Gotham Diary:
Organized Money Hits a Pothole
12 June 2014
Eric Cantor’s surprising defeat in the Virginia primary has everyone talking. Nothing like this was supposed to happen. And the most least-likely-to-happen aspect of the surprise was that Cantor’s challenger, David Brat, seems to have spent about $200,000 on his campaign. Muffling this singularity somewhat — but only “somewhat” — is the post-mortem analysis that faults the Cantor campaign for its attack ads, which brought Brat to the attention of more voters than he could have paid to access.
One way or another, David Brat’s victory in the primary signals to me a breakdown in the operation of organized money.
“Organized money” is a term that I found in George Packer’s The Unwinding. Packer was not precise about its meaning, so, intrigued, I speculated about what that might be.
I have long believed that, while people do not act in ways that might be predicted by scientific laws, money does. At least when it is not simply hoarded under a mattress, money tends to seek the best value, whether this is an appliance or a return on investment. I also suspect that money becomes more efficient at finding best values when it is concentrated. It is always possible for the human beings who possess a money to act counter to money’s inherent tendencies, but it is not really likely.
As if to help money out, we have created a pseudo-world in which everything, or almost everything, has a “value.” In other words, a price. The value of your job is embodied in your salary — period. If you think that you deserve more, because you do a lot of overlooked and uncredited work, then, from the point of view of money, you are a fool, because while money is always seeking the best value, the equation dictates that values seek optimization. The strange-sounding proposition that your job is always seeking to be worth more money than you’re being paid is demonstrated whenever a competitor comes along and does it better.
In this pseudo-world — fake because it is utterly inhuman — everything is liquidatable, convertible, through money, into something else. Detroit’s municipal collection of art masterpieces is convertible, in this pseudo-world, into a means of paying off the city’s debts.
Organized money is a step beyond mere money because it exists in such concentrations that one of the values that it seeks is sheer self-preservation.
Organized money is not to be confused with the rich people who have a lot of money. The people themselves are not organized. They don’t really have to be. Their money organizes itself in a way that protects itself, and, incidentally, their personal bank balances. In the real world, of course, there are severe constraints on the power of money to organize itself. There are taxes, and rules about offshore banking. There is anti-trust legislation. There is unemployment insurance and health care. In the real world, there are many priceless things that cannot be traded for money — such as Detroit’s collection of art.
But when this real world is abandoned, as it has been for the past thirty-odd years, for the pseudo-world of universal valuation, there are no real constraints on the power of money to defend its concentrations. This is in part because a generation has grown up without any familiarity with the worth of the world.
At the moment, organized money’s principal weapon of self-defense is campaign financing. This takes a number of forms, from television advertisements to lobbying efforts (which include tailoring proposed legislation to organized money’s need for security). The fundamental purpose of campaign financing, from organized money’s point of view, is to persuade voters to support political arrangements that, whatever other impact they might have, leave organized money untouched. Given the fact that many concentrations of money have resulted from business consolidations, job cutbacks, offshore outsourcing, and environmental degradation, campaign financing is charged with tricking voters into voting against their own interest.
For thirty-odd years, marketers — the wizards who deploy the principles of psychology to deceptive purposes — have modeled stupendously successful campaigns, often by introducing irrelevant considerations. Would you rather your neighbor had a job, or would you rather live in a Christian community? The remolding of political debate along religious lines has done much to cloud economic issues. Sometimes, the ostensible economic debates are themselves bogus, as in the controversy over immigration. Right-wingers can scream all they want to about protecting jobs for “native” Americans, but their demographics prove that they’re simply hostile to “Mexicans” and to the intrusion of Spanish.
Eric Cantor’s defeat was symptomatic of a disaffection, spreading through the “liberal democracies” of the West, with political elites, which, like elites everywhere, are always prone to lose touch with the larger bodies of which they are the elite. It is no wonder that, in the pseudo-world of universal valuation, unemployment and immigration — both inevitable consequences of universal valuation (unemployment because money seeks better value for jobs, thus reducing the stock; and immigration because it is a form of economic prostitution, a willingness to do mindless or degrading things for a salary) — should be the points on which ordinary voters feel most disenchanted with their representatives, because their representatives have no real experience of either unemployment or immigration. Representatives and other members of the elite live according to an entirely different value system — by which I mean, of course, an entirely different price list. It’s greater than the difference between the menu at McDonald’s and the menu at Per Se.
I wouldn’t worry about organized money, though. That is, I shouldn’t worry that it might fall apart. If campaign-financing ultimately turns out to be ineffective, there are always the options of private security system and economic blackmail. (What if Big Pharma started behaving like Amazon? Don’t imagine that “there are laws against it,” because there aren’t, and there probably can’t be unless we overhaul our fundamental ideas about intellectual property.) I should go on worrying about the body politic upon which organized money is an unthinking, and therefore malignant, growth.
Daily Blague news update: Sorting.