Good to have allies

From Mother Jones:

Income inequality has grown dramatically since the mid-'70s—far more in the US than in most advanced countries—and the gap is only partly related to college grads outperforming high-school grads. Rather, the bulk of our growing inequality has been a product of skyrocketing incomes among the richest 1 percent and—even more dramatically—among the top 0.1 percent. It has, in other words, been CEOs and Wall Street traders at the very tippy-top who are hoovering up vast sums of money from everyone, even those who by ordinary standards are pretty well off.

Kevin Drum asks the key question, "How did we get here?"  It's a question near and dear to my heart, one I first wrote about here in 2007 under that exact title.

Drum and I agree that the Democrats' surrender of social class has led to rampant plutocracy and to government policy that encourages huge growth in income disparities. We even agree in part about why.  Drum says:

Parties need money. And parties need organizational muscle. The Republican Party gets the former from corporate sponsors and the latter from highly organized church-based groups. The Democratic Party, conversely, relied heavily on organized labor for both in the postwar era. So as unions increasingly withered beginning in the '70s, the Democratic Party turned to the only other source of money and influence available in large-enough quantities to replace big labor: the business community.

I say:

Democrats gave up their unity voluntarily as a result of the marketplace, not of ideas, but of campaign contributions. They passed post-Watergate reforms in reaction to the financial abuses of Nixon's Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP), but they ran afoul of unintended consequences.

Democrats could no longer raise large chunks of money from wealthy ideological sources; they now had to spread their fundraising to wealthy business interests who were much more likely to play the access game.

Obviously, we find different causes.  Drum emphasizes the decline of organized labor.  I point to an unintended consequence of post-Watergate reforms in campaign finance.

One reason I doubt the union decline as the main cause - though any big change in society is bound to have many causes - is that unions remain to this day influential in Democratic Party politics, at least in states where unions have influence at all.  Their members are less reliable (ask Martha Coakley), but their leadership is not, and it's true that the disaffection of membership began during the social upheavals of the 1960s and 70s, exactly the right timing to help explain America's political degeneration.  So I'd have to concede that the union decline does figure in the decline of America as a liberal and forward-looking country.

Another cause I hadn't thought enough about is the retirement of the World War II generation.  Men and women who had been 30 years old at the end of the war were leaving the work force in 1980, just in time for the Reagan retrenchment.  It didn't hurt that he, as one of them, could co-opt them with his neo-1920s economic ideology and his sunny disposition.

Reagan said that government was the problem.  But he smiled.  And his age cohort, who had seen muscular government succeed at many things, could stop thinking about complicated problems and let go of the responsibilities that they had borne so well.

In any case, it's good to have Drum working this beat - strength in numbers and all.  Of course, that has been the promise of unions, a promise now forgotten along with the history of dire worker exploitation by the mercenary corporations of a century ago.

Happy Resignation Day

I admit to some small nostalgia for the 1970s, when the Constitution was preserved, when many Republicans could be and were responsible, when Democrats stood up for themselves and the nation. Richard Nixon was rightly hounded from office on this day in 1974. Then age 16, I had watched his typically bullshit-filled resignation speech the night before, but nowadays I have to give even Nixon credit for two things:

• The country was indeed better off for his resignation, rather than the sure impeachment and conviction that would otherwise have followed.
• He was, it turns out, not the worst the Republican Party could foist upon America with divisive and dishonest manipulation and appeals to the worst in us.

Unfortunately, the young Republicans of the time didn't learn to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution and the law against their own impulses and will to power. Instead, the lesson they took from White House tapes and Federal Court processes and Gerald Ford's pardon was to fight tooth and nail to keep their misdeeds in the dark.

Dick Cheney and the Bushists now claim openly the Nixonian theory that the President is above the law, as if we didn't evict George III for that exact sentiment - when he had a much better claim under the laws of the time. Darth and Duhbya claim to be above all checks and balances between elections, and the Constitution is honored in the breach if at all. Oh, and the full weight of the Republican political apparatus is doing everything it can, whether legitimate or not, to tilt those elections away from public opinion.

The young Democrats of the 1970s learned to be pussies. That one I don't understand at all.