Tag Archives: Democracy

Them That Has, Gets

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A well-known French economist, Thomas Piketty, has written a big book called Capital in the Twenty-First Century. It’s getting a lot of attention, because Piketty is an expert on wealth and income and he’s reached a disturbing conclusion: 

Modern economic growth and the diffusion of knowledge have allowed us to avoid the Marxist apocalypse, but we have not modified the deep structures of capital and inequality – or in any case not as much as one might have imagined in the optimistic decades following World War II.

When the rate of return on capital exceeds the rate of growth on output and income, as it did in the nineteenth century and seems likely to do again in the twenty-first, capitalism automatically generates arbitrary and extreme inequalities that radically undermine the meritocratic values on which democratic societies are based [1]. 

In other words, those relatively happy years in the 20th century, during which economic inequality declined in the developed world, was an aberration, the result of special circumstances. Global capitalism is now returning to its normal state: an extended Gilded Age in which the rich get richer, workers struggle, inequality grows and democracy suffers. It’s not a pretty picture, but it’s based on a great deal of historical data.

Piketty argues that “there are ways democracy can regain control over capitalism and insure that the general interest takes precedence over private interests” (for example, by instituting a tax on wealth), but that’s not going to be easy, since capitalists are so good at screwing with democracy.

They buy up and consolidate media outlets, make the majority of campaign contributions, hire armies of lawyers and lobbyists, fund political action committees, support “think tanks”, pay for advertising campaigns on “the issues” and keep the “revolving door” between government and business revolving. All of which contributes to low taxes on high incomes, minimal taxes on capital gains and large estates, corporations being treated as “people”, feeble campaign finance laws, weak labor unions, political gridlock, vote suppression, voter apathy and lots of average citizens thinking that the accumulation of vast wealth by a tiny minority is inevitable and/or good for the majority. 

If you’d like to read more about Capital in the Twenty-First Century, including some skeptical comments, take a look at this New Yorker article by John Cassidy. If you want to feel even more depressed, pissed off or motivated to work toward political reform, check out Paul Krugman’s less skeptical “Wealth Over Work” column at the New York Times.

The New Deal and the Same Old Deal

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For those of us under 80 or so, the New Deal was basically President Franklin Roosevelt using the federal government in creative ways to address the Great Depression, which wasn’t fully tamed until World War II began, government spending rose even further and lots of working-age men joined the armed forces (there were 450,000 Americans in the military in 1940 and 12.5 million in 1945).

A recent book, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time, tells the story but leaves Roosevelt in the background. The New York Review of Books has a fairly long but excellent review by Nicholas Lemann, a professor of journalism at Columbia University, here. 

The author of Fear Itself is Ira Katznelson, a professor of political science and history, also at Columbia. According to the review, Katznelson considers the national legislature to be the most central political institution in a democracy. For that reason, he presents an account of the New Deal and its aftermath that pays little attention to Presidents Roosevelt and Truman:

Katznelson has no interest in their personal qualities or their methods of leadership. Instead his focus is on Congress and government agencies, and more broadly on political systems, voting, and interest groups. This gives Fear Itself the feeling of a fresh look at a familiar story.

In addition, Katznelson emphasizes the perilous situation the country faced in the 1930s. Germany and Italy had reacted to the Great Depression by turning to fascism. The diplomat George Kennan believed America’s government should become authoritarian. The respected journalist Walter Lippmann told President Roosevelt that he might have to become a dictator. New Deal policies were enacted in “an atmosphere of unremitting uncertainty about liberal democracy’s capacity and fate”.

Becase Katznelson focuses on Congress, the South has a major role in the story he tells. Since the Civil War, the South had been firmly Democratic. In the 1932 election, Democratic congressional candidates received 86% of the vote in the South. After that election, more than half of the committee chairmen were southern Democrats. As a result, Roosevelt needed southern support in order to get anything through Congress:

The South used its power to create de facto regional exceptions to many New Deal policies, either by exempting domestic and agricultural workers (meaning blacks) from them, or by placing administrative and policy control of them in the hands of state governments. To use the most obvious example, the 1935 law that created the Social Security system had both of these features...

It was specifically the South that blocked … the possibility of the New Deal’s moving further left in its policies. The New Deal wound up largely achieving one set of goals—an American welfare state, including retirement security and an empowered labor movement—but stopped far short of another, which would have involved creating, through democratic procedures, a more centrally planned economy….

It was Congress that blocked national planning, for reasons having to do with the southern bloc’s overriding concern with maintaining the regional racial order. The South, in Katznelson’s view, was willing to move left on economic issues as long as that didn’t threaten segregation. When economic policy and race began to seem intertwined, the South opted out on economic policy, and that defined the leftward boundary of the New Deal.

Reading this should remind us how little has changed since then. Much of our politics is the same old deal it’s always been. Since the compromise that resulted in slaves being counted as 3/5ths of a person in the Constitution, America has been politically divided between the North (now including western states like California) and the South (now including northern states like Idaho and Wyoming). 

Of course, after the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965, the South switched to voting Republican. But progressive federal policies are still being watered down in order to accommodate southern sensibilities. For example, the Affordable Care Act allowed individual states, especially in the South, to avoid expanding Medicaid, thereby limiting benefits to poor people and low-paid workers (including, of course, poor and low-paid blacks).

Professor Lehmann, the author of the review, highlights other ways in which southern “conservatives” have affected federal policy since the New Deal: by supporting our entry into World War II (Southern politicians tend to favor the military and military activity); by encouraging the creation of our national security state (internment of the Japanese, loyalty oaths, FBI surveillance, the creation of the CIA and the House Un-American Activities Committee); by voting for a “defense” budget that has continued to grow even in peacetime; and by making life difficult for labor unions and people who want to vote.

For example, given the Republicans’ recent attacks on voting rights, this passage from the review is especially striking:  

Katznelson also reminds us that whites as well as blacks were substantially disenfranchised in the South, because of poll taxes. Voter turnout was shockingly low in the South—below 20 percent of eligible (meaning mainly white) voters, for example, in Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, and South Carolina in the crucial presidential election of 1940. In the 1938 midterm elections, Mississippi, with a population of more than two million, had only 35,000 voters. 

There are few activities more troubling in a democracy than intentionally limiting the size of the electorate, although that’s now standard Republican policy, especially in the South.

Professor Lehmann thinks that the South described by Professor Katznelson is too homogeneous. Lehmann argues that there have been significant differences between Southern politicians regarding civil rights and economic issues. Nevertheless, if you want to understand where America is today, Lehmann’s review of Katznelson’s book is terrific reading. So, probably, is the book. 

(A personal note: when I was in college, I read something by a black author who claimed that the status of black people has been the central issue in the history of our country. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find the quotation or even identify the author. But I remember reading that statement some 40 years ago and being highly skeptical. The more I learn about American history, however, the more I’ve come to agree.)

Kitty Genovese Was Raped and Killed 50 Years Ago, But…

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Everybody who was around in 1964 knows the story of Kitty Genovese. She’s the young woman who was stabbed to death on a street in New York City while 38 witnesses supposedly did nothing to help.

The lesson we all learned back then was that society was falling apart. People would listen to somebody screaming outside their window and do nothing because “they didn’t want to get involved”, especially a bunch of self-centered, cowardly, unfeeling big-city types. I was only 12 at the time, living on the other side of the continent, but it was easy for me and everyone else to form a mental image of what happened that night: a woman repeatedly crying for help in a narrow street or alley as onlookers looked down from their windows or sat on their fire escapes doing nothing.

An article in the New York Post (by the way, one of the most unreliable newspapers in America) tells a very different story, based on a new book called Kitty Genovese: The Murder, the Bystanders, the Crime that Changed America.

It was 3 a.m. Somebody called the police immediately after Genovese was stabbed on the street (although the police didn’t show up, not realizing the nature of the incident). She was able to walk home but collapsed in her apartment building’s vestibule, not outside where people could hear her. Her killer was initially scared away by a witness, but then followed her into the building and attacked her again. That’s where she died as one of her neighbors held her in her arms.

According to the article, there were two witnesses who were certainly blameworthy. One of them even said “he didn’t want to get involved”. But if you believe the Post article, this is another case in which a story got told and retold because it confirmed something people already believed: people who live in big cities aren’t real Americans and don’t care enough about anyone else to bother calling the cops when a young woman is being raped and murdered. Which, if you’ve ever spent much time in New York City, where you tend to rub shoulders with lots of different people every day, you know isn’t true at all.

On a related note, does living in a city like New York make you more or less accepting of people who don’t look or sound like you? You see people whose families came from everywhere in the world going about their daily business, sitting next to you on the subway, or waiting in line at the deli. Familiarity breeds contempt sometimes, or a bad experience does the same, but I think that sharing space with a wide variety of people all behaving in similar ways tends to make city-dwellers more favorable toward democracy and social programs. Maybe it’s easier to be a liberal, less fearful or disdainful of those “other” people, if you see all manner of human beings up close, following the rules, doing the same things you do every day. 

Score 1 for United Government

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Something I wrote a few days ago has piqued the interest of a supporter of “divided” government (see We Should Expect Divided Government for a Long Time and associated comments below).

Coincidentally, I just read about President Lincoln addressing Congress after the attack on Fort Sumter. Lincoln had raised a volunteer army to defend the Union, but without Congressional approval, since Congress was out of session and not due back for months. He summoned Congress back for a summer session and made his case (I’m quoting from The Man Who Saved the Union by H. W. Brands):

“These measures, whether strictly legal or not, were ventured upon under what appeared to be a popular demand and a public necessity, trusting then as now that Congress would readily ratify them” He requested authority to expand the army to 400,000 men at a cost of 400 million dollars. “A right result, at this time, will be worth more to the world than ten times the men and ten times the money…”

“This issue embraces more than the fate of these United States. It presents to the whole family of man the question whether a constitutional republic, or a democracy – a government of the people, by the same people – can, or cannot maintain its territorial integrity against its domestic foes… Must a government, of necessity, be too strong for the liberties of its own people, or too weak to maintain its own existence?… It is now for them to demonstrate to the world that those who can fairly carry any election can also suppress a rebellion.”

Since the Democratic Party’s Southern wing had disappeared (i.e. joined the Confederacy) and its Northern wing had lost its leader (Stephen Douglas had recently died of typhoid fever), the Republicans now had a large majority in both houses. Congress immediately ratified Lincoln’s previous actions and approved his request for more men and money. In fact, they voted for 500,000 men and 500 million dollars, more than Lincoln asked for.

U. S. Grant Speaks

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When I was in school, I got the impression that Ulysses S. Grant was a drunk and a terrible President. Everyone agreed he helped the Union win the Civil War, but I assumed he must have been lucky. Maybe he was in the right place at the right time.

Some years ago, however, I learned that Grant’s autobiography is highly regarded by both historians and literary critics. Here’s what Mark Twain had to say about it:

I had been comparing [Grant’s] memoirs with Caesar’s Commentaries… I was able to say in all sincerity, that the same high merits distinguished both books—clarity of statement, directness, simplicity, unpretentiousness, manifest truthfulness, fairness and justice toward friend and foe alike, soldierly candor and frankness, and avoidance of flowery speech. I placed the two books side by side upon the same high level, and I still think that they belonged there.

Grant began writing his memoirs after being diagnosed with terminal throat cancer. Hoping to provide for his family, he worked quickly, although he was in constant pain. He finished five days before he died.

I’ve got a copy of Grant’s autobiography, but have never gotten around to it. Recently, however, I began reading The Man Who Saved the Union: Ulysses Grant in War and Peace by H. W. Brands. It’s hard to know how accurate a biography is, but so far Grant is appearing in a very positive light, as a flawed but highly admirable human being.

Part of Grant’s appeal comes from his own words. For example, in regard to the Constitution:

It is preposterous to suppose that the people of one generation can lay down the best and only rules of government for all who are to come after them, and under unforeseen contingencies… The fathers would have been the first to declare that their prerogatives were not irrevocable.

And after the attack on Fort Sumter:

Whatever may have been my political opinions before, I have but one sentiment now. That is, we have a Government and laws and a flag, and they must all be sustained. There are but two parties now, Traitors and Patriots, and I want hereafter to be ranked with the latter.