Category Archives: History

Pro-Market or Pro-Big Business?

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“Donald Trump, Crony Capitalist” is a nice little article by Luigi Zingales, a professor at the University of Chicago’s business school. He analyzes one aspect of Trump’s surprising presidential campaign: the fact that Trump presents himself as a critic of big business, even though he’s a long-standing member of “the pro-business establishment”.

One of the best parts of Zingales’s article is his explanation of the difference between big business and the free market. He says the Republican establishment has spent years obscuring that difference, claiming to be champions of the free market while serving as “big business’s mouthpiece”.

Supporting the market means being in favor of competition and against concentrated economic power. Zingales cites Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican President from a century ago. From Wikipedia:

One of Roosevelt’s first notable acts as president was to deliver a 20,000-word address to Congress asking it to curb the power of large corporations (called “trusts”). He also spoke in support of organized labor to further chagrin big business … For his aggressive use of United States antitrust law, he became known as the “trust-buster”. He brought 40 antitrust suits, and broke up major companies, such as the largest railroad and Standard Oil, the largest oil company.

Being pro-market means you’re against monopolies (in which one company controls a market) and oligopolies (in which a few companies do). It also means you’re in favor of government regulations and policies that help make markets competitive. A fair, properly functioning market requires that the playing field be level, not slanted to the advantage of insiders or the powerful.

Big business, however, is totally in favor of special advantages when it increases profits. As Zingales says, “business executives are only pro-market when they want to enter a new sector”. But:

[Once] they become established in a sector, they favor entry restrictions, excessive licensing, distortive regulation and corporate subsidies. Those policies are pro-business (in the sense that they favor existing businesses), but they are harmful and distort a competitive market economy.

Zingales points out, for example, how rare it is for Republican politicians to call for antitrust enforcement, the prosecution of white-collar criminals and pro-market policies like fostering competition in the market for prescription drugs. That’s because the men who run the Republican Party are in the business of protecting big business, not the market.

Many of his supporters think Trump is fervently pro-market, but:

As a businessman Mr. Trump has a longstanding habit of using his money and power aggressively to obtain special deals from the government… He is, in short, the essence of that commingling of big business and government that goes under the name of crony capitalism.

Anyway, it’s a good little article that’s worth reading even if you’re sick of hearing about the Republican freak show currently touring the country.

Parting thought:

The Bill of Rights would have been better if the Second Amendment, including its call for a properly-regulated militia, had never been written. In its place, we could have had an amendment like this:

A well-regulated Market, being necessary to the prosperity of a free State, the right of the people to enjoy the benefits of fair competition shall not be infringed except to benefit the Nation as a whole.

Those Angry Days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh and America’s Fight Over World War II, 1939-1941 by Lynne Olson

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America was a much angrier place in the years before World War II than I realized. It had only been twenty years since the end of the last war. The thought of getting involved in another one, especially in Europe, was very hard to accept. Even after Hitler was on the march, even after the Germans took France, many Americans believed we should stay out of the war. Some were even opposed to providing assistance to Great Britain, arguing that we should remain completely neutral. They hoped the British and Germans could negotiate an end to the war. If that didn’t happen, they were willing to see Germany conquer all of Europe rather than fight another war.    

There was an amazing level of animosity between these “isolationists” and the “interventionists” who wanted us to do whatever we could to stop Hitler. Organizations were formed; mass meetings were held; national radio broadcasts were delivered. Insults were hurled and friendships were destroyed. There were student protests. As the most famous isolationist, Charles Lindbergh was branded a Nazi sympathizer and a traitor. 

But when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, we all had somebody else to be angry with. When President Roosevelt asked for a declaration of war, even the isolationist Republicans in Congress gave him a standing ovation. 

Those Angry Days is an interesting book, even though the author spends too much time on Lindbergh and his wife Anne Morrow Lindbergh (it really seems as if the author would have liked to write a book about them). Aside from the incredible amount of controversy over our involvement in the war (controversy that began before 1939, despite the book’s subtitle), the most surprising part of the story is President Roosevelt’s unwillingness to force the issue. He was clearly an “interventionist” who wanted to help the British, but, according to the author, he vacillated and procrastinated. He feared public opinion, even when most of the public were in favor of intervention. He made stirring speeches but didn’t follow through. It drove Churchill crazy. If you can believe Those Angry Days, it was only after Pearl Harbor that Roosevelt went back to being the strong leader he’d been in the early years of the Depression.

What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of Ameria, 1815 -1848 by Daniel Walker Howe

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What Hath God Wrought is an 850-page entry in a well-written series of books called “The Oxford History of the United States”. It covers the period between the War of 1812 and the Mexican War, part of our national history that is overshadowed by what came before and what came after.

In roughly thirty years, America became much more recognizably modern. Improved transportation (railroads) and communications (the telegraph) had widespread effects. Modern political parties were created and the population became more diverse as immigration increased. The population soared. The women’s rights movement began.

In fact, Howe points out that President James Polk, an obscure figure today, added more territory to the United States than any other President, even more than Jefferson added with the Louisiana Purchase. By the end of Polk’s four-year term, everything from the Pacific Ocean to the Rocky Mountains, as well as Texas, was American territory.

The principal lesson I took from this long book, however, was that the same political divisions we find today were already in evidence before the Civil War. The Whigs, as exemplified by John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay, were the progressive political party. They wanted slavery eliminated and federal money spent on infrastructure. Abraham Lincoln was elected to Congress as a Whig.

The Democrats, as exemplified by Andrew Jackson and Polk, were basically white supremacists. They preferred a weak federal government that wouldn’t interfere with slavery. Yet they supported territorial expansion by any means, including the extermination of the Indians and armed aggression against Mexico. 

In other words, the early Democrats (especially Jackson) were real bastards. The Whigs weren’t. But now we have the Republicans, the progressive successor to the Whigs, as the war-mongering, white-supremacist party, and the Democrats as the modern-day Whigs. The Republicans are now the real Party of Jackson, while the Democrats are the real Party of Lincoln.

The Decline of the Militia

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From What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 by Daniel Walker Howe:

Jeffersonians of the founding generation had reposed great confidence in the militia as an alternative to a standing army that could be used against the liberties of the people it supposedly protected.This militia, organized in each locality, consisted of all physically fit white males of military age, who would supply their own arms and donate as much of their time as necessary to keep in training and readiness when called upon to deal with insurrection or invasion. This was the “well regulated militia” postulated in the Second Amendment of the Bill of Rights and prescribed by the federal Militia Act of 1792.

The militia had proved ineffective on many occasions in both the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812 (George Washington never put much trust in it), but its gradual disappearance in the generation after 1815 had nothing to do with its military shortcomings.

The militia gradually ceased to function because most male citizens resented it as an imposition, and hated serving in it so much that they either refused to show up for the periodic musters and drills, or if they came made a mockery of the occasion. Since the men who defied the militia laws constituted the electorate, politicians dated not to coerce service. White male democracy could successfully defy the law, as squatters defied landlords or Indian treaties…. When the war with Mexico came in 1846, the administration made little use of the militia and relied instead on its small professional army plus volunteers trained and equipped at government expense [p. 491].

Now, 170 years later, we have the most powerful military and most heavily-armed police in the world, while sad, angry men, with a death wish for themselves and others, “serve” in the “militia”.

PS – “994 mass shootings in 1,004 days”

Evangelical Christians for Sanders, the Left-Winger?

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Two articles about Christianity and American politics caught my eye this week.

The first was a New York Magazine interview with someone named Jim, an alumnus of Liberty University, who now works as a pastor and therapist. Liberty University is the Southern Baptist school in Virginia founded by Jerry Falwell, the well-known televangelist and right-wing troublemaker. Jim posted some anonymous remarks on Reddit in response to Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders’s recent speech at Liberty. Here’s the part New York Magazine quoted:

As I heard Bernie Sanders crying out to the religious leaders at Liberty University, in his hoarse voice, with his wild hair — this Jew — and he proclaimed justice over us, he called us to account, for being complicit with those who are wealthy and those who are powerful, and for abandoning the poor, the least of these, who Jesus said he had come to bring good news to.

Jim grew up supporting right-wing politicians, as so many evangelical Christians are taught to do. But he eventually realized that his politics conflicted with the Bible. He says that Bible study convinced him:

that the gospel of Christ is what he says it is in the Book of Luke. He says the messenger comes to bring good news to the poor, to heal the sick, and to set the captives free. If our gospel is not good news to the poor, to the captives, to the indebted and the broken, then it is not the gospel of Jesus Christ…

The Bible talks about God destroying those who destroy the Earth and standing for the weak and the penniless. That same God was being displayed on our flags and in our songs as this warrior king who doesn’t like the Muslims and who doesn’t like the poor and who wants us to have free-market capitalism and no regulations. I thought that was inconsistent. This is the same God who designed … his theocratic government in Israel so that the poor were cared for. This is the same God that designs into the concept of ministry a tithe of 10 percent to care for others…

Jim is remaining semi-anonymous for the time being. He says he doesn’t want his patients or congregants caught up in controversy. Nevertheless, he’s going to continue explaining why it makes sense for an evangelical Christian to support Senator Sanders:

I’m calling my fellow Evangelicals to raise their eyes and to pay attention, to read their Bibles carefully, as I was taught to do in an Evangelical school. So many get their faith points from [right-wing TV personalities] Bill O’Reilly or Sean Hannity, but if they would get their faith from Jesus, they would be surprised at how he does not fit into any box and flips the tables of the money-changers and stands with the adulterers and prevents the death penalty…

Bernie at Liberty, for me, struck such a nerve because he treated us like grown-ups. He presented the message thoughtfully, politely. He was warmhearted, he was jovial, he didn’t play any political games. He didn’t tell us what we wanted to hear. He was just plain, and it reminded me of John the Baptist.

But why does someone like Jim seem like such an outlier? Aren’t evangelical Christians the natural ally of right-wing politicians and Big Business?

No, not according to One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America, a book by Kevin Kruse, Professor of History at Princeton. As explained in a review at the website of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, Kruse argues that there was an organized effort in the 1950s to link religion and corporate capitalism. For example, a group called:

Spiritual Mobilization sought to rally clergymen to fight liberalism, arguing that the only political position compatible with Christianity was laissez-faire. They aimed to counter the ideas—summed up as the Social Gospel—that good Christians might have obligations to help the poor, that there was something spiritually problematic about the love of money, and that working to create a better and more egalitarian social order might be necessary to live a righteous life. In his first inaugural address, Roosevelt had celebrated the expulsion of the money changers from the “temple of our civilization,” and called for replacing the “mad chase of evanescent profits” with a return to more noble social values. Spiritual Mobilization begged to differ, insisting instead that profit could be the cornerstone of a moral vision.

Spiritual Mobilization was funded by conservative businessmen and a number of corporations, including General Motors and Gulf Oil. Its leader “embraced his identity as a man who preached to the rich: “I have smiled when critics of mine have called me the Thirteenth Apostle of Big Business or the St. Paul of the Prosperous.”

Kruse says that:

 … long before the 1970s, religious leaders … and the businessmen who backed them sought to politicize the country’s churches, seeing them as a natural and sympathetic base. Their concern was not social or sexual politics, but rather economics—they wanted to advance a libertarian agenda to undermine the economic program that became ascendant during the New Deal. This top-down Christianity in turn provided an image of the United States as an explicitly religious nation, creating a rhetoric that inspired the populist Christian conservatives of a later generation. When the men who built the religious right in the 1970s—such as Jerry Falwell and his Moral Majority—issued their jeremiads about the United States as a fallen nation, they made the implicit case that the country had hewed more closely to faith before the 1960s. But in fact, Kruse suggests, the pumped-up image of America as a Christian nation had gained popularity only a decade before.

Before Jerry Falwell, there was the evangelist Billy Graham:  

… one of his major concerns [was] the encroachment of the liberal state… Graham opposed the Marshall Plan and the welfare state, and attacked the Truman Administration for spending too much on each…  [In 1951] Graham warned the audience at a North Carolina crusade that the country was no longer “devoted to the individualism that made America great,” and that it needed to return to the “rugged individualism that Christ brought” to humankind.

America has been a Christian nation for a long time in the sense that most Americans have thought of themselves as Christians and still do. The question is: what role should Christianity play in a our democracy? The Constitution requires separation of church and state, but people have the right to support politicians who share their religious ideals. This makes me wonder what America would be like if there were more Christians like Jim.