Why the Law Matters: Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad

In light of Obama’s recent Supreme Court nomination and the likely fight over the liberal vs. conservative direction of the Supreme Court, I’d like to reflect on how recent and unusual it is that the major political conflicts around the Court have revolved around questions of abortion and the rights of the accused, as well as other so-called “personal freedoms.” Don’t get me wrong, however – I’m not arguing that there has been a recent politicization of an otherwise neutral Court. I find that to be a ridiculous assertion. In a democracy, law and its interpretation is inherently political, an expression of our most deeply-held beliefs about the extent and expression of our rights, the meaning and reality of justice, the nature and scope of the state and the market, our very definition of what freedom, equality, democracy, privacy, independence, speech, mean.

Historically, however, the conflicts over the Court have gone through phases: before the post-1973 struggle over abortion, Court politics largely revolved around questions of civil rights (especially questions around affirmative action and de-segregation) which exploded onto the national consciousness in 1954, but had obviously been brewing for at least ten years before that. However, the longest-lasting political fight over the Court has been the fight over the nature of the state and the economy, and the competing claims of democracy and property rights, that arguably lasted from the end of the Civil War (many of the Civil Rights Cases that emasculated Reconstruction and its 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments revolved around questions of economic regulation) through to the 1940s.

I’d like to consider this particular political struggle, because I think it illuminates the critical importance of the law and the Supreme Court in shaping the most fundamental political decisions in our country’s history (which raises the question of how democratic our decision-making process really is), and because it shows that the true fight being carried on is not actually a fight over the law (because neither side has even been consistent regarding separation of powers, judicial independence or activism, strict constructionism versus more expansive legal philosophies, etc.), but rather a broader fight over the direction of national policy. In that sense, both sides believe that the court “is where policy is made” in our peculiar system of checks and balances, but not everyone’s honest about it.


Before I start, let me just say that there’s so much to learn about the relationship between the law and policy that this post is really inadequate. I would recommend the following books. William Novak’s The People’s Welfare, Michael Curtis’ No State Shall Abridge, Ned Beatty’s Age of Betrayal, William Forbath’s Law and the Shaping of the Labor Movement, Morton Horwitz’s Transformation of American Law, and Martin Sklar’s Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, just for starters. They’re books every citizen should read, and they make great summer reading (for amnesiacs and political/legal junkies).

The reason I’ve singled out Santa Clara is that it’s a great example of how a small, almost unnoticed change in the law can have huge political ramifications, and also a good example of how law, even Supreme Court super-schmancy Constitutional law, is really politics with fancier words.

First, the background - in the 19th century, the railroad was the economic thoroughfare of life, especially in rural farming districts and anywhere out West; agricultural products traveled from country to town, and from the rural West to the urban East via rail, industrial goods went from the cities to the countryside, and from the developed East to the developing West via the same routes. As a result, railroads were perfectly placed to extract massive monopoly rents from their unique position, and did – there’s a reason why the first big corporations were railroad corporations, why they invested massively in political lobbying, and why they received such political largess in the form of Federal aid and land-grants to finance railroad construction. At the same time, the railroads began diversifying their interests – they used their position as carriers and huge landowners to exert a huge influence over the agricultural market, often buying up large percentages of the yearly crop through their carrier fees, they were bought out or merged with coal and steel companies to vertically integrate the product from the mine to the mill to the shop, and so forth. This naturally touched off a huge reaction across the country – in the East, the American labor movement rose against industrial corporations starting in the 1870s and in the railroad industry first; on the Great Plains and out West, the Populist movement began to rise; but throughout the country, even your garden variety republicans turned against the railroads and embraced education.

Out in California, the major struggle was between the state and the railroads. The major California railroads, especially the Southern Pacific, not only dominated the agricultural market through their monopoly on commerce, but also through their massive land holdings, and their whole-sale purchase of the state legislature. As a result, the major impulse behind California Populism was the fight against the railroads, the drive to regulate railroad rates, to tax railroad property, and to reform the political system.

And Santa Clara was fundamentally a fight over whether the state could tax railroad property, in this case, the fencing along the right of way. Ultimately, a minor, almost piddling issue. The true consequences of the case was the obiter dicta that “The Court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution which forbids a state to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws applies to these corporations. We are all of opinion that it does.” With those two sentences, not even decided by the Court but rather added in a headnote by John Chandler Bancroft Davis, the Court’s Reporter (and coincidentally the former president of the Newburgh & New York Railroad Co.), a massive change in American law was made. Where previously corporations had been viewed with suspicion as artificial creations of the state that should be carefully regulated to protect the “salus populi” (the people’s welfare), now they were legal persons with all of the rights that had been judicially stripped away from the freedmen. As a result, any regulation, any tax, any government action that could be construed as damaging to the rights of a corporation could be challenged under law as a violation of equal protection, or substantive due process, or any other right under the 14th amendment.

This one decision massively upended the political balance between corporations and their adversaries, bringing the courts (and thus the law-enforcement powers of the state) into the fray against them. Railroad rate regulations to stop railroads from robbing farmers blnd or rigging markets in favor of particular trusts? Violations of due process. Health and safety regulations? Violations of equal protection if they weren’t the same for all industries. Unions and strikes? Out of the question. And so it went.

Part of the tragedy of the decline of a genuine liberalism in the legal profession, a shrinking away from the boldness of the Warren Court years, has been a hesitancy to challenge the assumptions about the free market and the nature of property that are at the very basis of the corporation’s advantage in the courts. This is especially problematic because the conservative legal movement has not been so hesitant. One of their major goals, along with eviscerating a woman’s right to choose or the right to privacy, is a full-blown assault on the modern reading of the Commerce Clause. As Clarence Thomas has written, “our case law has drifted far from the original understanding of the Commerce Clause. In a future case, we ought to temper our Commerce Clause jurisprudence in a manner that both makes sense of our more recent case law and is more faithful to the original understanding of that Clause.” This is the ball game right here. If the Commerce Clause goes, so does all economic regulation, so does any environmental or labor regulations, and so does anti-discrimination legislation in the field of employment or housing.

So when we gear up for Sotomayor, or for whoever Obama picks next, there is a much bigger fight we need to be ready for, and there is no reason why we should think defensively about what’s possible in the realm of the law.

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Like Water Dripping on a Stone: Rethinking the Politics of Single-Payer

In the run-up to the universal health-care bill being debated in Congress, one of the more contentious issues on the political left has been the question of single-payer and its’ inclusion or exclusion from the debate. Recently, we’ve seen single-payer advocates getting themselves arrested to draw media attention, a huge amount of back-and-forth within the progressive blogosphere (of which the links here are just a small sampling), and a good deal of fear about the public option getting watered down or eliminated.

I feel somewhat ambivalent in this debate, in part because I agree with the policy of single-payer advocates, but I find myself turned off by their political style. And I think a lot of it has to do with a particular theory of activism and an ahistorical understanding of how social policy happens that I really disagree with.

Especially as we draw closer to the crucial mark-up and voting phases, and ever closer to passage of the Baucus/Kennedy/Dingell/Obama health care legislation, it’s imperative that the progressive movement think very carefully about what we want to accomplish.

Background:

One of the ironies about the debate over the current health care reform versus single-payer is that the basis for the current plan (and indeed, the rough consensus between the Clinton, Edwards, and Obama plans during the 2008 primaries), the “Hacker Plan” – was designed as a compromise measure between gradualists who favored things like the exension of SCHIP in the wake of the Clinton health reform disasters and single-payer advocates.

For those of you not familiar with the Hacker Plan (available here), it basically consists of three key elements:

1. Employer Pay-Or-Play Mandate – Employers are required either to provide health care for their employees or to pay a payroll tax that goes into a fund for covering the uninsured.
2. Individual Mandate Plus Sliding Subsidy – Individuals not already covered by their employer would be required to purchase health insurance, either from a public or private insurer; income-based subsidies would ensure that the cost of insurance would be reasonable.
3. A New Public Insurer – A new, Medicare-like public insurer would be created to act as a competitor/yardstick to private health insurers and to ensure that there is an “insurer of last resort.”

With some alterations (a health care purchasing pool, new emphasis on reforming private insurance, new emphasis on reducing the growth of health care costs, new emphasis on cutting premiums and out-of-pocket costs for the insured, new emphasis on extending SCHIP/Medicare/Medicaid as part of the solution), this is essentially the plan that is being debated.

Single-payer advocates are upset that they are basically being shut out of the debate, and they have a right to be. However, I believe that a certain amount of the anger directed at advocates for “public option” reform is due to the fact that the Hacker Plan has become more or less consensus within a broad segment of the Democratic Party, from as far left as Ted Kennedy/EPI/labor to as far right as Max Baucus and Hillary Clinton, although there remains to be seen how extensive the Blue Dog/Evan Bayh contingent is, and how much they’re actually going to remain outside the consensus on this issue. This has meant that while the single-payer advocates have some base – especially with CTA/NNA (the nurses’ unions) and various health care grassroots groups (HCAN, etc.) – a lot of its natural supporters are now in the “public option” camp, which reduces the constituency for single-payer at the legislator and lobbyist levels. Even if single-payer was to “get a seat at the table,” they’d find that the other chairs – those not reserved for industry – are already taken up by “public option” advocates, and would find themselves on the losing side of a number of internal debates, and we’d probably end up exactly where we are today.

Like I said earlier, I feel very ambivalent about this, because I am ideologically and emotionally sympathetic to single-payer as a policy goal, but I feel really turned off when I see the tactics and strategies being carried out by single-payer advocates as they try to push their ideas back into the debate. For me, this isn’t a theoretical issue, it’s quite personal.

Humphrey Cooper Attewell, my great-grandfather. was elected to the British Parliament in 1945 as the Labor M.P for Harborough. As such, he cast his vote for the establishment of the National Health Service in 1946. The NHS was at the time and remains to this day the one of the most progressive health care systems in the world – a system in which the hospitals belong to the state, where the doctors, nursers, and other medical workers are public employees, and where health care is provided to all for free as a right. In a sense, therefore, the story of single-payer health care is the story of where I come from and who I am.

Yet I find myself oddly turned off when I listen to single-payer advocates, in part because I really disagree with the manner in which they are attempting to push their agenda, both in terms of their tactics and their larger strategy. I don’t find the tactics of single-payer advocates compelling in the slightest; I think direct actions and civil disobedience directed at the chairman of the committee who’s going to decide what health care bill will ever emerge on the floor of the Senate to be totally without merit. Simply put, it does not advance the cause of single-payer at all to piss off Senator Max Baucus, especially since single-payer advocates do not have the resources or the political strength necessary to seriously challenge him either in Montana or in the Senate Democratic Caucus. Strategically, I find the insistence on an all-or-nothing single-payer system to be utterly misguided and contrary to all the lessons that history can teach us about how advances in social policy actually happen.

Take a look at two of the most single-payer nations out there – Canada and the U.K. The Canadian health care system emerged, not in a single all-or-nothing burst, but rather in a gradual process of expansion. In 1944, Tommy Douglas of the CCF (Canada’s socialist part at the time) was elected premier of Saskatchewan on a platform that included free hospital care to all citizens. In 1946, his government passed the Saskatchewan Hospitalization Bill, which provided hospital care (not including physicians’ bills, prescriptions, etc.) to most, but not all residents. It took time to build up enough finances to cover all residents, and to extend coverage to all servcices; full Medicare for the province didn’t come in until 1959. Other provinces began experimenting with universal health coverage; Alberta establishing a pre-paid system that covered 90% of their residents in 1950. It took longer for the system to spread across the country: the first Hospital Insurance and Diagnostic Act in 1957 merely provided 50% of the costs of running health care programs; in 1962, the national government passed legislatuion to include phsyicians costs in the federal susbsidy; in 1966, the national government passed the Medical Care (Medicare) Act, which enabled provinces to establish full Medicare systems based ont he Saskatchewan model; and in 1984, the Canada Health Act established the modern system that Canadians know today.

In the U.K, the move towards single-payer began in 1911, with the introduction of the National Insurance Act by Lloyd George’s Liberal government. This legislation established a national system of health insurance, funded by payroll contributions from workers, employers, and contributions from general taxation – quite different than the current system. However, this system only covered certain trades and occupations of workers paid into the system, and the relatively low government contribution meant that coverage could often be quite expensive. During WWII, the pressures of the mass bombing of civilian populations led to the creation of the Emergency Health Service, which put all medical professionals into government service, created a coordinated national hospital system, and so forth. And finally in 1946, the new Labor government passed the National Health Services Act, establishing the modern National Health Service (NHS) on the basis of three central principles, that services should be free at the point of use, that general taxation should be the source of financing for the system, and that everyone would be eligible for care.

The point of this history lesson is that single-payer has historically developed in a gradual fashion – the Canadian system took forty years to develop into the modern Medicare system, and the British system took more than thirty years. In both cases, it wasn’t a single piece of legislation that made single-payer a reality, but the gradual achievement of partial steps that, like water dripping on a stone, wore down institutional resistance to single-payer.

Which leads us back to the current debate. I think that single-payer advocates should rethink their attachment to immediacy and to all-or-nothing when it comes to achieving their goal of a single-payer system; moreover, I think this will lead towards a re-evaluation of tactics, and the embrace of a strategy that emphasizes allying with public-option advocates to gain entrance into the coalition, so that they can begin pushing for those elements that would make the current proposal a true stepping-stone to single-payer. Here, I’m primarily thinking about ensuring the inclusion of a public option, making that public option as Medicare-like as possible, pushing for more generous income subsidies and more comprehensive minimum stnadards for healthcare plans, and support for states to experiment with single-payer. The passage of any major health care reform would in itself be a major step forward, in that it would break the now forty year gap in major social policy achievements, it would de-stabilize and de-motivate opponents ot health care reform, it would create a political atmosphere more open to single-payer by making universal health care a new “third rail,” and it would create pressures and interest groups to reform and improve and expand the new system.

Furthermore, in policy, passing the bill is only half the battle – implementation is the longer and more crucial phase. Here, I think one way that single-payer advocates can begin to broaden their base while pushing for their objectives is to begin a national campaign to sign people up for the public option, pushing the system closer to single-payer with every person signed up, and concretely solving the crisis of the uninsured. Here, single-payer advocates could usefully work with allies within the labor movement to push all 12.4% of the workforce that’s currently unionized into the public plan, and other social justice groups (union organizing campaigns, civil rights groups, GLBT groups, feminist groups) could plug into the campaign by folding signing people up for public health care as part of their ongoing missions. Moreover, single-payer advocates, by being slightly outside the coalition of public-option advocates, would then be free to begein “raiding” the private insurance market, taking the fight to the private insurance companies by mobilizing their friends, families, neighbors, and co-workers into switching from private to public insurance; you could target major employers with public insurance drives, especially focusing on corporations like GM, Ford, and Chrystler, where the argument for a single-payer (as opposed to employer-based) health care system might resonate.

In my mind, that’s the winning strategy for single-payer.

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Strange Fruits of Victory: A Vision of the Democratic Party in 2040

Note: This is a cross-post from my new group blog, The Realignment Project.

One of the side-effects (collateral damage if you want to be ironic) of the 2008 election, and the broader public reaction against the Bush Administration, has been a massive shift in partisan identification away from the Republican Party and toward the Democratic Party.

One example of this trend is the most recent Pew Poll on partisan identification that shows a shift from a tie of 43% to 43% in 2002 to a 53% Democratic and 36% Republican split. This follows several other polls that suggest a massive decline in Republican identification and a smaller, but still significant increase in Democratic identification.

All of which has caused a bit of speculation over whether the Republican Party will survive as an institution, and what this will mean for the future of American politics. Will the Republican Party collapse, and what will fill its place? Will there be a new second party, and what will it look like? Will the Democratic Party become the lone major party, and how long would their sole dominance last?

For the purposes of a thought experiment, I’d like follow one particular line of speculation in order to tease out some major questions about the current nature and future direction of the Democratic Party.

One of the advantages of taking a historical approach to a question like this is that American history luckily gives us examples of how this kind of political realignment has happened in the past. Unusually, the United States seems to experience major political realignment on a fairly regular basis, so we have several models that could tell us what the collapse of a political party might look like:

• A New Second Party – in this model, the fall of one of the two major political parties results in its place being taken by a new second party that assembles a new coalition, often borrowing from elements of the fallen political party’s coalition and adding new groups in order to forge a new and more durable coalition. The best example of this from American history is the rise of the Republican Party from the wreckage of the Whig Party. The Whig Party’s Northern and Southern coalition, previously formed on the basis of economic policy, was destabilized by the introduction of a new issue – slavery – into the political debate. The new Republican Party brought Northern Whigs, anti-slavery Democrats, Free Soilers, Nativists, and abolitionists into a new anti-slavery coalition. It’s interesting to note, however, that the Republican Party’s economic policy largely followed Whig lines: support for a national banking policy, a protective tariff for industrial goods, internal improvements (public works, usually in the field of transportation infrastructure), and nationalism over regionalism.
• The Dominant Party Breaks Into Two New Parties – in this model, the fall of one of the two major parties results in the remaining period experiencing a long period of dominance. Ultimately, underlying tensions within the ruling party’s coalition built to the point of fracture, resulting in two new parties. Here, the best example is the emergence of the Whig Party in 1828-1832 out of the National Republicans (who themselves had emerged from the ex-Federalist New England wing of the Democratic-Republican Party). The divisions between the Whigs and Jacksonian Democrats had many causes, including personality conflicts and divisions over separation of powers issues, but chief among them were the expression of economic policy divisions that had persisted for some time, with Whigs following the more Federalist lines of John Quincy Adams and Andrew Gallatin, and Jacksonian Democrats cleaving more towards the Jeffersonian economic philosophy.
  
• The Second Party Gets Its Act Together, But Changes Dramatically – in this model, one of the two parties comes close to political oblivion and spends some time in “the wilderness,” before adapting itself to suit a new coalition, new ideological position, and/or geographic or demographic changes. In some ways, this is the most frequent case – one can look to the transformation of the Democratic Party in 1932 into the New Deal Coalition after spending 10 years in the minority, the re-emergence of the Republican Party as the party o anti-communism in the 1950s following nearly 20 years of political isolation, the Cold War Liberal dominance of the Democratic Party in the 1960s, the re-constitution of the Republican Party into the party of the New Right from 1964 to the 1980s, the emergence of New Democrats in the 1980s and 1990s, and so forth. In each case, the party takes on new constituents (urban workers and African Americans in the New Deal coalition, Southern Whites in the Reagan coalition, and so forth) or new issues (anti-Communism in the 1950s, civil rights int he 1960s).
  

Ultimately, I’m persuaded by polling data that shows a continuing trend of declining Republican identification, which suggests that the failures of the Bush Administration have not merely damaged the reputation of George W. Bush, but have also damaged the long-term reputation of the Republican Party as well. In addition to the partisan damage, I think economic conservatism has been badly damaged by the Bush recessions, and it will take some time before the public is willing to support more pro-market policies. Furthermore, I think that surveys of political ideology – as can be found here and here - suggest that the political environment is likely to shift leftwards for some time to come, making it more difficult to establish a new second party. This evidence is especially persuasive on social issues, suggesting that cultural conservatism may be in for a more long-lasting decline, as younger generations turn against cultural conservative issues across the political spectrum.

What I think will happen, therefore, is a period of Democratic Party dominance for the next 10 to 20 years. However, I think tensions will gradually emerge between its left and right flanks over economic and social policy that may very well lead to the establishment of two new parties. What we may have in 2040 is one party that is socially liberal and economically liberal – a genuine Progressive party, although probably partaking less of the class politics of a Social Democratic Party than the “social organism” politics of Progressivism – and another party that is socially liberal and economically laissez-faire – what Europeans would recognize as a Liberal Party. The reason for this is that as moderate and liberal Republicans desert the Republican Party for the Democrats, there will be a wider base for this kind of politics – at least after expansions of the welfare state (especially in the area of universal health care) and the return of economic prosperity have given middle class and affluent Democrats the sense of economic security necessary for the return to a more New Democratic attitude towards markets, especially given the availability of corporate financing for such a political shift.

However, it’s hard to tell what will happen. It may well be that the Republican Party will jettison cultural conservatism and become a European-style Liberal Party – if that does happen, I don’t think it will happen any time soon. At the very least I would think it would take a period of sustained losses in 2010, 2012, and probably 2014 and 2016 to really produce enough of a scare to make that happen. It would also be wrong to suggest that any of this could happen on its own – any political shifts we might see over the next 10 or 20 years will require huge amounts of political work. At the very least, we will need to see key policy victories in the Obama administration – with universal health care being the most important among them – in order to create the political climate for an enduring left shift.

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

"Democrat Socialist:" Would a Party By Any Other Name Smell As Sweet?

In one further step toward political oblivion it seems likely that, when the Republican National Committee meets next week, they will approve a resolution to refer to the Democratic Party as the "Democrat Socialist Party" in all formal communications. Thus, Republicans have managed to combine their 5th-grader's taunt of refusing to use the proper suffix for our party and their ridiculous habit of labeling anything other than massive regressive tax cuts as socialist.

In even more amusing turn of events, Frank Llewellyn, the national director of the actual Democratic Socialists of America, is apparently offended by the change. According to Dave Weigel of the Washington Independent, Llewellyn said "“It’s objectionable..because they’re giving socialism a bad name by associating it with the Democrats, who are the second-most capitalist party in the world."

But rather than simply labeling this event as comedy and moving on, I think we should rather treat this as an opportunity to reflect on the meaning of our party and the future of American political thought.


What Does it Mean to Be a Democrat?

Part of what makes this event so ironic is that conservative elements in the Republican Party clearly believe that the Democratic Party has a much more coherent ideological posture, and a much more left-leaning ideological posture than we actually have. This isn't anything new: Republicans called the Democratic Party an agent of "creeping socialism" in the 1930s when the Party consisted of a tenuous alliance between urban liberals and southern reactionaries; Republicans considered Bill Clinton - who was, before, during, and after his presidency a moderate right-of-center Democrat - a dangerous radical, an unreconstructed McGovernite.

In reality, the Democratic Party is still an extremely ideologically diverse party, running from socialists (Bernie Sanders isn't in the party formally, but you could certainly find his ideological kin in parts of the Democratic Party) to conservatives like Ben Nelson. In some ways, we're more left-leaning than we were during the Clinton years - on the use of economic stimulus, the importance of public investments versus deficit spending, the public plan in health insurance reform, some elements of foreign policy and trade. In other ways, we've become more conservative - we don't talk about gun control much any more, I would argue we haven't significantly shifted on financial regulations yet, and so on.

And that's something I've always considered to be somewhat problematic. An open tent is a wonderful thing, but it does present certain problems. One of the largest is what overall direction we want to have as a party on the country. As one of my old mentors once said, one's politics should always begin with a vision of how you would want the world to look like if you were in charge, and then working how to get from where you are to where you want to go. Historically, political parties at their core are those visions. Communist parties had a vision of the end of capitalism and a new world to follow; in a different way, so socialist and social-democratic parties have a vision of a better world. Even conservative parties, like our own Republican parties, have a vision of an imagined past, a golden age they seek to return to, a sense of tradition they want to preserve.

At various times, the Democratic Party has had strong visions, although never uncontested. The New Deal vision was dominant, although challenged by the Southern Democrats, from 1932-1948; what has often been referred to as "Cold War Liberalism" was quite strong from '48 through to the collapse of the "Cold War consensus"; we've had "civil rights" Democrats and "New Left" Democrats, and so on. Yet for all the strum and drang that we hear about Progressive Democrats versus Establishment/DLC/DINO/whatever else you want to call them, it's more often been a conflict over policy or strategy, as opposed to ideology. Even within DailyKos, for example, there's a good amount of ideological diversity and fluidity, and a certain disagreement over what ideological terms even mean. Witness for example the lively debate in this thread over the difference between "progressive" and "liberal."

What Does "Socialist" Mean in 2009?

Of course, the irony of the Republican's newest rebranding exercise is compounded by the fact that it appears that socialism is becoming less and less of a negative label. While I take Rasmussen's results with a degree of skepticism, I'm less surprised that "adults under 30 are essentially evenly divided: 37% prefer capitalism, 33% socialism, and 30% are undecided."

After all, you would have to be older than 20 years old to have even been born at a time when the Cold War had any real meaning. I'm 25, and I only vaguely recall the feeling of a world divided between the Soviet Union and the United States. I was woken up as a child to witness the fall of the Berlin Wall - none of my undergraduate students were even born in 1989. For them, socialism (if it means anything) is something they associate with campus radicals (who are essentially harmless), Europe (which they tend to like), and attacks on Barack Obama. And while I'm not the first to say this, the relentless Republican association of any progressive policy or politics with socialism I think will have the long-term effect of eroding public fear of socialism, at least in so far as socialism is understood to mean broadly progressive public policy like progressive tax cuts and increases, universal health care, Keynesian fiscal policy, and so forth.

But the interesting thing is that even the Republicans seem to have given up the ghost when it comes to the Evil Empire. When Republicans accuse Democrats of being socialists, they tend to refer to the social democratic parties of Europe - Mitt Romney accuses the Democrats of trying to make the U.S look like Sweden, and Michael Steel believes that Democratic rule is "marching America toward European-style socialism." The problem is that "European-style socialism" isn't very scary - no secret police, no show trials, no one-party state, no gulags. It means higher taxes, more regulation, universal health care, more social spending, a bigger public sector, but that's not something that bothers most people.

What Would It Mean For the Democratic Party to Become a Social Democratic (or Democratic Socialist) Party?

All of this makes the idea that the Democratic Party is a Social Democratic Party or a Democratic Socialist Party rather ironic, because those would be two very strong visions of the future to base a party around.

Democratic socialism broadly refers to an political philosophy that, unlike social democrats, does not accept the existence and continuation of capitalism as necessary but unlike Leninist communists abjures the idea of violent revolution as the means of achieving its end. You can think of Eugene V. Debs as an archetypal democratic socialist - someone who viewed capitalism as an inherently immoral and exploitative institution, but who sought to abolish poverty through the electoral victory of the Socialist Party and the passage of legislation. The modern Democratic Socialists of America - who might well have a trademark infringement case on their hands- are a group that emerged out of several factional disputes in the 1970s and 1980s, and have been closely associated with the American democratic socialist Michael Harrington. As their manifesto states, "we are socialists because we reject an international economic order sustained by private profit," which fulfills the first point of the description, while their statement that "our vision of socialism is a profoundly democratic one, rooted in the belief that individuals can only reach their full potential in a society that embodies the values of liberty, equality, and solidarity" fulfills the second.

Social Democrats historically diverged from their socialist colleagues over the question of the question both of political change versus violent revolution, but also over the question of whether socialism would be achieved in a sudden revolution or a gradual evolution,

The point of all of this is that if the Democratic Party would actually become a social-democratic party, it would be a massive ideological shift comparable to nothing since the dramatic transformation of the Democratic Party from the party of laissez-faire into the party of the New Deal in the 1930s, or the transformation of the Democratic Party from the party of the Segregated South to the party of Civil Rights in the 1960s.

Ultimately, it would involve the Democratic Party grappling with two issues we don't really deal with - first, our relation to capitalism, and second, our conception of class.

On the issue of capitalism, our party is badly divided between those who are pro-market (especially in regards to major questions about regulation, especially financial regulation, taxation of corporations, estates, and high-income earners, impact of climate change on corporate behavior, copyright, patents and other forms of intellectual property, and the nature of free trade) and those who are more pro-worker, or pro-consumer, or pro-environment. If the Democratic Party would become a social democratic party, we would have a single vision: that unregulated capitalism is an inhumane socio-economic system, that the economy should be reformed and regulated to gradually move towards a different economic order where basic necessities are a matter of human rights rather than ability to pay and where workers have a voice in their working conditions. .

On the issue of class, our party and indeed many if not most Americans have an extremely fuzzy conception of what class means. You can see this in Democratic messaging which frequently conflates "working families" with "middle class families" or "working poor" with "working families," which uses the term "middle class" to include people making $30k a year and people making $225k a year. If we were a Social Democratic Party, we would have a very clear idea, based on hundreds of years of thinking about what it means to be a worker, and a solid sense that we are on the side of the working class when it comes down to a clash between their interests and the interests of corporations or employers.

What Might We Become?

Ultimately, I don't think the Democratic Party will become a social democratic or democratic socialist party, even in the event that the country as a whole shifts substantially to the left. To be frank, I don't think the ideological foundations for a capitalism-and-class based political party. If I'm wrong, I'd love to hear it.

What I do think could happen is for the Democratic Party to become a genuine Progressive Party, in the sense of the Progressive Party of 1912 and 1924 (interesting historical note: in 1912, Theodore Roosevelt won 27% of the vote and 88 electoral votes as a Progressive; in 1924, Robert LaFollette won 17% of the vote and 13 electoral votes as a Progressive).

The major difference between socialist or even social-democratic parties and progressive parties is that while the former are focused on class conflict, the latter tend to believe in social organic-ism, a belief that society is organized around functional groups rather than individuals, that all groups play an important roll in contributing to the whole, and that all groups are part of a single "industrial commonwealth." As members of a commonwealth, all citizens are entitled to social and economic rights and protections against the "hazards of modern life," and are entitled to a seat at the table in the governance of industry. Rather than seeing class conflict as between the working class and the bourgeoisie, progressives see conflict in populist terms between "the people" and "the powerful" or "special interests" or the "trusts," or between the "producing classes" and the "parasites."

In my opinion, I think if universal health care, EFCA, and climate change pass, and if the broad turn from deficit reduction and balanced budgets to Keynesian stimulus and public investments continues, then we may, in time move to a political environment in which the Democratic Party can be a Progressive Party, while democratic socialists and social democrats can exist as a legitimate part of the political culture, the left-most edge of "mainstream" politics.

But in order to get there, we will have to do a lot of political work to push our party to be more progressive, and eventually confront the more pro-corporate members of our party. As Frederick Douglass once said:

"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without demand. It never did and it never will."

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Industrial Democracy: The True Meaning of EFCA

The back-and-forth over the Employee Free Choice Act is often hard to decipher; like negotiations over health care or climate change, the real work is happening quietly behind the closed doors of committees and Congressional offices while the propaganda wars rage above them. Occasionally, there's a sudden announcement as a senator picks sides, but that's it.

It's a bit like a classic medieval siege - all the visible action is the catapults flinging giant rocks through the air, but beneath the ground, there are teams of miners burrowing under the walls.

But for all the confusion, it's important to take a step back and ask ourselves what the true importance of EFCA really is.

Where We Stand:

At the moment, the picture for EFCA is rather blurred. Most Democrats are on board, virtually every Republican is against, and significant numbers of moderate-to-conservative Democrats are walking sideways (Bayh, Lincoln, even our own Senator Feinstein). Arlen's Specter's switch to the Democratic party and non-switch on EFCA is a good sort of symbol of the ambiguity - neither here nor there.

Ezra Klein points out an interesting piece in the Washington Post:

That approach is being floated in Congress by, among others, Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Pa.), who suggested that an election be held within three weeks of the union filing such a request with the National Labor Relations Board and that union organizers be allowed "equal time under identical circumstances" to make their pitch to employees if management has held "captive audience" speeches making the anti-union case.

Floated "compromises" like this are difficult to suss out. Specter's compromise, that's being backed by Costco, Starbucks, and Whole Foods (and Lanny Davis), basically chops out card check and arbitration, but adds in a shorter, 15-day election campaign, guarantees "equal access" (organizers would have access to the workplace during the workday, on equal terms so that if management holds a captive audience meeting, labor gets one too), and increased unfair labor practices penalties. There's also another proposal being backed by Jay Krupin, called the 70/50/30 plan, that allows for card-check if you bring in 70% in cards, that chops the election campaign to 15 days if you bring in 50% in cards, and that guarantees "equal access" if you bring in 30% of cards.

These compromises leave me feeling rather ambivalent. On the one hand, passing EFCA straight-up would be best, and I still think there's a reasonable shot at getting it if Specter and the sideways Dems are willing to vote for cloture and then against the bill so that it passes with less than 60. On the other, I think these compromises are positive indications - first, because they indicate that the waverers and at least part of the business community doesn't think they can actually defeat the bill without paying a big price, and second, because it's focusing real attention on the unfairness of our labor elections system and forcing opponents to justify captive-audience meetings and barring labor organizers from campaigning on company property.

As Ezra points out, "The corporate community opposes this, too. But having predicated their assault on a principled belief in "workplace democracy," it's extremely hard for them to credibly oppose reforms that would help bring democracy to the workplace...the business community has made a bad decision centering their counterattack around workplace democracy."

These days, I am feeling more confident about the prospects of passing something - and that's what really matters. Especially when we're caught up in the passion of the moment, trying to push this bill through, it's important to remember our history and why laws are really important.

On June 16, 1933, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) into law. Among other things, the law established a system of industrial codes by which corporations could set price floors, production agreements, market share agreements, and so on. The sop to labor was Section 7a, which read:

Employees shall have the right to organize and bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing, and shall be free from the interference, restraint or coercion of employers of labor, or their agents, in the designation of such representatives or in self-organization or in other activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid or protection

This provision was almost entirely ignored by employers, who continued to establish company unions and enforce the open shop, and the law itself would be declared unconstitutional two years later. Yet 7a lead to a huge upsurge in labor organizing, as millions of workers surged into the AFL. Why such a change, even when the law hadn't actually changed?

Because after June 16, 1933, labor organizers could go into any workplace in America and say "the president wants you to join the union," could point to 7a and reframe the entire conversation about joining a union as being the exercise of your rights as an American, and cast the conflict between workers and bosses as a conflict between patriotic citizens upholding the rule of law, and greedy, lawbreaking fat cats. In Fabric of Defeat, Bryant Simon writes about textile mill strikes where workers marched on mills defended with machine-gun nests and private armies, waving the American flag and led by preachers who declared that the union crusade was a fulfillment of Christ's Sermon on the Mount. Symbols matter, and in the United States, the presidency and the law are still important symbols.

Labor historians talk about the impulse behind this phase of the 1930s union upsurge as "industrial democracy." Industrial democracy is a remarkably fluid term that at its most expansive form imagines workers owning the factory and organized through an internal democracy with management elected by the workers; or a system in which workers and unions have a say not just in bargaining for wages and benefits, but also deciding questions of pricing and design and organization and production;or a tripartite collaboration between labor, business, and government. But another form that labor historians talk about is instilling the "rule of law" inside the factory. If we think about it, the workspace is one of the least American places we live in - somewhere where the concepts of free speech or the rights of the individual or equality before the law, things we automatically assume are functioning everywhere we go in America- do not operate.

The idea of industrial democracy in the wake of 1933 was that 7a had extended the rule of law into the factory, that you had the fundamental right to tell your foreman that he was a son-of-a-bitch, the right to be treated with dignity when you needed to use the bathroom or eat lunch or even talk, or the fundamental right to not be fired without a good reason. And it was the belief in those rights that brought so many people under the union banner, even when the rights in question existed only in their minds.

So if we can pass a law, even if it gets us part of the way, if we can get a picture of Barack Obama signing a piece of paper and telling the tv audience that they have a legal right to join a union, that might be all the opening the labor movement needs to begin the hard work of changing this country.

Note bene, though. This does not mean that any compromise is legitimate, or desirable. To me, there are some "bright lines" that have to be honored:

1. Either Card Check or Fair Elections - in negotiations, it's always a good idea to go in asking 200% of what you want so you end up closer to 100% rather than 50%. Thus, while it's tempting for Democrats who are walking sideways on EFCA to look for a compromise that ditches the "controversial" card check provisions, there has to be some serious returns in exchange. Equal access and 15-days is a bare minimum; negotiators should ask for the abolition of one-on-one meetings without a union rep present, the abolition of the prophecy doctrine, campaign finance for union elections, and anything else necessary for truly fair elections.
   
2. Binding Arbitration - according to the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, 33-46% of successfully-recognized bargaining units fail to reach a first contract, because employers can easily and painlessly extend bargaining, appeal, stretch things out until workers get frustrated and give up. If you look at the compromises being offered by retailers, arbitration is the one thing they don't mention, because it's hard to defend dragging your feet, but it's also a key fulcrum of labor relations. I think labor should fight hardest here, and demand some form of binding arbitration for first contracts as the "drop dead" line on EFCA.
   
3. Labor Penalties - sadly, this is one area where employers don't care and cheerfully throw in expanded unfair labor practices penalties, because even tripling the costs makes the accounting come out in favor of firing and paying the penalty down the road. Labor should not "weight" compromises here very heavily; even if senators start larding up penalties, it's unlikely to make a difference unless punitive damages come on the table.
   

So there you have it.

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Devil's Advocate: Does Democracy Require Clean Elections?

Recently, there was a bit of a stir when, after the DSCC and DCCC put together a special Obama fundraiser with no lobbyist or PAC money for this summer, a number of progressive-types, like Laurence Lessig, Chris Bowers, Glen Greenwald and other big-name bloggers formed themselves into a group calling itself Stop Fake Reform and penned an open letter calling on the DSCC and DCCC to "ban PAC and lobbyist contributions 365 days a year."

A couple years ago I would have cheered this on as a noble reform effort. These days, I find myself less and less amenable to this particular brand of reformism. Because to me, there's a big difference for calling for the banning of corporate donations and calling for the banning of PAC/lobbyist money. The former is, in my eyes, a real reform fight aimed at winning the Democratic Party back from elements of corporate America (especially the financial industry) that have a significant purchase on decision-making, and the other is an elitist charge at a windmill that betrays problematic thinking about democracy.

*Explanation over the fold*

The problem is that the ACLU and Amnesty International are lobbyists, and so is the NAACP and LULAC and la Raza and Asian-American groups and Native American groups, and so is the AFL-CIO, Change to Win, and all their member unions, and so is National Organization for Women and every other major feminist political group, and so is the Sierra Club and the NRDC. EMILYS LIST is a PAC, and so is MoveOn, and so is Act Blue and BlogPAC. In short, every element of the Democratic Party, from labor to African-Americans to women to environmental groups, organizes themselves into lobbies and PACs, because that's how you organize in our current political system.

What makes this effort all the stranger is that many of the signees - Laurence Lessig of Change Congress and Chris Bowers of Open Left are just two examples - would be barred from contributing to the DCCC and DSCC under their proposed rules, since Lessig's group lobbies and does fund raising, and Chris Bowers is the treasurer for BlogPac.

Ultimately, where this effort is coming from is an ideological position that dislikes political institution and hierarchy, and that believes that Democratic politics should be carried about by freely-associating individuals. Institutions can be corrupted or taken over, hierarchies are elitist and too removed from the people, whereas the grassroots are noble, democratic, and genuine. It has a long intellectual tradition - it can be found both in the liberal (for the emphasis on individuals over groups) and republican (for the distrust of elites and the valorization of the common people) wings of the Enlightenment. During the American Revolution, you could find this kind of thinking in the denunciations of the King's "evil ministers," the dislike of "factions" and "cabals," the simultaneous belief in voters exercising their individual powers of reason and in voters collectively striving for the common good.

What these 4,192 signees want is a purer, higher-minded form of politics, a politics without self-interest or corruption or elites, a politics ultimately without politics. And they're not alone - you see this attitude all the time when people fulminate against "career politicians," or when people run for political office claiming to be "not a politician."

There's just one problem - it's a bad idea. An ideal democracy, where high-minded individuals ponder the ins and outs of public policy and strive to persuade each other in reasoned debate without resorting to the blunt instruments of money or propaganda or party organizations, may sound great in theory, but it just doesn't work. Politics is inherently political; it's rude and crude and vibrant and alive, and it always has been.

Consider the origins of democracy. People often point to Classical Athens as a pure democracy - all citizens met in council directly and the true leaders of the Deimos were individuals who used the power of their rhetoric to persuade their fellow citizens; elections, even for executive officers, were disparaged as too aristocratic, and Athenians selected members of the executive council by means of random lottery, so strong was their belief that anybody could rule. There's just one problem with this vision - it's a fantasy. To begin with, Athenian democracy excluded all women, all non-citizens, all children born not of two Athenian citizens, and was perfectly compatible with the owning of slaves. However, even within the normal constraints of ancient civilizations, Athenian democracy was vibrantly partisan and not a bit corrupt. Cleisthenes, who overthrew the tyrant Hippias and was hailed as the "father of Athenian democracy," was also an aristocrat who turned to the democratic side after losing a power struggle. Themistocles, who led Athens and the Greeks to victory against Persia at Salamis, was known for being a political spin-master who hustled working-class votes, systematically exiled his political rivals, and who bribed widely to achieve his goals. Pericles, who led Athens through its Golden Age, also ostracized his political opponents, pushed through laws providing free (state-subsidized) theater tickets for the poor, built the Parthenon as a massive vote-winning public works project, and provided wages for juries (another crowd-pleaser). In short, classical democracy was a rough-and-tumble affair, where radicals and aristocrats fought with propaganda, "walk-around money," free theater, character assassination, and banishment laws to win leadership of the deimos.

If we fast-forward to the modern form of democracy, that emerged from the revolutions of the 18th and 19th century, you also get an image of a vibrant and messy form of democracy. As Gordon Wood and George Rude and many other historians have shown, it was precisely the irrational, ideological, excitable, beer-and-circuses crowd that gave birth to the democratic revolution and without whom there would be no democracies in either the United States or France. Gary B. Nash and Eric Foner have both shown that urban political machines were alive and well in the American colonies before, during, and after the Revolution, issuing endorsements, running slates and passing out slate cards, conducting GOTV campaigns and street rallies, and yes, raising and spending money.

The great political machines that arose in the Age of Jackson and flourished through the turn of the century, the best known of which was New York's Tammany Hall, are often reviled as corrupting, anti-democratic, and morally bankrupt organizations that ruined the republic until liberal reformers could restore it during the Progressive Era. Yet the irony is that while the machines were certainly corrupt, they were operationally quite democratic - voter turnout at the height of the machines' influence routinely hovered at the 80-90% rate as competing machines fought for every last vote. And if they lacked the keen attention to public policy that progressive intellectuals would later wield, and if they were still as bent as corkscrews, their hearts were for universal suffrage. From the beginning, Tammany Hall fought against property qualifications for the vote: first by coordinating joint purchasing of property in 1800, then in agitating for the abolition of property qualifications for suffrage in 1827, worked to register immigrants, and continually fought against elite attempts to re-institute property qualifications or establish literacy tests and residency requirements, including major attempts in 1868 and 1876 to roll back universal suffrage in favor of suffrage for the rich.

In short, the history of democracy is the history of a grand, messy experiment in collective action, carried out on street corners and in marches, a fundamentally public and group activity.

Which makes the label of "reform" a tricky one. Among elite reformers in the Progressive Era, people who believed that voting should be a secret, individual, protected process; that government should be professionalized, and that political machines should be smashed, there has always been the undercurrent of dislike and distrust of poor people, immigrants (especially Catholics), and non-white voters "corrupting" the political process, and the desire to see the political process dominated by men of the right class. A lot of ink has been spilled about the extent of anti-democratic or elitist sentiment in the Progressive movement, but that's beyond the point. The question is what impact a lot of their reforms had. The written Australian ballot - introduced at a time when 17% of the population was illiterate - had a huge impact on the voting behavior of immigrants and African-Americans. The introduction of modern voter registration systems in the U.S offered huge opportunities to restrict access to the ballot on grounds of illiteracy, failure to pay taxes, or other qualifications. Non-partisan elections and the initiative system, especially in the state of California, have had the perverse effect of handing power over to incumbents (who have the name recognition to, for example, win both parties' primaries over less well-known opponents) and the wealthy (who have the cash to fund ballot initiative drives).

In sum, I think we need to be more careful about how we think about who counts as "reformers" and who counts as "special interests" and what "reforms" actually mean. Campaign finance is one of those areas where the rhetoric of reform often gets in the way of clear thinking about what we want. Ultimately, it's not the labor groups or the environmental groups or the women's groups or the NAACP that do or should bother reformers. The real threat to democracy is the unequal balance of power between the rich and the poor, between ordinary citizens and corporations in the political process. So as a campaign finance matter, I'd welcome the prohibition of all corporate lobbyist and PAC money from the Democratic Party. I'd also welcome measures to establish public funding of political parties and campaigns to balance; I'd welcome a progressive matching fund that added to the political donations of poor and working class voters and taxed the contributions of the wealthy.

But there is a difference between democracy as a process and democracy as a spirit, and my disagreement with the 30 would-be reformers mentioned above is that I think they focus too much on process (lobbying and PACs = bad) and not enough on spirit (poor people contributing = good, corporations = bad). Moreover, I would challenge anyone who believes in democracy as an atomic process of solitary individuals casting their votes as expressions of belief, and the resulting distrust of political groups as "special interests." Democracy is a collective process, the exercise of power by groups of people, and in such a system, all groups are welcome, all interests are worthy of being heard. The only test of "special"ness should be the ratio of votes to dollars, because the 16,000,000 workers in unions and the 19 members of the Board of Directors of Bank of America are not equally "special."

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Reflections on May Day

"Eight hours for sleep, Eight hours for work, Eight hours for what we will."

Today is May Day, which is International Workers' Day and the original Labor Day. In the spirit of this day of celebration, I'm going to talk (briefly) about the history of May Day, and then more fully about where I think the labor movement stands today.

In 1886, the soon-to-be American Federation of Labor (AFL) declared that May 1st would be a national general strike on behalf of the eight hour day. Anywhere from 300,000 to a million workers downed tools and walked off the job to rallies, where speakers proclaimed that the American labor movement had declared that the workday would henceforth be only eight hours, with no reduction in pay.

It wasn't a request, it wasn't a protest, it wasn't an appeal. Rather, the American labor movement simply announced that workers had made the decision and that was that. The idea that American workers could dictate their working conditions unilaterally is so audacious, so far removed from the unthinking acceptance of management prerogatives we see today, that it almost seems to have come from a different world.

Yet eighty thousand workers in Chicago took part in a parade that wound around the city, especially around the McCormick Reaper Factory where a bitter strike was going on. Two days later, a rally was held outside the factory, and a great mass of protesters confronted some 400 strikebreakers. Chicago Police fired into the crowd, and two workers were shot and killed. The next day, a protest rally was called at Haymarket Square and the rest was history. May Day was afterward adopted world-wide as a memorial to the workers' struggle and those workers who lost their lives in Chicago, and in a larger sense to all workers who die fighting for their rights.


And that's the history that gets told in every union hall and at every union rally. It's a saga of victory and defeat, of a radical demand that has become an unthinkingly normal part of American working life.

At this moment in time, the original May Day seems peculiarly both remote and immediate. The national unemployment rate is 8.5% - if you take the more accurate measurement that includes "discouraged" workers (unemployed people who want to work but have given up on finding a job) and the underemployed (people who want to work full-time but can only find part-time work), the unemployment rate is 15.6%. While the current recession seems to be at least leveling off, it's going to take a long time to fully recover:

And yet, I don't feel dispirited on this May Day. Unionization rates in 2007 rose from 12.0% to 12.1% and then again in 2008 from 12.1% to 12.4% - the first time in 25 years. It's quite possible that this year will see the passage of universal health care or the Employee Free Choice Act and possibly both. The UAW, my union, now owns 55% of Chrysler and 39% of General Motors, something that I don't anyone would have imagined would have happened back in 1935 when the UAW first began to organize auto workers in Detroit.

In short, the situation is uncertain. The old orthodoxies about the economy seem to have been refuted by the course of events, and there's a number of thinkers and groups that are jockying to fill the intellectual space left in their implosion. Yet we still don't have even a full vocabulary for talking about where we are and where we want to go, let alone a full policy program or an overarching ideology.

But if there is a good place to start, I think it has to be the idea of democratic control over economic life. One thing that this recession has shown us is that there is something fundamentally irrational and unlivable about an economic system in which the lives of tens if not hundreds of millions of people can be suddenly uprooted because of something completely out of their control yet entirely man-made. We should have some say in how we live our lives, some influence if not outright control over the parameters of what's acceptable and what's not in a civilized economic order, some way of protecting ourselves, and guiding our society from the present to a collectively-imagined future.

After all, that's what the American labor movement was doing on May 1st, 1886. They had a belief that it was wrong for people to spend every waking hour working at the direction of other people, that it was wrong for people to wake up in darkness and go to sleep in darkness without ever being able to walk freely in the sunshine. But above all, they believed that in a democracy, people have to exercise autonomy and freedom in their day to day lives, have to have time to walk and see what's happening around them, to talk and debate with their fellow citizens, to read about current events and improve their minds, to vote and volunteer and run for office, to live freely at least eight hours out of every day. And that's the part that's important - "eight hours for what we will" - the idea that for part of every day, each worker should be free to decide how to live their lives.

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...

Misappropriated History and Tea-Bagging

One of the peculiarities of recent conservative efforts to mobilize public opinion against the Obama administration's stimulus and budget plans has been their uncritical adoption of the mantle of the American Revolution on behalf of the conservative cause.

Witness Nebraskans chanting "no taxation without representation," Or the risible "tea-bagging" parties being held by a bunch of astro-turf conservative organizations promoted by Fox News.

On one level, this shouldn't be surprising. Conservatives like to think of themselves as the true heirs of the American Revolution (see "original intent"), in order to claim the mantle of legitimacy and authenticity, and the anti-tax theme at least makes the fit better than other historical analogies. In addition to supporting their current political aims, this theme also does the yoeman work of insinuating that the U.S has always been a conservative, anti-tax nation, and that freedom equates with not being taxed. Winning the historical imagination, like winning the rhetorical battle for other powerful symbols such as the flag, mothers, "freedom," has a powerful impact on people's political thinking.

But as a historian, I would caution the modern conservative movement that historical analogies can be dangerously double-edged. The American Revolution was a tumulteous, and quite radical time period, and a lot of the ideas advanced by the Revolutionary Generation (a term I personally prefer to the Founding Fathers) go far beyond the anti-tax, small-government, negative liberties, property rights ideology of modern conservatives.

Consider, for example, Tom Paine. For a long time, I've considered Tom Paine to be my favorite member of the Revolutionary Generation - he wasn't rich (a struggling corsetmaker/tax-collector/pamphleteer), he wasn't a slaveowner (Paine was a fervent abolitionist), and he wasn't yet another bucolic farmer (Paine lived in London, Philadelphia and Paris).

Add to that his internationalism, his commitment to universal suffrage, and his quite radical economic policies - although a fan of Adam Smith, Paine advocated the distribution of public lands, progressive taxation, and an early version of social insurance. Eric Foner's book, Tom Paine and Revolutionary America, is a brilliant overview of how Paine emerged from the world of Philadelphia's self-educated artisans, his participation in drafting the radical Pennsylvania Constitution, and his engagement with the question of controlling the price of food versus laissez faire in the commodtiies market.

Over on DailyKos, Sam Wise Gingy's excellent diary reminds us of how radical Tom Paine could be with this quote:

Separate an individual from society, and give him an island or a continent to possess, and he cannot acquire personal property. He cannot be rich. So inseparably are the means connected with the end, in all cases, that where the former do not exist the latter cannot be obtained. All accumulation, therefore, of personal property, beyond what a man's own hands produce, is derived to him by living in society; and he owes on every principle of justice, of gratitude, and of civilization, a part of that accumulation back again to society from whence the whole came.

This is putting the matter on a general principle, and perhaps it is best to do so; for if we examine the case minutely it will be found that the accumulation of personal property is, in many instances, the effect of paying too little for the labor that produced it; the consequence of which is that the working hand perishes in old age, and the employer abounds in affluence.

It is, perhaps, impossible to proportion exactly the price of labor to the profits it produces; and it will also be said, as an apology for the injustice, that were a workman to receive an increase of wages daily he would not save it against old age, nor be much better for it in the interim. Make, then, society the treasurer to guard it for him in a common fund; for it is no reason that, because he might not make a good use of it for himself, another should take it.

Here you see a lot of the elements of radical republicanism in the 18th century - the deep understanding of the social nature of economic activity, and the attendant social nature of property; a strong belief in the labor theory of value from an artisan's perspective, and a budding awareness that capitalism might cheat workers of the fair value of their work; and the almost unspoken idea that the commonwealth and the common good should be the foundation of society and economy. I doubt that modern conservatives would want to claim this American Revolutionary as their figurehead.

But even if you focus on more conservative Founding Fathers, you keep coming across comments so radical that they explode the staid veneer of patriotic memory. Even the arch-moderate John Adams argued that ""All the perplexities, confusion and distresses in America arise not from defects in the Constitution or confederation, nor from want of honor or virtue, as much from downright ignorance of the nature of coin, credit, and circulation.," and called for speculators in grain to be shot. If you look at Thomas Jefferson's writings on corporations and banks, you begin to get a sense why the northern urban worker joined the Democratic Party - ""If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. "

One of my favorite works on the American Revolution, Gordon Wood's Radicalism of the American Revolution, should remind us that the idea that the American Revolution was exception in that it was conservative, is a nonsense. The American Revolution turned society upside down, dispossessed much of the colonial elite, saw huge transfers of political and economic power, and set down new and newly combined languages, traditions of thought, and structures of government and politics. Inside the first twenty years of the new government, there were no less than two separate rebellions "from below," the emergence of the first American trade unions, and the first stirrings of abolitionism.

Remember that the next time you see some right-winger wave a tea-bag in your face.

[+/-] Read More...

[+/-] Summary only...