Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse Eloquently Decries Corporatism on the Senate Floor

I find especially interesting Whitehouse's repeated insistence in his speech on describing the corporate capture of various regulatory agencies and the more general influence of corporations on elections via unlimited contributions using terms like "tentacles" (repeated over and over again), and also "lurking," "silent," "secret," "insidious" (also repeated many times) followed by a call to action expressed in terms of "stem[ming] the tide." I can't say I was the least bit surprised given this narrativization of the problem of corruption of democratic governance by corporate interests that Whitehouse's practical recommendation was that the Attorney General of the United Stated be empowered and tasked with the work of auditing regulatory agencies across the layers of federal governance to "root out" (again, his term) corporate influence.

I have long wondered what the Democrats would do to address the "burrowed" Bush Administration anti-government hacks and corporatist shills given career appointments throughout our institutions of governance, too many of them incompetents hired for reasons of ideological purity, too many of them more accountable to incumbent interests than to the people whose government this is. Whitehouse calls explicitly for a "house cleaning" rather than a "purge," but I do hope the incumbent interests he is targeting are alive to the historical resonances of his evocation of "tentacles" and "rooting out" "secretive" "insidious" anti-democratic forces and "turning the tide," and I hope they are rendered just a bit more canny and careful and fearful to grasp their role in the narrative Whitehouse has framed. That is to say, I hope I am right to discern in Whitehouse's rhetoric a real threat, and I hope that incumbents heard that threat and will grasp the potential power in it.

Although the Red Menace was a paranoid fantasy deployed to unravel some of the cultural accomplishments of the New Deal most despised by powerful reactionaries in our society, the Corporatist Menace is of course palpably real, just as it was when FDR named it "Economic Royalism" (at a time when its influence was less ramified and intensive than it is today) and directed his righteous anger and our collective attention to resist it in the name of our ongoing democratic revolution. Part of the reason corporatism has become so much more ramified and intensive was precisely because FDR in waging WWII re-organized the US economy (as in the New Deal he had already radically accelerated the ongoing post-Progressive era re-organization of governance into the administration of social democracy) into a military-industrial complex, the immediate forerunner to our contemporary neoliberal-neoconservative corporate-militarist complex.

Even the best elected politicians and professional administrators of the left have taken on as part of their real responsibility the maintenance of aspects of this system, even as they would resist its anti-democratizing effects. I don't think enough of us grasp the fraught and paradoxical demands of democratic-progressives living in the belly of the beast of corporate-militarist institutions and norms who would still seek to administer such social justice as is available in our system while at once pushing to overcome the authoritarianism inhering it. It seems to me that opportunistically re-establishing regulations and oversight over corporate profit-taking and military secrets, gradually returning from the orgy of privateering and profiteering and contracting out of public services -- both civilian and military -- to hiring and service provision in house, and finally, eventually introducing some sanity into our elections through public financing and the institution of something like instant runoff voting across the board to overcome the US Party Duopoly is the re-democratizing path out of our current corporate-militarist distress.

No doubt the struggle along that path will be compromised and heartbreakingly slow, certainly the key actors implementing the path will often appear so compromised as to be anything but allies in the struggle from moment to moment as it plays out, possibly the struggle of an engaged organized public in partnership with imperfect but best available elected representatives and professional politicians will not be equal this time to the incumbent forces arrayed against them, perhaps the work of gathering authoritarianism and know-nothingism and massively destructive instrumentalities and forces of climate catastrophe will outpace the political and educational and institutional resources to which and processes through which we must avail ourselves.

Come what may, it seems to me that one of the ways it might look for us to set out on the path toward an overcoming of the anti-democratizing evil of corporate-militarism in our time, given the resources at hand and the processes in motion, might look like a taking up of the language and recommendations in Sheldon Whitehouse's speech on the Senate floor. It is easy to make fun of the inadequacy of his gesture, but it would be, well, something to make something of it instead. A gathering of inadequate somethings is as good as a revolution if you can just keep your eyes open and spirits up long enough to see them through.