Winner Take All Politics by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson Hacker and Pierson are both professors of political science, the first at Yale, and the other at the University of California at Berkeley. This is their second book together, the other having been “Off Center: The Republican Revolution and the Dismantling of the Welfare State.” As the titles of their books imply, they are highly critical of the conservative direction that the political scene has been going in the United States. Although academics, this is a relatively easy to read work, not weighted down by voluminous references nor by the kind of statistical tables and charts one often finds in non-fiction books by professorial authors. The do cite their sources, and provide just enough detail to make their case. That case is an easy one to make, three years into the worst recession since the Great Depression. Nevertheless, Hacker and Pierson argue convincingly, although their conclusions don’t quite follow from the analysis they present in the first half of the book. Their thesis that politics has slanted economic opportunities toward the very rich over the course of the last forty years or so is quite plausible, yet the evidence they present to tie those historical changes to what is happening today could have benefited from more detail. The Introduction describes what is basically the underlying idea of the entire book. They describe what they call “The Thirty Year War” in which federal policy has been used to ensure that the rewards of economic growth have been hyper-concentrated at the top of the socio-economic scale. For example, since 1979 the top one percent accounted for almost three times as much growth in income as the bottom sixty percent (remember that the benefit to the rich is divided among far fewer individuals than that to the rest of us). They also point out that there is no precedent for this kind of explosion in income among industrialized nations. Along the way, they also address certain common counter-claims that are often made either to deny the growth in income disparity, or to try to diminish it’s perceived importance. For example, it’s not true that our less regulated economy produces more as a result of rewarding the wealthiest investors (a common claim of those who support an unfettered laissez faire economy). We don’t grow any faster than Western Europe, a bastion of economic justice in comparison to us. They also argue against the most common academic explanation of the growth in income disparity- it really isn’t primarily the result of the technological revolution, globalization, or rising educational requirements in employment, since other nations have experienced the same transformations in their technology, trade and employment without experiencing the same effect, nor have populations that have access to better technology, protected markets or higher education done as well as the top one percent. Their answer to the “mystery” of why the United States has experienced such a marked concentration of wealth at the very top of the income ladder is the effect that money has had on the American political process. The book is divided into three parts: Part One “The Puzzling Politics of Winner-Take-All” describes historically what changes have occurred in the American political system since the 1970’s, basically arguing against the position that little has changed economically or that the changes which have occurred have benefited everyone. Three types of evidence are cited to support this: hypeconcentration of income gains at the very top of the scale (and not spread across incomes with moderately more gains at the top), the sustained nature of the concentration of income (it’s been accelerating steadily since at least 1980), and the limited nature of the benefits that trickle down to the rest of us (they take into account not only payroll income but non-payroll benefits such as health care, unemployement insurance, improved quality of workplaces, etc.). Part Two: “The Rise of Winner-Take-All Politics” describes what actually changed on the political scene, starting in the 1970’s. The argue against the more common view that the key political watershed occurred in the late 1960’s with the impact of the counter-culture, the demise of LBJ’s Great Society and the rise of “Nixonland”-style politics of resentment. They claim that focusing primarily on elections and headlines misses the critical element of changes in national policy, esp. as passed by Congress. It was during the administration of Carter, they argue, esp. in the years of 1978 and 1979, which marked the demise of the “Liberal Era” and saw the emergence of what would later be called the “Reagan Revolution”. This took two forms: the defeat of new initiatives that were intended to benefit the working class, and the passage of laws, esp. tax reforms that benefited only the very rich. This, in turn, they ascribe to a new level of organized lobbying. Organized groups, they point out, not only win more elections, they have more influence on what laws get passed afterward. Basically, to summarize several chapters, they claim that business interests organized themselves in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s to roll back the legislation of the previous forty years. They support this by tracing the rise in membership and budgets of key pro-business lobby groups such as the Chamber of Commerce, the National Federation of Independent Business, and of course, the Business Roundtable. In addition, they describe the rising importance of conservative PAC’s and thinktanks in that era, the contribution such PAC’s made to congressional election campaigns, and the change in style of lobbying (they started targeting specific campaigns, mostly moderates and swing-states). All this was new, they say, and enormously successful. Part Three: “”Winner-Take-All Politics” attempts to describe the current situation in light of the historical changes that they outlined before. They do this mostly by comparing the two parties to one another, esp. the changes in the Republican platform that took place after Reagan. They argue against the perception of Reagan as the primary source of political change, describing him as more pragmatist than ultra-conservative, a kind of transition figure. They also argue for the rising importance of political parties as an organized force in politics. Not only do they collect money on a national basis which can then be spent on targeted local campaigns, but they also can afford to hire expensive political consultants who provide highly sophisticated marketing data on what approaches to take with precise types of voters in specific locations. Television and modern polling, they argue, fundamentally changed the nature of running for office. During this same period, corporate and trade PAC’s increased vastly in number and outspent labor by “two or three to one.” Nor are the Democrats blameless. Although they lagged behind the Republicans in terms of fundraising and spending, when they did catch up it was by catering to the interests of corporate and trade-oriented lobbying groups, not consumer or labor-oriented ones. The rise of the Democratic Leadership Council was critical in this regard. These trends continued right through to the Obama administration, in spite of the popular backlash against wall street and in spite of Obama’s careful strategy of trying to win over key moderate Republicans. Their conclusionary chapter, “Beating Winner-Take-All” is the most disappointing. Hacker and Pierson are much better at describing what has gone wrong than they are at making recommendations regarding what to do about it. Nevertheless, their well-documented and clearly written diagnosis of what has gone wrong will be extremely valuable to those who are currently agitating for change. Anyone who may want to develop a vision for the future would do well to carefully read this book. In particular, their admonition to attend to three specific issues- reducing the capacity of elites to block change, promoting greater mass participation in the political process, and developing new groups to organize voters and lobby the Congress, are well taken.
Posted on: Fri, 23 Aug 2013 20:39:05 +0000
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