Category: The Opinionsphere

Categories
Economics Political Philosophy The Opinionsphere

The Success of Goldman Sachs as a Repudiation of the Free Market

[digg-reddit-me]David Rothkopf – commenting on Goldman Sachs – sees their success as a repudiation of the free market – and I tend to agree with him:

I’m a dyed-in-the-wool capitalist. I love free markets. I hope a free market marries one of my daughters some day. But if some people have too many advantages and others simply can never catch up, the markets aren’t free, regardless of law or intent. Even if the advantages are in part derived from talent and hard work, fairness can remain an issue if other components of the success are linked to access, influence, history and other intangibles. [my emphasis]

From this insight comes the inevitable conclusion that – contrary to the doctrine of the right-wing – the government is not the antithesis of the free market, but rather plays an essential role in creating and maintaining it.

Goldman Sachs – with their obscene profits so soon after needing public assistance – demonstrate that our system has become less free and more feudal. As I wrote several weeks ago:

[T]he free market is effective because it prevents any small set of individuals from monopolizing decision-making. Especially in the world today with so much information available and events moving so quickly, the “right” business choices to make aren’t always clear. A free market – by allowing each business to make its own choice – prevents decision-making from falling victim to individual follies. But our current economic system – with it’s enormous corporations – ends up recreating the feudal system in which power is not centered in a single place, but in a handful of powerful “princes.” While these “princes” push for free market reforms, it is not in their interest to actually achieve this ideal free market – as Yglesias points out:

As a market approaches textbook conditions—perfect competition, perfect information, etc.—real profits trend toward zero. You make your money by ensuring that textbook conditions don’t apply; that there are huge barriers to entry, massive problems with inattention, monopolistic corners to exploit, etc.

George Will himself has pointed out that those “reforms” that are passed tend to be of a specific sort, following what Will calls, “the supreme law of the land…the principle of concentrated benefits and dispersed costs.” What free market supporters rarely seem to admit is that the free market exists not in spite of the government, but because of it. And today, our market is far from free because the government has failed to protect it – and has instead allowed the worst characteristics of capitalism (exploitation of labor; externalizing as much cost to society as possible, for eg. pollution) with the worst characteristics of socialism (concentration of power and limitation of competition) to create a kind of modern feudal society. In  this feudal society, freedom is enjoyed by the “princes” of finance and industry while the creative ferment of a real free market is formally protected but effectively quashed.

David Rothkopf expresses the same thing with different terminology:

These guys [at Goldman Sachs] operate as ultra-citizens in our society, virtually able to tell the government to heel and fetch in ways the rest of us can only fantasize about.

Warren Buffett seems to agree – as he claimed that America is moving from an aspiring “Ownership Society” to a “Sharecropper’s Society” – with its suggestions of a feudal structure. Of course, Buffet now owns a significant portion of the very Goldman Sachs that epitomizes this trend.

Goldman Sachs – along with other major corporate powers – rise by exploiting inefficiencies in the market – and eventually must try to create inefficiencies in the market in order to maintain their profitability (which is the hyperbolized point of Matt Taibbi’s recent piece). This contradicts those who see the market as supremely efficient – as Warren Buffet admitted, he would “be a bum on the street with a tin cup if the markets were always efficient.”

Goldman Sachs proves – with its successes – that our system is not a truly free market – but a more feudal one – in which those with sufficient money can secure power and tilt the system to their advantage.

[Image by saebryo licensed under Creative Commons.]

Categories
Criticism Politics The Media The Opinionsphere

On Media Bias and Conventional Wisdom (cont.)

[digg-reddit-me]I wrote earlier about the history of major news organizations and Conventional Wisdom. It is important to acknowledge though that the role of the news organizations has rarely been more prominent than it was at the beginning of that history – in the 1950s and 1960s.

Where the previous piece ended was with acknowledgement that the Conventional Wisdom of the mainstream news organizations was no longer authoritative – as partisans of the left and right each sought to contest every aspect of the media landscape, and as certain flaws in news gathering, news presentation, and commentary became more apparent.

Those following the biggest news organizations – the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, CNN, CBS, NBC, ABC, Time, Newsweek, the Associated Press, McClatchy, and many of the other top news organizations – can sense a bias if they follow the coverage closely. Though many of the reporters, editors, anchors, and others may subscribe to a mainstream form of liberalism (as polls show), the actions of the news-gatherers and their editors demonstrate that their primary ideology is not liberal but instead is based on cynism and opportunism. (Fox News is the rare case of a newsgathering organization that is almost purely ideological – making its “Fair and Balanced” tagline positively Orwellian.) Even the Huffington Post – which is one of the most liberal news gathering organizations – published off-the-record remarks by their darling, Barack Obama – at a time when it caused him considerable damage. The press went after Bill Clinton – rooting amongst his sexual dalliances – all in search of a scoop. The reporters were pretty brutal in their takes on John Edwards – the most progressive Democratic candidate to have a plausible shot at the Democratic nomination in a generation – even before his affair. If you listen to the members of these news organizations talk – which you can increasingly do with podcasts and other behind-the-scenes takes – the unstated biases are not liberal – but are instead a distrust of every official and every politician – and a desire to make a name for themselves by bringing someone big down with a juicy story.

Another primary aspect of these newsgatherers is faux-objectivity. This sometimes leads to news stories being framed in a manner to give credence to more liberal views (though this primarily is true on social issues rather than political ones) – but more often, it leads to the news stories on controversial topics being presented as “he said, she said.” Campbell Brown presented a perfect example of this faux-journalism recently:

Even as the news organization no longer play an unchallenged role in deciding on the Conventional Wisdom, they still play an important role. No longer can an individual pronounce – as Walter Cronkite did – that Vietnam was “unwinnable” after a news report and succeed in shaping the Conventional Wisdom. No longer can the press hound a president from office on the basis of law-breaking. No longer will those who stand to benefit from the status quo allow a consensus opinion regarding what action should be taken on civil rights or to combat global warming be reached. Partisans would challenge it and attack the messenger – and given the mistrust of most people for the press, they would likely succeed to some extent, which is all they need to paralyze the system.

The most effective way news organizations can – and do – shape the Conventional Wisdom of the public as a whole is to make some conclusion they have reached implicit in their coverage. Some recent examples of such nuggets of conventional wisdom from the press – which are mostly personal characterizations:

  • “Al Gore exaggerates.”
  • “George W. Bush is dumb.”
  • “There’s not much difference between Bush and Gore.”
  • “America doesn’t torture.”
  • “America does torture.”
  • “Dick Cheney is really in charge.”
  • “Joe Biden puts his foot in his mouth.”
  • “Bill Clinton is a philanderer.”
  • “John Edwards is phony.”
  • “Obama throws people under the bus if they’re causing him trouble.”
  • “John McCain is a maverick.”
  • “John McCain is erratic.”
  • “Sarah Palin is out of her depth.”

True, not true; fair or unfair, these conclusions, once reached, became implicit in news coverage, unchallenged by the commentators or the press, and the fodder for late night comedians and political cartoonists. Today, it is probably comedy more than anything else in which the Conventional Wisdom is expressed and accepted.

Probably the most basic rule of faux-journalism is that every event and off-hand remark must be interpreted as confirming the conventional wisdom of the press – becoming part of the litany of “proofs” that the stereotype is true.

Categories
Election 2008 Palin Politics The Opinionsphere

Why I Despise Sarah Palin

[digg-reddit-me]One of my friends asked me this question. Actually, he accused me of despising her (which I admit to) and postulated that feminists and liberals hate her so much because she stands for “a sort of  ‘reincarnation’ of the traditional post-war female that scares the bejesus out of liberals for a variety of reasons.”

I can’t speak for every liberal, or every progressive, or every feminist – but I can speak for myself – and I tell you, it is not Palin’s  status as a reincarnation of the traditional post-war female (a description which I incidentally don’t find that fitting) that leads me to despise her. It is that she found herself to be a very capable demagogue. Frank Rich in The New York Times explained it well this Sunday:

The essence of Palinism is emotional, not ideological… The real wave she’s riding is a loud, resonant surge of resentment and victimization that’s larger than issues like abortion and gay civil rights.

Palin constantly positions herself as a victim of the conspiracies of the elite. As interviewers lob her softball after softball, she points out the few outliers and claims she is a victim of a giant conspiracy. As a local blogger files a frivolous ethics complaint, Palin claims she is being targeted for persecution by Rahm Emanuel and Barack Obama. A similar logic of collective victomhood makes its way into every speech she gives; she constantly sets up a dynamic of “us” against “them” – the “Joe Sixpacks” versus “the Hollywood/NY elite” and the “real Americans” against those “who [see] America…as being so imperfect…that [they are] palling around with terrorists [who]…target their own country.” What this accomplishes is what Cass Sunstein in the Spectator describes as the dyanmic of self-reinforcing moral outrage:

Political extremism is often a product of group polarisation and social segregation is a useful tool for producing polarisation. In fact, a good way to create an extremist group, or a cult of any kind, is to separate members from the rest of society. The separation can occur physically or psychologically, by creating a sense of suspicion about non-members. With such separation, the information and views of those outside the group can be discredited, and hence nothing will disturb the process of polarisation as group members continue to talk.

Sunstein does not link this to Palin – but it is clear that she is playing with this exact dynamic. This stands in stark contrast to John McCain who, to his credit, realized how dangerous this dynamic was and tried to calm his crowds down; and it stands in contrast to Barack Obama who has deliberately taken an approach that minimizes this dynamic of escalating moral outrage – challenging his audiences when they seem to be dehumanizing the other side. Palin though escalated her rhetoric. Her crowds became more extreme – in the way that like-minded groups do, especially when united against a nefarious and dehumanized “them.”

Why do I despise Sarah Palin? Because she is a demagogue, and more important, because she is an effective one.

Continue reading “Why I Despise Sarah Palin”
Categories
Criticism Politics The Media The Opinionsphere

On Media Bias

There was a time when news organizations could pronounce the Conventional Wisdom of our society as a whole authoritatively. This Wisdom was not decided on by the media – but rather once it had reached a critical mass of acceptance among the media professionals, the political class, and the public at large, a news organization would close down the debate and declare it so. Before this point, various news organizations would be engaged in the battle for what was accepted as true and what was not. Pronouncing and explaining the Conventional Wisdom was the main focus of the biggest news organizations of the 1950s and 1960s. Time magazine, the New York Times, CBS News – all prided themselves on this. But there came moments when a news organization catalyzed opinion so suddenly, when they played a decisive role in creating the Conventional Wisdom. For example, when news organizations showed the images of the children with fire hoses turned on them – and vicious dogs – in Birmingham, the brutality of the oppression of black Americans was driven home. When Walter Cronkite declared “the bloody experience of Vietnam is a stalemate” and that the war was “unwinnable,” Lyndon Johnson famously declared he had lost “Middle America.”

Right-wingers – seeing how the media had decisively affected the course of both the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam protests by influencing the Conventional Wisdom – began a deliberate campaign to undermine the media’s ability to play such a role again. They promulgated studies of media bias, promoted conservative media and commentary, opposed regulations ensuring the equal treatment of controversial subjects on public airwaves, and constantly repeated the talking points about a liberal media elite. By the 1980s, they had mainly succeeded in delegitimizing the mainstream news organizations in the eyes of conservatives, right-wingers, and Republicans – but independents and those towards the left continued to see these news organizations as legitimate.

It wasn’t until the late 1990s that progressives, liberals, and Democrats, began to seriously question the legitimacy of these news organizations – as the Clinton witch hunt became frenzied. Most though just saw this whole episode as tawdry. They saw it reflecting badly on both the president and the news organizations who followed each revelation with tabloid-like zeal.

The real turning point came in the lead-up to the Iraq war, the success of Fox News with their Orwellian slogan, “We Report, You Decide,” and the election of 2004 – as Karl Rove and the Republicans attempted to influence those outside of their base with a deliberate strategy of manipulating the media. The last straw for many came in 2004 as Rove sought to discredit John Kerry by promoting the extreme allegations of a handful of Vietnam veterans who accused Kerry of faking his injuries. News organizations, wary of being branded “liberal” and adhering to standards of faux-objectivity, reported the story in their classic, unenlightening “he said, she said” style. What they did not report prominently was that many of these reporters had researched these allegations and came to the conclusion that Kerry’s Swift Boat attackers were wrong in their accusations. To report this truth would be to compromise their objectivity and take a side in a presidential campaign.

Liberals, progressives, and Democrats – seeing how these news organizations had been deliberately manipulated by Rove – began to realize the flaws in these news organizations and how they affected the public debate and the Conventional Wisdom. From this came the boom in the progressive blogosphere – some, like Talking Points Memo and Huffington Post focused on reporting from a progressive perspective; others, like the Daily Kos, MoveOn, and myDD on creating an online communities for progressives.

By the 2008 election, both Democrats and Republicans contested the Conventional Wisdom of the mainstream news organizations constantly – and partisans on both sides developed their own communities around their own set of agreed facts and opinions – creating their own “conventional wisdom.” It seemed that there was only one group left trusting the legitimacy of news organizations – independents.

[Image by Chris Seufert licensed under Creative Commons.]

Categories
Barack Obama Criticism Domestic issues Politics The Media The Opinionsphere Videos

Campbell Brown Does the Best Journalism Ever!

[digg-reddit-me]Last week Campbell Brown provided a perfect example of the total abdication of the main responsibility of the press in a short piece in which she discussed the debate over whether or not the stimulus had worked or was working. The story was done in a perfectly formulated “he said, she said” manner in which she made no attempt to perform her basic job as a journalist: figuring out who is right and who is not.

It is hard to think of a more basic description of what the job of a journalist is than to say, “He or she should try their best to state the facts, and when there is controversy to try to get to the bottom of it.” Brown though is clearly happy to merely play clips of two different sides saying entirely opposing things, and then to smirk and hold herself above these individuals by taking no position whatsoever. It is on the shoals of this irresponsibility that our public policy debates will be run aground:

Someone here is right; someone is wrong; and there are various sets of facts out there backing up each side. Showing these clips like this – without delving into the actual policy questions accomplishes nothing.

Of course, someone might take the position that there was limited time on the air – and Brown didn’t have time to go into the details of the actual debate. And you’re right. Brown needed time for this great montage a few minutes later:

At the end of this segment, it’s easy to see how Obama is personally so popular and why his policies are less so. The policies are ignored on this serious news show while his coolness under the pressure of an annoying gnat are replayed once again.

Regardless of your position on the political spectrum, an actual discussion of policy in which facts were discussed rather than accusations traded would be to everyone’s benefit.

Categories
Health care Libertarianism Political Philosophy The Opinionsphere

There Is Such A Thing As A Right to Health Care

[digg-reddit-me]F. Paul Wilson had a post that was reddit-famous last week (in the Libertarian subreddit) in which he declared “There ain’t no such thing as a right to health care.” He proposed “the alone-on-a-desert-island rule [as] a convenient way to differentiate genuine human rights from the poseurs.” The genuine human rights are inherent, according to Wilson – and he says – on this desert island alone – one has the right to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, the right to free speech, free sexual expression, freedom of religion, and freedom to smoke or inject anything you want. What you don’t have – according to Wilson – are the right to a house (because there is no one to build it), the right to three solid meals a day (because there are no farmers), or the right to health care (because there are no doctors.)

But by Wilson’s “alone-on-a-desert-island rule” Iran would be considered quite free. Fine – they don’t have freedom of assembly – but you can’t have that on a desert island. They don’t have free speech in public – but they would in the privacy of their own homes (in their own, walled-in desert island), especially if no one was listening. The Iranian authorities actually  allow their people a broad range of rights as long as they keep their activities private.

The problem is – as social animals, humans cannot fully express their freedom of sexuality, the freedom of religion, the freedom of speech, or many of their other freedoms except in the presence of others. Many of the rights we take for granted are social rights – relying on others to a society to make these rights possible.

Perhaps the distinction Wilson is trying to make is between negative rights – rights which constrain the government – and positive rights – rights which impose responsibilities on the government.

The right to health care is one of the latter – but that does not make it any less a right. While the right to health care is not absolute – as if one is alone on a desert island, one has no such right, just as one has no right to assemble, or vote – few today would deny that each individual has a right to some level of care if they are sick and injured. While Wilson is concerned about imposing a burden on doctors, they have already sworn an oath to provide such care if it is needed, a responsibility they take upon themselves with their profession.

This right to health may not be inherent – but that does not make it less substantive. All humans live in some sort of society – as it is our nature. One of the most basic purposes of a society is to take care of the sick and hurt. As a citizen in such a society, I have a right to health care – even as it imposes a burden on others, just as I have a right to vote, even though others must then count my vote, and as I have the right to an attorney if accused of a crime, even though this imposes another burden. It is a right inherent in my citizenship, in my status as a member of a society.

[Image by Matthew Winterburn licensed under Creative Commons.]

Categories
Barack Obama Criticism Foreign Policy History Iran Law National Security Politics The Bush Legacy The Opinionsphere The War on Terrorism

McNamara, Cuomo, Bearing Witness, Iran’s Bomb, Sri Lanken Victories, and Historical Dignity

It’s that glorious time of the week – Friday. So, here’s my recommendations of some interesting reads for this weekend that came up this past week…

  1. There were a number of excellent obituaries of Robert McNamara published upon his death. But what I would recommend would be reading this speech given in 1966 at the height of his power.
  2. Another speech worth reading is Mario Cuomo’s “Our Lady of the Law” speech from November 2007 which was published for the first time on this blog earlier in the week.
  3. Roger Cohen in the New York Times tries to express the insufficiency of online reporting aggregating news and media – as Andrew Sullivan and Nico Pitney did so usefully did during the Iranian protests. As these two journalists amassed tweets, photos, videos, news stories and every other bit of information about what was going on in Iran, Roger Cohen himself was in Tehran having evaded the Iranian censors. He went to the protests, interviewed the protesters, ran from basij with them. What I could see then was that while what Sullivan and Pitney were doing was new and unique – and extremely useful for understanding what was happening, it was missing a certain urgency that Cohen was able to provide with his bylines from Tehran. So he writes here about the “actual responsibility” of the journalist – to “bear witness:

    “Not everyone realizes,” Weber told students, “that to write a really good piece of journalism is at least as demanding intellectually as the achievement of any scholar. This is particularly true when we recollect that it has to be written on the spot, to order, and that it must create an immediate effect, even though it is produced under completely different conditions from that of scholarly research. It is generally overlooked that a journalist’s actual responsibility is far greater than the scholar’s.”

    Yes, journalism is a matter of gravity. It’s more fashionable to denigrate than praise the media these days. In the 24/7 howl of partisan pontification, and the scarcely less-constant death knell din surrounding the press, a basic truth gets lost: that to be a journalist is to bear witness.

    The rest is no more than ornamentation.

    To bear witness means being there — and that’s not free. No search engine gives you the smell of a crime, the tremor in the air, the eyes that smolder, or the cadence of a scream.
    No news aggregator tells of the ravaged city exhaling in the dusk, nor summons the defiant cries that rise into the night. No miracle of technology renders the lip-drying taste of fear. No algorithm captures the hush of dignity, nor evokes the adrenalin rush of courage coalescing, nor traces the fresh raw line of a welt.

  4. Robert Patterson in Foreign Policy brings some measured historical analysis to what would happen if Iran got the bomb.
  5. Robert Kaplan in The Atlantic explains how the Sri Lankan government was able to achieve a monumental victory over a terrorist group – and also why America should not imitate its methods in any way. He concludes bleakly:

    So is there any lesson here? Only a chilling one. The ruthlessness and brutality to which the Sri Lankan government was reduced in order to defeat the Tigers points up just how nasty and intractable the problem of insurgency is. The Sri Lankan government made no progress against the insurgents for nearly a quarter century, until they turned to extreme and unsavory methods.

  6. David Brooks wrote about dignity:

    In so doing, [George Washington] turned himself into a new kind of hero. He wasn’t primarily a military hero or a political hero. As the historian Gordon Wood has written, “Washington became a great man and was acclaimed as a classical hero because of the way he conducted himself during times of temptation. It was his moral character that set him off from other men.”

Categories
Russia The Media The Opinionsphere

The Goal of the Commentariat

Ellen Barry of the New York Times quotes Russian “television commentator Mikhail V. Leontyev, who has built a career on his relentless hectoring of the West” on what he does

My task on television is to verbalize, in a certain formula, the real public consciousness that exists. So people will hear what they want to hear. So they can say, ‘Yes, that is what I thought!’

My impression is that Barry was trying to convey the idea that Leontyev was a propagandist for the Russian state – but his explanation of his job struck me as a pretty honest description of what most talking heads and columnists aim for – and what Glenn Greenwald so derides – as they claim to and aspire to explain what the American people think about a matter.

It’s always a bit fuzzy though – in either state-controlled media or our more free press at home – whether these thoughts are what people thought before, or if these ideas have been planted by the commentator – or if there instead exists some delicate balance between the two.

Categories
Criticism Politics The Opinionsphere

Noam Chomsky’s Useful Fantasy

[digg-reddit-me]I’ve long been a bit puzzled by the respect given to Noam Chomsky’s politics. Yesterday, I listened to a lecture given by Chomsky this past Friday which seemed to consit of his meandering thoughts on the state of the world and the economy. I have to credit it for being interesting – and persuasive in a manner which all lasting worldviews as well as conspiracy theories are.

But there are several reasons I still find it difficult to take Chomsky’s politics seriously. His worldview has an all-or-nothing quality to it – as it is based on a number of presumptions which he does not attempt to prove and which inform every aspect of his view. These Chomskyian assumptions include:

  • Everything of significance is controlled by a small number of wealthy individuals.
  • These individuals deliberately and consciously inflict great evil on the world for their personal gain.
  • These individuals control American foreign policy and government and thus America has become a malignant empire which violently imposes the will of this oligarchy on the world.
  • The American people are opposed to this, though they have been propagandized to accept it.
  • The American people are also being exploited by having their jobs shipped overseas.

Chomsky preaches only to the converted – those who accept these premises. He has a certain understanding of the world which is quite different from that understood by at least most Americans who are his primary audience – but he does not attempt to speak to these masses. His presentation is directed squarely at those who agree. Chomsky makes little secret of this. As he wrote regarding American torture under George W. Bush:

For one thing, even without inquiry, it was reasonable to suppose that Guantánamo was a torture chamber.

For Chomsky, who starts out assuming the evil intent of those he opposes, this is a reasonable supposition. None of this makes his views necessarily wrong. But it makes his presentation unpersuasive to me. I do sense the attraction of his views though – similar to that of the fantay world of vampires or Harry Potter or Star Trek – except no one confuses these interesting and at times revealing fantasies with the world we live in.

His insistence that the many evils of the world are the result of secret and evil planning strikes me as improbable, as in my own experience, I have found that most awful things are not the result of deliberate and evil planning but stupidity and accident and coincidence and incompetence.

The other thing I noticed in his work is his easy lies, his distortions and omission of facts to fit his propagandistic purposes. Some of these are easily figured out by anyone paying critical attention. Others are harder to smoke out. For example, in the lecture referenced above he speaks of the current poverty in Bangladesh and then observes:

We might, incidentally, remember that when the British landed in what’s now Bangladesh, they were stunned by its wealth and splendor. And it didn’t take very long for it to be on its way to become the very symbol of misery, not by an act of God.

In this accusation, he is unusually indirect – as he generally specifically blames the Western elite for the evils of the world. But perhaps in this case, he realized how nakedly dishonest this observation was. After all, any slight knowledge of the history of the world in the 17th century begins with the fact that the “standard of living” – to use a modern term – was extremely poor for all but the most wealthy. The wealth the British were impressed by was that of the royalty – who were busy exploiting the people before the British arrived. At the same time, Bangladesh became “the very symbol of misery” not because the fate of it’s citizens deteriorated from the moment the British arrived – but because they did not progress at the same rate as the Western world. The greatest strides in reducing poverty in Bangladesh have in fact come in the past two decades (as poverty decreased by nearly 20%)  under the precise economic liberalization that Chomsky opposes with all his intellectual skills. (This also coincides with the introduction of microfinance.)

Similary, in his article on America and torture – in which he tries to make the case that torture has always been one of the tools America uses to force its will onto the world – he mentions that in the war in the Phillipines, there was “widespread use of torture”  by the Americans. He fails to mention that President Theodore Roosevelt and his War Secretary Elihu Root prosecuted and punished those soldiers and commanding officers who were found guilty of torture.

I find Chomsky’s views to be quite interesting as well as fantastic. In the same way that a well-thought out fantasy can reveal important truths about reality, so can Chomsky’s work. But it is difficult to accept as a serious worldview.

[Image by MatthewBradley licensed under Creative Commons.]

Categories
Financial Crisis Politics The Opinionsphere

The People’s Rage At A System That Had Failed Them

Frank Rich uses the new film Public Enemies and the saga of Bernie Madoff to try to get at the momentous forces rippling through our society as this financial crisis reveals the rifts and trade-offs and makes explicit the social bargain that is submerged during prosperity:

“Dillinger did not rob poor people,” wrote one correspondent to The Indianapolis Star. “He robbed those who became rich by robbing the poor.”

Gorn writes that the current economic crisis helped him understand better why Americans could root for a homicidal bank robber: “As our own day’s story of stupid policies and lax regulations, of greedy moneymen, free-market hucksters, white-collar thieves, and self-serving politicians unfolds, and as banks foreclose on millions of families’ homes, workers lose their jobs, and life savings disappear, it becomes clear why Dillinger’s wild ride so fascinated America during the 1930s.” An outlaw could channel a people’s “sense of rage at the system that had failed them.”

As Gorn reminds us, Americans who felt betrayed didn’t just take to cheering Dillinger; some turned to the populism of Huey Long, or to right-wing and anti-Semitic demagogues like Father Coughlin, or to the Communist Party. The passions unleashed by economic inequities are explosive because those inequities violate the fundamental capitalist faith. It’s the bedrock American dream that virtues like hard work and playing by the rules are rewarded with prosperity.

In 2009, too many who worked hard and played by the rules are still suffering, while too many who bent or broke the rules with little or no accountability are back reaping a disproportionate share of what scant prosperity there is.