Public Policy and Governance – Page 38

Countervailing Power

When I was growing up in Anderson, Indiana, both my parents were passionately anti-union. There was a reason: my father had a small auto-parts business, and frequent strikes in Anderson’s then-dominant automotive plants meant fewer customers. Furthermore, there was a considerable amount of what can only be described as union “thuggery” that occasionally erupted. So I grew up with a very dim view of unionization.

Let’s just say I’ve developed a more nuanced perspective.

What my parents and I failed to recognize “back in the day” was that it’s not good when either unions or management holds vastly superior power. The ideal is balance, or what has been described by scholars as “countervailing power.”

The phrase “countervailing power” was coined in the 1952 book American Capitalism: The Concept of Countervailing Power by the economist and social thinker John Kenneth Galbraith. Galbraith argued that, in a modern technological society, most important markets would be dominated by a few large firms. Their market power and political influence could be checked, however, by countervailing power—both public, in the form of a strong regulatory state, and private, in the form of labor unions and consumer cooperatives. Arguing that measures to strengthen the bargaining power of unions and farmer groups were “among the most important legislative acts of the New Deal, all designed to give a group a marketing power it did not have before,” Galbraith asserted that “the support of countervailing power has become…perhaps the major peacetime function of the Federal Government.”

The equation of the New Deal with government-supported checks and balances in the market may seem surprising today, when many associate the New Deal with social insurance programs like Social Security or Keynesian deficit spending in downturns. But this view was the conventional wisdom (another phrase coined by Galbraith) of many New Dealers. For example, in 1940, the journalist John Chamberlain wrote: “The labor union, the consumers’ or producers’ cooperative, the ‘institute,’ the syndicate—these are the important things in a democracy. If their power is evenly spread, if there are economic checks and balances to parallel the political checks and balances, then society will be democratic.”

When there is no countervailing power–when those sitting on one side of the bargaining table are easily able to dominate or intimidate those on the other side– the result is inevitably negative. The longtime imbalance between management and workers in the auto industry has enriched managers–obscenely– at the expense of those who make their companies profitable: CEO compensation for 2022 is reportedly $29 million for GM’s Mary Barra, $21 million for Ford’s Jim Farley and $24.8 million for the CEO of Stellantis (and as the Free Press recently noted, those weren’t even the highest payouts to an individual last year at the companies).

It’s not difficult to understand why union members– who had agreed to reduced wages and benefits in 2009 when the economy tanked and who still haven’t caught up– would be resentful.

In the more than half century since I left Anderson, the precipitous decline in the power and influence of organized labor has led to a number of unfortunate consequences. As the linked essay notes, one of those consequences has been an “upward shift of political power on the center-left to college-educated progressives,” and a politics that is more technocratic and top-down. Another has been the captivity of the GOP to the anti-labor agenda of the party’s libertarian donors.

Technocratic neoliberalism ignores the values and interests of the two core constituencies of the New Deal—the working class and rural Americans. Unrepresented in either party, these groups are drawn to outsider populists, including maverick old-school New Dealers like Sanders and right-wing demagogues like Trump.

I think the above paragraph oversimplifies the reason working and rural folks have flocked to Trump –it overlooks the extent to which his appeal is to a still-potent, still widespread racism. The racist element of his appeal been repeatedly documented.

But it’s also true that when people feel powerless or abandoned, racism that might otherwise be latent rises to the surface, so the observation isn’t entirely wrong.

The bottom line is that bargains made by unions composed of the laborers whose prospects are on the line–the people with “skin in the game”– are infinitely preferable to laws passed by well-meaning elected officials. The parties to any negotiation are privy to the issues particular to that workplace, and an agreement hammered out between employers and workers is unlikely to stoke the same level of resentment as a measure imposed by lawmakers.

The recent rise in union activity may be disruptive, but it’s long overdue.

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No More Dog Whistles…

Indiana contributes more than its share to the crazy caucus of the House of Representatives. Our state’s intrepid culture warriors not only close ranks with the far-Right “lawmakers” (note quotes) intent upon blocking anything close to actual governance, they are also happy to advance their bigotries publicly.

No more “dog whistles.” Just good old Hoosier White Supremacy.

Take Jim Banks. (Please!) In addition to his vote to shut down the government and his efforts to form an “anti-woke” caucus, he and Greg Stuebe (R-Fl) are coming after the accreditation of colleges and universities.

And why, you might reasonably ask, would they be doing that?

Reps. Jim Banks (R-IN) and Greg Steube (R-FL) urged Congress to take action to reform the college accreditation process to combat diversity, equity, and inclusion requirements from accrediting agencies.

In a Washington Examiner op-ed Wednesday, the two Republican lawmakers, known to be among the most conservative members of Congress, argued that the college accreditation system has become politicized with diversity, equity, and inclusion requirements and that congressional action is needed to solve the issue….

Banks and Steube are both members of the House Anti-Woke Caucus, which they said was launched in part because of the state of higher education. The two lawmakers, along with Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), introduced the Fairness In Higher Education Accreditation Act earlier this year, which would ban accrediting agencies from requiring commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion from institutions seeking to be accredited.

Well, yes, I suppose efforts to combat historic discrimination and bigotry could be considered “political”–at least, if you are one of the far-too-numerous Americans who are trying to take the country back to a time when only straight White Christian men were considered “real Americans.”

“Credit” where it’s due: Banks doesn’t limit his bigotry to racism. He’s also a rabid misogynist/forced birther– 100% anti-choice with zero exceptions. (Evidently, if a ten-year-old is impregnated during a vicious rape, it’s God’s will…) During his time in Congress, Banks has endorsed a federal abortion ban, called the overturning of Roe v. Wade a “joyful day,” and supported imposition of a travel ban that would criminalize women who leave a state to access an abortion.

In an interview with a conservative Fort Wayne radio host, Banks touted such a travel ban–and went on to say, “there’s much more that we must do, that we need to do, that I’m going to fight for in the House, and when I get to the Senate, I’m going to fight for there in a bigger way as well.”

That certainly tells Hoosier women what’s at stake in the upcoming campaign for U.S. Senate…(You can donate to his Democratic, pro-choice rival here.)

And we shouldn’t forget Banks’ homophobia, demonstrated by his despicable attacks on trans children. The far-Right “Family Policy Alliance” has praised him for his introduction of a mean-spirited bill that would effectively prevent doctors from assisting children diagnosed with gender dysphoria.

Senator Tom Cotton (AR) and Congressman Jim Banks (IN-3) have introduced federal legislation to protect vulnerable children from transgender interventions, the Protecting Minors from Medical Malpractice Act. The legislation provides minors a private right of action to sue the medical professionals who perform their “transition” procedures for 30 years after they turn 18…

Here at Family Policy Alliance, we firmly believe that hurting children deserve real help, not the harm of experimental hormones and irreversible surgeries. That’s why we authored our Help Not Harm legislation to protect children at the state level. Now, Congressman Banks and Senator Cotton are boldly taking that language to the federal level to protect children around the nation. We heartily support them in this effort.”

Rep. Banks noted of the legislation, “This is such a common-sense bill, and FPA’s been on the front lines advocating for this legislation at the state level, which is where we pulled ideas from to write the federal version of this bill.”

What kind of person considers it “common sense” to over-rule the considered and difficult decisions of medical professionals, their patients and patients’ families–to insert government into the doctor-patient relationship in order to ensure that vulnerable children abide by his Christian Nationalist beliefs?

The answer is: the same sort of ignoramus who would say–as Banks did in October of 2016, according to Wikipedia–“I believe that climate change in this country is largely leftist propaganda to change the way Americans live and create more government obstruction and intrusion in our lives.”

For a guy who opposes “government intrusion in our lives,” he’s sure willing to use government to limit women’s rights, interfere with health care for LGBTQ youngsters, and prevent colleges and universities from battling discrimination.

Georgia has Margery Taylor Green. We have Jim Banks.

What an embarrassment……

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Elon Musk And The Public/Private Dilemma

Alexandra Petri recently had a gloriously snarky opinion piece in the Washington Post,comparing Elon Musk to her toddler. Titled “Things both my toddler and Elon Musk do that are signs of genius, apparently” it included things like “Constantly yelling at people to change things that cannot be changed” and “When presented with slow, patient explanations of why things are not possible, just screams louder;” and “Likes to seize nice things and ruin them because of a fundamental misunderstanding of what they are for.”

And of course, “Wants to be center of attention at all times.”

It’s disturbing enough when a man-child (“man-toddler?”) has enough money to buy and control what had been a significant mode of communication, but its terrifying to discover that this petulant child has the power to interfere in matters of global war and peace. As multiple media outlets have reported, Musk’s SpaceX refused to allow Ukraine to use its Starlink internet services to launch an attack on Russia last September–a decision that undoubtedly prolonged the conflict and benefitted Russia.

Musk has defended his decision as an effort to prevent possible nuclear war. Whatever your opinion of that excuse, or his action, the episode raises a profound question: should a single private citizen–even one less mercurial and self-aggrandizing than Musk– have the power to decide such questions?

We live in a very weird time. Government evidently gets to decide what I do with my uterus, but not how the U.S. will assist in the defense of its allies….

I know this will come as a shock to several self-satisfied “captains of industry,” but having a lot of money does not necessarily translate into superior knowledge or nuanced understanding. Musk is actually a poster boy for that disconnect–as David French (who spent years as a First Amendment lawyer) recently wrote in the New York Times,

Despite his loud and frequent protestations, Elon Musk may be the worst ambassador for free speech in America. To understand why, it’s necessary to look at X, the website formerly known as Twitter, which he owns and rules over like the generalissimo of a banana republic….

Instead of creating a platform for free speech, Musk created a platform for Musk’s speech — or, more precisely, Musk’s power. First, he has demonstrated that he’s perfectly willing to take action against people or entities that challenge him or challenge X. As my friends at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (where I used to serve as president) have detailed, he has used his authority to suspend accounts, to throttle (or limit the traffic of) competitors and reportedly to boost his own voice.

As French quite accurately notes, rather than making Twitter (now X) into a free speech paradise, Musk has turned it into the generalissimo’s playpen, where the generalissimo’s values shape everything about the place.

X is Musk’s company, and he can set whatever speech rules he wishes. But do not be fooled. When Musk defends his decisions by shouting “free speech,” I’m reminded of the immortal words of Inigo Montoya in the movie “The Princess Bride”: “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” Musk isn’t promoting liberty; he’s using his power to privilege many of the worst voices in American life.

Power and privilege. Those two words are–or should be– at the heart of the public/private distinction. Once again, we come back to that fundamental question: what is government for? What functions are properly left to the private sector–to the individual, to the marketplace, or to the wide variety of nonprofit and voluntary organizations–and which must be exercised by a democratically-elected government?

Right now, that essential inquiry is mired in a host of very serious concerns about the declining health of democratic decision-making, and the increasingly obvious effort of MAGA Republicans to turn America into an autocratic, White Christian Nationalist state. If they are successful, American government will no longer be legitimate under any definition of that term, and the allocation of power between those privileged by the regime and the rest of us will be moot.

If we do manage to salvage democratic governance–if voters come out in 2024 and deal a sufficiently robust defeat to the MAGA Confederates still fighting the Civil War–we will need to turn our attention to the necessary divisions between public and private power.

Governments can and do make grievous mistakes, but that is no reason to allow individuals–even individuals considerably more mature and informed than Elon Musk–to usurp decision-making in realms that must be subject to public accountability.

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Just WOW…

It appears that our fearless (okay, feckless) lawmakers have identified a dire threat to America and its children–librarians. The Washington Post recently reported on one of the current allegations–this one by Senator Mike Lee of Utah–

“The goal is to sexualize children — to provide minors with sexually explicit material … and then hide this content from the parents.”

The American Library Association is facing a partisan firefight unlike anything in its almost 150-year history. The once-uncontroversial organization, which says it is the world’s largest and oldest library association and which provides funding, training and tools to most of the country’s 123,000 libraries, has become entangled in the education culture wars — the raging debates over what and how to teach about race, sex and gender — culminating in Tuesday’s Senatorial name-check.

Lee isn’t alone. The increasingly insane Right is intent upon painting the ALA as a defender of pornographic literature for children. MAGA warriors insist that the nation’s libraries, including school libraries, are filled with sexually explicit, inappropriate texts.

Attacks on libraries are part and parcel of what Isaac Asimov called the “cult of ignorance,” a phenomenon that we see in contemporary dismissals of expertise as “elitism”and the cyclical eruptions of anti-intellectualism in the United States. Asimov’s famous quote probably says it best:

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”

America’s libraries are our intellectual gatekeepers, safeguarding our ability to access practical information as well as hard-won wisdom that has been built up over centuries. Attacking them is an attack on human intellectual progress–a declaration that, as Asimov aptly framed it, ignorance is just as good as knowledge.

We’ve been here before. In a speech in 2014, I argued that libraries as we know them are important protectors of what I call “the American Idea.” I spent six years as Executive Director of the Indiana Civil Liberties Union, and of all the lessons I learned during that time, the most profound was this: the future of western liberal democracy rests on the preservation of intellectual freedom.

That preservation, of course, is the library’s mission.

America’s Constitution is grounded in the Enlightenment concept of the individual as a rights-bearing, autonomous being. That concept is integral to our legal system; it is the foundation upon which our forbears erected the Bill of Rights. The Founders envisioned the good society as one composed of morally independent citizens whose rights in certain important circumstances “trumped” both the dictates of the state and the desires of the majority.….The First Amendment is really an integrated whole, protecting our individual right to receive and disseminate information and ideas, to consider arguments and theories, to form our own beliefs and craft our own consciences. It answers the fundamental social question– who shall decide? — by vesting that authority in each individual, subject to and consistent with the equal rights of others.

Implicit in the First Amendment is the legal system’s concept of personal responsibility, the University’s commitment to academic freedom, the moral authority of the clergy, the independence of the media, and the legitimacy of the political process.

That exercise of personal responsibility requires untrammeled access to information. For that matter, protection of civil liberties of every kind depends upon and requires intellectual freedom.

As I noted on this site back in April, the culture warriors out to terrorize Marian the Librarian are seeing considerable success. In an Urban Library Trauma study conducted in 2022, more than two-thirds of respondents reported encountering violent or aggressive behavior from patrons at their library.

Groups such as Moms for Liberty, No Left Turn in Education and Parents Defending Education aren’t the only ones fighting to remove books by Black and LGBTQ+ authors. Proud Boys have taken to storming into Drag Queen Story Hour events, for instance, causing serious fear for patrons and librarians.

Lest we give these censors the benefit of the doubt, thinking they are identifying mostly trashy books, it’s instructive to consult the AIA’s annual list of the most frequently challenged books. They include Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.

Challenges are overwhelmingly aimed at books by or about LGBTQ+ people, and books critical of racism. (The most censored books of all times are 1984, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Catcher in the Rye, The Color Purple, The Great Gatsby, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Lord of the Flies.)

The culture war isn’t “just” about democracy versus Christian Nationalism. It’s also about ignorance versus knowledge.

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From Your Mouth To God’s Ears…

My grandmother had a favorite response whenever one of us made a rosy prediction. That phrase– “From your mouth to God’s ears!”–was her way of expressing hope that the prediction would come true.

I had a very similar reaction to a column by Greg Sargent in the Washington Post. Sargent asserted that a MAGA “doom loop” would defeat Trump and the GOP next year–an outcome I devoutly hope to see. His thesis is as follows: Republicans continue to defend and embrace Trump’s authoritarianism. That backfired when voters responded by defeating the predicted Red wave in the 2022 midterms and continuing to defeat Republican candidates in multiple ensuing special elections.

Subsequently–as Sargent accurately reports–rather than learning the rather obvious lesson from those defeats, Republicans have dug in. They’re going even further Right, responding to electoral losses “with even more flagrantly anti-democratic maneuvers all around the country.”

The pattern is becoming clear: Even as voters are mobilizing to protect democracy at the ballot box, Republicans are redoubling their commitment to the former president’s anti-majoritarian mode of politics. And this, in turn, is motivating voters even more.

Call it the “MAGA doom loop.” It’s playing out in state after state.

Sargent supports his thesis by surveying the disarray and infighting in several state-level Republican parties–notably, Michigan, North Carolina and Wisconsin (where the GOP is threatening a bizarre, anti-democratic response to the electoral loss of a state supreme court seat.)

As Sargent predicts about Wisconsin,

Democrats will surely be able to use those MAGA-approved tactics to mobilize voters against Trump and Republicans in 2024. “The threat to overturn an election through impeachment pushes MAGA attacks on democracy to the top of voters’ minds,” Wisconsin Democratic Party Chair Ben Wikler told me.

He also reminded readers of the recent shenanigans in Ohio, where Republicans tried to raise the threshold for amending the state constitution to 60 percent of votes cast, in order to head off an almost-certain victory for reproductive rights in an upcoming referendum. Despite scheduling the vote on this single, arguably technical issue for August, turnout was robust, and the change was defeated by a crushing 14-points.

Research confirms that Issues become salient for voters when elites talk about those issues a lot, and in the U.S., concerns about democracy have increasingly taken center stage. A newsletter I subscribe to recently and helpfully included a partial list of current GOP threats to democracy:

In May, Georgia Governor Brian Kemp signed into law a measure that will create a commission that can punish and remove prosecutors, saying it will curb “far-left prosecutors.” That includes a certain prosecutor pursuing the case against former President Donald Trump.

In April, Iowa’s Republican-led legislature introduced a bill that restricted information the state auditor—the only Democratic Statewide office holder—could access. “Let’s be clear about this, this is the destruction of democratic norms,” State Auditor Rob Sand said.

Immediately after last year’s nonpartisan Ohio State Board of Education election created a majority of members aligned with the Democratic party, conservative legislators moved to transfer the body’s power to a new department under the governor’s authority. While the bill failed during that year’s session, a similar bill passed in the Senate in January of this year and was introduced into the House in March (it’s currently in committee).

In 2021, Republicans in Arizona, using the state budget, stripped the Arizona Secretary of State—a Democrat–of the right to defend the state’s election laws in court—handing it over to the attorney general who happens to have been—you guessed it—a Republican. Any pretense that it was done as a move to strengthen some legal principle was undermined by the fact they intended the move to expire simultaneously with the end of the term of the secretary of state. Taking aim at secretaries of state is no accident, as these officers have authority over how elections are conducted. Legislators similarly trimmed the power of secretaries of state in Georgia and Kansas. In fact, Republicans have moved to take control over the election process in at least eight states.

In recent years, after Democrats were elected to statewide offices in North Carolina , Wisconsin, and Michigan, Republican-led legislatures and governors moved to severely weaken their powers.

This doesn’t even begin to address the gerrymandering and the changing of rules over the last decade or so to make voting harder, more complicated, and less likely, especially among people of color, including restrictive voter ID laws and aggressive voter purges.

The “chattering classes” tell us that democracy is on the ballot in 2024. They’re correct–it is.

I just hope Sargent’s “doom loop” thesis proves to be equally correct…..

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