An old but still potent critique has re-emerged in American politics, one that holds concentrated wealth, and perhaps American capitalism itself, as inimical to the democratic society we want to build.
The basic idea holds capitalism as at best an uneasy partner with our democratic values. At worst, it erodes them completely, undermining the social and material basis of republican citizenship as envisioned by the American revolutionaries.
Since the start of the new year, this thinking has become especially prominent. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, came out in favor of high marginal tax rates on the rich, arguing last week that “a system that allows billionaires to exist” while others live in extreme poverty is “wrong.”
This thinking is also present in a new proposal from Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts to tax the nation’s largest fortunes. The plan, which would impose an annual 2 percent wealth tax on fortunes greater than $50 million and a 3 percent tax on ones greater than $1 billion, is geared as much toward protecting democracy as it is toward raising revenue. It’s an attempt to arrest the many types of economic inequality that threaten political equality — the ability of everyone to have something like an equal say in the democratic process.
Most Americans tend not to think of these egalitarian (even anti-capitalist) sentiments as part of the nation’s intellectual heritage. But Warren, Ocasio-Cortez and similarly situated politicians like Bernie Sanders are drawing on influential currents in American political history.
Some of those stretch back to the founding era. Despite his own status as a wealthy slaveholder, Thomas Jefferson was wary of extreme disparities of wealth and thought it was incompatible with republican political ideals. Commenting on “the consequences of this enormous inequality producing so much misery to the bulk of mankind” in Europe, he described his position in a famous letter to James Madison in 1785. “Whenever there is in any country, uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right. The earth is given as a common stock for man to labor and live on. If, for the encouragement of industry we allow it to be appropriated, we must take care that other employment be furnished to those excluded from the appropriation.” He concluded with a statement of belief: “The small landholders are the most precious part of a state.”
More than a century later, labor and agrarian radicals would make a version of this observation vis a vis the unjust and unfair arrangements that trapped farmers and industrial workers. For them, the extreme inequality and labor exploitation of the era was simply incompatible with meaningful democratic citizenship, as it left both hopelessly dependent on the owners of capital, corroding American democracy’s basis in the ideal of equal relations between citizens. “Suddenly, without warning, the shop closes down” or the worker “is discharged and his wage, small at best, is cut off. He has to live, the rent must be paid, the wife and children must have clothing and food, fuel must be provided, and yet he has no job, no wages, and no prospect for getting any,” wrote the socialist leader Eugene Debs in a fiery 1904 pamphlet, “Unionism and Socialism,” which painted a dire picture of capitalist dependency.
He continued: “Is a worker in that position free? Is he a citizen? A man? No! He is simply a wage slave, a jobholder, while it lasts, here today and gone tomorrow.” Channeling the founders, Debs held independent material security as a precondition for individual liberty. “No man is free in any just sense who has to rely upon the arbitrary will of another for the opportunity to work,” he had written in 1900. As Debs saw it, if we are deprived as workers, then we cannot truly act as citizens.
The National Farmers Alliance and Industrial Union had its heyday some years before Debs entered public life, but its theorists similarly connected ordinary people’s dislocation from the political process to the growing dominance of corporations and concentrated capital. They too saw the answer in a transformation of the American economy that placed the monetary system under democratic control and moved the entire system in a more cooperative direction.
This plan, the historian Lawrence Goodwyn wrote, “would have produced a more democratic sharing of the nation’s total economic production. The ‘producing classes,’ no longer quite so systematically deprived of the fruits of their efforts, would have gotten a bit more of the fruits. Hierarchical forms of power and privilege in America would have undergone a significant measure of rearrangement.” The reorganization of economic power would yield a more vibrant democracy, where ordinary people had more power to shape the economic and political institutions that dominated their lives.
Neither labor radicals nor agrarian rebels ever attained enough power to enact their ideas in full, although they had a huge influence on the New Deal, which attempted to reconcile the reality of an industrial society with the nation’s democratic values. Likewise, the labor and political radicals of the New Deal period itself helped bring somewhat marginal ideas about political and economic equality to the mainstream.
But by the end of the 20th century their insights had been smothered by corporate power and its political allies, with predictable consequences: We live with a narrow politics where democratic deliberation rarely touches fundamental questions of power and ownership. The re-emergence of this democratic critique of inequality through the political success of figures like Warren, Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez seems to point to the beginning of a course correction, or at least the beginning of dialogue about a course correction. The extent to which our economic elites are rattled by the mere fact that this discussion is happening is a clear sign that it needs to happen.
As Americans across the political spectrum gear up to try to deny President Trump a second term in office, all of this may seem divisive — a distraction from the emergency at hand. Just the opposite is true. Trump’s presidency is a symptom of profound democratic weakness. Should he lose in 2020, that will be the beginning of a recovery. We’ll still need to rethink and rebuild our democracy and that has to include a reimagining of the economy on which it rests.
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.
Jamelle Bouie became a New York Times Opinion columnist in 2019. Before that he was the chief political correspondent for Slate magazine. He is based in Charlottesville, Va., and Washington. @jbouie
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Home » Analysis & Comment » Opinion | Economic Power Corrupts, and Absolute Economic Power Corrupts Absolutely
Opinion | Economic Power Corrupts, and Absolute Economic Power Corrupts Absolutely
An old but still potent critique has re-emerged in American politics, one that holds concentrated wealth, and perhaps American capitalism itself, as inimical to the democratic society we want to build.
The basic idea holds capitalism as at best an uneasy partner with our democratic values. At worst, it erodes them completely, undermining the social and material basis of republican citizenship as envisioned by the American revolutionaries.
Since the start of the new year, this thinking has become especially prominent. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, came out in favor of high marginal tax rates on the rich, arguing last week that “a system that allows billionaires to exist” while others live in extreme poverty is “wrong.”
This thinking is also present in a new proposal from Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts to tax the nation’s largest fortunes. The plan, which would impose an annual 2 percent wealth tax on fortunes greater than $50 million and a 3 percent tax on ones greater than $1 billion, is geared as much toward protecting democracy as it is toward raising revenue. It’s an attempt to arrest the many types of economic inequality that threaten political equality — the ability of everyone to have something like an equal say in the democratic process.
Most Americans tend not to think of these egalitarian (even anti-capitalist) sentiments as part of the nation’s intellectual heritage. But Warren, Ocasio-Cortez and similarly situated politicians like Bernie Sanders are drawing on influential currents in American political history.
Some of those stretch back to the founding era. Despite his own status as a wealthy slaveholder, Thomas Jefferson was wary of extreme disparities of wealth and thought it was incompatible with republican political ideals. Commenting on “the consequences of this enormous inequality producing so much misery to the bulk of mankind” in Europe, he described his position in a famous letter to James Madison in 1785. “Whenever there is in any country, uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right. The earth is given as a common stock for man to labor and live on. If, for the encouragement of industry we allow it to be appropriated, we must take care that other employment be furnished to those excluded from the appropriation.” He concluded with a statement of belief: “The small landholders are the most precious part of a state.”
More than a century later, labor and agrarian radicals would make a version of this observation vis a vis the unjust and unfair arrangements that trapped farmers and industrial workers. For them, the extreme inequality and labor exploitation of the era was simply incompatible with meaningful democratic citizenship, as it left both hopelessly dependent on the owners of capital, corroding American democracy’s basis in the ideal of equal relations between citizens. “Suddenly, without warning, the shop closes down” or the worker “is discharged and his wage, small at best, is cut off. He has to live, the rent must be paid, the wife and children must have clothing and food, fuel must be provided, and yet he has no job, no wages, and no prospect for getting any,” wrote the socialist leader Eugene Debs in a fiery 1904 pamphlet, “Unionism and Socialism,” which painted a dire picture of capitalist dependency.
He continued: “Is a worker in that position free? Is he a citizen? A man? No! He is simply a wage slave, a jobholder, while it lasts, here today and gone tomorrow.” Channeling the founders, Debs held independent material security as a precondition for individual liberty. “No man is free in any just sense who has to rely upon the arbitrary will of another for the opportunity to work,” he had written in 1900. As Debs saw it, if we are deprived as workers, then we cannot truly act as citizens.
The National Farmers Alliance and Industrial Union had its heyday some years before Debs entered public life, but its theorists similarly connected ordinary people’s dislocation from the political process to the growing dominance of corporations and concentrated capital. They too saw the answer in a transformation of the American economy that placed the monetary system under democratic control and moved the entire system in a more cooperative direction.
This plan, the historian Lawrence Goodwyn wrote, “would have produced a more democratic sharing of the nation’s total economic production. The ‘producing classes,’ no longer quite so systematically deprived of the fruits of their efforts, would have gotten a bit more of the fruits. Hierarchical forms of power and privilege in America would have undergone a significant measure of rearrangement.” The reorganization of economic power would yield a more vibrant democracy, where ordinary people had more power to shape the economic and political institutions that dominated their lives.
Neither labor radicals nor agrarian rebels ever attained enough power to enact their ideas in full, although they had a huge influence on the New Deal, which attempted to reconcile the reality of an industrial society with the nation’s democratic values. Likewise, the labor and political radicals of the New Deal period itself helped bring somewhat marginal ideas about political and economic equality to the mainstream.
But by the end of the 20th century their insights had been smothered by corporate power and its political allies, with predictable consequences: We live with a narrow politics where democratic deliberation rarely touches fundamental questions of power and ownership. The re-emergence of this democratic critique of inequality through the political success of figures like Warren, Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez seems to point to the beginning of a course correction, or at least the beginning of dialogue about a course correction. The extent to which our economic elites are rattled by the mere fact that this discussion is happening is a clear sign that it needs to happen.
As Americans across the political spectrum gear up to try to deny President Trump a second term in office, all of this may seem divisive — a distraction from the emergency at hand. Just the opposite is true. Trump’s presidency is a symptom of profound democratic weakness. Should he lose in 2020, that will be the beginning of a recovery. We’ll still need to rethink and rebuild our democracy and that has to include a reimagining of the economy on which it rests.
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.
Jamelle Bouie became a New York Times Opinion columnist in 2019. Before that he was the chief political correspondent for Slate magazine. He is based in Charlottesville, Va., and Washington. @jbouie
Source: Read Full Article