Viking Economics (27 page)

Frances Fox Piven, the former head of the American Sociological Association, has shown that many gains that we Americans take for granted were the results of the turbulent 1960s and ’70s, as well as the flourishing mass movements of the 1930s.
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A short
list would include social security, Medicare, limits on the length of the work week, rights for people with different abilities, rights for black people and others of color, rights for women and elders and children. All those gains resulted from movements using the leverage of nonviolent action. Two of the most distinguished scholarly books on inequality conclude that only social movements can overcome the economic elite’s power and privilege.
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Some gains made by Americans in the 1960s and ’70s—gains that depended on direct action and that were in the majority-supported direction of the Nordic model—were lost in the decades since the 1970s. During the 1980s, “Reagan revolution,” several important movements went on the defensive in an effort to keep previously won gains. As the wily old strategist Mohandas Gandhi pointed out long ago, justice-seekers cannot win by going on the defensive.

Billionaire Warren E. Buffett described the post-seventies era in his 2006 wide-ranging interview with Ben Stein of
The New York Times
. Stein noted that, when unfair tax rates are discussed, some people accuse others of being engaged in class warfare. Buffett replied, “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”
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That was 2006, and Mr. Buffett’s class has multiplied its wins since then. In the “recovery” after the financial sector’s crash in 2008, the wealth gap grew even more. In contrast, Iceland became more equal as it picked up the pieces after its crash and returned to prosperity.

In the United States after 2008, most progressives fell back on lobbying and the electoral arena, clearly the wrong venue. Further, they failed to learn from either Gandhi or our own history: they tried to protect previous gains, instead of going on the offensive
as Americans did after the crash of 1929. After 2008 freedom and equality continued to lose ground in our country.
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The good news is that not all American movements forgot the American legacy of what works when the ballot box does not. The lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) movement staged its first national demonstration at Independence Hall on July 4, 1965. While the movement did selectively use electoral means later on, the activists’ remarkable progress rested mainly on their unstinting use of nonviolent action. This very American movement arguably ranks with the best of the Nordic movements in its use of people-power, and helps us to answer the listener’s question about leverage.

The tactics included sit-ins and street demonstrations. Countless individuals, including me in 1973, undermined the oppression by “coming out of the closet.” The nature of homosexual and gender injustice depends heavily on maintaining a cultural narrative that renders otherness invisible. Coming out, therefore, is an act of noncooperation in the classical Gandhian sense (refusing to participate in an oppressive system), and yet is accessible in everyday settings. Decade after decade since the 1960s, LGBT people have been coming out of the closet despite a near-toxic homophobic atmosphere, courageously performing this action millions of times in one of the longest-running confrontations in history.
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When Republican elected officials desert their party’s stand against gay rights, they routinely acknowledge the power of friends and family coming out of the closet.

As with the civil rights and labor movements in their day of strong nonviolent campaigns, LGBT people experienced imprisonment, injury, and death in their struggle. As Dr. King used to say, “Freedom is not free.” LGBT people challenged oppression
thousands of years old by steadily going on the offensive with multiple nonviolent tactics. They continue to reap stunningly rapid change by taking the offensive. In 2015, both Indiana and Arkansas passed legislation that arguably permitted discrimination against LGBT people; the counterattack by gays and allies was fierce and both states backed off. Some movements at that point might rest on its laurels, but a headline in the
Philadelphia Inquirer
tells a different story: “Gay-rights
push follows
successes.” (Italics mine.)

Gandhi would be proud of the LGBT movement’s strategic smarts. The example is a challenge to other movements: find your own creative nonviolent tactics and take the offensive!
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Conditions are very different now than they were in those days, and some of the changes favor an outcome that leads to greater freedom and equality. Here are five ways that today’s circumstances are quite different from those of the 1960s.

Then, the prevailing order still had enormous legitimacy
. The overall context of the 1960s contained remarkable prosperity and expansion of opportunity. Nearly everyone saw the United States as the best of all possible worlds: “There’s nowhere to go but up.”

This legitimacy was reinforced on the ideological front by “American exceptionalism.” Princeton historian Kevin Cruse has described the religious dimension in detailing “how corporate America created Christian America.”
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Early in his career, Dr. King in his speeches accepted the American Dream and demanded access for African Americans. Only later did he question the economic structure and urge us to rethink our attachment to free-market capitalism. After all, in the 1950s and ’60s, wages were rising, higher education was cheap (and sometimes free), bipartisan problem-solving reigned in Washington. The 1960s ferment was a “revolution of rising expectations.”

In that context, many older and calmer minds believed that the United States had the correct political economic model and that impatient young people just needed some maturity to realize that some piecemeal reforms like a “war on poverty” would take care of our major problems.

In contrast, today’s older people see widespread evidence of stuckness, even general deterioration. Many of their children have dimmer life prospects than they themselves had as young people. It is obvious that the United States is falling in international ratings of equality and freedom and that the policies of both parties are dominated by the economic elite.

Everyone complains about the “gridlock” in Washington and notes that cadidates who promise to “reach across the aisle” fail to do so when they arrive at the House and Senate. Dysfunction increases on a state level as well. A trio of researchers investigated the question: Might increasing political polarization be related to another powerful U.S. trend?

Political scientists Nolan McCarty, Keith T. Poole, and Howard Rosenthal posed that polarization is closely related to economic inequality. For decades after World War II, white male inequality in the United States was relatively low and governance largely bipartisan in spirit. As their research shows, our politics began to polarize at the same time that economic inequality widened.
As the two increased together, growing dysfunctionality plagued both economy and governance. The researchers’ book,
Polarized America
, was published two years before the Great Recession of 2008. Since then, polarization has accelerated along with income inequality. No structures are yet in place to change this trend, but grassroots movements are growing.
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Just as in the Nordic countries in the 1920s and ’30s, the legitimacy of the U.S. political economy is shredding. Already in 2006 billionaire Warren Buffett acknowledged to
The New York Times
that what he called “the class war” had escalated in recent decades. Buffett’s statement reminds me of the boy who said the emperor wears no clothes. Now, because legitimacy has eroded, we can go well beyond the piecemeal reforms yielded in the ’60s that kept the power structure in place.

Then, the economic elite offered plans for amelioration
. President Lyndon Johnson declared a war on poverty. President Richard Nixon promised to clean up the environment. Now the economic elite denies the problem or its magnitude (climate change, lack of opportunity), or avoids mentioning the problem (growing insecurity and poverty). The alienation felt widely in working-class African American neighborhoods is spreading well beyond them, as pressing problems disrupting the lives of nearly all Americans remain unaddressed by the country’s leadership. Each climate-change-induced disaster is, like Hurricane Katrina, California wildfires, and Superstorm Sandy, another event exposing the rot at the top.

Then, there was little economic grassroots organizing for empowerment
. The 1960s remnant of largely bureaucratized cooperatives from the 1930s was nothing like the recent vitality and empowerment described by Gar Alperovitz. Today, support for
equality and freedom has a growing grassroots base, far outstripping the tentative storefront co-ops of the 1970s, with increased skills and confidence to match the track record of success.

We should not count out trade unions in this scenario. Organized labor
is
growing where grassroots approaches are tried and coalitions are built between unions and community groups. Even after all the battering and slanted mass-media coverage of recent decades, a significant part of the public still believes in labor. According to Gallup polls, a majority of people say they generally side with labor in disputes and only 34 percent side with management. Fifty-three percent believe that unions help the economy and only 36 percent believe that they hurt.
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Now our country has a headstart in grassroots activism and organization.

Then, there was little knowledge or understanding of people-power
. Since the 1960s, social scientists have researched the technique of change called “civil resistance,” “people-power,” or “nonviolent struggle.” This technique includes boycotts, demonstrations, occupations, and strikes familiar in both Nordic and American history, plus a hundred other tactics that effect change. A web-based searchable database now comprises more than 1,000 cases of nonviolent action in 200 countries, complete with narratives for each case.
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The campaigns range from local issues to national struggles that brought down military dictatorships, all by nonviolent struggle used when the ballot box did not work.

Along with investigation of tactics have come striking new insights about strategy. The newly burgeoning knowledge changes the playing field for those who want to work for change. A recent award-winning study by political scientists Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephens, for example, found by comparing mass struggles
since 1900 that the movements choosing nonviolent action rather than armed struggle doubled their chances for success.
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The 1960s activists in the United States who argued for (and even experimented with) armed struggle had no access to this modern knowledge bank. Those activists’ often brave and always misplaced emphasis on violence scared allies away and reduced the potential impact of their campaigns.
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Scientific support for the existence of a technique for change
more powerful than either electoral campaigns or armed struggle
encourages grassroots movements who want to go beyond piecemeal reforms to bring about real democracy in the United States. As the growing experience of empowerment at the grassroots links to a macro-strategy for change through nonviolent struggle, the movements of the future will be stronger and more confident, less factionalized and romantic than most were in the 1960s and ’70s.

Now, when people give up on electoral contests that usually result in unaccountable elected officials who follow the direction of the economic elite, they can turn to a wealth of knowledge to create strategically sound, pragmatic, nonviolent campaigns that will create more powerful mass movements for change.

Then, alternative economic designs were either speculative or scary
. Visionary thinking in the 1960s was clouded by the specter of a Soviet Union that pretended to be democratic and socialist and was neither. Piecemeal improvement projects within the design of liberal capitalism then seemed the only sensible option.

Now the Nordic alternative is drawing increasing attention. It is a design with a long track record of delivering freedom and equality well beyond the Anglo-American model. When the alternative is regarded not as a blueprint but as an invitation to create our own design inspired by what works there and in our own experience,
a majority of Americans might find it simply pragmatic rather than scary.

A growing movement pressing for economic democracy will no doubt meet resistance from those who label it “socialistic.” Fortunately, “socialism” is losing its scariness in U.S. political discourse, despite the best efforts of Fox News. While the neoliberal
Economist
magazine has tried to claim the Nordics as “capitalist,”
Inc. Magazine
entitled its laudatory article, “In Norway, Start-ups Say Ja to Socialism.”
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The Pew Research Center surveyed Americans in 2010 on identification with socialism, two years after the 2008 economic crisis spurred a massive barrage of propaganda against socialism from the media and many politicians. In the Pew poll, only 52 percent reacted favorably to the word “capitalism” while 29 percent reacted favorably to the word “socialism. Among eighteen- to thirty-year-olds, support of socialism and capitalism was evenly divided at 43 percent each. Support for socialism is dramatically higher among women, people of color, and people who make less than $30,000 per year. The poll found that interest in socialism has grown despite the propaganda campaign against it.
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