If you’re like me, Kate Kelly and Lisa Lerer’s reporting in the New York Times reads like an excellent rationale for supporting Elizabeth Warren’s candidacy.
From corporate boardrooms to breakfast meetings, investor conferences to charity galas, Ms. Warren’s rise in the Democratic primary polls is rattling bankers, investors and their affluent clients, who see in the Massachusetts senator a formidable opponent who could damage not only their industry but their way of life.
Interviews with more than two dozen hedge-fund managers, private-equity and bank officials, analysts and lobbyists made clear that Ms. Warren has stirred more alarm than any other Democratic candidate. (Senator Bernie Sanders, who describes himself as a socialist, is also feared, but is considered less likely to capture the nomination.)
There are certain people who probably ought to feel a bit apprehensive about the political implications of the current Roaring Twenties wealth distribution in our country.
“Everyone is nervous,” said Steven Rattner, a prominent Democratic donor who manages the wealth of Michael R. Bloomberg, the former New York City mayor. “What scares the hell out of me is the way she would fundamentally change our free-enterprise system.”
But I have my own worries. When I think about fascism, I really look for two major warning signs. The first happens when the right wins the hearts and minds of the majority-race working class. The second happens when big business seeks protection from lawless right-wing thugs because of their fear of left-wing populism. These are the first steps on a road that can lead to the more serious things we associate with fascist movements.
Of the two, the acquiescence of big business in the destruction of norms and the constitutional order is the more serious risk. This is because the financial elites have tremendous power and play an indispensable role in policing our system. They own all the major media outlets, and they employ lawyers who go to court to challenge the government when it violates our rights. Through their philanthropy, they keep afloat think-tanks and non-profitable publications that would cease to exist without their support. Our freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, rights to due process, and rights to government transparency are all bound up with these efforts. Even our country’s role on the international stage in promoting democracy and human rights is largely shaped by organizations that are funded by the business elite. If they abandon that project in favor of defending a right-wing movement that respects none of these things, we lose the guard rails that protect us. If they go further, and put their money toward promoting similar right-wing nationalist movements on a global scale, then the risks become truly grave.
So far, this has not happened. The media has fought back aggressively against Trumpism. Almost no media outlets endorsed Trump’s candidacy in 2016. They have been in court every day seeking government records and asking judges (usually successfully) to uphold the law against Trump’s illegal policies. The impeachment of Trump is inseparable from the establishment’s support for Ukraine’s independence from Russia.
But this has happened because they’re defending against something they consider to be a threat to their way of life. If a different threat comes along that concerns them more, their calculus could change.
I think most people focus only on the influence of the media. What gets reported and how it gets reported can move a lot of votes, and this is how the always outnumbered financial elite protects its interests. But people should also focus on how big business works to protect our interests. They may do an uneven job of that, but we still depend on them. If a substantial fraction of the elites in this country decide to throw in with Trump, that could be the ballgame for our representative form of government. It’s not their ability to move votes that is most worrisome, but their ability to stop defending the system if they no longer feel the system serves their interests.
Ordinary people don’t have the infrastructure or the organization presently to step in and fill that role. And, even if they quickly tried to build that kind of capability, they’d lack the media reach to be as effective.
For me, this is the risk of pushing left-wing populism further than the elites are prepared to see it go. I’d be less concerned about it if the right hadn’t already taken over most of the white farmer-labor contingent from the left. But, with the Democrats largely ceding that field to Trump, the danger is that the two main prerequisites for a successful fascist movement will snap into place.
So, when I see panic from the financial elites about a likely Democratic presidential nominee, a part of me exults in that because they’ve let inequality and injustice grow to levels not seen since the 1920’s. But another part of me worries about how the 1920’s turned into the 1930’s. I do not want to see that happen again.
Your essay on your concerns about the business elite states a fundamental political problem problem brilliantly. On the other hand, you have stopped short of saying what can be done about the problem.
Surely, you do not think nothing can be done. FDR and his allies saved American capitalism in the 30’s, but he had to drag the capitalists kicking and screaming into his solutions. Sen. Warren is now proposing to save capitalism from itself once again. We should naturally expect the kicking and screaming to return.
It is true any more clear to me than it may be to you how to avoid a fascist future. But our current capitalist elite does not seem to recognize any limits to the inequality they have been building since Reagan. Did the Never Trump billionaires oppose his tax cuts? My concern is that a President Biden will propose nothing that offends a Wall Street, in which Case the rage of workers, millenials and minorities will only grow more desperate. Meanwhile, Biden and his ilk would also do nothing serious about the global warming that will engulf everyone if the fat and happy elites are allowed to continue down the road they want to stay on.
The core of this argument seems to be “don’t provoke the abuser or he’ll hurt you.”
A candidate that doesn’t scare these people is a candidate denying that there are serious problems that can’t be ducked any more.
Yeah, but does it make any sense not to provoke the abuser in case he’ll hurt us?
Did you see what Bill Gates said today? He’s opening to voting for Trump because of Warren’s mean words. I do find it funny that Booman doesn’t mention Sanders because Gates certainly hates him as much as he does Warren.
“The thirties” did not follow so much from “the twenties” as it followed from the Great Depression. True, the Great Depression followed when the 1920s bubble popped, but we do know quite a bit more about stimulating the economy than we did then, thanks mostly to Keynes analysis of inadequate demand. I don’t see that kind of bubble bursting on the horizon, but I admit that there’s still a lot of misinformation about that kind of stimulus out there, propagated both by people who are ignorant and people who are acting in bad faith, and there’s lots of work to be done before we could be sure that a path forward would be politically certain.
Curious how the financial elites apparently would rather operate (and live) under a lawless, unconstitutional presidentialism than under a rule of law regime. Also curious is that every ordinary schmoe Dem is quick to declare that they will support whoever is the Dem nominee, but that commitment is beyond the Dem financial elite, who instead threaten the country with more doses of National Trumpalism. Who’s the un-American element here?
The mega-rentiers are having “the hell scared out of them”[!] over some (historically mild) increased taxation of income, and new taxes on their (obscene) wealth and on their endless financial transaction churning (taxes which Roberts’ Repubs will likely declare unconstitutional). That’s what the the demonic communist Warren is proposing vis-a-vis the hedge fund boyz, that’s what (supposedly) “would fundamentally change our free-enterprise system”. Yet somehow American capitalists were able to resign themselves to FDR’s (much more radical) New Deal and not push us into an American Hitlerism. Leave aside their turning a blind eye to Trumper’s Trade War and Deficit Explosion and Government Insolvency Policy, circa 2016.
Are the few thousand billionaires created by St Reagan’s “conservatism” going to turn out to be the worst parasites ever inflicted on the nation? I guess they’ve got the (abusive) financial power, foolishly given by us–even more to our disgrace.
“Curious how the financial elites apparently would rather operate (and live) under a lawless, unconstitutional presidentialism than under a rule of law regime.”
Of course they’d rather have that, because they continue to benefit from the kind of lawlessness at the top that allowed them to continue to increase their fortunes unabated. The elites have nothing to fear from a lawless Trump administration, and everything to gain. Its the rest of us who should be worried about that.
To me most of Warrens prescriptions seem like eminently reasonable palliatives for our various societal diseases that have been exacerbated mainly by the right over many years, and acquiesced to by the upper class. Those of her prescriptions which may seem a bit extreme will never get passed into law anyway, in all likelihood. If the business elites are that concerned by her policies, they need to take a reality check and consider what 4 more years of Trump would mean for what’s left of this countries political structures. If that doesn’t scare most of them more than a President Warren, we’re already doomed.
So a little dose of equality feels like oppression to our economic oppressors.
I think another part of what is scaring them is that all their money has not translated into influence with Warren. Or several other Democratic candidates. They are proving difficult to buy, and the thought of not being able to dangle a check for access is startling.
Possibly the most hopeful thing about the last couple of election cycles is that their money and influence is being overcome by popular action.
Are you suggesting we meekly go along with the sellouts rather than do our very best to take back our Democracy? If the wealthy want to throw their lot in with Trump, they’ll ultimately bring down the most suffering of all upon themselves. This is the stuff of revolution. The forces of history are not predictable or controllable. To the elite I say shit on the people at your own risk.