Whether you’ve been bad or good
IYKYK: The South lost the Civil War but won Reconstruction, neutered the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments across the South, and maintained a rigid system of Jim Crow oppression for the next 100 years.
IYKYK: Each July 4th, we celebrate America’s war to overthrow rule by hereditary royalty and landed gentry and to create on these shores democratic self-rule … plus a little slavery to appease the South’s economic royalty.
Like the Civil War, the American Revolution now seems to have failed. Is there any doubt?
Former bartender, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, doesn’t think so. Her Instagram followers asked about American oligarchy, and one oligarch in particular from the South (Africa).
AOC: “Oh, I don’t think we’re witnessing the START of an oligarchy. I think we are fully here.”
AOC: “Republicans don’t know who their Daddy is.”
Democrats might have had AOC as ranking member of the House Oversight Committee next year. What happened there?
“What we are looking at here is oligarchy”
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders could teach a master class in class politics. He sees it too.
Sanders: “My friends, what we are looking at here has nothing to do with democracy. What we are looking at here is oligarchy. This is up and up government by the billionaire class, for the billionaire class.”
Sanders: “What we are dealing with right now is that the billionaire class, which owns so much of our economy, which owns so much of our media, they are now moving aggressively to own our political system as well.”
Ten years ago to the day, I commented on an interview with historian Steve Fraser in which he warned about this second Gilded Age:
Bill Moyers’ guest, historian Steve Fraser, deconstructs how the second Gilded Age differs from the first. Then, people banded together and rose up to challenge their newfound serfdom. But these are “acquiescent times,” says Fraser. We live in a fable of capitalism as “a democracy of the audacious who will make it on their own, while in fact most of the people are headed in the opposite direction.”
Then on Christmas Eve in 2014, I returned to Fraser’s comments:
What Milton Friedman called capitalism in 1962 looks more like an economic cult today. Question the basic assumptions behind corporate capitalism, publicly point out its shortcomings and suggest we are overdue for an upgrade, and the Chamber of Commerce practically bursts through the door like the Spanish Inquisition to accuse you of communism and heresy. Why you … you want to punish success! It’s weirdly reflexive and a mite hysterical. What their blind fealty and knee-jerk defense of this one particular style for organizing a capitalist enterprise says about them, I’ll leave for now. It suffices to say I find it rather peculiar.
We think we invented capitalism. Yet there have been “capitalist acts between consenting adults”* since before Hammurabi. We don’t call one capitalist enterprise the world’s oldest profession for nothing. There’s a restaurant in China that has been in operation for nearly 1000 years. And pubs in England that have been in business for 900. All without being incorporated in Delaware or the Cayman Islands. (Communists?)
The fetish for the current economic model isn’t about money or ideology, but, like The Matrix, about control. For some and not for others. Working people in the first Gilded Age, says Fraser, “summoned up a kind of political will and the political imagination” to civilize capitalism,” to say to themselves, “we are not fated to live this way.”
Now, corporate capitalism is pretty successful at what it does. But then, so is kudzu, another invasive species. I used to live on the edge of a field of kudzu. In the summer, I had to cut it back with a machete each week to keep it from taking over my yard and eating my house. On those hot, summer afternoons, not once did a passing neighbor wag a finger in my face and accuse me of “punishing success.”
Corporate capitalism has become an invasive species that has taken over government of, by, and for the People. Sen. Elizabeth Warren very publicly called out one such creeping pest recently. She suggested it was time we cut it back. She’s right.
We upgrade our hardware and software every couple of years. When was the last time capitalism got a new operating system? And what might that look like?
We’d damned well better start answering those questions or the Elon Musks and Lords of Silicon Valley will answer them for us. Corporate capitalism and our teetering republic need upgrading, but nearly half the country is just fine with being ruled instead of governing themselves. What’s it going to take for that to sink in? Making our oligarchs wear powdered wigs?
Is that lump in your stocking or in your throat?
We’re not giving up if you’re not.
Happy Hollandaise!