The Big Myth
This is a review of a FT book review. Apologies to the authors of the book if they are actually saying something more profound, actually anything profound at all, than what's revealed in this review. Problems start with the article’s title, “Who’s the real villain when executives stray into political terrain?” Or as the author writes “disagreements are raging about how far executives should stray into politicians’ terrain.” Executives have never “strayed” into politics, they've been fully immersed and engaged from day one.
The book is titled, The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us How to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market and concerns American corporations’ successful fight to dismantle much of the New Deal over the last three-quarters of a century. It's a story already repeatedly told. If you're unfortunate to be old enough to have lived through most of it you don't really need a refresher. So, maybe it's helpful for the youths in understanding in part, just in part, how we got here.
But there's a number of problems, first with the fundamental assertion that this is something new. In 1944, Karl Polanyi's wonderful history, The Great Transformation, destroyed the case the post-war free-marketeers made before they even made it. Polanyi incontrovertibly documented the transformation of agrarian society to industrial society was accomplished with government as an active partner of business. It would never have been done otherwise, no matter what America's post-war corporations, Ronald Reagan, or Milton Friedman propagated in their campaign to destroy the New Deal.
In fact, the New Deal itself was as much as anything else a deal between Washington DC and America's largest corporations – the banks, oil and steel companies, auto manufacturers, et al.. This isn't said in anyway to accuse the New Deal of being some diabolical nefarious act, just the opposite. The New Deal was essential seat of the pants innovation in reaction to the collapse of a relatively new national and international industrial economy, the corporations fully engaged from the beginning.
I read somewhere recently John Maynard Keynes told FDR to treat big corporations as “feral animals.” Pretty good advise. In the end, they couldn't be re-domesticated. The New Deal attempted two main restraints on corporate power; one was organized labor, the other through DC regulation. First, the corporations, with more than a little help from labor, crushed labor, then they fully took over DC.
Which gets to the main problem of this review and America's broken politics, the thing most peculiar, somewhat astounding, and in the end just pretty depressing is the endless talk, writings, and actions taken as if the corporations aren't completely in control of American politics and government. Recently, the exception proving the rule was provided by the most honest observation in years on American politics from the Wall Street Journal about the McCarthy speakership tussle, “Why Can't Big-Money Donors Reel in GOP Rebels?”
The book continues the false and useless dichotomy promoted pseudo-factiously by America's political class as the nation’s main political divide. The results summed up,
“Four decades after Reagan said that their government was the problem, not the solution, more than half of Americans think it is too powerful, Gallup surveys say. A Pew report last year found that just one in five Americans trust Washington to do the right thing, suggesting that those who set out to erode trust in government have succeeded.”
As pollster Caddell would quip, “What's wrong with the other 20%?” Those in government have had just as great a role eroding trust as any wicked thing the corporations have done.
The greatest fault of the review, book, and our politics is in the statements,
“If critics of government have been so convincing, then government’s defenders might spend more time considering what reforms would make it less vulnerable to such critiques. Washington, as Clark said, does need to work.”
Washington does work, it works for the leviathan corporations that own it. There's no government reform without political reform. Political reform starts by rethinking democracy for the 21st century, not by accepting its 18th century architectures, including a restructuring of government, which by definition requires reforming the corporation.
At the end, the review ironically gets to the valueless nut,
“It offers a valuable perspective on our current disputes about both the democratic and the capitalist sides of democratic capitalism.”
At this point those who speak most loudly about democracy neither understand what it is, nor would they care much for it if they did. While capitalism can only be defined as rule by colossal global corporations. It is beyond delusional to think this delimits a political spectrum that can provide answers to the challenges facing humanity in the 21st century.