Ganesh Sitaraman's "The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution" - The Atlantic - 0 views
www.theatlantic.com/...519909
oligarchy dictator inequality democracy Founding constitution crisis history culture politics economic

lasvegas-flights liked it
-
Rebecca J. Rosen: Your new book, The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution, is premised on the idea that the American Constitution is what you call a middle-class constitution. What does that mean?
-
Ganesh Sitaraman: The idea of the middle-class constitution is that it’s a constitutional system that requires and is conditioned on the assumption that there is a large middle class, and no big differences between rich and poor in a society.
-
Prior to the American Constitution, most countries and most people who thought about designing governments were very concerned about the problem of inequality, and the fear was that, in a society that was deeply unequal, the rich would oppress the poor and the poor would revolt and confiscate the wealth of the rich.
- ...52 more annotations...
-
We have to distinguish between two separate things. The first is what I’m calling the tradition of the middle-class Constitution, and the idea here is that to have a republic, you have to have relative economic equality, and that’s within the political community.
-
What we have is a constitutional system that doesn’t build class in at all, and the reason why is that America was shockingly equal at the time in ways that seem really surprising to us today.
-
The idea is that the Constitution relies on a relatively equal society for it to work. In societies that are deeply unequal, the way you prevent strife between rich and poor is you build class right into the structure of government—the House of Lords, House of Commons idea. Everyone has a share in government, but they also have a check on each other.
-
In a country that doesn’t have a lot of inequality by wealth, you don’t need that kind of check. There’s no extreme wealth, there’s no extreme poverty, so you don’t expect there to be strife, to be instability based on wealth. And so there’s no need to put in some sort of check like that into the Constitution.
-
That’s how our Constitution works. The reason why it works this way is that when the founders looked around, they thought America was uniquely equal in the history of the world.
-
extreme wealth, there’s extreme poverty, neither of which really exists in America. As a result they don’t need to design a House of Lords and a House of Commons, they don’t need a tribune of the plebs in order to make their constitution work.
-
And in an unequal society, the only possible government you could have would be some sort of aristocracy or monarchy.
-
there’s another question which is, who is in the political community? And that’s a question that’s been fiercely debated over our history, fiercely contested over our history.
-
There’s a second tradition that we call the tradition of inclusion, which over time has fought to expand the community to include minorities, to include women. The challenge for anyone who’s interested in continuing both of these traditions is, how do they work together?
-
I think the key thing is, when you expand the political community, you have to make sure that every member of the political community then has the opportunity to join the middle class, or else you can't maintain the structure of the republic and the preconditions for having a republic.
-
In the 17th century in England, James Harrington writes a book called The Commonwealth of Oceana, and it’s a pivotal book, extremely important in the history of political thought. What Harrington argues is that the balance of power in politics in any society will inevitably mirror the balance of property in society, and he talks a lot about property. We can think about that as wealth
-
there’s actually a radical change in our Constitution that we don’t build economic class directly into these institutions. The purpose of the Senate, with its longer terms, is to allow representatives to deliberate in the longer-term interest of the republic, and that’s the goal of the Senate.
-
their intellectual fountain, is Harrington, who suggests that, if you have an equal society, it is possible to have what he called a commonwealth, or a republic.
-
his views were well known in the time period. In fact, more so than being known, they were just believed by everyone. Everyone embraced them, in some cases without even necessarily knowing their source, although throughout the founders’ writings they list Harrington as one of the great political thinkers who can comment on what it means to create a republic.
-
These are all huge changes in the economy, and they put serious pressure on the economic foundations of the Constitution.
-
The response that starts really in full force in the populist era of the late 19th century and moves into the Progressive Era is to try to combat both economic power and to prevent economic power from turning into political power.
-
These factors, these actions, both economic and political, were designed to create what Teddy Roosevelt called an economic democracy that was necessary as a precondition for political democracy.
-
we regulated the financial industry through the Securities and Exchange Commission, Glass-Steagall during the Great Depression.
-
it happens for three reasons. The first is that we experience a huge economic boom. This is a period that economists call the Great Compression. GDP goes up, median wages go up, we build America’s middle class during this period.
-
After World War II, something changes. In this period, post-World War II, the idea that economic equality is necessary for our constitutional system falls out of the consciousness of most people.
-
We also invested a lot in the kinds of things that would build a strong middle class. We sent a generation to college through the GI bill. We invested in infrastructure, which created jobs. We invested in research and development
-
We also encouraged homeownership, and in addition to all of that, we also undertook policies that would help the people who were worst-off in society: Medicare, Medicaid, Head Start. Together, these things meant that we created a society that was more equal economically than we had seen in generations.
-
constitutional debates over the economy waned, because the New Dealers won the fight over the Constitution. Debates about economic policy now just moved into regulatory terms. There was no question that the Constitution empowered the federal government to be able to regulate and operate within the economy.
-
After World War II, the contrast is now between capitalism and communism, not between republics and aristocracies. As a result, the egalitarian tradition in America wanes because of the fear of communism.
-
The fear in that period switches from a fear over aristocrats, oligarchs, and plutocrats to a fear of becoming too much like the Soviet Union and too much like the communists.
-
first had a period of about 30 years where things went really well. We had a growing middle class, an expanding middle class; in fact, it was in this period that we first made serious efforts to make our country more inclusive.
-
then, just at that moment, we started turning in a different direction and undermining many of the policies that had actually built the middle class. So over the last generation, we’ve significantly reduced taxes on the wealthy, we’ve abandoned a serious antitrust policy, we’ve started investing less in the things that create a broad middle class—education, infrastructure, research. And the result of all of this was the stagnating middle class
-
One of the important things about having a large middle class for society is that there’s a sense of everyone being part of the shared project. No one’s so different from each other when there’s a large middle class.
-
People don’t have different economic interests, and as a result, they often don't have very different social interests. People send their kids to the same public schools, they live in the same neighborhoods, they shop in the same places, they play on the same sports teams.
-
When the middle class starts to crumble, people increasingly see themselves as different from others. They sort themselves by wealth, by education level, and the result is that there’s an increasing fracturing of society, a loss of the solidarity that comes with having a large middle class
-
throughout our history, you see big divergences between the tradition of inclusion and the tradition of the middle class. In some cases, they overlap.
-
I think the most interesting moments in our history, though, are when there were people who understood that these two things had to go together, and in fact tried to build movements around them. The Civil Rights Era is a good example
-
One of the most exciting things about writing this book is discovering how often throughout our history people talked about the Constitution in economic terms. Throughout our history there was a deep sense that to have a republic, to have our Constitution work, we had to have economic equality, and that the Constitution in fact relied on this and in some cases even required action from political leaders to fulfill this economic equality.
-
In Reconstruction, in the Jacksonian Era, the populists, the progressives, the New Dealers. Throughout our history, there is a strong tradition of people who believe this.
-
To take a simple example, a case like Citizens United uses the First Amendment in order to stop efforts, it seems, to make our political and economic system more equal by enabling corporations and wealthy people to have outsized power over the political process. We could think about a wide variety of constitutional provisions differently if we took this seriously—the Equal Protection Clause, the First Amendment, the 13th Amendment, which was seen by the Reconstruction Republicans as not just ending slavery but also empowering Congress to create economic opportunity for people who were struggling economically.
-
Even going back to the ancients there was a fear that economic power would turn into political power and undermine the republic. That’s an oligarchy.
-
First, the wealthy start believing that they’re better than everybody else, that they’re more virtuous, that they deserve to govern
-
The second thing that happens is that the wealthy now have different interests than everybody else. The things that are good for them aren’t actually in the common good, so when they do govern, they start pursuing policies that improve their well-being and wealth at the expense of everyone else.
-
The problem with the vicious cycle that leads to oligarchy is that people are smart, and they see it happening, and they know, and they feel that the system is rigged against them. And in that context, people revolt against the system. This doesn’t happen through some sort of mass uprising. What the people do is they look for a leader, they look for someone who will help them overthrow the oligarchy.
-
The threat for unequal republics is on the one hand oligarchy and then on the other hand tyranny. That is a pretty unfortunate fate in either direction.