Can democracy survive global capitalism?

Robert Kuttner

Book - 2018

"'Democracies govern nations, while global capitalism runs the world. Robert Kuttner provides a clear-eyed, intellectually riveting account of how the inevitable tensions between the two have fueled neofascist nationalism here and abroad, and why the response must be a new progressive populism rooted in democracy and social justice. Timely and compelling.'--Robert B. Reich. In the past few decades, the wages of most workers have stagnated, even as productivity increased. Social supports have been cut, while corporations have achieved record profits. Downward mobility has produced political backlash. What is going on? [This book] argues that neither trade nor immigration nor technological change is responsible for the harm to ...workers' prospects. According to Robert Kuttner, global capitalism is to blame. By limiting workers' rights, liberating bankers, allowing corporations to evade taxation, and preventing nations from ensuring economic security, raw capitalism strikes at the very foundation of a healthy democracy. The resurgence of predatory capitalism was not inevitable. After the Great Depression, the U.S. government harnessed capitalism to democracy. Under Roosevelt's New Deal, labor unions were legalized and capital regulated. Well into the 1950s and '60s, the Western world combined a thriving economy with a secure and growing middle class. Beginning in the 1970s, as deregulated capitalism regained the upper hand, elites began to dominate politics once again; policy reversals followed. The inequality and instability that ensued would eventually, in 2016, cause disillusioned voters to support far-right faux populism. Is today's poisonous alliance of reckless finance and ultra-nationalism inevitable? Or can we find the political will to make capitalism serve democracy, and not the other way around? Charting a plan for bold action based on political precedent, [this book] is essential reading for anyone eager to reverse the decline of democracy in the West."--Dust jacket.

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Subjects
Published
New York : W. W. Norton & Company [2018]
Language
English
Main Author
Robert Kuttner (author)
Edition
First Edition
Physical Description
xxii, 359 pages ; 25 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN
9780393609936
  • Preface
  • 1. A Song of Angry Men
  • 2. A Vulnerable Miracle
  • 3. The Rise and Fall of Democratic Globalism
  • 4. The Liberation of Finance
  • 5. The Global Assault on Labor
  • 6. Europe's Broken Social Contract
  • 7. The Disgrace of the Center Left
  • 8. Trading Away a Decent Economy
  • 9. Taxes and the Corporate State
  • 10. Governing Global Capitalism
  • 11. Liberalism, Populism, Fascism
  • 12. The Road from Here
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • Index
Review by New York Times Review

LAST STORIES, by William Trevor. (Viking, $26.) The great Irish writer, who died in 2016 at the age of 88, captured turning points in individual lives with powerful slyness. This seemingly quiet but ultimately volcanic collection is his final gift to us, and it is filled with plots sprung from human feeling. FASCISM: A Warning, by Madeleine Albright with Bill Woodward. (Harper/HarperCollins, $27.99.) Albright draws on her long experience in government service and as an educator to warn about a new rise of fascism around the world. She is hopeful that this threat can be overcome, but only, she says, if we recognize history's lessons and never take democracy for granted. MOTHERHOOD, by Sheila Heti. (Holt, $27.) The narrator of Heti's provocative new novel, a childless writer in her late 30s - like Heti herself - is preoccupied with a single question: whether to have a child. Her dilemma prompts her to consult friends, psychics, her conscience and a version of the I Ching. INTO THE RAGING SEA: Thirty-Three Mariners, One Megastorm, and the Sinking of the El Faro, by Rachel Slade. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $27.99.) Pieced together from texts, emails and black box recordings, this is a tense, moment-by-moment account of the 2015 sinking of the cargo ship El Faro during Hurricane Joaquin. SEE WHAT CAN BE DONE: Essays, Criticism, and Commentary, by Lorrie Moore. (Knopf, $29.95.) The first essay collection by this gifted fiction writer features incisive pieces about topics like Alice Munro, John Cheever, "The Wire," Dawn Powell and Don DeLillo, all of it subject to Moore's usual loving attention and quirky perspective. CAN DEMOCRACY SURVIVE GLOBAL CAPITALISM? by Robert Kuttner. (Norton, $27.95.) Kuttner returns to the argument he's been making with increasing alarm for the past three decades: Countries need to have autonomy to control their economies, otherwise they'll be crushed by the whims of the free market. THE GIRL WHO SMILED BEADS: A Story Of War and What Comes After, by Clemantine Wamariya and Elizabeth Weil. (Crown, $26.) As a 6-year-old refugee of the Rwandan genocide, Wamariya crisscrossed Africa with her sister, enduring poverty and violence. She recounts her path to America lyrically and analytically. AND NOW WE HAVE EVERYTHING: On Motherhood Before I Was Ready, by Meaghan O'Connell. (Little, Brown, $26.) This honest, neurotic, searingly funny memoir of pregnancy and childbirth is a welcome antidote in the panicked-expectant-mothers canon - though its gripping narrative will appeal to nonparents, too. WHITE HOUSES, by Amy Bloom. (Random House, $27.) A psychologically astute novel that celebrates the intimate relationship of Eleanor Roosevelt and the A.P. reporter Lorena Hickok. The full reviews of these and other recent books are on the web: nytimes.com/books

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 30, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review

Last year's explosive interviews with former presidential adviser Steve Bannon brought liberal journalist and analyst Kuttner (Debtor's Prison, 2013) into the spotlight. Here he explores the circumstances that enabled an alt-right provocateur like Bannon to become a White House insider. His goal is to connect the dots between the rise of right-wing populism and the fall of a social contract that once served the broad citizenry in Western democracies, and his target is the role of global capitalism in that process. Kuttner argues that while the managed capitalism put into place after WWII could coexist with democratic institutions, unfettered global finance capitalism cannot. Using historical synthesis and reporting, he explores how its resurgence captured the political process and cut off policy approaches that could have protected the interests of workers and nations, leading to disillusionment with political institutions and the rise of ideological extremes. Kuttner's call to recognize and fight this status quo doesn't come with easy solutions, but it will inspire readers to think deeply about our complex and troubling times.--Jorgensen, Sara Copyright 2018 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Americans still struggling to comprehend the election of President Trump will find American Prospect coeditor Kuttner's cogent analysis illuminating. His critique of the Clinton campaign, which echoes and expands on Mark Lilla's controversial New York Times op-ed "The End of Identity Liberalism," is woven into a much broader survey of recent trends-both national and international-that have put liberal democracy in retreat across the world. Kuttner links that development, and the related potential resurgence of fascism, to globalization, which writers such as Thomas Friedman generally view as an unmitigated good. The reality, as Kuttner sees it, is that the "deregulation of constraints on transnational movements of money, products, service and labor" changes "the political distribution of power domestically" and increases the "influence of elites" who support globalization. He builds his case methodically and in a manner accessible to lay readers without a background in economics, looking at how tighter governmental controls impacted powerful financial institutions over the past century. However, even those who share his perspective may not necessarily share his optimism that the Democrats will choose a progressive standard-bearer in 2020, or that such a candidate would prevail against Trump's brand of populism. As such, Kuttner's analysis is thought-provoking but not fully convincing. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review

Democracy and the world's dominant economic system are at loggerheads. So argues American Prospect co-founder Kuttner (Debtors' Prison: The Politics of Austerity Versus Possibility, 2013, etc.) in this vigorous critique.The short answer to the titular question iswell, maybe, but probably not. By the author's account, the great successes of postwar capitalism were precisely those that expanded the civil and human rights and material well-being of ordinary people, the post-New Deal promise that labor would have a voice and that the social contract would allow access to health, education, and other public goods, all of which he describes as "a system of political economy, whose rules were drastically different from the usual rules of capitalism." Those "usual rules," Hobbesian and dog-eat-dog, have generated ever more inequality even as the financial system becomes both more internationalized and less regulated. At the same time, the "equalizing mechanisms" that allow children from poorer families to participate in the social system and become adults with at least some chance of success have become vastly weaker. These are all the result of not economic but political choices, Kuttner insists; as he writes, "nothing in the structure of the late-twentieth-century economy compelled a reversion to an unregulated nineteenth-century market," but that, effectively, is where we are. The author harbors no hope that the faux populism of Trump will yield any improvements for the 99 percent, and he suggests that even the most progressive of corporations are pleased with the deregulatory mood that reigns today, with the result that any chance of resuscitating democracy will require the involvement of "empowered citizens." To that end, he closes with a series of prescriptions for reform, including establishing programs for "green infrastructure on a serious scale" and re-establishing regulatory boundaries on the market.Capitalism as we know it today is anti-democraticand not likely to relinquish power without a fight. A useful resource for setting agendas. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.