Opinion: The common man will rise!

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Jim Woolsey has retired from a seafaring career and now spends his days musing on the state of things ashore. Here, he responds to an Op-Ed article in The Times. If you would like to respond to a recent Times article, editorial or Op-Ed in our Blowback forum, here are our FAQs and submission policy.

In their recent Op-Ed, ‘The Gentry Liberals,’ Joel Kotkin and Fred Siegel hit the nail on the head ... mostly.

As the authors indicated, among Democrats, the concerns of the liberal gentry have replaced those of the common man. Fashion has replaced substance in the Democratic Party. Allowing political correctness to trump standard-of-living provides a useful distraction from the disassembly of the U.S. economy.

Kotkin and Siegel highlight the musings of such men as Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., who seemed to favor having an intellectual aristocracy supplant the influence of working people, businessmen and labor leaders. What the authors did not mention was how the Vietnam War catalyzed that change, as intellectuals rejected the war long before the rest of the public abandoned the effort. Getting out of the war was clearly a high priority, but the impatience of the party elite cost Democrats their identification with the welfare of Everyman. The party’s new leadership thought it could replace this single, almost universal issue with a bouquet of individual concerns among various smaller groups, women, gays and minorities being foremost. Economically, these groups were neutral enough that Democrats could replace economic and labor issues with campaigns focused on trendy concerns. Their campaigns could be funded by interests that normally favored Republicans. The downside was that the resulting decline in the fortunes of organized labor painted Democrats into the same corner as Republicans.

Republicans, long the standard-bearers for the cult of personal enrichment, understood both the threat and the opportunity of this change by the Democrats. While the Democrats might become even less credible on issues like national security, corporate entities now had an alternative if the Republican Party dragged its feet on any part of the corporate agenda. On the right, only the foot soldiers of the gun lobby or the Good Book remain in the dark as to their party’s ultimate loyalties, or the means by which those loyalties will be enforced.

Among Democrats, only those at the apex of the campaign-contribution class recognize that serving the interests of CEOs is now the only game in town. Thus Bill Clinton did more for the corporate agenda than any public servant on the right. There remains a host of other issues to distract the average voter, but the financial elites are indifferent.

The good news is that this trend marches unflinchingly to its own doom. ‘It’s the economy, stupid’ is a phrase we shall hear again, even if Democrats remain unsure of its ultimate meaning. A modern economy, built on robust discretionary consumption, is as likely to drown those on the upper decks as those in steerage once consumer incomes fall far enough. This is something we already see in the mortgage crisis.

Only two alternatives will then remain: Hire enough night watchmen to postpone chaos, or restore the economic factors that once produced widespread consumer prosperity.

The bad news is that many of the institutions that were crucial in our escape from the Depression are either fatally crippled or have become vehicles for the self-satisfied views of those described by Kotkin and Siegel. How many university endowments does one suppose are entirely based on selling the concept of deregulation or the open market?

Only Big Labor, as it was once called, had the organizational and economic might to counterbalance the power of the financial elite. It was in the eddy between these forces that consumer incomes propelled both commercial activity and public welfare to the heights experienced in the second half of the 20th century. Sadly, labor itself may have fallen into a state of mortal gentrification. Its next champions, should they ever appear, are likely to hold a greater resemblance to the anarchists of Republican Seville than to the pragmatic men who built the City of Big Shoulders.

Thus, the model most likely to undo both the corporate elite and the gentry liberals will be something similar to that practiced by the Soviets, the Fascists, the Nazis and the Falange.

These totalitarians will not resurrect the estate of the common man, but they will clearly drive other parasites from the corpse.