tHe DeEp StAtE iz ReAL

A lot of my thoughts this week have been half-formed because I’ve been thinking about too many things and none of them have congealed coalesced into fully loaded TAKES. So where to begin? Ah yes, the Deep State.

The Deep State, for those of you who don’t follow conspiracy theorists or Trump and their ilk, is a concept that the government is controlled by a shadowy cabal of either Illuminati or Liberals or Ultrarich or celebrities and that they are the puppetmasters making the populist masses down-trodden. Most (all?) conspiracy theories are deeply rooted in anti-semitism. That links to just one article, but trust me: if you search for anti-semitism and conspiracy theories, prepare to settle in for a long winter’s night of reading.

The ironic thing about Trump and other white men claiming that the Deep State exists is that there is a particular set of relationships in America (and Europe and anywhere else that Western culture has colonized) that are secretive and ensure that power stays consolidated within that group. That group is, historically, white men.

Instead of calling it The Deep State, we’ve been calling it The Old Boys’ Network. The OBs do not like to have attention paid to the Network. Let’s look back at that Affirmative Action case the Supreme Court just handed down. Here’s what I said:

Going back to the affirmative action case, I want to note a few things about the underlying issues in the case. The majority opinion and the concurrences are racist and naive. But it’s important to note that nothing about this decision requires elite institutions to stop considering the “other” race card, i.e. legacy admissions. More than 40% of white students at Harvard are the children of alumni or staff and the monetary value of their alumni contributions is a factor. That’s how Power Genius Jared Kushner got in: his dad paid for a building. The perpetuation of privilege is the entire point of Harvard, not education. The reason we want a more diverse student body is in hopes that someday, the elite students of color will lead us to a more racially equitable future. I’m skeptical but whatever. Ketanji Brown Jackson went there, so maybe there’s something to it. But if Harvard really wants a diverse student body, there are plenty of ways to achieve that. It just means they have to stop favoring white people all the time.

A few people took the hint on this problem: The Department of Education is now investigating Harvard for its legacy admissions policy, and Wesleyan is probably just the first school to end legacy admissions. This comes on the heels of a huge study that found that colleges admit rich kids at much higher rates even when test scores are the same. “At Ivy League schools, one in six students has parents in the top 1 percent.” That’s 16%, which is (math) much higher than the proportion of rich kids in the general population.

If you want more evidence that the OB’s network is tightly wired to our institutions of higher learning, recall that four of the eight Supreme Court justices went to Harvard Law School and three went to Yale. It isn’t just that our leaders attend the same universities: More than 118 “political elites” have slaveholding ancestors.

Trump and the MAGA Republicans are engaged in an act of misdirection. They accuse “liberals” of a Deep State to throw the light off their own entrenched power. They point to the women and people of color who go to Harvard and Yale and say either that they are taking to spots of other deserving white people OR that there are a few who are “worthy” and “exceptional” who prove that the OBs aren’t racist. And white people who lack political power can tell that there is SOME force at work that limits the redistribution of power and wealth; they’d just rather blame Jews and Social Justice Warriors than the people who claim to speak for them.

There’s nothing new about this, of course. Barbara Ehrenreich wrote Fear of Falling in 1989 about how the aspirations of the middle class to become wealthy prevented them from recognizing the far greater affinity they should have with the poor. So I guess I’m pointing it out again. That’s all.

The other stuff on my mind has been equally ponderous, bouncing from Oppenheimer, which I liked (if that’s the right word for it), and the labor movement, which is always on my mind, for professional reasons, but more so this week because of a newsletter I read by Hamilton Nolan called Everything We’re Doing in Not Enough. Nolan argues that unions need to do more organizing and that they haven’t fulfilled the organizing promises that they made 25 years ago, which is why we still have a labor movement that still only represents 7% of private sector workers in the US (compared with 35% in the 1970s). You can read my comments to the article about why I think that organizing alone won’t save the unions.

Union density in the US overall fell to 10.5% of the workforce in 2022. In 1995, 14.5% of the workforce was unionized. Since then, some unions have invested 20-30% of their budgets in organizing, while others have put their money in political lobbying. So far, I’d say neither has paid the dividends they hoped for. The best that can be said is that all the money spent on organizing prevented the unions from disappearing more quickly.

This article about Starbucks’ campaign against their employees’ organizing efforts is a good example of why unions cannot organize their way out of this mess. The Starbucks Union was funded by major unions like SEIU and UFCW and caught on like wildfire. Unions win 80% of the elections that they file for with the NLRB. Organizing is not the whole problem; getting a first contract is.

The amount of time that leftist unionists spend fighting with business unionists is wasted time. The internecine battles inside of unions are also pointless. It’s true that reform-minded union leaders often campaign on promises of organizing and better contracts, but at the end of the day, when they are elected, they need to serve the members they have, not the members they dream of having. Sean O’Brien, the new Teamsters president, did a remarkable job getting a new contract for UPS workers by keeping his eyes on the ball: getting the contract. He did that through internal organizing: getting UPS workers ready to strike months in advance, and knowing exactly what he needed to achieve in a settlement.

What’s my point? My point is that the unions that spend their money on political lobbying to get labor law reform like the PRO Act aren’t wrong to be spending their money that way. However, their money would be much better spent on internal organizing that helped workers understand the political value of reform and could be turned out like WGA and SAG/AFTRA (and IATSE and Teamsters) to get that reform.

Stepping down off my soapbox. I apologize for not one, but two screeds about slightly dry topics. I’ll return to my previous hilarious programming (if that’s what it is) shortly.

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