Alexandria on the Daily Show: the Moral Economy and Modern Money
The hopes of many progressives in the United States are being hitched to a new generation of left-wing Democratic politicians emerging to challenge both corporate Democrats and the Trump-loving radical-right Republican Party. This movement has grown out of a group of organizations and institutions originating in, or energized by, the Bernie Sanders campaign of 2015-2016. Among the most prominent of this new generation and perhaps its first political star is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (sometimes abbreviated AOC), a 28-year-old community organizer and economics graduate from New York, who is now the Democratic nominee for New York’s 14th Congressional District, unseating in the process the 4th most powerful Democrat in the House, Representative Joe Crowley in June 6th’s New York Democratic primary.
Ocasio-Cortez is sharp, charismatic and knowledgeable about many of the key issues facing her constituents and the world more generally. She appears to genuinely empathize with other people, even people who nominally oppose her position. She is also, critically important, a fighter and has the ability to turn arguments against her around to be used as a political tool for her and her political program, often in a light-hearted or charming way. It is hard to tell these things from afar, but she appears to have a duty-based (deontological) ethical commitment to social justice, social solidarity, and social change for the better, a rare characteristic in politicians in the neoliberal era. Such a commitment if she has it, would mean she could restrain herself from enjoying various temptations that come with power and fame for the sake of greater-than-self causes. She is a member of Democratic Socialists of America and identifies herself as a democratic socialist and is also a Justice Democrat, a new group of Democratic politicians that doesn’t take corporate PAC money. In full disclosure, I donated to her campaign and on and off tweet support for her from afar here in California, seeing in her a potential leader in the House of Representatives of the great changes we need in our country.
Ocasio-Cortez has given indications that she may understand and may endorse some tenets of Modern Money Theory, MMT, the school of economics that studies and highlights the fiat dimension of national currencies and their necessary stabilizing effects on national and the world capitalist economy more generally. Ocasio-Cortez has said, in an interview with Kate Aronoff in the left publication In These Times, that the public and Democrats have been conned because “they don’t understand the transformative power of the purse that Congress has. It’s not just Democrats. I don’t think most of Congress understands how economics works.”
Despite these heterodox economic remarks, Ocasio-Cortez has also had a conventional economics education, so it is not clear yet what are her core views are in the area of economic theory. At times, Ocasio-Cortez has seemed to endorse any expertise at all in economics as a positive qualification, seemingly without an awareness that much academic and professional economics has been used as either obscurantism or as a means to stifle the political program for which she is standing up. It is not clear if Ocasio-Cortez is familiar with the devastating critiques of mainstream economics by people with whom she might share a lot in terms of an overall political and ethical orientation to life. In my opinion, her actual operative economic framework and understanding, one that she would use to fight for and propose new policies, matter a lot for her ultimate success as a progressive leader, as they will for any politician.
In a recent interview with Trevor Noah of the Daily Show, Ocasio-Cortez did not seem to so decisively endorse an MMT view of Congress’s fiscal role but instead tended to wander between views of how government fiscal policy works. There are important conceptual and rhetorical framing issues that arise from examining how Ocasio-Cortez handled Noah’s questions, even as she may move beyond that particular way of addressing the issues.
Because it is counter-intuitive and still outside the mainstream, I will first outline the MMT view of Congress’s “power of the purse” and then trace how Ocasio-Cortez’s message that was relatively clear in her In These Times interview got muddled in the face of Noah’s not unsympathetic but conventional line of questioning.
Read more: neweconomicperspectives.org
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario