The Socialist Bloodsuckers Society of America
Written by Michael Tomasky
March 17th 1:09 PM
Item one: The real socialists
It’s a long-standing truism of American capitalism: We privatize gains, but we socialize losses. This is in some sense unavoidable, or at least the second part of that equation is. When banks get into trouble, they need a fast cash infusion, not just to protect them but to protect their depositors, and the federal government usually has little choice but to arrange a rescue. And so we have a situation like the one currently unfolding in the banking sector following the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. As Eugene Robinson opened his Washington Post column Friday:
Question: What is a socialist?
Answer: A libertarian tech bro who had money in Silicon Valley Bank.
Robinson pointed to the example of David Sacks, an old PayPal partner of Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. Robinson writes:
On Twitter, Sacks has railed against “profligate spending and money printing coming out of Washington” and the evils of what he calls “Bidenomics.” But on Friday, Sacks was frantically calling for big government to come to the rescue of Silicon Valley Bank. He tweeted: “Where is Powell? Where is Yellen? Stop this crisis NOW.”
Greg Becker, the CEO of SVB, supported Congress exempting banks of SVB’s size from having to undergo annual stress tests and other forms of regulation that govern the largest banks. Congress obliged in 2018, of course, with a deregulation bill that the “populist” Donald Trump eagerly signed. The bill was pushed by Republicans—but it could not have passed the Senate without the votes of the 13 Democrats who supported it. And this week, many of those Democrats in various interviews have said they don’t regret their votes and don’t want to rush into reimposing stress tests.
Joe Biden had to do what he did last weekend for SVB. But even so, the politics of this for Democrats should be pretty clear. TNR’s Timothy Noah, writing this week about the debacle, cited a poll showing that anger at corporate power is widespread in both parties. Minorities of both Democrats and Republicans say that corporations and banks have a positive impact on the country. Of nine categories of institutions (the military, religion, small businesses, etc.), corporations and banks were the only two on which respondents of both parties agreed they exert a negative influence.
It’s just one poll, but it tracks with everything one knows. And actually, there are other polls. Here are some Gallup numbers from this year on whether people are satisfied or dissatisfied about the influence of big business: very satisfied, 5 percent; somewhat satisfied, 22 percent; somewhat dissatisfied, 27 percent; and very dissatisfied, 44 percent. Even I can do that math: It’s 27 percent happy with big business versus 71 percent disapproving.
Biden’s tone here could echo that of the parent who relents and allows the kid who’s in the doghouse to go to his friend’s birthday party but reminds the kid he’s still in the doghouse: “I’ll approve this bailout, for the sake of the depositors and the companies relying on SVB to innovate and create jobs. But I want to be clear: When these executives rail against regulation, rail against Washington, and then they go and do this, and then they want Washington to rescue them, that is selfish and unpatriotic behavior. Yes—unpatriotic. If they want the government’s help in times of crisis, they need to play by the government’s rules during good times.”
Only about 5 percent of the American population would disagree with that. The problem is it’s a powerful 5 percent, who tend to make a lot of political donations. But could Democrats make that up in small donations from regular people? Yes, they could, and I think rather easily. This might not have been winning politics 15 years ago, when populist anger wasn’t as widespread. But it is now.
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Item two: Those woke bankers
The right-wing response, meanwhile, is just a joke. Based on little except the fact that the bank is in Silicon Valley (blue) and regulated out of San Francisco (uber-blue), eyes lit up and salivary glands swelled on the right: Aha! Woke banks! We got ’em right where we want ’em!
The emblematic remarks were from Senator Josh Hawley, who dubbed SVB “too woke to fail,” and Wall Street Journal columnist Andy Kessler, who surveyed the diversity on the bank’s 12-member board and opined: “I’m not saying 12 white men would have avoided this mess, but the company may have been distracted by diversity demands.”
Trust me on this one. I’ve been at this pundit game a long time, and whenever any pundit starts a sentence “I’m not saying,” you can take it to the bank that that is exactly what the pundit is saying. Right-wing pundits would have you believe that white male bankers (presumed to be Republican) don’t worry about nonsense like ESG and DEI (“diversity, equity, and inclusion”). Actually, they do; attention to these matters is by now standard in corporate America. SVB, like thousands of other banks, practiced socially responsible investing and diversity in hiring, but those had nothing to do with its collapse.
Moderate Democrats like James Carville and Ruy Teixeira who learned their politics in the 1990s, when the culture wars were aflame and it all looked like walking through fire for Democrats, always worry that wokeism is going to destroy Democratic candidates. I wouldn’t completely dismiss this concern. There is a language on the left, incubated in think tanks and the academy, about some of these matters that just isn’t a language your average American speaks, and that can probably be off-putting to a fair percentage of people.
But on substance? Perhaps you noticed that USA Today poll last week that found that by 56 to 39 percent, respondents thought being “woke” was being aware of social injustice, not being overly politically correct. Even independents went with injustice over political correctness, by 51 to 45 percent.
Times change. Back in the ’90s, arguably, Republicans were more in tune with middle America on these matters. Today, they are not. Today, most middle Americans (a grouping that includes a lot more people of color than it did in 1995, and a lot more people who don’t have strong religious identification, and a lot more nontraditional families, etc.) don’t hate minority groups and see them as threats to the American way of life. It’s hard-right Republicans who are out of touch today. I think Ron DeSantis, if he’s the Republican nominee, is going to find that being anti-woke is not the basis of a winning campaign.
Item three: The new blame America firsters
If you’re of a certain age, you’ll recall that Ronald Reagan got a lot of mileage out of calling Democrats and liberals the “blame America first” crowd. The phrase was actually Jeane Kirkpatrick’s, but they all took it up. Again, at the time, this resonated in middle America—Democrats and liberals, quite rightly of course, did blame America for the tragedy of Vietnam, still a searing memory at the time, so every time a Democrat warned against, say, Reagan’s military buildup (which, by the way, accounted for much of the deficit Reagan ran up, but deficits don’t matter, of course, unless they’re caused by spending on poor people), Reagan could accuse said Democrat of blaming America, and it rang true to a public that wanted more than anything in 1980 to be released from any guilt about the condition of the nation and the world.
Today, again, the roles are reversed. Donald Trump gave a speech this week, complete with dark mood lighting, in which he said: “But the greatest threat to Western civilization today is not Russia. It’s probably, more than anything else, ourselves, and some of the horrible, USA-hating people that represent us.”
Trump does say, “We have to put America first,” but he doesn’t mean the United States that now exists, the country where far more people see being woke as a good thing rather than a bad thing. He means the America of his famous slogan, where guys like him ran things and could tell whatever jokes they wanted to tell at the nineteenth hole, and dames were dames, and everybody knew their place, and America was America. I suspect that he, and DeSantis, and all of them are in for a surprise.
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