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In 1904, Lincoln Steffens published a series of essays entitled "The Shame of the Cities," which inveighed against the “boss”. But he added a spin by linking businessmen to political corruption and indeed saw them as the chief promoters. Steffens said it straight and true: “because politics is business. That’s what’s the matter with everything.” It was not the tawdry actions of a few political hacks but “respectable” business types that tolerated dishonest government.
Certainly, the administration of Donald Trump reflects the primacy of corporate supremacy over politics. Everything he does is transactional, and he cares not a whit for process. He would agree with Cornelius Vanderbilt when he stated, “Law, hain't I got the power?” Admittedly, Vanderbilt had more shame, but it is not certain if he would have behaved as Trump did after the World Cup. Despite being richer than Croesus, he tried to take the trophy. “Hain't, I got the power” indeed.
However, this arrogance is not simply limited to Trump; it seems a disease with most of corporate America. And as Steffens observed over one hundred and twenty years ago, the aristocratic privileges of a bygone age were bestowed on big business. He noted, “There is no essential difference between the pull that gets your wife into a society,” Steffens wrote, “or a favorable review for your book and that which gets a heeler into office, a thief out of jail, and a rich man’s son on the board of a corporation.” Steffens merged political and business corruption as one and the same.
Despite attempts to control such mischief, the Supreme Court managed to recoup the system for the current group of bosses. The Citizens United v. FEC in 2010 allowed corporations to spend what they like, making the already strong even stronger. Recently, the Supreme Court reinforced this ruling by allowing no limits on how much political parties could give to individual candidates, so much for democracy. The playing field allows that inequity is the standard, and the old populist platform charge that corruption even touched “the ermine of the bench” still held.
This has been a practice grossly violated in recent years and expanded by Trump with his fetish for ballrooms and taste for baubles, but Democrats are not untouched. Carl Oglesby, a 1960s critic, coined the term “corporate liberalism.” Disillusioned by the assassination of President John F Kennedy and the War in Vietnam, Oglesby began to explore the links between business and government. He explored the links between Southwestern Construction and big oil with government action. The liberal benefits would be a reward for supporting what Dwight Eisenhower referred to as “the military-industrial complex.”
Over time, he became disillusioned and advocated that the “Old Right and New Left are morally and politically coordinate.” But Oglesby knew who to place responsibility on when he criticized Lyndon Johnson’s decision in 1965 to expand the Vietnam War and was then condemned for being unpatriotic. Then he stated, “Don’t blame me for that! Blame those who mouthed my liberal values and broke my American heart.”
Steffens went one better in 1904 when he concluded who was the real culprit, the political fall guy, when he wrote: “The boss is not political, he is an American institution, a product of a free people that have not the spirit to be free.” An idea most important in the 250th year of Independence.