Her technocratic plans are no
threat to the establishment.
6th November 2019
Elizabeth Warren’s campaign
for the US presidency has been described as ‘populist’,
‘insurgent’ and even ‘socialist’, both by her supporters and her critics.
Pundits tend to either marvel or recoil at the sheer volume of policy proposals
being churned out by her campaign. They’ve dubbed her the ‘woman with a plan
for everything’.
But for an alleged radical,
Warren seems to be garnering support in many constituencies that found Bernie
Sanders’ 2016 challenge to Hillary
Clinton too left-wing.
This is in part down to her
willingness to play the identity-politics game.
A pundit for MSNBC – the broadcast wing of Clintonite Democrats – has said that
anyone still supporting Sanders instead of Warren was ‘showing [their] sexism’. Warren has at various points in
her career claimed to be a Native American, to have been fired for getting pregnant, and to have been ‘the first nursing mother to take a bar exam in the state
of New Jersey’. All of these claims have been disputed.
Others admire Warren’s
wonkishness. A Vox columnist, for instance, delights at her proposals to ‘make corporate
governance great again’.
Even the more balanced
responses are telling. A recent editorial in The Economist describes Warren’s mission to ‘remake
capitalism’ as ‘remarkable’. And though The Economist seems wary of
an agenda it sees as too radical and left-wing (it is the bible of economic
liberalism, after all), it also sees much it can get behind in Warren’s plans,
from a $15 minimum wage to new antitrust laws.
So how can Warren be both a
left-wing radical and a relatively safe choice for the pundit class? Partly
this is because her critique of capitalism is so limited. Her core message is
simple. American capitalism has failed to deliver for the middle class because
a corrupt elite is siphoning off the spoils for itself. Putting ‘corruption’
front and centre means that Warren’s solutions are necessarily limited to
dealing with a few bad apples, rather than questioning the underlying structure
of contemporary capitalism and the unequal distribution of power it is
producing among classes.
In fact, blaming ‘corruption’
for capitalism’s ills is hardly any different to an often-voiced right-wing
critique of the modern economy. Warren was a free-market libertarian once – she
left the Republicans in 1996. And libertarians will often tell
you that, of course, capitalism has problems today, but the real problem is
‘crony capitalism’ or ‘corporatism’. The difference is that the right-wing
solution is always to remove regulations, whereas Warren’s proposed solution is
to have more and better regulations, managed by new technocratic bodies.
This is not to say there is no
benefit in some of the specific actions Warren has in mind. Monopoly power has
been allowed to accrue to an alarming extent in some sectors, particularly Big
Tech. A pushback is welcome. Plus, in an era of wage stagnation, her plan to
almost double the minimum wage is nothing to be sniffed at.
But let’s not pretend that
Warren’s campaign is a major ‘insurgent’ challenge to the economic and social
order. The main beneficiaries of a Warren presidency would be the
professional-managerial class – aka the ‘liberal elite’ – who would populate all
the new government bodies she has in mind. It is they who would be given new
unaccountable powers to manage parts of the economy in their interests. At
most, this could rebalance power among different factions of the ruling class.
The more Republican-leaning business and banking wing of the establishment
would have to cede some control to the Democratic professional
wing of the establishment. But that would barely be worthy of a footnote in the
history of class struggle.
What’s more, many expect
Warren’s grand plans to be watered down if she ever gets into the White
House. The Economist points to the lack of economic radicalism in the
rest of the Democratic Party, which would inevitably slow any reform agenda. In
a recent interview, Harry Reid, a former senator and Warren’s political mentor,
pushed back at a question insinuating that Warren is too radical. He said he
expects her to be more ‘pragmatic’ after securing the Democratic nomination.
She has herself been aggressively courting centrist party insiders – those
who scuppered Bernie Sanders’ chances of gaining the nomination in 2016 – and
trying to privately reassure them she is on their side.
Slavoj Zizek hit the nail on
the head when he described Warren as ‘Clinton with a human face’,
promising ‘socialism without socialism’. The ‘big, structural change’ that
Warren is offering amounts mostly to the creation of a new layer of the state
divorced from democratic politics. She expects a morally virtuous class of
elite bureaucrats and lawyers to save us from the bad elites in the business
world. Warren’s technocracy is not the answer.
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