Thoughts on, or around, campaign finance

On 21 January, I was still too absorbed by the Haitian earthquake to really pay too much attention to the Supreme Court decision rejecting corporate campaign finance contribution limits. While I am by no means a specialist in domestic law or politics, I have to say that the implications of the decision really worry me.

Some observers have claimed that the case marks the beginning of an unprecedented embedding of corporate America within the apparatus of the state. Certainly, it looks that way. But just as certainly, the fiction of the American political system – or really any strong state at all – as ever having functioned independently of the industrial complex it tames, nurtures, and protects, is just that: a fiction. As Alice Amsden has noted elsewhere, America cultivates a certain founding myth, stemming from the Jeffersonian vision of a nation of smallholders and diffuse economic power, that is totally at odds with the Hamiltonian strategy of government-infused big-business development that became our reality. This topic resonates with me, as someone concerned with the ways in which industry may condition the strength and legitimacy of the state – and, in the cases that I study in conflict-affected areas of the world, determine the realtionship between the state and its challengers.

The power and legitimacy of the modern state on the one hand, and the breadth and depth of economic industrialization on the other, can be said to develop in tandem. This often occurs in the crucible of war, which in puts strain on public finances and generates a state-industry mutualism. And it isn’t new. Even in what W.W. Rostow termed the “pre-conditions for takeoff” in Western Europe, there existed a growing philosophical alliance between the increasingly powerful and centralized absolutist monarchies on the one hand, and the nascent propensity to leverage scientific knowledge for technological applications. Francis Bacon asserted that, “…the true and lawful goal of the sciences is none other than this: that human life be endowed with new discoveries and powers.” His contemporary and countryman, James I of England declared that, “[t]he state of monarchy is the supremest thing upon earth: for kings are not only God's Lieutenants upon earth, and sit upon God's throne, but even by God himself they are called Gods.” Nor were these two notions merely concomitant, but found their union in the writing of Thomas Hobbes, that devotee of causal materialism who sought to harness scientific knowledge of the social realm to better govern it – and thus avoid the much trumpeted “war, as of every man, against every man” that our natures would surely bring upon us otherwise. In developing this ideology, Hobbes paved the way for future social engineers like Saint-Simon.

The campaign finance decision is particularly troubling because it seems to have the potential to accelerate an already run-away social process of wealth accumulation. Capital has a tendency to concentrate – “cumulative causation” Gunnar Myrdal called it. It is the reason we have cities. It is the reason we have regional competitive advantage. It is the reason we have disparities between rich and poor, North and South, the developed and developing worlds. To a certain extent, and for all the reasons that Alfred Marshall enumerated, it is a good thing. But as we all know, labor is not as fleet of foot as capital, nor as maleable. Labor must be cultivated and it can be susceptible to emotional and social crisis. And labor is, lest we forget, real people who desire real, dignified work. At the risk of sounding downright Marxian, labor, not capital, is the end of economics. And government, elected by majority vote, has always served as a mechanism for bringing the two back into line with one another, educating the workforce, regulating capital markets, preventing exploitation, and redistributing wealth.

That last function is increasing important in a society in with the richest 20% of the population hold over 85% of the private wealth – a statistic that most Americans do not approve of (if they even know). Moreover, economists have realized for over half a century (since Kuznets) that societies in which wealth is more unequally distributed tend to have slower long-run growth trajectories. So there is a balance to be struck: on the one hand, we want to incentivize entrepreneurs and the private sector more generally to go forth and productify (and presumably accumulate wealth). On the other hand, we don’t want to deprive future entrepreneurs the educational and business opportunities that past generations have enjoyed. That balance is best struck by our political institutions, because they are designed to have longer time horizons than the private sector, even if they are informed by it.

As I’ve mentioned, I harbor no illusions as to the absolute separation of the private and government sectors in American political life – nor do I believe we should aspire to that vision. But that joint venture should ultimately be accountable in its performance to the voters. I worry that the rescinding of corporate campaign finance contribution limits, a mainstay of the American legislative environment for over 100 years, threatens to undermine our government accountability. That is for two reasons.

First, like it or not, humans are gullible, sometimes ill-informed, often herd-like, and easily swayed by well-funded, emotionally evocative, and aesthetically appealing advertising blitzes. For instance, many elections in the developing world occur relatively freely and fairly, but in places where the dominant party is the only one wealthy enough to afford publicity, the outcomes are still just foregone conclusions. What good is fair when most people only know of one choice? Yes, individual voters can, and sometimes do, do due diligence in researching their ballot options. But as a rule and from a structural point of view, most do not. Why not make it easy to do so?

Second, while some braindead Tea Party pundits have claimed that this is a victory for the middle class (since a middle class upstart politician with a bold new message of reform can now find the resources to fight in the big leagues, or so goes the argument), I think we all realize what an ungodly load of crap that is. There are far fewer middle class upstart politicians with bold new messages of reform than there are money-grubbing, snake-oil-selling, middle class aspiring politicians who will say or do just about anything to get into the hallowed Halls of Power. If you were the CEO of a company, liable for lawsuits by your investors if you failed to maximize their profits at any given point, would you really choose to sponsor some unpredictable, stubbornly idealistic do-gooder? No way, I’d take the palavering snake-oil dude any day, and have him peddling my agenda.

In the end, I wonder if we are doomed to the fate of all democratic societies as predicted by Mancur Olson: that they should all succumb, slowly but surely, to the increasingly ineluctible influence of specialized interest groups – those able to lobby for concentrating benefits on them while dispersing the costs across the voiceless masses.

I close with another quote from Sir Francis Bacon – a bit of cold comfort:

 

Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not; a sense of humor to console him for what he is.

- Francis Bacon

The battle for the Asian state

An Indian development economist recently asked me my opinion on "emerging trends" in India-Pakistan-China relations.  This person then proceeded to talk about de facto Chinese administrative expansion into small parts of northeast India, and Pakistan's relentless push in Kashmir.  What?  Emerging?  These "trends" have been going on for a number of decades, and to talk of a joint Chinese-Pakistani assault on Indian territory not only starts to sound a bit Indo-centro-paranoid, but also, I think, misses a key trend that really should catch our eye in the 21st century - namely, the struggle of the state to survive and adapt to new internal challenges.

All three of these great Asian powers are finding it increasingly difficult not to jockey for international clout or territory, but just to keep a firm grip on the territory that is nominally theirs already. This reorientation takes the interesting form of armies that have typically been outward-looking being tasked with increasingly inward-looking security work - and begging a whole host of questions from the state's legitimacy to govern without the classic Weberian monopoly on the use of violence, to basic questions of how the state defines who "the Enemy" is when it is its own citizenry.

Pakistan is the most notorious case now, of course, as the legendarily professional and historically India-focused national army turns on its own territory to fight the spread of the Taleban in the Northwest Frontier Province and Balochistan. Now ethnic Baloch are being disappeared by the Frontier Corps in a clandestine campaign.  Less well known in the western world is India's increasingly intense struggle to wrest control of the so-called Maoist "Red Corridor" from the Naxalites, so named for a peasant uprising in the West Bengal town of Naxabari in 1967. The Naxal movement first gathered steam in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and was largely stamped out by the Indian government in the following decades. The opening of the Indian economy, however, and the resulting effects of globalization – everything from large-scale development projects like dams and special economic zones that displace marginalized groups to the rapid development of farmland and forests on which tribal and poor people depend – have seen it roar back to life. While historically consisting of an urban intelligencia and a rural peasant base of support, the Naxals and their front organizations today are increasingly finding themselves struggling to remain hidden in urban areas – a trend attested to by the recent arrest of Kobad Ghandy, the South Western Regional Bureau (SWRB) coordinator for the premiere Naxal group, the Communist Party of India (Maoist), or CPI-M, formed in 2004 through the merger of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) People’s War and the Maoist Communist Centre of India. Ghandy had organized Naxal activity in Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Kerala and Maharashtra, and was caught living in Delhi on 20 September, 2009.

Nonetheless, today Naxals are present in 16 of India’s 28 states (or 170 of 602 districts), primarily finding purchase in the remote and less developed forested belts running generally from the Nepali border in the north to the inland mountains of Kerala and Tamil Nadu in the south. They draw largely on marginalized tribal people for their recruits and logistical support, where they are often seen as the only force standing up for the rights of the underclass. While the various Naxal groups disagree on the overarching strategy for eventual capture of the Indian state, most groups have relied upon recruits from the forest areas, with the intention of then spreading to rural agricultural areas, small towns, and, in the final stage, large cities. As such, it is often seen as a classic case of a rural insurgency, even if its primary recruits are often forest-dwellers rather than agricultural peasants.

There has been a great debate in India over just how to deal with the Naxals.  Do you (as the progressives suggest) push a strategy of rural development so that Naxals lose their peasant support base?  Or do you adopt a sort of Guilliani-type "mano dura" with heavy police repression and possibly the domestic use of the military against the country's own citizenry?  Some have even suggested a bombing campaign of the forest areas by the Indian Air Force, to the outrage of most people of conscience (or just those who remember how well air strikes have traditionally fared against entrenched insurgencies in places like Vietnam or the Afghanistan/Pakistan border).

Add to this trend the handful of secessionist movements in Northeast India; the festering anger of Muslims, Christians and other minority communities marginalized in an increasingly Hindu-nationalist political atmosphere; and a crescendo of terrorist activity that is often - though not often enough for the Indian government's liking - linked to foreign interlopers, and you have a true national identity crisis.

While China's army has been outwardly-oriented to a limited extent since the establishment of the PRC (pushing into Tibet, fighting border wars with Burma, India, Vietnam), China has never pretended to embrace democracy like India, nor even flirted with it sporadically and schizophrenically like Pakistan.  It has therefore never pretended to make any social contract with its citizens (even if it claims to represent them), and has often used its army to repress domestically at will, solidifying its "legitimacy" and image of national harmony.  But there too, signs of strain have been appearing, whether in the Uighur unrest, the rural farmers revolts, continuing American arms sales to Taiwan (still part of China, in the eyes of the establishment), or even the siding of urban internet users with Google and against the official Chinese position in the recent political sparring around human rights campaigners' email privacy and web censorship.

Across the board, then, transnationally-flavored movements - whether religious, ideological, or economic - continue to challenge the Asian state.  Far from being inherently invidious, many of these challenges could push these states in the direction of increasing accountability, more broad-based development initiatives, and greater respect for human rights.  How the political establishments will choose to respond will make all the difference in the years to come.