by Ralph Nader
We oppose all corporate subsidies. . . . So we also agree on unconstitutional wars, the Patriot Act, and the Fed run amuck. . . . Finally, I prefer the First Amendment to having the government control advertising to kids, adults or pets.
As a matter of fact, I think the alliance you are seeking is not between free market conservatives/libertarians and progressives, but between populist conservatives and progressives. There is a lot in common.4
Credit Ed Crane for putting a lot of judgments in a few short sentences. Clearly, we have chicken or egg differences about whether it is government or organized business that is largely the prime initiating culprit. Even so, it might be worthwhile to say a little more about the validity of his arguments.
On many planes the government is a corporate government. At or around the helms of the most powerful departments and agencies reign high officials right out of the business establishment or very close to it. Think of the Treasury Department, the Department of Defense, the Department of Commerce, and the Department of the Interior as evidence. Huge business lobbies know the government is the many-splendored provider of corporate welfare and enormous tax escapes, while showing a willingness to adopt weak, under-funded regulations and offering huge contracts. The corporations are the seekers. Is it permissible to conclude that it’s mostly corporatism, not the state, that is responsible for the big-ticket items? Even concerning unconstitutional wars, would the White House have invaded Iraq if the defense and related industries seriously objected as corporate citizens, instead of funding neocons and silently smacking their lips? Corporations have their own ideological imperatives; governments, such as ours, are not of themselves very ideologically driven. Nevertheless, neither the government, which is full of corporate executives on leave in government positions, nor its elected members, who take campaign cash from corporate PACs, are innocent. They know very well what agenda they’re driving. Still, if Mr. Crane says that once the honeypot is spotted or the gold rush begins, then the state provides the goodies, he is right. But we can ask from our side: Who started the merry-go-round, spotted the honeypot, and led the prospectors?
As for his reference to Freddie and Fannie, true, these were started by the federal government, but with the hearty and politically hefty approval of the home builders and realtors. Then, years later, they were privatized with public shareholders on the New York Stock Exchange and ended by developing a legendary lobbying muscle over Congress, possessed of all the usual indicia of big companies: stock options, high executive pay based on cooking the books, and every customary behavior and incentive known to Wall Street, right down to powerless investors. Where else could the giant Wall Street banks, that fostered by far most of the risky debt, find such congenial and compatible fall guys for their toxic paper during the subprime mortgage mania? Sure, Fannie and Freddie had an implied backup by the federal government. But so did the Wall Street banks, as we found out in 2008–2009.
Very little is done in Washington, including formulating many but not all the regulations that affect corporations, that is not rewarding to or watered down by Big Business and its lobbyists, many of whom come from congressional or executive branch positions to cash in their know-how and know-who. Obviously, the moment taxpayer debt became an endless magnet for exploitation while the bankers’ Federal Reserve was printing money and, now, lending massive sums to the major banks for near zero interest, it could be said that Wall Street had corrupted Washington, making it the possessor of a deficit-driving accounts receivable fund as well as being a last-resort bailout servant. Can anyone think the state started this dynamic? Business tied to greed and power misbehaved long before Big Government started, all the way back to the time when the principal activity and personnel of the federal government were centered on delivering the mail. By the way, the mail service was another early and productive subsidy to business.
In bringing up unconstitutional wars, the PATRIOT Act, and the Fed, in bringing these up, Mr. Crane is iterating a long-standing area of concurrence between Left and Right, but one from which no operating convergence has emerged to combat these seminal ongoing violations and aggravations of what he would call our constitutional republic. Even though these areas of compatibility exist, there is still no move by either side for convergence, though at least the Cato Institute does invite all sides to their luncheon debates and, contrary to strict free market dogma, proves that there is such a thing as a free lunch.
Crane’s suggestion that the alliance sought is not with free market conservatives and libertarians but with populist conservatives is an idea that has deep roots, which I’ll explore in the next chapter. Suffice it to say that our differences still allow for overlaps, such as the three major examples given by Mr. Crane.
To add to the confusion about the categories, Grover Norquist told me that “the Populist Right likes the PATRIOT Act,” and they like public “funding of their favorite baseball stadium.” Even so, he allowed that “there are some very real and large areas where principled conservatives and libertarians and progressive critics of corporate statism can work together. He listed “civil liberties . . . the Patriot Act, opposition to bailouts of Wall Street, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, etc., government contracting abuses (lack of transparency) and no government funding of baseball/football parks.”
As noted, though, often certain basic differences between Left and Right outlooks seem to freeze conservatives, who will not work with liberals, even when there is an avowed similarity of interest concerning certain issues. The same is true for many liberal activists and writers.
Ninth, LC convergence is nobody’s top priority or not one that is weighty enough to elicit the effort needed to secure staff, meet, plan, and iron out how far the convergence will go when the heat starts or how to respond when the details start filling in and stumbling blocks arise. It is just so much easier to devote careers to working with like-minded people from the get-go, folks who do not have the baggage of still being your adversaries on many other directions. Intuitively, a conservative sees that as sufficient reason to think twice. Moreover, their work cup is always full.
Tenth, incipient convergent rebellions get crushed, deferred, or punished by their respective leaders. This happened in 2011 to rank-and-file House Republicans and Democrats who viewed President Obama’s attack on Libya to be clearly unconstitutional. They were certainly accurate in that conclusion. Mr. Obama asked for neither a declaration of war nor a war resolution; he did not obey the existing 1973 War Resolution Act nor receive an authorization or appropriation of funds for the military action’s costs. This bipartisan alliance wanted a vote on a resolution by Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) requiring the president to withdraw from the Libya operation within fifteen days.
The Kucinich resolution had surprising support, as reported by the press, at the closed-door House Republican Caucus meeting in June 2011. Alarmed, the Republican leaders quickly moved to squelch the resistance, knowing, of course, that the Democratic leaders would not object to their stopping it. A leader of the rebellion, Republican Walter Jones, had his seat on the House Armed Services Committee taken away.
The Fate of Convinced Conveners
Bruce Fein, a prominent, Harvard-educated, constitutional lawyer who had been a deputy assistant attorney general in the Reagan administration, is the ultimate converger. Without any agenda, he tirelessly promotes the due process rule of law and constitutional adherence that preserve the checks and balances in the federal government. For years he has been litigating, writing, and authoring materials on these themes (see http://www.intelcommission.org). As a volunteer adviser to both Republicans and Democrats in Congress, Fein has testified more than two hundred times before congressional committees. Yet, instead of becoming more influential, he has been increasingly marginalized except for his pro bono representation of the father of Edward Snowden in mid-2013. Many of his compelling op-eds and letters to the editor pile up largely unpublished. I have read a number of these responses to contrary editorials or op
inion pieces. They are to the point—maybe too much to the point. Recently, his newly formed convergent nonprofit, the National Commission on Intelligence and Foreign Wars, has been unsuccessfully asking for funds from like-minded affluent individuals, who apparently imagine retaliations if they became involved with such collaborations.
Unlike Fein, neocons like Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and Douglas Feith, who were wrong legally, morally, and strategically on brutally invading Iraq, and wrong on the costly, spreading imperial aggressions of the US government under both parties, are on the paid lecture trail, receive lucrative book deals, and are welcomed on the op-ed pages of the New York Times and Washington Post. One of them, John Bolton, whose war mongering and State Department mischief placed him at odds with his superior, Secretary Colin Powell (who once told me he could not stand Bolton’s fatuous belligerence), got different op-eds in the Times and the Post on the same day—an unheard of coterminous acceptance.
Anyone in a position of some power who might be prone to pursue converging initiatives against the grain will look over such contrasts as that between Bolton and Fein and do a mental cost-benefit calculation that can indispose them to follow such initiatives. This is especially true when most of the media, programmed to limit their attention to covering clashing antagonists who are perceived as having power, rarely see start-up convergences as worthy of reporting to their audiences and readership around the country. Thus, seeds of convergence, no matter how momentous and no matter if they are planted right on Capitol Hill, have less chance of sprouting.
Why Liberals Often Fight Shy of Convergence
The liberal think tanks and advocacy groups are not without their own inhibitions. They have their reasons or excuses, ones that overlap with the foregoing list, for thinking twice. Some parallel those of their conservative counterparts: peer pressure against insidious associations with antagonistic groups and concern over their funders and key allies. The latter point may surprise readers, but bear in mind that liberal organizations receive funding from many foundations with corporate-connected boards of directors or from large donors, who may, for instance, like environmental causes but not any wayward alliances on tax loopholes, trade policies, specific foreign policies, investor power, corporate subsidies, or corporate crimes.
Small donors mainly expect a consistency of opposition to “darker forces” and might not find convergence to their taste either. After all, don’t the fundraising letters they receive feed on that expectation? Other liberal groups have one-issue orientations, with members who expect adherence to that one issue only. On the other hand, single-issue groups, such as opponents of nuclear power, can more easily converge with conservative organizations, which share their focus—ones, for instance, that are opposed to government subsidies and guarantees, a convergence we saw took place in the anti–Breeder Reactor victory. Moreover, there are liberal writers who may agree with some convergence but reject it overall as a bad strategy because they do not want to give any credibility whatsoever to the ad hoc convergent partners from the Right.
Routes to Convergence
I’ve observed at close hand these restraints over the years and have tried, with limited success, to overcome some of them by urging that the overall reform must be kept in mind. I tell possible joiners of the convergence movement that there is no need to compromise or weaken their position. To create a convergence that will work and endure, at the onset those from the Left should have a take-us-or-leave-us stance, indicating they are not ready to compromise their principles but will work with any good-faith conservative who shares this one goal. This is what the other, conservative side would want for themselves as well.
Ask the Cato Institute’s willing, veteran, free market conservative/libertarian Ed Crane about prospects for convergence, and he replies, “Alas, it ain’t happening.” What Mr. Crane is reflecting is the fundamental polarization between two political-civic forces arrayed against each other over perceived contrasting public and moral philosophies about how the world should conduct itself from the top all the way down to communities and neighborhoods. The worldviews have been bundled into starkly contrary images that come out of our educational, literary, economic, and political systems. Crane seems to recognize that any alliances based on avoiding these rigid binary mentalities can deplete customary emotional mentalities, unsettle strong views, and upset a person’s balance, which can only be maintained by adherence to the images.
The escape from this constricting matrix of demarcation can possibly be found in an organizational change. Take staff and resources from existing multi-issue convergers, which have agreed to merge their strength, and move them to a separate new organization or task force where the convergent mission is their only one. This separation, this spinoff, would help the staff shed many of the inhibitions that keep convergence from happening. A similar organizational approach would serve donors who wish to start or support new groups “without the baggage” of old Left-Right conflicts.
Even though corporate welfare has been denounced by the Progressive Policy Institute, Common Cause, Heritage, and Cato—in detail and more than once—individually these groups have gone nowhere because their focus is not on that issue. Were they to join resources, apply for additional ones, and start a new advocacy entity devoted singularly to opposing and discrediting this massive redistribution of taxpayer monies, forces would be set in motion toward making this a compelling subject that neither the lawmakers, nor the candidates, nor the media could ignore. The unusual credibility of this convergence would likely make this effort quite successful.
Justice O’Connor and Convergence
One of my favorite examples of convergence begins with the continual passion (going for twenty-one years) on behalf of legal services for the needy being pursued by Supreme Court justice and Reagan appointee Sandra Day O’Connor. Years ago, the speeches and writings of this widely and highly regarded conservative jurist astonished me. Now that I know more of conservative philosophy and its own respect for due process and rule of law, I am no longer so astonished. But still, her cutting so clearly through the fog of the power structure that many conservatives allow to mar their public image is still an eyebrow raiser.
Here is Justice O’Connor, speaking for herself before the annual meeting of the American Bar Association in 1991:
While lawyers have much we can be proud of, we also have a great deal to be ashamed of in terms of how we are responding to the needs of people who can’t afford to pay for our services. . . . There has probably never been a wider gulf between the need for legal services and the availability of legal services. . . . Every day, all over the country, people lose their homes or apartments when the law says they should keep them, and people can’t feed their children when the law says they should be able to feed them. People don’t know the rights they have; even if they know the rights they have, they don’t know how to enforce them. And it all has one cause—many people desperately need legal services, but can’t afford to pay.5
She said that she found that “nearly one quarter of all poor people each year have a civil legal problem deserving a lawyer’s attention. But publicly funded attorneys can handle only twelve percent of the load. According to the ABA, eighty percent of poor people’s civil legal needs go unmet.”6 That amounts to tens of millions of Americans. Her basic message, grounded in numerous studies, is that when lawyers represent these clients or when they can educate people about how they can invoke the law themselves, far fewer Americans would be evicted from their homes, fewer families would go hungry, fewer people in need would be denied benefits (like Medicaid), and fewer consumers would be gouged.
Justice O’Connor put forth three proposals. First make mandatory law school clinical programs to provide legal services for the poor under the supervision of professors.
Second, educate the potential clients themselves. “Often,” O’Connor said, “knowing where to go, who to talk to, and which documents to bring will enable someone to solve their
problem without the assistance of an attorney.” She added, “But our legislation has outpaced our education. . . . This is the kind of project local bar associations are well-placed to organize.”7
Third, she strongly urged that “a significant percentage of the more than 750,000 practicing lawyers [now more than a million] take on pro bono work as a regular part of their practice.”8
The Justice found the absence of legal services to be shocking, telling her audience of attorneys that “the legal needs of poor people involve the most basic necessities of life, needs like food and shelter.” Legal services are even more needed at the present time, with more poor families and more homeowners in the midst of foreclosures.
Progressive jurists and lawyers have long stressed the need for free legal services for the deprived. That is why public defender groups were established early in the twentieth century, and in the sixties the federal Legal Services Corporation was created. It now retains four thousand attorneys to serve the poor. These legal service initiatives were distinctly liberal creations, while later gaining the support, for example, of the American Bar Association as a result of the persuasiveness of Edgar and Jean Cahn, then young progressive graduates of Yale Law School, who drafted the original legislation.
So when conservative Justice O’Connor encouraged a movement to greatly expand pro bono legal services, an opportunity for convergence sprang forth, which could be especially nourished after her retirement from the Supreme Court in 2006. She was freer to advocate this cause more persistently.
A national organization is needed to activate the bar associations, to educate potential clients, and to get more of the 203 law schools in the country to require a place in the curriculum for pro bono legal services.
When Justice William Brennan retired, his scores of law clerks, turned successful lawyers, established the influential Brennan Center at New York University Law School, now with a multimillion-dollar annual budget. Justice O’Connor has a sizeable group of former clerks and supporters in conservative circles around the country who believe in the supremacy of civic values over parochial economic gain in this important area and who could start an O’Connor Center.
