My
classes at UMKC are over. It was a challenging semester. A week before Spring
Break classes went online. Given that the class I took, Political Ideologies,
was a class that relied a great deal on discussion, both the professor and the
students had to make considerable adjustments. But we soldiered through. What
choice did we have?
That
said, I’ve come across three books that I will be discussing. I’ve read two,
and I’m anxiously awaiting the third, which is due out in June. That book is on
Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), and given that the country has embarked on a
course that will require reliance on MMT, I would really like to understand it.
I hope I’m up to the challenge.
The
first book I’m going to discuss is Why You Should Be a Socialist by Nathan
J. Robinson, which was published in late 2019. I read a review of this book
somewhere and was able to get it from the library before the stay-at-home order
went into effect.
Robinson
is editor-in-chief of Current Affairs, a magazine he started in 2015 and
with which I am not familiar. He was born in 1988 and has a Ph.D. from Harvard,
an M.A. from Brandeis, and a J.D. from Yale.
He
writes exceptionally well and knows when to mix pathos with self-deprecating
humor at least in the early part of the book. He describes the growing
inequality in this country, in one example contrasting a home featured in The
Wall Street Journal’s “Mansion” section in its Friday editions as having
four kitchens, one of which has a loading dock for catering trucks, two
garages—a two-car one for the owner and a 30-car guest garage, and, well, you
get the idea, with GoFundMe appeals for help paying medical expenses and an
injured woman who begged responders not to call an ambulance because she
couldn’t afford one. These observations, not reading Marx, he says, are what
led him to socialism.
He
attacks the arguments in favor of the status quo, pointing out people are not
rewarded according to their productivity, the rich do not “deserve” their
riches because they were given to them through voluntary transactions, those
who do not succeed do not do so because they “didn’t try hard enough,” and that
those who succeed do not prove that anyone can any more than, as Henry George
pointed out, every competitor can win a race.
He
attacks neoliberalism, pointing out it is neither new nor liberal. He says it
is the privatization of everything including education and fire departments
(pointing out during the 2017 California wildfires, some people had paid for
special policies so their homes could be coated in fire retardant, and only
those houses were). It is also the commodification of everything—for example,
the University of Akron eliminated most of its history department in favor of…
e-sports, since they were more in demand, prisoners are placed in rehab
“programs” which are little more than slave labor, children are placed in
for-profit juvenile detention centers for offenses that might be as trivial as
creating satirical MySpace pages, etc. He then takes on corporations, which he
describes as “an army of psychopathic androids.”
By
the time he gets to socialism, he points out there is a difference between a
socialist ethic and a socialist economy. The former is an anger at the
systematic destructiveness and injustice of capitalism, while the latter is a
rearrangement of the way goods are produced and distributed. He writes that the
New Deal “was a series of improvisations in response to specific problems that
were stalling economic development… there was no master plan, many ideas
failed, and some were ended after a period of experimentation.” Some, as we
know, still exist and are taken for granted. He recommends that we take a
similar approach today and solve problems without worrying too much about
whether those solutions fit the definition of socialist, saying it doesn’t
matter if it’s socialism. It matters that it helps create something closer to
an equitable society.
He
reminds us that socialist experiments have been successful in this country,
including a series of mayors in Milwaukee, where socialism was so popular that
even that crusading demagogue and Wisconsin Senator, Joe McCarthy, didn’t dare
criticize the mayors.
Robinson
points out how absurd some conservative arguments are, including if people do
not work for their money they will become lazy and dependent, to which he gives
the example of Dan Bilzerian, who inherited money and spends his life posting
Instagram photos of his driving expensive cars, dating porn stars, etc. He
devotes a chapter titled “Mean, False, and Hopeless” to refuting such arguments
while pointing out that the conservative movement began following the 1971
advice of future Supreme Court justice Lewis Powell, who wrote that the right
should install conservative professors in classrooms, turn out a stream of
books, press vigorously for support of the free enterprise system and penalize
politically all who oppose it. Accordingly, a network of think tanks, legal
organizations, and lobbying groups (and even educational institutions) now
exist to support the conservative view.
Robinson
saves most of his vitriol for liberals in a chapter titled “Polishing Turds.”
He is extremely hard on Obama, who brought many Republicans and former Goldman
Sachs employees into his administration naively thinking bipartisanship was
possible. He tells of Obama deputy chief of staff Jim Messina who was shocked
when a Republican staffer told him after the 2008 election, “We’re not going to
compromise with you on anything. We’re going to fight Obama on everything.”
When Messina pointed out that’s not what Democrats did for Bush, the staffer
replied. “We don’t care.” He’s also tough on Bill Clinton.
As
many of you know, I’ve long considered Bill Clinton a closet Republican, and
while I admire Barak Obama, as a review of Reed Hundt’s A Crisis Wasted
in the April 20/27 The Nation says, he let his Republican appointees steamroll
him into a bailout of the financial industry that left homeowners without any
relief. Ten million families were forced out of their homes. I strongly believe
the resentment caused by this socialism for the rich and cutthroat capitalism
for everyone else is a major reason we now have an orange buffoon in the White
House.
Memo
to Joe Biden: If you win the election, remember one thing—you can’t be
bipartisan unilaterally. Learn from Moscow Mitch and remember Merrick Garland.
Both
Robinson and Max Skidmore, whose book I’ll discuss next, advocate a greater
role for the Post Office including providing banking services, which would give
underserved Americans access to checking accounts without the high fees
associated with low balances. This is not a new idea. The Post Office offered
banking services between 1911 and 1967.
Several
stimulus proposals have included funds to shore up the USPS, but Trump said he
won’t sign off on any relief for the USPS unless is raises its prices for
package shipment. He says prices should be “four or five times” more than they
are. I found it strange that the president would want to raise prices for
package shipment, but the rationale became a bit clearer when I read an opinion
piece by Gary MacDougal in the May 6 edition of The Wall Street Journal.
Mr. MacDougal advocates phasing out, not bailing out the Postal Service. Mr.
MacDougal is a director of UPS. No conflict of interest there. Nope. None at
all. Move along folks. Nothing to see here.
So
why does Trump want to make it more expensive for us to ship Christmas packages
to Grandma? He wants to get back at Jeff Bezos, who is a verifiable billionaire
(as opposed to Trump whose claims to billionaire status have never been
substantiated) and who owns The Washington Post, which is one of Trump’s
many critics. What Trump evidently fails to comprehend is if Amazon’s costs go
up, Amazon will pass these costs along. Or, to paraphrase the late unlamented
Al Capp, what’s bad for General Amazon is bad for the USA.
Robinson
has chapters on how to respond to criticisms of socialism and how to get things
done. He warns that every time “a socialist opens her mouth, the first thing
you’ll hear in reply is ‘Venezuela.’” He points out that Venezuela is a
right-wing bourgeois kleptocracy posing as a socialist government. We don’t
have to go too far in history to see similar misnomers. Nazis claimed to be
national socialists and could not have been more right-wing. The Union of
Soviet Socialist Republics was a totalitarian autocracy. The German Democratic
Republic was neither. He describes himself as a libertarian socialist, which is
never fully defined, but as I mentioned above, he suggests we not be too
concerned about ideologies when implementing solutions.
Fortunately,
that seems to be the approach both parties are taking during this crisis—so
far.
The
book has many interesting ideas including a guaranteed income or a universal
basic income and Medicare for All. Given the current crisis, when many jobs are
not coming back (and, frankly many companies are not letting the crisis go to
waste and are using it as an opportunity to eliminate higher paid and older
staff, leaving these former employees high and dry and without health
insurance), how obvious does the need for universal health care and some sort
of income guarantee have to be before Congress does something about it? Just
last week Harvesters handed out 8,000 boxes of food at Kaufman Stadium. This
crisis is too big to hide.
The
libraries should be open again soon. I’d suggest you check the book out and
read it with an open mind.
