Panic of the Plutocrats
It remains to be seen whether the Occupy Wall Street
protests will change America’s direction. Yet the protests
have already elicited a remarkably hysterical reaction from
Wall Street, the super-rich in general, and politicians and
pundits who reliably serve the interests of the wealthiest
hundredth of a percent.
And this reaction tells you something important — namely,
that the extremists threatening American values are what
F.D.R. called “economic royalists,” not the people camping
in Zuccotti Park.
Consider first how Republican politicians have portrayed the
modest-sized if growing demonstrations, which have involved
some confrontations with the police — confrontations that
seem to have involved a lot of police overreaction — but
nothing one could call a riot. And there has in fact been
nothing so far to match the behavior of Tea Party crowds in
the summer of 2009.
Nonetheless, Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, has
denounced “mobs” and “the pitting of Americans against
Americans.” The G.O.P. presidential candidates have weighed
in, with Mitt Romney accusing the protesters of waging
“class warfare,” while Herman Cain calls them
“anti-American.” My favorite, however, is Senator Rand Paul,
who for some reason worries that the protesters will start
seizing iPads, because they believe rich people don’t
deserve to have them.
Michael Bloomberg, New York’s mayor and a financial-industry
titan in his own right, was a bit more moderate, but still
accused the protesters of trying to “take the jobs away from
people working in this city,” a statement that bears no
resemblance to the movement’s actual goals.
And if you were listening to talking heads on CNBC, you
learned that the protesters “let their freak flags fly,” and
are “aligned with Lenin.”
The way to understand all of this is to realize that it’s
part of a broader syndrome, in which wealthy Americans who
benefit hugely from a system rigged in their favor react
with hysteria to anyone who points out just how rigged the
system is.
Last year, you may recall, a number of financial-industry
barons went wild over very mild criticism from President
Obama. They denounced Mr. Obama as being almost a socialist
for endorsing the so-called Volcker rule, which would simply
prohibit banks backed by federal guarantees from engaging in
risky speculation. And as for their reaction to proposals to
close a loophole that lets some of them pay remarkably low
taxes — well, Stephen Schwarzman, chairman of the Blackstone
Group, compared it to Hitler’s invasion of Poland.
And then there’s the campaign of character assassination
against Elizabeth Warren, the financial reformer now running
for the Senate in Massachusetts. Not long ago a YouTube
video of Ms. Warren making an eloquent, down-to-earth
case for taxes on the rich went viral. Nothing about what
she said was radical — it was no more than a modern riff on
Oliver Wendell Holmes’s famous dictum that “Taxes are what
we pay for civilized society.”
But listening to the reliable defenders of the wealthy,
you’d think that Ms. Warren was the second coming of Leon
Trotsky. George Will declared that she has a “collectivist
agenda,” that she believes that “individualism is a
chimera.” And Rush Limbaugh called her “a parasite who hates
her host. Willing to destroy the host while she sucks the
life out of it.”
What’s going on here? The answer, surely, is that Wall
Street’s Masters of the Universe realize, deep down, how
morally indefensible their position is. They’re not John
Galt; they’re not even Steve Jobs. They’re people who got
rich by peddling complex financial schemes that, far from
delivering clear benefits to the American people, helped
push us into a crisis whose aftereffects continue to blight
the lives of tens of millions of their fellow citizens.
Yet they have paid no price. Their institutions were bailed
out by taxpayers, with few strings attached. They continue
to benefit from explicit and implicit federal guarantees —
basically, they’re still in a game of heads they win, tails
taxpayers lose. And they benefit from tax loopholes that in
many cases have people with multimillion-dollar incomes
paying lower rates than middle-class families.
This special treatment can’t bear close scrutiny — and
therefore, as they see it, there must be no close scrutiny.
Anyone who points out the obvious, no matter how calmly and
moderately, must be demonized and driven from the stage. In
fact, the more reasonable and moderate a critic sounds, the
more urgently he or she must be demonized, hence the frantic
sliming of Elizabeth Warren.
So who’s really being un-American here? Not the protesters,
who are simply trying to get their voices heard. No, the
real extremists here are America’s oligarchs, who want to
suppress any criticism of the sources of their wealth.
