Dear Citizens and Elected Officials:
I posted the following response a few days ago to Peter Radford’s musings about “Post-Iowa” at the Real-World Economics Review Blog, a site for dissenting professional economists. Peter was an Executive Vice-President at NatWest bank for a dozen years and has a Harvard MBA. He also has his own blog, The Radford Free Press. In some senses then, he could be seen as logical for the Clinton camp but as you can see from the following, he’s not. Let’s count our blessings.
“Let me venture to say that Clinton’s lost gloss – a truly accepted ‘presumptive’ nominee would not have lapsed into a tied race in Iowa – is cause for reflection amongst all those who profess to be well versed in American politics and government. She simply cannot resonate with a message for the future. She has no message of the future. In one of her last rallies before last night’s caucus she waxed lyrical about pressing on with the current agenda. Yet, surely, the electorate is no mood for continuation. The post-recession muddle and thirty years of neoliberal economics have eroded voter’s confidence in our economic institutions, in our leadership, and even in our capability to get anything done. The electorate is losing both its nerve and its patience. Bad things happen when that occurs. Bad things like Donald Trump.”
Here was my response, now edited and amplified a bit to be more of an essay rather than a long comment. I’ll only preface it by calling attention to Sanders’ reference to the Democratic Party “establishment’s” and the economic “establishment’s” failures. If you doubt that there is such an establishment, and that Hillary and Bill and the policy experts circling around them form such an edifice, then just take a look at the astounding fact that Senator Sanders has come all this long way, to run equal with Mrs. Clinton, virtually without any endorsements from elected Democratic Officials. When former Iowa Senator Tom Harkin endorsed her and not Senator Sanders, I could scarcely believe it, recalling what I once thought Harkins stood for, courageously against the Bushes’ dynasty, and fighting mad compared to his moderate colleagues indifference. It reminds me of everything I’ve experienced over nearly a half a century skirmishing with that establishment, especially over economic ideas and the collapse of counter-veiling powers against the corporate state and its revolving door.
So here it goes:
“Well done Peter I agree with your assessment. I’ve just come from reading Senator Sanders post Iowa statement, which is quite consistent with what he has been saying in his basic stump speech. I especially like his phrase that the Democratic Party establishment can no longer deliver the programs or the vision to lead the country forward. He specifically added the term “economic establishment” to go with political establishment, of both parties. The boundaries set up by these establishment economists about the role of government, which interventions into private “markets” are allowable and which are taboo, have come to form rigid intellectual boundaries against more egalitarian policies. I’m not talking “socialism” ruled out here, I’m talking plain old American FDR New Deal, to get right down to it. Which the Republican Right, with the acquiescence of the Democratic Center, has demonized into something which it was not. Ironically, it may be that it takes the more accurate historical memory of a 74 year old democratic socialist, not the corporatized Democratic Party, to accurately recall the party’s own bedrock foundations.
I do have some worries though, that Sanders doesn’t quite go deep enough at times, becomes too recitational, needs to loosen up a bit without going the full Senator Bulworth route. Right now, the democratic socialist self-designation is not hurting him among Democrats, but it will be a burden should he win the party’s nomination. It’s a strange matter really, because the policies he has put forth are not necessarily socialist, they could be proposed by social democrats, new New Dealers and almost anyone choosing the liberal-progressive label for themselves. And when he formulated his basic definition in that Georgetown University speech in November of 2015, he drew upon Martin Luther King, Norman Thomas (interestingly enough though, not Michael Harrington) and FDR’s Second Bill of Rights, which is where I’ve been urging the left to go for more than a decade.
FDR was no socialist; when pressed for his own characterization of his political roots, ideological motivation, all he would offer was “a Christian and a Democrat.” And in that Georgetown speech, Sanders, chided for his alleged pie-in-the-sky proposals, explicitly disavowed tampering with the “means of production,” leaving many present day socialists scratching their heads, since that phrase, has formed historically, to a greater or lesser degree, one of the distinguishing features of socialism. I’d better add, for better or worse, mostly worse when Socialists took office in Western Europe in the 20th century. Better done in Scandinavia. And now neoliberalism has put old social democratic Western Europe in fiscal and monetary restraints, irons so binding that New Deal type proposals made by Yanis Varoufakis and James Galbraith to help Greece are considered beyond the pale. You don’t have to look too hard to see the same economic limits in the policy advice going to establishment Democrats over the past 30 years, ever since Jimmy Carter.
After the 1970’s, when I was close to Michael Harrington’s Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, and as the country headed far right, I had to ask myself whether the burden of defending a label was worth the price since I couldn’t detect a difference in the policies socialists vs general left policy people brought to the table. And that still holds true with Sanders today.
I call myself a social democrat, a green New Dealer, because I can’t imagine the world’s most intensely capitalist country shifting into the terrain of traditional socialism, but I can imagine America adopting the Second Bill of Rights, starting with two in particular. I urge not all eight but two as the most important: the right to health care at a price people can afford, and the right to a job. I, like other commentators (Paul Jay and Doug Henwood, for example who discussed the Sanders Georgetown speech here at the Real NewsNetwork: therealnews.com/... ) find it strange that Bernie chooses the first but not the second, because it seems to me with his diagnosis of working class and middle class pain, the right to a job, with the public sector supplying them if the private sector can’t or won’t, is a substantial, the most substantial part of the remedies, and one that has not been tried since the 1930’s. It meshes so well with his emphasis on combatting global warming, and there are such robust historical examples with the CCC and WPA, that I’m puzzled by this lack of follow through logic. Is it perhaps because this potential intervention into private labor markets is one of the great, if not the greatest taboos of 30 years of neoliberalism, echoing the foundations of the 19th century “liberal economy” (translate that into today’s conservatives) so well presented by Karl Polanyi in his 1944 book The Great Transformation, a glimpse into the foundations of today’s neoliberalism, without the gold standard, but balanced budget austerity serving almost as well.
Now it seems to me, in a fit of Clintonian “pragmatism,” that going for the full eight rights in FDR’s Second Bill of Rights, presented in his State of the Union Address in 1944, is too much right now, that’s why I chose the two I did as those which could help the most. The public mood, which you and Sanders have stressed, seems to understand what Polanyi was telling us: that free markets left to run out their own logic, would destroy civil society and nature as well (clearly echoed without citation by Wendell Berry’s Jefferson Lecture from 2012), and have to be checked, setting off the great “double movement” of left and right to push their forms of interventions (and the Right certainly has theirs, perhaps disguised better as easy access to military employment and spending, unlimited interest rates and selective asset purchases by Central Banks, the latter being one of the chief “counter movements” initiated in the late 19th century to offset the chaos of industrial life spreading to financial markets…
And let us not forget one of the main planks in the shared neoliberal “project” in economic thought, given Democratic Imprimatur by none other than Bill Clinton himself in his 1996 State of the Union speech when he declared that the “Era of Big Government is Over,” just as capitalism and globalization were about to demonstrate that the era of big economic problems - financial crises, inequality and corporate domination of democracy – were about to intensify once again. For one of the main answers to the end of this Big Government era was the privatization of formerly public services, everything from human services, research, military and diplomatic services, the monitoring processes for food and agriculture, and the whole mass incarceration and probation system. It has ended in a shocking conclusion, in the findings of an Harvard Law Review article, “Policing and Profits,” from April in 2015, that shook me up and has gone virtually uncommented upon by the press and almost needless to say, has yet to surface in the political debating season. It’s where Black Lives Matter – or don’t, very much, as the findings disclose, meets neoliberalism’s austerity, balanced budgets and the new poor house: the prison and probation system where the poor, largely but not exclusively the racial minorities poor, are forced into further debt to pay for what formerly was borne by the whole society in the administration of “equal justice under the law.” It’s hard to write those words after having read this article; how could this have happened in the land of millions of lawyers, of the Republican Right who proclaims their defense of the
Constitution; it’s equally disgraceful that the Democratic Party has been silent…it’s time the Sanders’ campaign seizes the opportunity to contrast what happened to the poor who couldn’t pay their initial fines for minor violations to the fate of Wall Street law breakers who Eric Holder’s Justice Department winked at, sentence free. Here it is, the most shocking thing I’ve read about American life in a long time, and I’m not easy to shock: harvardlawreview.org/...
Isn’t the great establishment fear in the United States, that if we head down even the road to the first of these two great rights in the Second Bill of Rights, the Right to a Job, that we destroy something unique about America, threaten the American Dream itself by destroying incentives, which, if we would look closely at our own history, often take the form of cruelties and social brutalities that create a desperate driven form of that Dream, create “Monsters of Ambition,” riding roughshod over domestic life, and all those decencies which Karl Polanyi saw making up the embeddedness of society, the values which once restrained economies and economics within more powerful cultural assumptions. This was often in America a cruel illusion, that the Dream didn’t have a very dark side, and I have no fear that were we to create these more decent minimums, that the powerful centrifugal forces urging individuals to distinguish themselves from others will not be extinguished but instead will be enhanced within a more humane framework. It seems to me that this is the missing central discussion, always has been, and I don’t know if our campaigns can ever get there. Eugene O’Neill and Arthur Miller certainly did in their theatre work, explore the dark side of the core values of American life; President Obama gave us the upbeat gloss of “innovation, change and adaptability” in his 2016 State of the Union Address (which I am overdue to answer) and perhaps a good way to remember what I’m driving at is to recall Death of a Salesman. I can imagine many happier occupations to replace the one Willy Loman lived out so tragically: ecological ones, educational ones and nurturing ones, to repair the lives shattered by the Ferguson like systems described in “Policing and Profit,” and in Jill Lepore’s startling article about the failures of the American social service system to protect the children at the bottom of our vast inequalities: “Baby Doe: How child-protection policies fail.” (The New Yorker, print edition, February 1, 2016).
It reminds me once again that “austerity” kills, but kills selectively.
PS Readers will forgive me for my writing to be shaded, perhaps a bit darkly, but realistically so, I believe, for our times, by having just finished the late Joe Bageant’s book about rural white working class America, Deer Hunting with Jesus, from 2007. Joe has been called “The Sartre of Appalachia” and in writing it he was reviewing his own roots and the gaps which exist between upper-middle class Democrats and the white-working class left bitterly and resentfully behind. They have revolted, but that plays out along the cultural lines offered by the Republican Right, Evangelicals and Fundamentalists, having not been offered a new New Deal as an alternative. It’s more nuanced than that, but the gaps are real enough and one of the unanswered questions for the Democrats is who is best suited to close them, if that is possible: Senator Sanders or Sec. Clinton. So far Donald Trump has reaped the harvest for this portion of deeply alienated America and Paul Krugman says they are never coming home to the Democrats…their “false consciousness” is permanent. I’m not sure Bageant wouldn’t agree with Krugman, because the only remedy for the distance is “fleshly contact” – intimacies of social life that seem precluded by the occupational and regional sortings of city-suburban-rural demographics. And a bit further, there are the different diagnoses of the sources of the anger itself. I do know one thing from first-hand experience though: where I live at the edge of Appalachia you have to be quite an archeologist to find any significant traces of “progressive history,” much less progressive political economy. It’s been buried, silenced and intimidated for decades. Not even a fossil in a museum remains.
Like the fate of Pfc. Lynndie England, whom Bageant devoted a chapter too, “The Ballad of Lynndie England,” whose saga in West Virginia and Iraq’s prison scandal sums up pretty well the roots of American divisions, the white working class version of the fates of black lives described in Policing and Profits. As best I can judge today, Lynndie is unemployed, or very episodically employed, raising a child on her own, Scarlet Lettered by that dishonorable discharge, someone whom “the right to a job” and a new CCC surely could help, even as the country she served has largely forgotten her. The Democratic Establishment offers her ladders of mobility she can’t reach, it no longer believes in the lifeboat of an actual job, and the Republicans offer her Scripture and recitations of character building, Horatio Alger stories, courtesy of Cruz and Rubio bios… She’s a story from the “other side” of the American Dream. A living ghost, like so many others, whom we are more than happy to forget, connecting the working class fate at home to imperial adventures abroad, repeating in an eerie way the fate of the fragile Roman Republic that our founders so selectively built their dreams upon.
Best to all my readers,
billofrights
Frostburg, MD