My advisor died of a heart attack last tuesday. Below is a speech he gave at an anti-bush teach in at Rutgers I helped orgainize in 2003. It is one of my favorite talks I ever heard him give, and is a real excellent look about what makes Bush and co. different from other conservatives, as well as an excellent moral critique of the administration from probably the most brilliant person I've ever met. This was all done extemporaneously, so there are some run on sentences, etc.


The Bush Oligarchy
-Prof. Carey McWilliams 4/15/03

I want to begin by doing something unusual, I want to be fair to President Bush. I want to begin by saying that some of the really terrible things that are happening in this country predate the Bush presidency. The rise of politics based on media and money and the Supreme Court’s happy discovery that contributions of money are speech so that money in fact talks, and consequently our political life is more and more dominated not only by money but by those who can give it, or for that matter the increase in what was already a towering economic inequality, the greatest inequality in the industrial world, that it began to grow exponentially before the Bush administration. Just to give you one statistic: the gain of income in the United States from 1983 to 1998, 47% of all the income gained in the United States went to the top 1% of Americans, and 42 went to the next 19%. And if you are, as most of you are, in the lower 80% you got something like 11% of the income gained in the United States. Inequality is not only great but is getting greater all the time. James Heckman of the University of Chicago refers to this as a market failure of titanic proportions. Heckman says that it’s probably true that the accident of birth has never in American history determined your life outcome more than it does today. And what makes this more startling is that Heckman is not a man of the left, he’s a libertarian. So that is the second surprise of the evening, this is the last time you’ll ever hear me quote a libertarian. But this is simply to say the obvious, that inequality in the United States has reached extraordinary proportions and that in some ways mobility and opportunity that’s trumpeted as a characteristic of our regime has probably never been lower in our history than it is today.

To say that the United States is developing an oligarchic regime, and that’s what I want to argue, requires some delineations. Because oligarchy doesn’t simply mean that our government is dominated by rich men. Any society like ours which allows for large measures of inequalities, the odds are that our rulers are going to be disproportionably drawn from the privileged classes, as would be the case in any society at any time, so we really can’t make much of a case based on that. And it isn’t even evidence of oligarchy that we make a lot of rules that are broadly in the interest of the rich. Aside from the fact that you are going to do that because the rich have got lots of power and lots of money, you could make an argument, and people do make arguments, that having certain polices or certain kinds of legislations that favor or support the well to do is in some utilitarian sense good for the country. You could calculate that helping the rich would help the rest of us and you would still have a standard of value which wouldn’t be a standard of value based simply on the claims of the well to do having a kind of ascendancy.

Oligarchy, on the other hand, is a moral theory. And that’s what we’re dealing with. That’s what’s new. Oligarchy involves a belief that the interests of the rich are not simply possibly useful to us, but that the interest of the rich are entitled to special consideration, that the rich make the greatest contribution to the good of society and are entitled to receive the most from it. This is after all an argument that at least some of you will recognize traces back to Aristotle. Aristotle taught us that you could easily have a society that is based on majority rule, which is a democratic form, but the form does not describe the regime. You could have a society which operates by majority rule which is at the same time an oligarchy, Aristotle argued, if the many, the majority, are somehow persuaded that wealth is the greatest contribution to the welfare of the regime, the greatest gift to the common good. Because if they are it will be perceived that the rich are benefactors who deserve to be rewarded so that policy in their interest is simple justice.

Now that is what we’ve got today. We have a government that is acting not on the basis of some kind of calculation of interest or even a calculation of power. It’s acting on what to this administration is a moral theory. It is what gives the administration both unusual force, the kind of ridgity and purposiveness that people affect to admire in the president. One can also say that he doesn’t have the imagination to think anything else. It gives this administration extraordinary force and focus because it doesn’t have an internal moral conflict If you look back at recent great conservative administrations, Nixon at least knew there were other moral standards. And one of the great advantages of Nixon was that he always showed his conscience. He always looked guilty. Ronald Regan was a better actor. He didn’t look guilty but he also knew that there were other standards. He did after all grow up a democrat, so he knew better. This is not an administration that knows better. It is not conflicted. It acts with a kind of assurance that comes with the conviction that it is doing what is right. And if you understand that about the administration a lot of what it does will make sense to you.

The first we can learn about this administration is not to believe the reasons that it gives you for things, because President Bush’s reasons are a form of periodical literature. If you look back at the Bush tax cuts you’ll find an extraordinary array of reasons. A surplus is a bad idea, remember when Alan Greenspan told us that, because it gives the government too much money and it gets confused, so we ought to spend the money so we don’t have a surplus. Oh, we don’t have a surplus, oh that’s all right because the deficit will be small and easily overcome by the stimulus that the tax cuts will give to the economy. Oh, it’s going to be a big deficit and it’s going to last a long time. That’s all right, because deficits are a good thing. And so forth. Recently when the Senate of the United States decided that maybe eliminating the taxation on dividends was not a great idea, particularly in war time, President Bush suggested that this was a crucial part of the stimulus package, and that he needed it, and that he might be willing to settle for a delay in implementing the ending of the taxation of dividends. If we put it off maybe five or six years maybe he could settle for that. Now if you think about this for a minute you we realize that if we put off not taxing dividends for five or six years it can’t possibly be a stimulus in the short term because no one would be getting any money.

What this tells you is that eliminating taxation on dividends isn’t being argued as an economic stimulus. It’s being argued for something else, in the same way that the tax cuts are being argued for something else. The arguments all the way through on tax policy have been filled with double talk and gobbledygook. Double taxation is a bad thing in the case of dividends. But if you have to hire a gardener or a nurse to take care of your aging parent the income that you spend to hire these people is taxable to you and is taxable to them. Nobody is talking of relieving of you that burden. If you go the store and buy goods in New Jersey and they are taxable under New Jersey sales taxes you’ve paid income tax on the money and you’ve paid sales tax at the counter and no one is talking about ending that. Double taxation of dividends on the other hand, is a bad thing. Or, my favorite, we have to eliminate the estate tax because it’s a death tax. Now actually, a moment’s reflection will tell you that it is not a death tax, because the dead don’t pay it, because they’re dead. The estate tax is a tax on unearned income that comes to inheritors to have not done a thing to earn it other than currying favor with or being born into a family who have it. And one would that an administration which is so zealous to make sure that poor people work for every damn nickel might be concerned that people who inherit money do a little bit of work for it. But of course that’s a very different matter too, isn’t it.

This is an administration which loves patriotism, and loves to fight terrorism, but not so much that it will force banks to make publicly available income transfers overseas. Senator Phil Graham said that the day that that happened in the United States, the day the banks were forced to release their transfers overseas, would be a day that the United States has fallen to the level of Nazi Germany, which suggests that Phil Graham’s grasp of history is as shaky as his grasp of economics. Notice that there is no problem with corporations reincorporating overseas in places overseas like the Bahamas for the sole purpose of dodging taxes. The administration has resisted every measure to punish corporations for doing that. Patriotism doesn’t extend to the question of lowering corporate taxes. Now if we put this to the administration the answer that you would get, if they spoke to you honestly, and some of them probably haven’t forgotten how to, is that in their judgment by following polices that benefit upper income across the board, or large corporations across the board, they are following what is a simple rule of justice. The greatest contribution to the common good is to contribute wealth. The wealthy make that contribution. They are entitled not only to what they have, but they are entitled to our respect and reward. Government ought to give it to them. President Bush was stark about this in one of his statements about taxes when it was pointed out to him that despite some extraordinary fuzzy math that he invoked that money was in fact going to go to upper income people, and he said ‘well, the rich deserve to get the most back because they are paying the most in the first place. If you think about that argument, you’ll realize that it is a starkly oligarchic argument. If you pay in more, if you make more, you deserve to get more back. You deserve more from us. Wealth is the greatest contribution to the general good. What’s interesting, and maybe even alarming about this is that the kind of language that the administration is talking is increasingly being accepted. Lots of people buy into it.

Take for example the fact that we are dealing with an administration that practices patriotism light. It has no real sense of the claims of community. Think of the argument that President Bush made in the course of the 2000 campaign and he has made many times since. The argument in favor in cutting taxation is that it is, after all, the people’s money, and the people ought to get it back. But the people in this argument is the people seen as individuals. The people, apostrophe S. Not the people as a collectivity. Because the other way of thinking about it is that it is the people money, it is our money, and we want to damn well keep it for our purposes, to do the things that we want. But this administration is not an administration that has a real sense of the United States, or of the republic, or of the people, as collectivities. One of my favorite old line Social Darwinists, the great William Graham Sumner, says in the course of his extraordinary tract “What Social Classes Owe To Each Other” (the answer to this is nothing, by the way), but in the course of his tract Sumner says ‘Of course, of course the state, the government, may extract from the estates of the wealthy a reasonable proportion that reflects the contribution that the state has made in the accumulation of property by providing order and decent culture. Of course, Sumner says. What is self-evident to maybe the most militant Social Darwinist of the 19th century isn’t self-evident at all to this administration. Because to this administration Sumner is a rather nutty liberal, but he’s a liberal. This administration is an administration composed of oligarchs that thinks very differently than Sumner. Sumner said among other things the greatest test of the United States is whether or not it can curb plutocracy, because if it can’t curb plutocracy, if there really get to be classes, than you can’t really make claim to the notion that there is equality before the law. Well guess what William, we almost lost that battle but we have an administration who fundamentally doesn’t care. It doesn’t see the same issues in anything like the same way. This is simply to say that we have an administration that is following oligarch polices and is having extraordinary success in selling them to the rest of us.

After 9-11, with that extraordinary upsurge of patriotic sentiment, the administration called upon us for no, no significant sacrifice except to sacrifice some of our liberties. What the administration told us to do, you will recall, in President Bush’s Churchillian eloquence was to get on with our lives, hug our kids, and go to the mall, to act like consumers, to make in our small way a contribution to the wealth of the country so that we would have some claim on it. But what Americans learned after all, from 9-11 is a very different lesson. We learned that what we felt that day and those we admired were not those who lost the most money. We didn’t think that Cantor Fitzgerald had made the greatest sacrifice to the public good. The greatest sacrifice on 9-11 was those who gave their lives, policemen. And the second thing we learned from 9-11 is that we are all in this together. A tragedy like 9-11 reminds us that community is a moral fact. It’s a fact of life. We live in an interdependent society and what affects one of us affects all of us, amidst our calamity and in instantiations of joy.

The administration doesn’t get it. Democracy, Aristotle told us, turns not just on the rule of the majority. It turns on the belief that the greatest contribution to the common good is a life freely given to it, which doesn’t require equality in the absolute sense because we all have a life to give. It does, however, require a sense that we have an honorable station, a place and a chance to make a contribution to the life of the community and that’s what can be a regulating principle of democracy life, but you have to make it that kind of principle. Again, that’s why this kind of meeting matters.

I know a lot of you are disillusioned with democratic politics and there are lots of reasons to be disillusioned. That’s all the more reason for you to be out talking, and thinking, and persuading, and organizing. Yes its true democratic politicians will tend to go which way the wind blows. But that’s in large measure because that’s what they are supposed to do and that’s why we elect them. You guys ought to be in the business of changing the direction the wind blows.

Great post. RIP.

AWESOME!