clinton, who needs Republicans?)

The ratchet clicks: Nixon. The pawl holds: Carter. Click again: Reagan. And again: Bush Senior (and Iraq War I). The pawl holds: Clinton. Click: Bush Junior and Iraq War II; then another click, and it’s Bush Junior triumphant, and God knows what to come.

Has the phrase “conspiracy theory” crept into your mind yet? Let me exorcize it. This is not a vast conspiracy. Nobody planned it out. What I am offering here is a structural explanation, not a conspiracy theory. There is a very important difference. Perhaps an analogy will help.

I assume that most people reading this book believe in the Darwinian theory of evolution. We often speak of the “function” or “purpose” of anatomical structures — like your liver, or your thumb, or the hammerhead shark’s odd cranium. But this way of talking doesn’t commit us to believing that somebody planned these structures out. They were not contrived; they evolved.

The same holds true for the rightward ratchet in contemporary American politics. No Machiavelli schemed it into existence; it evolved. And it evolved for the same reason that anything evolves: it was useful. But useful to whom?

Not useful, certainly, to the millions of slightly, or more-than-slightly, left-of-center Americans who troop glumly to the polls every four years, hold their noses, and vote for the “lesser evil,” even though they expect nothing from their candidate. Nor is it useful to the forty to fifty percent of Americans who don’t bother to vote at all because neither candidate has managed to say anything that seems relevant to their lives,

I have a somewhat unlikely friend, a rich man in Chicago — let’s call him Al. Politics is not Al’s profession, or even his first interest in life, but he is a well-connected, intelligent guy who has some pet political causes. I happened to ask him one year, during a Senatorial campaign, which candidate he and his friends were contributing to. Both candidates were quite friendly to his cause, and I thought he might have had a hard time deciding between them. Al looked at me as if I had just revealed unsuspected depths of idiocy. “Both, of course,” he replied.

“Both?”

“Well, we’re giving a little more to X [the Republican], naturally, ’cause he’s got a better chance of winning. But we’ve given a lot to Y [the Democrat], too. In fact, I think we may be his biggest single bloc of support.”

“But… which one do you want to win?”

He laughed. “It doesn’t matter. We own ‘em both.”

The ratchet works really well for people like Al: and that’s what keeps it in operation. It’s not that he’s an especially right-wing guy himself; in fact, he thinks of himself as a liberal. But the ratchet has lowered his taxes, gotten the unions out of his plant, fattened the budget of his wealthy suburban school district (and correspondingly starved the urban districts where his employees live). He thinks Bush is a contemptible idiot, and may even have voted for Kerry himself (though he’s very reluctant to talk about it). But what’s beyond question is that the ratchet has operated to his benefit.

Absent some countervailing pressure from what we’ll call, for short, the Left, it’s a foregone conclusion that the political system will evolve in a way that responds to the desires of the wealthy and powerful.

Over time, the Democratic Party has assumed the role of ensuring that the countervailing pressure from the Left doesn’t happen. The party contains and neutralizes the Left, or what there is of it. Left voters are supposed to support the Democrat, come what may — and it’s amazing how many of us have internalized this supposed obligation — but they are not allowed to have any influence on the party’s policies, either during the campaign or during the Republicans’ infrequent holidays in opposition. Al’s employees mostly vote Democratic. They get nothing for their pains, but the Clinton years were as good for Al as the Reagan years.

But that’s not the worst of it. The reluctant-Democrat voters — like my neighbor Annie — don’t realize that their votes are not just wasted: they are positively helping drive the ratchet. The fact that these captive lefties can be counted on not to bolt enables the James Carvilles and the Al Froms and the other DLC “triangulators” to pursue their rightward course without fear of any consequences. Annie and all the other well-meaning dependable Democrats are supplying an essential part of the fuel that keeps the machine going.

Again: Nobody planned this. The Democratic Party fell into its role in the ratchet for historical reasons, which we will explore in the next chapter. But now that the machine is up and running and delivering the goods for the wealthy and powerful, there is certainly no reason for the wealthy and powerful to interfere with it. And there is no means by which the less wealthy, whose power is only in their numbers, can affect it at all — except by depriving it of their support.

Over the decades since the ratchet started operating, each party has developed a story, a narrative, or less politely, a scam, that depends crucially on predictable behavior by the other party. Those Republicans, say the Democrats, they’re crazy extremists; last year it was Iraq, next year it’ll be Iran. We have to stop them by any means necessary, even if it means wearing their clothes.

The Republicans reply: Where do you get off calling us crazy? You voted for the Iraq war. And you’re defending Iran now?

Oh no, say the Democrats, those Iranians, they’re terrible. Somebody really needs to do something about them. Why haven’t you guys done it?

At this point Annie gets upset and calls her Democratic congressman. “Ted! Are you advocating war with Iran?”

“Naaah, naah, Annie,” Ted coos, “That’s just to get our guy elected. Gotta keep those crazies out of the White House.”

Annie hangs up the phone, trying to feel reassured, and tomorrow’s New York Times will announce that war with Iran is a matter of bipartisan consensus.

The Democrats depend on the Republicans to frighten their constituencies and keep them in the Democratic corral. It’s not too strong to say that in effect, they encourage the Republicans to play the bad cop. The Republicans, conversely, need a bogeyman to energize their activist base — a Godless, urban, liberal bogeyman who will tempt good Christian boys into sodomitical vice and take away people’s guns. So far, the relationship between the party narratives is symmetrical: each is Bad Cop to the other’s Good Cop. But there are some crucial asymmetries, and it’s these asymmetries that drive the ratchet effect.

One of the most important asymmetries is that while the Republicans can be as ferocious as they please on matters relating to culture — sex, religion, and so on — the Democrats are not prepared to be ferocious on the only possible counterweight to culture, which is… class. In fact, not only are the Democrats unwilling to be ferocious, they’re unwilling to raise the topic at all. It’s the Great Unmentionable of American politics.

It was not always thus. Class politics was one of the pillars of the Democratic party of Roosevelt — the party that Annie is remembering when she pulls the donkey lever. How we got from there to here is the subject of the next chapter.

What, pray tell, is your definition of a terrorist?

Now, I guess we’ll get to find out how much “Justice” Roberts cares about Constitutional rights for Americans. Not much, I think.

As you get towards the end, keep in mind what the OWS people have been doing. Michael J. Smith was absolutely correct – he was just a little bit early.

Here is Chapter 15. Read it. Please.

XV. What is to be done?

The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold persistent experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it: If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.

–Franklin D. Roosevelt, May 1932

Many pages ago, I promised Annie that I would suggest some alternatives to voting for a Democrat and then resigning ourselves to the inevitable disappointment. Now it’s time to fulfill that promise. But before I do, let’s make one thing perfectly clear, as Nixon used to say: I don’t know what will work. I don’t claim to be clairvoyant, or even to have any greater insight into American politics and American culture than the next guy. Nobody knows what will work — until we stumble onto something that works.

One thing I do know, and after all these pages I hope you know it too: I know what won’t work. What won’t work is voting for people like Clinton, and Gore, and Kerry. All these guys, and all their epigones stacked in the warehouse, were stamped out by the same factory, the Al From Republican Knock-Off Mill. Whether they get into office or not, we have nothing to hope for from them.It’s very liberating, though, when you finally decide that something won’t work. You can drop it by the roadside, like an old burden that has become gradually heavier and more useless with every wearisome step. And then you give yourself a little shake, like somebody just waking up, and go on your way rejoicing, feeling strangely strengthened and refreshed. Even if you don’t know exactly where you’re going, the odds are that you’ll get there sooner without all that unnecessary baggage.

So here are a few things to try.

Vote for a third party

I know, it’s an existential crisis when you walk into that voting booth. You realize it’s futile to vote for the Democrat, but you’ll feel guilty if you don’t and the Republican then gets elected. It’s important not to lose your nerve at this point. Don’t worry so much about the next four years; they’re going to be a disaster no matter who gets into the White House. Face that fact squarely, keep a bag packed and your passport handy by way of preparation for the next President, and when you vote, think ahead a little more. Think about what might make things better for your kids, or your nephews and nieces if you don’t have kids, or your friends’ kids if you’re an only child. Or even think about your own old age if you’re still reasonably young. What might make a difference at that time scale?

I hope it’s clear at this point that any improvement on the time scale of decades has a precondition, and that precondition is breaking up the collusion of the Republican and Democratic parties. Broadly speaking, there are two plausible ways we can imagine this happening.

Possibility 1: Many parties

The first way is the evolution of a multi-party political order. We’ve never really had that in this country, except for very short periods, so it might seem a little unlikely. But multi-party politics are the norm in most other places that have anything resembling democratic institutions. Even Britain, which has been a two-party polity for most of the modern era, appears to be heading in that direction. So why not here? Let’s not foreclose the possibility. But clearly, if we are going to have more than one-and-a-quarter parties, the other parties will have to be built. And they can’t be built unless people are willing to vote for them, and vote for them year after year. Parties can’t be built overnight; we saw in Chapter __ that it took the Grangers and the Populists almost thirty years to build themselves into a threat to Republicrat rule at the national level. Very likely we can beat that pace nowadays, with the advantage of modern communications. But it can’t be done in a week, or a year, or four years. Think of it this way, when you go into that voting booth: it’s like working your way up through the educational system, or the job ladder, or saving for your retirement. You probably spent at least sixteen years getting your education, perhaps considerably more. If you’ve achieved, or hope to achieve, a measure of success in your work, you very likely have or will put in a decade or more at that. And saving for your retirement will take you all your working life. Changing our political order demands at least as much time and consistency of effort as any of these things.

Possibility 2: Resurrection of the Democrats

We saw in Chapters __ and __ that the Democratic party, though it has normally acted, for the last century and a half, as second banana to the Republicans, is capable at moments of crisis of shaking off that role and revealing signs of life. It is conceivable, though I think unlikely, that it might do so again. But what could possibly cause such a revitalization of the dear dead old donkey party?

It won’t happen through a change of heart by the existing party machinery. That has been as exquisitely crafted for its tawdry function as the mosquito’s proboscis; the apparatchiks are as likely to turn their party into a constructive force as the mosquito’s proboscis is to light up and start blinking Morse code. No, the only thing that will make the Democrats change is the prospect of annihilation if they don’t. And the only way to raise that specter before their eyes is for their captive constituencies to desert them in droves. As long as they think you have nowhere else to go, they will take you for granted. And the only way to convince them you have somewhere else to go is… to go there.

So either way we need the third parties: whether we expect them to grow and supplant the Democrats, or whether we expect them to put the fear of God into the Democrats and keep them honest, we need vigorous, serious, determined third parties that really mean business and won’t get frightened by their own success, as our pathetic “Greens” were in the 2000 election. Those of us who are not satisfied with the Democrats, and who is?, — must resolve to give these third parties, election after election, the votes they need to grow and establish themselves, and not allow ourselves to be unnerved by the quadrennial banshee chorus of the Democrats, howling dismally in the graveyard of progressive causes.

* * *

What sort of third parties might we want to see? No doubt everyone will have his or her own answers to this question. Here are a few thoughts.

In general, third parties should have a well-defined constituency and a sharp focus on specific problems. We don’t need a high-minded Generally Progressive party that stands for everything good, from gay marriage to wetland preservation. Third parties should stay resolutely, even fanatically, on point and not allow themselves to broaden out, even on issues that most of their members might be expected to support.

Labor

We certainly need a labor party. As matters stand, there is nobody, but nobody, whose job it is to advocate for the interests of the wage earner as such. Although a labor party sounds like such a freakishly European notion in the American context, in fact it would be very easy for one to get going. All that’s needed is for one or two of the less sedated national unions to make up their minds to do it. National unions have the resources and the reach to negotiate the ballot access maze and get a labor party on the ballot in every state.

This party would probably want to leave the Presidency and Senate and the governor’s mansion alone, and concentrate on local offices, state legislatures, and the House of Representatives. It should concentrate its efforts in districts where the labor vote is strong, and do whatever it can to supplant the local Democrat.

Once in office, its candidates should focus with monomaniacal concentration on changing the laws and corporate tactics that now make union organizing so difficult. In the legislatures, they should serve notice on all fellow officeholders that they will do everything in their power — filibusters, committee foot-dragging, procedural obstacles — to torpedo any other initiative whatsoever, whatever its merits, whose supporters aren’t willing to trade their support for a better organizing climate.

In local government, Laborites should obstruct permits, road and infrastructure projects, zoning changes, and so on, for union-busting concerns like Wal-Mart, and keep a relentless drumbeat of sensational, I would go so far as to say demagogic, attacks on other officeholders who are not with the labor program. Wal-Marts and similar concerns in places where there are Laborites in local officialdom should find themselves getting inspected and cited every hour on the hour. They should find the road regularly dug up outside their parking lot, and sorry-for-the-inconvenience interruptions of their electricity and water service should be daily occurrences. I’m tempted to say that the sewers should back up, too, but perhaps that would be going too far.

Labor candidates should be working men and women themselves, the more rough-hewn the better. Ivy Leaguers need not apply, and there should be no ideological test other than the willingness to advance labor’s cause by any means necessary. It’s just fine for a labor candidate to oppose abortion, or have a big gun collection, or believe that the Earth is flat, as long as he or she is red-hot for the good of the wage earner. Candidates who really resemble the people they’re trying to convince will help neutralize the cultural-affinity syndrome that enables a George W. Bush to get votes by impersonating a cowboy.

Green

Now maybe you’re a more cultivated individual, who enjoys hiking and cross-country skiing, and this Labor Party sounds a little Stanley Kowalski for your taste. Well then, how about a Green party? I mean a real one, not those sad poltroons who now go by that name. Strictly nonviolent of course, but highly militant. Lots of great — but peaceful, peaceful! — civil-disobedience stuff: mass bike rides on Interstate highways, chain-ins on logging leases in national forests, fleets of windsurfers blockading oil pumping stations.

In the electoral arena, the Greens could hope to win local government offices from lip-service Democratic enviro-phonies, and the Green Party should always run a presidential, gubernatorial, and senatorial candidate, not with a view to getting elected at this level, but with a view to punishing the Democrat if he couldn’t or wouldn’t make good on the party’s supposed commitment to environmental causes.

You’ll have to be resolute, though, and vote for the Green anytime the Democrat isn’t up to snuff, even if the Republican is a wild-eyed berserker who wants to pave the world. It’ll take a few more losses like Gore’s in Florida in 2000 before the Democrats will get the message — if then — and you have to be willing to stay the course until they do get it. Just remember that the only difference between a pave-the-world Republican and an “environmentalist” Democrat is, well, none, really; the Republican means what he says, but the Democrat means what the Republican says, too.

Home rule

Perhaps you live in a large city, like New York, or Los Angeles, or Chicago or Boston or even San Francisco. If so, you probably don’t pay much attention to the way political power is divided between your city government and your state government. I don’t blame you; it’s a dry topic. But if you ever did take an interest in the subject, you would probably be shocked at how much urban affairs are interfered with by state legislatures — which are, of course, completely dominated by suburban interests.

In New York City, for example, our state legislature forbids us to enact rent-control legislation. It forbids us to require that our cops and firemen and teachers live in the city. It forbids us to set speed limits on our own streets, and it won’t even allow us to install red-light cameras. Our mass-transit systems, built and maintained over the years by our money and our sweat, have been taken over and run by a state-controlled agency, completely unanswerable to the public it supposedly serves, and this agency starves our subways to subsidize suburban commuter railroads.

In New York, we mostly send Democrats to the statehouse, and without exception they sell us down the river every chance they get. The top politician in the state assembly is a Democrat from New York City, Sheldon Silver, and no living soul remembers the last time he did anything for the town that sent him up the river to Albany. His most memorable recent achievement was engineering, in collaboration with a Republican governor, the repeal of a commuter tax levied on suburbanites who work in the city.

I could go on and on, but you get the idea. Large American cities are like Gulliver, tied down and immobilized by a web of gossamer threads strung and knotted by statehouse pygmies. The details will differ in your town, but the overall picture, if you look into it, will be very similar. And in your town as in mine, Democratic pygmies — elected by urban voters — will turn out to have played a prominent role in hogtying the urban giant.

So… why not a Home Rule party for American cities? Here again, a narrow focus is essential. The Home Rule party would have a simple message: let’s get these downstate, or upstate, yahoos off our backs. They tax us — and spend the money in the suburbs. They tell us what to do, and what good do we get out of that? We don’t know how to run our own streets, or schools? A residency requirement for city jobs would be extremely popular among urban voters. Especially in African-American neighborhoods, there is an appalling gulf of incomprehension and hostility between the suburban, mostly white Hessians who patrol the streets, and the people who live there. Urban young people would love to see vacancies opening up for them in the fire department or the police department or the schools — the kind of vacancies that a residency requirement would create. It’s not at all far-fetched that a Home Rule party, after one or two election cycles, could put a mayor in city hall, and a home rule majority, or a decisive home rule bloc, on the city council.

And in the meantime? Well, in urban politics, the difference between Republicans and Democrats is even tinier than it is on the national level. There is no real reason to think that a Home Rule candidate would take more votes from Democrats than Republicans, but even if he did, so what? In the cities, we have even less to fear from the greater evil, or hope for from the lesser, than in the country at large.

A Home Rule mayor, and city council, could use their bully pulpit and their door-to-door machine to send Home Rulers to the statehouse, and even to the House of Representatives. In both these places, they would find natural allies in the Greens and the Laborites. Individually, and even more among the three of them on issues of common concern, they would wield a powerful influence on policy in the state and in the country. Not tomorrow, not next year; but in our lifetimes — if we use our energy, and our votes, both wisely and boldly.

* * *

Annie, if she were looking over my shoulder, would probably object at this point that I’ve just sketched a recipe for complete Republican domination: with all these third parties siphoning off votes from the Democrats, the Republicans would have even less to worry about than they do now.

I think not, for three reasons:

1. Republican attrition

It’s by no means certain that the kind of third parties discussed above would take vastly more votes from Democrats than Republicans. As I argued in Chapter 14, the reason than so many struggling low-end wage-earners allow their cultural attitudes to overrule their economic interests is that no party is representing their economic interests. So cultural issues fill the vacuum. With an aggressive, defiant, in-your-face blue-collar Labor party in the field, I believe that many of these folks — Republican voters now — will put their cultural resentments on the back burner and vote for a bigger paycheck.

The same holds true for the Home Rule party. One of the great Republican scams is their lip service to local control, as opposed to rule by a cabal of liberal social engineers in Washington. (The reality of Republican governance is another matter, of course, but here again, since the other party doesn’t offer any real, or even plausible, alternative, the Republicans get away with their sloganeering on the subject.) A Home Rule party that’s visibly serious about getting the statehouse off the city’s back will attract many urban voters who are now bamboozled by the Republicans’ faux-redneck talk about Big Gummint.

As for the Greens, at first blush it might seem certain that they would attract more Democrats than Republicans. But it ain’t necessarily so, especially if the Greens get strongly involved in local causes. Many very conservative suburbanites are bitterly opposed to further “development” in their area, even if they don’t care much about the Arctic Wildlife Refuge. This attitude is arguably a bit ungenerous — they got theirs, and now they want to close the door on everybody else. But from an environmental point of view, it’s undoubtedly a good thing — a thing that an environmentalist party could support with a whole heart and a clear conscience. Less road-building, less sprawl development, fewer parking lots and Edge City office gulags — who but a real-estate speculator could be unhappy with that?

The Greens and the Home Rulers will find common cause on this issue — the Greens because limiting sprawl development is clearly the right thing for the environment, and the Home Rulers because they will want to keep the jobs and the investment in the cities.

2. Republican fission

We saw in chapter __ that the Republican party is very much like the Democratic party in being a coalition of incompatibles: cops and gun nuts, libertarians and Baptist ayatollahs, rural survivalists and corporate monopolists: people who have cattle gates, and people who want to be Bill Gates. What keeps all these people in one big tent is the same thing that keeps the Democrats in their tent: fear of the other party. The Democrats may not amount to much; but neither do the Republicans, really. They amount, more often than not, to a tiny bit more than the Democrats — a very tiny bit. Whenever they slip up, the Democrats slip in. Oz the Great and Terrible is worried to death about Ozzie The Only Slightly Less Great And Terrible — and of course, neither one of them wants you looking behind the curtain, and seeing who is pulling the levers.

Implausible as it may seem, all these red-blooded but incompatible Republican voters — these angry Middle Americans that puzzle us lefties so much — hate and fear the Democratic party even more than they hate and fear each other. Remove the fear of the Democrats, and the Republican party will be blown apart by its own internal pressures, like a deep-sea fish brought too suddenly to the surface. You’ll see a Fetus Party, a Leave Me Alone Party, a Machine Gun Party, a Head For The Hills Party, a Beverly Hills Party. Who’s to say that the Head For The Hills people might not find tactical common cause on some matters with the Greens, and the Leave-Me-Aloners with the Home Rulers? Indeed it’s almost certain that they would; everywhere in the world where minor parties thrive, this kind of negotiation is a fundamental part of politics.

3. New voter attraction

Finally, let’s not forget that large plurality of Americans who in every election vote for None Of The Above, by staying home. When we have a livelier, less impoverished politics; when we have parties that actually speak strongly about topics now ignored or papered over by the Republicrats with indistinguishable tired bromides, many of these abstaining voters will show up to pull a lever — because somebody will finally be saying something to, and for, them. Indeed, it should be Job One for the new parties to bring in new voters, even more than to convert people who now vote Republican or Democrat. Time spent trying to get my non-voting son Andrew out to vote, by offering something that’s not now on the very limited menu of American politics, will pay off better than time spent trying to convert Annie — though I haven’t quite given up even on her.

Third parties and the Electoral College

We saw in Chapter __ that the existing two-party system has a vested interest in the utterly insane electoral college machinery. In particular, both parties like the winner-take-all system of allocating a state’s electoral votes; it means that in the states where they are strong, they can be sure of getting all that state’s electoral votes with little or no effort (and without doing much for the people who live there).

Strong third parties in the mix will change this calculus. Even if the third parties fall far short of carrying the state, they will put now-assured Republican or Democratic pluralities in doubt. The Republican and Democratic party managers will apply the bird-in-the-hand principle and figure that it’s better to be sure of a bloc of electoral votes corresponding to their actual strength, rather than risk losing the whole shooting match in a particular state to the other big party, just because some upstart third party has spoiled the game. The result? Allocation of electoral votes in some kind of proportion to the popular vote.

This may seem like a minor, technical change, but it will have a vast effect on the way Presidential campaigns are run. No longer will the Democrat feel he can ignore New York, because he’s sure of victory there. He will have just as much incentive to appeal to another ten thousand Unitarians in Massachusetts — who might otherwise vote Green — as to ten thousand snake-handlers in Tennessee, who will almost certainly vote Republican anyway. Keeping the Unitarians in line will seem like a safer, and thus better, way to make up the votes, than doing a photo-op with some goddam snake. Yeah, they’re drugged, but you just never know, with a snake.

Candidates will have to pay more attention to the people they consider their “base” or natural constituencies, and less to flibbertygibbet “swing” voters pushed this way and that by a Brownian motion of trivialities: Kerry rides a road bike, Bush rides a mountain bike, so Bush is a he-man and Kerry is a fag. Do we really want these people deciding who will be President? No? Then that winner-take-all system has got to go, and third parties are the only way it ever will go.

At the pinnacle of delightful possibilities is the constitutional scholar’s nightmare: no candidate gets a majority of electoral votes, and the election is “thrown” into the House of Representatives.

What a wonderful, thrilling phrase. Makes you think of being thrown to the lions, doesn’t it? Given the caliber of recent Presidential candidates, thrown to the lions sounds pretty good, but thrown into the House isn’t a bad second-best. The House of Representatives is the only thing in the entire US Constitution that bears any remote resemblance to a small-’d’ democratic institution. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if a would-be President had to assemble a legislative majority — just as a would-be Prime Minister has to do in every other democracy worthy, or even halfway worthy, of the name?

A handful of Greens, Laborites, and Home Rulers could end up as kingmakers. Imagine the desperate promises, the wrenching concessions, to these tribunes of formerly ignored and taken-for-granted constituencies — constituencies like, well … like you. If it doesn’t give you a warm glow just to imagine the scene, you must have a heart of stone.

Don’t rely on parties

Third parties are a fine and necessary thing. But there is something even more important than parties, and that is, for lack of a better word, activism.

In my lifetime, the victories of the causes I believe in have come about through bypassing the parties and the electoral machinery, not by “working within the system.” The two greatest of these triumphs are the ending of the Vietnam War, and the ending of officially sanctioned racial segregation. Both these victories happened, not because the machinery of one or another party was mobilized to support the cause, but because strongly-focused, dedicated, go-for-broke single-issue activists put together extra-electoral mass movements.

This kind of issue-focused activism has also been a great source of strength to the Right in recent years — and why shouldn’t we do the same? In fact, how can we hope to get anywhere if we don’t do the same? In his brilliant book What’s The Matter With Kansas, Thomas Frank lays this out in words that I can only, admiringly, borrow:

“… the right understands the central significance of movement-building, and they have taken to the task with admirable diligence. Cast your eyes over the vast and complex structure of conservative ‘movement culture’, a phenomenon that has little left-wing counterpart any more. There are…. at the bottom, the committed grassroots organizers… going door-to-door, organizing their neighbors, mortgaging their houses, even, to push the gospel….”

As I write these words, the United States is embroiled in a colonial war, and is losing it. This war is costing us a great deal, both in lives and in dollars. It is not popular: apart from a tiny number of neo-con True Believers, even those Americans who “support the troops” do so out of a sense of duty and solidarity, not because they really expect, or even claim to expect, a positive outcome. To those of us who lived through the Vietnam period, this all seems uncannily, depressingly familiar.

But one thing that is missing from this otherwise familiar scene is, of course, the antiwar movement. And it’s not just missing — it went missing. In 2003, there were enormous antiwar demonstrations — actions on a scale that took years to put together back in the Vietnam days. And then, in 2004, the antiwar movement evaporated, just when events were vindicating its foresight. Why?

I think it’s because the people who should have been organizing against the war got distracted, and put their time and energy into getting kinder-and-gentler warmonger John Kerry into the White House. They put all their eggs into the Kerry basket, and the Kerry basket, predictably, went smash.

Cathexis is notoriously hard to withdraw. To place a bet of the magnitude that our “realist” anti-war leaders placed on Kerry has an inevitable consequence, if the bet doesn’t pay off: it demoralizes the bettor. So the leaders and organizers of the seduced-and-abandoned antiwar movement can’t help walking away from the crackup with the feeling that, well, the people have spoken, and the verdict went against us. After the electoral deluge, the memory of those hundreds of thousands of people who crowded the streets back in 2003 is lost. We placed our bet, and we lost our money, and now we have to leave the table.

Well, no. Or rather, yes. By all means leave the table that’s rigged in the casino’s favor — the electoral table. But electoral politics is not the only game in town. In fact, electoral politics is only worth doing when it takes place in a political milieu energized and, yes, polarized, by a vigorous advocacy culture. That culture exists in the United States at present, but it is very lopsided: the right-wing advocacy groups are infinitely more numerous, more bold, and more energetic than their timorous, tentative and soft-spoken liberal counterparts. Think of the NRA versus the Sierra Club. Put those two palookas in the ring, and my money’s on the gun nuts to KO the latte-on-the-trail wimps in the first round.

To some extent, this timorousness is due to the legalistic, proceduralist, institution-loving mentality of liberalism, as we discussed in the previous chapter. But I think another big part of the problem is the way the Democratic Party soaks up the energies of people who might otherwise be part of the environmental movement, or the anti-war movement, or the anti-globalization movement, or a band of hardy urban guerrillas spray-painting the lenses of surveillance cameras. (I strongly approve of this kind of thing but I’m a little old for it myself.)

There are a number of sort-of leftish “community” web sites — perhaps the best known is Daily Kos. A visit to one of these is depressing but instructive. There are literally thousands of mostly-young people burning up a huge amount of time on these sites, thinking and arguing and analyzing — about getting Democrats elected, Democrats whom most of the participants in these discussions frankly consider unsatisfactory. It’s painful to watch these always well-meaning, and often ingenious and well-informed young folks trussing up their thinking in the suffocating straitjacket of ward-heeler calculation. It’s as if they were all trying to turn themselves into James Carville.

No doubt they think this is the best way to advance the causes that are dear to their heart. But what a disastrous mistake. They’d be better off wheat-pasting homemade flyers on lampposts, organizing twenty-person demonstrations at the local shopping mall, or trying to upset the two-party Frick-and-Frack applecart by building up some spoiler third party. Any of these activities would be an infinitely better use of their time than nattering about the relative merits of two cookie-cutter Democrats contending for a House seat somewhere.

The Daily Koses, the MoveOn.orgs, the Air Americas, have anesthetized a whole generation of potential activists. The oxygen that should go into building up activist culture has been sucked right out of the atmosphere by these bloated, fungoid excrescences of the Democratic Party.

An old friend of mine refers to the Democratic Party as the “activists’ graveyard,” which is not only funny but profoundly true. It’s only half the story, though. The Democratic Party is not only a necropolis where activists decay into bureaucrats; it’s also a toxic growth poisoning the soil where activism grows — the crabgrass or milfoil that crowds out all the other species and devours all the nutrients. It is not merely an alternative to activism; it is the enemy of activism, and thus the enemy of any politics worthy of the name — by which I mean politics that goes beyond an empty, meaningless rivalry between two white-collar street gangs for the spoils of office.

As you read the chapter, which was written in 2005, by the way, keep in mind what is going on with the Occupy Wall Street movement. I think that Michael Smith hit the nail squarely on the head back in 2005 – he was just a few years too early in his analysis. This is a very interesting piece of work – I highly recommend visiting the blog where it can be read, Stop Me Before I Vote Again.

XIV. What’s the matter with… liberals?

Annie is very puzzled by most of her fellow Americans. She doesn’t understand their taste in food, or clothing, and she really doesn’t get why so many of them go to church. More than anything else, though, she’s baffled about why they hate liberals so much.

Social Security, student loans, interstate highways, subsidized mortgages, electricity in every darkest Dogpatch of the benighted South — all these things, and more, were the liberals’ gift to America. They’re all things that regular Red-State Americans consider their birthright. In fact, it’s not too much to say that all these liberal initiatives built the world the liberal-haters live in. So what’s their problem? Why do they have to bite the hand that feeds them — that’s fed them for three generations now?Annie, though she won’t admit it — old Commie that she is — suspects they’re just stupid. She won’t come right out and say so, but she talks a lot about how all these white-bread, flyover-country Amurricans are “deceived” and “fooled” by the mass media, how they’re “misled” by demagogues and TV preachers, how they’re “deprived” of important information, how they’re “distracted” and “stultified” and “hypnotized” and “lulled” and “educationally deprived.” It’s not their fault, of course, poor babies; they’ve been schnookered.

But if they’re that easily schnookered, doesn’t that suggest that they’re really, well, not very bright?

This conclusion doesn’t satisfy me. I’d rather start from the premise that the Red Staters, the Bush voters, even the holy-rollers, are in fact just as smart as the next person, and that if they hate liberals, they might have their reasons.

If this sounds like the DLC “triangulator” argument — well, it is: up to a point. Where we need to part company with the triangulators will appear a little later on.

It’s a commonplace of American historiography that our national narrative has been, to a very great degree, the story of a struggle between the progeny of Hamilton and those of Jefferson — or, better yet, of Jackson. The sons and daughters of Hamilton are centralizers, promoters of Federal power, urban and mercantile elites, graduates of Ivy League universities. The progeny of Jefferson and Jackson, on the other hand, have always been the localists, the small-towners, the rough-hewn, the bootstrappers, the tobacco-chewers and whisky-drinkers. Oh, and the local squire and slaveowner — we mustn’t forget him.

This is not the same thing as the cleavage between Left and Right, between progressive and reactionary. In fact, it’s a cleavage that runs almost at right angles to Left and Right. There’s an anti-elitist, Left aspect to the Jeffersonian-Jacksonian story, but there’s also a terribly reactionary side to it — an embrace of “states’ rights”, with all that that implies; a deep-dyed racism; a close-mindedness and provincialism; an anti-intellectualism and a susceptibility to obscurantism and superstition.

On the Hamiltonian side, it isn’t just a story of central banks, the sacred obligations of a bond issue, the more-than-sacred totem of hard money. There’s also an openness to rationality, to modernity, to ideas that come from somewhere else — even, perhaps, from Europe!

So where, in this divide, is the Left supposed to go? With the Hamiltonians and their central bank and their top-down ideas of governance, or with the Jacksonians and their uncouth, ill-informed, hick prejudices? Talk about a Hobson’s choice.

Liberalism, in the sense Americans attach to that term, has made its choice. It’s Hamiltonian to the core. There is no institution more holy to the modern American liberal than the Supreme Court — and there is no institution more profoundly undemocratic. Liberals like the idea of Federalizing policy matters: abortion, religion in the schools, even speed limits. Liberals tend to feel that regulation is a constructive thing, and don’t really see why anybody should object to being required to wear a seat belt, or a motorcyle helmet. It’s for their own good, after all.

The reasons for this outlook are not far to seek. With few exceptions, people who consider themselves “liberal” tend to be relatively well-educated and generally either belong to the managerial-professional-professorial cadre or work in media or the arts. This class is, in effect, the modern, secular equivalent of the parsons and monks who kept the administrative and cultural machinery of mediaeval society running. The peasants did most of the hard work, and the barons and abbots and kings enjoyed most of the goodies, but it was the conscientious, self-disciplined, literate, moral clerics who greased the institutional axles and mended the institutional harness.

We don’t really have a name for our modern educated, intelligent, reflective brain-worker class, so I’m going to revive a fine old Chaucerian word and call them the “clerks”. Boardroom condottieri like Dennis Kozlowski are our equivalent of the robber barons of old, though the modern barons’ taste runs more to Lear jets and $10,000 shower curtains than to roistering in the great hall and rogering the kitchen wenches on the side. Our clerks don’t approve of the modern baronial oafs and their wretched excess any more than the monks of Citeaux approved of the Duke of Burgundy’s mistresses. Like the monks of Citeaux, our liberal clerks are tender-hearted toward the downtrodden, and feel strongly that the rich and powerful should treat the poor and powerless more kindly. But like the monks of Citeaux, our clerks are also intensely loyal to the core institutions of the society. For the monks, it was the church and the feudal order; for our clerks, it’s the constitution, the schools, the courts, and the law.

They are, after all, bred to it – or really, I should say, we are bred to it, since in fact I belong to this class myself. We got where we are by going to school, doing our homework, getting good scores on our tests, matriculating at good colleges, and then landing good jobs with possibilities for promotion, and doing those jobs conscientiously. Most people who grow up to be liberals have faithfully kept their side of the social contract as it was represented to them, and have found that the other side has kept its promises to them, too – at least until recently, when the dukes and earls of corporate America have undertaken, like epigonal Henry Tudors in suits, to dissolve our little monasteries one by one.

Meanwhile, out there in the sticks, there are all the people who didn’t get on the escalator; who didn’t go to the good schools, or couldn’t pay attention and buckle down in the schools they did go to; who never acquired much culture, learned a foreign language, or cultivated refined tastes in food and drink. Our liberals may feel sorry for these unfortunates, but they neither respect nor trust them. Hoi polloi haven’t studied, they haven’t learned, they have no expertise, none of the professional man or woman’s intellectual or personal discipline, and they do have all kinds of odd and poorly-founded ideas. By all means we must better their lot, and raise them as much as possible from their degraded state, preferably by more, and more relentless, education, but — let them run things? That would be a disaster.

American liberals are decent, moral, humane people, and so they would like to make our fundamentally undemocratic institutions operate more benignly. But they are themselves an elite – and, what’s worse, an elite of merit, if SATs and good grades and postgraduate degrees mean anything. And elites of any kind are seldom enthusiastic about handing over the reins to the great unwashed. So our liberal clerks, kind and beneficent though they are, have no fundamental quarrel with an undemocratic, Hamiltonian social order – indeed, if truth be told, they rather like it, though they mostly conceal this fact even from themselves.

In the sticks, where Jeffersonian and Jacksonian sentiment have always thrived, liberals, being openly and obviously Hamiltonian in outlook, are recognized as adherents of the ancestral enemy. Most ordinary Americans don’t really know any powerful corporate honchos – any of the people who really rule them – just as most mediaeval laborers never made the acquaintance of the Duke of Burgundy. The actual structures of ultimate power in our society, as in any society, are fairly remote and abstract. But the teacher and the bureaucrat, the psychologist and the consultant, are known quantities, and they are not universally loved. These figures stand at the meeting point of Hamiltonian rubber and Jacksonian road.

The anti-liberalism of “red-state” Americans is a little like the anti-Semitism of the mediaeval peasantry. The peasants should have been angry at the lords, who had all the real power, and were their real, ultimate oppressors. But they didn’t really know the lords, and the lords put on a good show, and occasionally threw a party on the castle lawn. On the other hand, the Jewish merchant and the Jewish moneylender were chronic, day-to-day, intimately-known antagonists. The lords, being remote, could pose as defenders of Christianity and rural tradition, just as corporate errand boys in the Republican party nowadays can pose as Nascar-lovin’, gun-totin’, plain-speakin’ regular Amurricans. But Jews then, and liberals now, can’t strike that pose and make it convincing. Like Aunt Polly, the liberal’s social essence, his mission in life, is to edify, reform, civilize, and educate; and people don’t always welcome missionaries.

The Jacksonian outlook, as we noted above, contains an inchoate Leftishness; it’s insurrectionary and anti-elitist by nature, and these rebellious embers could be – and from time to time have been – fanned into flame by circumstances, and by political leaders who articulated a genuinely mutinous program. But nowadays the official left end of the political spectrum in the United States – as any editorial-page hack will tell you – is not mutiny, it is liberalism. And liberalism is a thoroughly elitist attitude. To be sure, it valorizes an elite of education, of expertise, of adherence to legal form and due process, rather than an elite of wealth and unscrupulous, unbridled power. But it is nevertheless an elite. Liberalism cannot speak to the mutinous side of the Jacksonian mind; and so faute de mieux, reaction speaks to it instead, and urges it to overthrow the iniquitous Hamiltonian dictatorship of – the liberals!

So the poor liberals get it coming and going. They keep the machinery in order – like those old mediaeval monks – for the benefit of the real rulers; and then the real rulers turn around and use them, the way the Jews were used in the Middle Ages, as scapegoats for public discontent.

But let’s not shed too many tears for liberalism. Its weakness lies in the fact that by virtue of its deepest nature, it can’t address the anger and resentment — the well-founded, if misdirected, anger and resentment — of much of the public. It is too invested in the institutions that have placed its adherents in positions of status, responsibility, and emolument. As long as the Left in American life is identified with liberalism, it doesn’t have a prayer. It can’t tap the Jeffersonian-Jacksonian, bottom-rail-on-top energies of the American people. And into the vacuum thus left, the Karl Roves and Matt Drudges, the Rush Limbaughs and the John McLaughlins, can move. They’re not the real Jeffersonian-Jacksonian thing, of course. They just borrow its language and dress up in its clothes; but they’re the only ones out there who are even doing that much. The liberals don’t bother to hide their top-down, Hamiltonian way of thinking — in fact they’re quite convinced that it is, in that favorite liberal turn of phrase, “appropriate.” The reactionaries, on the other hand, at least pay the public the tribute of hypocrisy, and articulate, however deceitfully, the anger that people understandably – appropriately! — feel.

Given a choice between an erstaz Jacksonianism and the real thing, I believe that many Americans would prefer the real thing. But given a choice between ersatz Jacksonianism and frank Hamiltonianism, it’s no contest; they’ll take the ersatz friend over the open enemy any time. In this respect, of course, Red Staters are very much like their Blue State counterparts, who embrace those false friends, the Democrats, in fear of the open enemy, the Republicans.

Speaking of false friends, of course, brings us back to those Blues in Red’s clothing, those Aunt Pollys trying to cuss and drink like Pap, the Triangulators: the DLC and its entourage of satellite organizations, the he-Clintons and she-Clintons, the Joe Liebermans. The faux Jacksonians of the Republican party are what we might call first-order con men, or hypocrites simpliciter; they’re errand boys for corporate power and greed, masquerading as advocates for the Little Guy. Their form of dishonesty is comparatvely straightforward.

The dishonesty of the triangulators is of a far more complex and exotic kind. They are second- or even third-order con men: grifters of one kind posing as grifters of another kind; degenerate liberals posing as hypocritical corporate populists. Or perhaps it’s the other way around; in such a well-stirred and long-simmered stew of dishonesty, it becomes difficult to distinguish the ingredients.

The Republicans have a comparatively simple role to play in the American political comedy, and they play it with a certain amount of conviction and plausibility. By contrast, the triangulation game is an exceptionally complex and involuted sting — a design so intricate that it can’t possibly ever work right. The triangulator role is so subtly conceived that it’s unplayable — the hapless actor cast in this part can’t help giving off a ripe stench of slipperiness, contrivance, and chronic bad faith. His task is to tell two obviously contradictory lies to two different audiences, while both audiences are simultaneously present. He has to tell the liberals that he’s really, basically, a “progressive” like them, and at the same time he has to tell the disgruntled Jacksonians that he endorses their resentments. Compared to the Democrats, no wonder the Republicans look comparatively straightforward and honest — which is, perhaps, the Democrats’ greatest service, among many services, to the triumphal march of reaction. The Democrat is such an obvious gallows-bird that the Republican by contrast seems like a straight shooter.

It would be a great deal easier for the American people to see through the Republican and his false populism, if it weren’t for the Democrat on the same stage, looking so deeply and manifestly fraudulent, so hang-dog, sidelong, slinking and serpentine, so embroiled in multiple simultaneous cons that he can’t remember himself which lie he’s telling to whom at any given moment.

Harry Truman famously said of Richard Nixon, “I don’t think the son of a bitch knows how to tell the truth.” The same could be said for Nixon’s contemporary Republican progeny; but they sure do know how to lie. They’ve brought it to a fine art. By contrast, the Democrat not only doesn’t know how to tell the truth; he also doesn’t even know how to lie with any degree of conviction. Or rather, he’s trying to lie at a level of virtuosity that’s beyond his skill — perhaps beyond anybody’s skill. The Republicans, like the hedgehog, have One Big Lie that they tell to one and all; but the Democrats are a not-very-competent fox, with a different lie for everybody, and a lamentable inability to keep their various stories straight.

The strategy of “triangulation”, then, doesn’t appear likely to bring the Democrats back into anything like parity with the Republicans. It’s just too complicated and tricky, and complicated, tricky things seldom work very well – particularly when they underestimate the intelligence of the public, a thing that it’s quite possible to do, whether Annie believes it or not. Even the master triangulator himself, Bill Clinton, had to catch a couple of lucky breaks to make it work for him. In 1992, he was running against an incumbent who had shot himself in the foot, and Clinton probably wouldn’t have won even so, if Ross Perot hadn’t further cut into the incumbent’s base. In 1996, Clinton had the advantage of incumbency, relative prosperity, an unprepossessing opponent, ovverreaching Republicans in Congress following their midterm victories in 1994, and help from Perot again.

More to the point, though, for those of us on the Left, is the question of whether the Clinton strategy is worth doing even if it could work reliably. And surely the answer must be “no”, as Clinton’s own record in office sufficiently demonstrates.

Behind this question lies a deeper question for us Lefties: who do we really trust? Is it the institutions, or the people? Do we want to continue to rely on the Supreme Court? On a handful of senior, mildly liberal senators? On the American Civil Liberties Union? On establishment environmentalist groups like the Sierra Club? Weak reeds indeed.

There is an alternative, but it’s frightening. We could decide to start believing in democracy instead. We could dismount from the high horse of education and expertise and embrace the Jacksonian bloody-mindedness of our fellow Americans. This would require listening as well as talking, and there would no doubt be many areas – cultural ones in particular – where we would just have to agree to disagree, at least for the time being.

Right-wing archfiend Grover Norquist, one of the leading engineers of Republican dominance in the last twenty years, has some important insights for us. Norquist says that one of the reasons ordinary Americans have shifted in such numbers to the Republicans is that, more than anything else, they want to be left alone: not meddled with, not edified, not improved. They want their dealings with bureaucracy to be few and quick, and they don’t llike filling out forms. They know perfectly well that the Democratic party does not respect this desire on their part. Of course, the Republicans don’t, either, but the yoke that the Republicans would settle on our shoulders takes a somewhat different form and doesn’t appear so obviously as the government’s work. The Republican program is a kind of wide-open, Wild West regime of untrammeled corporate self-enrichment. This program eventuates, of course, in a grinding oppression of the ordinary citizen, but that oppression appears to be the result of natural law, or the citizen’s own failure to compete well, or of wickedness on the part of some specific corporate evildoer; it doesn’t appear, on its face, in the ideological world we live in, as a social phenomenon, and specifically as the outcome of a certain kind of governance. So the Republican’s hatred of taxing the wealthy, protecting the land and water and air, and spending on social goods like schools and parks, can be packaged as opposition to government meddling in general. And Joe Citizen doesn’t like government meddling.

He’s right not to like it; and those of us who have a streak of real Leftism in us — those who may consider themselves liberals, for lack of a better word, but have within themselves, perhaps without fully realizing it, a streak of something hotter and more rebellious — we ought to recognize and honor this impulse on Joe’s part, and find a way to connect with it. We have a better and more honest story to tell on this subject than the Republicans have, and we should start telling it.

A Double Looting of the State and the Working Class

By Richard D. Wolff

Saturday, August 06, 2011

The political posturing around the debt ceiling “crisis” was mostly a distraction from the hard issues. The hardest of those — underlying US economic decline — keeps resurfacing to display costs, pains, and injustices that threaten to dissolve society. Its causes — two long-term trends over the last 30 years — help also to explain the political failures that now compound the social costs of economic decline.

The first trend is the attack on jobs, wages, and benefits, and the second is the attack on the federal government’s budget. The first trend enables the second. A capitalist economy suffering high unemployment with all its costly consequences shapes a bizarre, disconnected politics. The two major parties ignore unemployment and the system that keeps reproducing it. They argue instead over how much to cut social programs for the people while they agree that such cutting is the major way to fix the government’s broken budget.

The first trend amounts to looting the US working class (the media softens that to “disappearing middle class”). Since the 1970s, real wages have been flat to declining, while productivity per worker has risen steadily. What employers give workers (wages) has remained the same while what workers produce for their employers (profits) rose. Workers and their families responded by working ever more hours and borrowing ever more money to get or keep the “American dream.” By 2007, they were physically exhausted, families emotionally stressed and deeply anxious about the debts that their flat real wages could no longer sustain. When the system crashed, zooming unemployment, further wage and benefit reductions and home foreclosures made everything still worse for most Americans.The second trend was looting the government. This happened because exhausted and stressed workers turned away from participation or even political interests after the 1970s. In contrast, employers used the profits made possible by flat wages and rising productivity to buy politicians, parties, and policies. More than ever before, businesses and top executives grabbed the levers of political power. They made government serve their interests. Starting in the 1980s, Washington lowered business taxes, deregulated businesses, cut taxes on executives’ and other high incomes, increased spending on the military-industrial and medical-insurance complexes, provided more opportunities and freedom for financial speculation, and so on. To distract people from recognizing, debating, or opposing this political shift, more was also spent on social programs and supports.

Washington was thus deprived of tax revenues (chiefly on corporations and the richest individuals) while spending more on defense, business supports, and social programs. As this gap between revenues and expenditures rose, Washington kept borrowing ever more. Rising annual budget deficits added to the national debt. When the private capitalist system crashed in 2007, business and the rich made sure the government spent vast sums to bail out banks, insurance companies, and large corporations and to revive the stock market. Accordingly, government deficits and debts zoomed upward.

Business and the rich made trillions from both trends. By keeping workers’ wages flat, profits soared as employers alone kept the full fruits of rising worker productivity. Employers and the rich profited further by getting Washington to lower their taxes. They then lent at interest to the government what they no longer needed to pay in taxes. After all, the government needed to borrow precisely because it had stopped taxing corporations and the rich at the rates of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. Business and the rich happily financed a political system that converted their tax obligations into secure, well-rewarded loans to the government instead.

Looting the working class and the state widened the gap between rich and poor in the US to what it was a century ago. Now the corporations and the rich want the state, whose budget they looted, to cut back social supports and services for the working class whose wages and productivity they also looted.

Republicans yell “class warfare” against advocates of a return to the 1940s tax rates on business profits, and the 1950s and 1960s rates on high-income individuals. Both were far higher than they are today. “Class warfare” better describes government policies since the 1970s. Business and the rich made sure those policies shifted the burden of federal taxation from business to individuals and from rich individuals to everyone else.

Despite this double looting of working people and the state, many victims direct their anger at the government instead of those who control the government. Unemployed millions fired by private capitalist employers (or suffering wage and benefits cuts imposed by them) blame the government, not their employers. Millions foreclosed out of their homes by private capitalist banks blame the government. They want the government punished, made smaller and weaker, and they are desperate to avoid further taxes. Republicans promise to do all that. Those who fear that a smaller, tax-starved government will do even less for them hear Democrats promising to cut less than Republicans. This is politics disconnected from economic realities (for example, high unemployment) and twisted into a contest between more and less government spending cuts imposed on a working class already reeling from economic crisis.

Neither party dares to return taxes on corporations and the rich to what they were. Neither party dares to advocate that government hire the unemployed to rebuild the US, to spend their government-job wages on maintaining their mortgages (reviving the housing industry) and thereby stimulate the whole economy from the bottom up. Above all, neither party dares admit that, so long as production remains in the hands of tiny groups of rich shareholders and boards of directors, they will keep looting the system.

Can the US do better than this capitalist system’s performance? We need to debate honestly and decide whether and how we can do better. We should have had the courage to debate that over the last 50 years. The cold war — and the priorities of corporations and the rich — prevented that. Now it’s long overdue. We need new political organizations mobilizing people to demand and engage that debate, theoretically and also in practical, political struggles.

Richard D. Wolff is Professor Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst and also a Visiting Professor at the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School University in New York. He is the author of New Departures in Marxian Theory (Routledge, 2006) among many other publications. Check out Richard D. Wolff’s documentary film on the current economic crisis, Capitalism Hits the Fan, at www.capitalismhitsthefan.com. Visit Wolff’s Web site at www.rdwolff.com, and order a copy of his new book Capitalism Hits the Fan: The Global Economic Meltdown and What to Do about It.

This article is further evidence of what I like to call the tyranny of television. Have you done any research on-line about Jerry Mander yet?

And yes, I am a contrarian!

An excerpt from the article:

“The American media deploys a deep and varied arsenal of rhetorical devices in order to marginalise opinions, people and organisations as “outside the mainstream” and therefore not worth listening to. For the most part the people and groups being declaimed belong to the political Left. To take one example, the Green Party – well-organised in all 50 states – is never quoted in newspapers or invited to send a representative to television programmes that purport to present “both sides” of a political issue. (In the United States, “both sides” means the back-and-forth between centre-right Democrats and rightist Republicans).”

Worse Than Hoover, by Marshall Auerback