Feb 25, 2011

At Long Last, Take the Red Pill

by Cliopatria

Kevin Drum, Plutocracy Now: What Wisconsin is Really About.Mother Jones, March/April 2011 (emphasis added):

...[R]elentless concentration of wealth and power among the rich is deeply corrosive in a democracy, and this makes it a profoundly political problem as well.

How did we get here? In the past, after all, liberal politicians did make it their business to advocate for the working and middle classes, and they worked that advocacy through the Democratic Party. But they largely stopped doing this in the '70s, leaving the interests of corporations and the wealthy nearly unopposed....

With labor in decline, both parties now respond strongly to the interests of the rich -- whose institutional representation is deep and energetic -- and barely at all to the interests of the working and middle classes.

This has produced three decades of commercial and financial deregulation that started during the administration of a Democrat, Jimmy Carter, gained steam throughout the Reagan era, and continued under Bill Clinton.

Gabriel Kolko, The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900-1916, 1963 (emphasis added):

Nor is the extension of federal regulation over the economy a question of progressive intent thwarted by conservative administration and fulfillment. Important business elements could always be found in the forefront of agitation for such regulation, and the fact that well-intentioned reformers often worked with them -- indeed, were often indispensable to them -- does not change the reality that federal economic regulation was generally designed by the regulated interest to meet its own end, and not those of the public or commonweal...

The first federal regulatory effort, the Interstate Commerce Commission, had been cooperative and fruitful; indeed, the railroads themselves had been the leading advocates of extended federal regulation after 1887...

[T]he business and political elites of the Progressive Era had largely identical social ties and origins. And, last of all, the federal government, rather than being a source of negative opposition, always represented a potential source of economic gain. The railroads, of course, had used the federal and local governments for subsidies and land grants. But various other industries appreciated the desirability of proper tariffs, direct subsidies in a few instances, government-owned natural resources, or monopolistic privileges possible in certain federal charters or regulations. For all of these reasons the federal government was a natural ally.

Since the 1970s, political parties have responded strongly to the interests of the rich. Do journalists believe these things when they type them up, or is there a script of some kind?

More Comments:

Chris Bray - 3/1/2011

All fair points that I appreciate, although I think Drum's language is less nuanced than yours in several places. But he's very clearly seeing a history of this false balance between regulation, which controls business and serves the commonweal, and deregulation, which serves corporate interests. Regulation has worked quite well for corporations, more often than not. Maybe it's possible to make a kind of golden age argument in which, for a few decades, unions were strong, Democrats were pure, and every tree was ripe with golden fruit. But I think you'd have to find far more limits and exceptions than Drum manages to come up with.

Martin Baskin White - 2/28/2011

I think you are being somewhat unfair to Kevin Drum's article. While not written with scholarly precision, it makes a more specific historical claim than the mere assertion that business has recently acquiried dominance over federal goverment policy. He claims that during a paricular period--roughly 1930s to about 1970--a particular set of insitutions--relatively strong unions--acted as an effective interest group on a particular set of issues--pocketbook issues affecting middle and working class Americans--and that this caused the Democratic party to be significantly responsive to these issues. He further claims that once unions had declined to certain point (c. 1970), they no longer served as a very effective interest group counterweight to business on this particular set of issues, and nothing very effective filled in the gap, so the Democratic Party, and, a foriori, the political systime as a whole, became musch less reponsive to these issues.

I don't think Drum says that the Democratic party, much less the political system as a whole, was not also responsive to business interests during this period, although he does not address the issue specifically. He certainly does not say that the post 1970s period is the only period of American history when business interests have been dominant and he simply doesn't discuss the relative weight of business interests in the post-1970s period compared with any pre-New Deal period.

Unless you contend that business has had a uniformly hegemonic rule in American politics, with no ups an downs even in specific issue areas, from the Progressive Era to the present, I don't think the Kolko quote contradicts Drum's basic thesis, whatever the absolute merits of Drum's basic thesis may be.

Anthony Scalabrine - 2/25/2011

This is typical of the short view that many journalists take when assessing current events.