American Oligarchy: The Permanent Political Class

259 Pages·2017·2.31 MB·English

by  Ronald P. Formisano

AMERICAN OLIGARCHY
THE PERMANENT POLITICAL CLASS
RON FORMISANO
© 2017 by the Board of Trustees
of the University of Illinois
All rights reserved
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017946586
ISBN 978-0-252-04127-3 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-0-252-08282-5 (paperback)
ISBN 978-0-252-09987-8 (e-book)
Cover illustration: Charging Bull by Arturo Di Modica.
Photo: iStock.com / AndreyKrav.
Proportion…would impose on each man burdens corresponding to the power and well-being he
enjoys, and corresponding risks in cases of incapacity or neglect. For instance, an employer who is
incapable or guilty of an offense against his workman ought to be made to suffer more, both in the
spirit and in the flesh, than a workman who is incapable or guilty of an offense against his
employer…. [I]n criminal law, a conception of punishment in which social rank, as an aggravating
circumstance, would necessarily play an important part in deciding what the penalty should be. All
the more reason, therefore, why the exercise of important public functions should carry with it
serious personal risks.
—Simone Weil, “Equality”
Contents
Preface
Introduction Beyond Plutocracy: Becoming an Aristocracy
Chapter 1 Meet the Political Class
Chapter 2 Our One Percent Government, Congress, and Its Adjuncts: The
Way to Wealth
Chapter 3 Is the Political Class Corrupt?
Chapter 4 The Permanent Campaign and the Permanent Political Class
Chapter 5 Political Class Adaptation and Expansion
Chapter 6 The Political Class in a Poor State
Chapter 7 The Profitable World of Nonprofits
Conclusion
Afterword
Notes
Index
Preface
In 1994 during a five-month Fulbright lectureship at the University of Bologna
at a momentous time in Italian politics, when populist political parties arose to
challenge a sclerotic political order that had been in place since World War II, I
became familiar with the Italians’ la classe politica—the political class.
Entrenched politicians were under siege, from all sides, left, right, and center.
Ordinary Italians as well as journalists and intellectuals had long harbored a
culturally ingrained cynicism and disdain for traditional elites. But newly formed
populist parties and movements were attracting widespread support and
attacking with unprecedented energy established political and economic elites as
out of touch and self-serving.1 Although the upheaval eliminated the Christian
Democratic Party that had dominated politics since 1944, the political class
eventually did what it always does: survive.
A political class can serve as a convenient scapegoat for popular discontent.
But in reality it also possesses very concrete characteristics. In Italy, and
increasingly in the United States, many of its members are political professionals
for life, essere sistematica, “literally to be ‘fixed up’ for the long pull.”
Accordingly, the political class tends to be permanent, it continually expands,
and it “is relatively immune from outside checks of the kind that elections can
provide.”2
In Italy in 2007 a best-selling book by two journalists, Sergio Rizzo and Gian
Antonio Stella, described that immunity: La casta: Così I politici italiani sono
diventati intoccabili (The Caste: How Italian Politicians Became Untouchable).
Since then Italians have tended to replace la classe politica simply with la casta,
or la classe dirigente, the ruling class.
I began to think seriously about political class in the United States after
encountering it later in Joan Didion's scathing essays deconstructing the fictions
of American elections and politics, and particularly those created by “that
handful of insiders who invent, year in and year out, the narrative of public life.”
Agreeing to cover the 1988 presidential campaign for the New York Review of
Books, she discovered that it was clear by then “that those inside the process had
congealed into a permanent political class, the defining characteristic of which
was its readiness to abandon those not inside the process.”
Didion provided a marvelous example of the insider perspective in the
commentary of journalist Cokie Roberts following the one-time-only decision by
the Supreme Court's five-man Republican majority to hand the 2000 election, on
day thirty-five of stalemate, to Republican George W. Bush. In a decision
concocted of legalese “limited to the present circumstances,” the court decided
the case not on general principles or precedents but, in Alan Dershowitz's words,
“on a principle that has never been recognized by any court and that will never
again be recognized by this court.”3
Appearing on ABC's This Week, Roberts “made the case of the permanent
political class for order, for continuity, for the perpetuation of the contract that
delivered only to itself: ‘I think people do think it's political but they think that's
okay. They expect the court to be political and—and they wanted this election to
be over.’ In the absence of actual evidence to back up this arrestingly
constructive reading of what ‘people’ expected or wanted, she offered the
rationale then common among those inside the process. ‘At least now, we are
beginning to have that post-election coming together.’”4
In America evidence abounds of continuing discontent and disgust with the
political class, along with a corrosive alienation from government. Indeed, along
with rising economic inequality, distrust of governments spans the globe. In
2016 the U.S. electorate, during the primaries and nominating contests for the
Democratic and Republican presidential nominations, heard candidates from
both parties continuously attack the “political class” or “the establishment.”
Candidates who were themselves long-term members of the Washington elite
condemned it—without blushing—as a dysfunctional entity that large segments
of voters had come to view as self-interested or corrupt.
This book describes a broad range of sectors of the American political class,
including its corporate and financial sectors, as having acquired “untouchability”
and asserts that it has become, increasingly, the ruling class, la classe dirigente.
Rarely are any of its denizens held accountable for self-dealing or transgressions
of the public interest. The “permanent political class” in the United States
functions at times as an abstract scapegoat; this book describes many of the ways
it acts as a plutocratic oligarchy and contributes not only to the creation of
extreme economic inequality, but the creation of an aristocracy of inherited
wealth.
Introduction
Beyond Plutocracy
Becoming an Aristocracy
In recent decades, challengers to the status quo have relied heavily on the terms
political class and permanent political class to refer to entrenched and self-
serving elites. Populist parties and candidates in Europe and North and South
America have mobilized to displace them. The currency of these phrases as
pejoratives reflects the rise of oligarchies perceived as self-interested and out of
touch with ordinary citizens. In the United States the 2016 presidential primaries
and general election campaigns produced floods of “antiestablishment” rhetoric
directed at politics as usual and career politicians and bureaucrats. Outsider and
populist became accolades.
Across the political spectrum, many observers of Washington, D.C., have
recognized the existence of a self-perpetuating and self-aggrandizing political
class. But the phenomenon extends well beyond Washington to embrace
regional and state political and economic elites occupying a broad array of
institutions in and out of government, tied together by ambition, interest, and
mutual benefit. But Washington is the epicenter of the permanent political class:
Washington, where the median income for white families was $170,364 in 2013,
compared to the national median of $58,270; where rapid gentrification has
reduced the percentage of low-income African Americans in the population from
60 to 49.5 percent.
This book is a sequel to a study of inequality in the United States. It argues
that the permanent political class drives economic and political inequality not
only with the policies it has constructed over the past four decades, such as
federal and state tax systems rigged to favor corporations and the wealthy; it also
increases inequality by its self-dealing, acquisitive behavior as it enables,
emulates, and enmeshes itself with the wealthiest One Percent and .01 percent.
The political class bears heavy responsibility for the United States now
experiencing economic inequality more extreme than at any time in its history;
and it is increasing despite incremental measures to reduce it taken by President
Obama (limited by a hostile Republican Congress). Since the 1970s income
inequality in the United States has streaked ahead of most European and Latin
American countries. Here, the top 1 percent takes home 20 percent of U.S.
income, the most since the 1920s; the One Percent's income averages 38 times
more than the bottom 90 percent. But that looks puny, compared to the .01
percent taking in 184 times the income of the bottom 90 percent.1
In wealth distribution the United States is the most unequal of all
economically developed countries; here over 75 percent of wealth is owned by
the richest 10 percent: by comparison, in the United Kingdom this group owns
53.3 percent. Here, the top .01 percent—the super rich, just 16,000 families—
control $6 trillion in assets, as much as the bottom two-thirds of families. The
United States had the largest wealth gap of 55 nations according to the Global
Wealth Report for 2015 by Allianz (a financial services firm), prompting the
report's authors to label the nation the “Unequal States of America.”2
Most studies of inequality ignore the ways political class behavior creates
inequality. The political class's direct creation of economic inequality by
channeling the flow of income and wealth to elites has been well documented;
less exposed has been how its self-aggrandizement creates a culture of
corruption that infects the entire society and that induces many to abuse
positions of power to emulate or rise to the One Percent. Most dangerously, its
behavior threatens to subject the republic to the hegemony of an aristocracy of
inherited wealth.
Directly and indirectly the American permanent political class also contributes
to continuing high levels of poverty and disadvantage for millions that exceed
almost all advanced nations. Most members of the political class, in and out of
government, talk easily and with a veneer of sincerity about the nation's
problems: unemployment, lack of good-paying work, crumbling infrastructure,
hunger in a country of enormous food production, among others. But the talk
does not lead to substantive, radical action to attack and remedy inequality and
deprivation suffered by their fellow citizens; the political class avoids above all
policy change that might cost it something. Political leaders, especially when