Above: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, colloquially known as ‘AOC’, is a self-identified democratic socialist and rising star in the Democrat Party. She recently announced an extremely ambitious, and arguably highly unrealistic plan, ‘The Green New Deal’ which promises to make the United States carbon-neutral in 11 years (Credit: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images/New York Magazine).
Previously, I wrote about the rise of socialism in America and its soaring popularity among the youth. This is the second and final part of that essay.
The rich are faring quite well in an era of hyper-charged, accelerating inequality. In 2017, 82% of the wealth generated was captured by the world’s top one percent according to Oxfam. To be fair such inequality is not as extreme on a national scale in terms of income, but the results are still quite stark. The Economic Policy Institute estimates that in 2015, 22% of all income generated went to America’s top 1%, which is classified as families making over $421,926 per year. The last time the one percent fared so well was in the roaring twenties, right before the calamitous Great Depression, which decisively ended American confidence in laissez faire capitalism. Today, a typical CEO makes 361 times the amount of his or her average worker, a number which would be seen as unthinkable and perhaps morally reprehensible to a worker in whose CEO made only 51 times his or her wage in the 1950s.
Above: The Davos conference (credit: WEF Archive/Davos Klosters)
This wealth has created what Robert Frank described this phenomenon as “Richistan,” a world of, by and for today’s superstars of capitalism, where their only interaction with someone who doesn’t own a private jet is through paying the local help. That world, and its self-contained culture brazenly isolated from reality, was recently on display in Davos, Switzerland where a collection of industrialists, power players, tech gurus and media moguls gathered for the World Economic Forum to confidently discuss how they could fix a burning world under their banner of globalized neoliberal capitalism. To illustrate just how out of touch the Davos plutocracy is, they flew 1,500 private jets to this conference to discuss, among other things, climate change. In the words of political pundit, Anand Giridharadas, they traveled in splendor to “a family reunion for the people who broke the world.”
Until relatively recently, the political elites of both parties in the US grew increasingly comfortable in a new era of wealth inequality. Since the Reagan presidency, Republican policymakers have viewed tax cuts for the wealthy as a cure to all economic ails of our country. With a growing moral committment, conservatives framed marginal tax rate hikes not merely as bad policy, but as evil. In the Wall Street Journal, venture capitalist Tom Perkins compared himself and his wealthy cohorts to Jews living in Nazi Germany after Barack Obama mused that maybe the rich should pay higher taxes.
While the Democratic Party remained open to at least verbal denouncements of wealth inequality, the trajectory of the Clinton and Obama eras provides a depressing picture of a deferential political class succumbing to the forces of entrenched wealth and power. President Obama bailed out Wall Street’s big banks after their destructive practices callously wiped out middle and working class wealth. Bill Clinton repealed the New Deal-era Glass Steagall legislation which arguably contributed to the Great Recession by merging investment and commercial banking operations. Hillary Clinton earned a staggering $22 million giving speeches at numerous elite institutions such as Goldman Sachs, which she praised in 2017 after her humiliating crash and burn presidential defeat to Donald Trump for its role in propping up New York’s economy.
To an extent, this normalized acceptance of Wall Street and Silicon Valley’s influence over American democracy has become increasingly questioned. Bernie Sanders shocked the political establishment with his meteoric rise in the 2016 primaries, and he still remains one of America’s most beloved political figures. However, his rise and that of like-minded figures like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been viewed with derision by establishment figures such as Aaron Soorkin who scolded the young congresswoman for acting like a child. The far-left socialist publication, Jacobin, responded by mocking his famed TV show, The West Wing, as emblematic of degenerate Obama/Clintonian-era politics which worshiped status, procedure, wealth and powerful institutions above all else. Luke Savage writes,
“Perhaps better than any other cultural artifact, Sorkin’s The West Wing chronicled the moral and intellectual decline of a post–New Deal Democratic Party, reveling in its shift to a vacuous center characterized by deficit hawkishness, technocratic proceduralism, and smirking, credential-obsessive Ivy League pretension...In Sorkin’s parochial fantasy, politics at its noblest and most high-minded consists mainly of wonkish sophistry and elegantly crafted speeches designed to offer vague comfort while saying nothing.”
An article from a socialist website dissing the West Wing may seem meaningless in understanding the rise of socialism in 2010s America. However, it reveals the fundamental cultural impulse driving American political discourse increasingly leftward. For example, the brand power of Silicon Valley corporations paired with vague, ‘woke’ promises to fix education, empower women and increase diversity captivated figures like Barack Obama, who invited Google and its allied groups to the White House 427 times. In a marked shift, the American left increasingly values weakening the power and reach of corporations through high taxation, campaign finance regulation and other measures.Any claims by corporations to be ‘woke’ through supporting causes like identity politics are increasingly, and rightfully, seen as a cynical public relations gambit.
Rally against Amazon’s HQ2 in Queens, New York (Credit: Dave Colon/Curbed New York)
The socialist left exhibited what is now being called “the techlash” in their recent, successful scorched-earth campaign against Amazon. New York City, with some of the worst subways in the world, decided to heap $3 billion of subsidies on Amazon in order to entice the corporate giant valued at over $1 trillion to build its second corporate headquarters in Long Island City, Queens. Many argued this move would have accelerated a gentrification crisis similar to San Francisco’s. It would have done so in the name of worshiping the power, wealth and status of tech corporations over the material needs of economically vulnerable citizens. Consequently, many on the left broke out party hats upon hearing the news that Amazon would cancel its corporate HQ2 project in New York.
“Anything is possible: today was the day a group of dedicated, everyday New Yorkers & their neighbors defeated Amazon’s corporate greed, its worker exploitation, and the power of the richest man in the world.” I will leave you to guess who tweeted that out.
In marked contrast, real estate mogul David Lichtenstein of Lighthouse Group, which has $3 billion in real estate assets, was apoplectic over losing the opportunity to develop luxury condos in Queens for Amazon employees.
He blasted the cancellation of Amazon’s HQ2 as the “worst day for NYC since 9-11, except this time the terrorists were elected.”
Above: Former Goldman Sachs executive Henry Paulson chatting with Hillary Clinton and billionaire-turned politician Michael Bloomberg in an image that captures the 1990s transformation of the Democratic Party into an organization of political elitism and neoliberalism (Credit: Bryan Smith/Freelance/The New York Daily News).
The American conservative movement, in contrast, has not abandoned its worship of severely financialized capitalism. Donald Trump’s singular legislative accomplishment has been a dramatic lowering of America’s corporate tax rate, a stark contrast with his cultivated populist image. He also railed against the rise of socialism in America during his 2019 State of the Union. However, he did not win the presidency not by raving over free market libertarianism. Instead, it was his criticism of Hillary Clinton’s free trade policies that won him the decisive rust belt swing states of Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania. The voters who gave Trump these states were a tiny margin of the overall electorate, numbering roughly 80,000, but many of them were liberal-leaning, having previously voted for Barack Obama against the free market champion Mitt Romney. Arguably, these voters saw Hillary Clinton’s neoliberalism as rancid, toxic and a relic from the 1990s and 2000s: an economic era that under a gilded edifice utterly failed large swaths of the American population both economically and morally.
Regardless of your opinions on how or why Donald Trump won the presidency ( it is a highly contentious subject worth an article in itself), other American conservatives seem to be wondering whether the last few decades of unfettered capitalism have truly made the country a better place. Prominent Fox News host Tucker Carlson gave an impassioned rant on the subject, stating:
“The overriding goal for America is more prosperity, meaning cheaper consumer goods. But is that still true? Does anyone still believe that cheaper iPhones, or more Amazon deliveries of plastic garbage from China are going to make us happy? They haven’t so far. A lot of Americans are drowning in stuff. Yet drug addiction and suicide are depopulating large parts of the country. Anyone who thinks the health of a nation can be summed up in GDP is an idiot.
The goal for America is both simpler and more elusive than mere prosperity. It’s happiness. There are a lot of ingredients in being happy: Dignity. Purpose. Self-control. Independence. Above all, deep relationships with other people. Those are the things that you want for your children. But our leaders don’t care. We are ruled by mercenaries who feel no long-term obligation to the people they rule. They’re day traders. Substitute teachers. They’re just passing through. They have no skin in this game, and it shows. They can’t solve our problems. They don’t even bother to understand our problems.”
Tucker Carlson is largely correct in this assessment. In the popular discourse, policymakers and politicians on both sides of the aisle rarely if ever talk about making Americans happier through the relationships and connections that Carlson described. Neoliberalism has caused the popular discourse in culture and politics to denigrate ourselves both individually and collectively. We celebrate harm inflicted upon others, vilification, winning at all costs, impossible perfection and tribalism. We celebrate these “virtues” as the price to pay in a darwinist world that prizes competition above all else. Rarely, if ever, do we take the time to ask how we can connect with others to improve our society as a whole. To repeat a cliche of Carlson’s that bears consistent repetition, “We do not exist to serve markets. Just the opposite.”
To put it more bluntly, I do not care if America’s GDP goes down a few tenths of a percentage point next year. I will care if healthcare becomes more affordable, and if college tuition becomes less of a nightmare for families desperately trying to help their kids. I will care if Americans become a little happier, a little less high-strung and a little less under siege by predatory capitalism. I do not see how those goals could be fulfilled even if the megarich have to pay a slightly higher tax rate which inhibits some growth. In other words, we need to start thinking about how we can create “a post-growth society.”
To be clear, I do not identify as a socialist. That may come as a shock since I just spent a few thousand words disecting what has gone horribly wrong in America’s economy over the last few decades. However, I am confident that a progressive Keynesian economic system can harness the virtues of a market economy to create a more compassionate and less brutally callous society.
Those on the right should listen to the grievances those on the far left are airing, and understand how the government can act in such a way to help those who are economically struggling. In other words, one should not label the debt as America’s most looming challenge in order to cynically justify deeply unpopular austerity politics which brutally slash valuable programs like social security and medicare. Nor should folks equate raising marginal tax rates on incomes over $10 million with the hellish nature of Venezuela’s failed socialist government. Indeed, such a proposed tax hike would have a very tiny impact on an even tinier portion of the population in exchange for greatly improving the general lot through life saving healthcare or student debt relief. Think of it as “community-based quantitative easing,” in other words applying our current system of socialism for the very rich to the average American.
I will leave you with the statistic that 52% of Republicans support Medicare for All. Where do we go from there in enacting meaningful economic reforms to help broad swaths of the American population left behind in an era of extreme neoliberal competition and a “winner take all” ethos? I am eager to hear your thoughts.
