By Kevin D. Williamson
Monday, July 29, 2024
Americans have a funny relationship with big.
We are a big country: No. 4 by land mass, No. 3 by population, No. 2 in
agricultural production, No. 1 in GDP. We are big people (the average American
man is three inches taller than the average man in Brazil, Egypt, or Iran, and
goodness knows how much heavier), we like big trucks and big houses, we have
big ideas, big dreams, big plans. We do big things in a big way. Like the man said: We
parked a car on the Moon and left the keys in it, because we know we’re the
only ones who are going back up there.
But, then, we get weird about big: We sniff at Big
Business and whatever subdivisions of the same we wish to demonize: Big Oil,
Big Tobacco, Big Bigness. (That bias against big business is, I would like to
say as plainly and directly as I can, stupid.)
We valorize small businesses and the people who run them, which is fine—there
is value in all kinds of enterprises—but if you run the numbers on what has
driven U.S. economic growth, employment, wages, innovation, corporate profits,
etc., you’ll see that it has been
disproportionately large firms and startups that quickly grew into very
large firms. Every country has the local tailor and the guys down at the
farmers’ market, but not every country has Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon,
Exxon, Oracle, Coca-Cola, etc.
Fun comparisons: Foods giant Nestlé has long been the
most important global firm in Switzerland, with revenues that exceed one-tenth
of Switzerland’s GDP and a market capitalization of about $256 billion
(recently edged past by Roche), which wouldn’t even break the top 25 in the
United States. Britain’s largest firm, AstraZeneca, would be even farther down
the list, and the largest firm in the European Union, Novo Nordisk, wouldn’t
break the top 10 in the United States. The biggest U.S. firms are in technology,
finance, energy, and health care; the biggest firms in France are LVMH, which
is Louis Vuitton et al., followed by Hermès and L’Oréal. Meaning no disrespect
to the luxury goods and fashion industries, would you rather be the country
whose major industries invent all the world’s cool technology and figure out
how to profitably finance its deployment or the one whose biggest players are
important and valuable second-tier firms that make expensive handbags?
And, for the longest time, populists left and right
bitched and moaned about “big money” in politics. The case against “big money”
in politics was made for many years with varying degrees of stupidity: The
dumbest version of it maintained that corporations, special-interest groups,
and others of that ilk simply bribed politicians to get their way. It isn’t
that there isn’t any bribery in American politics, but there isn’t evidence
that there is much of it.
The slightly less dumb, but not really all that much less
dumb, version held that policy was driven by campaign donations, big lobbying
budgets, and independent expenditures. That was never really broadly true,
either: The NRA did not go out and just buy politicians, in spite of
what you might have heard in
great songs from the first year of the 21st century, and that isn’t what
the NRA and other special-interest groups do today. Instead, what they mostly
do is support politicians who support them and their agenda. The conspiratorial
view gets the arrow of causality bass-ackward.
Nobody has to tell people running for office in
Iowa that there are a bunch of people in the state who care a lot about issues
related to corn and pork production any more than anybody has to tell people
running for office in New York or California that there are a lot of
influential people with strong opinions about how we tax income from
private-equity and venture-capital investments. Successful politicians know
their electorates: People in Jackson, Mississippi, are probably going to have
views on police shootings that are different from those of the people in Aspen,
Colorado, do—and their votes and donations will reflect that. Sometimes, they
will pool their resources to press for certain policies, and often they will
form organizations to do that on a long-term basis. Some of those organizations
will spend a lot of money—and, if the issue is at all contentious (which it
usually is, otherwise, you wouldn’t need to work so hard to get your way) there’s
going to be another organization spending a lot of money on the other side. If
you are a politician who wants to raise money on gun control, you can raise
money either way: by supporting gun-control policies or by resisting them. That
isn’t corruption, or anything like corruption.
The critique that gets closest to the truth is basically
a kind of soft-Marxist class analysis: People of a certain breed are like dogs
that know one another by smell, and the guy who works as a banking regulator
spends all of his days around bankers and banking-adjacent people, thinking
about banking issues, developing expertise in banking-related questions, etc.
If he has 20 years of experience working as a bank regulator and decides he
wants to go to the private sector and make some money, what is he going to do?
Mow lawns? No, he’s going to put his banking expertise to work with the help of
some of those banking contacts he has made over the course of his 20 years as a
regulator.
While it is unlikely that he was playing a long game and
entered the regulatory agency as a kind of sleeper agent for the bankers with
the idea of getting a big payoff at the end, it certainly is the case that the
possibility of such a payout was on his mind at certain critical moments, and
probably always there in the back of his thoughts as his most likely career
Plan B or Act II. But that kind of economic self-interest isn’t the only factor
at work in bureaucracies, and it probably isn’t even the most important. It is
natural, and possibly inevitable, that regulators who spend all their working
hours in the company of people with adjacent professional lives—and similar
interests, similar educations, similar social situations, working in a
collegial way toward broadly shared goals, etc.—are going to adopt the point of
view of the people they are supposed to be regulating.
We see this in journalism all the time: Put a cub
reporter on the police beat and, six months later, he’ll be talking like a cop.
Sometimes, that identification is explicit: Randi Weingarten hasn’t spent her
career doing what’s good for education, she has spent it doing what is
good for members of teachers’ unions—which isn’t the same thing at all.
Usually, though, the identification is an unspoken thing. Sometimes, you get a
radical Jacobin type in an important regulatory position—ask my libertarian
friends about
Lina Khan sometime—but your average USDA guy doesn’t hate farmers, and your
exemplary bank regulator has been or will be a banker. He doesn’t need to be
bribed to take a banker’s point of view toward regulation—it comes naturally to
him.
Forgive me for taking such a circuitous route to get
around to my point, which is this: Most of the stuff we used to say about the
corrupting influence of money in politics was bumf to begin with, but changes
in the way politicians communicate and raise money has made complaints about
the nefarious effects of “big money” positively ridiculous. When Joe Biden
finally decided to announce that he was checking
out of the 2024 presidential race, the Biden-Harris campaign had about $96
million in cash on hand. That’s a big pile of money—but Harris and her team
raised more
than $200 million in the first few days after she became the
presumptive nominee. They didn’t do that by asking a couple of rich Democrats
to write big checks—our campaign finance laws make that pretty much impossible.
(Elon Musk can still put $45 million a month into a PAC as a thank you to the
Trump campaign for choosing former Silicon Valley moneyman J.D. Vance as his VP
nominee if
he wanted to, but he can’t give that money to the Trump campaign.) Harris
et al. did a bunch of Zoom calls, at least one of which reportedly
hit 160,000 participants. In 2024, you don’t need 50 rich guys on your team
when the right kind of candidate can raise $1 billion $20 at a time. Again,
ours is a big country: If your fundraising universe is only 1 percent of
Americans, you only have to get an average donation of about $295 to raise $1
billion. That isn’t a big ask, even for people who aren’t super-rich.
Which brings me back to those expensive handbags
mentioned above in what you probably assumed was a casual disgression.
Here’s an interesting bit of news for all you Fifth
Avenue shoppers: The company that owns Saks Fifth Avenue is
buying Neiman Marcus, which also owns Bergdorf Goodman, Saks’ more
aristocratic neighbor down the street. Amazon is part of the deal. There’s some
interesting economics at work there, but the basic motive force is that the big
retailers feel the need to gang up against the brands.
The consumer goods business has undergone a change that
is in many ways parallel to what’s happening with party politics. In the cachet
and prestige market, big stores such as Saks and Neiman Marcus, and even
snootier ones such as Bergdorf, don’t have anything like the social status of
the brands they stock. The markup on the handbag doesn’t come from the fact
that it is on display at Saks but from the fact that it says “Prada” or
whatever on the side. Luxury goods firms know this—there’s a reason LVMH is the
largest company in France and the second-biggest company in the European Union,
and it is not run by fools—and so they have for years been trying to capture a
bigger piece of the final sales price for themselves. Many of them have
established or expanded their own retail infrastructures and increased online
sales directly to consumers. So, while retailers are the brands’ partners, they
are also their competitors.
It’s a weird business, but one thing to keep in mind is
that, as in the case of politics, it’s less of a big-money thing than you might
expect: Tom Ford doesn’t make money selling a few $5,000 tuxedos every year—Tom
Ford makes money selling a whole lot of $200 bottles of perfume, sunglasses,
and other relatively low-priced items, by which I mean items that may be
expensive for their category but that do not represent enormous financial
commitments for consumers. A typical Hermès tie costs less than $300, which is
more than you’d pay at Brooks Brothers but isn’t your monthly mortgage payment,
either.
In this model, the politicians are the brands and the
parties are the department stores. Consumers’ loyalty increasingly is to the
politician-brand, not to the institution that provides the brand with some
shelf space, inventory support, and other boring business services. Donald
Trump is, of course, the nonpareil example of this in recent history, a man who
often was running against the Republican Party more than he was carrying its
banner. But Barack Obama practiced a very similar sort of politics: His brand
thrived while he was in office, but his tenure was disastrous for Democrats at
every level other than the presidency, with Obama’s party losing more House and
Senate seats, more state legislature seats, and more governorships than under
any other president. He was the Hermès handbag of Democratic presidents, and
the party was, to abuse the metaphor, more of a Bloomingdale’s, maybe even a
Macy’s.
(The relative snootiness of New York City department
stores provided the basis for one of the great studies in
the field of sociolinguistics.)
The emergence of brand as a factor superior to all others
hasn’t always been good for consumer goods (note the gaudy branding that now
disfigures the offerings of formerly reserved makers such as Loro
Piana) and it hasn’t been good for politics, either, in that it encourages
(and all but demands) an approach that relies on personality cults and
celebrity. Think of the way even a non-elected political figure such as Ruth
Bader Ginsburg was reduced to a kind of logo or brand (“the Notorious RBG”) and
an accessory (the lace
collar), which may have made her an icon (in a literal sense) but did
nothing at all to further the dissemination of her legal philosophy and may
even have impeded it. To the vast majority of the public, Ruth Bader Ginsburg
doesn’t represent a legal philosophy at all—she represents a mood. The
phenomenon is even more intense for elected officials and for those who hope to
become elected officials. Trump is anything but a package of policies, and he
has bounced from one position to another even on issues that people in his
orbit say they care a great deal about, such as gun rights, abortion, and
immigration.
As cartoonist and collector of propaganda posters Ted
Rall writes
in the Wall Street Journal:
Kamala Harris’s presidential
campaign is days old, and she’s already a social-media superhero. Memes and
T-shirts depict her as Captain America, Wonder Woman, a member of the Incredibles.
Facebook Democrats are sharing Kamalized images of Rosie the Riveter and the Statue
of Liberty. Democrats are donating like mad and attempting to create a cult of
personality.
Kamala Harris, for her part, isn’t going to raise the
money she needs to run her race by offering the market PowerPoint presentations
on highly detailed policy white papers. She is going to be icon-ized,
logo-ized, and branded. And as she goes about doing that, she doesn’t have any
real incentive to do what is in the long-term interest of her party. The
Democratic Party itself has many incentives to look after its own interests but
has little real power to do so—if it were otherwise, we’d be talking
about the presidential campaign of Gretchen Whitmer or Josh Shapiro.
Like the retailers, the parties used to be able to deal
with the brands from a position of strength, because they controlled the money.
They had the infrastructure and the relationships that facilitated transactions
between consumers and brands. The party apparatus was where political
business was done and how political business was done. But that business
has moved to a more online, direct-to-consumer model. That may have some good
effects, but it also will have—is having, already has had—some profoundly
destructive ones. Harris might make a pretty good meme—but what makes a good
president is something else.
Words About Words
This week’s entry will take the form of a correction
from last week: The surname of the oleaginous pastor in Houston is Osteen,
not Olsteen. The erroneous Olsteen has, to my ear, a kind of
Norski sound, like Olsen. Osteen, on the other hand, is an
Anglo-Irish name, sometimes written O’Steen but more commonly seen in
the Anglophone world in the familiar variant Austin.
Surnames have a way of changing, and had more of a way of
doing so before modern recordkeeping and standardization in spelling. Charles
Hardin Holley became famous as Buddy Holly, which was probably
just simplification for the sake of marketing, but we also see spellings change
as people move around and adopt the local norms of pronunciation and
orthography. Cartier sells jewelry, and Carter sold little pills,
but the names come from the same background, with Carter being the
Anglicization of the French surname.
There were a couple of different routes to Austin. Some
Austins are really Augustins or Augustines or Aostins, a
French name that arrived in the British Isles with the Normans and probably
provided the attractive example for the evolution of Osteen to Austin.
And if you are looking for an O’Steen and an Augustine
in the same spot, try Florida.
No
“Is This What Moving Toward Stability Feels Like?” The New
York Times wants
to know.
And Furthermore
Among the many deficiencies of this
Henry Olsen column is its omission of the word immigration, which is about
70 percent of what this is all really about.
Economics for English Majors
Do read Guy Trebay’s New
York Time write-up of the underlying economics of Tom Ford, along with
Jeannette Neumann’s recent
Bloomberg report on the Saks-Neiman deal.
In Closing
August 1 is the Christian holiday of Lammas,
traditionally celebrated in the British Isles and northern Europe. Like Easter
and Christmas, it is a Christian holiday with obviously pagan roots—a
first-fruits celebration. From James
George Frazer:
The first of August is our Lammas
Day, a name derived from the Anglo-Saxon hlafmaesse, that is, “Loaf-mass”
or “Bread-mass,” and the name marks the day as a mass or feast of thanksgiving
for the first-fruits of the corn-harvest, which in England and Ireland usually
ripen about that time. The feast “seems to have been observed with bread
of new wheat, and therefore in some parts of England, and even in some near
Oxford, the tenants are bound to bring in wheat of that year to their lord, on
or before the first of August.” But if the festival of the first of August was
in its origin an offering of the first-fruits of the corn-harvest, we can
easily understand the great importance which the ancient Irish attached to it,
and why they should have thought that its observance ensured a plentiful crop
of corn as well as abundance of fruit and milk and fish, whereas the neglect of
the festival would entail the failure of these things and cause the hair of
their kings to turn prematurely grey. For it is a widespread custom among
primitive agricultural peoples to offer the first-fruits of the harvest to
divine beings, whether gods or spirits, before any person may eat of the new
crops, and wherever such customs are observed we may assume that an
omission to offer the first-fruits must be supposed to endanger the crops and
the general prosperity of the community, by exciting the wrath of the gods or
spirits, who conceive themselves to be robbed of their dues. Now among the
divine beings who are thus propitiated the souls of dead ancestors take in many
tribes a prominent or even exclusive place, and that these ancestors are not
creations of the mythical fancy but were once men of flesh and blood is
sometimes demonstrated by the substantial evidence of their skulls, to which
the offerings are made and in which the spirits are supposed to take up their
abode for the purpose of partaking of the food presented to them. Sometimes the
ceremony is designated by the expressive name of “feeding the dead.”
One of the things I especially like about Frazer is his
insistent reminder to readers that ancient superstitions we find quaint or
savage were nurtured and practiced—and cherished—by people who were, in every
important particular, exactly like us. These superstitions simply
represented the best thinking of the time. They were, in an important sense,
the earliest progenitors of science in that they were the beginning of the
attempt to systematically apply generally understood principles (false ones,
but they didn’t know that at the time!) to specific problems and questions.
That’s how it went, for a very long time: “The crops were good last year, and
they were good the year before, but they failed this year, and now a lot of us
are going to starve. What was different about this year?”
What’s interesting is that they generally came up with
the same answer we so often do: that there was something wrong with the king,
that he was spiritually or morally defective or that age and sickness had
sapped his ability to bless the people through his own person.
So, bake a loaf of bread and laugh at your primitive
ancestors on Lammas. Somewhere, they are laughing back at you.
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