Category Archives: populism

MoveOn, faith-based organizing, and glimpses of the Great Community

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(Nashville) In the past few days, I have interviewed a prominent leader from MoveOn (the massive liberal online network) and from PICO (a network of community organizers based mainly in religious congregations). It’s fascinating how each sees combining the strengths of their respective organizational types as the essential next step for democracy.

According to my notes, PICO “invests lots and lots of time to connect with people and develop relations. … People begin to understand who they are in a public landscape by engaging with others in contesting for power. … They begin to discover that their voice can matter. … Their appetite [for more engagement] grows as well.” Meanwhile, citizens go on an ideological journey, starting out as relatively conservative and developing views that are more challenging to the status quo, although they would still not identify themselves as progressives. This is deep work, and it builds real power. But “scale is what we are trying to figure out. … How do you get to scale, because we are nowhere near where we want.”

Meanwhile, MoveOn began by channeling the mass voice of liberals, “one collective cry.” But mass petitions are not as effective any more, especially on issues like money-in-politics or climate change. “We need to organize in deeper ways to be taken seriously by those in power.” “Horizontal relations are incredibly important just to motivate people. People care about issues but ultimately they care about people.” “Communities are powerful for accountability for civic action. We are stronger when people are accountable to each other.” MoveOn’s goal is to “move from a list of 8 million to horizontal connectivity.” “A mega movement would radically scale accountability. That would require community.”

PICO has community and accountability, but not mass scale. MoveOn has “tremendous scale and little depth.” The problem is not new, although the solutions may now be dimly visible. John Dewey might as well have written these words (from the Public and its Problems, 1927) yesterday:

We have but touched lightly and in passing upon the conditions which must be fulfilled if the Great Society is to become a Great Community; a society in which the ever-expanding and intricately ramifying consequences of associated activities shall be known in the full sense of that word, so that an organized, articulate Public comes into being. The highest and most difficult kind of inquiry and a subtle, delicate, vivid and responsive art of communication must take possession of the physical machinery of transmission and circulation and breathe life into it. When the machine age has thus perfected its machinery it will be a means of life and not its despotic master. Democracy will come into its own, for democracy is a name for a life of free and enriching communion. It had its seer in Walt Whitman. It will have its consummation when free social inquiry is indissolubly wedded to the art of full and moving communication.

why is oligarchy everywhere? (part 2)

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By 1937, John D. Rockefeller had accumulated $1.4 billion from his monopolistic oil business. That was 1.5% of the whole nation’s GDP, concentrated in one person. It conferred vast political power on him and his family. His descendents were to include New York Governor and US Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, Arkansas Governor Winthrop Rockefeller, West Virginia Senator and Governor John D. Rockefeller IV, and other prominent leaders of government and philanthropy. In Aristotle’s terms, the Rockefeller family and their peers added an element of oligarchy to the mixed regime of the United States.

However, per Thomas Picketty’s argument, economic growth was larger than the returns to capital from 1913-2000. Meanwhile, the Rockefeller clan grew in number. They earned money from their capital (and from other business activities), but the country grew at a faster pace. As a result, according to Forbes, there are now 200 descendents of John D. Rockefeller, and they have $8.5 billion in combined assets. Their total wealth is 0.05% of the nation’s GDP. It is shared 200 ways, leaving each Rockefeller with an average share of .0002% of GDP.

In short, John D. had a slice of the national pie 7,500 times bigger than that of his descendents. To the extent that today’s Rockefellers have an advantage in politics, it is mainly because the generations after John D. genuinely served the public and built up some honor. His son John D. Jr. quit active management of the family business and devoted himself to philanthropy with a strongly progressive tilt. Many of his children and in-laws then became public servants.

Arguably this happened because, in Aristotle’s terms, the Rockefellers lived in a constitutional polity, or at least a society that aspired to be one. In any proper constitutional polity, “The end of the state is the good life … by which we mean a happy and honorable life” (Politics 3.9). Congress forced John D. Jr., to testify about the Ludlow Massacre, and then Mother Jones herself persuaded him that his testimony had been false. “Mackenzie King was later to say that this testimony was the turning point in Junior’s life, restoring the reputation of the family name; it also heralded a new era of industrial relations in the country.”

In a constitutional order, the rich can grow richer than they were, but their ability to convert their wealth into power must shrink over time; they must be required to explain and justify their behavior; and they must be disciplined by the need to demonstrate public service.

But Aristotle observed a cycle of decline before his own day: “The ruling class soon deteriorated and enriched themselves out of the public treasury; riches became the path to honor, and so oligarchies naturally grew up.” Signs that the same decline is happening today:

  • The owners of capital and their heirs accumulate growing shares of GDP.
  • Capital can be converted into political power. Restraints are removed.
  • Wealth (inherited or otherwise) confers respect or honor, independent of genuine public service.
  • The very wealthy are insulated from their critics and do not have to explain themselves.

[This is a follow-up from yesterday’s post. See also Ezra Klein’s “Doom Loop of Oligarchy” posted today.]

why is oligarchy everywhere?

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The first governments were kingships. … . But when many persons equal in merit arose, no longer enduring the pre-eminence of one, they desired to have a commonwealth, and set up a constitution. The ruling class soon deteriorated and enriched themselves out of the public treasury; riches became the path to honor, and so oligarchies naturally grew up. These passed into tyrannies and tyrannies into democracies; for love of gain in the ruling classes was always tending to diminish their number, and so to strengthen the masses, who in the end set upon their masters and established democracies. — Aristotle, Politics III

Recent headlines suggest that the Aristotelian cycle is happening globally–with the very important difference that Aristotle believed oligarchies turned into democracies, but the reverse seems to be happening now. For instance:

Why would this be happening? Mainly, it’s because we aren’t fighting back effectively; and I am optimistic that sooner or later we will. But in doing so, we’ll have to address the underlying currents that seem to cause democracies to drift into oligarchies unless we act.

First, consider the argument of Thomas Picketty’s Capital in the 21st Century, which–to be clear–I have not yet read. His point is that almost always, the return to capital has been greater than the economic growth rate. That means that the people who possess capital get progressively richer than everyone else, and their children get even richer than them. The period 1913-ca. 2010 was anomalous because growth exceeded the return to capital, meaning that people with wealth got richer, but their societies got richer still. That is also a period when democracy and socialism (between them) covered most of the global north. One might assume that market democracies boosted growth and lowered the returns to capital, and that would imply that they can do so again. But it’s also possible that the returns to capital were lower than growth for external reasons (technological change; war), which is why democracies survived. If the latter explanation is true, we are in trouble, because returns to capital again exceed growth and are expected to do so for decades to come.

Second, there’s the disturbing thesis of Matthew A. Crenson and Benjamin Ginsberg, Downsizing Democracy: How America Sidelined its Citizens and Privatized the Public. In my version of their argument: starting in the 1600s, certain nation-states allowed the mass public to have power. As a result, these states were able to mobilize their people to fight wars and to lend money to finance wars. In turn, the states that had the biggest armies either dominated everyone else or forced the others to imitate them. The exceptions were terrifying tyrannies that conscripted their men and seized their wealth, but they turned out to be fragile. By a kind of Darwinian process, the nation-states that were democracies prevailed; they were “fittest.” But then technologies of death became more sophisticated. Wealthy nations no longer needed lots of soldiers. They could win wars with a few well-equipped professionals. They only needed a small proportion of their people to finance these 21st century militaries. As a result, the Darwinian pressure to expand democracy is now gone.

Again, I am not proposing an inevitable drift to oligarchy. These are simply tendencies that we must confront.

the civic one million versus the Lesters

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Lawrence Lessig makes the following argument in his TED Talk, his excellent stump speech (which he gave last week at Tufts), and his book The USA is Lesterland:

Members of Congress and candidates for Congress spend anywhere between 30% and 70% of their time raising money to get themselves elected or their party back in power. But they raise that money not from all of us. Instead, they raise that money from the tiniest fraction of the 1%. Less than 1/20th of 1% of America are the “relevant funders” of congressional campaigns. That means about 150,000 Americans, or about the same number who are named “Lester,” wield enormous power over this government. These “Lesters” determine this critical first election in every election cycle—the money election.

I could not agree more. I spent 1991-3 lobbying for campaign finance reform on behalf of Common Cause and have watched things deteriorate ever since. I admire Lessig’s extraordinary leadership and commitment, exemplified by his walking across New Hampshire recently to raise awareness. He has moved easily 1,000 times as many people as I have with my book The New Progressive Era and other writings about campaign finance.

Yet I am not that optimistic about the strategies he proposes. He is clear-eyed about the limitations of each strategy but leaves the audience wondering if anything can work. Here is where I would offer an alternative.

The “Lesters” are exceptionally powerful because their money buys communication. They do not literally purchase votes; they buy the ability to advertise and persuade. One reason that they raise so much money ($7 billion in 2012) is that mass communication has a low return on investment. Influencing elections is an expensive and uncertain proposition.

Meanwhile, in We are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For, I estimate that at least one million Americans are currently involved in demanding forms of civic work–projects and programs that involve strong elements of open-ended public deliberation. Collectively, they engage many millions of their fellow citizens. Their impact per dollar is much higher, because they have strong relationships with peers.

But they are so deeply invested in specific civic projects that they do not have the time to step back and ask why civic work is so frustrating and marginal in our society. A major reason is the corruption of our political institutions, and the Lesters are deeply implicated in that. The strategy I recommend is to organize the “Civic One Million” for political reform. They have vastly less money than the Lesters, but they may actually have more of what the Lesters try to buy: persuasiveness.

In practical terms, this means convening people who do civic work to ask why their efforts are so hard, to diagnose the barriers, and to develop collective strategies for political reform.

Gerald Taylor on property, populism, and democracy

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The entire last issue of The Good Society is devoted to populism. It offers a powerful positive appraisal, building on the important scholarship of the last quarter century. The scope of the special issue is global, but I came away with a reinforced sense that American populism is a distinguished tradition of its own. In 1906, the German sociologist Werner Sombart wrote a book with the title Why is there No Socialism in the United States? This is not a dumb question, but if it is our only question, it presumes that the political spectrum must always run from socialism to laissez-faire. That is the European scheme. Well before Sombart wrote, a different orientation had developed in the US, and the radical end of our spectrum has serious merit.

One of the articles that supports that view is Gerald Taylor’s “Prometheus Unbound: Populism, The Property Question, and Social Invention.” Taylor is Southeast Regional Director of the Industrial Areas Foundation, the great community-organizing network, and this article is a brilliant scholarly contribution by someone who doesn’t happen to make his living as a professor. Instead, he is an intellectual leader of a populist organization.

Taylor offers this account of populism, which makes it incompatible with European socialism:

A property-owning consciousness is centered in an understanding by citizen workers, artisans, and farmers that in order to be free of employers, landlords, creditors, and possibly the organs of state power, one must assemble and own enough productive assets to guarantee liberty and independence. The means by which citizens attempted to accomplish this freedom included both individual and collective acts and instruments. Thus, workers and farmers joined together to negotiate better terms with purchasing agents, and employers that could yield them enough income and resources to allow their individual households to assemble productive assets to become “free.”

Hannah Arendt weaves a similar argument through The Human Condition (1958), claiming that private property is a precondition for participation in a democracy. “What is important to the public realm … is not the more or less enterprising spirit of private businessmen but the fences around the homes and gardens of citizens” (p. 72). To have standing in public, you don’t need the right to accumulate as much wealth as possible, but you do need a private space that you alone control.

At first, the invocation of property as a source of liberty sounds most compatible with markets and neoliberalism. But Taylor shows that Americans have long used collective grassroots power and social reform to spread private property. In the first 50 years of our republic, Congress passed 375 “land laws” that were mainly about distributing real property to citizens. Left out were Black people, 97% of whom were slaves in 1860–and only 11% of the free Blacks then owned land. After Reconstruction, the proportion of Black Americans who owned land fell again because of discriminatory legislation and anti-Black terrorism. But Blacks organized popular movements in response:

Ex-slaves clearly understood that in a predominantly agrarian society, ownership of land (productive property) would be central to their struggle for independence from white domination. There was a deep property owning consciousness among the freed persons of color, who had long nurtured a vision of the “promised land,” predicated on independence. Thus freed slaves sought in a myriad of ways to gain ownership of land. …

The elements of the movement varied over time but eventually coalesced and reached its pinnacle of organizing in the formation of the Colored Farmers Alliance in 1886. At the peak of its organizing, it is estimated that between two hundred fifty thousand and one million African Americans were members of the Alliance. …

Taylor spells out the violence and effectiveness of White opposition and the defeat of some Black strategies, such as a failed general strike of agricultural workers. Yet:

Through new individual and collective strategies and policies, some initiated during the black populist movement itself, black land ownership increased to over 13 million acres in the United States by the mid 1900’s. The new seeds of the next phase in the black freedom struggle were planted.

The next stage was the rise of Black “knowledge artisans,” lawyers, doctors and others, who used their own property and skills to launch the Civil Rights Movement.

After that, the story turns for the worse. Now we live in a time when everyone pays homage to property consciousness, but that means giving people completely individual opportunities that also bring high risk:

Everyone can have their own unmediated relationship with their employer, their stock portfolio, and their credit card. Anyone can start a business if they have the courage to take risk. The individual, in an Ownership Society, is able to independently negotiate contracts with corporate entities and hold them “accountable.”

The subprime loan crisis epitomizes the result: individuals borrow to buy homes in exurban developments that lose their value in the recession, leaving their families bankrupt and isolated and their former property abandoned.

The authentic populist response–which has roots in Colonial times and has informed groups like the Colored Farmers Alliance–is collective action to protect genuine and secure property for all. Because it is a movement for property, it is not socialism; and because it is a collective movement, it is not neoliberalism. See also Community-Wealth.org for some 21st century strategies.