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At Campaign for America's Future (CAF), Richard (RJ) Eskow took the CBS poll results about American's issue priorities that I wrote about yesterday and put them into graphic form:
This chart only includes economic issues (health care registers at 14%--more than twice the level of taxes and the deficit combined). As Eskow says:
Only 6% of Americans think Congress should concentrate on reducing the deficit or changing the tax code, according to the latest CBS News poll. Nearly ten times as many people, 56%, want it to focus on creating jobs and fixing the economy. Guess which set of policies is the center of attention in Washington right now?
This is why the Democrats lost the mid-terms. As HousesofProgress notes in Quick Hits, "POLL: Election was not mandate for GOP (70% - 17%)":
Americans overwhelmingly say that the midterm election results that gave Republicans control of the House represented a rejection of the Democrats and not a mandate for the GOP, according to a CNN/Opinion Research poll conducted Nov. 11-14. (Story; Poll data). Seventy percent of those surveyed said the results were a rejection of Democratic rule in the House while 17 percent called it a mandate for Republicans. Eight percent answered "neither" and 5 percent had no opinion.
The Democrats lost because they didn't address the people's number one concern. How hard is that to understand? Of course, they did address it sporadically and inadequately--which only makes matters worse, actually. It shows that Democrats know the problem exists, they just don't care enough to actually take it seriously. For all the GOP lies about Democrats "not sharing your values", this truth is far more devastating.
Also at CAF, Dave Johnson, who guests here occassionally picked up on the poll and Eskow's post, ("The DC/Rest-Of-Us Divide And Its Consequences"):
Only 6% of the public is concerned about the deficit. The only thing Washington elites are concerned about is the deficit. The rest of us live on the other side of the planet from the people in DC who make the policies. Maybe the other side of the solar system.
You can see how this divide affects policy. There is a "deficit commission" but no jobs commission. There are millions of people needing jobs and millions of jobs that need doing, but Washington won't "spend," even on badly-needed infrastructure investment. People over 50 (laid off because they were paid more or their health care was expensive) can't find jobs but the DC elite discuss raising the retirement age to 70. The deficit commission proposes cutting back the already-meager "safety net" while cutting tax rates for the really rich even more.
And while all of this goes on the rest of the people in the country are worried about jobs, foreclosures, bills, jobs, wages, jobs, and jobs - the things that matter to regular people. And they are feeling the consequences of the DC/rest-of-us divide.
In 2008, we expected the Democrats to recognize the obvious, side with the vast majority of the American people, and thereby cement long-term majority support. It was no-brainer. Unfortunately, the Democrats showed us they have no brains.
There is, of course, an explanation for this: the elite dominance of American politics, as described and explained, for example, by Thomas Ferguson's investment theory of political parties. In fact, the complete ignoring of the people's overwhelming #1 priority is about the most striking bit of evidence one could ask for proving such elite dominance. The question is, however, why that elite dominance has turned so short-sighted and self-destructive.
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One answer, of course, is that elites have always been short-sighted and self-destructive this way, it's just that they weren't powerful enough to bring the country down... until now. The concentration of wealth--and thereby power--they now enjoy is unprecedented... at least since 1929, the last time that their short-sightedness and self-destructiveness brought the country to ruin. So long as looking after their own interests coincides reasonably well with at least preserving the economic stability of the nation, it does not practically matter how short-sighted they actually are.
However, this explanation is almost certainly too crude. The loss of business prestige following the Great Depression, the loss of concentrated wealth, the growth of regulatory structures, and changes in public attitudes and expectations all may be pointed to as factors altering the form and constraints of elite thinking, reflected in such practical terms as the relatively "low" ratios of CEO salaries to entry-level salaties that were the norm in the 1960s. Various changes following then subsequently reversed the moderating effects that had constrained elite power, including, most importantly, those that tended to reinforce more long-term and institution-regarding thinking. Hyman Minsky was particularly prescient about this process and its consequences as applied to the economic realm, which I discussed in my September 2009 diay, "The One Percent Economy--Part Two: The Why", which focused on a paper he co-authored, "Economic Insecurity and the Institutional Prerequisites for Successful Capitalism". The paper discusses a progression of capitalist forms:
The financial structure of the American economy has undergone significant evolution over the history of the republic. From its initial stage of "commercial" capitalism, during which external finance was used mainly for trade, this structure has evolved into its present stage of "money-manager" capitalism, where financial markets and arrangements are dominated by managers of funds.
Two financial stages, "industrial" capitalism and "paternalistic" capitalism, were dominant between the eras of commercial and money-manager capitalism
It is the evolution of this last form, driven increasingly by the imperatives of meeting quarterly financial targets, that has played a central role in reducing the time-horizon of executive thinking, which in turn spreads throuhout the system. Indeed, this form of capitalism is decidedly more short-term in its fundamental logic than any that preceeded it. And the great irony is that it was created in large part because of the mixed-economy model of the American welfare state, which involves substantial government subsidies for pensions, which thereby accumulated large sums of money needing managing, which in turn gave rise to the inceasingly important role of money-managers.
I've also repeatedly called attention to the analysis of Augustus Cochrane III in Democracy Heading South: National Politics in the Shadow of Dixie, which provides a broader view of the political system as a whole, arguing that America circa 2000 had come to functionally resemble the South circa 1950 as described by VO Key in Southern Politics, although with different structures fulfilling similar functions (as with gills functioning like lungs, for example).
Most significantly, Cochrane argued that just as the one-party system of the South functioned effectively as a no-party system, dominated by various forms of informal alliances all within the formless realm of the Democratic Party, national politics had similarly seen an erosion of party structures and the emergence of more entreprenurial political actors--candidates as well as campaign managers, consultants and the like. Just as the 1950s South was politically ill-equipped to deal with the challenges of successful industrialization with such an opportunistic political system, so, too, America circa 2000 was politically ill-equipped to deal with the challenges of successful post-industrialization (as witness, for example, the series of bubble economies from the Reagan Era onward).
One function of party systems is to organize public action on a vast scale--for the primary benefit of those who fund it--in a manner that is responsive to public opinion so that it preserves social order. Put simply: elections are mechanisms to prevent revolutions.
While ordinary people may well perceive parties today as powerful, out-of-touch entities, Cochrane's perspective shows something quite different: their problem is that they are actually too weak to properly respond to public opinion in dealing with serious problems. They can sell the sizzle, but they can't deliver the steak.
This seems to be a particularly apt description of what's going on in Versailles right now. What politician worth his salt would not want to appeal to the overwhelming public desire to fix the economy now, given the CBS poll results cited above? But the GOP's conservative ideology is fundamentally incapable of doing anything about it, while the Democratic Party is simply too disorganized and divided--not to mention scared of its own shadow. This are not strong parties in any meaningful sense, they are incredibly weak ones. They are, however, the strongest political entities around (which is why, for example, the Tea Party was aimed at taking over the GOP). And that is the central political problem we confront today.
So long as this remains true, the phenomena of ignoring our most pressing problems, and those most popular with the public will continue to plague us. This is nothing more than a recipe for the gradual (or not so gradual) destruction of democracy itself.
One more thing: Obama's highly successful 2008 campaign, and total bust in delivering what people wanted, needed, and expected is utterly typical of how this system works when pressure mounts and needs to be contained. This is how Southern politics as entertainment/spectacle worked throughout the segregation era described by Key, and it strongly confirms Cochrane's thesis that the US today is much like the South circa 1950. This is not to excuse or to criticize Obama. It is merely to deflate the false impression that he is entirely sui generis. To the contrary, he is very much a "type", albeit on a very big scale, and on the cutting edge of campaign technology. |
