Chris Hayes has written an excellent essay for The Nation on the rise of corporatism. It is well worth reading.

There’s a word for a governing philosophy that fuses the power of government and large corporations as a means of providing services and keeping the wheels of industry greased, and it’s a word that has begun to pop up among critics of everything from the TARP bailout to healthcare to cap and trade: corporatism. Since corporatism often merges the worst parts of Big Government and Big Business, it’s an ideal target for both the left and right. The ultimate corporatist moment, the bailout, was initially voted down in the House by an odd-bedfellows coalition of Progressive Caucus members and right-wingers. In the wake of the healthcare sausage-making, writers from Tim Carney on the right (author of the provocative Obamanomics) and Glenn Greenwald on the left have attacked the bill as the latest incarnation of corporatism, a system they see as the true enemy. There is even some talk among activists of a grand left-right populist coalition coming together to depose the entrenched interests that hold sway in Washington. Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake touted her work with libertarians to oppose Ben Bernanke, more AIG bailouts and the Senate healthcare bill (“What we agree on: both parties are working against the interests of the public, the only difference is in the messaging”); David McKalip, the tea-party doctor who got into trouble for forwarding an image of Obama with a bone through his nose, wrote an open letter to the netroots proposing that they join him in fighting the “real enemy,” the “unholy corporate/government cabal that will control your healthcare.” I don’t think that coalition is going to emerge in any meaningful form. The right’s anger is born largely of identity-based alienation, a fear of socialism (whatever that means nowadays) and an age-old Bircher suspicion that “they” are trying to screw “us.” Even in its most sophisticated forms, such as in Carney’s Obamanomics, the basic right-wing argument against corporatism embraces a kind of fatalism about government that assumes it will always devolve into a rat’s nest of rent seekers and cronies and therefore should be kept as small as possible. But the progressive critics hold that we can and should do better.

For me, the right’s “fatalism about government” reflects its basic optimism about the capacities of citizens working together voluntarily, and about markets as a decentralized discovery process that proves more far more resilient than top-down hierarchies. And interestingly, Hayes calls for a “re-democratization” of society, only his way of getting there differs markedly from the conservative vision.

What the country needs more than higher growth and lower unemployment, greater income equality, a new energy economy and drastically reduced carbon emissions is a redistribution of power, a society-wide epidemic of re-democratization. The crucial moments of American reform and progress have achieved this: from the direct election of senators to the National Labor Relations Act, from the breakup of the trusts to the end of Jim Crow. So in this new year, while the White House focuses on playing within the existing rules, it’s our job as citizens and activists to press constantly for changes to those rules: public financing, an end to the filibuster, the breakup of the banks, legalization for undocumented workers and the passage of the Employee Free Choice Act, to name just a few of the measures that would alter the balance of power and expand the frontiers of the possible.

Public financing would stymie the Gene McCarthys and the Ron Pauls, ending the filibuster in a sharply polarized environment would encourage extreme policy swings and efforts to entrench the power of one political party or movement, and the centerpiece of EFCA remains the elimination of the secret ballot. I’ve written about how some aspects of EFCA might make sense and also about how we should pursue regulatory reforms that encourage alternative models of worker representation, but I was discouraged by how Hayes’s vision of re-democratization differs so little from the aims of the very top-down organized labor movement.

I am, however, very sympathetic to breaking up the banks. John Cochrane and Luigi Zingales have made a solid case for doing so.

The big banks know the government will bail them out, and they are already bigger, more global, more integrated and “systemic” than ever. They are making huge trading profits—profits that must someday turn to losses. If brokerage and banking are “systemically important,” they cannot be married to proprietary trading. Yet the financial-reform plans do not even talk about breaking up this marriage—they hope simply to regulate the behemoths instead.

Overall, I’m encouraged by how at least some voices on the left are growing more skeptical of the concentrating power in the District, where, as my old friend Christina Lewis reported in the Wall Street Journal, commercial real estate prices are about to top those in New York.

Rents declined in almost all of the 79 American cities tracked by Reis Inc., a New York based-research firm, in the fourth quarter of 2009. The largest fall was in New York, where average effective rents — or the net amount tenants pay after landlord concessions — fell nearly 20% to $44.69 per square foot annually. It was the sharpest decline in rents ever recorded by Reis since it began compiling data in 1981.
By contrast, average rents in Washington were $41.77 per square foot, down 3% annually. Reis estimates that by the end of this year, rents in New York will come down to around $41.07, slightly below their estimates for Washington of $41.27.

You can’t make this stuff up.