The return of a plague on both your houses. Part 5: mutant Democrats and where they come from
A plague on both your houses no.5: Mutant Democrats
In his otherwise illuminating account of social change at the top of American society, which I quoted in my last essay, Paul Krugman only briefly touches on the causes of the change. And there is something paradoxical and rather symptomatic about the way he does it. First, he establishes conclusively that “purely” economic explanations, that is explanations in terms of some notion of discorporate economic advantage, won’t do:
Let's leave actual malfeasance on one side for a moment, and ask how the relatively modest salaries of top executives 30 years ago became the gigantic pay packages of today. There are two main stories, both of which emphasize changing norms rather than pure economics. The more optimistic story draws an analogy between the explosion of C.E.O. pay and the explosion of baseball salaries with the introduction of free agency. According to this story, highly paid C.E.O.'s really are worth it, because having the right man in that job makes a huge difference. The more pessimistic view -- which I find more plausible -- is that competition for talent is a minor factor. Yes, a great executive can make a big difference -- but those huge pay packages have been going as often as not to executives whose performance is mediocre at best. The key reason executives are paid so much now is that they appoint the members of the corporate board that determines their compensation and control many of the perks that board members count on. So it's not the invisible hand of the market that leads to those monumental executive incomes; it's the invisible handshake in the boardroom.
Having discarded the “economicistic” explanation, he sketches another, much more promising one:
But then why weren't executives paid lavishly 30 years ago? Again, it's a matter of corporate culture. For a generation after World War II, fear of outrage kept executive salaries in check. Now the outrage is gone. That is, the explosion of executive pay represents a social change rather than the purely economic forces of supply and demand. We should think of it not as a market trend like the rising value of waterfront property, but as something more like the sexual revolution of the 1960's -- a relaxation of old strictures, a new permissiveness, but in this case the permissiveness is financial rather than sexual. Sure enough, John Kenneth Galbraith described the honest executive of 1967 as being one who ''eschews the lovely, available and even naked woman by whom he is intimately surrounded.'' By the end of the 1990's, the executive motto might as well have been ''If it feels good, do it.''
And then, having suggested that the reason is not to do with economics but with moral norms, he… goes straight back to “naked” economics:
How did this change in corporate culture happen? Economists and management theorists are only beginning to explore that question, but it's easy to suggest a few factors. One was the changing structure of financial markets. In his new book, ''Searching for a Corporate Savior,'' Rakesh Khurana of Harvard Business School suggests that during the 1980's and 1990's, ''managerial capitalism'' -- the world of the man in the gray flannel suit -- was replaced by ''investor capitalism.'' Institutional investors weren't willing to let a C.E.O. choose his own successor from inside the corporation; they wanted heroic leaders, often outsiders, and were willing to pay immense sums to get them. The subtitle of Khurana's book, by the way, is ''The Irrational Quest for Charismatic C.E.O.'s.''….
…blah, blah, blah. It seems clear to me that Krugman has come in view of something really important and fundamental about the social changes he so loathes, and that, rather than define it better and go into it in detail, he has turned back to the very economic theories he had just dismissed as incapable to explain the facts. Of course, you might say, he is an economist. But being a specialist does not mean being forced to explain everything in the world in terms of your own specialism; especially when you have shown, in admirably plain English, that your own specialism does not supply the answer. What does Krugman do with the rest of his article? He keeps hammering away at the bad results of inequality and aristocracy - and does so well, convincingly and even entertainingly. But he never gives another look at the causes that unleashed this uncontrolled accumulation. There is something escapist in this; one might say that he is using the details of everything that is wrong, inefficient and damaging about rising inequality to avoid having to discuss the issue of where this rising inequality comes from. What is he afraid of?
There can be no doubt whatever of what he is afraid of, and why he plainly refuses to go down that road. He is afraid of a moral explanation of the collapse of social norms; and the reason why he is afraid of it is that it would destroy his chosen remedy to rising inequality - Vote Democrat! - and show that the Democratic Party as it has been for the last forty or more years is as much part of the problem as the Republicans. In fact, it would show that there is no solution to the problem as it is currently, and that any solution lies more in the area of religion than in that of politics - at least, politics as it is now. For if the issue is a widespread belief that “If it feels good, do it”, then the Democrats are five times as guilty of it as the Republicans ever were.
This is a kind of fanaticism I see very widely in modern politics, certainly not only in the United States. In my own country, there is the horrible issue of Berlusconi. Certainly the man is enough to discredit in the eyes of thinking people any political cause he associates with; but the point is that I have frequently met with a mentality that positively forbids any criticism of Berlusconi’s opponents - who, God knows, are criticable enough. The anti-Berlusconi coalition has nothing in common except opposing Berlusconi. Its figurehead leader, Prodi, is uninspiring. They have patently failed in the great task of reforming Naples, Italy’s largest city, which they have been administrating for decades, and which, under their management, has seen the local underworld grow in power and influence rather than fade. They include open Communists and people totally unfit for government, such as Greens and Radicals. It seems impossible to make Prodi supporters understand that the presence of such figures as Oliviero Diliberto, whose political idol is Fidel Castro and who at the last elections deliberately angled for Muslim Brotherhood votes, is enough for many decent people to decide that Berlusconi is much the lesser of two evils. No, if fifty per cent of Italian electors vote for the Berlusconi coalition, it is not because of the presence in the current government of people one would cross the road to avoid; it is because they are all corrupt, ignorant, self-interested. In short, they are unworthy of the vote. One left-wing Italian blogger summed up her reaction to the catastrophic defeat of the Left in last year’s referendum on assisted fertilization: this country, she said, is shit, and events just prove it. In other words, I have nothing to learn from defeat: it is the enormous majority that decided against me, who need to learn from me, and if they don’t, then they are - not human, but shit.
The same, of course, happens in America. People who vote for the Republican list are ignorant, easily led. Their concern about public and private morality cannot be real; they are manipulated by their leaders to consider abortion important - more important than “real” issues, which in Democrat talk inevitably mean economic issues. As for the Republicans, one just has to read a couple of Ann Coulter columns to see what they are teaching themselves to think about their opponents.
This demonization, not just of your opponents, but, more importantly, of their electors, is a profoundly stupid process. It simply results in both sides becoming incapable of understanding their opponents. The Democrats reacted to the disaster of 2004 by recruiting a number of conservative-sounding candidates, and, more absurdly, by creating, more or less out of nowhere, a so-called “religious left” to oppose the massed ranks of Baptist preachers and Catholic laymen who had, in the Democrats’ mind, won the previous election for Bush II by marching their poor, ignorant, backward, easily led followers to the voting booths. (The “poor, ignorant, backward, easily led” is a quotation.)
The contempt for Christians that this shows does not need to be underlined. They do not have any principles of their own, indeed hardly any individuality; for it goes without saying that as an individual grows, matures and develops an individuality, that individuality must lead to Democratic attitudes. Christians in politics are a bunch of immature ranters, a mob that hangs from the lips of any self-proclaimed preacher; therefore, in order to stop their absurd obsession with such issues as abortion and marriage, all we need to do is to promote tame preachers of our own, declaring that our goals are more pleasing to God. Of course, the invention of party and state churches does not begin with Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, but they are in the great tradition.
The victory gained in 2006 may have misled the Democrats as to the long-term success of these tactics. That is certainly what I would expect in the light of the self-blinding just described. What happened is that, while the obvious failure and nearly as obvious corruption of the Republican establishment mobilized every angry voter on the left, it also kept home millions of those values voters who had swept Bush II to victory only two years before. It was not the Democrat principles that convinced them; it was the failure of the Republicans to adhere to any notional Christian principles that kept them home. But these electors, if they vote at all in future elections, will vote Republican. A few token “Conservative Democrats” in unimportant places are not going to convince them that Nancy Pelosi has anything to do with family values beyond the value of her family’s estates.
What puzzles thoughtful Democrats is why the lower classes of America should vote for a party which is run in the near-complete interest of the ultra-rich, and whose economic policy has effectively ran labour into the ground, devastated traditional manufacturing, lost over a million jobs and McDonaldized what work is left. It is a good question. But the mere asking of it shows that the Democrats themselves are not a part of that lower class. They look at it from outside: they wonder at its ways and its priorities. They come to the industrial rust-belt suburbs and the rural centre of the country as strangers, out of touch with its culture, unable to penetrate its mystery; and are rejected. And yet the mystery is not really so mysterious. This is how far they have gone from the days when their northern part looked for moral guidance from the Catholic Church, and their southern from the Southern Baptists.
In a sense, the Democrats have managed to make themselves invisible to themselves. By assuming that the only real class difference, and the only real class conflict, was that between relative poverty and relative wealth, they have become unable to see the kind of things they are. For to a working-class American from the heartland, the Democrats are no less rich people than the worst of the Republicans; only they are marked with that particular kind of brand of Cain that is called "elitist".
The grave mistake is to imagine that there is only one rich class in modern society. There are at least two, as exclusive, as divided from each other, as either of them is from the relatively poor. The fact that the Democrats cannot make the imaginative leap to seeing themselves as socially different both from the rank capitalists who make up the bulk of Republican numbers and from the middling folk who vote for them insures that the Democrats will always lose.
One of the major products of modern society is an infinite and ever-flowing stream of work of the mind. Newspapers, magazines and books; advertising; theatre and music; cinema and television; and the hundreds of thousands of jobs that relate, one way or another, to these. Thousands of people are paid to write, not novels or editorials, but DIY textbooks, tourist guides and joke collections. Thousands of people are draftsmen, commercial artists, secondary workers in theatre, advertising... you name it.
This class cannot be identified with the ordinary labourer who lends his/her strength and even his/her technical skills to a master for hire. They are employing something else than technical skill: they are, to some extent, making use of their mind. Of course, the shades of social distinction are vague and uncertain at the edges, and there is little to separate a top craftsman in, say, goldsmithing or catering, from a technical artist who makes use of his/her skills purely for hire. But if you move your attention from the limits to the centre of the respective social classes, then there is plenty to separate a factory or farm labourer from an advertising copywriter or a session musician. Their worlds, their kinds of work, their priorities in life, are not the same. However conscientious and skilful a labourer may be, he will not receive prizes for top quality work; he will not vest his soul into the perfecting of it. He will do the work as best as he can, take his money, and go home; and the emotional centre of his life will not be his work, but his family and his circle of friends.
The intellectual worker's life is different. No doubt, there are thousands of hacks who approach their work with no more commitment than a (slack) farm labourer, and churn stuff out without consideration; God knows I have met them. But at the heart of each field of work there is an inherent demand on the self. In the arts, and art-related fields, quality becomes a surpassing consideration more or less from the moment when two human beings start working together. Even the meaning of that popular phrase, "work ethic", is different in the two fields. To a labourer, it means "a fair day's work for a fair day's pay" - you pay me for so much work and I will do it to the best of my ability and in the times you set me. To the intellectual worker, it means not stopping until something is done as well as it can possibly be done, even if the monetary reward is not worth the labour. For there are other rewards: in particular, the consideration of one's peers and public. I will not say that a cartoonist or detective writer will gladly starve if s/he has a gilded statuette on his/her mantelpiece awarded by other cartoonists or detective writers; but it will make up for late nights, tons of caffeine, rows with the Significant Other, and lack of interest from one's relatives. No field, however mercenary and meretricious, fails to develop a regard for quality within its products: professionals vote for, and value, quality awards in pornography, advertising, or Harlequin/ Mills & Boon romance writing.
This makes for a different social experience. The social life of intellectual workers is projected towards their peers; that of labourers, towards their families and neighbourhood. Intellectual workers have notoriously fragile relationships, caught as they are between the Scylla of finding a Significant Other who knows nothing of their world and therefore has no sympathy with their joys and sorrows, their sacrifices and their aims; and the Charybdis of finding their SO among their own colleagues, and so finding a critic and, in the worst scenario, a rival in the home. This is one of the reasons why divorce and promiscuity are much more frequent among intellectual workers than other classes. And that contributes to distort their view of the world.
But intellectual workers don't starve. The rewards of their trade can be quite considerable. Unlike most kinds of manufacturing, the manufacturing of intellectual product depends to a huge degree on individuality - in a business where a Dan Brown makes more than dozens of better thriller writers, I dare not say, individual talent. But individuality is essential; and not even so much essential, as unavoidable. You can get two hundred workers to turn out widgets or plough fields in exactly similar ways; but you cannot get two people to write a paragraph the same way. And that is whether or not they are talented. Talent, of course, can make a huge difference. When Walt Disney licensed a small publishing company to produce comic books of his characters, that company took an assembly-line view of their work, refusing to have artists or writer sign their work and going for a “company look”. But it so happened that among the faceless, nameless writers and artists they employed there was a man of genius, whose work began to move away from the company look and towards a decidedly individual and recognizable look. They had the sense to let him go his way, and in a few years his work - though not his name - was known to dozens millions of children in a hundred countries. Not knowing who he was, they all - from Japan to Turkey and from South Africa to Sweden - just called him “the good artist”. Thanks to his unacknowledged but unmistakeable and magnificent work, Disney comics sales soared in America and across the world: at the height of his success, in the early fifties, Whitman Comics were increasing sales by one hundred thousand copies a month. His name was Carl Barks, and the characters he created or reworked are probably now better known and loved than Walt Disney’s own, although Disney probably never even noticed them.
The case of Barks shows rhe relationship between individuality, success and wealth. Thanks purely to his own highly individual genius, Carl Barks made and continues to make untold billions for Walt Disney. He himself was never more than a hired hand, paid a wage and denied any part in the products of his genius. Well, the first generation of artists in any field may perhaps accept this kind of situation for a while - Barks himself has been rather irritable about it in the last decades of his life. But that does not last. When a man or woman finds out that his or her individual work can make the difference between a production flopping or triumphing, it does not take long before they learn to demand a piece of the action. And while these superstars only represent the top froth of the work in a few of the most popular fields, I think it may be said that a considerable amount of well-established professionals in these fields have quite a substantial income.
The important point however is that they are completely different from the rich proper in one substantial fact: they do not have control. The average intellectual worker, journalist or artist, cartoonist or actor, singer or writer, is an employee. The businesses that distribute their work do not belong to them. Attempts to break down the division between employer and intellectual worker are as old as capitalism itself; certainly, no sooner had cinema become an artistic industry than Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford led a revolt by exploited artists to set up their own production company, United Artists - which swiftly became just another company. And if even the superstars cannot manage to permanently alter the power relationship between intellectual employee and capitalist employer, so much less can the rank and file.
This means that, whatever their individual circumstances, the relationship of the intellectual worker with the capitalist employer is no less hostile and oppositional than that of the average unionized labourer. Both of them regard the employer as someone who stands there, tells them what to do, and then pockets the result of their work. This is why the intellectual labourer class - which, you will have understood by now, is in my view at the core of the Democratic party - has a strong feeling that their interests are identical to those of the working classes (including in this white-collar wage slaves, whose relationship to their bosses is also one of dependency and opposition).
But this is where the mistake is made. First, the intellectual worker class badly underrates its own power - a power which can feel as oppressive as, and more alien than, that of any employer; and second, they do not realize that social opposition is not only about money. Alienness of experience and values is just as deadly in dividing people.
The social power of the intellectual-worker class grows out of three specific features. Of one of them I have already spoken: their tendency to focus their social life on their fellow intellectuals, and to value their opinion. Compared to the conversation of an "outsider", that of a man of one's own trade always has a perceptivity, a direct relevance to and understanding of one's own condition, that others achieve only by chance or exceptional talent. And, by the same token, the praise of a member of one's own world is worth more than that of fifty outsiders, even if those outsiders should happen to be your own public. This tends to create a social group that is very cohesive, extraordinarily cohesive, in ideas, views, understanding and experience. Their views spring from the same peculiar experiences and tend to confirm each other.
The second important feature is their near-monopoly over communication in society. The very being of the intellectual-worker class is in the many different forms of communication that a modern society develops: it is in order to service press and publishing, showbusiness and advertising, that the intellectual-worker class comes into being. Therefore, these mass media, which are supposed to be the medium by which the whole of a society reflects on itself, immediately tend to acquire a particular tone, reflecting a particular experience, which is not that of the whole of society, but only of the class that works on them.
The third feature is the complete confidence of the intellectual-worker class in the world-view they have thus developped. It is not only the case that their experiences reinforce each other, but that they are, by and at large, conscious of working with their minds. They therefore conceive their views and experiences to be particularly reasonable and rational. They quickly develop a missionary urge to spread them around.
The uniformity of this class is further encouraged by the structure of their employers. In America, the media began by being both widely dispersed and widely different in terms of their policies, viewpoints and styles. Newspapers were essentially town operations, and each town of some size could be counted on to have at least a couple, serving opposing viewpoints. Large cities such as New York could have as much as ten. However, a slow, irresistible process of conglomeration led to a collapse in numbers - most American towns now have only one newspaper - and homogenisation in content. By the fifties, this process was virtually complete: the formation of three massive Radio-TV nationwide conglomerates completed the situation. By 1960, the shape of the American media industry had moved from an anarchic, competitive chaos to a corporate oligopoly.
The impact of this upon the media themselves is not, as people feared, the omnipotence of a few media barons dictating their own individual viewpoints. This, certainly, was the case at the beginning of this oligopoly, with newspaper barons such as Hearst or Northcliffe, who had been journalists themselves, imposing very individual viewpoints across their empires. However, the long wave of homogenization was quite different. It pushed the media away from all extremes towards an imagined centre, discouraging strange or dangerous viewpoints. This is, by the same token, the visible course of American politics in the fifties: it has been said that the election of 1948, in which the near-Communists of Wallace and the racists of Strom Thurmond were both routed, sounded the death knell for a plurality of views in the USA. While both Thurmond and Wallace’s positions were abhorrent, the homogenisation of attitudes cannot be counted a gain.
The point however is this: that as employers in the media sector sought more and more for uncontroversial, polite and politely authoritative tones, tones that would say (as did the most famous broadcaster of the time) “and that’s the way it is, folks”, the talent pool from which they had to fish was that particular talent pool; and the drive of owners for commonplace and unchallenging view met from below the drive of the intelligentsia towards its own kind of homogenisation. People who wanted to employ people who thought what everyone else thought, but said it better, met with people who had a common view of what a common view should be. The result is the unmistakeable left-wing tone of practically every media profession in the western world. People in Italy wonder why Berlusconi, with his immense publishing and TV empire and his huge political interest, could not hire more people who thought like him; why even the employee pool of such notoriously right-wing tycoon as Rupert Murdoch and Lord Rothermere is found more often than not to lean to the left. Well, in the case of Murdoch and Berlusconi, it is certainly because the pornographic aspect of their empires is well suited by a relativistic approach. But it is more to the point that the whole culture of the trade, down to the last trainee in journalism school, leans in that direction.
The end result of this is that the intellectual-worker class takes a formidable, phalanx-like appearance before the rest of the world. The intellectual-worker class moves in a compact, unbroken formation, "as terrible as an army with banners". The ordinary person finds that they neither respect nor understand his/her views and experiences, and that they are all too ready to dictate their own standards of value and reason on the rest of the world. They do not think that is what they are doing; they find whatever they do rational and obvious and normative; they certainly have no idea that there is anything oppressive about it. To then, it is just the way normal people do things; and those who do not, in the long term, are freaks. Indeed, many of them began their adult lives by escaping working-class, middle-class, even upper-class homes in favour of the intellectual-worker-class milieu; and therefore, by a sort of invalid but terribly convincing mood - a mood, not a reasoning - they come to feel that the intellectual-worker mindset is the adult mindset. It has represented adulthood in their lives, and in the lives of their friends and colleagues; therefore it stands for adulthood in all lives. They may even think of their parents and relatives back home with affection; but it is the affection you would give to a backward or ignorant person, someone who has never won through to adulthood - an affection that involves a full measure of contempt.
Now try and be an actor or a writer in your own mind. Try and imagine a different experience. Make the imaginative effort of casting your mind into being a member of a group who does not think the same way as your group does; a group who maybe takes a different view, and maybe have had plenty of time to reach their own views on the matter; a group, at any rate, which is taught, by the law, the social experience, the mentality, of America, that their view and their votes are as good as yours. And imagine feeling patronized, preached to, not taken seriously. No adult person minds disagreement; experience, if nothing else, will teach any person who has reached his/her late twenties that there is no way that you can live with people who all agree with you. But no self-respecting, free-born citizen of a democracy will put up with being patronized and treated as a moral infant. That is what they are protesting about when they protest about "elitism". The resentment of Middle America about the blast of contempt they feel coming from the Democrats is written in the results of almost every election in the last few decades. From Nixon onwards, elections have not been won by Democrats, but lost by Republicans. The Republicans have become the party to beat. And the reason for this is the perceptible sense of superiority of the intellectuals’ party. A large number of adults - who were being treated as children - took across their knee and spanked their children - who were behaving as the only adults in the land.
This is not just about the power of the vote. It is about a narrowness of mind that does not learn, that refuses to learn. The truth is that the experience of the intellectual worker class is in no way more rational than that of the average outsider; in fact, being since that experience is largely determined by the power of unthinking, unmediated class and caste similarity, there is very little about it that is even really based on individual openness to facts. It is a social construct, and a particularly obstinate and change-resistant one. I am a member of this class myself; goodness, if not I, who is? I know from the inside how unpopular it is to have changed one's mind, to have accepted that the average intellectual-worker view is just plain wrong, to have come, individually, to different conclusions. Someone characterized me as a martyr looking for a cause. The use of the word "martyr" in a negative sense, as a stupidly wrong-headed person who tries to show his difference from the herd by empty posturing, just shows how much contempt for individuality and opposition lies unnoticed in the average intellectual-worker breast. Martyrs are heroes. But intellectual workers do not care for heroes.
(Incidentally, I do not think that I am a martyr. In the words of Hamlet, would that I were so good a man.)
Indeed, there is no real or necessary connection between this compact, aggressive class and the world of the intellect in the sense of its best and highest achievements. Intellectual workers in the mass are no more intelligent or talented than the average person, and many of them are quite fantastically stupid. They do not even need to be very educated - Mencken complained, not without reason, of half-educated bohemians. And conversely, the further you move towards the very height of talent and achievement, the less frequent and consensual is the intellectual-worker attitude. Many of the greatest artists, scientists and scholars have nothing in common with the average intellectual worker, and do not even consider following the mass. Some do: Luchino Visconti, one of the greatest movie makers who ever lived, took the Marxist position that was commonplace in his time and country. But Thomas Mann, Jack Kirby, Carl Barks, Frank Capra, and so on and so forth and so following, had a lot more in common with the ordinary citizen than with the intellectual worker class - what used to be called Bohemia.
The class of intellectual workers, in short, draws its prestige and above all its self-regard from the world of the intellect; but it really has no higher claim on it than any other component of society, since the individuality that always goes with genius cannot altogether be placed in the ranks of a group-thinking social class. Even those artists who positively dedicated themselves to politics more or less of the left-wing kind eventually produce work that one way or another pierces through their pretensions. I made this observation about the work of H.G.Wells and Berthold Brecht a while back; but if you sum up all the great workers of the mind, even in the last century or two (that is, in a period in which the intelligentsia or bohemia or intellectual-worker class was firmly established) you will find no common political feature. Gilbert K.Chesterton is not like Tolstoy is not like Dickens is not like Brahms is not like Benedetto Croce is not like Walt Disney is not like Hayao Miyazaki is not like Thomas Mann is not like Berthold Brecht is not like George Orwell is not like Irving Berlin is not like Bob Dylan is not like Gilbert K.Chesterton. Indeed, the harder you look at the real greats, the more you realize that the one thing they have in common is a vigorous and unbreakable individuality that goes with a firm view of reality. And this leads us back to the essential point: there is no essential connection between the intelligentsia and the intellect. It is a result of social position, not of serious personal reflection.
The result of this attitude and mood is that mentalities that do not adhere to the intellectual-worker standard are unthinkingly, carelessly treated with contempt. It is not something that they even think about, and certainly they would rebel if charged with it. They did rebel, when, in the last election, the rest of America rose up against them. They never realized that they had done anything wrong; it had never occurred to them that they had treated anyone differently or slighted anyone's hard-won beliefs. Oh no: it just did not occur to them that anyone's views but their own were adult, hard-won, or based on personal experience. The attitude that reached the rest of the world is that they alone were the adults and everyone else were a pack of children to be patted on the head when acting cute or slapped on the wrist when getting out of line. Wagner created an utopia in which the best judge of artistic value - and, ultimately, of personal value - was a cobbler; but in the minds of most intellectual workers, the idea is not too far from the surface that the best thing that the cobbler can do for us is to stick to his last.
(to be continued…)
In his otherwise illuminating account of social change at the top of American society, which I quoted in my last essay, Paul Krugman only briefly touches on the causes of the change. And there is something paradoxical and rather symptomatic about the way he does it. First, he establishes conclusively that “purely” economic explanations, that is explanations in terms of some notion of discorporate economic advantage, won’t do:
Let's leave actual malfeasance on one side for a moment, and ask how the relatively modest salaries of top executives 30 years ago became the gigantic pay packages of today. There are two main stories, both of which emphasize changing norms rather than pure economics. The more optimistic story draws an analogy between the explosion of C.E.O. pay and the explosion of baseball salaries with the introduction of free agency. According to this story, highly paid C.E.O.'s really are worth it, because having the right man in that job makes a huge difference. The more pessimistic view -- which I find more plausible -- is that competition for talent is a minor factor. Yes, a great executive can make a big difference -- but those huge pay packages have been going as often as not to executives whose performance is mediocre at best. The key reason executives are paid so much now is that they appoint the members of the corporate board that determines their compensation and control many of the perks that board members count on. So it's not the invisible hand of the market that leads to those monumental executive incomes; it's the invisible handshake in the boardroom.
Having discarded the “economicistic” explanation, he sketches another, much more promising one:
But then why weren't executives paid lavishly 30 years ago? Again, it's a matter of corporate culture. For a generation after World War II, fear of outrage kept executive salaries in check. Now the outrage is gone. That is, the explosion of executive pay represents a social change rather than the purely economic forces of supply and demand. We should think of it not as a market trend like the rising value of waterfront property, but as something more like the sexual revolution of the 1960's -- a relaxation of old strictures, a new permissiveness, but in this case the permissiveness is financial rather than sexual. Sure enough, John Kenneth Galbraith described the honest executive of 1967 as being one who ''eschews the lovely, available and even naked woman by whom he is intimately surrounded.'' By the end of the 1990's, the executive motto might as well have been ''If it feels good, do it.''
And then, having suggested that the reason is not to do with economics but with moral norms, he… goes straight back to “naked” economics:
How did this change in corporate culture happen? Economists and management theorists are only beginning to explore that question, but it's easy to suggest a few factors. One was the changing structure of financial markets. In his new book, ''Searching for a Corporate Savior,'' Rakesh Khurana of Harvard Business School suggests that during the 1980's and 1990's, ''managerial capitalism'' -- the world of the man in the gray flannel suit -- was replaced by ''investor capitalism.'' Institutional investors weren't willing to let a C.E.O. choose his own successor from inside the corporation; they wanted heroic leaders, often outsiders, and were willing to pay immense sums to get them. The subtitle of Khurana's book, by the way, is ''The Irrational Quest for Charismatic C.E.O.'s.''….
…blah, blah, blah. It seems clear to me that Krugman has come in view of something really important and fundamental about the social changes he so loathes, and that, rather than define it better and go into it in detail, he has turned back to the very economic theories he had just dismissed as incapable to explain the facts. Of course, you might say, he is an economist. But being a specialist does not mean being forced to explain everything in the world in terms of your own specialism; especially when you have shown, in admirably plain English, that your own specialism does not supply the answer. What does Krugman do with the rest of his article? He keeps hammering away at the bad results of inequality and aristocracy - and does so well, convincingly and even entertainingly. But he never gives another look at the causes that unleashed this uncontrolled accumulation. There is something escapist in this; one might say that he is using the details of everything that is wrong, inefficient and damaging about rising inequality to avoid having to discuss the issue of where this rising inequality comes from. What is he afraid of?
There can be no doubt whatever of what he is afraid of, and why he plainly refuses to go down that road. He is afraid of a moral explanation of the collapse of social norms; and the reason why he is afraid of it is that it would destroy his chosen remedy to rising inequality - Vote Democrat! - and show that the Democratic Party as it has been for the last forty or more years is as much part of the problem as the Republicans. In fact, it would show that there is no solution to the problem as it is currently, and that any solution lies more in the area of religion than in that of politics - at least, politics as it is now. For if the issue is a widespread belief that “If it feels good, do it”, then the Democrats are five times as guilty of it as the Republicans ever were.
This is a kind of fanaticism I see very widely in modern politics, certainly not only in the United States. In my own country, there is the horrible issue of Berlusconi. Certainly the man is enough to discredit in the eyes of thinking people any political cause he associates with; but the point is that I have frequently met with a mentality that positively forbids any criticism of Berlusconi’s opponents - who, God knows, are criticable enough. The anti-Berlusconi coalition has nothing in common except opposing Berlusconi. Its figurehead leader, Prodi, is uninspiring. They have patently failed in the great task of reforming Naples, Italy’s largest city, which they have been administrating for decades, and which, under their management, has seen the local underworld grow in power and influence rather than fade. They include open Communists and people totally unfit for government, such as Greens and Radicals. It seems impossible to make Prodi supporters understand that the presence of such figures as Oliviero Diliberto, whose political idol is Fidel Castro and who at the last elections deliberately angled for Muslim Brotherhood votes, is enough for many decent people to decide that Berlusconi is much the lesser of two evils. No, if fifty per cent of Italian electors vote for the Berlusconi coalition, it is not because of the presence in the current government of people one would cross the road to avoid; it is because they are all corrupt, ignorant, self-interested. In short, they are unworthy of the vote. One left-wing Italian blogger summed up her reaction to the catastrophic defeat of the Left in last year’s referendum on assisted fertilization: this country, she said, is shit, and events just prove it. In other words, I have nothing to learn from defeat: it is the enormous majority that decided against me, who need to learn from me, and if they don’t, then they are - not human, but shit.
The same, of course, happens in America. People who vote for the Republican list are ignorant, easily led. Their concern about public and private morality cannot be real; they are manipulated by their leaders to consider abortion important - more important than “real” issues, which in Democrat talk inevitably mean economic issues. As for the Republicans, one just has to read a couple of Ann Coulter columns to see what they are teaching themselves to think about their opponents.
This demonization, not just of your opponents, but, more importantly, of their electors, is a profoundly stupid process. It simply results in both sides becoming incapable of understanding their opponents. The Democrats reacted to the disaster of 2004 by recruiting a number of conservative-sounding candidates, and, more absurdly, by creating, more or less out of nowhere, a so-called “religious left” to oppose the massed ranks of Baptist preachers and Catholic laymen who had, in the Democrats’ mind, won the previous election for Bush II by marching their poor, ignorant, backward, easily led followers to the voting booths. (The “poor, ignorant, backward, easily led” is a quotation.)
The contempt for Christians that this shows does not need to be underlined. They do not have any principles of their own, indeed hardly any individuality; for it goes without saying that as an individual grows, matures and develops an individuality, that individuality must lead to Democratic attitudes. Christians in politics are a bunch of immature ranters, a mob that hangs from the lips of any self-proclaimed preacher; therefore, in order to stop their absurd obsession with such issues as abortion and marriage, all we need to do is to promote tame preachers of our own, declaring that our goals are more pleasing to God. Of course, the invention of party and state churches does not begin with Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, but they are in the great tradition.
The victory gained in 2006 may have misled the Democrats as to the long-term success of these tactics. That is certainly what I would expect in the light of the self-blinding just described. What happened is that, while the obvious failure and nearly as obvious corruption of the Republican establishment mobilized every angry voter on the left, it also kept home millions of those values voters who had swept Bush II to victory only two years before. It was not the Democrat principles that convinced them; it was the failure of the Republicans to adhere to any notional Christian principles that kept them home. But these electors, if they vote at all in future elections, will vote Republican. A few token “Conservative Democrats” in unimportant places are not going to convince them that Nancy Pelosi has anything to do with family values beyond the value of her family’s estates.
What puzzles thoughtful Democrats is why the lower classes of America should vote for a party which is run in the near-complete interest of the ultra-rich, and whose economic policy has effectively ran labour into the ground, devastated traditional manufacturing, lost over a million jobs and McDonaldized what work is left. It is a good question. But the mere asking of it shows that the Democrats themselves are not a part of that lower class. They look at it from outside: they wonder at its ways and its priorities. They come to the industrial rust-belt suburbs and the rural centre of the country as strangers, out of touch with its culture, unable to penetrate its mystery; and are rejected. And yet the mystery is not really so mysterious. This is how far they have gone from the days when their northern part looked for moral guidance from the Catholic Church, and their southern from the Southern Baptists.
In a sense, the Democrats have managed to make themselves invisible to themselves. By assuming that the only real class difference, and the only real class conflict, was that between relative poverty and relative wealth, they have become unable to see the kind of things they are. For to a working-class American from the heartland, the Democrats are no less rich people than the worst of the Republicans; only they are marked with that particular kind of brand of Cain that is called "elitist".
The grave mistake is to imagine that there is only one rich class in modern society. There are at least two, as exclusive, as divided from each other, as either of them is from the relatively poor. The fact that the Democrats cannot make the imaginative leap to seeing themselves as socially different both from the rank capitalists who make up the bulk of Republican numbers and from the middling folk who vote for them insures that the Democrats will always lose.
One of the major products of modern society is an infinite and ever-flowing stream of work of the mind. Newspapers, magazines and books; advertising; theatre and music; cinema and television; and the hundreds of thousands of jobs that relate, one way or another, to these. Thousands of people are paid to write, not novels or editorials, but DIY textbooks, tourist guides and joke collections. Thousands of people are draftsmen, commercial artists, secondary workers in theatre, advertising... you name it.
This class cannot be identified with the ordinary labourer who lends his/her strength and even his/her technical skills to a master for hire. They are employing something else than technical skill: they are, to some extent, making use of their mind. Of course, the shades of social distinction are vague and uncertain at the edges, and there is little to separate a top craftsman in, say, goldsmithing or catering, from a technical artist who makes use of his/her skills purely for hire. But if you move your attention from the limits to the centre of the respective social classes, then there is plenty to separate a factory or farm labourer from an advertising copywriter or a session musician. Their worlds, their kinds of work, their priorities in life, are not the same. However conscientious and skilful a labourer may be, he will not receive prizes for top quality work; he will not vest his soul into the perfecting of it. He will do the work as best as he can, take his money, and go home; and the emotional centre of his life will not be his work, but his family and his circle of friends.
The intellectual worker's life is different. No doubt, there are thousands of hacks who approach their work with no more commitment than a (slack) farm labourer, and churn stuff out without consideration; God knows I have met them. But at the heart of each field of work there is an inherent demand on the self. In the arts, and art-related fields, quality becomes a surpassing consideration more or less from the moment when two human beings start working together. Even the meaning of that popular phrase, "work ethic", is different in the two fields. To a labourer, it means "a fair day's work for a fair day's pay" - you pay me for so much work and I will do it to the best of my ability and in the times you set me. To the intellectual worker, it means not stopping until something is done as well as it can possibly be done, even if the monetary reward is not worth the labour. For there are other rewards: in particular, the consideration of one's peers and public. I will not say that a cartoonist or detective writer will gladly starve if s/he has a gilded statuette on his/her mantelpiece awarded by other cartoonists or detective writers; but it will make up for late nights, tons of caffeine, rows with the Significant Other, and lack of interest from one's relatives. No field, however mercenary and meretricious, fails to develop a regard for quality within its products: professionals vote for, and value, quality awards in pornography, advertising, or Harlequin/ Mills & Boon romance writing.
This makes for a different social experience. The social life of intellectual workers is projected towards their peers; that of labourers, towards their families and neighbourhood. Intellectual workers have notoriously fragile relationships, caught as they are between the Scylla of finding a Significant Other who knows nothing of their world and therefore has no sympathy with their joys and sorrows, their sacrifices and their aims; and the Charybdis of finding their SO among their own colleagues, and so finding a critic and, in the worst scenario, a rival in the home. This is one of the reasons why divorce and promiscuity are much more frequent among intellectual workers than other classes. And that contributes to distort their view of the world.
But intellectual workers don't starve. The rewards of their trade can be quite considerable. Unlike most kinds of manufacturing, the manufacturing of intellectual product depends to a huge degree on individuality - in a business where a Dan Brown makes more than dozens of better thriller writers, I dare not say, individual talent. But individuality is essential; and not even so much essential, as unavoidable. You can get two hundred workers to turn out widgets or plough fields in exactly similar ways; but you cannot get two people to write a paragraph the same way. And that is whether or not they are talented. Talent, of course, can make a huge difference. When Walt Disney licensed a small publishing company to produce comic books of his characters, that company took an assembly-line view of their work, refusing to have artists or writer sign their work and going for a “company look”. But it so happened that among the faceless, nameless writers and artists they employed there was a man of genius, whose work began to move away from the company look and towards a decidedly individual and recognizable look. They had the sense to let him go his way, and in a few years his work - though not his name - was known to dozens millions of children in a hundred countries. Not knowing who he was, they all - from Japan to Turkey and from South Africa to Sweden - just called him “the good artist”. Thanks to his unacknowledged but unmistakeable and magnificent work, Disney comics sales soared in America and across the world: at the height of his success, in the early fifties, Whitman Comics were increasing sales by one hundred thousand copies a month. His name was Carl Barks, and the characters he created or reworked are probably now better known and loved than Walt Disney’s own, although Disney probably never even noticed them.
The case of Barks shows rhe relationship between individuality, success and wealth. Thanks purely to his own highly individual genius, Carl Barks made and continues to make untold billions for Walt Disney. He himself was never more than a hired hand, paid a wage and denied any part in the products of his genius. Well, the first generation of artists in any field may perhaps accept this kind of situation for a while - Barks himself has been rather irritable about it in the last decades of his life. But that does not last. When a man or woman finds out that his or her individual work can make the difference between a production flopping or triumphing, it does not take long before they learn to demand a piece of the action. And while these superstars only represent the top froth of the work in a few of the most popular fields, I think it may be said that a considerable amount of well-established professionals in these fields have quite a substantial income.
The important point however is that they are completely different from the rich proper in one substantial fact: they do not have control. The average intellectual worker, journalist or artist, cartoonist or actor, singer or writer, is an employee. The businesses that distribute their work do not belong to them. Attempts to break down the division between employer and intellectual worker are as old as capitalism itself; certainly, no sooner had cinema become an artistic industry than Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford led a revolt by exploited artists to set up their own production company, United Artists - which swiftly became just another company. And if even the superstars cannot manage to permanently alter the power relationship between intellectual employee and capitalist employer, so much less can the rank and file.
This means that, whatever their individual circumstances, the relationship of the intellectual worker with the capitalist employer is no less hostile and oppositional than that of the average unionized labourer. Both of them regard the employer as someone who stands there, tells them what to do, and then pockets the result of their work. This is why the intellectual labourer class - which, you will have understood by now, is in my view at the core of the Democratic party - has a strong feeling that their interests are identical to those of the working classes (including in this white-collar wage slaves, whose relationship to their bosses is also one of dependency and opposition).
But this is where the mistake is made. First, the intellectual worker class badly underrates its own power - a power which can feel as oppressive as, and more alien than, that of any employer; and second, they do not realize that social opposition is not only about money. Alienness of experience and values is just as deadly in dividing people.
The social power of the intellectual-worker class grows out of three specific features. Of one of them I have already spoken: their tendency to focus their social life on their fellow intellectuals, and to value their opinion. Compared to the conversation of an "outsider", that of a man of one's own trade always has a perceptivity, a direct relevance to and understanding of one's own condition, that others achieve only by chance or exceptional talent. And, by the same token, the praise of a member of one's own world is worth more than that of fifty outsiders, even if those outsiders should happen to be your own public. This tends to create a social group that is very cohesive, extraordinarily cohesive, in ideas, views, understanding and experience. Their views spring from the same peculiar experiences and tend to confirm each other.
The second important feature is their near-monopoly over communication in society. The very being of the intellectual-worker class is in the many different forms of communication that a modern society develops: it is in order to service press and publishing, showbusiness and advertising, that the intellectual-worker class comes into being. Therefore, these mass media, which are supposed to be the medium by which the whole of a society reflects on itself, immediately tend to acquire a particular tone, reflecting a particular experience, which is not that of the whole of society, but only of the class that works on them.
The third feature is the complete confidence of the intellectual-worker class in the world-view they have thus developped. It is not only the case that their experiences reinforce each other, but that they are, by and at large, conscious of working with their minds. They therefore conceive their views and experiences to be particularly reasonable and rational. They quickly develop a missionary urge to spread them around.
The uniformity of this class is further encouraged by the structure of their employers. In America, the media began by being both widely dispersed and widely different in terms of their policies, viewpoints and styles. Newspapers were essentially town operations, and each town of some size could be counted on to have at least a couple, serving opposing viewpoints. Large cities such as New York could have as much as ten. However, a slow, irresistible process of conglomeration led to a collapse in numbers - most American towns now have only one newspaper - and homogenisation in content. By the fifties, this process was virtually complete: the formation of three massive Radio-TV nationwide conglomerates completed the situation. By 1960, the shape of the American media industry had moved from an anarchic, competitive chaos to a corporate oligopoly.
The impact of this upon the media themselves is not, as people feared, the omnipotence of a few media barons dictating their own individual viewpoints. This, certainly, was the case at the beginning of this oligopoly, with newspaper barons such as Hearst or Northcliffe, who had been journalists themselves, imposing very individual viewpoints across their empires. However, the long wave of homogenization was quite different. It pushed the media away from all extremes towards an imagined centre, discouraging strange or dangerous viewpoints. This is, by the same token, the visible course of American politics in the fifties: it has been said that the election of 1948, in which the near-Communists of Wallace and the racists of Strom Thurmond were both routed, sounded the death knell for a plurality of views in the USA. While both Thurmond and Wallace’s positions were abhorrent, the homogenisation of attitudes cannot be counted a gain.
The point however is this: that as employers in the media sector sought more and more for uncontroversial, polite and politely authoritative tones, tones that would say (as did the most famous broadcaster of the time) “and that’s the way it is, folks”, the talent pool from which they had to fish was that particular talent pool; and the drive of owners for commonplace and unchallenging view met from below the drive of the intelligentsia towards its own kind of homogenisation. People who wanted to employ people who thought what everyone else thought, but said it better, met with people who had a common view of what a common view should be. The result is the unmistakeable left-wing tone of practically every media profession in the western world. People in Italy wonder why Berlusconi, with his immense publishing and TV empire and his huge political interest, could not hire more people who thought like him; why even the employee pool of such notoriously right-wing tycoon as Rupert Murdoch and Lord Rothermere is found more often than not to lean to the left. Well, in the case of Murdoch and Berlusconi, it is certainly because the pornographic aspect of their empires is well suited by a relativistic approach. But it is more to the point that the whole culture of the trade, down to the last trainee in journalism school, leans in that direction.
The end result of this is that the intellectual-worker class takes a formidable, phalanx-like appearance before the rest of the world. The intellectual-worker class moves in a compact, unbroken formation, "as terrible as an army with banners". The ordinary person finds that they neither respect nor understand his/her views and experiences, and that they are all too ready to dictate their own standards of value and reason on the rest of the world. They do not think that is what they are doing; they find whatever they do rational and obvious and normative; they certainly have no idea that there is anything oppressive about it. To then, it is just the way normal people do things; and those who do not, in the long term, are freaks. Indeed, many of them began their adult lives by escaping working-class, middle-class, even upper-class homes in favour of the intellectual-worker-class milieu; and therefore, by a sort of invalid but terribly convincing mood - a mood, not a reasoning - they come to feel that the intellectual-worker mindset is the adult mindset. It has represented adulthood in their lives, and in the lives of their friends and colleagues; therefore it stands for adulthood in all lives. They may even think of their parents and relatives back home with affection; but it is the affection you would give to a backward or ignorant person, someone who has never won through to adulthood - an affection that involves a full measure of contempt.
Now try and be an actor or a writer in your own mind. Try and imagine a different experience. Make the imaginative effort of casting your mind into being a member of a group who does not think the same way as your group does; a group who maybe takes a different view, and maybe have had plenty of time to reach their own views on the matter; a group, at any rate, which is taught, by the law, the social experience, the mentality, of America, that their view and their votes are as good as yours. And imagine feeling patronized, preached to, not taken seriously. No adult person minds disagreement; experience, if nothing else, will teach any person who has reached his/her late twenties that there is no way that you can live with people who all agree with you. But no self-respecting, free-born citizen of a democracy will put up with being patronized and treated as a moral infant. That is what they are protesting about when they protest about "elitism". The resentment of Middle America about the blast of contempt they feel coming from the Democrats is written in the results of almost every election in the last few decades. From Nixon onwards, elections have not been won by Democrats, but lost by Republicans. The Republicans have become the party to beat. And the reason for this is the perceptible sense of superiority of the intellectuals’ party. A large number of adults - who were being treated as children - took across their knee and spanked their children - who were behaving as the only adults in the land.
This is not just about the power of the vote. It is about a narrowness of mind that does not learn, that refuses to learn. The truth is that the experience of the intellectual worker class is in no way more rational than that of the average outsider; in fact, being since that experience is largely determined by the power of unthinking, unmediated class and caste similarity, there is very little about it that is even really based on individual openness to facts. It is a social construct, and a particularly obstinate and change-resistant one. I am a member of this class myself; goodness, if not I, who is? I know from the inside how unpopular it is to have changed one's mind, to have accepted that the average intellectual-worker view is just plain wrong, to have come, individually, to different conclusions. Someone characterized me as a martyr looking for a cause. The use of the word "martyr" in a negative sense, as a stupidly wrong-headed person who tries to show his difference from the herd by empty posturing, just shows how much contempt for individuality and opposition lies unnoticed in the average intellectual-worker breast. Martyrs are heroes. But intellectual workers do not care for heroes.
(Incidentally, I do not think that I am a martyr. In the words of Hamlet, would that I were so good a man.)
Indeed, there is no real or necessary connection between this compact, aggressive class and the world of the intellect in the sense of its best and highest achievements. Intellectual workers in the mass are no more intelligent or talented than the average person, and many of them are quite fantastically stupid. They do not even need to be very educated - Mencken complained, not without reason, of half-educated bohemians. And conversely, the further you move towards the very height of talent and achievement, the less frequent and consensual is the intellectual-worker attitude. Many of the greatest artists, scientists and scholars have nothing in common with the average intellectual worker, and do not even consider following the mass. Some do: Luchino Visconti, one of the greatest movie makers who ever lived, took the Marxist position that was commonplace in his time and country. But Thomas Mann, Jack Kirby, Carl Barks, Frank Capra, and so on and so forth and so following, had a lot more in common with the ordinary citizen than with the intellectual worker class - what used to be called Bohemia.
The class of intellectual workers, in short, draws its prestige and above all its self-regard from the world of the intellect; but it really has no higher claim on it than any other component of society, since the individuality that always goes with genius cannot altogether be placed in the ranks of a group-thinking social class. Even those artists who positively dedicated themselves to politics more or less of the left-wing kind eventually produce work that one way or another pierces through their pretensions. I made this observation about the work of H.G.Wells and Berthold Brecht a while back; but if you sum up all the great workers of the mind, even in the last century or two (that is, in a period in which the intelligentsia or bohemia or intellectual-worker class was firmly established) you will find no common political feature. Gilbert K.Chesterton is not like Tolstoy is not like Dickens is not like Brahms is not like Benedetto Croce is not like Walt Disney is not like Hayao Miyazaki is not like Thomas Mann is not like Berthold Brecht is not like George Orwell is not like Irving Berlin is not like Bob Dylan is not like Gilbert K.Chesterton. Indeed, the harder you look at the real greats, the more you realize that the one thing they have in common is a vigorous and unbreakable individuality that goes with a firm view of reality. And this leads us back to the essential point: there is no essential connection between the intelligentsia and the intellect. It is a result of social position, not of serious personal reflection.
The result of this attitude and mood is that mentalities that do not adhere to the intellectual-worker standard are unthinkingly, carelessly treated with contempt. It is not something that they even think about, and certainly they would rebel if charged with it. They did rebel, when, in the last election, the rest of America rose up against them. They never realized that they had done anything wrong; it had never occurred to them that they had treated anyone differently or slighted anyone's hard-won beliefs. Oh no: it just did not occur to them that anyone's views but their own were adult, hard-won, or based on personal experience. The attitude that reached the rest of the world is that they alone were the adults and everyone else were a pack of children to be patted on the head when acting cute or slapped on the wrist when getting out of line. Wagner created an utopia in which the best judge of artistic value - and, ultimately, of personal value - was a cobbler; but in the minds of most intellectual workers, the idea is not too far from the surface that the best thing that the cobbler can do for us is to stick to his last.
(to be continued…)