George Packer is such an accomplished writer that everyone he talks to becomes an interesting person, at least on the pages of his book, The Unwinding. But only one of them puzzled me. That puzzlement will probably prove to be very constructive, indicating as it does a new window on human possibility that I’ve got to figure out how to open, but at the moment, I just don’t get Peter Thiel. I don’t understand how anyone so manifestly intelligent can be stuck on sweet dreams of the Tolkien fantasies and the, to me, equally childish worldview of libertarianism. Is it possible that his education passed by without a single teacher’s getting through to him about the meaning of the humanities? Or that the sprouts of any seeds of understanding that might have been planted have been rigorously weeded out?

According to Packer, Thiel believes that a constructive era in American life came to its end in 1973, and that sounds right to me. The oil shocks of that year are often cited as watersheds of trauma, but my recollection of a time in which I had little or no interest in the economic health of the United States, it seems to me that it was thereabouts that the last of the fizz of the Sixties finally went flat. It has long been my impression that, somewhere in the early Seventies, feminism went from being a challenge proposed to being a challenge undertaken. That most preposterous of terms, “human resources,” came into use about then, signalling a disingenuousness in American business that cleared the moral ground for the financialization of everything. Rather than share their merit badges with the girls, the boys converted the troupe into a casino. Men got sly. This did not mean that they became more intelligent, however, and that’s why we’ve had such a bumpy ride.

I agree with Thiel that we haven’t any real technological progress since 1973, but I’m not sure that this is the bad thing that he thinks it is. No technological progress since 1973? you gasp, glaring meaningfully at the screen upon which you’re reading this; but I agree with Thiel: the proliferation of circuits and binary strings that has certainly altered the texture of intelligent life in the past thirty-odd years has been a matter of implementation, not one of invention. The introduction of the personal computer (itself the miniaturization of existing machinery) launched a multiple-warhead novelty bomb that continues to cloud our understanding with information of dubious value. It has also facilitated transactions that tend to benefit few at the expense of many — the globalization of manufacturing, the merchandising pressures of a behemoth such as Wal-Mart, the growth of unwittingly risky financial trades requiring bail-outs.

In short, a mess. But Thiel doesn’t want to hang around cleaning up messes. He wants to visit other galaxies and live forever. He wants more new experiences. The novelty bomb is still going off in his head.

***

As I finished The Unwinding over the weekend, one figure stood out as a potential member of what I’m calling the loyal opposition to organized money, and that was Elizabeth Warren.

The bankers could never forgive her. They saw her as “the Devil incarnate, and they threw money all over Congress to keep her out of the consumer agency job. They called her naive, but what they could forget was how well she knew their game.

The Republicans could never forgive her. She didn’t back down or extend the usual courtesies, and so they hectored her, called her a liar to her face, and devoted themselves to killing the consumer agency almost as if they were pointing the knife at the woman who dared.

Some of the Democrats would never forgive her. The White House considered her “a pain in the ass.” Dodd suggested that her ego was the problem. Timothy Geithner, aggravated almost to shouting in an oversight hearing, couldn’t stand her.

And the president didn’t know what to do with a woman like this. They had Harvard Law School in common, and Warren talked about the same things Obama did — the hard-pressed middle class, the need for a fair playing field, the excesses of finance. But she did not talk about things things as one of the elites. She did not say, in the same breath, “It’s not personal, guys — let’s be reasonable and get a deal.” For that reason, some of Obama’s most prominent supporteers were moving away from him, and toward her.

We shall see. Now that she is in the Senate, Warren has an opportunity to show what loyal opposition might look like, by taking stands that preclude her selling out to the party in power, which is organized money. Organized money corrupts elected officials by purchasing their inaction with the promise of lucrative lobbying and consulting jobs upon return to the private sector. Packer illustrates the process in a brilliant single paragraph, which also encompasses the final awakening of one of his feature players, Jeff Connaughton. Connaughton, working for Senator Ted Kaufman to enact a strict Volcker Rule, might have hoped that Banking Committee chairman Chris Dodd would support their efforts once he announced that he would not be running for re-election.

That should have liberated him to go after Wall Street with Kaufman, but Connaughton saw it the other way around. If Dodd had to face the voters again, he would have felt pressured to shepherd through a tough bill. Instead, he was free to prepare for life after the Senate, where the power of money would still hang over his career. You had to think really hard before you took on the establishment, because there were a lot of ways to build a very comfortable way of life if you went with the flow (like become the top lobbyist for the movie industry, which was what Dodd would go on to do), but standing against the establishment closed off a big part of America that otherwise would have made room for you. You were in or you were out.

To be perfectly clear here, “organized money” is the amorphous special-purpose entity that provides compliant politicians and other public figures with comfortable livings when they retire from public life. No loyal opposition currently exists as an organized body. That is what Packer means by “out.” Out in the howling darkness, with nothing but your own talents to chase down the rare high-compensation job that is not a comfortable living in the gift of organized money.

Organized money can never be eliminated altogether, but it can be cut back, and cut back extensively, if:

• We deny corporations the protection of the Fourteenth Amendment — free speech especially. Defenders of this protection must be obliged to spell out the harm that would be done to actual human beings by its withdrawal, and to be very clear how many human beings (if any) would be harmed.
• We professionalize civil servants, real-estate developers, and retailers, as we do lawyers, doctors, and military officers. Imposing standardized skill-sets and codes of ethics creates powerful bodies of men and women, while by the same token fracturing the elite into union-like organizations.
• We improve living standards for elected officials by raising salaries and pensions and preserving the dignities of office after retirement, as we currently do for the President. Campaign financing must be equalized if not neutralized. (A good deal of this would be accomplished by denying the right of corporations or industry associations from contributing to campaign chests, as would follow from their loss of the right to free speech.)

There are undoubtedly many other things that could be done, but I’ve tried to focus on measures that don’t directly diminish anyone’s personal property or other expectations.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 4th, 2013 at 11:19 am.