Plus... Breaking Up In The Digital Age... What's The Connection?
In which Adam Smith and Jane Austen both take their bows
The moment I heard about the Google/Verizon deal, I thought of Google's supposed ethic: "Don't be evil".
Ooops!
Such is virtually always the fate of marketplace enterprises. The market rewards virtue... up to a point. But it rewards vice far beyond the limits of virtue, though not indefinitely, as the recent financial crisis revealed. And when the market fails, that's when the libertarians duck out for a quick one.
Remember Net Zero? Remember when it was free? And they ran those ads where they pretended to be
defending freedom against Big Brother?
Then the business model failed.
Ooops!
Dating back several centuries, liberalism is is connected to the market, but surprisingly few people seem to realize why. It's not because the market is good, but because it holds the potential to turn even our more selfish desires toward more useful ends. This is Mandeville's Fable of the Bees:
The Fable of The Bees: or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits is a book by Bernard Mandeville, consisting of the poem The Grumbling Hive: or, Knaves turn'd Honest and prose discussion of it. The poem was published in 1705 and the book first appeared in 1714.[1] The poem elucidates many key principles of economic thought, including division of labor and the invisible hand, seventy years before Adam Smith (indeed, John Maynard Keynes argues Smith was probably referencing Mandeville[2]). It also describes the paradox of thrift centuries before Keynes, and may been seen as part of the school of underconsumption.
At the time, however, it was considered scandalous. Keynes reports in his General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, that it was "convicted as a nuisance by the grand jury of Middlesex in 1723, which stands out in the history of the moral sciences for its scandalous reputation. Only one man is recorded as having spoken a good word for it, namely Dr. Johnson, who declared that it did not puzzle him, but 'opened his eyes into real life very much'."[3]
In the Dictionary of National Biography, Leslie Stephen describes it as follows:
Mandeville gave great offense by this book, in which a cynical system of morality was made attractive by ingenious paradoxes. ... His doctrine that prosperity was increased by expenditure rather than by saving fell in with many current economic fallacies not yet extinct. Assuming with the ascetics that human desires were essentially evil and therefore produced "private vices" and assuming with the common view that wealth was a "public benefit", he easily showed that all civilization implied the development of vicious propensities....
Keynes observes that this is a precursor to his theory of effective demand. He notes that the book describes the paradox of thrift-showing that a community that forsakes luxury for savings achieves neither.
But, of course, the fact that the market can turn private vices into public virtues doesn't mean that it only and invariably does so. Nor does it mean that this obviates any need for straight up public virtue--as should be exceeding clear from Adam Smith's second most famous book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, which develops the Scottish Enlightenment's theory of benevolence, pioneered by Francis Hutcheson, but which Smith put on a more empirical foundation (following the lead of the most famous Scottish Enlightenment philosopher, David Hume).
After the best Netroots Nation conference yet, my wife and I hit the road out west, going to 4 national parks - Sequoia, King's Canyon, Yosemite, and the John Muir woods - and ending the trip in San Francisco, my favorite city to visit. Spending time in the majesty of the trees, mountains, canyons, and valleys of Western America fills up your soul with goodness like nothing else I know of. But being with the good folks of Netroots Nation does pretty well at that too.
The progressive netroots is a fascinating movement. Having been around progressive politics for 30 plus years now gives one perspective, and the netroots movement has a lot of the same characteristics as some of the other social movements and constituencies I have seen, but is also very different in some ways. Whether you think of it as starting from MoveOn's dramatic beginning in 1998, or from the time Jerome Armstrong and Markos began blogging around 2002, the netroots is still a very young movement, and they have a lot of the characteristics of young movements: the excitement of previously ignored people getting a taste of political power for the first time; the passion of people organizing for the first time; the creativity of people not constricted by old ways of thinking about politics; the impatience and anger at how messed up and slow to change things are; the aggressiveness of a movement seeing the potential of power but not yet part of the power structure.
A lot of times what happens in politics is that movements become strong enough to get a seat at the table, but once they have that seat, their leadership becomes satisfied, complacent, and stale. Once you have your seat, you don't want to lose it by pushing too hard, and you start to accept the conventional wisdom of everyone else already seated there alongside you.
The question for the netroots is what happens now. A seat at the Democratic Party table is a good thing in many ways, and it is within range. This is a movement, though, that will die faster then most if it becomes stale, complacent, or captive to conventional wisdom. What makes this movement a movement is the early-adapter edge, the creativity, the ability to say what is not being said by the establishment. If that is lost, people will get bored and communities build on websites will erode.
On the other hand, without the knowledge of what works on the inside or the capacity to build longer term institutions, without the kinds of relationships with insiders that can turn activism into legislative accomplishments, all the good work being done by this movement will run into a brick wall and people will get frustrated and start drifting away. Striking the balance right is challenging for any young movement, especially one as diverse, bottom-up, and (small d) democratic as the netroots.
The polling business is far more of an art than a science, is easily manipulated, and is open to as many interpretations as there are people looking at the polls. I have never known a pollster who didn't walk in the door with a set of assumptions and biases in how to interpret the data. And everyone in the business knows that the way you phrase the questions, the way you sequence the questions, the way you draw the sample of who you are asking, and a bunch of other little tricks those of us in the political biz know can dramatically impact outcomes.
The other huge factor in the polling business is who the client is, and what the purpose of the poll is. If the poll is designed for internal analysis, you get one kind of results (and generally more honest data). If the poll is designed to be released to the public to prove a point (our candidate is winning, our issue is popular, our spin is best being the usual things clients use these kinds of polls for), you want to be really careful about accepting the analysis on its face, because that is where the little (and big) things that can be done to manipulate the findings really come into play.
I say this by way of introduction to my central discussion: the internal debate within the Democratic party for what the central narrative of our party ought to be. Over the short term, that fight centers on how to save us from getting crushed in the 2010 elections, but it is of course a very long term fight that has been going on in our party since the New Deal coalition came unraveled in the late 1960s.
As I said, everyone comes to this debate with certain biases, and I will admit mine upfront. Just in case you haven't read my stuff much, I am - by history, sentiment, ideology, and instinct - naturally drawn to progressive populism: fighting for the "little guy", standing up to wealthy corporate interests. My political role models in history are people like FDR, Truman, and Bobby Kennedy, people who figured out how to appeal to a multi-racial coalition and the idealism of the young while still winning over working class white folks. In the modern era, my favorite political leaders are people like Paul Wellstone, Sherrod Brown, Dave Obey, Tom Perriello, and Brian Schweitzer, candidates who have won in purple or even red states/districts not by becoming more like Republicans but by raising the populist progressive flag unapologetically.
Now, having admitting my biases, I will also say that progressive populism (like every other messaging frame) has some limits as a political strategy. There are some districts it doesn't work in. There have been elections where it hasn't been as salient, or runs into a moment where it is overwhelmed by a certain mood in the electorate or a particular candidate's magic touch (Reagan's Morning in America theme in 1984, combined with Reagan's charm and a surging economy, was a classic example, although Mondale's kind of populism wasn't exactly stirring). Certain candidates can't pull populism off credibly, and probably shouldn't try (John Kerry comes to mind).
I also firmly believe that an angry populism all by itself isn't convincing to a majority of voters, that you have to combine the justifiable anger at the abuses of corporate power with compelling positive policy ideas on how you will deliver jobs and other benefits to voters. I don't think a purely anti-business populism usually works, for example: I think candidates need to show how they support small business and manufacturers and companies that are really contributing jobs and useful products to our country and communities. Finally, I would say this: I would never recommend a purely pro-government kind of populism to candidates. Voters, for very good reasons, are deeply cynical that government is really on their side, and will really deliver for them. Progressives have to make clear that part of our mission is to clean up the corporate corruption of government, and that we understand that government in recent years (outside of old stand-bys like Social Security and Medicare and Head Start and the minimum wage) has not always done a good job in making most people's lives better. We also have to be clear that we do want to cut wasteful government spending, and that most of that wastefulness comes from corporate subsidies and sweetheart deals: contracting practices that overwhelmingly favor the contractors rather than the taxpayers, agribusiness subsidies that have no merit, sweetheart deals in health care reform that don't allow for negotiations with drug manufacturers or public sector competition with insurance companies, tax loopholes that have no rational basis for existing besides a really good lobbying operation.
On the other side of the populist argument are Democrats who argue that it is bad political strategy to be too aggressive in taking on corporate America. Since we're all admitting our biases here, I would urge the pollsters and groups who generally make this argument to admit their own: almost all of them get most of their client or contributor list from the ranks of corporate America. The leading pollster who has been making this argument for the last couple of decades is Mark Penn, who heads a firm that does far, far more work in corporate PR and lobbying than it does for candidates. The leading politicians making this argument have been the Blue Dog and New Democrat caucuses, whose members receive far more corporate money than the rest of the Democratic party. And the leading groups making these arguments are the DLC and Third Way, both of which have as a (probably the, but I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt) leading source of contributions big corporations and their executives.
The latest example is a poll recently released by Third Way. Before I get to criticizing it, let me stop for a minute and say that I thought it had some useful insights for Democrats. The idea of tying Republican policies in congress closer to Bush, for example, is certainly a solid idea (although I fear that it is harder said than done.) The idea that Democrats should speak to the future and be aspirational in their language is something that makes sense to me. I even like the fiscal discipline thing, though I would redirect it to where the real waste in the budget is (corporate sweetheart deals, see above).
Having said that, though, it was really clear that this poll's questions, and the interpretation in the memo they wrote about the poll, were designed to try and talk Democrats out of using populist rhetoric. Let me take you through a couple of examples:
So we are now finding out the answers to some of our questions about which members of Congress actually represent We, the People...and which ones represent, Them, the Corporate Masters.
We have seen a Democratic Senator propose a policy that would put people in jail for not buying health insurance and a Democratic President who has taken numerous public beatings from those on the left side of the fence for his inability to ram something through a group of people...and yes, folks, the entendre was intentional.
But most of all, we've been asking ourselves: "why would Democratic Members of Congress who will eventually want us to vote for them vote against something that nearly all voting Democrats are inclined to vote for?"
Today's conversation attempts to answer that question by looking at exactly how money and influence flow through a key politician, Montana's Senator Max Baucus-and in doing so, we examine some ugly political realities that have to be resolved before we can hope to convince certain Members of Congress to vote for what their constituents actually want when it really counts.
How much of what we see on TV, hear on the radio and read in newspapers or online as "conservative" or "centrist" opinion is actually paid for by corporate interests? In fact, how much of what we think of as "conservatism" itself is actually just paid corporate PR?
The American Conservative Union asked FedEx for a check for $2 million to $3 million in return for the group's endorsement in a bitter legislative dispute, then flipped and sided with UPS after FedEx refused to pay.
For the $2 million plus, ACU offered a range of services that included: "Producing op-eds and articles written by ACU's Chairman David Keene and/or other members of the ACU's board of directors. (Note that Mr. Keene writes a weekly column that appears in The Hill.)"
This follows the story the other day about the Washington Post and then reports of other media outlets selling "access" to lobbyists.
I have followed this stuff for some time, and I venture to say that most -- not all but most -- of what I see coming out of the so-called "conservative movement" appears to have been little more than corporate pay-for-play for many years.
I started thinking about this back when the "conservative" position was pro-logging. Remember how they mocked the spotted owl? (The spotted owl is an "indicator species," or a shorthand way to judge the health of an entire ecosystem.) I wondered why the logging industry was a cause for conservatives, but not the fishing industry, which was greatly harmed by the logging practices advocated by conservatives. The answer turned out to be that a guy who ran a corporation that had made a ton of money looting S&Ls (how come no one remembers the S&L Crisis?) had bought a lumber company and was destroying all the old-growth redwoods was hookedinto (i.e. paying) the conservative movement. (Please read the links and follow the links there!) And so the "conservative" opinion became that logging old-growth forests was a good thing. Cash payment was the reason for this core pillar of conservative ideology. (The whole thing ended up paying off even more handsomely, probably thanks to more conservative movement backscratching.)
The news that Iraq is enjoying a record budget surplus while the US creaks under the weight of record deficits is fueling calls for Iraq to use those costs to pay for its own rebuilding efforts, a politically posthumous vindication of Iraq war architect Paul Wolfowitz's belief that the war could be fought "on the cheap," and Iraq could pay for the country that we (that's us, America) wrecked with its own money. It's all bullshit, of course--a way to justify abrogating responsibility for the damage we've caused.
Yesterday, a Huffington Post reader commented on my previous article about the campaign against Bruce Wasserstein's gouging of seniors to fatten his own pockets. "Sadly," they said, "nobody cares."
I will admit, it's tough to raise interest in an issue like this. Everything from high gas prices to the crumbling economy to the Iraq war is demanding people's attention--and that's before you have to deal with the filtering effects of the media that reduces complex issues to trivial "gotcha" games. But a small group of committed citizens got out on the streets yesterday to say "Yes, we do care about the health and well-being of our elders, and the workers who take care of them. Do you?"
Tomorrow marks a depressing day for fans of Internet radio stations and alternative newsmagazines of any political stripe. Corporate interests have successfully shepherded through bad business plans designed to choke off independent voices using the power of the purse.
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