The Chapter Ten Problem

Kevin Drum’s opus on the decline of labor and the collapse of economic egalitarianism in American politics isn’t something I agree with in every detail, but it’s good. But it suffers from an acute case of the so-called “chapter ten problem” where you can’t produce a positive vision for the future. Here’s the end:

Over the past 40 years, the American left has built an enormous institutional infrastructure dedicated to mobilizing money, votes, and public opinion on social issues, and this has paid off with huge strides in civil rights, feminism, gay rights, environmental policy, and more. But the past two years have demonstrated that that isn’t enough. If the left ever wants to regain the vigor that powered earlier eras of liberal reform, it needs to rebuild the infrastructure of economic populism that we’ve ignored for too long. Figuring out how to do that is the central task of the new decade.

Of course I don’t have the answer either. But to begin to sketch an idea, I think that in abstract terms “infrastructure of economic populism” isn’t the right description of what a labor union contributes politically. What you have with a union is a mechanism for collecting modest sums of money from a large group of people, such that some of the money is spent on hiring professionals to do the following things:

— Monitor legislative activity and political campaigns.
— Analyze the implications of policy proposals.
— Convey the upshot of the analysis both down to members and up to legislators.
— Produce bodies to show up at stuff.

The essential issue here is a basic collective action problem. If had the option of teaming up with 30 million like minded people to spend $100 a year in dues in order to maintain a political institution with an annual budget of $3 billion dedicated to my priorities, I’d be in good shape. Indeed, an institution specifically dedicated to political advocacy on behalf of like-minded people would be a much more optimal solution to the “countervailing forces” problem posed by the decline of organized labor. And I think a lot of people might find that kind of arrangement appealing. But of course once such an organization existed, $100 more or less wouldn’t make or break it so donors would tend to defect. And in the absence of the organization existing, it’s hard to persuade anyone to give the $100. No new conceptual ground there except to observe that these collective action problems pop up all over the place in the political domain, and if was truly impossible to overcome them you’d never see change for the better.

Mark Schmitt on “Dean’s Penguin” is still the closest thing to a workable vision on this score that I’ve seen.