Business: The New Military?

I used Jessup's rant in my last post because I consider it emblematic of a certain attitude I have been seeing these last few years among Republicans.

Jessup's error is clear enough.  He starts with a perfectly reasonable premise -- the military is necessary, it protects us, and the front line troops should be honored for it.  But he leaps from that to an utterly different conclusion -- that the military should therefore be unaccountable and not bound by laws other than its own.  His call for a lawless and unaccountable military assumes that military men are morally superior to civilians, and front line troops to support forces.  It also assumes that this superiority is great enough to make front-line troops immune to the normal failings of human nature -- the temptations of power, the tendency to confuse one's personal interests with the public good, and so forth.  Taken to its ultimate conclusion, it is the logic of military dictatorship.

I have no doubt that many professional military men agree with Jessup, nor that many right-wing civilians also do.  Certainly, in times past (say, when Dole or the senior Bush ran for President against Dukakis or Clinton), many right wingers were quick to hold up military service as proof of moral superiority and treat anyone who had not served as morally unqualified to hold office.

That approach is no longer viable.  Since the Vietnam war, our elite of both parties have usually been able to avoid military service, and besides, our military has shrunk enough that large portions of the population never serve.  And there was a long gap for anyone to young to have fought in Vietnam and too old for Iraq when the opportunity to fight in a major war just wasn't there.*

But it is sort of startling the way that attitude has now been shifted over from military service to running a business.  Part of it is no doubt the fact that the Republicans have nominated a former CEO as their candidate and want to play up that part of his biography.  But one heard that sort of talk, the general attitude that anyone who had not run a business did not really contribute, well before Romney was nominated, before primary season even began.  The basic view that businessmen are "job creators," that wealth is created only at the top, and that income is a reasonable surrogate for contribution to society.  Romney is pitched as the ideal President in an economic crisis because his private sector experience, just as a retired military man (think McClellan, Eisenhower) was pitched as the ideal candidate to win a war.  But the attitude has moved beyond that.  Just as many people used to regard anyone who had not served in the military as not morally worthy to hold office, today's Republicans seem to regard anyone who as not run a business as not morally worthy to hold office.*

There are some obvious problems to treating running a business as the equivalent of military service.  Business management and the military are both specialties that are not for everyone.  No society could possibly function in which everyone is a soldier, and no modern industrial society is possible with everyone running a business.  Nonetheless, in certain military emergencies, extremely broad drafts have been instituted.  Some societies, now and in the past, have had systems of universal military service, so that everyone with a few exceptions does have military experience.  Claims that lack of military service disqualifies a candidate from office have usually been made in societies in which service is the norm and failure to serve is the exception.**

But there is no equivalent system of requiring everyone to run a business.  Extreme economic emergencies have sometimes forced people to become entrepreneurs in the sense of selling apples and the like, but hardly in the sense of knowing what it is to run a business and make payroll.  And while organizations like Junior Achievement may encourage people to have the simulated experience of running a business, the thought of any system of universal conscription is simply absurd.  In short, think of not running a business as morally disqualifying for holding office, and you exclude the majority of population.

Add to that the view that businessmen should be held to no laws except the law of supply and demand, and accountable to no one except the market, and certainly the view that no lesser mortal may criticize them, and you get the businessman version of Colonel Jessup.  The ultimate logic of such a view is not military dictatorship, but plutocracy.

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*Ironically, A Few Good Men and Colonel Jessup were products of this era.  For all his ranting about lives being on the line, Jessup was not actually fighting a war.
**Both Dole and the senior Bush fought in WWII, a war that caught up most able-bodied men of their generation.

The Rage of a Privileged Class

The New Yorker did a recent piece on why the super-rich feel victimized by Obama, even though they are economically doing quite well.  Their basic answer is that Obama criticizes them instead of praising them as "job creators,"  and that speaking ill of the rich and powerful is divisive and amounts to class warfare.  Needless to say, they don't see anything divisive or class warfare in dividing the country into "makers and takers," "people who work for a living and people who vote for a living," or Romney saying of 47% of the country, "I'll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives."

Felix Salmon commenting on the article, is unconvinced.  He is unconvinced that it is anything as superficial that the super-rich can't bear to be criticized. After all, the worst Obama has said about them pales in comparison to what they have said about him.  (One financier compared Obama's attempt to eliminate their preferential taxation to Hitler's invasion of Poland).  

Instead, Salmon sees three main reasons so many billionaires are outraged at Obama.  One is that the outrage is largely confined to the financial sector.  Another is that they really, really like Romney who is, after all, one of their own, and that they have to justify their passion for Romney with a countervaling hatred toward Obama.  I am less convinced on that one.  After all, this hatred began well before Romney had locked up the Republican nomination.

More plausible and appalling is the final answer.  Salmon points out that Wall Street strongly supported Obama in 2008.  Various reasons have been suggested why this was so -- that Obama resembled Wall Street's financiers in background and education, or that Wall Street is socially liberal and therefore dislikes Republicans.  But Salmon believes that hard self-interest was at work.  Obama, far more than McCain, recognized just how serious the financial crisis was, and financiers were confident his team would do whatever was necessary to prevent the financial system from collapsing.  McCain inspired no such confidence.  But once the financial crisis was over and profits came back, they saw no reason for anything to change from before the crisis.  They certainly didn't see themselves as bearing any blame for the crisis, or the crisis as grounds for stronger regulations.  That's crazy talk!

In other words, the two political parties hold two ideologically consistent views about finance.  Democrats fear financial crashes and will bail out the banking system, but in return want tougher regulations to prevent a repeat performance.  Republicans want to leave things to the free market -- let banks do as they please and if they fail, so be it.  (Presumably they think that a serious financial crisis will scare enough sense into the surviving banks to prevent a repeat performance).  So financiers respond to this in the most economically rational way possible -- support Republicans in good times and Democrats in bad times.  Then they can run riot all they want and be bailed out if they run into trouble.  This is a great deal for banks, but understandably unpopular with everyone else.

This is possible, but maybe we should be taking bankers at their word, that they hate Obama because they resent being criticized.  Quite simply, they are economic royalists.  They believe that, as agents of the free market, they must be treated for all intents and purposes as infallible, and that no lesser mortals have the right to criticize them. Obama is a lesser mortal.  One of the bankers said that he had never worked a day in his life.  When called on it, it turned out that he meant Obama "never made payroll.  He's never built anything."  In other words, if you do not run a business, you are not really "working" and certainly don't have the right to criticize people who do.  Or, to paraphrase Colonel Jessup's rant, "I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who walks and sleeps under the blanket of the very wealth I provide and then questions the manner in which I provide it.  I'd rather you just said thank you."  That, I suspect, is what really lies at the root of it all.

Despair?

Andrew Sullivan is all but calling the election for Romney.  Time will tell, I guess.  At the very least, the debate stands as a warning not to do electoral post-mortums on a live election.  Of course, I was calling the election for the Republicans way back in May.  I could yet turn out to be right.  I hope I turn out to be wrong.

I will now return to my regularly scheduled blogging and hope not to despair too much.

Economic Royalism, Not Fascism

I want to do a series of posts on the increasingly open identification of the Republican Party as the plutocratic party.  I realize that the reason Democrats have found it so frustrating the the white working class votes Republican is the view that the Republican Party is the party of plutocrats.  But since the Republican takeover of the House in 2010, and especially with the Romney-Ryan ticket, the tendency is becoming increasingly open.

The Republican Party is more or less openly positioning itself in favor of the unrestricted power of big money interests.  Some people on the left refer to this as fascism, but that is not accurate.  Fascism was a populist movement that often expressed resentment of big money elites.  Fascist paramilitaries were not hired guns for the elite, but popular organizations outside their control.  Granted, big money elites ultimately cut a deal with the fascists in Italy and Germany because they feared left-wing revolution from below, but it was always an uneasy alliance.

Romney-Ryan Republicans, by contrast, are advocates of big money interests plain pure and simple. Plutocracy would be an accurate description of what they advocate.  But I prefer the term economic royalism.  (I will, nonetheless, often use the term plutocracy because it is shorter).

There are immistakeable similarities between old-style royalism and economic royalism.  Old-style royalists believed that the social order was ordained by God, and that any questioning of it was blasphemy against God's will.  They believed that kings were agents of God and that their actions must be regarded as God's will.  They used the expression, "The king can do no wrong, " but they did not mean it quite literally.  The view that no king ever did anything wrong was impossible to maintain in the face of the overwhelming evidence to the contrary.  But what they did argue was that the king was answerable to God only, and that no lesser mortal was ever permitted to challenge the king's actions.

Well, then, economic royalists believe that the social order is ordained by the free market and that any attempt at reform is blasphemy against the free market.  They believe that capitalists (both independent entrepeneurs and corporate managers) are agents of the free market and their actions must be seen as the will of the free market.  They do not actually claim that capitalists never make mistakes because the evidence to the contrary is overwhelming.  But they do maintain that capitalists are answerable to the free market only, and that no lesser mortal may legitimately question their actions.  The big difference is that old-style royalists believed that the social order God ordained was immutable and should never change.  Given the disruptiveness of the modern-day free market, economic royalists do not maintain that position today.  Instead, they view any disruptions as the free market may create as part of its will and see any attempt to soften or mitigate them as blasphemy.

Economic royalists often regard themselves as libertarians.   They say that they are not supporters of big money interests, but simply opponents of any government interference with the free market.  Thus they oppose most government regulations interfering with the freedom of private actors.  But in case of conflict between one set of private actors and another, their preferences are revealing.  They oppose unions, for instance, even though unions are private actors.  Ditto homeowner's associations trying to keep out a developer.  Often they say that unions or homeowners' associations are cartels unfairly interfering with the workings of the free market, which should be consumer-driven.  But then libertarians turn out to be advocates of tort reform, seeking to limit consumers' ability to sue for products that harm them.  Alternately, libertarians say that the economy is property shareholder-driven, rather than consumer-driven.  But libertarians are not notably friendly to shareholder derivative suits against corporate management.

In short, economic royalists who call themselves libertarians invariably favor not only private actors over government regulation, but producers over consumers, employers over employees, developers over homeowners, and corporate management over shareholders.  If this is not a presumption of infallibility of the management and championship of its interests, it is a remarkable imitation.  It reached its apotheosis during the 2008 economic crisis when an extraordinary number of conservatives were unwilling to admit that the prospect of widespread failures of banks and the auto industry could possibly have anything to do with mistakes by management, and must be the result of government regulation and unions, respectively.

And now the presumably infallible agents of the free market see their status as threatened and they are mad as hell.  That will be the topic of my next post.

One Thing I Do Understand About the Economy

One thing I do understand is a phenomenon that I have notices and has a plausible explanation.  Weekly reports of unemployment applications are invariably revised upward.  Monthly job creation reports are also invariably revised upward.

The explanation in both cases is that the reports are based on incomplete information.  Most unemployment applications or jobs created have been reported when the announcement comes in, but a few trickle in later, moving the number upward.

And Another Thing I Don't Understand About the Economy

How do you manage to have a household survey that shows an 873,000 job gain in September and an employer survey showing 114,000?  Oh, yes, and how can that possibly add up to a 0.3% decline in unemployment in one month despite more people entering the job market?

Don't get me wrong.  I'm not one of these conspiracy theorists.  It's just really weird.

Bitter Clingers, 47%, and is it Always About Race?

Since the Romney video is all in the news, I was going to write a fairly conventional post on it, comparing it to Obama's bitter clingers speech, as so many others have.  Both speeches, after all, were a candidate speaking to wealthy donors, making disparaging remarks about large number of ordinary Americans.  Obama's bitter clingers remark has done him more harm, over the long run, than his associate with Jeremiah Wright.  How Romney's speech will affect him remains unknown, of course, but it certainly confirms a lot of people's worst stereotypes about Republicans.  So the comparison is apt.

But this exchange convinced me that there is more going on here than meets the eye and that another issue has to be addresses -- that of race.  So let me start out with my conventional analysis and then move on to race.

Comparing the insult:

Obama started out with what was actually a promising beginning:

You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.

This would actually go over well -- if he proposed to do something about it, or acknowledged that he didn't know what to do about it but would make it a priority, or told his donors that until the Democratic Party can offer something to the small town white working class, it has no business expecting their votes.  But then, of course, he added:

So it's not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

Contrast that to  Romney::

There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it. That that's an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what. And I mean, the president starts off with 48, 49, 48—he starts off with a huge number. These are people who pay no income tax. Forty-seven percent of Americans pay no income tax. So our message of low taxes doesn't connect. And he'll be out there talking about tax cuts for the rich. I mean that's what they sell every four years. And so my job is not to worry about those people—I'll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.

Romney is clearly  insulting a large portion of the population.  I agree with Rich Lowry's analysis -- that Romney is lumping together three disparate groups -- the ones who regularly vote Democratic, the ones who don't pay income taxes, and the ones who receive government benefits -- and writing them collectively off as a lost cause.  This is a highly offensive argument.  I am also inclined to agree with Lowry that Romney is picking up unrelated conservative concerns and lumping them together without really understanding them.  But in this he is doing no different than countless other popularizers and vulgarizers do all the time.

Obama, by contrast, is trying to "understand" and encourage his donors to "understand" people he doesn't understand at all.  He is equating what many people proudly hold up as virtue with social pathology.  His remarks are properly offensive, but more ignorant and patronizing than deliberately hostile -- or so I believed until just recently.

Sincerity:

Conor Friedersdorf has wisely that the damage in remarks like this is not just in their insult to large portions of the population.  It is also in showing that what candidates say in closed meetings of donors is not what they say to the general public.  People jump to the conclusion that they are simply lying or pandering to the general public, and the what they say in secret to donors is what they really believe.

I have no doubt that Obama really meant what he said in the "bitter clingers" speech.  He was, after all, not just pandering to his donors.  He was asking them to move at least a little beyond their comfort zone and show at least a little understanding for how some people might be so benighted as to disagree with them.  Romney, by contrast, was telling his donors what they wanted to hear, so there is no way of knowing whether he actually meant it or was just pandering.  (See Lowry, above, for an excellent case that he was pandering).

I am less clear, however, which candidate this reflects less favorably on.  It is sort of like the Ron Paul news letter controversy.  Which is worse, that Ron Paul believes all the paranoid lunacy in his newsletters, or that he doesn't believe it, but panders to people who do?  Which is worse, a candidate who sincerely believes offensive things about his fellow countrymen, or one who merely pretends to to pander to wealth donors?

Race:

But to some people, it all comes down to race.  Is the critical part of both speeches race?

I will start with Romney.  No, I do not believe that his comments were intended as a plausibly deniable appeal to racial resentment, for two reasons.  First, he was speaking at a closed gathering of donors.  There is no need to maintain plausible deniability in closed meetings.  Second, wealthy donors don't have racial resentments, at least not ones that they will admit to, and don't want even plausibly deniable appeals to racism. The resentment of the upper class against the perceived laziness and irresponsibility of the lower is longstanding and independent of race.  On the other hand, I suspect his remarks will do him less harm than they ought.  Yes, a great many Republicans fall within the 47%, either who don't pay taxes or who receive some sort of government benefits.  But my guess is that they don't see themselves as within the nearly half of the population who will never "take personal responsibility and care for their lives."  My guess is that most Republican voters, including ones who pay no income tax, assume that Romney was talking about someone else, and probably not someone white.

I had long been baffled by the people who described the "bitter clinger" remark as an expression of hate and intentional insult.  Yes, it was offensive.  Yes, patronizing.  Yes, it essentially dismissed religion as the opium of the masses.  But actual hate?  But this was what finally clued me in to the real reason the remark has stuck to him.  It wasn't the remark about clinging to guns and religion.  It was the part about clinging to " antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment."  Bingo!  A lot of people took this as an accusation of racism.  And the same people tended to think both that false accusations of racism are rampant, and that they are the dirtiest form of politics possible.  What am I to make of that?

First, I don't think Obama was trying for plausible deniability for the same reason that I don't think Romney was.  There is no need to maintain plausible deniability in a closed meeting of donors.  On the other hand, yeah, I do think it is possible that he was making an accusation of racism, or at least nativism towards at least some rural Americans.  But, contrary to my conversation partner at the link, I certainly do not think he was casting his net anywhere near as broadly as Romney.  He certainly wasn't saying that nearly half the population were racist (or nativist).  He was making the accusation toward a (deliberately) ill-defined sub-group.  But then there is another little awkward fact.  Yeah, probably racism (or nativism) does play some role in the world view of some people, especially the more passionate anti-immigration types.  I also believe that small town virtues (the guns and religion, representing, as they do, a closer knit, more personal, more human society than Obama's donor base) are inseparable from small town vices (antipathy toward outsiders not part of the tight-knit community).

So I suppose you could say advantage Romney, who was not talking about race, over Obama who may have been remotely raising the subject.  But I do not believe that racism was Obama's primary emphasis.