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Politico Accidentally Exposes Beltway Elite

- By Jonathan Chait <http://nymag.com/author/jonathan%20chait>

Politico editors Jim VandeHei and Mike
Allen<http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=55F59122-520B-4C54-925D-0E5C296F75D2>today
have published what may be the most revealing piece I have ever read
about the Washington power elite. The value of the piece is almost entirely
anthropological. That is to say, read at face value, it tells the reader
almost nothing new. But examined as a cultural specimen, it offers profound
insight. The piece reads as if it were written by Upton Sinclair, if he
were taken prisoner and trying to smuggle messages out to the world past a
particularly literal-minded group of censors.

The subject of the piece is Allen and VandeHei’s report that broad
agreement exists on the correct policy agenda, as revealed to them through
“conversations we have had over the past three months with top lawmakers,
officials, their senior aides and the CEOs who advise and lobby all of
them.” The story proceeds to describe the obviously sensible agenda agreed
upon by these sources: It is vital to reduce the deficit through tax reform
and stingier entitlements, along with more free trade, resource extraction,
and liberalized immigration.

This is far from the Randian paranoia that has spread among so many
millionaires in the Obama agenda. Indeed, I find most of it fairly sensible
as policy. What makes the consensus so astonishing, and even nauseating, is
the degree to which those who share it show no awareness of their own
insularity. Their shared sense of a smart economic growth strategy excludes
any monetary or fiscal plan to bring down unemployment through higher
consumer demand, a position that commands strong support among economists.
Their list of ailments also excludes skyrocketing income inequality and
out-of-control carbon emissions. (Though, at the end of a passage extolling
the glorious possibility that American oil production will exceed that of
Saudi Arabia within a decade, VandeHei and Allen do note, “No doubt, there
are environmental concerns, especially for drinking water.” Well, yes. Also
for the future of the human race.)

Obviously, the CEOs, lawmakers, and top aides have a shared economic
interest in defining the agenda this way. Mass unemployment doesn’t hurt
them, and rising inequality helps them. They not only support more free
trade (as I do) but lack any sense that its corrosive effect on the
bargaining power of labor might make it anything less than an unalloyed
blessing. Non-self-interested rationales exist for all these policies, but
the role of self-interest in making them attractive to the economic elite
ought to be obvious. Yet all seem to believe implicitly that what is good
for the CEO class is by definition what’s good for America.

Even more remarkable is the approach Politico’s editors take toward the
consensus. They have on their hands the most ripe material for a scathing
exposé of a chummy, self-interested business-political elite. VandeHei and
Allen, by contrast, understand their role here not as exposing the insider
nexus but as uncritically transmitting its point of view. The authors begin
by describing the consensus as the opinions of the CEO-Beltway class but
never bother to mention dissenting opinions. By the middle of the piece,
they dispense altogether with the convention of describing the opinions as
such and merely repeat them as obvious truths (i.e., "Tax reform would
raise more money to pay down the debt and help create the 'certainty
premium' Moynihan spoke of.")

That mainstream journalists feel comfortable doing so is itself further
confirmation of the extraordinary and almost unchallenged power commanded
by the business and political elites. The Politico story is fairly typical
of Washington reporting in its basic endorsement of the business-political
elite consensus. The Sunday talk shows and editorial pages are filled to
the brim with right-thinking people who would read this piece and nod along
happily. What makes this one unusually valuable is that it approaches
unusually close to what ought to be a moment of self-awareness — by making
explicit rather than implicit the social web that produces the Beltway
consensus — but then sprints as fast as can be in the other direction. It
should be preserved for generations as the early-21st-century *cri de
coeur*of an incestuous, self-satisfied economic and political elite.


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Alexander Snyder-Mackler
(302) 598-867