Chrystia Freeland, you can come home and still say “we”

Chrystia Freeland should be a fabulous catch for the upcoming federal by-election in Toronto. This time, Canada’s Liberal Party—the shoppers' party—has landed a young, public intellectual with a growing reputation in Washington, New York, and London. Why would a cosmopolitan problem-solver, at the height of her career, want to represent old Rosedale as a member of the oldest Liberal machine in the Western World? To my mind, that’s the question.  

To pundits, however, and, apparently, to Freeland this morning, the question now is whether she can talk enthusiastically as a proud Canadian.

Blogging in Maclean’s Magazine, Paul Wells spots trouble in this paragraph Freeland penned just last week in reviewing Obama’s speech on the economy:

“Obama pointed to some of the familiar political drivers of this shift — weaker unions and tax cuts at the top. But, to his credit, he also noted the structural factors — in particular, technological change and globalization — that have helped hollow out the middle class. These are the heart of the problem, because they are both largely positive and hard to change. We can’t stop them, and most of us don’t want to — but we surely do want to reverse their devastating consequences for the middle class.”

The problem, clearly, isn’t partisan. Indeed, at its heart are good things worth preserving: technology and globalization. Is Freeland too realistic, too capitalistic, and too committed to the liberal economic values of the past? No. Of course not.

Rather, Freeland used: “we” and “us” when referring to the economic challenge of our time. How many times has she done this before? Will this issue carry along on hundreds of little small legs?

Michael Ignatieff, the last failed Liberal import, got in trouble using the term “we” when he was addressing Americans for unique and arguable reasons.

He’d made a living as a writer singing the virtues of Canadian nationalism and Canada’s separateness from the US. Most important, he used “we” to promote American jingoism and war in Iraq. There was no way to pretend that he was trying to or even thinking about Canadians when he waved the flag of aggressive American Exceptionalism.

Conversely, there was nothing in what Freeland expressed that was exclusively American. Surely, a majority of voters in Rosedale would agree that what she said applies to Canada’s high wage economy as well. Furthermore, Canadians increasingly accept that they also have a huge stake in a balanced US economic recovery.

It’s disappointing, therefore, to read Freeland’s newborn nationalism in her op-ed piece The path leading to middle-class Prosperity in this morning’s Globe and Mail:

“At a time when the rest of the world is struggling to live with one of the human consequences of globalization – mass immigration – Canada is a model for how to make a multicultural, multilingual community really work. We can do the same when it comes to ensuring middle class prosperity in the 21st century. Indeed, we are much better at this than the United States, where income inequality has become an economically and socially devastating chasm. We can’t let that happen to us.”

There’s a smugness and simplicity in that statement, and it belies the energy, passion, and optimism that she has displayed in the past about the US and the West’s ability to restore shared prosperity.

Freeland doesn’t have to pander to anti-Americans to be a successful Canadian politician in a renewed North American economy.

The "Plutocrats" and the US election

This Thursday, party insiders will elect China’s new political leadership. Tomorrow, millions of Americans—after standing in lineups for hours—will elect theirs.

China is becoming the world’s first modern superpower plutocracy. The United States remains a far better place for the super-rich to live, and express themselves. But, its democracy is still more powerful than its pushy "plutocrats."

Whichever way it tips, the 2012 US presidential election can already be celebrated as a democratic success: next to nothing has been excluded from discussion; religion, race, region, family background, and relative privilege haven’t seriously handicapped either campaign—and the influence of a "plutocratic class" hasn’t been decisive either.

Indeed, the interests of surging minorities, workers, radical pensioners, and numerous value issues of little consequence to the pocket books of the rich have dominated the desperate final appeals for votes.

As a 50-50 election, with $billions to help partisans shout out their messages and with the voices of more independent commercial and amateur opinion makers than ever before, it's been wonderful for those who collect American faux pas. Nevertheless, history will probably note that the two national parties were especially effective as inclusive, competitive political organizations.

In the closest swing states, their organizations will likely get out two-thirds of eligible voters, as they did in 2008.

Most billionaires favor the Republican Party, but don’t run it; and the Democrats found plenty of money and talent people elsewhere.

As Chrystia Freeland brilliantly reminds us in her book Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else, self-esteem and political ambition grow with the accumulation of great wealth.

However, the titans who’d like to be called "plutocrats" shouldn’t take themselves too seriously. Freeland’s thesis is essentially cautionary: entrenched wealth ultimately is self-serving, will eventually compromise social and economic mobility, and, thereby, enfeeble both America’s democracy and economic vitality—but we’re not there yet.

A working plutocracy—as opposed to a failed democracy—must secure internal cohesion among the rich and have enough talent and time away from the office to run Washington, consciously and intelligently, on behalf of their interests.

Running the American polity, with its free press, secret ballot, independent courts, and dynamic regional differences, is not the same as running one of Disneyworld’s company towns or a high-tech valley in California. Along with a talent for money, the successful plutocrat must have a talent for politics—for picking political fronts that can get elected, and for staffing a political elite that can finesse the interests of the most powerful in each of the country’s contending regions.

The best defense for democrats, however, is not to count on their incompetence. Maintaining an open, dynamic American federation, two ambitious national political parties are still the surest ways to keep the plutocrats at bay.

Leadership: please, leave the spin for later

Thanks to popular theories of participatory management, our bloated communications bureaucracies, and film footage of FDR and Churchill’s best performances, it’s now accepted that great leadership and great communication roll-outs go together.

“Grand bargain(s)” on the euro zone and the US federal deficit, actions to reduce escalating health care costs and adapt to the aging Baby Boom long ago stopped being technical or even ethical mysteries.

At a moment less dangerous for Europe than today, Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker of Luxembourg, the chairman of euro zone finance ministers, explained: “We all know what needs to be done, but we do not know how to get re-elected after that.”

Click on: www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/international-business/european-business/latvia-shows-how-europe-can-save-itself/article4240590/

Inaction and endless in-camera meetings, in large part, can be blamed on a fair-weather illusion: Leaders can always have a persuasive explanation—a winning communications plan—when they make big decisions.

Responsible leaders—at least in our representative democracies—needn’t feel so fettered. They are assigned the responsibility of making hard decisions—on time—and answering later to the people. That’s the sequence of events that allows democracies to keep up, and often surpass, the pace of decision-making in dictatorships.

Good politicians ultimately need to be good in debate. Canada’s Stephen Harper, for instance, will eventually have to defend his reforms on pensions, unemployment assistance, and environmental regulation. Next year, Obama and Congress will have to explain why they finally had to mess with George Bush’s temporary tax regime.

However, sensitive, democratic, humble, or arrogant leaders needn’t know exactly how to win all the arguments before taking action. Furthermore, often the facts speak for themselves or are so complicated and so susceptible to interpretation that only results will settle the matter.

All the issues raised above can be settled to the ultimate satisfaction of the public at large. Yet, leaders can’t simplify and broker their responses enough that they can be sure that reasonable people will understand and like what’s being done, right off the bat.

The Tea Party’s ancient grievance

Latest gambit in the branding business is the suggestion that Democrats are “reactionaries” and Republicans are “radicals.” Supposedly, the core business of Democrats is to uphold the entitlement programs legislated over the last seventy years and the defining purpose of Republicans is to re-invent America according to the Constitution of 1787. These two roughly equivalent pejorative terms leave reasonable people outside of the debate.

However, the credibility of this semantic exercise—switching their historic accusations of one another—is over-run by the facts.

For one thing, today’s Republican Party resurgence—the element in its base that gives it its fresh energy—has no comprehensive ideological point of view and, emotionally, predates the 20th century. The Tea Party isn’t radical, it’s mom and apple pie sectarian.

Chrystia Freeland neatly summed up a careful study by three Harvard political scientists entitled “The Tea Party and Remaking of Republican Conservatism.”

“The central tension for the Tea Party grassroots isn’t between the Big Brother state and the freedom-loving individual, or between inefficient government spending and effective free markets. Instead, the researchers found that the fundamental distinction for Tea Partiers is not state versus individual, it is the division of their country into “workers” versus “people who don’t work.”

Click on: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/commentary/chrystia-freeland/the-tea-party-versus-the-freeloaders/article2090164/

Freedland notes that Tea Party followers like their entitlements but don’t like their tax dollars going to young “freeloaders.” The immigration issue, she notes generously, isn’t race-based, “it is about (the) deserving, income-earning citizen and unauthorized, foreign freeloader.”

What other terms do populists ever use to define the “other”?

 Radicalism is a way of thinking. How can you think your way into believing that a $4 trillion dollar debt problem was created solely by spending on free loaders and illegal immigrants? Do they think throwing in undeserving corporate subsidies and open-ended home mortgage subsidies would close the circle?

Yes, there is something radical about the resurgence within the Republican Party—a child’s insistence that everyone else is the problem.

Has American capitalism abandoned the middle class?

Sometimes a factoid or two illuminates.

Chrystia Freeland, writer at large for Reuters, brought a few to bear on the seeming lethargy of the political system toward high unemployment and the seeming preoccupation of the voices of business for cutting deficits rather than pursuing domestic economic growth. Don’t they know they need the middle class?

In the new global economy, Freeland reports, big business may, in fact, be able to thrive without mass affluence in America: 

“Perhaps U.S. business is learning to get by just fine, thank you, without middle-class U.S. consumers. And while that may be good news for chief executives and shareholders, it could be the beginning of a new and socially wrenching political logic that leaves the great American middle behind.

Wall Street, which is paid for smarts, not sentiment, has this figured out. In a newspaper interview earlier this month, Robert C. Doll, chief equity strategist at BlackRock, the largest money manager in the world, pointed out that the fortunes of U.S. companies and the fortunes of the country as a whole were diverging: ‘The U.S. stock market and the U.S. economy are increasingly different animals.’”

Click on: http://blogs.reuters.com/chrystia-freeland/2011/06/10/is-u-s-business-abandoning-the-middle-class

The factoids: since the Great Recession, leading newspapers have published more than three times more stories on the federal budget than on unemployment; the Dow is up 85%; and, according to investment strategist Robert Doll, 70% of the future incremental earnings of S&P 500 companies will come from outside the United States.

Are economic policy and public attitudes being distorted by these hard men and their hard Wall Street facts? Is American national policy tied to the Fortune 500 and now being towed off shore? Old Tories and socialists have long worried about multinational capitalism and its cosmopolitan (rather than mainstream American) loyalties. Freeland adds fuel to their concerns. However, no one should wait for a change of heart in Manhattan or a radical turning away from big business to solve today’s dangerous economic malaise.

Neither capitalists nor busy city editors are very good at complex economic issues. Once the recession bottomed out and high unemployment became chronic, their eyes turned to the next big thing on the move—souring deficits and debt. It may be shameful and short-sighted, but news about broken families and high school dropouts can’t compete with warnings about state and national bankruptcy.

It wouldn’t hurt if Robert Doll temporized his macho vision of booming US multinationals partying off the shore of a stagnant American middle-class America. The notion that global capitalism will thrive, with or without a prosperous outward-looking America (upholding the rules of open trade and its currency, protecting sea lanes, and helping keep the peace) is both parasitical and naive.

In any event, there are lots of other reasons to be optimistic or pessimistic about the competence of American governing institutions. Business leaders can have some influence in bolstering sound thinking and warning people away from the extremes. However, historically these leaders have hardly been essential; some wise and very foolish things by Democrats and Republicans have been undertaken largely without their help.