Breaking The Gentlemen’s Agreement

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I believe that the power of corporate America, the power of Wall Street, the power of the drug companies, the power of the corporate media is so great that the only way we really transform America and do the things that the middle class and working class desperately need is through a political revolution when millions of people begin to come together and stand up and say: Our government is going to work for all of us, not just a handful of billionaires.

These words were spoken by Senator Bernie Sanders during the first Democratic Party debate among presidential candidates who hope to win the party’s nomination. The Washington Post has made a full transcript available online. In it, the word “billionaire” appears 13 times, all of them voiced by Sanders. Here’s another sample:

I am the only candidate running for president who is not a billionaire, who has raised substantial sums of money, and I do not have a super PAC.

Right now, the internet is abuzz with accusations that pundits, who have pretty much claimed universal victory for Hillary Clinton, ignored the type of informal (and unscientific) polling reflected in social media (Sanders’ name was posted more on Twitter than all the other candidates combined, and won the U.S. News Facebook poll by a landslide, for instance). Meanwhile, the inside baseball pundits, who do claim their predictions are scientific, have no question that the first debate made Clinton even more likely to win.

None of the candidates are perfect, of course (sad to say, not one of we observers is perfect either), but I admire Sanders for many reasons, not least of which is his willingness to be educated: by activists from #BlackLivesMatter and others committed to racial justice, by climate crisis activists, by economic justice activists. If he wins, I will rejoice.

But the question that is engaging me now isn’t who will win. It is stupefyingly boring to treat the election like a multi-year horse race, and handicappers like genius horse-whisperers. I’m thinking about how easily the culture of electoral politics is transformed by the simple introduction into this mortally wounded and dismally corrupt process of a single candidate who is willing to speak forthrightly about so many topics the electoral gentlemen’s agreement has previously foreclosed.

I’ve seen this phenomenon time and again in settings that have nothing to do with elections. In each milieu, there’s a tacit agreement that certain topics are off-limits. Everyone knows not to ask the faculty members assembled for a symposium how their own university’s policies – and indeed, their own salaries – are implicated in that institution’s proclivity to gobble up surrounding real estate, displacing thousands. Everyone knows not to point out to a funder trumpeting a new grants program that the same core group of grant recipients has consistently received funds despite several prior such proclamations of new policies, so why bother pretending?

When everybody knows and abides by such rules of conduct – when everybody internalizes the stories that tell us how the game is played – the people who made the rules and whose power is protected by them benefit from our passive compliance, and everyone else loses.

In every such situation I have seen, it takes only a single individual to rupture the accord that sustains the status quo. You just have to ask the forbidden questions, raise the forbidden topics, out loud. That is what Senator Sanders is doing. It takes confidence and chutzpah and a kind of presence we rarely see on the political stage. And showing up this way makes him a role model for us all.

In prior elections (and I expect in the Republican debates to come too), anyone who dared to hint that there may be something fundamentally undemocratic and dangerous about the growing polarization of wealth in this country would be loudly denounced for formenting “class warfare.” This is slightly ironic, in that the concept came into common usage through Marx and his followers, who saw an essential conflict between the owning, ruling class and the working class as the engine of radical social change. In recent decades, though, the epithet has most often been used by fat cats who want to discredit anyone who has the temerity to point out the disastrous social consequences of their entrenched privilege. Here’s a nice compilation from a dozen years back, charting the Republicans’ skyrocketing use of the term as a club to beat critics of their polarizing economic policies.

But what’s true is true. Warren Buffett had it right back in 2006: “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” Bernie Sanders is speaking this truth, fighting back in no uncertain terms, and thus shifting the debate.

I wish I could say the shift will be permanent, but of course, the gentlemen’s agreement is renewable. All that’s required is for the audacious to sit down and shut up. I have an idea that audacity is viral. I think if we ask the foreclosed questions as often as possible in as many domains as possible, it will get easier and easier for others to do the same. What topics can’t be raised in your world or mine? Have we got more to lose than Bernie Sanders? To the contrary, there is everything to gain.

The great Charles Brown, “Don’t Fool With My Heart,” just because.

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4 thoughts on “Breaking The Gentlemen’s Agreement

  1. I love Charles Brown, I love audacity and I love chutzpah. Is there a difference? Perhaps Chutzpah may be more associated with blarney. Audacious truth might be the right expression for Bernie.

  2. I call our form of government, Electoral Despotism. We are all enslaved one way or another with subsidies.. Essentially, Government buys our votes and we sell them. We vote for our own perks…The bigger government the lessor freedom. Bu this is historically normal for the history of man… 99.99 percent of the history of man, he lived under despotism… and most people supports this
    Both parties maintain power this way. Both support cronyism, and we all think that we get more than we put into the government. The reality is that we are herd animals… we want to be led by the Judah Cow… The bigger the government, the greater the control… The 20th century was the century was the last century of the 400 year old period of enlightenment. and increasing freedom and liberty… In the last 15 years we have seen increased control…
    Historically, this is the age old battle of Idealism and Realism… Even today our First Amendment has been beaten down with group think and political correctness characterized by vitriolic character assignation.. the next step will eventually turn to being battered down with more violence. The people will demand this. Take Title IX in the universities… once a program to encourage women to participate in sports… today, the edit from the Department of Education, it has now morphed into a Star Chamber that abuses all the civil rights and the protections of the minorities…
    Just as I object to what people call crony capitalism, it really is crony fascism… let’s call it what it really is… and on the other side, we buy off the poor with a few bucks for the same reason, to control the poor. Let’s call this crony socialism, just for the sake of a name. We are getting hit from both sides. We are all steal slaves… one way or another. The result of this universal buy-out volunteered control. When this exist, the social contract of enlightenment is fractured in to a dog verses dog survival of the fittest, Everybody is out to get what they can get more than ones neighbor .
    Yes, there is no perfect system…so for me, we take the middle ground, smaller government, maximum liberty and freedom along with the social contract… But where is that common ground?
    When the power of government says jump, we all jump… We all think that the grass is greener on the other side of the road… but to assume that it is better may not be the case. I am the happiest when I am just left alone. I find the author’s solution just as oppressive as that of the one that she criticizes.
    We all have the right to petition the government… the rich and poor… The problem is not the petitioner, but the receiver of the petitioner who controls by giving everybody perks to maintain power. They buy votes, and we sell them. There is no free lunch… Government is not responsible for the costs they incur… and we pay the price… and are willing to get all we can ourselves… yes, we could say we have enslaved ourselves. Bennie Franklin said, ” You now have a Republic… if you can keep it.” Have we failed to keep it? Ron Hansing. 10.19.15

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