How Did We Get Here? Politics in the Age of the Koch Brothers and #OWS

Here’s a video shot at the University of California-Davis. It shows Lt. John Pike of the UC-Davis police sauntering up to students associated with the Occupy movement and pepper spraying them, before backing slowly away in a heavily armed phalanx while demonstrators and onlookers chant “shame on you”:



I take this moment as emblematic of our current political situation. It is a situation in which about 2/3 of Americans sympathize with the Occupy movement's call for greater economic equality, but only half that number approve of the protests themselves, and no political party does anything to address the growing inequality. It's a situation, too, in which administrative leaders at all levels seem happy to tolerate police violence, which the right-wing media, led as ever by Fox News, presents as necessary and even heroic.  The people are angry, but they're wary of those who demonstrate on behalf of their interests, and the political elites prefer to address the situation with violence rather than reforms. How did we get to this sad state of affairs?

The answer, I think, has to do with changes in the attitudes of our various elites over the past few decades.

There was a time, not so very long ago, when elites from various fields — politics, business, finance, labor, journalism, religion, academe — would gather together and attempt to ameliorate whatever social and economic problems seemed of pressing importance. And they would gather in something like a spirit of enlightened self-interest, if not exactly of disinterest, trying to take a look at problems from a point of view other than that of immediate self-advancement. This, anyway, is what George Packer claims in a recent article in Foreign Affairs. Knowing a little bit about the history of social elites and their relation to the notion of disinterest or impartiality, I’m inclined to agree with him. Here’s what Packer says about the various American elites in the postwar era:

…the country’s elites were playing a role that today is almost unrecognizable. They actually saw themselves as custodians of national institutions and interests. The heads of banks, corporations, universities, law firms, foundations, and media companies were neither more nor less venal, meretricious, and greedy than their counterparts today. But they rose to the top in a culture that put a brake on these traits and certainly did not glorify them. Organizations such as the Council on Foreign Relations, the Committee for Economic Development, and the Ford Foundation did not act on behalf of a single, highly privileged point of view — that of the rich. Rather, they rose above the country’s conflicting interests and tried to unite them into an overarching idea of the national interest. Business leaders who had fought the New Deal as vehemently as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is now fighting health-care and financial reform later came to accept Social Security and labor unions, did not stand in the way of Medicare, and supported other pieces of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. They saw this legislation as contributing to the social peace that ensured a productive economy. In 1964, Johnson created the National Commission on Technology, Automation, and Economic Progress to study the effects of these coming changes on the work force. The commission included two labor leaders, two corporate leaders, the civil rights activist Whitney Young, and the sociologist Daniel Bell. Two years later, they came out with their recommendations: a guaranteed annual income and a massive job-training program. This is how elites once behaved: as if they had actual responsibilities.

This establishment really does represent an accommodation of different elites to one another: business and finance came together with leaders of what Chris Hedges has called “the liberal class”: a group consisting of “the media, the church, the university, the Democratic party, the arts, and labor unions” (his book on the fate of these elites, The Death of the Liberal Class, makes chilling reading). Together, the moneyed elite and the liberal class worked out ways of sharing wealth and solving social problems that, however imperfect, kept the fabric of society together. The liberal class could feel it had delivered some justice to the disempowered, and the moneyed interest could rest assured that, with enough soup in every bowl, radicalism had been headed off.  Indeed, as Hedges notes, one function of the liberal class has been to “discredi[t] radicals within American society who have defied corporate capitalism and continued to speak the language of class warfare.” With the great mass of people placated, radicals discredited, and the position of business and finance secured (at a moderate cost) a social compact was maintained. This is not to be sneered at: the years prior to the war had shown the world (especially Europe) what the failure of social compacts, and the legitimization of certain kinds of radicals, looked like. No one wanted to go back to those days.

The postwar arrangement, Packer notes in passing, didn’t deliver for everyone: if you were African-American, or a woman, you’d probably find those postwar years something less than Edenic. I’d add other groups to Packer’s list, especially gay people, who are only now beginning to gain something like equality and something like a public voice. But for many people, the establishment seemed to deliver a decent life, with relatively secure employment and relative egalitarianism, with inexpensive public universities, and wealth far less polarized than it is today (we’ve gone from a postwar 40:1 CEO-to-worker pay ratio to a ratio of more than 400:1).

(If you are interested in the first modern instance of an amalgamation of different elites and their cultivation of an ethos of relative disinterestedness, you might want to read the bits about Addison, The Spectator, and the class dynamics of eighteenth century England in this post).

In Packer's view, the old establishment, with its alliance between moneyed and liberal elites, came to an end for two reasons: the "youth rebellion and revolution of the 1960s" and the economic troubles of the 1970s, brought about by "stagflation and the oil shock." Here, I think, he's only partially right, and very light on detail. It's certainly true that the student and New Left movements of the 60s (and, I would add, the 70s) challenged the old establishment. But Packer neglects to say why: it was the draft and the war, certainly, but it was also the coming into the public sphere of all the social groups the old establishment had left out: African-Americans, women, gay people, and others. They rightly questioned the representativeness of the old elites, and they rightly saw that, whatever degree of disinterest informed elite decisions, it masked a preference for whiteness, maleness, and heterosexuality. The demands of repressed groups for representation, though, led to a backlash, as the established elites, and many of the non-elites benefitting from the old social compact, felt threatened. The moneyed elites that already felt they'd been asked to share a great deal resented being asked to share with even more people ("What! First the G.I. bill and now urban renewal on top of that?!"), and the hard-working white male non-elites sensed that their small privileges were under threat. This, I think, is the nature of the undermining of the old establishment during the 60s and 70s. When the oil shock came along, further undermining confidence in the old compact, it simply presented an opportunity for already existing cracks to widen.

As the fissures in the old compact widened, elites lost faith in the process of working together in relative disinterest for the good of all, and America began to resemble something more like the Hobbesian state of nature, with the war of all against all. Here's how Packer describes the oil-shock era and the subsequent end of a relatively disinterested establishment:

[The oil shock] eroded Americans’ paychecks and what was left of their confidence in the federal government after Vietnam, Watergate, and the disorder of the 1960s. It also alarmed the country’s business leaders, and they turned their alarm into action. They became convinced that capitalism itself was under attack by the likes of Rachel Carson and Ralph Nader, and they organized themselves into lobbying groups and think tanks that quickly became familiar and powerful players in U.S. politics: the Business Roundtable, the Heritage Foundation, and others. Their budgets and influence soon rivaled those of the older, consensus-minded groups, such as the Brookings Institution. By the mid-1970s, chief executives had stopped believing that they had an obligation to act as disinterested stewards of the national economy. They became a special interest; the interest they represented was their own. The neoconservative writer Irving Kristol played a key role in focusing executives’ minds on this narrower and more urgent agenda. He told them, “Corporate philanthropy should not be, and cannot be, disinterested.”

Among the non-disinterested spending that corporations began to engage in, none was more interested than lobbying. Lobbying has existed since the beginning of the republic, but it was a sleepy, bourbon-and-cigars practice until the mid- to late 1970s. In 1971, there were only 145 businesses represented by registered lobbyists in Washington; by 1982, there were 2,445. In 1974, there were just over 600 registered political action committees, which raised $12.5 million that year; in 1982, there were 3,371, which raised $83 million. In 1974, a total of $77 million was spent on the midterm elections; in 1982, it was $343 million. Not all this lobbying and campaign spending was done by corporations, but they did more and did it better than anyone else. And they got results.

If you remember the Carter administration, you remember what the end of the establishment looked like: bipartisanship came to an standstill in Washington, and it remains stuck in that mode today. And the moneyed elites ceased to see their well-being tied to that of the nation as a whole: their interest was self-interest plain and simple, without the amelioration of any enlightenment. There's a sad irony to all of this, in that the break-up of the old elites, and the airing out of their smoke-filled rooms, didn't lead to greater egalitarianism. "Getting rid of elites..." says Packer, "did not necessarily empower ordinary people." Indeed, when "Walter Reuther of the United Auto Workers and Walter Wriston of Citicorp stopped sitting together on Commissions to Make the World a Better Place" and began "paying lobbyists to fight for their separate interests in Congress," says Packer, "the balance of power tilted heavily toward business." And there it has stayed, as indexes of wealth distribution and worker productivity and tax policy make plainer and plainer every day.

The massive, well-organized deployment of enormous sums of money by the business and (especially) the financial elites have in large measure made American politicians, regardless of party, into the tools of the wealthy elites: Bush cut taxes on the very rich to near-historic lows, and the right-wing Roberts court more or less legalized political bribery in the Citizens United decision, but it was Bill Clinton who began the deregulation of Wall Street that led first to massive profits for the few, then to an terrible crisis for the many, and it was Democrat Chuck Schumer who kept capital gains taxes so low that most hedge fund managers pay taxes at a lower rate than their secretaries. The Koch brothers and those of their ilk don't consider themselves stewards of national well-being, not really: they consider themselves people who have a right to buy the means to rig the system ever-further in their favor. For them, this is simply their prerogative. Acting on this presumed prerogative has made them very wealthy, but it has also made their whole class less and less legitimate in the eyes of the public, despite the constant drumbeat of political advertisements and the far-from-disinterested vision of events presented on Fox News and other corporate media platforms. 

The liberal elites — mainline churches, universities, elements of the media, labor leaders — have been complicit in these sad developments. Unable to ameliorate the naked self-interest of financial and corporate elites, they have clung to their own small privileges while no longer serving a useful role.  They simply do not deliver for the broad population as they used to do, and in failing to do so they have become despised by many in the working and middle classes. As Chris Hedges puts it,

The liberal class has become a useless and despised appendage of corporate power. And as corporate power pollutes and poisons the ecosystem and propels us into a world where there will be only masters and serfs, the liberal class, which serves no purpose in the new configuration, is being abandoned and discarded. The death of the liberal class means there is no check to a corporate apparatus designed to enrich a tiny elite and plunder a nation.... It ensures that the frustration and anger among the working and middle classes will find expression outside the confines of democratic institutions and the civilities of a liberal democracy.

That's a difficult pill for many of us to swallow, but it does explain some of the most notable political developments of our time. It explains the urges behind the Tea Party (which saw itself as an outsider movement, at odds with all elites, but was co-opted almost from the start by the moneyed elites). And it explains what's been happening these past two months in New York, in Oakland, in Chicago, and in towns and cities across the country. The Occupy Wall Street movement can be seen as several things. It can be seen as a desperate move for political expression by those who see the failure of all elites to even try to stop the erosion of the social and economic position of the vast majority of Americans. It can also be seen as an attempt to wrest the old liberal classes away from their complicity with the now-completely-dominant moneyed elites — to revitalize a liberal class on its deathbed. It can also be seen in a less charitable light: I recently saw a nephew of mine and his friends disparage the Occupy movement as "a hipster convention" of people who looked like they were "in line for the latest iPhone." I think this is wrong, but I see where it comes from: it comes from the correct perception that the old liberal elites ("a hipster convention" signifies this class) have been more concerned with their petty privileges ("the latest iPhone") than with delivering for the millions of Americans whose relative position has been steadily degrading for decades. I like to hope that the Occupy movement can both give expression to the political needs of the many, and can give the old liberal class the backbone it needs to stand up to the ever-expanding domination of American life by a tiny financial elite.
 
If we don't have this hope, what's left?

Occupy Arcadia: Mythos of an Emerging Movement

“What,” ask the pundits, “do the Occupy Wall Street people want?” When they deign to answer their own question, they tend, if they are uncharitable, to say that the protestors don’t know what they want, that any real message is lost in a miasma of different agendas.  The more charitable type of pundit tends to say something more along the lines of “the protestors know what they’re against — economic inequality and the power of money — but they don’t know what they’re for.”  I’ve spent enough time at the Chicago manifestation of the movement to see the iota of truth in both the charitable and the uncharitable analysis, but in the end both analyses miss the significance of what’s happening.  To get at that significance, it’s important to drop the usual categories of analysis — left and right, cultural and economic, idealist and realist — and come at matters from an angle where things appear less familiar.  Otherwise, we risk reducing something truly new into one or another version of what we find familiar.  So bear with me while I propose a means of analysis that might seem quite strange: it’s the strangeness that we’re after, here, since the familiar categories of understanding have proved remarkably ineffective.

Mythos and Movement

As the scholar Malcolm Bull argued in New Left Review (March-April 2010), Greek mythology presents a coherent typology for understanding the relations of power, production, and knowledge.  In his view, the Greek mythos can be mapped out on a pair of axes thusly:

Olympus is the realm of pure power, in its various manifestations.  It is the dwelling-place of Zeus, the figure of pure executive power, and of Hercules, the figure of physical strength.  It deals with realities, and does so by ruling over them, by authority, by influence and manipulation, or by sheer force.  It is the realm of mastery.

Hades also deals with realities, but does so differently.  It is the realm of production, where Hephaestus works at his forge: his realities are those of existing materials, of the strengths and limits of bronze and silver and gold.  Many people who know their myths have been puzzled about why Aphrodite is married to the lame, ugly, Hephaestus — but at a symbolic level, it makes perfect sense: while he is the figure of artisanal, or even industrial production, she is a figure of sexual reproduction.  Together they cover the realms of inorganic and organic production.  If Olympus is the realm of mastery, Hades is a subordinate realm, the world of labor set against the Olympian world of command.

Parnassus deals less with existing realities than with the free play of speculation: it is the realm of Athena and the life of the mind, and of Apollo and the poetic.  The muses dwell here, and it is to Parnassus that scholars and intellectuals repair.  Like Olympus, it is a privileged realm, but unlike Olympus, it is not a world of power.  To put it in modern terms, one might think of Olympus as the realm of executives, and Parnassus as the world of tenure, think tanks, and foundation grants.

And then there’s Arcadia.  This, too, is a realm of free play rather than of existing realities with all of their limitations.  But unlike Parnassus, this isn’t a world of concepts or philosophies or epic poems: it’s a wild realm, a realm of potential energies.  It’s the world of Pan, who dwells in forests and open meadows that have not been brought under cultivation.  It’s the world of Diana the huntress, another forest-dweller defined in terms of potential: she is, after all, the virgin goddess.  Everything about Arcadia is about the primitive state of things, from which other things might emerge.  

Hermes, the messenger god, is a special case: he inhabits the very center of the map, at the intersection of the axes: this is central to his function as the messenger god, and to his function as the god of boundaries and those who cross them.

Once one grasps the general structure of mythological relations, a lot of things become clear about the significance of the myths: when Apollo and the faun Marysas (a figure of Arcadia) have a musical duel, won by Apollo who then flays Marysas, we have a kind of martyring of naïve or potential artistry by the established forces of Parnassus.  One can see its relevance to, say, aristocratic culture’s disdain for folk culture, or the sophisticated formalist’s soul-crushing dismissal of emergent talent. 

But we’re a long way from talking about Occupy Wall Street.  What happens when we try to view the movement through a conceptual framework as defamiliarizing as the Greek mythos?

Occupying Olympus, Occupying Hades, Occupying Parnassus

The first thing that should be clear about Occupy Wall Street is that it isn’t a movement based in Olympus.  Unlike the Tea Party, which was bankrolled by the enormous fortunes of the Koch Brothers and for which Fox News served as something like an advertising and P.R. firm, Occupy Wall Street has little or no connection with the realm of worldly power.  Even when those in powerful positions, such as President Obama, make gestures of sympathy to the movement, they do so in ways both unconvincing and uncomfortable.  Michael Gerson of the Washington Post put it clearly enough:

President Obama’s awkward, unreturned embrace of Occupy Wall Street is among the strangest developments of the 2012 campaign…. Obama has been the unrivaled leader in fundraising from the financial sector in recent years. Senior staffers with Wall Street connections have occupied the White House for some time now. Banks and financial-service firms have been some of the main direct beneficiaries of Obama’s economic policies.  And Obama himself has often sought to defuse public criticism of Wall Street.… Last year, he went out of his way to defend large bonuses for the chief executives of ­JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs: “I know both those guys; they are very savvy businessmen. I, like most of the American people, don’t begrudge people success or wealth.”

A stronger case can be made for Occupy Wall Street as a movement based in Hades, under the protection of Hephastus (if that sentence doesn’t defamiliarize the political categories, I don’t know what will).  Unions, for example, have intermittently swelled the ranks of the protestors in New York, Chicago, and elsewhere.  But the key word here is “intermittently”: the Occupy protests are not union-centered rallies, like those we saw in Wisconsin earlier this year.  Union leaders don’t call the shots.  If they did, we probably wouldn’t hear the punditocracy’s complaints about the lack of a clear message: instead, they’d be writing about how the demands of workers for decent wages and benefits are unreasonable in a globalized economy.

What about Parnassus?  Is this where the real center of the movement rests?  There are certainly plenty of students to be found at the demonstrations, and a few professors (full disclosure: my tenured feet have occupied a few sidewalks and parks in Chicago).  But the disproportionate representation of students is certainly a matter of greater opportunity to show up, rather than of significantly greater motive.  As one man said at a recent demonstration, “you students, you’re my voice: I work 60 hours a week to keep my house, and I look after my kids, and I just can’t get out here often.”  Some polls suggest that the majority of Americans support for the movement: this isn’t an ivory tower thing, not in its essence.  Veterans, working stiffs, union guys, moms with kids in tow, office jockeys, street people, and others are all in evidence, and though they applaud when Cornell West speaks, they’re not lining up behind him: they’re standing beside him.

Et in Arcadia Occupy

This leaves us with Arcadia.  But what exactly is Arcadia, anyway?  In the Greek mythos, it’s all about what might-yet-be.  It’s where Paris stands when he judges who has the greatest beauty: Hera, Athena, or Aphrodite.  This is significant: he’s choosing between representatives of Olympus (power), Parnassus (knowledge) and Hades (production), and as he makes the choice from the only position outside of their realms: in Arcadia, the world of the not-yet, the potential.

This, I think, is the proper location of the Occupy movement in the Greek mythos, at least at the moment. 

A few days ago I was arguing with the historian D.L. LeMahieu about the nature and meaning of the Occupy movement, and I’d begun with the proposition that what we were seeing was a resurgence of the now-old New Left paradigm: the language of class, anti-capitalism, and economic justice returning after a long eclipse.  LeMahieu refuted all that, claiming that what we were seeing wasn’t a return to something old, but the birth of something new.  Sure, there were old left-wing slogans.  But this was part of the mulch out of which something very new was being born.  We weren’t going to see a new socialism, because socialism was the countervailing force that tried to civilize 19^th and early 20^th century capitalism: it was a response to a kind of economics that doesn’t really exist anymore.  We’re in a new phase of economic development, with transformative technological forces and the entry two billion of new workers into a global marketplace.  We had an unprecedented economics (which developed out of our old economics), and it would create an unprecedented politics (which would also develop out of our old politics).  I’m convinced LeMahieu was right: we’re not going to get a return to something old, even if the new thing we get takes up and transforms the old political paradigms. 

In a way, the very fact that the pundits have had a hard time grasping what the protestors want is a sign that what’s coming together is something truly new.  It doesn’t fit easily into our paradigms.  It’s not a student protest, it’s not a labor protest, it’s not a rally orchestrated by one or another of the political parties.  Slavoj Žižek got at the nature of things in his address to the protestors in Zuccotti Park:

So what are we doing here? Let me tell you a wonderful, old joke from Communist times. A guy was sent from East Germany to work in Siberia. He knew his mail would be read by censors, so he told his friends: “Let’s establish a code. If a letter you get from me is written in blue ink, it is true what I say. If it is written in red ink, it is false.” After a month, his friends get the first letter. Everything is in blue. It says, this letter: “Everything is wonderful here. Stores are full of good food. Movie theatres show good films from the west. Apartments are large and luxurious. The only thing you cannot buy is red ink.” This is how we live. We have all the freedoms we want. But what we are missing is red ink: the language to articulate our non-freedom. The way we are taught to speak about freedom— war on terror and so on—falsifies freedom. And this is what you are doing here. You are giving all of us red ink.

…. Remember that our basic message is “We are allowed to think about alternatives.” If the taboo is broken, we do not live in the best possible world. But there is a long road ahead. There are truly difficult questions that confront us. We know what we do not want. But what do we want? What social organization can replace capitalism? What type of new leaders do we want?….We are not Communists if Communism means a system which collapsed in 1990. Remember that today those Communists are the most efficient, ruthless Capitalists. In China today, we have Capitalism which is even more dynamic than your American Capitalism, but doesn’t need democracy. Which means when you criticize Capitalism, don’t allow yourself to be blackmailed that you are against democracy. The marriage between democracy and Capitalism is over. The change is possible.

I’ve only felt the political ground shift beneath my feet twice in my life.  The first time was in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, when one could feel a horrible lurch toward authoritarianism and fear.  The other time is now.  I don’t know where it’s all going any more than you do.  But unlike last time, I have faith that it’s moving in the direction of hope.

Because it Matters.

More information is available here. Despite ten days of protest there has hardly been any coverage in the mainstream media.