The Powers Of Concentration (Or How We Got Here)

One of the features of American society in the current era is the concentration of power in the hands of an ever-shrinking circle of the few. That is true both in the economic and political spheres. As history has illustrated many, many times, with such concentration of power comes corruption and abuse, usually on a significant scale. And that concentrated power becomes both self-sustaining and self-regulating as it uses its existing power to expand its control over more and more of the levers of accountability and restraint. The growth of such concentrated power is no accident, but the result of conservative efforts, often aided both wittingly and unwittingly by so-called centrist Democrats, for the last 50 years.

The seeds of today’s concentration of power, both political and economic, were actually planted in the 1970s. Politically, the driver was the conservative backlash against the liberal gains of the 1960s and early 1970s where Blacks, women, and even gays were empowered like never before — for Blacks, gaining political power; for gays, the ability to come out of the closet; for women, an entry to the workforce — as well as the opposition to the war in Vietnam. Economically, the seed was the conservative exploitation of two separate food and energy supply shocks, one in 1973 and the other in 1978–79, which created a period of high inflation, low or even negative economic growth, and high unemployment in what became known as stagflation. More urgent for those driving the backlash, however, was the fear of the incipient regulatory state that was imposing restrictions and responsibilities on the unfettered power of business elites. For them, the emergence of new regulatory agencies like the EPA, Naderism, and the albeit disastrous but threatening left-wing campaign of George McGovern in 1972 required an immediate and coordinated response. It is this reaction to the liberal gains of the 1960s, the rise of the regulatory state, and the economic crises of the 1970s that have scarred policy makers for the last half century, and we still live with the consequences of both the responses and the failures to respond to the destructive policy outcomes driven by those reactions.

There are two seminal documents that laid the groundwork for conservative policies for the last 50 years. Economically, it was a 1970 article by…