M. Taibbi on Piketty's paper:
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/taibbi-piketty-study-is-two-party-system-doomed-w518585
Is the Two-Party System Doomed?
A new study shows us what observation should already have made clear: a
messy restructuring of America's political parties is coming
By Matt Taibbi
Thomas Piketty, the French economist whose 2013 bestseller Capital in
the 21st Century awoke upscale Americans to the shocking news that their
economic system was not working for everyone, has written a new paper
exposing more uncomfortable truths.
Piketty's new essay, called Brahmin Left vs. Merchant Right, studied
electoral trends in three Western countries – France, Britain and the
U.S. – dating back to the 1940s.
Even though the three countries have different systems, all three
feature electoral showdowns for executive power that broadly come down
to "left" versus "right" factions.
A remarkable feature is how mathematically balanced these elections have
been over the years. Piketty notes that even in France, whose final
votes involve coalitions of multiple minority parties, the widest
disparity observed in recent history involved splits of ten points (De
Gaulle vs. Mitterand in 1965) and eight (Mitterand vs. Chirac in 1988).
More often, he notes, the splits have been 51-49, 52-48, etc.
This mimics the remarkable closeness of American elections. Four times
in recent history, we've had presidential elections end either in nearly
perfect statistical ties (Kennedy-Nixon in 1960, Nixon-Humphrey in 1968)
or in contests close enough where there was a disparity between
electoral and popular votes (Bush-Gore 2000, and Clinton-Trump 2016).
As Noam Chomsky wrote after the Bush/Gore fiasco, about the only
scenario where you'd expect to see a contest of a hundred-plus million
voters end in a statistical tie would either be a completely random
process, or one where voters were asked to make a choice about something
totally unrelated to their lives, like the presidency of Mars.
That we've had the flipped coin land virtually on its side so many times
has always suggested something was off about our political system.
Piketty now hints at what that was.
He writes that across all three countries, we've seen the evolution of
the same trend. Fifty or sixty years ago, voting with the "left-wing"
side (which he terms the socialist/labour/democratic parties) tended to
be associated with low income and low education. Conversely, high
education and high-income voters in all three countries voted right.
Over the years, however, the "left-wing" has become more and more
associated with higher-education voters, giving rise to what he calls a
"multiple-elite" party system.
According to Piketty, in 2016, for the first time – and of course some
of this has to do with the unique repugnance of Donald Trump – the upper
10% of voters, sorted by income, voted Democratic.
Piketty just puts numbers behind an observation that anyone covering
recent American presidential elections could have made: That huge
pluralities of voters on both sides of the aisle feel unrepresented and
even insulted, and increasingly see both major parties as tools of the
very rich.
His belief is that a major reordering of the political landscape is
coming. It will be based less on traditional notions of right and left,
and more along the lines of what he describes as "globalists
(high-education, high-income) vs. nativists (low-education, low-income)."
We've known for a while that America's current party structure doesn't
make demographic sense.
Nearly seven years ago, I was sent to cover two different stories within
the space of a few days that illustrated this. The first was a recap of
the Occupy Wall Street protests at Zucotti Park. The second was a trip
down to Jacksonville, Florida for a tour of "rocket docket" foreclosure
courts that had been set up to expedite the process of tossing poor
people out of their homes.
The Occupy protests accomplished one extremely important thing. They
popularized the terms "The 1%" and "the 99%."
This simple idea, that the real split in American society was less like
50-50 and more like 99-1, was completely logical in a country where the
top 1% owns more wealth than the bottom 90%.
The protesters' demographic critique implied that whatever we've been
voting about, it hasn't had a lot to do with economics. It also seemed
to mean that the wealthy have somehow been seriously over-represented at
the polls for ages.
The people at Zucotti were mainly what you might describe today as
Sanders Democrats. They tended to be socially liberal, educated, and
full of feelings of being left out.
An example was an organic farmer from Vermont who talked with disdain
about the money the Democrats took from big agribusiness corporations
who were his competition. This theme, that big money owned both parties,
was prevalent at the demonstration.
In Jacksonville, people were being thrown out of their homes by a
hi-speed foreclosure court that shamefully swallowed without protest the
robo-signed or phony documentation offered by banks and lenders. The
victims in these courtrooms were not, by and large, the same people as
the kind you'd find at an Occupy Protest.
They were overwhelmingly either the ethnic poor – predatory mortgage
lending disproportionately targeted people of color – or what pundits
today would derisively call the "white working class." Both of those
groups were there together, however, victimized by the same malefactors.
The pure rage and sense of abandonment in those courts was striking.
This group of people experiencing a system stacked against them was not
interested in elaborate explanations of how the foreclosure crisis
evolved. Most were focused on questions like, "Where are my kids going
to sleep tonight?"
If I'd even tried to bring up, say, a foreign policy question in that
room – So, now that you have no house, what do you think about the
future of the EuroZone? – I might have had my teeth knocked out.
It was clear that if all of these groups ever started to align with each
other – the Occupy types and, say, the victims of the foreclosure crisis
– you'd have revolution, and probably a pretty quick one, given the
numbers involved.
Fast-forward four years, to the beginning of the 2015-2016 presidential
election campaign. All of the trends described by Occupy had worsened
significantly.
Income disparity was worse. The gap in criminal justice outcomes was
worse (especially after the 2008 crash criminals were let off
wholesale). Indebtedness was worse. Even political influence was now
significantly more imbalanced, after the Citizens United decision.
People everywhere, even on the right, were angrier about all of it.
A few establishment voices, like Jimmy Carter, eventually pointed to
these factors when asked to explain the rise of Trump. But most pundits
dismissed the discontent over these things as mere low-information
stupidity, which played right into Trump's hands.
Candidate Trump's solutions were all lies. But his stump presentation
hammered home an unfortunately true observation that politicians in both
parties had incentives not to care about them, because they were
sponsored by the same mega-donors.
From pollsters to think-tank analysts to pundits, the Beltway pros have
not only consistently underestimated these feelings of
disenfranchisement; they've consistently over-counted their own numbers.
This week, for instance, the New York Times ran a piece pointing to new
evidence that pollsters in 2016 made massive errors. Some exit polls in
November of 2016 had the number of college graduates of all races
representing more than 50% of voters. But a recent Pew study says the
number was closer to 37%.
America, like pretty much everyplace else in the neoliberal world, is
becoming a society split up into unequal camps. We have an extremely
small group of very rich people, and a much larger group of everyone
else, who may or may not be educated, but increasingly have either zero
net worth, or close to it.
The numbers are getting harder to ignore.
American politicians for decades have done an outstanding job of keeping
low-income voters from seeing their shared economic dilemmas. The
Republicans dating back to Goldwater and Nixon have kept voters
transfixed with race hatred and fears about things like gun control,
while Democrats have emphasized the Republican threat on social issues
like reproductive rights and Social Security.
But having two parties sponsored by the same donors simply can't work in
the long-term. The situation ends up being what a Colombian politician
once deemed "two horses with the same owner."
From Mitt Romney's idiotic tirade against "the 47%" to Hillary
Clinton's recent remarks about how she won all the "dynamic" parts of
America, our political leaders have consistently showed that they don't
see or understand the levels of resentment out there.
Papers like Piketty's are a warning that if the intellectuals in both
parties don't come up with a real plan for dealing with the income
disparity problem before someone smarter than Donald Trump takes it on,
they're screwed. Forget nativists vs. globalists. Think poor vs. rich.
Think 99 to 1. While Washington waits with bated breath for the results
of the Mueller probe, it's the other mystery – how do we fix this
seemingly unfixable economic system – that is keeping the rest of the
country awake at night.
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