This week, I published two pieces about economic power. One, an op-ed in the New York Times, distilled some major themes from the Supreme Court’s neoliberal jurisprudence: allowing private power to colonize public law (arbitration), using constitutional rights to protect economic power (First Amendment restrictions on union dues and campaign finance), and deploying federalism doctrine to block national programs of social provision (the Medicaid expansion decision). I argue basic LPE themes: public and private power are inseparable, law stitches them together, and we need to protect and reclaim a way of integrating them that empowers democracy to constrain capitalism. Today the Supreme Court is taking aggressive, creative steps to make this harder. In fact, this has been a major theme of the Roberts Court.
The other piece is a review of three new books on class. There’s a lot of twist, turn, and texture. I celebrate that they try (two of them especially, in very different ways) to describe the experience of class in a new landscape of global commodity chains, rural depopulation, and the fracking boom. I especially admire Eliza Griswold’s description of class–in which she doesn’t use the word–as a web of social and environmental vulnerabilities, ways the world is indifferent and dangerous to you. At the same time, I suggest we might also need to think about class from a different perspective: that of the bosses and owners. Their class consciousness is often arrestingly lucid, and in many ways they are the ones who make the world. And, with the next confirmation, the Roberts Court looks likely to defend the economic power of bosses and owners even more vigorously in its ongoing transformation of American law.
