As American progressives, especially New Yorkers, honor the passing this week of Mario Cuomo, editorials and eulogies in various forms will cite the former governor’s famous keynote address at the 1984 Democratic National Convention. In this speech, Cuomo challenged President Reagan’s statement that America is “a shining city on a hill,” which comes from Matthew 5:14; and it is a phrase that has been synonymous with America’s unique capacity for divinely presumed exceptionalism since John Winthrop first invoked the words in advance of founding the Massachusetts Bay Colony. (All credit to historian Sarah Vowell for making these connections in her book The Wordy Shipmates.)
Cuomo addressed Reagan directly, accusing the president of living in an ivory tower from which “the city” may indeed look shiny to him and his wealthy friends, but down on street level, where people work, struggle, and endure deprivations like homelessness, the American city is neither shiny nor on a hill. Progressives like me didn’t think much of Reagan’s rhetoric that often glossed over real challenges (like energy and climate issues) that we are only now beginning to take seriously. And we didn’t buy into supply-side economics or the deregulatory agenda that helped foster a culture of “conspicuous consumption,” which continues to distort the principles of responsible capitalism to the extent that contemporary progressives seem to have broken faith with the idea that the system remains a rational, economic model for a free society.
This understandable frustration, combined with an equal measure of distrust in government, appears to be leading many social progressives toward economic libertarianism that, ironically enough, champions the same deregulatory paradigm long-cherished by the trickle-down, supply-side conservatives. What’s different this time is that it isn’t financial services, extraction industries, or the manufacturing sector promising the “market will solve everything if government gets off our backs,” it’s the high-tech industry, the disruptors of Silicon Valley. Many of us democrats and progressives marveled at Reagan’s ability to teach the conservative, working-class base to vote against its own self-interests, and now the technocrats appear to be teaching progressives to do the same thing.
In an article that appeared yesterday in The Washington Post, writer Larry Downes offers old-school, industry-serving declarations dressed up in the new lingo used by the tech industry elite. Touting what he calls “Big Bang Disruptions,” Downes is not only promoting a new book, he is serving up classic, conservative rhetoric, sprinkled with a dash of Schumpeter, and folded into byte-sized hors d’oeuvres that smell tasty and fresh, but are really just pigs in a blanket again. It’s just another business sector saying, “Get out of the way, and technology (i.e. the market) will meet all challenges and bring about prosperity.” And the reason I think this GOP stand-by is now playing among progressives is the aforementioned disenchantment with government in general and the nature of the Internet, which many see as an antidote to or substitute for government. I honestly think we’re at a baby-with-the-bathwater moment when faith in both private and public systems is so low, that even traditional progressives are susceptible to messages like this one from Downes:
“We see . . . the FDA’s growing discomfort with new technologies, such as the DNA testing service 23andMe, that are being translated into new products and services circling the moribund health care industry, giving patients access to information about their own bodies that have long been the exclusive fiefdom of medical professionals.”
Of course such populist ebullience must be tempered in light of this piece by Sarah Zhang, which appeared Tuesday on Gizmodo; it reports that the supposedly self-empowering 23andMe is entering into deals with large biotech firms to sell the DNA data people have been voluntarily providing to the company through its app. Not that I don’t hand it to guys who figured out how to make billions from spit, but Downes’s implication that their business model is going to solve the underlying flaws in American healthcare by disrupting the “fiefdom of medical professionals” is farcical. Of course, nobody should be surprised that selling user data is where the money is, not only for these high-tech expectorant collectors, but for most of the companies Downes is assuring us will “build the future” if the damned regulators will just stay out of the way.
And I have little doubt they will build the future, but on the chance that it starts to look like a future we don’t like, on the chance we don’t want to allow our genetic data to be sold like bundled securities, I have to ask my fellow progressives precisely what hedge against this kind of corporate practice might they propose other than government? We could argue about it on Facebook and Twitter, I suppose, but because Silicon Valley is interconnected by an incestuously small pool of venture capital, this “representation” through social media only makes more money for the new elite in their new towers. And from up there, America really does look a lot like a shiny city on a hill, doesn’t it?
It is also worth noting that some of the most successful Silicon Valley firms don’t have a particularly good track record for abiding by rules and regulations in the first place. In their own words, they like to “break things” and “get big fast” and “apologize later,” meaning they’ll settle lawsuits and pay fines after a few million dollars is a mere drop in their over-valued buckets. As such, I think a little skepticism is warranted in response to the assertion that a shiny future is somehow being delayed by the prospect of regulatory oversight.
Rules are ignored, broken, and fought against daily by these companies, so where is the unfettered prosperity? The economy is certainly healthier than it was when we were on the brink of disaster, but is the gap closing or widening between the ultra-rich and everyone else? One need only look in Silicon Valley’s own neighborhood to see that not much trickles down from those particular hills to the streets below. And if an industry is not closing that gap through legitimate creative destruction, but is potentially widening that gap with with destructive destruction, then it has no right to say to the public, “Back off. We got this.”
