Political Concepts: Politics Itself (Ch #1)

(Introduction and Table of Contents)

When I sat down to decide which ten concepts were important enough to be included in this booklet I quickly realized the first concept had to be that of politics itself. While it smacks of college essays to define terms, it’s unavoidable, so:

Politics is how groups decide what they will and won’t do, what they should and shouldn’t and do, and what is good or bad.

Politics determines who makes decisions and how; who enforces those decisions and how, and even what we should believe.

In 1959 the Sociologist C. Wright Mills published the classic book, “The Sociological Imagination.” In it he wrote:

The facts of contemporary history are also facts about the success and the failure of individual men and women. When a society is industrialized, a peasant becomes a worker; a feudal lord is liquidated or becomes a businessman. When classes rise or fall, a person is employed or unemployed; when the rate of investment goes up or down, a person takes new heart or goes broke. When wars happen, an insurance salesperson becomes a rocket launcher; a store clerk, a radar operator; a wife or husband lives alone; a child grows up without a parent. Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both.

Climate change, including the vast wildfires we have recently seen in multiple countries, was both caused and not stopped by political choices.

In 1970 a single job in America or much of the Western world could support an entire family. A house cost two to three times one’s annual salary. Tuition at most universities was either free or nominal. Today most young people can’t afford homes; working class jobs in major cities can barely pay for a one-bedroom apartment let alone support a family, and tuition is so high that students spend decades in debt.

This is not accidental: New Deal and post-War politics was set up to keep wages and prices for goods high, and to keep asset prices low. It systematically reduced the proportion of wealth and income the top of society controlled and increased the proportion the middle and working classes controlled.

After 1979/80, with the elections of Thatcher and Reagan, policy shifted to deliberately keeping wages lower than inflation, supposedly to “fight inflation.” Taxes on the rich were dropped radically, unearned money was favored over earned, and asset prices, like stocks and housing, were deliberately inflated. Tuition soared, free tuition went the way of the Dodo, while good jobs were locked behind degree requirements, and every generation after the Boomers was poorer than the generation before.

These were political choices: deliberate government policies caused much of this. Yes, there was an oil shock (also a political event), but how it was responded to was not predetermined, other options existed, like pushing down hard on using less energy thru changing housing and crashing renewable energy technology, but those paths were not taken, though those who remember the 70s know they were debated extensively.

Had they be taken, renewable energy would have been as advanced by the late 90s as it is today. The choice to go to austerity for the working and middle class and enrich the richest, was the choice to stay on oil and coal, and directly responsible for the onrushing climate crisis. (Let no one pretend we did not know about global warming by 1980.)

So politics matters. It exists anywhere there is more than one human: there are politics of friend groups, marriages, families, clubs, corporations and countries, as well as international politics.

Politics determines

• Who has the good life.

• It determines what the good life is. Vast amounts of effort went into making suburbs viable because that was the image of the good life we had after WWII. Suburbs are unproductive: there are almost no jobs, they are pure consumption, they don’t make sense environmentally or economically, instead they were a choice because we believed the single family home with a picket fence and lawn was the ideal.

• Politics determines what sort of person is allowed the good life. The Covid pandemic has revealed that the most important people in the economy are those who actually produce and transport goods and foods; they are also among the worst paid and treated people in our societies. We don’t value them, or think they should have a good life. Doctors, CEOs, executives, lawyers and so on, on the other hand, should. They “deserve” it. (Teachers and nurses, not so much.)

• Politics determines how you get the good life. In our society this usually means doing well in school and university, and acting a certain way. Everyone who’s worked both blue collar and white collar jobs knows that the manners and mores are very different. As for university, the richer your parents are, the more likely you are to go, and the more likely you are to make it thru. Working class Americans mostly don’t finish bachelor degrees even when they start them.

• Politics determines hat proportion of the population does what: how many farmers there are, how many doctors, how many blue collar workers, factory jobs, rich people and so on. There are limits here: agricultural societies always have way more farmers, but within what your technology and geography allow, what people do is decided mostly politically. The offshoring of well paid manufacturing jobs from the US and Britain (which Britain is paying dearly for as I write) was a political decision. It was cloaked in “we have no choice” but there were choices; the choice of keeping those jobs in the US and Britain did not appear to the political class and the wealthy, to make as much money for the wealthy.

• Politics determines what the physical world looks like. Vast suburbs are a choice. High rises are a choice. Endless concrete and asphalt is a choice. Ugly cities are a choice. Entire forests cut down is a choice. The very world you walk thru is a human creation, the natural world moulded by our decisions.

Politics is not all-powerful. Nature is, in the end, the final arbiter, as Covid and onrushing climate change are teaching us. Technology and geography limit what is possible.

But within those limits, politics is the most immediate and powerful force in our lives. We pretend that what happens to us is “individual” but it isn’t: even that which seems most clearly individual isn’t.

Warren Buffet, the billionaire, has noted that in a different society or time his abilities would not have been rewarded as they have. Absent basketball, there would be a lot fewer rich 7 foot tall men in America. The nerdy abilities that made Bill Gates rich would not have been rewarded nearly so heavily had he been born even 20 years earlier, even his ruthlessness would not have had so high a reward.

Most of successes of members of the GI, Silent and Boomer generations would have been impossible had they been born as members of the Lost Generation, even assuming they didn’t die in World War I or the great Flu pandemic right after the war. In fact, many would have lost all in the great crash of 29 and the Great Depression, and never recovered.

Equally today’s rich are still rich because in 2008 the Federal Reserve and other central banks created as much money as necessary, and guaranteed their losses. This was a political decision, and it occurred because the rich controlled the central banks, the politicians, and were willing to do anything to ensure they did not lose everything, which they would have, since even those who had “won” had lost. (If your uncle bet you a a million dollars, then goes bankrupt, you do not get a million bucks.) Not a single major US bank or brokerage would not have been forced into government control if the Fed had not bailed them out.

While this was hailed as “saving the economy” and in a sense it was, it also made sure the rich maintained political control and could continue to impoverish the working and middle class. It meant no FDR and no New Deal was possible this time.

In the 1960s married women could not have their own bank accounts without their husband’s permission. American blacks could not sit at the front of buses. Most schools were segregated. In the 19^th century women couldn’t vote. When the US first came into being men had to have a certain amount of property or they couldn’t vote.

Before World War II far more women worked in the US; it was a political choice to drive women out of the workforce and prefer men to the extent America did in the 50s and 60s.

It’s all politics; all the way down.

There are other forces, even human forces, to be sure, but politics has the most immediate effect on our lives of anything humans have control over.

Politics matters, so now let’s look at how and why it works.

Next: Legitimacy

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