The Matador's Cape (Part 3)
The Trojan Horse of Identity Politics
This is the 3rd of 3 mini-essays about the fundamental tension between democracy and wealth-hoarding. America is an experiment in both. We are a strange mixture of democratic ideals from Classical Greece and hierarchical capitalism from Renaissance Europe. That’s an explosive combination. So far, the wealth of American capitalism has been sequestered from democratic redistribution by a series of clever deceptions. This mini-essay series illustrates the point by drawing an analogy with the red cape of a matador.
During the 1970s, the ability of workers to negotiate higher wages collapsed thanks to technology, social change, and CIA subterfuge. It was the beginning of the end for the American middle class. 50 years of stagnant wages followed, with a corresponding bonanza in corporate profits. Meanwhile, Reagan restored tax rates on the wealthy to pre-New-Deal levels and crushed the labor unions that funded the Democratic Party. The Democratic Leadership Council filled that fundraising void by connecting Democratic candidates with the same corporate donors that funded Republican campaigns. Bill Clinton was its chairman before he swept into the White House on a floodtide of corporate cash. “Slick Willie” was a man who knew which side his bread was buttered on. He signed the repeal of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act, a key piece of New Deal legislation separating commercial banks from risky investment banks. By 2008, the financial system was right back to where it was in 1929: a smoldering ruin. Only this time, there would be no New Deal.
Obama rose to power as the first black president after the 2008 financial collapse. His rhetoric was music to the ears of Americans whose wages had been stagnant for 40 years. But Obama was the banks’ man through and through. Citibank itself selected the appointees for Obama’s cabinet. While Wall Street was handsomely bailed out with public funds, ordinary Americans were left to pick up the pieces of their shattered financial lives. This transfer of wealth from poor-to-rich was the polar opposite of the old New Deal strategy, which saved the economy by transferring wealth from rich-to-poor. FDR’s Democrats once flexed the muscle of a powerful working class majority. But their modern counterparts accept the same paymasters as Republicans to instead gaslight that majority out of their wealth. Like the Washington Generals, their goal is not victory. It’s putting on a credible show of opposition.
Excitement over the nation’s first black president persisted, even as Obama sold out the working and middle classes. His election was promptly followed by the broad legalization of gay marriage. America was beginning a healing process and making amends with trampled minority groups. Well-intentioned Americans turned out to vote for Democrats on social justice issues alone, without expecting them to deliver economic justice like their predecessors. And that’s exactly what those wealthy campaign donors to the Democratic party are paying them for. In the aftermath of 2008, identity politics were used to cripple the Occupy Wall Street movement by dividing it against itself, and to hijack the national conversation—in the same way that a matador uses a red cape.
Great hoards of wealth are being preserved within our democracy by distracting the electorate. But the story is far from over. By facilitating the free flow of ideas between regular people, the printing press once shattered the structure of Medieval society. The democratizing power of the internet has the same revolutionary potential. The forbidden histories of the Business Plot, the infiltration of Women’s Lib, and the woke demolition of Occupy Wall Street have not been forgotten on the internet. Because it allows us to bypass authoritative sources of information and connect directly with one another, it’s our best weapon in the ongoing class war.
