The reinforced specter of imminent destruction increasingly drives the demand for ever more extreme policy choices.
Whether it’s fires in California or Brazil, hurricanes like Dorian or your summer hot spell, it’s not just weather anymore but a sign of the impending apocalypse.
For the past 125 years, Labor Day has been a time to celebrate the relevance, and political power, of the American working class. As recently as the 1990s, organized labor’s big day was an important milestone on the political calendar, particularly for Democrats.
But in recent decades, America’s working class has had precious little celebrate. In contrast to the conditions that prevailed in the aftermath of the Second World War, when the incomes of lower quintiles surged by roughly 40%, five times faster than the top echelon during the past four decades, those in the bottom 80% have enjoyed no consistent gains. Meanwhile union membership — the key to working class political power — has plunged from 28% in 1954 to 11% today. Read more
California likes to think of itself as the brain center of the universe, but increasingly much of that intellectual content comes from somewhere else. Once a leader in educational innovation and performance, California is now toward the bottom of the pack.
Left to its own devices, California’s Republican Party would be ready to be embalmed for display at the Museum of Natural History. But there’s one last hope for the state GOP: the growing lunacy among Democrats.
Many positions now taken for granted by Democrats should threaten their hold on the bulk of California’s middle- and working-class voters.
This week, the troubled state of American democracy was on display in the reactions to the mass shootings in Texas and Ohio. To the establishment Left, led by the New York Times, the El Paso shooter operated as if he were a white nationalist acting on orders from Donald Trump. Some on the right, meantime, linked the Dayton shooter’s actions to Antifa. In a healthy political environment, Americans, regardless of political views, would consider these tragedies the heinous actions of disturbed people, motivated mostly by a dangerous combination of madness and ideology. But in our warped political climate, everyone assumes that their enemies want to kill them.
If there’s anything productive to come from his recent Twitter storm, President Trump’s recent crude attacks on Baltimore Congressman Elijah Cummings have succeeded in bring necessary attention to the increasingly tragic state of our cities. Baltimore’s continued woes, after numerous attempts to position itself as a “comeback city,” illustrates all too poignantly the deep-seated decay in many of our great urban areas.
Baltimore represents an extreme case, but sadly it is not alone. Last year our three largest urban centers — New York, Los Angeles and Chicago — lost people while millennial migration accelerated both to the suburbs and smaller, generally less dense cities. These demographic trends, as well as growing blight, poor schools, decaying infrastructure and, worst of all, expanding homelessness are not merely the result of “racism” or Donald Trump, but have all been exacerbated by policy agendas that are turning many great cities into loony towns. Read more
The United States is a great country dominated by small minds. The two dominant political forces of our time — the progressive left and the Trumpian right — have a stake in pushing a declinist narrative, one to change the country in a more statist direction, the other to stir up resentment and nostalgia among the middle-class masses.
Both political forces overemphasize the country’s problems, obscuring the underlying reality. Read more
I’m not a free-market fundamentalist. To me, the beauty of liberal capitalism lies in its performance: More people live well, and live longer, than ever before. Millions of working-class people have moved from poverty to become homeowners and have seen their offspring rise into the middle class or higher.
When there is a general change in conditions, it is as if the entire creation had changed, and the whole world altered.
—Ibn Khaldun, 14th-century Arab historian
Congressional posturing about tech firms may have quieted for the moment, but the existential crisis that these firms are creating remains as now unchecked. Even faced with opposition on both sides of the aisle, the oligarchs—those five tech giants that now constitute the world’s five most wealthiest companies—continue to rapidly consolidate economic, cultural, and, inevitably, political power on a scale not seen for over a century.
This tiny sliver of humanity, with their relatively small cadre of engineers, data scientists, and marketers, represent a challenge to democracy, competitive capitalism, and the future of the middle class. Given their virtual monopoly status, a laissez faire approach will likely result in more consolidation; only government action of some kind can stop them now. Current concerns are large enough now that both the Trump administration and many Democrats oppose Facebook’s bid to issue its own currency. That’s a hopeful first step.
No surprise then that tech firms are radically boosting their DC operations—Google is the top corporate spender in D.C., while Facebook and Amazon (whose CEO owns The Washington Post) are in the top 20. Money is the mother’s milk of politics, and the oligarchs have more of it than anyone in a capital that has all the scruples of the Roman Praetorian Guard, with loyalties always at sale for a little silver.
Historian Jeffrey Winters defines oligarchy as being based on “extreme concentrations” or power and wealth. Whether in ancient Athens or Rome, or contemporary New York or London, this overclass tends to be “unusually resistant to radical dispersions of power.” In our time, the ascendant tech oligarchy, as a recent World Bank Study suggests, have exploited “natural monopolies”—roughly 80- to 90-percent control of most key digital markets —that adhere to web-based business, and have served to further widen class divides not only in the United States but around the world.
The imperative for all oligarchies is to preserve their power. Once the media lights are off, and the posturing is done, the oligarchs can continue playing a clever double game, making common cause with the defenders of capital and pouring money into the welcoming arms of the conservative think tanks.
At the same time, they wish to restore their dominance of the Democratic Party, something they (particularly Google) tried under President Barack Obama’s “Android administration.” They showed early interest in former Vice President Joe Biden but are now pinning their hopes on Kamala Harris, who has longstanding ties to big media companies, telecom providers , Hollywood, and, most of all, Silicon Valley. She seems more amenable to beating on old white men than curbing younger, richer ones exercising oligarchical power.
Whom do the oligarchs’ wish to destroy? Of course, Donald Trump, whom they find understandably offensive, but who also owes little or nothing to them. Perhaps even more threatening are the populists of the left variety, people like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, who openly seek to drain their riches and regulate their empires. It could prove a difficult task.
John D. Rockefeller tried to control energy distribution through his Standard Oil. Later, the Big Three ran the automobile businesses. These were powerful firms, but they could not, like Google, create algorithms that determined what people see, tilted not only toward their own commercial interest but their political predilections as well. In this way, what the techies are doing is oddly reminiscent of China’s efforts to control and monitor thoughts, sometimes assisted by these same U.S. tech firms.
“Tech firms are positioned to dominate older industries like entertainment, education, and retail, as well as those of the future: autonomous cars, space-exploring drones, and most critically artificial intelligence.”
It might seem strange to think that the slick, urbane, and well-educated oligarchs as a greater threat to our future freedom than blathering apostle of “fake news.” But despite his crude statements, it’s not Donald Trump curbing free speech and consigning even the mildly dissident into digital exile. If he loses next year, Trump will leave office as the bizarre leader of a peasant rebellion, but we could be living with the oligarchs information empire for decades.
In contrast to the late futurist Alvin Toffler’s hoped for “demassified media,” we see increasingly centralized control by a few companies. Nearly two-thirds of readers now get their news through Facebook and Google. Long after Trump has retreated to his world of golf links and gold-plated faucets, an embarrassment at best, oligarchs like Jeff Bezos, Marc Benioff, and Lauren Jobs, widow of the late Steve Jobs, will have gained ownership over the nation’s fading traditional media.
But the main vehicle for oligarchical wealth comes from the exploitation of personal data, what Alibaba founder Jack Ma calls the “electricity of the 21st century.” These “super platforms,” as one analyst noted, “now operate as “digital gatekeepers” lording over “e-monopsonies” that aim to monitor our lives in ways even the snoop-crazy Chinese would admire. Firms like Facebook and Google seek to ferret out “psychographic” profiles as part of their core business.
We are already headed toward a world controlled by these super-snoopers. With their enormous financial resources and control of the key digital channels, they are positioned to dominate older industries like entertainment, education, and retail, as well as those of the future: autonomous cars, space-exploring drones, and most critically artificial intelligence. Particularly vulnerable to “disruption” will be Wall Street, long the epicenter of American wealth, but increasingly threatened by the rise of “quant jocks” and “fintech” firms, who may well be shifting much of the financial industry’s weight from New York to the Bay Area.
In a normally functioning competitive environment, such firms would risk consumer wrath that could open the door to newcomers. But with their near-monopoly status intact, these firms, as tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel notes, don’t have to “worry about competing with anyone” or alienating customers. They can continue de-platforming groups they don’t like and enforcing orthodoxy among their employees, who fear they may find themselves unable to move up or even be fired if they step out of line. What aspiring code-writer would risk offending bosses at Facebook, Google, Apple, and the oligarchical firms?
Valley mythmakers, particularly on the right, like to suggest that today’s tech oligarchs epitomize the old tradition of American entrepreneurship and individualism. But with the rise of “super-platforms” like Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google, the period of open competition has atrophied; today the tech elite reflects John Kenneth Galbraith’s assertion that in the long run technology inevitably relies on capital accumulation, concentration, and size of enterprise.
The Valley has taken a “reprieve from the bogeymen in the garage,” and its elite represents something like “the capitalist monopolist” that F.A. Hayek described in his writing. You may also hear from some publicists, including former Obama aides now working for the oligarchs, that the Valley-driven “gig” or “sharing” economy is a step toward “democratizing capitalism.”
This article first appeared on .
But Juliet B. Schor, a sociology professor at Boston College who interviewed gig workers, says the picture is much grimmer and dissatisfaction far higher. In one survey almost two thirds of American gig workers in their late thirties and forties—the ages most associated with family formation—were struggling to make ends meet.
Our past generation of old industrialists may have been far more openly racist and sexist, created pollution and pockets of poverty, but they also built middle- and working-class opportunity; the oligarchs do neither. The Valley was once an exemplar of the American dreamscape but is now an increasingly narrow plutocracy dependent on non-citizen foreign labor, which constitutes upwards of 40 percent of their workforce as well as a cadre of young, largely temporary workers.
“Once, the tech moguls were exemplars of American exceptionalism. But now, they are likely to be its assassins.”
In its earlier iteration, Silicon Valley was a uniquely egalitarian place where outsiders made success and working people had decent incomes. Today, Wired magazine’s Antonio Garcia Martinez has labeled Silicon Valley as ‘feudalism with better marketing.” Despite enormous wealth, tech-driven cities like San Francisco and increasingly Seattle have become dysfunctional places, with massive homeless populations and a shrinking middle class. The urban website CityLab has described the Bay Area as “a region of segregated innovation,” where the rich wax, the middle class wanes, and the poor live in increasingly unshakeable poverty. In the last decade, according to the Brookings Institution, among the nation’s large cities, inequality grew most rapidly in San Francisco, a finding shared by the California Budget Center, which named the city first in California for economic inequality.
Even in the Valley, once the exemplar of suburban egalitarianism, life has become increasingly hierarchical and feudal. Some 76,000 millionaires and billionaires call Santa Clara and San Mateo counties home, while hundreds of thousands of people struggle to feed their families and pay their bills each month. Nearly 30 percent of Silicon Valley’s residents rely on public or private assistance. This is a far away from democratic capitalism.
Once, the tech moguls legitimately could be sold as exemplars of American exceptionalism. But now, if unrestrained, the moguls are likely to be its assassins. Once, it was wise to let them work their magic unimpeded. But now, if we do this, we will create a society that is profoundly hierarchical, uncompetitive, and undemocratic. They need to be stopped, and now, or the world of tomorrow will not be a place we would like our children to inherit.
This article first appeared at The Daily Beast.
Homepage photo credit: Elliot P. via Wikimedia under CC 2.0 license remixed.
We live, as the Indian essayist Saeed Akhter Mirza has put it, in “an age of amnesia.” Across the world, most notably in the West, we are discarding the knowledge and insights passed down over millennia and replacing it with politically correct bromides cooked up in the media and the academy. In some ways, this process recalls, albeit in digital form, the Middle Ages. Conscious shaping of thought—and the manipulation of the past to serve political purposes—is becoming commonplace and pervasive.
Google’s manipulation of algorithms, recently discussed in American Affairs, favors both their commercial interests and also their ideological predilections. Similarly, we see the systematic “de-platforming” of conservative and other groups who offend the mores of tech oligarchs and their media fellow travellers. Major companies are now distancing themselves from “offensive” reminders of American history, such as the Nike’s recent decision to withdraw a sneaker line featuring the Betsy Ross flag. In authoritarian societies, the situation is already far worse. State efforts to control the past in China are enhanced by America’s tech firms, who are helping to erase from history events like the Tiananmen massacre or the mass starvations produced by Maoist policies. Technology has provided those who wish to shape the past, and the future, tools of which the despots of yesterday could only dream.
Sadly, many of the very institutions charged with understanding the past are now slipping back to Medieval antecedents. Writing in 1913, the historian J. B. Bury compared the Middle Ages to “a large field … covered by beliefs which authority claimed to impose as true, and [where] reason was warned off the ground.” Scholars at the University of Paris, described as the “theological arbiter of Europe,” were “licensed” by the bishop to, among other things, defend church dogma. In the late 1300s, the University held a conclave to reassert the reality of demons that were supposedly infecting society.1
Over the ensuing centuries, as capitalism and liberal thought arose, the university gradually emerged as a beacon of liberal education, open inquiry, and tolerance. But this period of liberalization seems to be coming to an end. Like the Medieval scholars, today’s intellectuals are narrowing the field of inquiry. The “frantic energy to know more and more about less and less,” identified by Russian sociologist Pitirim Sorokin a half century ago, has made academic life increasingly irrelevant to most people.
A healthy appreciation for the past is being lost. Today, historical analysis is increasingly shaped by concerns over race, gender, and class. There are repeated campaigns, particularly in and around schools, to pull down offensive statues and murals—including of George Washington—and to rename landmarks to cleanse Western history of its historical blights.
It is not surprising to find that a worrying number of students possess remarkably little knowledge of history or of how civilization developed. The number of history degrees being awarded is down 33 percent this decade to the lowest on record, and history departments, like the even smaller classics departments, are increasingly run by progressive critics with little conservative or liberal input. University summer reading lists largely ignore the great texts of Homer, Confucius, Shakespeare, Milton, de Tocqueville, Marx, or Engels. Professors have faced criticism for assigning too many books written by dead white males who, as a group, are linked to such horrors as slavery, the subjugation of women, and mass poverty. Books written before 1990, suggests the Guardian’s Ashley Thorne, represent “a historical cliff beyond which it is rumored some books were once written, though no one is quite sure what.”
These trends are combining to produce what the late Jane Jacobs called a “mass amnesia,” cutting Western societies off from knowledge of their own culture and history.2 Europe, the primary source of Western civilization, now faces a campaign, in both academia and elite media, to replace its art, literature, and religious traditions with what one author describes as “a multicultural and post racial republic” supportive of separate identities. “The European ‘we’ does not exist,” suggests French philosopher Pierre Manent. “…European culture is in hiding, disappearing, without a soul.”
Peasants and many nobles in the Medieval period usually lacked first-hand knowledge of even the Bible and Christian theology and lore. Yet they had the excuse of being illiterate during an age in which books were expensive to produce and rare. By contrast, the liberal era that began in the sixteenth century saw dramatic gains in literacy, notably in Great Britain and Holland; between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, English literacy rates rose from 30 to 50 percent.
This trend was most marked in the British colonies of North America. Benjamin Franklin noted that high levels of literacy helped American traders and mechanics instigate the rebellion against the Crown and sustain it.3 But now, with access to information unimaginable in the past, our knowledge of history is fading. Information is increasingly separated from actual knowledge; blogs replace books, and tweets replace essays. Knowledge of even relatively recent events, like the Holocaust or D-Day, is become scanty. Four in 10 American millennials, and at least one in three Europeans, say they know “very little” about the Holocaust, and one in five young French respondents are not even aware it took place.
Nor is it likely they will become better informed outside of school. Book-reading outside of school and work has declined markedly, particularly among the young, so that barely half actually read anything for pleasure or personal edification. Between 2011 and 2015, the number of American children who said they read “for fun” dropped nearly 10 percent according to a recent survey. Indeed, one recent study of American college students found that upwards of 40 percent “did not demonstrate any significant improvement in learning” over four years of college. A landmark study by University College London (UCL), based on 11,000 children tracked from their births in 2000, found that only one in 10 students surveyed ever did any reading for pleasure in their spare time.
Intellectual intolerance thrives when the heritage of the past—with its mixed and inconvenient lessons—is sent down the memory hole. In feudal times, classical heritage was replaced by rigid religious dogma. Today’s clerisy uses the education system, the media, and the means of cultural production to impose its standards of “privilege” and value, and to decide who deserves special dispensations.
Throughout history, those who assume an absolute superiority of belief rarely demonstrate a natural inclination to skepticism or doubt. Education and culture are not prerequisites for enlightenment; academicians, entertainers, and scientists thrived in the Soviet Union, and in Nazi Germany, they served as a “stronghold” of the party and, later the regime.4 Academics, artists and journalists can prove to be the most vociferous conformists and enforcers of orthodoxy.
Critical to this devolution is the absence of conflicting views. The faculties of universities in the West are increasingly afflicted with troubling levels of unanimity. In 1990, according to survey data by the Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) at UCLA, 42 percent of professors identified as “liberal” or “far-Left.” By 2014, that number had jumped to 60 percent. Another study of 51 top colleges found that the ratio of liberals to conservatives can be as high as 70 to one and is usually at least eight to one. At elite liberal arts universities like Wellesley, Swarthmore, and Williams, the proportion reaches an astonishing 120 to 1.
These trends are particularly acute in fields that most impact public policy and opinion. Well under 10 percent of faculty at leading law schools—such as Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Columbia, and Berkeley—describe themselves as conservative. These patterns can also be seen in the United Kingdom. Although roughly half of British voters lean to the Right, only 12 percent of academics do so. Such gaps are common both in Canada and across Europe. Professors who criticize multiculturalism, mass migration, or even the utility of “bourgeois values,” can find their employment threatened.
Liberals like Cass Sunstein suggest that students raised in an atmosphere of homogeneity “are less likely to get a good education, and faculty members are likely to learn less from one another, if there is a prevailing political orthodoxy.” Yet too few university administrators counter these trends. One college President in Canada, for example, justified efforts to tamp down on “free speech” by arguing that doing so created “better speech.” At many schools, professors are now asked to sign “diversity” pledges that eerily reprise the kind of “loyalty” pledges common during the darkest days of the Cold War. This passion for thought control extends even to comments such as “America is the land of opportunity” or professing to believe in a colorblind society, views which can now be categorized as punishable “microagressions.”
This ideological rigidity has shaped a generation of progressive activists who also now represent the best educated, whitest, and most politically intolerant portion of the American polity. A common tendency among progressives is to designate certain conversations as “hate speech,” an approach to free speech recently endorsed by the California Democratic Party.
In the end, the embrace of wide-ranging ideologies such as “intersectionality”—linking all manner of gender, racial, colonial, and class oppression—makes a nuanced discussion about the past almost impossible. As the writer James Lindsay has observed, only a “morally pure” version of history and culture is now acceptable. “They especially tend to demonize heretics or blasphemers,” he said, “or anyone who goes too far outside that dogmatic structure of belief and threatens it. Those people are often excommunicated.”
The purge of conservative or even traditional liberal thought from the universities and the media is already having an impact on democracy. Some 40 percent of American millennials favor limiting speech deemed offensive to minorities, well above the 27 percent among Gen-Xers, 24 percent among Boomers, and 12 percent among the oldest cohorts. Millennials are also far more likely to be dismissive of basic constitutional civil rights, and more sanguine about a military coup than previous generations.
Similarly, European millennials display far less faith in democracy and fewer objections to autocratic control than previous generations, which lived under dictatorships or in their aftermath. Young Europeans are almost three times as likely to say democracy is failing than their elders.
The spread of mass education may have exemplified the promise of liberal civilization. But, without an understanding and appreciation of what allowed it to flourish, it could also accelerate its dissolution. The reduction and reshaping of the past are essential to undermining liberal democracy. The great exemplars of the past—Washington, Madison, Burke, Jefferson, Lincoln, Churchill—all warned that human beings are not necessarily good and, for that reason, power must be dispersed and restrained not concentrated. Yet we are witnessing the creation of a society, as envisioned by HG Wells, controlled by a credentialed elite. This “emergent class of capable men,” Wells wrote, should take upon itself the task of “controlling and restricting…the non-functional masses.” This new elite, he predicted, would replace democracy with “a higher organism” of what he called “the New Republic.”5
Any reasonable reading of history cautions us against such power grabs, however well-intentioned. But this won’t resonate if our next generation remains cut off from the past and molded by a highly manipulated tech-driven reality. If one does not even know about the legacies underpinning democracy, individual freedom, and open discussion, one is not likely to miss them when they are eroded.6
This article first appeared at Quillette
Joel Kotkin is the Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. He authored The Human City: Urbanism for the rest of us, published in 2016 by Agate. He is also author of The New Class Conflict, The City: A Global History, and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. He is executive director of NewGeography.com and lives in Orange County, CA.
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Fred Murphy, used under CC 2.0 License
