Everyone around here knows where I stand on politics. I am a liberal on social as well as economic issues. But I don’t think much about the social issues. Without a decent amount of economic equality, how ever we go about accomplishing that, the social issues are of limited importance. Regardless, as long as we live in an oligarchy, we don’t have the ability to affect social policy anyway. As the Princeton study pointed out: poor people occasionally get the policies they want because they just happen to agree with the policies that rich people want. It’s coincidence, not power.
It was in this context that I heard last week that Michael Bloomberg was planning to spend $50 million to start a group to counter the NRA. This was not exactly news, because Bloomberg started a political campaign after Sandy Hook. And I noted at that time that he was going after some good economic liberals. I’m not keen on the NRA. But I would much rather a representative be beholden to them than to be beholden to Wall Street—as most politicians are. So I figured it made sense for Bloomberg to spend that kind of money on this cause. He is, after all, a one-issue guy. He can offer some crumbs to liberal mindedness, as long as no one gets in the way of his money.
It seems there are very few issues that I disagree much with Thomas Frank, but today I felt like he read my mind when he wrote about Bloomberg’s new venture, “I’m a strong supporter of gun control, so hooray, I guess.” It’s part of a larger argument, Straight into the Fox News Buzzsaw: Why Elite, Billionaire Liberalism Always Backfires. After taking a scalpel to Bloomberg, he gets to his main point: we can’t depend upon rich liberals because their interests are not our own.
Think about Milton Hershey, who was one of the most beneficent plutocrats ever. There was nothing that he wouldn’t do for his workers. But when they wanted to start a union, he fought them with everything he had. It was all fine as long as he was the great patriarch who showered his employees with living wages. But when the workers demanded independence, that was just too much. And Hershey was far greater than plutocrats then, and light-years ahead of plutocrats now.[1] Frank sums up the plutocratic as only he can:
During the Occupy Wall Street protests, he declared that we should stop criticizing investment banks; it would cost us jobs: “If you want jobs you have to assist companies and give them confidence to go and hire people.” Later on, when confronted with a successor who didn’t share his views, he graduated to straight-up trickle-down: “The way to help those who are less fortunate is, number one, to attract more very fortunate people.” Only by helping the rich, and helping them more, and then helping them even more, can we ever hope to do something for the poor.
Unusually, Frank’s article actually ends on an upbeat note. And I agree with him that as individuals we really do have power if we work together. I have long thought that the key to saving our country is unionization. But at this point, the only way that’s going to happen is if we all get out there and vote, because for the last 60 years our rights to organize as workers have been steadily destroyed.
Unfortunately, I am not upbeat nor am I very hopeful. And the reason I’m not is the current state of the Democratic Party. It has become primarily a socially liberal party. In terms of economic policy, the Democrats are now far more conservative than any Republican could have ever hoped for in the late 1960s. And voters seem to have largely accepted this. I don’t think it is a knowledgeable acceptance. I think most people—young people especially—have come to believe that having no real choice on economic policy is not only the way things are, but the way they should be.
What hope I have is found in the recent Democratic Party embrace of raising the minimum wage. But we have to look at this clear-eyed. Getting a (still too low) minimum wage pegged to the inflation rate will only happen with a Democrat in the White House and Democratic control of both branches of Congress. And even then, it wouldn’t surprise me that a Democratic president would veto a minimum wage increase—if that Democrat was someone like Andrew Cuomo, who claims to be for it but always finds a way not to support it in practice. What’s more, I’m sure there are at least three people on the Supreme Court that would love to find the minimum wage unconstitutional.
But whatever hope I have is dependent upon all of us. We can’t depend upon rich benefactors. We have to do it ourselves. We have to vote. We have to organize. And above all else, we have to stop believing this nonsense that the laudable improvements in gay rights make up for ever increasing poverty and an ever shrinking middle class. We mustn’t mistake our own issues that just happen to overlap with those of the plutocrats as any indication that they are on our side. They aren’t. We are alone in this struggle.
[1] I’m not an expert, but I’ve read quite a lot about that period. In general, the plutocrats of the Gilded Age were concerned about wealth inequality. It was mostly only because they didn’t want to look like jerks to other plutocrats. But largely because of Ayn Rand, today we have this philosophy that just being rich is doing good works. That is what’s behind the “job creator” myth and it is why the myth is so damaging to society. Anyway, this is why I think today’s plutocrats are worse than they were a hundred years ago.
It’s hard to express just what it is I admire about Frank’s writing so much. Perhaps it’s that he seems to be exploring, in his work, not just how to put his point of view across effectively but the reason he holds that point of view; writing as a form of understanding how one thinks. This can lead to the occasional convoluted essay or messy book ("The Conquest Of Cool," which I think I agree with, but it’s all over the place.) When he’s on it, though, he’s on it. His excoriation of Ayn Rand in "Pity The Billionaire" is as apt, as vicious and as richly deserved as anything I’ve read on that odd sociopath.
I only know a bit about the Gilded Age myself. One thing I’d be curious to know — did other, less philanthropic robber barons hate the Carnegies and Madison Grants for throwing a scrap or two the public’s way? Another is how much such philanthropy was truly genuine, how much was intended to make other robber barons look cheap, and how much was to keep labor from ripping these guys limb-from-limb. Even as weak as the labor movement was at the time, it was stronger than it is now, and more of a threat — strikers were getting murdered.
Another good modern plutocrat example might be Bill Gates. His charitable work no doubt does some real good (you can’t sneer at helping people get medicine, even if you resent how medical philanthropy basically accepts the false notion that countries shouldn’t be able to manufacture their own generic drugs.) His education reform efforts grease his ego about allowing the Best And Brightest to succeed — those like Bill Gates — while harming the shit out of public education. All in all the world would be a far better place if the likes of Gates never managed to hold the power they hold, even if occasionally some of that power isn’t used maliciously.
@JMF – I think there are three things about Frank: intelligence, wit, and passion. The last one is the key.
I think a big part of the Gilded Age giving was that the plutocrats had all the money they could want. But they wanted to be loved and they were decidedly [i]not[/i] loved. Today, plutocrats are treated like wise oracles. They don’t need to build opera houses to feel like good people.
I think on the whole Gates is bad in his giving. So much of it is clearly politically motivated. And make no mistake: Gates is [i]lucky[/i] not brilliant. He lucked into getting the contract for DOS. His company basically bought the operating system and then just sat on it making minor changes for a decade. The only thing he coded was a BASIC interpreter, which might take me a week to code in assembly language, and if I had a pascal compiler, I might be able to have it done this evening. There is no greater example of how the economy mis-allocates rewards than Bill Gates.