Will McCutcheon Give Birth to the Next Occupy?

By Robert Reich, Guardian UK

06 April 14

The conservative supreme court thinks it can build a gilded age for the era of income inequality. They won't know what hit 'em.

he supreme court is composed of five justices appointed by Republican presidents, and four appointed by Democratic ones. In the McCutcheon v FEC case decided on Wednesday, the five Republican appointees interpreted the first amendment to protect the right of individuals to pour as much as $3.6m into a political party or $800,000 into a political campaign.

The decision by those justices allows individual donors to buy – and federal officeholders to solicit – unparalleled personal influence in Washington. McCutcheon drowns out the voices of ordinary citizens.

Presumably, the individuals who were of concern to the majority of the court have incomes larger than the median US family income of roughly $50,000 a year and wealth in excess of the median American family's wealth of approximately $70,000. It is very likely that these individuals have huge incomes and enormous wealth.

The decision rests on the court's dubious finding that such spending does not give rise to corruption. That's baloney, as anyone who has the faintest familiarity with contemporary American politics well knows. As Justice Stephen Breyer noted in his dissenting opinion: "where enough money calls the tune, the general public will not be heard".

The majority's decision to open the floodgates to big money would be less important if the distribution of income and wealth in America were more equal. But it has become extraordinarily unequal. Together, the richest 400 Americans now possess more wealth than the bottom half of the American population. A handful of billionaires are, at this moment, deciding on whom to place their multi-million dollar bets in the 2014 midterm election. The McCutcheon decision makes it easier for them to do so than ever before. They don't need to go through political action committees or so-called "social welfare" organizations. The rich can now make their bets directly.

We have returned to the gilded age of the late 19th century, when the lackeys of robber barons placed sacks of money on the desks of pliant legislators. If this is not corruption, what is?

The McCutcheon decision coincides with the publication in English of an important book by French economist Thomas Piketty, Capital in the 21st Century. Piketty sees the United States, Britain and most of the rest of the world returning to the vast inequalities of wealth that were taken for granted as late as the end of the 1800s. He writes:

It is almost inevitable that inherited wealth will dominate wealth amassed from a lifetime's labor by a wide margin, and the concentration of capital will attain extremely high levels – levels potentially incompatible with the meritocratic values and principles of social justice fundamental to modern democratic societies.

With an extraordinary sweep of history backed by remarkably detailed data and analysis, Piketty shows that, for several centuries leading up to World War I, the financial returns to the owners of capital exceeded the rate of growth of modern economies, creating a wide divergence between incomes and wealth – and, with that divergence, widening inequality between those owners and people who worked for a living.

That divergence was reversed in the 20th century's brutal wars and the Great Depression. But the widening gaps in income and wealth that have characterized the US, the UK and most other advanced economies since the 1970s, combined with his historic view, give Piketty reason to believe that the older pattern is reasserting itself. While admitting that such divergence is not inevitable, he finds that "the possibilities are not heartening" and the actual responses to the problem will in practice be "far more modest and less effective" than needed.

Piketty's economic analysis and historical proofs are breathtaking. But even as he counsels economists to break out of their narrow habitats and understand the profound influence of politics on economics (and vice versa), he has remarkably little to say about politics. He notes that "politics is ubiquitous and ... economic and political changes are inextricably intertwined and must be studied together." But, oddly, Piketty doesn't really put them together.

He notes that a "conservative revolution" swept the US and UK starting with the elections of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, but he never explains what that revolution had to do with the economic forces he catalogues elsewhere.

One obvious connection is this: as wealth began to re-accumulate at the top in the 1970s, so did political power. That led to the indirect financing of political campaigns and the establishment of an army of lobbyists, researchers, denizens of think tanks and media experts – all of which eventually enabled the wealthy to lower their marginal taxes, summon bailouts and subsidies for their businesses, and remove regulations that otherwise reduced their profits.

The "conservative revolution" thereby marked a return to the politics of the late 19th century, in which dynastic fortunes were so interwoven into government that the "ruling class" could ensure that laws maintained both its wealth and its power to rule.

In this sense, then, the McCutcheon decision by the five Republican-appointed members of the supreme court is but another step toward restoring dynastic rule.

Nonetheless, I think Piketty is way too pessimistic. He disregards the political upheavals and reforms that such wealth concentrations have inspired in the past – such as America's populist revolts of the 1890s followed by the progressive era before World War I, or the German socialist movement in the 1870s followed by Otto von Bismarck’s creation of the world's first welfare state.

Even now, at a particular dark hour for democratic capitalism, we can see evidence of a resurgent populism and progressivism in the United States. The so-called Tea Party movement is in large sense a populist revolt against large corporations, Wall Street and the Republican Party establishment. But for every Tea Party, there's an Occupy.

And there may be something of a balance wheel inherent in democratic capitalism that Karl Marx failed to comprehend – indeed, that even Thomas Piketty too readily discounts: a public that refuses to cede control to concentrated economic power. Inthe America of the late 19th century, the great jurist Louis Brandeis noted that the nation had a choice:

We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both.

Soon thereafter, America made the choice. Public outrage gave birth to the nation's first campaign finance laws, along with the first progressive income tax. The trusts were broken up and regulations imposed to bar impure food and drugs. Several states enacted America's first labor protections, including the 40-hour workweek.

The supreme court's McCutcheon decision may make it easier for today's robber barons to take over American democracy in the short term. But by inviting them to do this so brazenly, McCutcheon may also fuel a popular backlash and a new era of democratic reform. It has happened before. Let's make it happen again.

#CancelColbert and the Return of the Anti-Liberal Left

By Michelle Goldberg, The Nation

06 April 14

erhaps every political generation is fated to be appalled by the one that succeeds it. In the 1960s, longtime socialist intellectuals were horrified by the anarchic energies of the new left. Then some of those new leftists reached middle age and watched, aghast, as new speech codes proliferated on college campuses during the first iteration of political correctness. I was in college then and am now in my thirties, which means it’s my turn to be dismayed by a growing left-wing tendency towards censoriousness and hair-trigger offense.

It’s increasingly clear that we are entering a new era of political correctness. Recently, we’ve seen the calls to #CancelColbert because of something outrageous said by Stephen Colbert’s blowhard alter ego, who has been saying outrageous things regularly for nine years. Then there’s the sudden demand for “trigger warnings” on college syllabi, meant to protect students from encountering ideas or images that may traumatize them; an Oberlin faculty document even suggests jettisoning “triggering material when it does not contribute directly to the course learning goals.” At Wellesley, students have petitioned to have an outdoor statue of a lifelike sleepwalking man removed because it was causing them “undue stress.” As I wrote in The Nation, there’s pressure in some circles not to use the word “vagina” in connection with reproductive rights, lest it offend trans people.

Nor is this just happening here. In England’s left-wing New Statesman, Sarah Ditum wrote of the spread of no-platforming—essentially stopping people whose ideas are deemed offensive from speaking publicly. She cites the shouting down of an opponent of the BDS movement at Galway University and the threats and intimidation leveled at the radical feminist Julie Bindel, who has said cruel things about trans people. “No platform now uses the pretext of opposing hate speech to justify outrageously dehumanising language, and sets up an ideal of ‘safe spaces’ within which certain individuals can be harassed,” wrote Ditum. “A tool that was once intended to protect democracy from undemocratic movements has become a weapon used by the undemocratic against democracy.”

Call it left-wing anti-liberalism: the idea, captured by Herbert Marcuse in his 1965 essay “Repressive Tolerance,” that social justice demands curbs on freedom of expression. “[I]t is possible to define the direction in which prevailing institutions, policies, opinions would have to be changed in order to improve the chance of a peace which is not identical with cold war and a little hot war, and a satisfaction of needs which does not feed on poverty, oppression, and exploitation,” he wrote. “Consequently, it is also possible to identify policies, opinions, movements which would promote this chance, and those which would do the opposite. Suppression of the regressive ones is a prerequisite for the strengthening of the progressive ones.”

Note here both the belief that correct opinions can be dispassionately identified, and the blithe confidence in the wisdom of those empowered to do the suppressing. This kind of thinking is only possible at certain moments: when liberalism seems to have failed but the right is not yet in charge. At such times, old-fashioned liberal values like free speech and robust, open debate seem like tainted adjuncts of an oppressive system, and it’s still possible for radicals to believe that the ideas suppressed as hateful won’t be their own. 

“One of the most striking characteristics of ‘60s radicalism was its aversion to liberalism,” wrote Alice Echols in Daring to Be Bad, her history of radical feminism. “Radicals’ repudiation of liberalism was not immediate; rather, it developed in response to liberalism’s defaults—specifically, its timidity regarding black civil rights and its escalation of the Vietnam War.” Something similar, albeit on a much smaller scale, happened after Bill Clinton ended welfare as we know it, and it’s happening now, as economic misery persists under Barack Obama. There’s disenchantment not just with electoral politics, but with liberal values as a whole. “White liberal” has, once again, emerged as a favorite left-wing epithet.

At times like this, politics contract. On the surface, the rhetoric appears more ambitious and utopian than ever—witness, for example, the apparently sincere claim by Suey Park, creator of the #CancelColbert hashtag, that Twitter activists intend to “dismantle the state.” But at the same time, activism becomes less about winning converts and changing the world and more about creating protected enclaves and policing speech. As the radical cultural critic Ellen Willis wrote in 1997, at another moment of widespread left-wing illiberalism, “It’s the general repressiveness of the social climate that encourages moves to ban offensive speech or define any form of sexual oppression in the workplace as sexual harassment. The main effect of these maneuvers is to foment confusion, cynicism and sexual witch-hunts, trivialize sexual violence, and legitimize conservative demands for censorship—while at the same time ceding the moral high ground of free expression to the right.”

There’s a cure for this sort of thing, though it’s worse than the disease. When the right takes power, the left usually discovers the importance of unfettered speech. In the 1980s, with conservatives leading a crusade against the National Endowment for the Arts for funding projects deemed anti-Christian and pornographic, tolerance no longer seemed quite so repressively bourgeois. The same was true during the Bush administration, when opposition to the Iraq War got Phil Donahue fired from MSNBC and the Dixie Chicks pulled off radio playlists nationwide. That’s why the Colbert Report was so cathartic when it first appeared—his relentless mockery cut through the bombastic jingoism, the right wing political correctness, that was stifling us.

It’s no surprise, of course, that right-wingers like Michelle Malkin, author of a defense of Japanese internment, glommed on to the recent anti-Colbert campaign. Anti-liberalism is, after all, supremely useful to the right. Some day president Paul Ryan or Ted Cruz or Rand Paul is going to be sworn in, and an ascendant, empowered conservatism will once again try to curtail dissent in pop culture and academia, just as it always does. Public art won’t be taken down because it’s considered triggering—it will be taken down (or covered up) because it’s considered indecent. There might be another #CancelColbert campaign, but it won’t come from the left. Maybe people will be ashamed, then, that this one did.