Partisans and Partners: The Politics of the Post-Keynesian Society
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Partisans and Partners: The Politics of the Post-Keynesian Society
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Overview
Wheels-down in Iowa—that most important of primary states—Pacewicz looks to two cities, one traditionally Democratic, the other traditionally Republican, and finds that younger voters are rejecting older-timers’ strict political affiliations. A paradox is emerging—as the dividing lines between America’s political parties have sharpened, Americans are at the same time growing distrustful of traditional party politics in favor of becoming apolitical or embracing outside-the-beltway candidates. Pacewicz sees this change coming not from politicians and voters, but from the fundamental reorganization of the community institutions in which political parties have traditionally been rooted. Weaving together major themes in American political history—including globalization, the decline of organized labor, loss of locally owned industries, uneven economic development, and the emergence of grassroots populist movements—Partisans and Partners is a timely and comprehensive analysis of American politics as it happens on the ground.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226402727 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 05/31/2024 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 398 |
| File size: | 978 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Partisans and Partners
The Politics of the Post-Keynesian Society
By Josh Pacewicz
The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2016 The University of ChicagoAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-40272-7
CHAPTER 1
The Old Families
When older Prairievillers talk of their city's public life, the old families who once dominated it are seldom far from their minds. One such resident I spoke to was Shannon, who moved to Prairieville when her husband Frank, an engineer, took a job in one of the city's homegrown industries. They bought a house in Sheppfield, a tree-lined neighborhood at the city's northern edge that was inhabited by many old families. As was customary then, Frank's new employer counseled him to first drive his family into town from the north to avoid the stench of a meatpacking plant — owned by one of Frank's new neighbors — that skirted environmental regulations and stunk up the city's working-class South End in summer. Shannon never quite found her place among her new neighbors.
"This town has a lot of history, and it is a hard town if you move here," Shannon said. She sat on a dumpy couch with a home-knit blanket laid across her lap. "'Old money,' they call it — my daughter used to always laugh and say that there is 'old money' and 'new money' in Prairieville and that we were 'new money.' Prairieville does not welcome newcomers; it's a gossipy little town. It is just full of these old families that have been here forever and got a million kids everywhere. Like here in this neighborhood we got some, a Browning that lives maybe six or seven houses down from us, and another past that — the Bloor family."
"But you know," Shannon continued, leaning in to share a delicious piece of gossip, "their kids aren't all that successful now either. They may have the backing, but the ones that don't take up the family business, [many] don't make it. Like we had one family two houses down. They were into [warehousing] and had been around the city a long time — so financially they were doing great. But he was a gambler and not a great husband and not a good daddy to the little kids. Eventually, he sold the business and the wife divorced him and moved down to Florida, and I heard those little kids did not make anything of themselves at all."
Such pieces of seemingly apolitical gossip, common among transplants like Shannon and more generally those who identified with the new, cosmopolitan, and partner-dominated city that they hoped Prairieville was becoming, were one way in which Prairievillers discussed changes in their city's public sphere. At the center of such narratives was a particular kind of public actor: a member of the city's business-owning families, or simply old families. Sometimes, people told stories focused exclusively on the old families and sometimes ones about their public struggles with union leaders — the latter type was especially common in working-class neighborhoods. In these stories, members of the old families appeared frequently as villains: they were clannish, conservative, jealously guarded their interests, opposed unions, and kept Prairieville frozen in time. "These old-timers — the city fathers — these old families with their names everywhere and in everything, they did not want change," a former factory worker told me. "General Mills, or maybe General Foods, some big company wanted to move in here, but whatever it was, the old-timers did not want the union. They said, 'No thank you, we like it just the way it is!'"
But sometimes, people remembered the old families fondly, too: as generous and giving, dependable, and — above all — committed to Prairieville. "I don't see Prairieville's prospects as too rosy," one of Prairieville's former Labor Council presidents told me, looking kindly now on his old enemies. "We've got five-, six-dollar-an-hour jobs hanging out our ass, and they can dress that up all they want but hell, even the businesses aren't here, their corporate offices, the majority of that money goes back there," he added, pointing into the air toward imaginary corporate headquarters. "[We're missing businesses] like Glover's Manufacturing, Prairie Tools. The people who started those businesses were part of the community. [Now] you have [these corporate subsidiaries] with no ties. What do they give a shit about Prairieville, Iowa? They have no commitment. We're giving away the goddamn farm to get them here, but there is nothing to keep them from making a drastic decision that affects the entire community."
After hearing many such stories, I came to realize that they were about the particular role that the old families played within Prairieville's public life, not about wealth or business owners per se. In fact, many of members of the old families still resided in Prairieville and were still wealthy; a few even continued to run the business associated with the family name. But older Prairievillers insisted that only a handful of them were really like the old families had been; most had "made the transition" along with other leaders during the 1980s. To older residents, the old families signified a particular form of control that this group once exercised over the city's economy, voluntary associations, municipal decision-making bodies, and Republican politics.
In contrast to today, the past influence of the old families is undeniable. It appears everywhere in the historical record and is even written into the city itself. If one walks down Prairieville's Main Street, for example, the brown and red brick buildings that once housed the economic engines of the city are still marked with their names: Berkin's Department Store, Klueger and Son's Brick and Tile, the Peelmer Building, Browning Construction, the Wheeler Building. Stopping mid-walk in Prairieville's public library, one sees the same names in the picture-filled encyclopedias that document Prairieville's past. Regardless of the time period, the leading citizens' family names and sometimes even first names are the same. In one photo from the 1970s, one sees Charles Springer, Charles W. Browning, and Gilbert F. Jones Jr. posing at a groundbreaking ceremony for a new manufacturer or greeting a visiting Republican dignitary. Another from the early 1950s, features Nick Springer, Charles R. Browning, and Gilbert F. Jones leading the city's Fourth of July parade or beaming proudly while receiving the newspaper's first citizen award. Even further back, the same names appear among the original operators of Prairieville's stockyards. Leaving the library and continuing along Main, one reaches a circular plaza that marks the city's symbolic center. It is dominated by the Willis fountain, a gift from the prominent meatpacking family. Built of imported Italian terracotta that tastefully complements the reddish coloring of the district's surviving warehouses, the fountain's style is classical, but the theme is unapologetically local: a bull on each pillar sprays water from its mouth into the fountain's center, and the fountain itself is inset with plaques showing images of work in the old stockyards. An inscription reads, "A gift to Prairieville and its people, who have brought us so much good fortune" Symbolically and actually then, the old families are central to historic Prairieville and — appropriately — announce themselves in the language of gift and reciprocal obligation: you gave to us so we give back to you.
In this chapter, I explain why the old families emerged as a cohesive actor in Prairieville's public sphere, one that locals perceived as opposed to — or even the polar opposite of — union leaders and their allies. This conflict was important to the public imagination of Prairievillers, because it structured how they thought about politics. Indeed, many older residents still use the division between the old families and union leaders as a heuristic for making sense of national politics, much like the subjects of social scientists' first election studies in 1940s Elmira, New York, who understood politics as a blue-collar/white-collar conflict. My central argument is that there is nothing natural about older residents' tendency to equate politics with a conflict between working-class and business-class sides, or even with sides at all. People saw politics this way — and some older residents still do — because the public actors of their day happened to organize their activities this way. The puzzle in this chapter, then, is how the old families got to be a "side" in the first place. My answer is twofold and focuses, first, on the way that members of the old families organized their public activities and, second, on the broader system of Keynesian-era regulations that supported, and even encouraged, the old families' mode of public engagement.
The cohesive, factional relations that bound Prairieville's old families resulted from the particular way that individuals strove for public prominence or, more simply, the game for public esteem they played with one another. Within this traditional game, members of the old families rose to prominence by giving or — more exactly — by creating a social system akin to one that social theorist Marcel Mauss identified as a total system of gift and counterobligation. Prairieville's old families monopolized economic, civic, and political resources, and doled these out to one another and their supporters, who effectively became their clients. The old families thereby created networks of generosity and reciprocal obligation that penetrated deeply into Prairieville's economic, civic, and political life and, in the minds of Prairieville's residents, blurred the boundary between community governance and national politics. The Janus-faced logic of gift, which Mauss argues puts the receiver under obligation to the giver, is key to residents' divergent perceptions of the old families. To some, the old families were committed and understood that they had to give in order to get Prairievilliers' public esteem. To others, they were cliquish, controlling, and conservative. In fact, they were both at once.
Crucially, however, the old families' game was politically constructed: supported and even encouraged by pre-1980s federalism in two ways. First, Keynesian-era financial regulations created an economic sector of medium-sized locally owned firms that were sheltered from corporate acquisitions and therefore allowed the old families to exist. Moreover, Keynesian-era social service and urban development policies transferred large, discretionary chunks of federal dollars to local bodies, thus allowing and encouraging grassroots leaders to factionalize and compete over these resources. I begin the chapter with a history of Prairieville, which describes the formation of the city's old families and their working-class opponents. This history is followed by sections that focus on the old families' economic, civic, and political activities, and show how pre-1980s federalism reinforced the old families' efforts to exercise collective control over these sectors of community life. Chapter 2 then complements this chapter by showing how Keynesian-era policies promoted a similar organization of public life in River City, albeit with labor leaders gaining the upper hand in the latter case.
A History of Prairieville's Public Life before 1980
In the 1870s Prairieville was a frontier outpost of a few thousand inhabitants, but the railroad changed it overnight into a contender for America's pre-eminent heartland city. Boosters hoped that Prairieville's stockyards would eclipse those in Chicago, turning Prairieville into a key node in America's growing market for meat: livestock would be shipped to Prairieville from the west, slaughtered, and shipped east. Speculators descended, and the city council annexed surrounding farmland, making plans for a city of several hundred thousand — much bigger than Prairieville ever became. Behind the speculators, architects followed and left behind office buildings in the Prairie School style, complete with half-naked natives, gargoyles, and biblical motifs that long ago earned Prairieville the nickname "Little Chicago." Behind both the speculator and architects came a diverse mix of German, Irish, Polish, and Swedish immigrants who worked the stockyards. As the population quadrupled to nearly 50,000 in the 1880s, new immigrants built shanties near the stockyards that dominated the city's southern half, while the original inhabitants moved north to Sheppfield.
Prairieville's fortunes changed with the invention of the refrigerated railroad car, which allowed cattle to be slaughtered closer to the range. The stockyards declined and the economy diversified into meat processing and other industries, but not without leaving an indelible mark on the city. To locals, Sheppfield remains associated with the city's original unhyphenated American inhabitants, while southern neighborhoods bear names like Swedish Village and Polack Hill. Some older working-class residents still recall hearing parents argue in German or Swedish and many nonaffluent Prairievillers are bound by a general sense that they are white-ethnics and therefore rougher and hardier than the city's old families — a panethnic identity that locals celebrate with tales of Prairieville's frontier days, when every weekend brought drunken brawls that spilled onto the streets from downtown's bars.
The 1950s brought another decade of boom to the city with the construction of America's interstate highway system. Prairieville fell on an interstate route, which was extended and expanded during several mammoth projects during the 1960s, thus turning the city into a processing, manufacturing, and commercial hub for its agricultural periphery. The city's packinghouses consolidated into three massive operations, each employing over a thousand workers apiece while locally owned plants manufacturing ice cream, denim products, chemicals and fertilizers, baked goods, consumer tools, and appliances grew into major operations that employed hundreds. Construction of the interstate highway system also cast a long shadow over Prairieville's business community, as homegrown construction firms swelled with federal contracts. Even after the interstate was complete, some of Prairieville's businesses remained focused on building and construction ventures and branched out into related sectors like transportation, warehousing, and wholesale retail.
It is important that Prairieville's period of industrial consolidation occurred during a period when Democratic and Republican leaders alike embraced Keynesian public policy. Popular commentators and academics alike often associate Keynesianism with countercyclical government spending, but I use the term to capture policymakers' prevailing understanding of society, which motivated such policy prescriptions. Historian Daniel Rodgers describes Keynesian-era policymakers' approach to statecraft as "institutional realism": they saw society as rife with power imbalances, dysfunctional norms, and out-of-date traditions, and understood markets as unusually imperfect institutions embedded within this messy social reality. Unlike post-1970s politicians, most Keynesian-era policymakers did not equate the economy with "the market" — a metaphor for society as a whole, which implies a flexible and self-correcting economy — and viewed it instead as a collection of particular markets in need of management and regulation (e.g., labor markets, agricultural commodities markets, mortgage markets). Postwar policymakers' commitment to economic management was reinforced by the era's economic experts. Economic textbooks, for example, addressed macroeconomics before microeconomics, because policy experts assumed that microeconomic price system models would only work if government first established stabilizing conditions. A popular economic and policy teaching tool of the period was the MONIAC computer, a hydraulic system — literally a series of pumps and valves — that simulated the flow of money through the national economy and modeled imperfect allocations of resources that students were invited to correct. In this intellectual climate, mainstream Republicans and Democrats alike accepted tenets of the New Deal like regulation, protections for organized labor, and generous federal programs. For instance, President Eisenhower summarized conventional wisdom in a private correspondence thus: "Should any political party attempt to abolish [the New Deal] you would not hear from that party again in our nation's political history. There is a tiny [GOP] splinter group ... that believes you can do these things. Among them are a few ... Texas oil millionaires and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid."
One key consequence of Keynesian-era policy was a financial system that was more regulated and compartmentalized than the one that emerged after the 1980s. Sociologist Gerald Davis argues that this system arose in the wake of the Great Depression, when policymakers decided that the best way to prevent financial panic was to create multiple financial subsystems that were insulated from one another. The result was three types of financial institutions: investment banks that underwrote issues of corporate stock, commercial banks that lent deposits to firms, and savings and loans that lent deposits to homebuyers. Federal regulations prevented these types of financial institutions from merging, and additional regulations prohibited banks from operating branches in multiple states, thus preventing the emergence of financial conglomerates in any financial subsector (e.g., Citibank or Bank of America in retail banking).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Partisans and Partners by Josh Pacewicz. Copyright © 2016 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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Table of Contents
PrefaceIntroduction: Partisans and Partners
Part I: Keynesianism
One The Old Families
Two The Lions of Labor
Three Politics Embedded in Community Governance: The Community Leadership Party
Part II: Neoliberalism
Four The Political Construction of Partnership
Five Prairieville’s Business Community in Transition
Six The Ben Denison Campaign: How Partners Failed to Colonize Politics
Part III: Neoliberalism (continued): Politics Disembedded from Community Governance
Seven The Activist Party
Eight What Regular People Think
Nine How Obama Won the Heartland (Thrice)
Conclusion: The Politics of the Post-Keynesian Society
Acknowledgments
Methodological Appendix
Notes
Bibliography
Index