The 2016 election season revealed a United States gripped in populist fervor. Republican Donald Trump on the right, and Democrat Bernie Sanders on the left, whipped up the masses by denouncing American politics and big business. And, both said, this cabal worked hand in glove against the interests of ordinary, wage-earning Americans.
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a Rhode Island Democrat, agrees with the diagnosis. His new book “Captured: The Corporate Infiltration of American Democracy,” paints a bleak picture of a rapacious corporate class that bends the will of the nation to fit its needs. Co-authored with Boston-based Melanie Wachtell Stinnett, “Captured” was written during the months Sanders and Trump were campaigning against their party establishments.
As Whitehouse notes, voters increasingly agree with this assessment. As evidence, he cites surveys that show Americans perceive Congress and the court system to be rigged in favor of corporations. Sanders made similar points in his book – “Our Revolution” – published several months ago. And Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, also a Democrat, will no doubt cover similar terrain when her contribution – “This Fight Is Our Fight” – arrives in bookstores next week.
In theory, then, Whitehouse delivers his message at an intense populist moment.
Yet you’d be hard-pressed to find any evidence of that in Washington. Just last week, Trump signed a bill allowing corporations to profit from online users’ private information; the Senate voted to rescind a rule allowing states to provide “safe harbor” retirement accounts; U.S. House members used a Congressional Hearing to repeatedly call for the firing of the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau; and, of course, the Senate confirmed a pro-business justice to join the Supreme Court.
That last item has been a particular focus of Whitehouse’s recent wrath, and understandably so. You don’t need to take Whitehouse’s word that Neil Gorsuch is a corporatist in sheep’s clothing. Fortune Magazine predicted Gorsuch “will generally take the side of companies” as a Supreme Court Justice, will side against labor unions, will be “an ally in [corporations’] push to rein in class actions,” and will “diminish the power of regulators.”
Despite the populist-driven 2016 campaign, D.C. has seen an almost daily parade of victories for the corporate agenda. So, does this confirm Whitehouse’s theory of how the system is rigged? Does it call those priorities into question?
The Whitehouse diagnosis blames the usual progressive suspects: among them, the 2010 Citizens United ruling that unleashed corporate spending on political campaigns, and the Koch brothers network of funding. These are not new Whitehouse concerns. I heard the same complaints at a session he led five years ago at the progressive Netroots Nation conference in Providence.
Neither Citizens nor the Koch family gave us the Trump Presidency. He won the Republican nomination despite fierce opposition of the Kochs, and the amassed fortunes of the party’s corporatist backers. Many continued to shun him in the general election. Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, cashed in on the situation, employing every big-money, fund-raising trick in the book. (We know how that worked out.)
Trump’s post-inauguration embrace of the corporatist agenda might not surprise skeptics on the left, who never believed his populist façade. Nevertheless, the election — along with that of Barack Obama over Mitt Romney in 2012 — would seem to dispel the notion that corporatists can now manipulate elections to their favored ends.
Corporatists may not excel at elections, but when it comes to lobbying – they are very hard to beat.
Whitehouse is best when he gets into the weeds. He tells of working across the aisle in the U.S. Senate with conservatives on criminal justice reform — only to discover the effort was a Trojan Horse attempt to slip in so-called “mens rea reform” to protect corporations from civil lawsuits. He describes the “regulatory capture” that defangs regulating agencies while nobody is paying attention. And Whitehouse—a former Rhode Island Attorney General and U.S. Attorney —devotes an excellent chapter to what he calls the “corporate assault on the civil jury.” Over time, Whitehouse shows, this assault has largely immunized corporations from punishment.
It is also clear that Republican officeholders are openly pursuing a corporatist agenda despite election results. It’s not just that Trump ran and won on a populist platform. Republicans in Congress, who Whitehouse argues run constantly scared of corporatist-backed challenges from the right, easily repelled all such attempts in 2016, getting re-nominated and re-elected at record rates.
There is a puzzle deeper than Citizens United and the Koch brothers to be found in the disconnect between populist conservative voters — who have been visible since at least the 2009-’10 Tea Party movement — and the unabashedly corporatist agenda of elected Republicans. To a lesser but significant extent, there is also a painful disconnect between populist progressives and the corporate-friendly agenda pursued by Washington Democrats.
I suspect that somewhere in those explanations of the Republicans and Democrats selling out their bases lays the path to change. But Whitehouse doesn’t discover it. He dismisses Tea Party voters as angry, ignorant extremists manipulated by corporatist money; and he shies away from almost any criticism of his own party. Understandable, but not helpful.
It’s unsurprising to me, then, that Whitehouse offers no way forward more specific than “stand up, push back, and make it right.” Perhaps we’ll find more useful advice in Warren’s book. Hope springs eternal.
