Dear Citizens and Elected Officials:
On the cusp of the South Carolina and Super Tuesday Democratic primaries of March 3rd, and with attacks mounting on Bernie Sanders from the Party establishment, it seems to me now was the appropriate time to re-issue an essay which is eight years old, entitled “Why I Write.”
I was living in a very different place then, in December, 2011, near the Beltway, but my experience with the Democratic Party of that time resonates to this day and this situation.
And I reminded myself of that when I found this essay buried in the piles of my writings: that the title came from George Orwell himself, in the 1950’s. He wrote, he said, to make clear the distinction between totalitarian socialism and democratic socialism, between the communists of his day, and his own left views. The distinctions were born of his experience actually fighting in the Spanish Civil War, and led to his three most famous books from the 1930’s and 1940’s: Homage to Catalonia, Animal Farm and 1984.
When I revisited the background of this famous writer, whom we were all acquainted with in our high school and college days in the mid Cold War, 1955-1972, I realized that something had been left out of his biography: that he was a democratic socialist criticizing Communists. And to bring it up to contemporary ramblings on the radio, I don’t believe that Rush Limbaugh had dwelled very much on the distinction.
I don’t have to remind readers here at the Daily Kos why this is important right now, given the accusations hurled against Sanders for his too sympathetic statements about various left governments gone bad, gone anti-democratic.
Sanders can help himself a great deal by referring to George Orwell’s distinctions, and to take a brief break from his policy recitations and speak from the heart to make it clear why he is a democratic socialist, and why he keeps the “s” word for his policies which are actually social democracy writ large, and based, as he said at Georgetown University in the late fall of 2015, on FDR’s Second Bill of Rights from 1944 - and referencing the fact that FDR, court packing attempt and all, described himself only as a “Christian and a Democrat.”
The time is ripe Bernie, and such a speech can only help build the momentum you and the movement have generated, and blunt all the ideological spears now being hurled in your direction.
Best to you all
Bill of Rights
Frostburg, MD
WHY I WRITE
December 9, 2011
Dear Readers:
I first sat down to write about the economy in 2003-2004, and what emerged was an essay called The Great Moral Inversion: How the Republican Right Disabled the Democratic Compass. It was mailed to congressional leaders, authors and progressive think tanks in February of 2004. The motivation came from the acute economic troubles of those early years of the 21st century, especially the dot.com bust of 2000 and the great corporate accounting scandals that followed in its wake.
The real driver, however, was the gap between what I heard on the news, and from elected officials, and a persistent gut sense I had that there was something more profoundly wrong with the economy. Given that sense, it was even more troubling to realize that serious critical thinking about the basic structures of the economy had almost disappeared from public discourse. The political economy belonged to the Center-Right consensus, the conservative neoliberals, and there was no competing alternative. “There is no alternative.”
As you can sense from the title, I had concluded that in our predominantly Judeo-Christian culture, the priority of reintegrating the poor and outcast into mainstream society had been replaced by setting an increasingly bountiful table for business. Sometimes large changes can be grasped by placing a few words side by side, and watching the meanings flow: try putting “Social Gospel” next to “Donald Trump” and let the culture go at it. Didn’t work for you? Just put “social worker” in place of Social Gospel then.
There were dissenting writers however, with warnings of future troubles, and Bill Greider, who was one of the best of them, was an early and sympathetic reader of mine, who rightly pointed out that the Democrats had actively disabled their own moral compass. They were becoming as zealous as The Right in matters of globalization and trade, and in gradually sundering the informal yet significant social contract that the New Deal had left us. President Bill Clinton assured us that the era of “big government” was over, because in Bill Clinton’s mind, the era of big economic troubles was too. And as Clinton read the eulogy, off to the right of the stage, one could hear a chorus emanating from Larry Summers, Robert Rubin and Alan Greenspan: “And so say all of us.”
As to the Republican Right, I had no illusions. In my farewell environmental speech in New Jersey, given on September 9, 2001, at Sandy Hook, when I received the Lifetime Achievement Award for Environmental Advocacy from the NY/NJ Baykeeper, I warned the audience that they too should have no illusions: there would be no further progress in environmental matters because of that Right, an assertion that was greeted by a mixture of applause and boos as I ticked off the major environmental laws which had been left without reauthorization. I didn’t know it at the time, and certainly didn’t intend to do so, but I had just vastly understated the problem, as we can now all clearly see in 2011, a decade later.
It took me a while to come back to the economy, but as I was waiting in the winter of 2007 to hear about a job with the O’Malley administration that never arrived, I thought I ought to take advantage of what I imagined would be my last “free time” to formally record my continuing economic worries. Among those worries were the high levels of private debt, the growing trade deficit and the mysterious world of financial speculation, especially those exotic “derivatives.” To register my complaint against Democrats who had become more obsessed with budget balancing than the GOP, I presented my new essay as a rhetorical question: “Fiscally Responsible, or Ingredients for an Economic Katrina?” And that was the first “posting" I sent out to a small mailing list, just as the world was first awakening to the huge fault lines buried under 30 years of conservative theory.
And here we are now, more than four years later, and I’ve never stopped writing, except for the research pauses in-between postings. So maybe it’s time now for a brief look back over my shoulder, and some reflection upon exactly what it is I’ve been trying to do, some 900 pages or so later. (And I have to admit, I was surprised when I did the actual tallies for 2011 – 250 pages; and 2010 – 303 pages.)
The simplest explanation is that I’ve been writing a history of this financial crisis, from a citizen’s point of view, from one who has had to teach himself, all over again, a good part of economic history since the Industrial Revolution, because that’s what it takes to adequately explain the past four years, and to offer a plausible way out. And I’ve been sharing that with you as I go along. In some respects, and without intending it at all, what I’ve been doing resembles the 19th century serialization of books in magazines, now adapted to the Internet age, and with a stronger connection to the immediate time flow of economic news. And through it all, I offer this perspective: I’m translating all the time from economic specialists and technocrats, across barriers of class and education, trying to penetrate the mystifications that have long been the cloak for the most important interior processes of capitalism: exactly the task 19th century dissenters faced in opposing the “classical economists.” For example, when you hear the term “flexible labor market” directed at the workforce, you know where all that “uncertainty” is going to end up, and that longer hours and lower pay are going to be the end result, if indeed there are still jobs.
My work, however, comes at a time when the economics profession by itself can no longer satisfactorily explain our world. Economics has always been deeply interwoven with moral and cultural values, despite its scientific pretensions, and I am of the view that the best way to understand today’s catastrophes is to broaden the historical horizon and watch with open eyes all the different shapes capitalism has assumed since its rise in the late Middle Ages. Hence the title and themes of my own favorite essay, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Market, from January of 2010, which anticipated the moral lashings that German neoliberals have administered to the allegedly profligate Greeks, Spaniards and Italians, (the same profligates whom “austere” German bankers were previously only too happy, or desperate enough, to lend to) and which closed by announcing that the Right to a Job, and Full Employment, were the first priority rungs on the ladder leading out of the crisis.
I also pointed out that America was soon to get its own moral lashing, its own austerity regimen, announced at a late April, 2009, conference held in New York, where conservative historian Niall Ferguson fulminated against Paul Krugman’s Keynesianism, declaring, as if by royal fiat, that only the private sector could create jobs. I paired Ferguson alongside the libertarian Nassim N. Taleb, of Black Swan fame, who spoke out at another panel that spring, dismissing the possibility of effective financial regulation because anyone with economic smarts would of course be a hedge fund owner, not a regulator, a judgment he rendered in rather contemptuous tones, almost standard gear for libertarians when addressing the role of government. It was not only the content of what Ferguson and Taleb said then - there was a message hidden in the tone - and I wrote that in it I could hear “the early rumbles of major policy clashes ahead for the Obama administration, and the groundwork for the revival of the Republican Right.” (Stagnation, Stagflation, Stalemate…or Reform, Reconstruction, Renewal? June 15, 2009).
So I’m pleased to be able to say that I was stressing the importance of the Right to a Job and FDR’s Second Bill of Rights, and the perils of budget balancing, two years ago, long before a few Democratic Centrists decided that unemployment was the crucial economic malady of our time, not debt and deficits, and the key to eventually reducing them and creating the missing consumer demand (see Debt, Deficits & Balanced Budget Bull and Austerity, Courtesy of the Best Men, from April, 2010).
However, even though I’ve been on target and well ahead of the curve through these four years, I’ve heard from only five elected Democratic office holders, only one of whom engaged in a brief policy discussion, and that on a narrow topic. On the broader questions and directions I’ve raised, in this, supposedly the greatest democracy in history, at a time of great economic distress, I’ve heard nothing. Of course, one has to factor in what society has learned the hard way: there is no such thing as secure electronic communication, and politicians are hypersensitive on precisely the topics I write the most about.
I’ll never forget the dismissal I received at a Democratic precinct official training session, when a Central Committee member told me they hadn’t read and wouldn’t be reading what I wrote. And they were true to their word; the only time I heard anything back was when I published my resignation letter as a precinct officer, stating that I could no longer campaign for a Democratic Party that had turned its back on its own best traditions – those of FDR - not Theodore Roosevelt! And what I heard is the standard line in all such situations: what is the alternative? Sometimes, and for the political experience of far too many citizens, this begins to feel like, in unspoken translation: “The Party is the only Alternative.”
Now I don’t want to get carried away with this analogy, but it is true, after I came up with the title for this piece, that I found that George Orwell had beaten me to it with one that appeared in a collection of his essays in 1953 (Such, Such Were the Joys.) And how long did it take me to find out, after all that high school praise of Orwell, that there was a virtually unknown side to the author, who started writing after his experience in the Spanish Civil War in 1936-37: “Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.”
I wish this “There is no Alternative” attitude was just a random or even a personal preference that I just happened to run across in a busy election year, yet I don’t believe it was. In the structure of American politics there is always a crucial election for The Party going on at some level. The effect, intended or not, is always a narrowing of vision and discussion. Even under the extraordinary economic circumstances of 2008-2011, one could never find the party panels and forums asking the deeper questions. Most of the state and local discussions involved disputes over the trade-offs on the road to the mandatory balanced budget, with no reference or warning of the disaster looming when the federal budget turned down the same street…one which loops back directly to the 1930’s.
So if an elected Democrat ever complains to you about commotion in the streets, of unformulated goals and demands, as from OWS, please refer them to me, because I’ve been following the old civil civic blueprint for a different Democratic party and a different economy, and putting my sweat equity and soul, what remains of it, into the effort. And I can fully certify the formal indifference, or, to be a bit more generous, the seeming indifference. In the way the game is played, one just doesn’t know for sure where one’s postings have travelled, and which minds, if any have been changed.
But this shouldn’t be just my worry, and my complaint, it should be yours as well. Independent voices are always in danger, and always too rare in and around the Democratic Party, and they never have an easy time finding a place at public forums, no matter how responsible they try to be. Thus I was too polite, not insistent enough one year ago, December 3rd, at the National Press Club, when I got up and asked the joint John Podesta-Robert Rubin “Future of American Jobs” conference: where were the public jobs, the calls for a new WPA, and CCC amidst all the cautious and narrow proposals… the times demanded more? It’s from countless unnoticed and unrecorded experiences just like this one, from rank and file citizens who got fed up with the brush offs and dust offs, that has led to the Occupy people in the streets.
I meant what I wrote in Pre-Occupied, at the end of November, 2011. The economic conditions we are living under are presenting the left, around the world, with the most fertile ground for change since the Great Depression. What has been said about historian Christopher Lasch speaks to all of us: “He was a reformer in a society in which the most elemental of reforms, the democratization of economic life, has not been accomplished.” And that democratization surely points far beyond “The New Nationalism” of 1910, it points directly to the economic rights contained in that great “Second Bill of Rights,” from 1944, the one Democrats refuse to talk about, and especially about the very first right, the one to a job. Step back and look at the history of the proudest accomplishments of the last three centuries, here and in Western Europe, and you will understand that “the way forward” is something close to this Second Bill of Rights, one that must be added to those great emancipatory documents of human history, which includes our own Declaration of Independence.
I want, more than anything, to continue to work towards this great task of a “Second Bill of Rights.” The outlines of future writing are clear and insistent in my mind. And yet, the truth is, I don’t know how much longer I will be able to continue to write. That’s because I haven’t been working from an economic vantage point above the troubles of our time. I’ve had no paying job in the past six years other than a brief stint as a Democratic door-to-door canvasser in 2006. My true full time job has been, as you now know, my research and writing.
When I turned 60, I began receiving a small pension from the State of New Jersey based on just over ten years’ service. It turned out to be much smaller than I anticipated 20 years back when I chose the option, since New Jersey apparently stopping believing in cost of living adjustments for retirees long ago, which is not the impression you would get from listening to the speeches of conservative Governor Christie. I have offered to bare my pension in public as counter testimony, but no one has taken me up on it. Perhaps it was the hefty fee I was asking to do the baring. Or maybe I had just been written off as a “counter-factual.”
I was very fortunate, though, to have had no debts when I left my last job in 2005, and to own some modest investments and savings, but we all know what has happened to such financial life rafts since 2008. I am consequently living the times without “immunity” as I write about them, and year-by- year my viewpoint has been moving closer and closer to the brutal ground level where so many of my fellow Americans experience them. And that’s a little different perspective than the one my “neighbor,” Tom Friedman has, just a couple of miles away in Bethesda.
So there it is readers: this is my first appeal for financial contributions; whatever you feel comfortable in contributing, let your conscience and your means be your guide.
And if any of my readers want to step up and draw inspiration from the experience of the abolitionists in ante-bellum America, I encourage them to play the role that the Tappan brothers, Arthur and Lewis, did for that fine cause. When I mentioned this idea to one of my long-time readers, she reminded me that given the views on political economy over in Potomac, Maryland, it was more likely that the Tappan brothers of today would be sending their checks to Niall Ferguson, not me, although I doubt he needs them very much. This would be a major economic misunderstanding on their part, however. After all, isn’t that what my writing is about: demonstrating that a capitalism without American customers isn’t going to be a very happy one, especially if most of the remaining customers have Chinese and Indian addresses? Economic nationalism indeed.
So contributions can be sent to my home address, made out to:
Readers and contributors who want to stop by and visit with me at the 1200 square foot, one story, 1952 house that I rent, are more than welcome to do so. It can be like the old social work home visit to make sure that the “client” isn’t living beyond their declared means.
On that count, I can offer you my unqualified assurances, and will be more than happy to give you a tour of the working library, which takes up one of the four rooms.
Until then, I wish the very best to all my readers – and contributors - for the holidays and the coming New Year.
Bill of Rights
Rockville, MD
Postscript: I’m not a non-profit organization, so contributions won’t be tax deductible.
And if you want to follow up on Teddy Roosevelt’s “New Nationalism” speech from 1910, the one President Obama referred to in his December 6th, Osawatomie, Kansas speech, then try this site, where you will learn in the document that follows the speech that TR didn’t write it; Gifford Pinchot did, with some editing by the famous editor, William Allen White (1868-1944); here at http://www.theodore-roosevelt.com/images/research/speeches/trnationalismspeech.pdf
And here is a thoughtful commentary from someone we haven’t heard from in a long time, the former New America Foundation writer, now law professor Jedediah Purdy at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jedediah-purdy/obama-teddy-roosevelt_b_1133376.html .
Because the European Crisis has been dominating the financial news recently, and may come to a head in December, I have included this 13 minute interview from the Real News Network with Rob Johnson, of the Roosevelt Institute. The first half explains the recent actions of the Federal Reserve in coordination with other central banks; it starts wonky yet ends with clear analogies; but it is the last four minutes which contain the economic dynamite: the motives and goals of the European private sector, to push things right to the brink, echoing Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine, to unravel what’s left of Social Democracy in Europe. Absent a threat from the left, as during the Cold War, Europe’s private sector doesn’t care to pay the “social insurance premium” charged by Social Democracy anymore…this has a message for the US as well…and ties in with the Orwell quote I included in this posting. http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=7656