It’s the Economy, Stupid?

The Frankfurt School was formed in Germany between the wars, and — over the course of several decades — attempted to answer several very specific questions. (All of this is detailed in the recent and very accessible Grand Hotel Abyss, a group intellectual history by Stuart Jeffries, recently published by Verso.) These included:

• Why did the Communist Revolution fail in Germany? (That Marx was wrong was not one of the choices.)
• Would the German working class resist the rise of Hitler? (We know the answer, then and now.)
• Why do people choose authority over freedom?

This week, America advances to the third of these questions, but as I try to explain it to myself, I keep coming back to this chart from the Economic Policy Institute, which always hovers alongside discussions of income inequality.

You don’t have to be an economic reductionist to see that that trend cannot be sustained. You cannot generate more wealth and share less of it with employees without — eventually — generating a backlash. The backlash came yesterday, and it — arguably — hit the wrong party, but (as an old debate coach once told me) if you got screwed it’s because you left the door open.

The Republican Party, starting with Reagan, has systematically dismantled organized labor and the safety net, leaving the working and middle classes precarious and angry-to-anxious. (They have been taught, of course, to call this precariousness “freedom.” just as they were taught to label their constant availability to Capital.)

For the last eight years, meanwhile, the GOP have systematically blocked all attempts to spend more on stimulus, à la FDR, which would have been the right thing to do in a low demand, low interest rate environment. Had that worked, the GOP’s future would have looked pretty dim. They preferred to starve the middle, the better to feed them red meat.

Not that the DNC does not share part of the blame. Tom Frank, who is indeed shaping up to be the most important public intellectual of his (my) generation, has been persuasively arguing that the Democrats under Bill Clinton essentially abandoned the lower and middle classes, taking them for granted as a voting block, and — eventually — leaving them out there as a political jump ball. Last night, Verso live-streamed a panel from their offices, where it was poignantly but chillingly observed that the DNC is a patronage organization that hasn’t distributed any patronage in close to 40 years. They’re not paying their “workers” either.

So the GOP created and advanced precarity, then successfully pinned it on the Democrats, through repetition more than anything else. (I’m planning to think about “behavioral politics” in a future post.)

Last night, the Verso panel of course got into the economics vs. bigotry discussion. Is it really the economy, or is it a system of interlocking “otherings” to retrieve some language from my grad school days?

It is obviously both — and there was a healthy (to my mind) plea on the panel to move past the dichotomy — but I think we will get worse outcomes if we think fixing the bigotry will fix the economy, rather than the other way around, and for two reasons.

• Bigotry is like detritus that appears at low tide. When the economy gets weak and the tide goes out, it is exposed. When the tide comes back in, it is hidden. Now while true that it is still there in some sense, by removing income inequality, you are stealing oxygen from bigotry. Jacobin’s Bhaskar Sunkara made a similar point during last night’s Verso panel. Anti-racism is a necessary feature of a movement sufficiently united to address systematic income equality, which — I would argue — would in turn steal oxygen from bigotry and so on.
• Unlike bigotry — which lives in hearts and minds — income inequality is thoroughly intersubjective. We can all look at the chart above and there are real levers the government — or enlightened Capital, should any appear — can pull to ameliorate it. It is solvable, though — it should be clear by now, and I hope this resonates in Silicon Valley especially—it is not going to solve itself. Serving the shareholder class is no longer enough to bring about Utopia.