Controlling Workers in the Platform Economy

No, the two present parties have been stably in existence, unpopped like ball bearings, since 1860. There are cycles of dominance, at the somewhat misleading federal level, but the metaphor you've chosen misrepresents rotation in office as existential failure.

We’re due.

I don't understand this yet. The United States became an aristocracy, characterized by extremely concentrated ownership of the society's wealth and income, from the end of the Vietnam War. Because wealth is concentrated enough to control politics, the parties naturally adopt the policies favoring fractions of that dominant class (regional and cultural). The parties then arrange to get their votes by the usual means, which have little to do with rational debates about policy. What is unstable about the political arrangement, which is not only familiar but conventional? Are you saying that the social arrangement of wealth and power concentration is not sustainable? It can't be static, but that's hardly the same thing.

Is this rhetoric only? What is the analysis actually contained in this paragraph? I should think, if we are going back to the process of identifying parties with policies, that the policy offerings of the Democratic Party go far past what you've stated. Commitment to expansion of national health insurance, significant energy behind the idea of public guarantee of some higher education through community college at public expense, activist climate policy, efforts to increase unionization of the private economy and reverse de-unionization of the public sector, are surely all identifiable as parts of the party's policy basket. But why are we treating parties as primarily made of ideas for the thinking man?

Nor is it clear what epithets directed at potential candidates mean. Arnold would be asking how adroitly individuals might arrange to be the right sort of screen against which disparate groups of voters could project their hopes. What is the theory of a candidate's role that backs your expression of judgment?

I should think everyone bets that way, because no one wants to bet on the fatal unravelling of the social order. But while the language is lively, what is the actual idea of betting on how a moment you are living in will be remembered by some other people?

The old, bad, hard Right has emerged temporarily from the basement, but it’s more aggrieved, skulking gamer than aggressive, striding brownshirt. Demographics are not on their side, and, most importantly, racism is bad for business. It’s true that the Weimar crack-up opened the door for the fringe Right, but when one or both of our political parties implode, I just don’t see anything comparable happening; the nation isn’t humiliated enough. Things are still going too well for too many people.

My sense is that a more likely bad outcome is the consolidation and ascendancy of a technocratic-libertarian Soft Right — the McKinsey? Right — that promises lower taxes, data-driven solutions to social problems, more ‘personal freedom’ (social and economic) and a seductively agnostic, corporatist and ostensibly racially-inclusive solution to our polarized, stagnant present.

What is the sense that is sensing this likelihood?

But one would have to know how to do this. The problem with the analysis is that, like some contemporary political activity you don't identify with, it's all just fantasy about some TV show describing a reality that isn't actually real. Nobody knows how to enact a universal basic income in the United States, and you show as little interest in the realities of the earned income tax credit as the current president himself. We can say, for sure, that a "retail offer" to solve the opiate addiction problem, so that young people stop dropping dead in the front yards of decent, hard-pressed working-class voters, will have an immediate effect on the distribution of votes in the next Electoral College. But someone has to do what to do and how to make it happen.

The most important route to improvement here, from the mechanical point of view, is learning to kill your darlings. Your effort to harness rhetorical energy needs am additional injection of restraint. As the critic Wilfred Sheed once wrote, in a phrase that helped me over the years, "If you try to slay your audience with every sentence, you run the risk that you may succeed."

Substantively, as I've noted above, the most important route to improvement is to give the problem of governing a little attention in the discussion of politics. When everyone is a super-punchy talking head on video, it becomes difficult to explain how the garbage is actually collected and how roads are built. (Either by hordes of immigrants flooding over the borders to reduce wages and destroy civilization or not at all, one is left to suppose.) But when you ask how people getting involved with politics actually do engage, you get a better lawyer's theory of social action out of it.

The Shape of the Coming Realignment

-- By ZaneMuller - 22 Feb 2018

This idea is mostly built on Arnold’s Folklore of Capitalism and the Thomas Edsall piece posted to main page.

Political parties in the United States pop like soap bubbles every forty or so years. We’re due. The Republican Party’s flagrant screwing of its rank-and-file voters has been obvious since at least the 1980s, and is mirrored by the extent to which the Democratic party has forsaken its wards and ceased to seriously represent the interests of anyone without rich parents or at least an elite degree. Piketty calls this the “multiple elite party system”, or more colorfully, the Merchant Right vs. the Brahmin Left. I think he’s basically right in describing the state of affairs and diagnosing it as unsustainable.

The Republican soap bubble is showing more obvious strain, and I think the Democrats, despite their best efforts, might manage to make some lemonade for a cycle or two after Trump pulls down the pillars. But absent the singular appeal of Barack Obama (with whom the organization became dangerously overidentified), the only creed really holding the Democratic party together these days is a shared disinclination to overt sexism and white supremacy. There’s no reason to think that the Island of Misfit Toys that is the presumptive 2020 Democratic field won’t allow the Republicans to prolong our national nightmare for another term.

I’m not unafraid of what’s emerged from Pandora’s box lately. Even Arnold, after all, wasn’t exactly sounding alarm bells in 1937; societies sleepwalk to disaster. The risks of a Franz-Ferdinand-assassination-type event are real, but, I think, small.

I would bet our current political moment will be remembered more as a freakish death spasm of white nationalist patriarchy than the beginning of some broader, fatal unravelling of the global social order. The old, bad, hard Right has emerged temporarily from the basement, but it’s more aggrieved, skulking gamer than aggressive, striding brownshirt. Demographics are not on their side, and, most importantly, racism is bad for business. It’s true that the Weimar crack-up opened the door for the fringe Right, but when one or both of our political parties implode, I just don’t see anything comparable happening; the nation isn’t quite humiliated enough. Things are still going too well for too many people.

My sense is that a more likely bad outcome is the consolidation and ascendancy of a technocratic-libertarian Soft Right — the McKinsey? Right — that promises lower taxes, data-driven solutions to social problems, more ‘personal freedom’ (social and economic) and a seductively agnostic, corporatist and ostensibly racially-inclusive solution to our polarized, stagnant present. I picture a consolidation of the elites in which the Brahmins dictate aesthetics and the Merchants keep their property. Such a program could unite urban, educated top earners with a broad slice of the political middle who find it socially untenable not to act woke but nonetheless resent the activist Left, which refuses to give them enough credit for liking Oprah and shopping at Whole Foods — that majority of white Americans that hasn’t changed much since Dr. King described them in 1968.

I imagine something like the political-institutional embodiment of this Exxon ad. Its creed is not unappealing: optimistic, brochure-diverse, solutions-oriented, smart, connected, and inclusive of immigrants (with advanced degrees). Such a party would have ample room for the enduring culture heroes of American mythology, but would of course find its purest archetypes in the ascendant Zuckerbergian elite. The tech billionaire, in his wisdom and generosity, ensures that every kid in every classroom gets a Chromebook. Charging Bull in partnership with Fearless Girl.

The corporate elite has long since ceded the identitarian ground in the culture wars. People of all colors, creeds and sexual orientations buy stuff anyway. It’s not so hard to imagine the holdouts on the Merchant Right fully conceding the culture to the Brahmin Left in exchange for our continued help patching up the cracks in the capitalist edifice. The material circumstances of a post-industrial economy and the threat of destabilizing populism dictate a realignment of the people to whom the benefits of hot capital have accrued in opposition to those who have been burned. The elites will make common cause because we have little choice, because we are geographically concentrated, because we fear the populists and realize that something must be done about them. It will feel acceptable because we on the Left, with our more refined humanitarian sensibilities, will get to dictate the social norms; correct pronouns, etc. The material realities we will leave to the Merchants.

The policies, after all, matter less than the heroes. Take, for example, basic income, a moral-panic-inducing idea which would surely poison the work ethic of the Bootstrapping American Laborer, but could also surely gain traction with rational, thinking people if it could be shown to comport with capitalist dogma. Mix basic income with virtual reality as opiates for mass disemployment, add in (goes without saying) generous salaries for the more sophisticated servants (engineers, lawyers, etc), make sure all shapes and colors of people are represented in the promotional materials, and you have a new system that meets the new material needs. Such an exchange wouldn’t even represent a concession from the Merchants; the profits from automating most of the economy would clearly afford insurance against the type of real-deal social cataclysm that might interrupt the steady concentration of capital. Brahmins could call it Progress; Merchants, the cost of doing business.

I imagine a party capable of declaring us innocent of racism, climate change, gross inequality and poverty, you name it. Personal freedom polls better than social justice in these United States, and privileged people are apt to confuse the two anyway. This future scares me because a lot of good people I know and respect would go along with it — because I think we of the Brahmin left are easy to co-opt.

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