Renata Adler on pre-totalitarianism

 

In 1977, Renata Adler inaugurated a piece for the New York Review of Books with two great, dire paragraphs that seem like banners for that post-Watergate, post-Vietnam War decade:

“When too many scandals have gone on for too long, uninterrupted and inadequately investigated, they tend to merge. What began as isolated instances of corruption grow toward each other and finally interlock. The nursing home operators, and private garbage collectors, and parking lot owners, and film industry executives, and cable television interests, and vending machine distributors, and recording companies, and casino operators, the teamsters, the Mafia, and defense contractors, and finally the investigative agencies of government and elected officials up to the highest level begin to have in common not just a general corruption but joint ventures and even personnel.

That is an extremely dangerous moment in public life. It is almost impossible to understand. People with an abstract turn of mind adopt conspiracy theories—when the problem is not a conspiracy but some other link. Investigative reporters, meanwhile, find sources, gather facts. There is a lot of news. But the meaning, the most obvious inferences, in a time of high scandal, are lost in a deluge of trivially depressing information.|

Those two graphs still give me a contact high. Adler had been a speechwriter for the chairman of the House committee that investigated Nixon in 1973. She was then a self-proclaimed liberal Republican – a species even then suffering a drastic decline in the popular base. The line from Teddy Roosevelt to Teddy Lindsey had been annexed by the Southern strategy, which proved fatal to anything like the centrist politics Adler affected. She located herself in a niche outside of “ideology”, when such positioning seemed viable after the ideological forays of the New Left.

Reading the essay now, one notices that, after beginning with two quotes from Henry and Charles Adam’s great essay on the Eerie Railroad, a prescient warning against corporate power, Adler dismisses the problem of the corporation as an entity in a democratic republic and turns to the corruption of the Teamsters Union.

“What the Adams brothers feared never quite happened; the republic survived its corporate threat. But that threat had all the elements—in particular, the collaboration of the morally and intellectually disoriented victim—which we have recognized, since Hannah Arendt,  as pre-totalitarian. The threat recurs, in other times, in other forms. How close, after all, is the analogy between the present member of any notoriously corrupt union and the Adams brothers’ small investor. Every teamster has for decades had reason to know that his leaders are not only, in some way remote from his own interest, criminal. They are stealing his pension. Still, it is “his” union—in precisely the sense in which the robber barons’ rail-roads were the small investor’s corporation.”

The seventies was the age of de-regulation, a strategy lead – and this has gone down memory hole – by Senator Ted Kennedy. A liberal of the type that doubled down on capitalist competition as the solution to our woes. It was Kennedy that led the fight to deregulate airline travel, resulting eventually in the destruction of the FAA. Out of this fight we get our current airline monopolies and the inability to get to medium sized cities in America as we no longer subvent those flights.

A long-term Kennedy enemy was Jimmy Hoffa. Adler’s shot at the Teamsters was standard for the time. It was also true, to the extent that the Teamsters were in cahoots with the Mafia. Jackie Presser, the Teamsters president, was on everybody’s payroll – including the FBI.

However, a little thing happened on the way to the Union’s “reform.” The Teamster member whose dues were being stolen, much to Adler’s dismay, saw his union taken over by a government oversight committee. A headline from 2016 sums up the result: “How the Teamsters pension disappeared more quickly under Wall Street than the mob.” In fact, what the Adams brothers feared happened just as they imagined it. The learned inability of the state to act as a social democratic entity has given us a far right Court system, deregulation on every level, massive wealth inequality, and a lifestyle only supported by massive household debt. The democratic deficit we are struggling with has nothing to do with the corruptions of unions, and everything to do with legalizing the corruption of corporations.

That said, one does admire the icy clarity of Adler’s prose – even if that clarity is purchased at the expense of pre-suppositions that are not clearly argued for. So here’s a bit about Watergate that is all about our present:

“What we had for a time at the heart of government was not what Ron Ziegler, in the tapes, so memorably called a Rashomon situation, but a scenario from an earlier work. In Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday, the hero is a man who has been recruited as a police agent in a group of seven anarchists, each of whom has adopted the name of a day of the week. At meeting after meeting, a member of the group is exposed as such an agent. As Friday, Wednesday, and several others are discovered, Thursday fears each time that it is he who has been found out. By the end of the book, it turns out that every single anarchist was really a police agent in disguise. It is, in real life, normal for police and outlaws to be mutually dependent and to share an interest—as prison guards require, for their continued employment, the continued existence of prisoners, and therefore, of crimes. But when they share an identity, when the enforcers of narcotics laws are the sellers of narcotics, when the cops are the robbers, and the investigators the coverers-up, the foundations of common truth and honesty are shattered altogether, and society requires a subtle (and lucky) combination of forces to dig itself out.”

We have long passed the point where this combination of forces is marginal. It is as central to our functioning as flows of untaxed black money from unspecified sources are to the functioning of banks and private equity firms.  We are all Panama, now, Jake.