Good liberals, good “web people” on the other hand, see ourselves as smart and educated, elite but not elitist, righteous and empathetic, cosmopolitan and tolerant, pragmatic and post-ideological--even post-political.
*
If those “wall people,” especially the uneducated ones, are the problem, then we the educated ones are the answer: “innovators...experts...change-makers...value-adders… professionals...creative disruptors...(MacArthur) geniuses...Rhodes scholars...Ivy Leaguers, or new-Ivy Leaguers...Nobel Prize winners...strategic advisors...whiz kids...great talent...the smartest guys in the room…the best and the brightest.” Thomas Frank, aforementioned author of The People, No! wrote an unfortunately timely book before Trump’s election in 2016, Listen Liberal: Whatever Happened to the Party of the People? On liberals and education, he writes:
The first commandment of the professional class is the idea of meritocracy, which allows people to think that those on top are there because they deserve to be. With the professional class, it’s always associated with education. They deserve to be there because they worked really hard and went to a good college and to a good graduate school. They’re high achievers. Democrats are really given to credentialism in a way that Republicans aren’t.
(After writing Listen Liberal and The People, No!, Frank jokes, he lost a lot of his liberal friends, who wanted him to go back to writing about the conservative base with books like his earlier What’s the Matter with Kansas?) “You can join us in this meritocracy,” we tell the un- and undereducated. If only it were that simple.
Certainly expertise and competency are good things, in general and in government, especially when it comes to pandemic response, for instance. No doubt education can be good, especially when it is liberating. It can open doors for many people. We have, however, come to fetishize the smart people, to celebrate innovations for innovation’s sake, to hoard our degrees, and then to weaponize them as justification for our power, vis-à-vis the uneducated, or rather, those not educated like us. Moreover, education delivered as the solution by itself—without any interrogation or adjustment of the power relations between capital and labor, between the ruling and the working classes —is not only inadequate, but also, it further entrenches the power imbalance. There are the familiar critiques: unequal K-12 education due to segregation, racism, and poverty; unequal access to higher education; many of the “well educated” are just “well graduated” (T.Frank), i.e. with only more social connections and not necessarily more skills or ethics; people of color who graduate from college still do not necessarily get ahead, even compared to white non-college graduates, because of deep racist structures; and of course, debt. But even more so, pushing education always and only is disingenuous. Cristina Viviana Groeger writes on “The Education Fix”:
Education as the solution to inequality often places the burden of reform onto individuals with the least power, rather than directly challenging the unequal balance of power in the economy. But the problem goes even deeper: the American educational system has become a very effective tool for reproducing socioeconomic inequality, not minimizing it....
Today, perhaps the most common framework for understanding the relationship between education and jobs is the theory of human capital, which holds that one’s skills and knowledge determine how much money one makes. To reap the benefits of the modern “knowledge economy,” individuals must gain more human capital through education and training. If higher levels of education are available only to a small number of people, they will monopolize “high-skilled,” high-paying jobs. Expanding access to education, however, allows more individuals to enter these positions, reducing skill premiums and thus reducing inequality.
The United States has long had one of the highest rates of educational access in the world and continues to lead on measures of educational attainment. Despite this impressive record, the United States also has one of the highest rates of socioeconomic inequality and one of the lowest rates of social mobility across the Global North. High levels of education thus coexist with high levels of inequality. If education were in fact the best policy tool to reduce inequality, how could this be true?
The simple equation implied by the theory of human capital—more education equals less inequality—can’t account for the U.S. experience. It also misunderstands how the educational system has historically changed the economy around it. Indeed, we should be more attuned to how education contributes to the concentration of wealth and power today. Our national faith in education can become a trap if it succeeds in distracting us from what matters most in reducing inequality: the collective economic and political power of workers themselves.
Or, as Thomas Frank explains:
If you look at historical charts of productivity and wage growth, these two things went hand in hand for decades after World War II, which we think of as a prosperous, middle-class time when even people with a high school degree, blue-collar workers, could lead a middle class life. And then everything went wrong in the 1970s. Productivity continued to go up and wage growth stopped. Wage growth has basically been flat ever since then. But productivity goes up by leaps and bounds all the time. We have all of these wonderful technological advances. Workers are more productive than ever but they haven’t benefited from it. That’s the core problem of inequality.
Now, if the problem was that workers weren’t educated enough, weren’t smart enough, productivity would not be going up. But that productivity line is still going up. So we can see that education is not the issue.
It’s important that people get an education, of course….It’s a fundamental human right that people should have the right to pursue whatever they want to the maximum extent of their individual potential. But the idea that this is what is holding them back is simply incorrect as a matter of fact. What’s holding them back is that they don’t have the power to demand higher wages.
As a teacher in a lower-income school district, I am guilty often of just telling that standard story: “if you go to college, then you can make it...so, write this essay.” Upward mobility may occur as a result of education, but by itself, it’s an incomplete story.
*
Liberals have rightly called out the incessant railing against (coastal) “elites” by Fox/Trump/Huckabee/Cruz/Palin, etc. for the nonsense that it is. Liberals have rightly defended the scientific process in the name of public health or mitigating climate change, for instance, and have rightly defended intellectuals against our country’s perverse anti-intellectualism. However, in response to Trump, many liberals have chosen to embrace elitism. We took that faux culture war served up by the right, from Phyllis Schlafly to Bill O’Reilly, and we won it. And we continue to win it, with some of us indulging in it and never moving beyond it. In opposition to Trump, elitism has been even more appealing. Along with the meritocracy and our education, this elitism is the psychological salve some of us needed: “We are the answer. At the least, we are not the problem.” We feel sick, yet good about ourselves, when we see those statistics of white non-college graduates going for Trump. Embracing elitism, though, is not a wise or humane response because, among other reasons, outright classism comes along with it. We throw around the terms “white trash” or “trailer trash” quite liberally, making fun of West Virginia or “Pennsyltucky”--essentially making fun of poor white people. However, I do not believe all rural/rural-ish voters are Trump voters (nor are all poor), and I don’t believe all Trump voters are “deplorable” people, as deplorable as I find Trump and as regrettable as I find the act of voting for him. I am certainly guilty myself of using those epithets and conflating those constituencies, but especially juxtaposed to our own role in the social rot, I don’t believe those are fair judgments for liberals to make.
*
We liberals are righteous and empathetic. “In this house, we believe, ‘Black lives matter. Women’s rights=Human rights. No Human is Illegal. Science is real. Diversity makes us stronger. Love is love.” So reads the sign in front of many liberal households. Check, check, check--those are ideas I can get behind. With a vicious Trump administration, we could not take any of those statements for granted, sadly, apparently. But as illustrated by the sign, our liberal politics have been reduced to statements of right belief. Additionally, notice how none of our core statements “in this house” touch on economics, let alone class, war, or empire. What if we added, “In this house, we also believe: ‘We should share my property tax revenue equally among school districts in the state (or country); We should tax the rich much more (and that might include me); We should build lower-income housing on this block; There is power in a union; Organize workers, especially ‘gig’ or ‘sharing economy’ workers who deliver to this house (even if that means I might have to pay more for their services and/or not get that thing I don’t need right this instant (but seriously let’s also talk about gig company CEO compensation!)); This house [where applicable] was purchased in a real estate frenzy, on the other end of which I still ended up ok; Reinstate a new Glass-Steagall Act; And while no human is illegal, I also understand that many immigrants follow their own countries’ wealth that has previously been extracted by the US and other western/colonial powers through war, overt/covert coups, and through ‘Washington (bipartisan) consensus’ IMF and World Bank 'structural adjustment programs,' so called ‘free trade’ deals, and other mechanisms.” And "Science is real, but 'science,' like 'technology,' never exists outside of political choices and 'science' can be put to destructive ends, so to clarify we want 'science for the people.'"
Or the other sign: “Hate has no home here.” “...and neither do you, dear black people and other racialized minorities, because of both de facto and de jure segregation BUT that is not ok!... we need to fix that ...but in the meantime, we really enjoy the home mortgage interest deduction, which continues to be a huge subsidy to (disproportionately) white, wealthier families and thus one driver of the racial wealth gap. (But when you do move in, please don’t bring down our school district’s standardized test benchmarks, which would bring down the quality of our school district, and might affect my child’s ability to get into _[INSERT ALMA MATER]__ in order to reproduce or even advance beyond our social class.)”
The yard signs are fine, sure—we had the second one--but if liberalism is just believing the right things, then liberalism is pretty easy. Liberalism is then just about managing our affectation and policing others’ affectation. Language certainly does matter, but part of this liberal focus on language/right ideas/affect only, part of this liberal inertia, I believe, stems from the fact that we are getting wealthier and wealthier. Maybe not billionaire or millionaire wealthy like Tom Friedman himself, but many of us are doing ok, even through this pandemic and recession. (Are the “Thank you essential workers” signs partly guilt-driven, especially for the lower paid workers, disproportionately of color, out there making deliveries to us as we work comfortably from home?)
One reason why many of us had that ability to work from home amidst a pandemic is that we are white-collar “professionals,” and the nature of our work allows us to. By itself, becoming professionals is not a bad development. I think the doctor, the teacher, the scientist, the accountant should be professionally trained and credentialed. We professionals, however, have become our own class—the “professional managerial class” as Barbara and John Ehrenreich first coined the term in 1979, i.e. not labor but for the most part not the owners of capital either. In turn, we are and we know fewer working-class people, and as a result, I hypothesize, we care less about their issues. We seek foremost to protect our own interests, even if we don’t admit it. Therefore, from Bethesda, Maryland (where Friedman lives) and from all of the proverbial Bethesdas, we opine and preach a little too easily.
A note here on white liberal racism (as promised), as much has been made of white conservative racism. We white liberals for the most part have not reckoned with our own destructive racism. Racism is about the policies and practices—even more than ideas—that contribute to racial inequality, even when those policies appear or pretend to be race-neutral. Especially when it comes to housing and education, we good liberals clutch our (white) pearls very quickly and strategically. Richard Rothstein has written about (often liberal/Democratic) government- and individual-led racist housing policies under the New Deal, under the Great Society, and in the wake of the 2008 crash up to the present day. Lily Geismer has focused on Boston’s Route-128-corridor suburbs from the 1970s to today as emblem of Northeast, liberal-led segregation in Don’t Blame Us: Suburban Liberals and the Transformation of the Democratic Party. Matt Lassiter has researched similar dynamics in the Sunbelt in The Silent Majority: Politics in the Sunbelt South. The latter two wrote together in 2019 in the Times: “The political culture of upscale suburbs revolves around resource hoarding of children’s educational advantages, pervasive opposition to economic integration and affordable housing, and the consistent defense of homeowner privileges and taxpayer rights.” Our home values, which we cherish, which we try to improve above all else—“you got to build equity!”—are directly tied to racism, as Professor Dorothy Brown writes. And now, with young white liberals moving back to city centers--some staying once they have school-aged kids, some darting back out to the suburbs once they do--they are shaping education decisions from Brooklyn to the Bay Area. Chana Jolfe-Walt reports on this phenomenon in the five-part podcast series Nice White Parents.
In the lead-up to and after the 2016 election, TV news and opinion pages debated the false choice, “Was it class or was it race that brought Trump to power?” as if class and race have ever been unentangled in our politics. Much of the mainstream media settled, definitively, on “race.” “They are all racist” was the final answer/cause (“and we’re not” was implied). A tangent to that false choice/debate was that the Democrats’ Sanders/left flank was “class reductionist.” That it didn’t care enough about racism. Attempting to swat back that upsurge Sanders/left flank in the primary, Hillary Clinton had said to a campaign crowd in February 2016, “Not everything is about an economic theory, right? If we broke up the big banks tomorrow — and I will if they deserve it, if they pose a systemic risk, I will — would that end racism? (No!!!) Would that end sexism? Would that end discrimination against the LGBT community? Would that make people feel more welcoming to immigrants overnight?”
No. But when it comes to racism, for instance, banks for years helped segregate neighborhoods. After decades of predatory exclusion, banks then took up predatory inclusion. Banks targeted people of color in the subprime mortgage crisis, in the lead up to the 2008 crash. No, breaking them up wouldn’t end personal prejudice, and it wouldn’t automatically end racist practices, but breaking them up, placing them under more transparent and democratic control, and removing perverse, racist incentives could reduce racist effects.
Personal racism (or personal sexism or homo- or transphobia) is extremely significant, and in the case of policing, it can be deadly (although racist policing’s roots are in the racist political economy). Anti-bias training has its place, and we white folks have a lot of interior homework to do to overcome our biases. However, if we view racism (or any -ism) as something essentialist or primordial—and “racist” as just a personal label and “anti-racist” as just a personal badge of honor—then there’s no way out of our mess and then unfortunately (or conveniently?) there are no political-economic solutions. The only answer in that case is, “Those people should be less racist.” (“Not us” is implied.). "More education." Racism (or sexism), however, is mediated most destructively through the racialized, capitalist political economy, and its remedies require action inside the political economy. “A Liberal ‘Moral Reckoning’ [Alone] Can’t Solve the Problems that Plague Black Americans.” And, “Caste does not explain Race.” (And "history is not the end; it is only more battleground where we must meet the vast demands of the ever-living now." )
*
"There’s something happening here"
In addition to having the right ideas, we liberals have empathy. We cultivate empathy for the victims, for the have-nots, for the less fortunate. That, of course, is a good thing. But our woke empathy often stops there and then serves to shield us from actual analysis, from actual politics. It can obscure the power or any violence involved, especially power we have wielded. “How can we change without any of us really having to change?” is what many of us are asking. This form of empathy, in turn, forgives us for not fundamentally changing anything in the end.
Thomas Friedman, like many liberals, had much empathy for the losers in the 2008 crash, for instance, and thus some sympathy with Occupy Wall Street: “There’s something happening here,” he observed. (Conservatives/Republicans for the most part had no sympathy.) Friedman’s hot take, however, devolved into his predictable, vapid tech punditry: “Is this ‘the Great Disruption’ or ‘the Big Shift’ that is naturally evening all things out?” It’s as if he pontificates long enough, the protests, which he sees as appearing naturally in "shifting systems," will disappear naturally too and the inequities will cure themselves naturally. And, he’ll never have to really analyze, for one, any power imbalance between (finance) capital and labor in the system, or why wages are stagnant, or how Wall Street bankers avoid jail and only rise in political influence. He’ll never have to really indict anyone.
This liberal empathy translates into much charity, philanthropy, and direct volunteer service, three things we rely on in the immediate, absent systemic change. But, that philanthropy can also, cynically, inoculate us against future systemic change. This type of empathy forges a post-political politics, i.e. a world where there are no bad guys or structures—and where there is no history—and where there are only stand-alone problems waiting to be fixed, principally by us and our smarts and our tech. This do-gooder energy is certainly directed at domestic problems, but it does have a curious bent towards the international. Bono, Bill Gates, George Soros, the Davos and Aspen crowds, the Clinton Global Initiative all encourage us to donate to and fight for women’s empowerment in Sri Lanka, malaria treatment in Kenya, or education in the Andes--all laudable efforts, to be sure. There was something about international work that drew me, personally, to volunteer-teach in Uganda for sixteen months some years ago and that draws plenty of Peace Corps-type volunteers out into the globe every year. Furthermore, thousands of trained medical workers, engineers, and other practitioners deliver on-the-ground, life-saving work to the world’s poorest (doing much more good than my unskilled self could have done in my short time overseas). Some of those people also try to fight the structures that keep people so poor. However, some little (or big?) part of me (us?) went to Uganda because I knew I would be lauded for doing so. It was safe work. That is, it was safe to talk about, among family and friends, because it didn’t challenge anyone’s comfort or politics. People were very happy to donate to the cause (for which I’m grateful). It might have been different, though, if I spent those sixteen months standing with Amazon warehouse workers in Alabama, trying to form a union. Or to stick with the international, it might have been different if I spent sixteen months in solidarity with indigenous Amazonian peoples resisting extractive corporations from the global north. And so, while a lot of worthy work is being done globally, very little of that thrust from Bono, Gates, etc., questions international “free trade,” or questions World Bank/IMF/Washington Consensus global capitalism, or questions the intellectual property rights regime (even during a pandemic), or questions 800 US military bases worldwide, or questions imperialism or settler colonialism more broadly, or questions offshore tax havens, or questions global north corporate extraction from and then dumping in the global south. If there are villains, they are only the military government in Myanmar or the Janjaweed in Darfur (villains to be sure). If there are any western villains, they are only the earlier, more removed ones: Belgium’s King Leopold or maybe Cecil Rhodes (but the British exceptionalists, who have influenced the American exceptionalists, are quick to distinguish their rapacious colonialism from German and other colonialisms). If there are specifically American villains, they are the easy ones: George W. Bush (before his recent rehabilitation, at least) or Donald Trump.
This then is the limitation of Nicholas Kristof-style, international-humanitarian journalism. Kristof, fellow Times columnist and fellow “good liberal,” is better intentioned, better informed, and humbler than Friedman and does a lot of good reporting, but we typically aren’t challenged to go beyond the occasional UNICEF donation, the biennial November vote for Democrats, the service/mission trip, or the Amnesty International petition.
“Why did we think Bill and Melinda Gates could fix the world?” Journalist Anand Giridharadas used to report back to the Davos/Aspen/TED world what they wanted to hear, on how good they were at changing the world. One day at Aspen he decided not to (in a short speech that is worth a listen). That speech evolved into a larger critique and into his book, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, in which he takes aim at the do-good-by-doing-well world. Specifically on the international front, he notes:
It isn’t just that solving things at the global level (which, in the absence of world government, often means privately, which often means plutocratically) lacks legitimacy. Pushing things up into that realm gives globalists “moral cover or ethical cover for escaping their domestic obligations as citizens in their own national setting.” It is a way of doing good that allows them to ignore the fact that their democracies aren’t working well. Or, even more simply, it allows them to avoid the duty they might otherwise feel to interact with their fellow citizens across divides, to learn about the problems facing their own communities, which might implicate them, their choices, and their privileges—as opposed to universal challenges like climate change or the woes of faraway places like Rwandan coffee plantations. In such cases, diffuseness or distance can spare one the feeling of having a finger jabbed in one’s face.
Relatedly, I believe this is one reason why so many liberals today have contempt for labor unions (in addition to the fact that so few of us are in them, especially blue-collar ones). Unions are necessarily frictional and, when successful, they exact demands that would not have been given without that friction. That does not fit with the smart-technocrat, wise-arbiter, benevolent-manager, philanthropist, globe-trotting-doing-good view of ourselves. Especially when there is a strike or some other disruption, “Those transit workers...those airport workers...those hotel workers...those nurses...those teachers...need to get back to work...or at least clear the street...so I can get back to work and get on with my own life and travel...and changing the world.”
*
Liberals, especially vis-à-vis their left flank, are the pragmatic ones. They own the mantle of pragmatism. Richard Hofstadter criticized the populists as romantic reactionaries. Chuck Schumer said the “far left” in the 1970s scared away “the Baileys” (the “imaginary Irish-American Long Islanders with whom Schumer consults on decisions”). Bill Clinton would regularly “counter-schedule," i.e. tell traditional left constituencies, such as labor opponents of NAFTA, certain “hard truths." The press loved Clinton’s counter-scheduling. They loved his performative transgression. They got to talk about his personality, his "political genius," his savviness. Throw in James Carville’s quips, and it was all made for TV. “The future is upon us. Get on board, you stubborn, backwards, ideological assholes” (paraphrased). Friedman carried that torch in the papers: “Get on the tech/‘progress’ train, you Luddite regressive assholes” (paraphrased). “It is a no-brainer,” and yet at the same time, “It’s too complex for you to appreciate.” Obama told the same hard truths to opponents of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), or opponents of the expanded drone program, or left critics of Obamacare: “Get serious, you unserious assholes. We’re serious.” (paraphrased)
It is one thing to argue, “You know what, on Tuesday, November 3, 2020, let’s put aside our important differences and take fifteen minutes (or however long it takes with voter suppression) and vote for Joe Biden, in order to defeat Donald Trump. That is the pragmatic thing to do at this moment. Particularly in swing states.” Ok. Along with plenty of other folks on the left, I agreed with that reasoning and voted that way, although I did not take it as a foregone conclusion, and I know many serious people who did not come to that conclusion. I believe we do have to engage, to some degree, with the Congress, the state legislatures, and the American public that we have, i.e. not as left as we wish they were. However, it is quite another thing to claim the mantle of pragmatism all the other days in between: “We can’t discuss universal healthcare, or ending the Afghanistan war, or climate change and a Green New Deal, or Wall Street reform. We need to be pragmatic.” This ever taking up the mantle of so-called “pragmatism,”-- combined with the lack of any deep working-class-centered, organizing, base-building efforts aimed at pushing the needle on these issues in between elections while at the same time crushing left insurgencies—makes it feel like establishment liberals/Democrats are just fine with the status quo. They have, after all, resoundingly won the culture war, and so the status quo is working quite fine for many of them. “Would you rather want Trump? Would you rather want Romney? Would you rather want McCain?” Viewing its left-flank as naïve purist ideologues, this center digs in even more into its center. It fools itself into thinking that, because it is the center, it is post- or non-ideological. “Moderation in all things!” quoting some classical Greek—or was it Roman?--poet, patting ourselves on the back. But moderation in and “consensus” with an extremely right-wing (on the aggregate), extractive, massive-carbon-emitting, consumerist, nuke-and-base-building, extremely financialized, wealth-sucking-and-hoarding, sanctions-wielding, racial-capitalist, settler-colonial, rapacious empire is not ideology-free. As even the Oracle Greenspan said, when questioned in the middle of the crash about his own ideology, “Remember that what an ideology is, is a conceptual framework with the way people deal with reality. Everyone has one. You have to --to exist, you need an ideology. The question is whether it is accurate or not.”
(At the same time, I believe there are too many “ultra leftists” out there who think their correct beliefs and snark on Twitter alone will win the day and that the “revolution” is around the corner and that anyone who engages with any political realities, from a local tenant fight to a union issue to a school board election to a Bernie to a Biden is a sell-out, but who have no political praxis themselves to get to their political dreams. I admit that post-navy and still from time to time, I relish in some ultra-leftism because it requires nothing of me other than being correct, on sleepy low-tech Blogspot--not even on Twitter.)
*
The Milton Friedman-Ronald Reagan conservatives love their economic growth. However, nowadays, liberals match or try to outdo conservatives in this cult of endless growth: “We just need more innovation...more entrepreneurs... more creative disruption...more adding value...more value added...more STEM higher education...more computing technology...more STEM secondary education...more start-ups...more STEM primary education...just a little more tech...just a little more job training (for you, that is; my job is secure, especially with my elite education and social network) and we will finally get to the promised equilibrium...no need to ‘divide the pie’...just ‘grow the pie’! (Friedman)...the losers are just temporary losers...they too can get plugged into this startup-innovation world...if needed with the assistance of our generous philanthropic friends just waiting to help: Gates, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett, Tom Steyer, Michael Bloomberg, Mark Cuban.” “Go learn how to code,” Rahm Emmanuel tells the losers. “All you need is a laptop,” Friedman encourages them.
Because these innovators are more woke, more green, more pink, or more hip than the captains of industry of the past and because we professionals are now closer—at least in regards to our perceived social capital, if not our actual capital—to the winners than to the losers, we care less about the labor that is “creatively” disrupted. We don’t criticize those who own the innovations. We watch the surplus value, created by labor, get vacuumed upwards. We don’t question the violence that polices this arrangement. Today, it is even easier to avoid these questions because so much of that labor has been outsourced, off-shored, gig-ified, casualized, “shared,” and altogether removed from our spaces. This trajectory will likely continue. Stand by for the next fetishization of the next innovation. John Patrick Leary, author of Keywords: The New Language of Capitalism, writes:
Innovation is an example of the ways in which the production and circulation of commodities becomes imbued with fantastic and even theological properties detached from the labor that produces them, or in the case of many common uses of the verb “to innovate,” detached from any object. So when liberal politicians promote an “innovation agenda” that includes student debt forgiveness for “startup founders,” as Hillary Clinton did during her 2016 presidential campaign, it is unclear how this differs from any other form of corporate welfare. And when conservative politicians or CEOs lament how labor unions or public regulation of the private sector “impede innovation,” we can recognize this as both a ludicrous obfuscation but also another example of the bourgeois contempt for labor.
The problem, of course, isn’t technology, innovation, or STEM education (similarly, the problem isn’t trade in and of itself). They are neither good nor bad. The original Luddites themselves weren’t actually anti-technology. They smashed the machines because they had no say over how the machines were to be used. “Each generation stumbles into the quicksand of forgetting that technology is an expression of other interests. In modern times [and the Luddites’ time] this means the interests of capital,” Shoshana Zuboff’s notes, quite simply, in the beginning of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. The problem is capitalism.
*
How we obscure power is also how we obscure history. To the degree that Americans even look, we have a tendency to view large social-economic-political processes as naturally occurring (maybe people from other countries do the same?): settlement, industrialization, increasing technology, urbanization, then de-urbanization and suburbanization, offshoring, outsourcing, economic shifts from the Northeast and Midwest to the Sun Belt and then to Mexico and Bangladesh, globalization, scientific advancement, automation, artificial intelligence, and financialization, to name a few. We treat them as if they just happen, like leaves falling off a tree or an older man going bald, as if past policies and conscious decisions did not shape these forces every step of the way, for both bad and good. Yet, we know that laws, litigation, and the occasional “lawfare”; investment, non-investment, and divestment choices; the occasional violence; public and backroom deals; contracts, arbitration, and strikes; lobbying, advocacy, and legislation; geography, the availability of resources, and the extraction of resources; the occasional expropriation and exploitation of those resources; education, training, and the occasional miseducation; and access and the occasional hoarding have shaped these processes through and through. In years past, liberals might have put up some roadblocks and safety rails, asked difficult questions, and nudged these tectonic shifts toward slightly more just outcomes, or at least pretended to (or maybe I am being too kind). But liberals now too often enable, cheerlead--sometimes out-cheerleading conservatives--and apologize for the above shifts.
“When you live in a time of change, the only way to recover your security and to broaden your horizons is to adapt to the change--to embrace, to move forward,” said Bill Clinton upon the signing of NAFTA. Change is presented as some type of extrinsic force assumed as always good and moral that comes upon us, not something done by powerful presidents, congresspeople, corporations, interest groups, and constituents.
Then, when some of the unpretty data starts to come back and when the people who had no say over any of these changes rise up in fury, we don’t really repent or change our thinking. We resort to the passive voice: “Mistakes were made.” Or, we make new pseudo-physics laws that suit us: “Crashes just happen. Jobs get offshored. That’s the way it is.” If we don’t just tell them to “go code,” we might express sympathy for the losers: “I feel bad for the Mexican farmers who lost their livelihoods and must migrate here…. We should really retrain those American workers who lost their jobs,” as if deliberate decisions on NAFTA, WTO, or financial deregulation did not wreck those livelihoods. We add, “If only we would have known. That was the current of the time, though,” which of course ignores the dissenting opinions that were present and squashed. Some liberals (and fewer conservatives) now express some limited remorse on having been on the wrong side of, or at least, for not having the full picture on a numbers of issues: NAFTA; the repeal of Glass-Steagall, the Commodities Futures Modernization Act, and financial deregulation in general; welfare reform; the crime bill; increased militarization of the southern border; WTO or at least the WTO’s admission of China; Afghanistan or at least the Afghanistan surge; Iraq; Puerto Rico, as recent as 2016 with the PROMESA.
“Mistakes were made. It’s what the intel said. Colin Powell, ‘one of the good ones,’ told us so!” Why and how do we keep believing all the bad intel? When are we going to stop? It’s starting to feel insincere and deliberate.
As for Friedman: when reflecting back on the possibility that deregulation led to the crash, he digs in further and argues that deregulation “done right” would have been fine and could still save the day. As for trade: to the Seattle protests, he says, “I'm for such higher standards, and over time the W.T.O. may be a vehicle to enforce them, but it's not the main vehicle to achieve them. And they are certainly not going to be achieved by putting up new trade walls.” He tries to kick the conflict down the road to some future evening-out or sorting-through process that never comes as he meanwhile ridicules the frictional, potential evening-out right before him in Seattle or any attempts before then. What will be the vehicle to achieve those higher standards then, Tom? Will those just come about naturally? As for Iraq, Friedman remained a true believer even after “Mission Accomplished” turned quite sour. At the same time, he berated the Iraqis for not being grateful enough to “such good people,” i.e. the American soldiers, who should have been "greeted as liberators" (D. Cheney). As the war turned even uglier, it was not that its premise was wrong but that we needed the right and savvier plan, the right general—David Petraeus! PhD from Princeton! McChrystal? McRaven?—the right technology, more “surgical strikes” (maybe more in number but definitely more surgical), the right diplomat—Richard Holbrooke? George Mitchell?—the right framing and messaging, the right speech, the right president—John Kerry? Barack Obama? Hillary Clinton? Thanks, Mr. Bush, we’ll take it from here—some silver bullet or innovation yet to be discovered for which the Iraqis will eventually be shocked and awed, in gratitude. “Fight it better!” Friedman and other Iraq liberal-hawks sounded a lot like their Vietnam liberal-hawk forefathers. And yet astonishingly, Friedman says he was not a cheer-leader for the war, and yet contradictorily, he stands by his original cheer-leading the war. “Mistakes were made. At least, we (or some of us) feel bad about them.”
*
"It’s the circle of life. Hakuna matata, baby!"
This vision of our educated, elite, empathetic, cosmopolitan, pragmatic selves colors our relationship with our three most prominent donor and/or booster constituencies: Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood.
Wall Street is full of dizzying innovation. The smartest guys from the most elite schools go to the Wall Street banks: Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Credit Suisse. Some do tours of duty with the big consulting groups: McKinsey, Boston Consulting, Accenture, Deloitte, Bain. McKinsey is the smartest of the smart, of course, the elitist of the elite, figuring out smart ways to cut postal jobs, execute mass layoffs, save money at ICE prisons, “turbocharge” opioid sales, or prop up authoritarian regimes, if the price is right. Other whiz kids spend time with the management consulting firms, law firms, mortgage lenders, and the ratings agencies that act as “palace guards” (R. Reich) around the banks. And then, there are the hedge funds.
Despite the crash, the whole apparatus continues on. And since all the innovators brought down the house in 2008, we kept them around to innovate our way out of it. We laugh, correctly, at the “Trump made a lot of money, therefore he can run an economy” logic, but we keep inviting Larry Summers and friends to run/advise/fix the economy under the same logic.
The 2010 Dodd-Frank Act and its Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, for instance, were important steps and better than nothing, and as is often given the excuse, “maybe all we could have asked for from that Congress (or any Congress).” (Or, maybe not. Maybe we could have asked for more. Democrats did control both houses and the presidency). Dodd-Frank unsurprisingly leaves the power dynamics of the whole finance edifice untouched--just a little regulation at the top. (When Chris Dodd left the Senate, he spent six years lobbying for the Motion Picture Association of America and then joined the white-shoe law firm Arnold and Porter. Barney Frank joined the board of Signature Bank. Frank defends his earlier and current ties to the financial industry, firing back at critics for applying a “purity test." And more broadly, regarding all elected officials and congressional staffers who worked on Wall Street reform:
Wall Street, K Street and firms representing financial interests have hired at least 15 of the 47 lawmakers who left Congress after serving on the House Financial Services Committee and Senate Banking Committee in August 2008, just before the financial crisis entered its most intense chapter. That number includes six of the 10 senators to leave Congress after serving on the Banking Committee. Seventeen of the 40 most senior staffers who served on the House Financial Services Committee in August 2008, as well as 15 of the 40 senior staff who served on the Senate Banking Committee at that time, later joined or took jobs representing a large financial institution.)
The problem isn’t investment banking. It’s who controls investment, the way investment is done, and the way investment reigns, not only with contributions and intense lobbying but also as a “virtual senate” on every issue. Chomsky, again:
To quote from the professional literature, free flow of capital creates a “virtual senate” of lenders and investors who carry out a “moment-by-moment referendum” on government policies, and if they find them irrational—that is, designed to help people, not profits—they vote against them by capital flight, attacks on currency, and other means. Democratic governments therefore have a “dual constituency”: the population, and the virtual senate, who typically prevail.
Highlighting the markets’ “liking” a candidate or “disliking” a particular bill has traditionally been a Republican ploy—a good fear tactic to convince people that any slight tack left will “ruin the economy (which is defined only as the stock market).” But as the Republicans become more and more unhinged—encouraging Capitol insurrections, for instance—the markets prefer Democrats more and more. That may be so—that Wall Street investors prefer “stable” Democrats to Trumpist Republicans—but that should not be the mantle we take up. “The Dow prefers Obama! (or Clinton! Or Biden! Or ____!),” the networks chatter, delivering that news triumphantly, with zero context or self-awareness.
Democrats’ favorite Wall Street banker over the years has probably been Jamie Dimon. This is despite JP Morgan Chase, led by Dimon, being central to the bubble and 2008 crash, despite the bank being implicated in scandal after scandal. “But! Dimon supports gay rights…. He believes climate change is real…. He believes that no human being is illegal…. He has made a lot of diverse hires…. He believes black lives matter…. Last year, after George Floyd’s murder, he formed a committee to tackle racial inequality…. He has recently spoken out against the Georgia voter suppression law…. He was Obama’s friend, at least for a time…. Dimon criticized and made fun of Trump from time to time…. He even has gone beyond the yard sign sentiments! He has talked about income inequality, for example:
A big chunk of [people] have been left behind. Forty percent of Americans make less than $15 an hour. Forty percent of Americans can’t afford a $400 bill, whether it’s medical or fixing their car. Fifteen percent of Americans make minimum wages, 70,000 die from opioids [annually].
He put $350 million into a program to train workers for the future! In a similar vein, Warren Buffett even admits, ‘There’s class warfare, alright, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.’ Buffett is our favorite billionaire.”
Despite his quips against Trump, Dimon and the Business Roundtable he chairs were instrumental in getting the Trump tax cuts passed. Despite his “concern” over income inequality, he doesn’t think the $31 million he brought home last year, or CEO pay in general, is part of the problem. It appears, to him, that lack of training and education is the main problem. “Just a little more job training and education. We’re almost there!” Dimon, the central (smart, media-savvy, woke) villain in Robert Reich’s The System. and the Roundtable
Could use their outsized political influence to push for laws requiring CEOs to consider all their stakeholders, not just shareholders. Rather than make it harder for workers to unionize, they could fight to make it easier, and to give workers larger voice in management decisions and a greater share of the profits. Rather than reflexively seek tax cuts, they could push to raise taxes on corporations and wealthy Americans like themselves, so there’d be more school funding to prepare American kids for the jobs of the future. They could seek a higher minimum wage, a larger Earned Income Tax Credit, universal healthcare, and other measures to make left-behind Americans more secure.
Dimon personally is fine with a little redistribution of income, but he and his compatriots will never stand for a redistribution of power, which might get to the heart of the inequality and the rot. In a similar vein, despite his admission of rich-led class war, Buffett vocally opposed the Employee Free Choice Act in 2009, which could have precipitated some redistribution of not only income but power.
There is a role for investment banking, but investment that is more regulated, more accountable, more democratic, more productive. Or at least, less parasitic to the rest of the real economy. Investment that serves the public and that does not control our politics for its own corrosive ends. The Reddit-Gamestop phenomenon this past January did get many people thinking about how messed up Wall Street’s model is, at least for a short while: “How is it that hedge funds make so much money betting against companies? Is that fair? Can renegade subreddit investors defeat the hedge funds? What is a subreddit? Who is WallStreetBets? Wait, how does all this work again?” The title of Thomas Friedman’s column right after the craze, “Made in the U.S.A.: Socialism for the Rich. Capitalism for the Rest” seemed to indicate that the GameStop thing led to some surprising epiphany for him. Nope. It did not. Instead of raising any challenging questions regarding labor/capital/power/inequality, he sidestepped and pontificated circularly over interest rates and other red herrings. Then, on CNBC, when asked what was happening, he provided even more drivel:
It is like watching a giant National Geographic nature film. First, there are people we call Lions “Long Sellers” who notice a Wildebeest hobbling around. We will call the Wildebeest “GameStop stock”. And of course, the Lions killed and ate the Wildebeest by driving the stock price from $63 to $4 dollars a share. When they did this, they made a fortune. Then along came the Hyenas. They are called “Short Sellers”. They fed off the carcass of the Wildebeest, “GameStop”. Yet, these are magical Hyenas. They made the carcass grow 50% larger than it really was. They did this with leverage.
Soon afterward came the Vultures, “Short Squeezers aka Reddit Army” This is a whole new group. The Vultures, “Short Squeezers” basically in turn ate the Hyenas. Now the really smart Vultures ate and flew away when the price hit $400 or so. The dumb Vultures hung around and kept eating. The Lions came back and ate the remaining Vultures. By the way, they are still eating. The latecomers. Eventually, when it is said and done the stock will return to the $4 value it had before this all happened. It is the circle of life, Hakuna Matata baby!
This supposedly passes for analysis and expertise. He closes:
What we’re seeing here is the democratization of finance...of short-squeezing...In America now, we do everything sort of laissez faire…. We kind of let it all happen and then we try to regulate it afterwards to try to find some hybrid balance and I think that’s the process we’re in now around news with Facebook and Twitter and now our markets.
This is his eventual evening-out, which just happens naturally over time on a libertarian internet he imagines exists. No comment on whether this game, be it played by lions or vultures, is fair, moral, or sane. No comment for the human beings left in the wake of “leveraged buyouts” and other capital games, more broadly, such as retail workers left without jobs and health care.
Versus the hedge funds, I obviously root for the part-time day traders and thank them for exposing the system’s folly, at least for a short time, but we should not kid ourselves that this is the “democratization of finance." Additionally, as Eric Levitz wrote in New York Magazine, “Whatever utility the GameStop rally theoretically had as a spectacle, its first-order consequence was to transfer wealth from ordinary Americans to Robinhood and Wall Street market makers.” Levitz not only chides Friedman fantasies but also attempts to sober up AOC, Matt Taibbi, and other, less credentialed left tweeters:
On a platform [Robinhood] that drastically underrepresents the supermajority of Americans who have less than $1,000 in savings, it was possible for some progressives to mistake the cause of recreational investors for that of the proletariat. Rallying to the cause of Robinhood traders may feel righteous. But it also has led leftwing lawmakers to the precipice of endorsing deregulation to facilitate riskier recreational speculation.
*
"Start-Up America: Our Best Hope"
Because we are so connected to our devices, or we are so susceptible to its top-notch PR, or so much of its advertising whispers to our hip lifestyle and personal branding, or we are too easily mesmerized by every innovation, or in many ways its devices have made our lives easier (sort of), or we get to use so many of their products for free (sort of), or many of its titans contribute to Democrats instead of Republicans (and we’re used to big business traditionally donating to Republicans), or so many Obama administration alums went to work there, or the industry seems to validate our meritocratic vision, or for any number of other reasons, liberals give much deference to Silicon Valley.
While Silicon Valley wields sway over our politics comparably to Wall Street, there is a major distinction between the two. Former New York attorney general and governor Eliot Spitzer, in the Academy Award-winning Inside Job (about the bubble and 2008 crash) notes the difference with Wall Street, “High tech is a fundamentally creative business where the value generation and the income derived from it actually comes from creating something new and different.”
It’s important not to fixate on just producing and consuming and on always having to produce/consume “something new and different.” Spitzer’s quote doesn’t touch on the labor-capital relationships around that creation. But compared to Wall Street at the least, Silicon Valley provides something of social value. Spitzer is right. Nevertheless, the sector’s power and influence is highly problematic.
The leaders of the big tech firms are the ubermenschen: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Larry Page/Sergey Brin. Zuckerberg, Musk, and Bezos have fallen slightly out of favor, but ubermenschen like them can keep creating and recreating themselves in addition to creating products and innovations. Even when we hold them in contempt, we aspire to be them (and they will soon cycle back out of our contempt). Bill Gates makes major decisions on global health and public education that affect the lives of millions of people who don’t use or even know Microsoft. Steve Jobs is the turtlenecked guru telling us to “Think Different,” still from the grave, and making his sleek products a countercultural lifestyle choice. Bezos is probably an asshole, but he [sic] can get us whatever we want to our doors in five minutes, and so we don’t really care that he is an asshole. Amazon has masterfully put the customer first, creating "Earth's Most Customer-Centric Company," as he put it in his last letter to shareholders. We dutifully obey and consume. Zuckerberg is a bit clueless and sloppy, or cleverly appears to be clueless, but he remains the boy-wonder. Musk may have some idiosyncrasies, but he will kindly open-source his solar-battery intellectual property with us, he says, to help save Earth before he takes us all to Mars. (Bezos/Blue Origin also might take us to Mars, depending on who’s faster.). Page and Brin stay under the radar enough to remain elusive, and in turn Google remains benevolent in our eyes.
Who better than Thomas Friedman to encapsulate our fascination with big tech? In a 2014 column, after visiting Silicon Valley, he could not contain himself:
Aaron Levie, the chief executive of Box, explains how his online storage and collaboration technology is enabling anyone on any mobile device to securely upload files, collaborate, and share content from anywhere to anywhere. Laszlo Bock, who oversees all hiring at Google, lays out the innovative ways his company has learned to identify talented people who have never gone to college. Brian Chesky, the co-founder of Airbnb, explains how his start-up has, in the blink of an eye, become one of the biggest providers of overnight rooms in the world — challenging Hilton and Marriott — without owning a single room. Curt Carlson, the chief executive of SRI International, which invented Siri for your iPhone, recalls how one leading innovator just told him that something would never happen and “then I pick up the paper and it just did.”
What they all have in common is they wake up every day and ask: “What are the biggest trends in the world, and how do I best invent/reinvent my business to thrive from them?” They’re fixated on creating abundance, not redividing scarcity, and they respect no limits on imagination. No idea here is “off the table.”
His visit and column happened to coincide with the TPP debate and therefore his punch-line just happened to be: “Silicon Valley tries new ideas all the time; Washington should too; pass the TPP—’fast-track’ it even (i.e. more ‘free trade’!).”
Big tech is no better or worse than any other industry. But what is unique about big tech is its particular branding in our popular cultural and collective psyche and, thus in effect, the mystification over how it actually gets us the hardware and software we need and don’t need. Behind the “Genius Hour”; behind the necessary and less necessary apps that enabled virtual teaching this past year; behind the million-dollar donations to civil rights groups after George Floyd’s murder; behind the pledges to reduce carbon emissions and Amazon paying its HQ2 employees to bike to work; behind its tear-jerking widower-trying-to-not-forget Super Bowl ads; behind its ostensible iconoclasm convincing us that buying their products is a small act of “resistance” akin to Vaclav Havel’s famed “green grocer” or Orwell’s Winston Smith (until Winston succumbs to Big Brother at least, or until we realize everyone else has the products too); behind the 18-minute-curated, usually necktie-less, thought-leader-led TED-talk promising the next innovation that will finally free us; behind the billionaire asceticism and gurudom; behind the self-congratulation for helping to topple dictators in the 2011 Arab Spring; behind its seemingly apolitical “we just love science” posturing; behind the kegerators, coffee bars, and ping pong tables in hip work spaces; behind all these, like in most other capitalist ventures, lie the extraction of natural resources, the expropriation of labor-generated surplus value, the accumulation of massive profits, the emission of much carbon, the pressure on municipalities to keep taxes and regulations low, cut-throat anti-competitive practices tending toward monopoly, and racialized/gendered hierarchies that facilitate such flows.
Rob Larson’s (very accessible) Bit Tyrants: The Political Economy of Silicon Valley details how much of the research and development for what would become the internet, what would become the personal computer, and what would become the hardware and software in between, were developed in publicly funded Department of Defense and other government and public university labs. Then the “pirates of Silicon Valley” obtained that intellectual property for cheap or free or stole it from other, smaller developers. Then, by the 90s, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs had gobbled all of that up, and they respectively used strong-arm tactics and “network effects” to establish and maintain their oligopoly. Meanwhile, Bezos was doing similar things focused in the new online retail world, ruthlessly driving out smaller competitors, for instance. Google/Page/Brin and Zuckerberg/Facebook mounted similar feats with “search” and social networking. All of this is, in one breath, fine and unsurprising. We shed no tears for the Pentagon not getting credit, for example. However, this reality does not square, to say the least, with the image Silicon Valley projects of itself as the meritocratic, libertarian, from-the-ground-up, world’s laboratory.
Shoshana Zuboff’s (much longer and more philosophical but still very accessible) The Age of Surveillance Capitalism details how, first, Google and then Facebook mined our behavioral surplus and sold it to advertisers and how we have incorrectly viewed this as neutral-to-benign. And how we have only begun to realize what’s happening now, twenty years into their project. Comparing Google’s “declarations'' to its users to the Spanish conquistadors’ declarations to the Native Americans, who couldn’t fully know how much their entire world was about to be upended (partially because the declarations were in Spanish), Zuboff writes:
Surveillance capitalists deftly employed the entire arsenal of the declaration to assert their authority and legitimacy in a new and undefended digital world. They used declarations to take without asking. They camouflage their purpose with illegible machine operations, moved at extreme velocities, sheltered secret corporate practices, mastered rhetorical misdirection, taught helplessness, purposefully misappropriated cultural signs and symbols associated with the the themes of the second modernity--empowerment, participation, voice, individualization, collaboration--and badly appealed to the frustrations of second-modernity individuals thwarted in the collision between psychological yearning and institutional indifference.
In this process the pioneer surveillance capitalists at Google and Facebook evaded the disciplines of corporate governance and rejected the disciplines of democracy, protecting their claims with financial influence and political relationships. Finally, they benefited from history, born in a time when regulation was equated with tyranny and the state of exception precipitated by the terrorist attacks of 9/11 produced surveillance exceptionalism, further enabling the new market to root and flourish. Surveillance capitalists’ purposeful strategies and accidental gifts produced a form that can romance and beguile but is also ruthlessly efficient at extinguishing space for democratic deliberation, social debate, individual self-determination, and the right to combat as it forecloses every path to exit.
Facebook these days seems to be involved in one scandal after another, including and since the 2016 election. But these are “mini-scandals,” according to Zuboff, inside that much larger tectonic shift, where all of our behavior is commodified for prediction/futures/virtual/AI technologies, which we do not and will not own. And, this is what should scandalize us, but it does not.
As for Silicon Valley’s--or Jamie Dimon’s or Coca-Cola’s, for that matter—progressive credentials and the power of “woke capital” to discipline Republican-led voter suppression in Georgia, for instance, we should not hold any illusions. As a last resort, we should only make very temporary, very critical common cause with such behemoths and stand removed from them. Elizabeth Bruenig reminds us why:
For one: Capital is unfaithful. It can, and does, play all sides. Many of the courageous businesses that protested North Carolina’s 2016 “bathroom bill,” for instance, also donated to political groups that helped fund the candidacies of the very politicians who passed the bill. It isn’t possible to cooperate with capital on social matters while fighting them in other theaters; capital can fight you in all theaters at once, all while enjoying public adulation for helping you, as well.
Setting aside the fact that capital can in a single moment be both heroic and diabolical — Amazon wants you to be able to vote, but it would prefer if you didn’t unionize — it is, incredibly, even less democratic, accountable and responsive than our ramshackle democracy.
Capital rallies to the defense of democracy while aggressively quashing that very thing in the workplaces where its workers labor. It’s tempting, perhaps even satisfying, to call the government’s boss, but after the dressing down, you’re still just a customer, worth only as much as you can pay them or make them. That the jerks who’ve done their best to enervate our democracy are in the same boat as us is a cold comfort.
Not unlike the US government, big tech celebrates itself for enabling certain elements of the Arab Spring, or the Orange Revolution, or the Hong Kong protests, but just as likely enables a different authoritarian regime elsewhere in the world--the highest bidder--to crush its opposition. Profits are its goal. The rest is incidental. And when the US government or military is the highest bidder, when its endless wars need the right technology, Silicon Valley will happily oblige, albeit not without some courageous dissenters.
In January, shortly after the Capitol riots, both Facebook and Twitter banned Donald Trump. That may have been the right move. However, we should note that they did so only after years of his ugly discourse helped bring in much revenue to the companies (just as the liberal TV news became the “resistance” to Trump only after giving his campaign so much free air time and enjoying the ratings he brought in. On the whole, this is a dangerous development. “We can have democracy, or we can have editing power in the hands of a few ad moguls, but we definitely can’t have both.” Facebook and other social media companies can’t be the public square and an unaccountable private enterprise at the same time. Furthermore, any capital-led censorship will eventually, predictably take aim or capitulate to others taking aim at anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist movements, as Facebook, Zoom, and YouTube recently did with several Palestine solidarity events.
All of this should serve to demystify big tech, but we are still too easily shocked/awed, and simultaneously anesthetized. Especially when time is money and “science is real” and “math!” look at all the “value” Bezos/Amazon, for instance, has “unlocked” for us:
Customers
complete 28% of purchases on Amazon in three minutes or less, and half of all
purchases are finished in less than 15 minutes. Compare that to the typical
shopping trip to a physical store – driving, parking, searching store aisles,
waiting in the checkout line, finding your car, and driving home. Research
suggests the typical physical store trip takes about an hour. If you assume
that a typical Amazon purchase takes 15 minutes and that it saves you a couple
of trips to a physical store a week, that’s more than 75 hours a year saved.
And yet, most of are still un-“fulfilled,” even less so for the workers getting us our fulfillment. In some corners, thankfully, there is now chatter and even the occasional walkout in reaction to tech workers’ grueling hours. But that conversation--who actually is included in the term “tech worker” by the way?--mostly excludes Amazon warehouse workers on Staten Island or Foxconn factory workers in Taiwan or copper miners in the DRC. Could they not be considered tech workers as well? Or is our empathy limited to our professional friends?
In the 2020 Democratic primary, candidate Andrew Yang brought to the fore some very important issues: automation, displacement of workers, and of course, universal basic income (UBI). Yet, that welcomed conversation never touched on the fundamentals of labor, capital, and power. And when the hegemonic faces of capital are that warm to a potential idea, like UBI, it should give us some pause (although not necessarily torpedo the whole thing). There was no discussion of the history and politics that brought us to this juncture. Yang and the commentariat presented automation as some natural, ahistorical, apolitical force that just happens inevitably. And he, entrepreneur, naturally as the one innovating our way out of it. But this obscures all the so-called entrepreneurs and innovators in the past 50 or 150 years who have hoarded the material and intellectual property. Who have outsourced, off-shored, “shared,” gigged, part-timed, and now automated jobs every chance they have gotten in the name of “staying competitive,” which means in the name of profits. The robots are not the bad guys. Who owns the robots, though, owns the world. They are the bad guys. And while the media mostly dismissed Yang as an unviable candidate (although viable for New York City?), they nevertheless admired his entrepreneurship and how he taught other people in distressed cities entrepreneurship—i.e. start-ups saving the world. But what is “entrepreneurship” when it is divorced from questions of labor, power, extraction, and accumulation? John Patrick Leary, again: .
The prophetic meaning embedded deep in its history allows innovation to stand in for nearly any kind of positive transformation, doing for the twenty-first century what “progress” once did for the nineteenth and twentieth. In the United States, innovation also suggests a high-tech update to the myth of “Yankee ingenuity” or “know-how” — the spirit of mechanical cleverness and entrepreneurial energy once associated with New England’s artisan class. Like the mythical inventors of the American industrial age — Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison tinkering in their workshops — the innovator is a model capitalist citizen for our times.
But the object of most innovations today is more elusive: you can touch a telephone or a phonograph, but who can lay hands on an Amazon algorithm, a credit-default swap, a piece of proprietary Uber code, or an international free trade agreement? As an intangible, individualistic, yet strictly white-collar trait, innovation reframes the cruel fortunes of an unequal global economy as the logical products of a creative, visionary brilliance. In this new guise, the innovator retains both a touch of the prophet and a hint of the confidence man.
When the innovator Yang and the McKinsey whiz kid Buttigieg and the other darlings seemed unable to stop Bernie (and when Biden was not yet in vogue), Thomas Friedman, James Carville, and the other really serious guys began “paging Michael Bloomberg” , innovator extraordinaire waiting in the wings. He, apparently, was just the right technocrat, the right billionaire, the right moderate at the right moment who would save the day by convincing enough fellow wealthy white Bethesdans to jump from the Trump ship, and who would fix this country, presumably. “Paging Michael Bloomberg.” Which shows either just how out of touch Thomas Friedman and company are or how much contempt they have for working people or both. Michael Bloomberg, who made his billions through a financial data company, Bloomberg LP, which provides Bloomberg Terminal subscriptions, which “provides access to a wealth of real-time financial market data,” which is kind of like the marriage of Silicon Valley and Wall Street (sort of). Michael Bloomberg, under whom “stop and frisk” skyrocketed in New York City. Michael Bloomberg, under whom New York City became even more a playground for the rich while so many more people could no longer afford housing (which, to be fair, is not only a New York City problem). (Then there was the liberal, “Cuomosexual” desire for Andrew Cuomo to run when people remembered how rusty Biden was and after Cuomo gave many press conferences with much bravado, but I will leave that alone.)
Meanwhile, lost among the confidence men vying for the presidency and hardly discussed in the news were two extremely important--and bad--developments, in deeply blue, “very liberal” California: the failure of Prop 15 and most especially, the passing of Prop 22. Prop 15 “sought to raise taxes on high-value commercial properties to undo some of the damage of the 1970s ‘tax revolt,’ which over the last decades has kept California and other states from raising revenue for public services.” It failed by 4 percentage points. Chevron, Disney, and the real estate industry fought to defeat it. Then, with Prop 22, Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, Instacart and other “gig” companies spent $200 million to overturn Assembly Bill 5 (2019) and gain exemptions from labor law. Prop 22 passed with a wider margin, and Uber, etc., now do not have to classify their drivers as employees. Predictably, the gig companies and the Yes-campaign highlighted how wonderful and freeing it is to be an “independent contractor,” to work when you want to and make extra cash. They also heavily incorporated people of color into their ads and tried to paint labor unions and the No-campaign as exclusive, rigid, and racist. One ad for Prop 22 even appropriated the words and voice of Maya Angelou as it showed drivers of color getting ready for work each day: “Lift up your eyes upon….” However, despite the Maya Angelou poems and the “If you tolerate racism, delete Uber” billboards, these companies “have built an entire business model on gaslighting people of color and exploiting them for cheap labor.” We sing Uber's praises in regards to its "innovations" and its "efficiency," but much of that obscures the venture capital flowing in, its overall unprofitability, and yet the value its drivers nevertheless produce for the company. It is most efficient in demeaning its workforce and most "innovative" in creating a race to the bottom, even with other workers outside the company. (Side note: Kamala Harris’ brother-in-law, Tony West, is the chief legal officer for Uber. He helped push Prop 22. He was in Obama’s Justice Department. The Biden administration had apparently entertained hiring him as well, but brought on other Uber executives instead.)
As a non-Californian, I can only hypothesize how landlords and Silicon Valley capitalists won in their respective ballot measures, against public investment and against unions, while the state went 65% percent for Biden/Harris on the same day, on the same ballot. Maybe blue-California young professionals were taken by the Angelou ad. Maybe they didn’t read the propositions carefully. Or, maybe it all makes sense. It does fit with the brahmanizing Democratic demographic. We educated, cosmopolitan web people for the most part don’t drive for Uber or Lyft, but we use them, and they are very convenient, admittedly. We web people don’t work for TaskRabbit or DoorDash or Instacart, but we use them--all very convenient, too. At the same time, we get to rate some of these workers. It appears to be a fair, egalitarian system: "Drivers can rate us, too...and they should just be nice, then there's no problem." Yes, but they can’t affect our wages or livelihoods. In this power imbalance, some of these workers have to grovel to earn our favor because our unfavor can burn them. In regards to AirBnb, we typically aren’t affected by the business model's “negative externalities” on the housing market, vis-à-vis our own relative housing security, and therefore we don’t think about that when we book our own, very convenient AirBnb trip. Furthermore, we can drive, we can deliver, if we wanted to. Those jobs don’t take that much skill, unlike our own professions. Subconsciously or consciously, we think, “Anyone can do that. Ipso facto, you don’t need benefits or a union.”
Employing the Amazon-perfected "Customer-Centric"(-at-the-expense-of-workers-and-all-else) framework, these companies actually pushed their political messaging out through their apps to their customers, insinuating, "Don't let these 'outside agitators' get in the way of this nice thing we've got going. That might raise the price of your ride home or lengthen the wait for those items you need at your doorstep."
I do foresee a time in the future--or perhaps I am being too generous again--when we empathetic liberals will look back and say, “Shoot, if we had known, at that juncture! How could we have foreseen the widening inequality?” Like, on NAFTA, on the WTO, on Glass-Steagall repeal and 90s financial deregulation, on PROMESA and Puerto Rico, on Afghanistan, and on Iraq. We will give half-apologies. “Mistakes were made. It was the bad intel! Did we mention they sent the trustworthy Colin Powell to the UN?” Prop 22 in California was one of those very junctures, and we did more than punt. We gave everything away to the other team. Unless, of course, that has been our team all along.
California-style liberalism, which is most of our style of liberalism, is a “a simulacrum of social justice,” “the Biden administration is the Californication of the Democratic Party,” and, beware, Prop 22 is coming for the rest of us in other states.
*
Several hundred miles south of Silicon Valley lies Hollywood. Because politics in the US is celebrity and campaigns are theater, it is no wonder that “Hollywood” (to include New York-centered entertainment or the music industry or big-time athletics, for my purposes) plays an outsized role, particularly for liberal/Democratic politics. True, there is the uglier Republican underbelly: Reagan, Trump, Kid Rock, Brett Favre. True: thousands of actors (i.e. most of them), film- and theater-workers, comedians, athletes, and athletics-workers do not make it to the upper echelons, from where they can Tweet liberal platitudes. True: many of these artists and athletes do keep their courageous, radical edges despite the co-opters’ best efforts. But fairly or unfairly, the Hollywood-and-politics that most of the country sees is on Oscar, Emmy, Tony, or Golden Globe nights--or on Tucker Carlson’s recap the next day--where awardees take their jabs at Trump or Bush (but certainly not at the guy in between). While I typically agree with those jabs, it is no wonder that, especially amidst the incredible wealth and opulence, Hollywood’s liberal preaching comes off as hypocritical and tone-deaf. Robert DeNiro says, “Fuck Trump,” at the Tonys. And yes, fuck Trump, certainly. And fuck Tucker Carlson too, absolutely. But, there is a major disconnect there. Much of the focus is only on the liberalism of correct beliefs: “In this mansion, we believe…. Hate has no home on this yacht.” Or, on representation. While very important, “Hollywood’s sudden wokeness is disproportionately obsessed with representation and the skin-deep skirmish over which well-paid celebrities win a golden trophy while studios and productions overwhelmingly employ low-paid, overworked hourly contractors [disproportionately of color].” Finally yes, there is a problem with how much those at the top make, but more so, the problem is how they use their wealth and power as influence to keep structures unjust, benefiting them even more in the end. We should be wary not just of Trump and Kushner but of all real estate moguls, including DeNiro. That is, including liberal ones who preach liberal platitudes quite freely, while at the same time shaping laws to their absentee-landowning advantage in places like Barbuda, post-Hurricane Irma.
And, on the topic of acceptance speeches, there is a limit though to what’s tolerated and applauded. When Michael Moore (who is somewhat problematic, as are his films) delivered his 2003 acceptance speech for “Best Documentary” (for Bowling for Columbine) and went after George W. Bush and the lies behind the Iraq war--very briefly too, by the way (Moore isn’t usually brief)--he was booed heavily by the crowd and cut off. Liberal late-night talk-show hosts, pundits, and guests like Keith Olbermann and Al Franken criticized Moore afterwards. It was only a couple days into the war, and its fever had gripped conservatives and liberals alike. War is good for business, especially the war-movie business.
"When My President Sang 'Amazing Grace' "
Finally, that brings us to the ultimate “web person.” The smartest, most elite, most empathetic, most cosmopolitan, most pragmatic, untouchable celebrity-superhero we know and love: the 44th president of the United States, Barack Hussein Obama.
Especially in the four-plus years since he left office, the Obama hagiography has solidified. In many good liberal circles, one does not criticize Barack Obama and come out alive, even more so now than in his eight years in office. During the Trump years, it appears, he was canonized. And because of the Obama-Biden connection and because of celebrity-personality politics in general, this colors how we approach Biden too, and thus how we consider or do not consider alternative paths forward.
For what it’s worth, Obama seems to be a good person, at least from what I can ascertain. He appears to be a good husband, a good father. He is a good writer, a good orator, a good eulogist, a good role model, and probably was a good law professor and community organizer. From what I see, he is witty, compassionate, and deep. I would probably enjoy a beer (summit) with him. I voted for him twice, the first time enthusiastically. The second time, when I was less enthusiastic, I still did a phone bank for him. I rooted for him and his agenda. I hated Mitch McConnell and Glen Beck for him. I had hoped that most of his campaign promises would materialize. I would have wanted him at my graduation. If I was graduating now, I’d still probably want him. And, as far as I “like”/rank presidents and as far as I indulge in “great (wo)man” history, he’s definitely top-ten for me, probably top-five. But politics is not biography, personality, or celebrity, even though that’s what we’ve been brought up to believe. (This focus on and defense of personalities would have been a problem, too, admittedly, for the much less refined and less congenial Bernie Sanders, in that outside chance he had become president.) Those attributes of and sentiments for Obama--“he was too good for us...we didn’t deserve him”--are, on one plane, relevant, even if grandiose. On that same plane, maybe it matters that Biden was nice to those Amtrak conductors on his regular trips to DC --"Character is on the ballot.” But on another plane, these notions are completely irrelevant. Unless we work for the future Obama or Biden libraries, none of us has to defend their personalities or their “legacies” (or FDR’s or Lincoln’s for that matter... or Bernie’s...or AOC’s or whoever’s). We shouldn't care about Biden's Delaware or Scranton roots unless we’re talking about “how Delaware thrives as a corporate tax haven” or how places like Scranton (or most of the rest of Delaware) suffer as a consequence. Politics is about who gets what, when, where, and how. It is the struggle among parties, propaganda, interest groups, labor unions, capital, church, military/police, and government bureaucracy itself over who gets what. Participation is not just voting, media personalities, and distant Ivy League-Rhodes Scholars managing a national issue, but it is neighbors, workers, and everyday people talking, learning, and acting together around a very local political goal. It can include repression and violence and counter-violence. It either attempts to maintain the status quo or move the ball forward (or backwards). All of this is informed by the material conditions under which people live in order to improve the material conditions under which they live.
Insofar as it illuminates alternative paths forward, we need to critique Barack Obama honestly. This does not mean just tweeting, “What about the drones?” or “Deporter-in-chief!” at him and self-satisfiedly thinking we’ve owned him. We need to have an honest critique, though, because the Obama hagiography industrial complex--and its continuities in the current Biden administration--does a very good job at maintaining the status quo and obscuring the power and sometimes violence of those presidencies--and of capital and empire, of cours. It does a very good job--more so than the man or President himself--at keeping our politics on the surface level of personal branding, right beliefs, and signaling.
To be fair, the Obama administration inherited a crumbling economy and two wars. As candidate and president, he dealt with more absurd, often racist, vitriol than probably any other modern politician has had to. Yes, after the 2010 midterms, he had to deal with an obstructionist Congress. Yes, he had to work within our anti-democratic constitutional framework. Yes, all true. But our politics requires analysis, not apologetics. At the end of the day, what matters is what his administration achieved, obstacles or none. On that measure, his was a decent presidency, I believe, but not a transformational one, like Lincoln’s or FDR’s (or Reagan’s, which was for the worse).
Team Obama did help stave off a greater recession, did establish some regulatory reforms of Wall Street, but they did not touch the underlying issues that caused the crash in the first place. Who would expect Tim Geithner, Larry Summers, or the McKinsey-ites to do so? Team Obama did expand health care coverage, but they further congealed private insurers in our healthcare system. “It was a step towards universal coverage,” they say to the left in defense. Ok, fine. Where have they been since, in the fight for that next step, in the 2016 or 2020 elections or in between? Or, especially as the pandemic has exposed, even more, the folly of employer-based health care? Yes, they passed the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which extends after-the-fact compensation for pay discrimination, but they let the Employee Free Choice Act die, which would have made it easier for workers to form a union and build power before the fact. Yes, they withdrew troops from Iraq and ended that war, sort of (leaving a permanent American footprint in Baghdad to be sure), but they “surged” and extended the war in Afghanistan. Yes, they normalized relations with Cuba, sort of, but they looked the other way on a coup in Honduras and recognized the illegitimate government afterwards. Yes, they brokered the Iran nuclear deal, but in Libya, “We came, we saw, he died” (no love for Qaddafi here, but they went beyond the UN mandate and helped send Libya into greater chaos). They expanded the drone war, expanded surveillance, went after whistleblowers. Yes, they tinkered where they could on climate change, but they could not stop the fossil fuel companies from dictating the terms. Yes, they acknowledged income inequality and made attempts to redistribute some income and wealth, but they attempted to fast-track TPP and further other structures that make redistribution necessary in the first place. Yes, they did not get along with Netanyahu and they “abstained” from a very mild UN rebuke of Israel in their last month, but the money kept flowing and the settlements kept growing for eight years. Yes, there were many other partial successes and victories, just like any administration’s successes (including Lincoln and FDR) are partial and imperfect. Yes, they were better than Team McCain or Team Romney would have been. Yes, they were absolutely better than Team Trump. That’s not even close. Or better than most of us could have done. But, that’s not the question or the point.
To his credit (sort of), Obama believed in consensus, despite the obvious bad faith of the Republican party. To his credit (sort of), he trusted “the process,” even though as a constitutional lawyer, he understood how backwards our particular process is. To his credit (sort of), Obama believed in “the idea of America, the promise of America” even though American realities have never matched the so-called “idea of America,” prior to and during his time. (Do other countries have as many ideas about themselves as we do?) Meanwhile, we, with our good Swedish liberal friends, were so eager for an intellectual, for the anti-Bush to come along with his ideas and promises--maybe more so than realities--that less than eight months into his term, we awarded him the Nobel Peace Prize. Which, to say the least, was a bit premature. Good liberal, though, I remember defending the decision myself: “Well the award is honoring his promise...and it could hold him accountable...and he has changed the rhetoric...and people like America again” (or something like that).
By the end of his time in office, Obama writes in A Promised Land, he had come to believe:
That [slow, painstaking reform] was all any of us could expect from democracy. . . . Not revolutionary leaps or major cultural overhauls; not a fix for every social pathology or lasting answers for those in search of purpose and meaning in their lives. Just the observance of rules that allowed us to sort out or at least tolerate our differences, and government policies that raised living standards and improved education enough to temper humanity’s baser impulses.
Which is fair. I believe he actually believes that, and I don’t think the hope/change was all a sham (even if it did win best advertisement in 2008). But in our analysis, we see that we got a lot of hope but not that much change. After the moral failings of the crash and of Iraq, what we needed was momentous change. Maybe he personally wanted it. But the team he brought in to expertly manage the crisis--all coming from the same Ivy League social class by the way--could not see beyond just technocratic tinkering. Or maybe would not, based on their class interest? This emphasis on “process,” on “consensus” also has the effect of telling the left--small and weak as it is--to back down and “get serious.” Team Obama, or team Biden, they’re the serious ones of course. Which is all fair posturing, because that is politics, too. But, it is not ideology-free just because it is more center or "moderate." And so, because “banks got bailed out and we got sold out,” Bernie did consider a primary challenge to Obama in 2012 because that is fair in politics, too. But in 2020, in our celebrity campaign media circus, Pete Buttigieg and others could seriously point to Bernie’s non-run against Obama in 2012 as an attempt to score political points, because one was not to challenge Obama then or now, supposedly. Which I guess is fair, too, because that’s also politics. It’s just very thin, that’s all. It’s in this milieu that Cornel West’s relentless Socratic criticism of Obama, to name one prominent detractor, in the media became focused on West’s idiosyncrasies (of which he has many) and his supposed feeling “left out” of team Obama. That was the media narrative, instead of on the substantive critique--a necessary critique of the most powerful man in the world, by the way, and of the leader of the most powerful empire in human history.
Team Obama tried really hard, believed really hard. It just wasn’t good enough, especially considering liberals/Democrats’ role in the social rot in the first place. Maybe then, we can read A Promised Land (which garnered a $65 million advance, by the way, far outdoing Clinton’s My Life, which only received a $15 million advance), but we don’t all have to be his memoirist ourselves.
Is this cynical? I don’t think so. Pessimistic? Perhaps But, “Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.” (We hope.)
*
(Thus far, I have avoided the term “neoliberal” because it can be a loaded or confusing term, and I hesitate to lob it around as a pejorative. But it can be a useful, descriptive term. Today’s liberals (and conservatives and everyone) exist and operate in a hegemonic neoliberal paradigm. As most already know but just to clarify: one, the “liberal” in neoliberal refers to the classical definitions of liberalism (i.e. Locke, Rousseau, Adam Smith, Ricardo, etc.) and not the FDR/LBJ/Hollywood left-of-center “liberal” in today’s mainstream discourse. Two, Wendy Brown defines neoliberalism as
a governing rationality through which everything is “economized” and in a very specific way: human beings become market actors and nothing but, every field of activity is seen as a market, and every entity (whether public or private, whether person, business, or state) is governed as a firm…. Neoliberalism construes even non-wealth generating spheres—such as learning, dating, or exercising—in market terms, submits them to market metrics, and governs them with market techniques and practices. Above all, it casts people as human capital who must constantly tend to their own present and future value.
Three, the famous neoliberals were/are Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, and the Ronald Reagan apparatus, to name a few. Therefore four, most of today’s “conservatives” are neoliberals. Five, it does not follow “neoliberal is to neoconservative as liberal is to conservative,” even though from an English logic standpoint, that might make sense. Six, the term neoliberal includes many neoconservatives. Seven, the neoconservatives found their particular resurgence in the George W. Bush administration, and neoconservatism tends to add an interventionist foreign policy to a neoliberal free-market fundamentalism. Eight, many of today’s liberals are neoliberals (Most? I don’t know). Nine, not all liberals are neoliberals. Ten, sociologist Stephanie Mudge believes it is important to distinguish between neoliberals and the "neoliberalized." That is, the Ronald Reagan neoliberal movement neoliberalized so hard that they created a situation where relatively conservative (economically) Bill Clinton and a generation of Democrats rose to power. Across the ocean, Thatcherites neoliberalized Labour PM Tony Blair. Mudge makes this distinction because she thinks someone like Clinton still sees himself as genuinely liberal and genuinely fighting for the working class in the New Deal-Great Society spirit. It might be helpful to keep this distinction, to give the Clintonites the benefit of the doubt, maybe, somewhat. Eleven, to be even fairer to Clinton, we must note that Jimmy Carter was the first neoliberal Democratic president, and many of these trends started under his administration, like the “Volcker shock” or deregulation of the trucking and airline industries. Twelve, scholars like Brown and Mudge have written tomes on the rise of neoliberalism and its effects, which are incredibly important, but I am interested in how this neoliberalism—and other forces and contingencies—affect the everyday thoughts and casual conversations of the liberal class.)
