In the eyes of a good part of American public opinion, Barack Obama’s economic team, from Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner to the president’s Chief Economic Advisor Larry Summers, like the king’s entourage at the end of the Ancien Régime, has inherited all the bad reflexes of the “court,” combining an excessive sympathy for the old logic of the financial world and an analogous ignorance about and indifference to popular emotions and sufferings.
Obama and the End of Privileges
by: Dominique Moïsi | Visit article original @ Les Echos
In order to understand America in 2009, would a reading of de Tocqueville’s “The Ancien Régime and the Revolution” be at least as useful as his indispensable “Democracy in America?”
Of course, present-day America is not in 1788, and the “Revolution” with a capital “R” is not around the corner. Lehman Brothers’ fall is not the same as the Bastille’s. You’d need a great deal of imagination to compare Barack Obama to Louis XVI and Michelle Obama to Marie-Antoinette … Nor does American political tradition include recourse to collective and uncontrolled violence. And yet, French citizen that I am, living in America the last two months, watching American television news programs every evening and moving daily through an American society in full crisis mode, how can I not see this mixture of fear and anger, accompanied by a strong feeling of injustice, that was one of the characteristics of France’s climate on the eve of the Revolution?
One need only substitute the lack of bread for the loss of habitation, to replace the aristocrats with bankers and financiers, and the aristocrats’ tax privileges with stock options, and the comparison seems a little less artificial.
The explosion of rage and populism that accompanied the A.I.G. scandal (the insurance giant saved from bankruptcy by the government that distributed retention bonuses to its leading executives) is indicative of a deep malaise. “Main Street America” – Middle America, as opposed to the elites – is animated by a profound feeling of fear and injustice: “How am I going to live, under what roof, and who will pay for my health care?” For these millions of Americans with an uncertain future, the banking and finance worlds’ elite live on another planet. And their “privileges,” like those of yesterday’s French nobility, no longer seem justified by the services they produce for society and have become quite simply “intolerable.”
In the eyes of a good part of American public opinion, Barack Obama’s economic team, from Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner to the president’s Chief Economic Advisor Larry Summers, like the king’s entourage at the end of the Ancien Régime, has inherited all the bad reflexes of the “court,” combining an excessive sympathy for the old logic of the financial world and an analogous ignorance about and indifference to popular emotions and sufferings.
The world of banking and finance must not only reinvent its profession and its lifestyle, but also its value system. What is so shocking about the “Madoff Affair” is not only one man’s crimes, but also the behavior of many of his rich clients, who, out of greed and to become still richer than they were, lost all financial common sense.
The other evening, television network CNN reported another significant incident that occurred last week. In the state of Connecticut, a group of demonstrators rented a bus that stopped at the luxurious properties of certain A.I.G. managing executives to congratulate those who returned their bonuses and protest against those who kept theirs. At the end of the eighteenth century in France, people burned chateaux; we’re not at that point, thank God. But some people’s privileges are no longer accepted or acceptable when the feeling of relative progress for everyone has been replaced by the reality of a crisis that strikes the multitudes with the violence of a tsunami.
What are the negative lessons the “jurist” President Barack Obama could retain from the experience of the end of Louis XVI’s reign? The first is that he must not cut himself off from the sufferings of his people; words alone no longer suffice. To not fall into an irresponsible populism, as a significant part of Congress and the media may, is one thing. To give the impression of too much “sympathy” for the world of finance and its aberrations is another. Otherwise, today’s “corporate laws” run the risk of enjoying the same end as the rights of yesterday’s Ancien Régime.
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Translation: Truthout French language editor Leslie Thatcher.
Dominique Moïsi, a special adviser to Ifri, is a guest professor at Harvard University.