Like Henry David Thoreau wearing down the path around Walden Pond, Melissa Glenn Haber appreciates a good thinking walk—and it took many steps to plan her most recent elective at Commonwealth, U.S. Politics and Policy in the 21st Century. A product of a Hughes/Wharton grant, the class challenges students to examine how we got to this political moment, starting with a philosophical foundation, digging into fifty years of economic and social policies, looking at the impact of COVID and the attention economy, and much more in between. Keep reading to learn more about Ms. Haber’s how and why.

Designing a course is a lot like designing a trail: it can’t just go to a great final destination; it needs to make getting there pleasurable, with challenging sections that aren’t too long, with ample variety, and, hopefully, with delightful surprises along the way. Similarly, I want my new elective, U.S. Politics and Policy in the 21st Century, to be engaging to students with disparate interests. Much of the planning I tackled for my Hughes/Wharton Project, then, was actually turning around in circles and undoing what had seemed like a great idea only the day before…

What helped: taking long walks and dictating essaylets into my phone about what I wanted the course to do. I knew, from the beginning, I wanted to give the kids space to to learn about and process what is happening now—why so many people feel democracy is under attack, here and elsewhere—but I also wanted to give them some of the history (political, economic, social) that would help them evaluate some of the theories about what’s happening. But as I walked, I kept coming back to the same thought: behind all this political/social struggle is a fundamental change to the economy. (“It’s the economy, stupid,” as Bill Clinton used to say.) I also realized I needed to broaden my understanding and perspective of what’s been happening to our economy over the last fifty years, listening to economists from across the political spectrum. Moreover, I keep coming back to Edward Baptists’ uncomfortable work about capitalism and slavery—that slavery was profitable in large part because it figured out how to make people more productive through torture. What’s happening at Amazon warehouses today isn’t the same—but it’s not as different as I wish, and at the back of my mind is the constant thought: our comfort depends on other people performing labor we don’t want to do at wages we wouldn’t accept. 

That said, I am not an anti-capitalist—or not exactly. On my walks, I tried to rearticulate the idea I emphasize in my U.S. History class that there is not one single definition of capitalism: all of the capitalisms that ever were and all the capitalisms that exist in different parts of the world today are all creatures of government. There is no such thing as capitalism in the state of nature; as the great economic historian Karl Polanyi wrote, “laissez-faire was planned.” The capitalism we find ourselves in now is pretty different from the capitalism of the 1950s. Forty percent of our GDP comes from the financial sector, which is driving our inequality. Moreover, the digital nature of the modern world changes everything—especially in the ways we are both consumers and the product itself. It’s a society economist Yanis Varoufakis describes as “technofeudalism” where the “land” is now the monopolized digital platforms. (I really wish I knew enough to evaluate his argument that the tech sector has “killed” capitalism.) What interests me about this is a point I first came across with the philosopher Elizabeth Anderson, who argues that we should expand our definition of government to include corporations. After all, in the medieval period, “government” was provided by those who controlled the manor—that is, the means of production. How different is that today?

I don’t mean that in the sense that the big corporations control the literal government—though as the course will explore, that is also true in many instances. Instead, I like Anderson’s assertion that we should consider the restrictions corporations put on us (as workers, consumers, citizens) as a form of governing. It is that growing power of businesses over all aspects of our lives (especially because of the control of the various digital platforms and the depredations of the attention economy) that have led people like Varoufakis to call himself, oxymoronically, a libertarian Marxist. These leftist critics of the current form of capitalism are, in that way, quite close to our founding fathers who wanted to maximize freedom above all else. Under the current economic and attention-grabbing system, I’d argue, most people are not free.

The fundamental question I keep returning to may be the question that consumes all students of U.S. history: what does it mean to be free? Where are the libertarians and liberals and conservatives meeting together, and where are the points of conflict? How are conflicts over social freedoms alike and unlike economic freedoms? And how does religion/philosophy fit in—the old questions of how to be free of our own desires and our own id?

I used to think the Venn diagram of liberal, conservative, and libertarian was pretty straightforward: Liberals agreed with libertarians that the state should not restrict freedom of what we should say, how we should act, whom we could love, and whether we had to fight in wars against our will. Conservatives agreed with libertarians on economic freedoms; i.e., the state should not restrict the freedom of how much I can be forced to pay for the benefit of others or how much my business should be regulated. But in part because of the ineluctable, transmutational power of polarization, everything has become very tangled (with, for example, liberals becoming increasingly concerned with what people say and do, and conservatives at this moment backing a man who is investing the government far more heavily in the economy than in generations). Moreover, after four decades of “neoliberal” policies, our economy is now less free and less competitive than many others around the world, as Thomas Phillipson has written in The Great Reversal (which we’ll read in the course). We’ll read economist Heather Boushey as well, including her work on how inequality is constraining our economy further. My question, as always, is why We the People^TM, left and right, are putting up with that. It is not a natural consequence of “capitalism,” as all capitalisms are made, not born.

One possibility of why we put up with it is suggested in two very dense books I dipped into this year: Greta Krippner’s Capitalizing on Crisis: The Political Origins of the Rise of Finance and Brian Judge’s Democracy in Default, which argue that the rise of the financial sector came not out of conscious choices but a great desire in our politics to avoid making decisions about the distribution of wealth. By relying on the idea that “the rising tide would lift all boats” (which was largely true in the thirty years after World War II but not after), Congress could pursue policies to strengthen the economy in the belief that all would benefit. By abdicating on the question of distribution as not being a political one—that is, assuming that there is one form of capitalism, and that it would benefit all—they abandoned the project and let our current capitalism create itself. 

These muddled musings led me to where I thought the course should begin. Both of my U.S. history classes teach that the idea that capitalism and democracy are two sides of the same coin is actually of recent vintage. Before the Cold War, there were plenty of people who thought that capitalism would destroy democracy by concentrating wealth and squelching the voices of the many—and plenty (including Hitler, I learned) who feared that democracy would destroy capitalism by the many rising up and challenging a system that did not benefit them. As we always say in the City of Boston class, the question in evaluating any system is not does it work, but does it work for this group or that. What do we mean by “work,” and what do we mean by “best”? Those questions are, of course, political, maybe even “moral” questions, which is why I decided to start the course with a unit on the more philosophical question of how the students in the class think the distribution of goods should work (and why). 

To that end, we started with philosophers: Michael Sandel, Elizabeth Anderson, the libertarian Murray Rothbard, Yasha Mounk’s summary of “Luck Morality,” and Frederick Nietzsche, as well as two conservative economists, Greg Mankiw and Thomas Sowell. Next, we turned to an introduction on economic principles before looking at the current inequality and its effect on our economy, our government, and our society—topics we’ll return to throughout the year. Later in the course will be a brief introduction into the topic that complicates so much in the United States: race. We’ll try to come up with more nuanced and sophisticated definitions of “racism,” systemic racism, implicit bias, and so on before a unit on history since the 1980/’90s/’00s (based mostly on John Ganz’ When the Clock Broke and Theda Skocpol’s work on the Tea Party). Then we’ll be ready to get to the heart of the course: the two units of polarization (which will draw heavily on The Coddling of the American Mind and Joan Williams’ White Working Class and a taste of Naomi Klein’s Doppleganger to think about the effect of COVID on all of this) before diving more deeply into the roles race, gender, and then the attention economy play in our divisions. For the fourth quarter, I’m hoping to linger on ideas for some time and not feel we need to get anywhere in particular.

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