It's remarkable how easily we've gotten used to a very strange political dynamic. Donald Trump is President. We've had change elections in 2006, 2008, 2010, 2014, 2016, and 2018. We have powerful plutocrats. This is extremely unusual historically. Also Donald Trump is President.
Despite the stories we're sold, plutocrats in America are an unusual phenomenon. The basis of American political economy thinking has pretty much always been ensuring each citizen had a little bit of property so he can be independent, with the definition of citizen in contention.
The notion that laissez-faire capitalism was a basis of 19th century American economy is a fictional history peddled by a series of German-influenced thinkers. Questions of commercial rights, regulation, and resources were deeply contested.
The Jeffersonian framework for America has always been about egalitarian political and economic rights for citizens. This vision of citizenship was white and patriarchal, but still much broader than pre-1776 aristocratic culture. It sounds odd today but equality was always core.
The revolutionary era of the 1970s and 1980s - and that period was a total intellectual and economic revolution - has culminated in Trump. And now we are reorienting, somehow, but confused, with false histories in our minds about who we are as a people.
The truth is, Trump is a pretty normal President for the post-Carter era. Totally media driven, largely detached from governance, deferential to financial capital. Not really so different than Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, or Obama.
It took me a long time to figure out what happened and just how significant the shift really is. It's not obvious whether so-called centrists or so-called leftists, or straight-up fascists will seize the moment. Hillary Clinton sort of got the problem but couldn't adjust.
A lot of centrists and establishment Democrats understand that something is very wrong and are learning quickly. The rapid acceptance of the need for more antitrust is a signal that business structures are now politicized, as they had been for 200 hundred years until the 1970s.
No one believes me since they seem to think I'm a Bernie fan (I'm not) or a libertarian (I'm not), but this is not a left-wing shift. It's a shift within the politics of business. It's a shift back to populism, back to a debate over the very purpose of property.
Americans understood property as dominion over land or some sort of set of tools, but also an obligation to care take. But the shift in the 1970s turned property into financial assets, with zero responsibility for the 'owner.'
Warren Buffett has *no idea* what is going on in 'his' companies. Zuckerberg has no idea what is happening on FB. It is really 'his'? No. Can anyone meaningfully oversee six trillion dollars of assets, as Blackrock does? No. This isn't property. This is pure libertine license.
Our systems are out of control bc we have wrecked our system of property rights, which were carefully designed to ensure that citizens took care of property and used it to be independent from the dominion of another.
Pieces of populism are scattered around. Centrists care about property and business but don't understand responsibility. The left understands the need for justice but has no interest in property or business. The right gets the need for community but are violent con artists.
The good news is we have wonderful technology and an incredibly tolerant culture (though quite racist institutions). We can remember our history. We are coded as Americans for justice and egalitarianism, and to do profitable business with one another. That's not a fake history.
A couple of links. This is on the revolution of the 1970s and 1980s. theatlantic.com/politics/archi…
This is on the weird Democratic reverence for the anti-democracy foe Alexander Hamilton, who was a great man but not a great American. thebaffler.com/salvos/hamilto…
Laura Phillip Sawyer's American Fair Trade is great. cambridge.org/core/books/ame…
So is @RrjohnR's Network Nation: hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?is…
If you've never read Brandeis's Other People's Money, it's online and beautifully written. archive.org/stream/otherpe…
Check out @jtepper2's Myth of Capitalism. mythofcapitalism.com
And @superwuster's The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age. amazon.com/dp/B07HRLQSLG/…
I tend to criticize Obama a lot because he's a kind of symbol of the old ideological framework. But it is an ideological framework. It's not him. He was part of what Carter/Reagan ushered in, a backlash by romantics and aristocrats on the left and right to the enlightenment.
Finally if you want a great tour among the winners of this ideology, check out @AnandWrites's wonderful "Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World" on the ethics of philanthropy. penguinrandomhouse.com/books/539747/w…
