How Labor Can Destroy the Democratic Party

"Shared sacrifice" -- You sacrifice, and they sell shares in it.

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Also, "... when your key constituency walks..."

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Thanks for this, BDB. One of those "Don't listen to NPR, listen to this" moments....

Ian Welsh: [13:13] ...The point is is that what makes them rich isn't what makes you rich. Right? So they're doing fine, they've spent thirty years, well forty years, well thirty to forty years depending on how you want to count it with their income going through the roof, their net worth going through the roof while Americans stagnated, they got shorter, they got sicker, they got poorer. So they don't see how an ordinary American does has any connection to how well they do except, maybe, a reverse connection. The worse you're doing the better off they are, all right? I mean that's been their experience, right?

They are richer than the rich Americans during the Gilded Age, right? This is the wealthiest generation of rich people in America's history [relative to the rest of the population] and maybe in the world's history, although that depends on how you want to count it. So they don't care what happens to you. Their profits have recovered, at least the financial side, the non-financial side is having some problems right now. They're fine, they're doing fine so why should they care what's happening to you?

You start by hauling out some well researched numbers. You explain that the fabric of America is being torn asunder and, because fear sells, you raise the specter of societal collapse based on the historical record if we continue down this road. Back in 2007 Jonathan Chait finished up an interesting history of Reaganomics with this discussion:

In February 2006, the conservative journal Policy Review published an essay that was shockingly heretical, though perhaps unintentionally so. In it, Carles Boix of the University of Chicago argued that there is a link between democracy and economic equality...

Boix's essay (which was brilliant and widely discussed) concerned the inculcation of democracy abroad and did not deal directly with the United States.... Of the many taboos that prevail among conservatives, the one forbidding any serious discussion of inequality is perhaps the strictest. Any forthright examination of this topic will lead one quickly to the realization that American society has been spreading apart rapidly for three decades and that Republican economic policies have without a doubt contributed mightily to this gulf....

[T]he circumstances Boix envisioned--mainly, developing countries attempting a transition to democracy--are different from those in an advanced democracy. Americans, fortunately, do not have to worry about kleptocrats, political violence, and massive vote fraud....

But, while Boix's theory may be less applicable to the United States than it is to the Third World, it is still somewhat true. Indeed, this theory offers an uncannily precise description of what has happened in American politics over the last 30 years. The business lobbyists have turned the Republican Party into a kind of machine dedicated unwaveringly to protecting and expanding the wealth of the very rich....

In the same essay, Boix marvels at the fortunes amassed by autocratic ruling elites throughout history:

Rulers such as the Bourbons, the Tudors, or the Sauds seize an important part of their subjects' assets. For example, at the death of Augustus (14 a.d.), the top 1/10,000 of the Roman Empire's households received 1 percent of all income. In Mughal India around 1600 a.d., the top 1/10,000th received 5 percent of all income.

Presumably, readers looking at these numbers are supposed to gape in astonishment at the sheer inequity of those autocratic regimes. But the numbers are less astonishing when you compare them to those in the contemporary United States, which Boix does not. As of 2004, the top one-ten-thousandth of Americans earned over 3 percent of the national income--a somewhat smaller share than that earned by the Mughal elite but several times higher than that enjoyed by the wealthiest Romans.

Meanwhile, the gap between Americans and Mughals is closing rapidly. Since the late '70s, the share of national income going to the top 1 percent has doubled. The share of the top 0.1 percent has tripled, and the share of the top 0.01 percent has quadrupled. This gulf was widened precisely at the same time that the right, growing ever more plutocratic and suspicious of popular demands, was battering away at the culture of American democracy....

I won't bother to ask where all those tenured progressives in the academy have been on this but can't any of the rest of us play this game on our own?

[T]he circumstances Boix envisioned--mainly, developing countries attempting a transition to democracy--are different from those in an advanced democracy. Americans, fortunately, do not have to worry about kleptocrats [check], political violence [do assassinations, both physical and character count?], and massive vote fraud [black box voting machines, Supreme Five judicial coup?]....

Surely, Chait jests....