Commenter Steggles asked me to respond to a passage in Elizabeth Warren’s new book: A Fighting Chance. It involves a dinner Warren had with Larry Summers in the spring of 2009. Here it is:
A telling anecdote involves a dinner that Ms. Warren had with Lawrence H. Summers, then the director of the National Economic Council and a top economic adviser to President Obama. The dinner took place in the spring of 2009, after the oversight panel had produced its third report, concluding that American taxpayers were at far greater risk to losses in TARP than the Treasury had let on.
After dinner, “Larry leaned back in his chair and offered me some advice,” Ms. Warren writes. “I had a choice. I could be an insider or I could be an outsider. Outsiders can say whatever they want. But people on the inside don’t listen to them. Insiders, however, get lots of access and a chance to push their ideas. People — powerful people — listen to what they have to say. But insiders also understand one unbreakable rule: They don’t criticize other insiders.
“I had been warned,” Ms. Warren concluded.
Most of the attention paid to this passage has focused on the last part of what Summers said. The idea that insiders don’t criticize insiders comes across as a rebuke of Warren for daring to criticize the Treasury Department. If people are afraid to give their honest analysis for fear of contradicting some other arm of the government, that’s a problem.
But, that doesn’t mean that the first part of Summers’ comment wasn’t true and important. If you want to have a real impact on policy, you have to be an insider or, at least, gain the insiders’ trust. You can stay on the outside and lob bombs at everyone but that will have minimal effectiveness. Sen. Warren seems to have gotten the message. She’s the senior senator from Massachusetts now, and she is in a position to impact policy. Other insiders have to listen to her. I’m glad she seems to have disregarded the part of Summers argument that was stupid and to have accepted the part that was wise.
This is an example for progressives everywhere.
Good points.
Summers was just saying, “Get with the program, Liz. You can’t fight City Hall.” Which is, of course, conventional wisdom.
But (1) the definition of inside and outside can change … from a lot (e.g. Russian Revolution, Mao’s Cultural Revolution and aftermath), to a little (maybe the present example will do).
(2) whatever the definitions at any particular time and place, there are degrees of insideness and outsideness.
If Elizabeth Warren is now an insider, I would say she is an outsider among the insiders. But of course she is not alone in that.
FDR is a supreme example of an outsider among insiders.
If Larry Summers is an insider, he is no longer as inside as he was when he made that statement. I’ll bet he never seriously thought that in a few years Janet Yellen would be heading the Federal Reserve. He thought he would be.
Janet Yellen, now there’s another outsider among insiders.
Which is why we had a second recession in 37-39, which taken on its own would be the second, or third, worst economic downturn since 1900.
FDR’s famous Halloween speech, if accurate, would have run “I welcome their hatred — but I accept their overall view of the macro-economic situation, and their prescription for improving it.”
“Janet Yellen, now there’s another outsider among insiders.”
How can you tell, do you have a link for the argument?
I was charmed by her and hoped she would get the nomination. Did PermaGov counteract with the choice of her deputy?
○ Larry Summers Will Doom Us All
I only know because she was so strongly opposed by the insiders.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/07/business/economy/Yellen-Senate-Vote.html?_r=0
I’m not suggesting she’s a flaming radical, but she wasn’t “in with the in crowd”.
Perhaps closer to the door leading to the outside, but hardly an outsider.
Outsider among the insiders. No flaming radical. It’s all relative.
The financial jock-strap club never fully admits any woman even if she is 100% on-board with their agenda. That’s sufficient to resist putting one at the helm.
Yes, that’s definitely true of Larry Summers, but incidentally, she’s different in many other respects too, including policy-wise, and everybody knows that.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/08/07/1229256/-Handy-comparison-chart-Janet-Yellen-vs-Larry-Summe
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Larry Summers is a scum sucking pig.
Quite possibly, but even a stopped scum-sucking pig is right twice a day.
While Summers’ rule is breakable, it would be correct so say that insiders should criticize other insiders less than outsiders do.
Some progressives should become insiders and some progressives should remain outsiders and there should be unseen coordination (you can call it a conspiracy) between insiders and outsiders so that outsiders can serve as surrogates and say the things that insiders sometimes can’t.
Isn’t Warren reminding all social democrats that the warnings never stop? That the powerful insiders today are like those that re-emerged after the initial phase of the New Deal and have been clobbering the people in countless ways — from actual killing to scaring us into compliance.
In fact you have to be an insider and an outsider. Summers’s arrogant statement is what closes off the Beltway bubble and prevents those who have definite agendas from being open to new information–like Saddam Hussein doesn’t have weapons of mass destruction and Bill Clinton convinced him to drop those programs, or Gramm-Leach-Bliley recommended by Summers created a disaster.
One doesn’t have to be an insider if the those on the inside are wise enough to open up. Surely the revolving door creates channels for outsiders to become insiders and then outsiders again with inside influence. Summers’s advice does not apply to the interests of the “club” just to those of the unwashed masses.
And what Summers was doing was waving Warren off of fulfilling her oversight function relative to Congress because it was not convenient for the newly formed Obama administration’s plan for financing re-election.
There was nothing but corruption in his advice, and definitely not grain of wisdom. It was a statement of arrogant and willful blindness and just an encouragement to go along to get along, pretend and extend, and waste critical talent that might be put to actual policy.
Outsiders generally don’t “lob bombs” when there is open communications to insiders, one of the assumptions to democratic government.
Critics of Obama on healthcare did not start lobbing bombs until he scuttled the public option and his staff told them to shut up about it. Even after months of Nancy DeParle on Ed Schultz saying nothing but muttering sweet nothings about “being practical”. Where was the up front new that Max Baucus has sold out the Obama voters from the get-go and that Lieberman was going to use it as revenge on progressives except for the fact that he was so in hock to Connecticut’s insurance industry. If we had some of that information at the time (where were the news junkies and blogs?), the policy discussion might have been more realistic. Who on the White House staff promoted that secrecy?
Occupy Wall Street did not appear until after the Republican party and Vichy Democrats brought us to the brink of default after Kent Conrad got his way on austerity. Who were those insiders that folks opposed to austerity were supposed to work with? And they did not just get disregarded, they did and still do get their heads beat while Cliven Bundy and his gun-toters get champagne treatment from the BLM.
Insiders, those in the royal court, do in fact criticize insiders all the time, slyly, in backstabbing and indirect ways, and all the other skills of courtiers.
It is indirect tactics more than not criticizing insiders that outsiders need to understand. And it seems that Occupy Wall Street did in fact understand indirect tactics: the inequality debate is still echoing in the public mind. Of course, Spain, Greece, Turkey, Chile, Brazil, and other countries still have active movements in the streets. And May will see whether Bill de Blasio, the new insider, really makes a difference in New York City. Meanwhile the NYPD is likely to sentence to jail a lady who was sexually assaulted by an NYPD officer. And the Chicago 3 are one to their court-mandated vacations in Joliet and other rural Illinois prisons as one of them will receive an additional trial for having Huntingdon’s disease and flipping out in solitary (because they just had to be in solitary, being “terrorists” and all that).
The insiders are an information event horizon for news from the outside, a stellar black hole. Inside the bubble, the people outside don’t matter; it’s all junior high school inside the bubble. Bully boys and mean girls with charming smiles and clever repartee and very good meals. At all our expense and with our tax money.
No — it creates channels for insiders to legally collect big bucks from their masters as temporary private sector workers before returning to their semi-permanent job as insider reps for their masters.
It depends on who the “outside” of the moment is. But I will grant you that it pays big bucks and the outsiders being represented are what in other countries be called the opposiiton-in-waiting.
Within insiders there is likely more cutthroat competition that against outsiders. Insiders don’t believe the mythology the foist on the outsiders. And Summers “realism” about insiders and outsiders is one piece of that very mythological narrative. It was not individuals personally that Warren was threatening by doing her job, it was individuals responsible for institutional failures of the grandest order. Summers personalized it into a “go along to get along” nostrum that seems pragmatic in its (likely sexist) and patronizing advice. (Pardon but the halo effect with Summers past is too great to ignore here.)
This is infuriating. “Nobody listens to outsiders” except that the right wing has an established, formalized system for channeling radical-fringe ideas into the mainstream, as outlined by David Neiwert (“Rush, Newspeak and Fascism”) and recently unearthed in the FBI report on the Clintons’ opposition (which came up on this site).
“Nobody listens to outsiders” unless those “outsiders” are Rush Limbaugh and Matt Drudge and all those British journalists running planted stories about Vince Foster’s murder or crazy American church groups “investigating” Obama’s Muslim heritage.
The right has spent decades marshaling their forces by coordinating their attacks across that insider/outsider divide. But the left remains terrified of its own radical fringe and disowns or discredits it whenever it can.
Those aren’t outsiders. Those aren’t outside views. They are all astro-turfed to incite anger, passion, and cohesion. All the Cliven Bundys in the West don’t control the direction of the conservative movement; billionaires do. Those billionaires are very much not outsiders (except in the opposition-in-waiting sense).
I understand, but I’m still complaining about the asymmetry.
Fringe conservative ideas (Creationism, “Birtherism,” the Bell Curve etc.) find their way into mainstream outlets or are “dog-whistled” by conspicuously well-respected conservatives.
But the converse isn’t true: you’ll never find “fringe” liberal ideas (abolishing guns, wind farms, aggressive approaches to climate change) — or even mainstream liberal ideas like increasing taxes on the rich — finding their way into the heads and out of the mouths of prominent liberal leaders. (Even the word “liberal” scares them.)
The “Democratic” insiders have held to the same one-way communication across that inside-outside divide.
Case in point Chris Dodd.
I’m so old I remember when Chris Dodd was the cynosure of DailyKos because of his fearless filbuster of telco immunity in the reauthorized FISA Act.
Summers’ attitude also explains the seriously hurt fee-fees among the MOTUs when Obama issued very mild rebukes of their behavior in crashing the global economy for their own greed. He was an insider publicly criticizing insiders. That all by itself was apparently enough to get the real insiders – the ones who don’t go away after four or eight years – to try to get him kicked out of the club in 2012.
It will be interesting to see what Obama does after his term – he’ll be a relatively young ex-president with the world still in front of him. Some ex-presidents and most ex-congressmen who weren’t born to the club – cf the Bushes – decide that they really, really like it. E.g., the Clintons, or all the former congresscreatures who cash in with cushy lobbying gigs and board posts. Carter is the only current example of someone who simply went off the reservation.
How was Bush not born into the club? His grand dad’s investments was the only thing that kept him from running for President. GW was good from both sides of the family.