| This diary has three parts. First, I present some background on Situationism as it developed in thinking of Jon Hanson, co-creator of the Situtionist blog. Second, I talk about the shift in income polarization as a situational shift. Third, I talk about how both Lind and Obama misread that shift.
Situationism--Some Background
It's long been realized that people tend to focus on content and ignore context. How else could advertising be so powerful an influence? Social scientists--interestingly enough--codified this general awareness in response to being surprised by its power. A 1967 experiment by Edward E. Jones and Victor Harris found that subjects attributed pro-Castro attitudes to writers of essays supporting Castor, even when they were told that the essays--including the position to take--were assigned, rather than freely chosen. Subjects ignored the fact that writers were told to write pro-Castro essays, and instead attributed the context-determined arguments to the writers' own attitudes. A decade later, social psychoilogist Lee D. Ross coined the term, "fundamental attribution error" to describe this phenomena.
The broader tendency to ignore situational factors in favor of dispositional ones--not just at the level of individual perception, but as a general pattern of human cognition--has emerged as a central subject of critical scrutiny in the work of Harvard Law Professor Jon Hanson and a network of colleagues who contribute to the blog he co-founded, The Situationist, which is associated with The Project on Law and Mind Sciences at Harvard Law School. Their work has a positive, constructive thrust in its concern with understanding situational causation generally, but critiquing and countering naive and overbroad dispositional explanations is necessarily a recurring part of their work as well.
An indication of the power of this approach can be gained from reading a series of ten blog posts Hanson co-wrote with David Yosifon on the subject of what they call "deep capture", which bears a striking resemblance to Antonio Gramsci's concept of hegemony. Historically--my point here--deep capture of our theories of human action means that dispositionalism underlies, among other things, a theory of consumer choice/sovereignty that in turn casts giant corporations as liberating agents of human freedom. It would take an entire blog post just to fairly summarize their argument (much less my own two cents), but one can get a sense of how their approach works from the introduction to the final installment, combined with the summary of previous ones. Intro:
This is the tenth part of a series on what Situationist Contributor David Yosifon and I call "deep capture." The most basic prediction of the "deep capture" hypothesis is that there will be a competition over the situation (including the way we think) to influence the behavior of individuals and institutions and that those individuals, groups, entities, or institutions that are most powerful will win that competition.
Previous posts in this series (which are summarized at the bottom of this entry), reviewed a sample of the evidence indicating that pro-commercial dispositionism has been widely accepted as the presumptive starting place for policy analysis. The previous post in this series described the strategy of relying on credible third-party messengers. This post suggests how that strategy may have influenced legal theory and law.
Summary of previous entries in the series:
Part I of this series explained that our "deep capture" story is analogous to the (shallow) capture story told by economists (such as Nobel laureate George Stigler) and public choice theorists for decades regarding the competition over prototypical regulatory institutions. Part II looked to history (specifically, Galileo's recantation) for another analogy to the process that we claim is widespread today - the deep capture of how we understand ourselves. Part III picked up on both of those themes and explains that Stigler's "capture" story has implications far broader and deeper than he or others realized. Part IV examined the relative power (measured as the ability to influence situation) of large commercial interests today, much like the power of the Catholic Church in Galileo's day. Part V described other parallels between the Catholic Church and geocentrism, on one hand, and modern corporate interests and dispositionism, on the other. Part VI laid out the "deep capture hypothesis" a bit more and began loosely testing it by examining the role that it may have played in the "deregulatory" movement. Part VII provided some illustrative examples of how atypical "regulators," from courts to hard-hitting news networks, reflect and contribute to deep capture. Part VIII contrasted different cultures for evidence of commercial interests in promoting dispositionism. Part IX described the strategy of employing third-party messengers.
In short, what Hanson and Yosifon have presented is, for all intents and purposes, a non-Marxist account of corporate hegemony. Modern-day corporatism legitimates itself on the presumed basis of "consumer sovereignty" and the "free will" of consumers freely choosing goods and services in the "free market."
But the reality is that "free choice" is actually quite constrained by our situation as consumers. Where, exactly does one go to purchase the continued survival of our planet in comfortably habitable form? Where did that choice go to? While it may be true that we have individual product choices within the situation of corporate capitalism, as a species we very clearly do not have the choice of what situational structures to live in--even if the one we're stuck in will eventually spell our doom.
The Situation Of Income Polarization
With the above commentary in mind, we may now turn to the data on income inequality and see it with new eyes. Prior to the Great Depression, wealth was highly concentrated, and poverty widespread. There was a relatively small middle class. The transformations that came after that produced an unprecedented level of shared affluence, which was widely perceived as part of a natural progression--particularly as it was broadly shared throughout the Western World, and increasingly in East Asia as well. However, the recent resurgence in income inequality strongly suggests that this was not a natural progression of capitalist development, but rather a function of capitalist crisis confronting a combination of social forces which compelled a social bargain that was quite at odds with dispositional myth of individual free choice on which the corporate capitalist order was based.
This, at least, is the meaning I bring when I look at the charts generated by Emmanuel Saez from his collection of income data. Looking at the period from the end of WWII to 1973, we see dramatic growth in the income of the bottom 99%, combined with only modest growth for the top 1%. This was normal for the New Deal era. More than that, it was simply assumed to be just the way things were. There followed a period of about a decade in which the income of both groups was virtually flat. This was a period in which the larger framework of economic assumptions that had previously prevailed was challenged from the right, and abandoned by elites. The results, reflected in Reagan's embrace of "voodoo economics", were clearly visible in the aftermath of this period, as the bottom 99% made modest gains, while the top 1% skyrocketed, until the bubble burst in the late 1980s. Growth for both rekindled under Clinton, slightly less unequal than under Reagan, but nothing remotely like it had been under the New Deal system. And then came the Bush II rollercoaster--which both hit and helped the top 1% a disproproationate amount, while the bottom 99% returned to full limp mode:
In a similar vein, this next chart shows how consumer prices continued rising from 1973 on, while average incomes stagnated for years:
Finally, we see how little growth there's been in average wages, while CEO pay has skyrocketed since the 1970s. Note that the pay scale here is logarithmic. It has to be. A linear scale chart would have to be either far too big, or else illegible:
What these charts show, collectively, is the massive disconnect between the ideology of the free market and the reality of corporate capitalism today, which leads us directly to our next section.
The Situation Of Confusion About Income Polarization
Market competition has one overwhelming long-term impact: it drives down prices. Capitalism is based on capital accumulation, which cannot be accomplished in a condition of perfect market competition. Thus, capitalism is not--as commonly believed--synonymous with free markets. Indeed, it's not even actually compatible with them. Capitlaism depends on the exploitation of market flaws. Competition is fine for everyone else, except the successful capitalist.
This is precisely what we have seen over the past 30-40 years. Most workers have been forced into a global competitive market place, but a relatively small number of elite workers have been spared--most prominently corporate CEOs, and other extremely high-wage workers, most visibly, but not exclusively, in the financial sector. The most powerful of these have not only been able to insulate themselves from competitive pressures, they've been able to monopolize control of money flows, effectively setting their own rates of compensation, along with those of friends and associates who help stability and secure their robber barron redoubts.
The problem, in short, is the capitalist system itself, rationalized in terms of individual consumer sovereignty in order to attack all would-be critics as themselves somehow anti-democratic elitists (perhaps even Stalinist fascists, or Hitleran Communists, whatever.) The broadly shared prosperity of the New Deal Era reflected the superiority of a mixed economy, and subsequent polarization reflects the capitalist looting of that shared prosperity. However, so long as realist criticism is preempted by free-market ideology, grounded in the myth of consumer sovereignty, the prospects for re-establishing an equitable economic order remain extremely remote at best.
Michael Lind understands this basic reality, however much he misunderstands how and why the New Deal economy and politics were overthrown. If I were to quickly sketch out how I think he goes astray it would be this: First, he does not sufficiently recognize the short-comings of the New Deal system, of what it meant for women and minorities, as well as low-income white men, to be left out of the broader social compact--or at best, to offered only relative crumbs. Second, he fails to recognize that post-50s progressive movements aimed at rederessing these grievances were not antagonistic to the central thrust of New Deal gains, and the broad uplift of labor. To the contrary, they took such gains for granted as a fact of life, and sought to build on them. Third, the erosion of union power had begun long before the emergence of such movements--starting when union density peaked in the 1950s--but labor did not suffer the consequences of eroded power until much later, in the 1970s, when corporations turned sharply hostile. Fourth, the very consumerist/individualist/free market ideology that would prove so devastating in the Reagan era had actually been growing in the bowels of the labor movement itself since the early post-WWII era--the more unions won a piece of the good life for their members, the more bourgoise Republicanism began to grow among them, aided and abetted by a variety of government programs which helped working-class urban workers move to the suburbs, become homeowners and join the middle class.
In short, what Lind fails to see is a larger pattern of causation spread out over a longer period of time, running beneath the surface of the sorts of political dramas that have captured his attention. And beyond that, he fails to realize that these patterns all reflect a deeper fact--the inherent tendency of capitalism toward extreme inequality, rationalized in the name of individual freedom. Lind sensed this--but misapprehended what he was sensing--when he wrote:
In my darker moments, I sometimes wonder whether the relatively brief influence of labor unions in the Democratic Party in the mid-20th century was not an exception to the rule of elitism in American politics. You can write a narrative of American history in which, first, agrarian populism and 19th-century labor movements are crushed by repression and bloodshed by the 1900s. Then organized labor, after a brief, unforeseen period of influence from the 1930s to the 1960s, is crushed a second time by neoliberal Democrats and conservative Republicans alike, leaving an America in which the only significant conflicts are those within the economic elite.
Lind is on to something, but it's not nearly as big as the whole of the story of deep capture Hanson and Yosifon write about, which is really the foundation of the powers Lind is struggling with.
Obama's confusion is far more profound than Lind's. Obama appears to be a total ideological prisoner of the deep capture that Lind at least opposes, though without fully grasping. Obama, in fact, is a true believer on the other side--albeit for "good" reasons: he truly wants to see everyone "be all they can be", just like the Army used to say. The naive belief in dispositionalism lies at the heart of the neoliberal worldview. It explains both the hands-off approach to Wall Street, and eagerness to see them start making money hands over fist, as well as the drive toward school privatization, and willingness to cut deals on health care, the stimulus, climate change, you name it.
The historical reality is the American people remain largely united in the shared values of the New Deal era, but those values have been submerged in the rightwing political shift toward the highly income-polarized present. Obama's naive prescription was to set aside the culture wars--which he associates with the growth of polarization--and reclaim a broad bipartisan majority approach to dealing with non-culture-war issues. However, this prescription totally ignores the fact that income polarization means that political elites and the American people have radically opposite views on precisely the bread-and-butter issues he seeks unity on.
In point of fact, Obama's team of Wall Street economic advisers and Bush's team of Wall Street economic advisers are much closer to one another than either of them is to the great mass of the American people. And if this is less true in other areas, Obama is still quite willing to cut deals that effectively close the gaps between elite power groups, consistently at the expense of the larger public. This is the very essence of Tony Blair's Third Way: Thatcherism done better than Thatcher herself could do it.
Thus, Bill Clinton passed NAFTA when Bush I could not, and Obama will privatize thousands of schools where Bush II's "No Child Left Behind" could not. He will also keep fighting Bush/Cheney's "long war" far longer than they could have, simply by not calling the "war on terror" any longer.
Obama will, from time to time, give lip service to a more comprehensive progressive vision--connecting green jobs and the fight against global warming to the stimulus was an example of this. But he does not live in this kind of deeply embedded, systematically inter-connected world, this kind of holistic vision, however easily he seems to speak of it. Instead, he lives in the fragmented, individualist, neoliberal world where he has done so well as an articulate social climber. And so he finds it very easy to cut deals that cut the legs out from under those who have supported his meteoric rise--on health care, on the stimulus, on giving free reign to Wall Street banksters, on fighting global warming, on any issue you can name.
Sure he would like to cut a deal that will save the planet from catastrophic global warming. But if he can't, no biggie. Because he is a true believer in dispositonalism. And his heart was pure. |
