When is a Right not a Right?

By Mike Kendall

Is a theoretical right a real right if 90% of our citizens lack the economic ability to exercise that right?  Most liberal capitalists would say “yes” and all social democrats would say “no.”  This is the fundamental division in the American left.  Its origins go back to the late 19^th Century, and the division has grown broader and deeper since 1968-1974.  Both liberal capitalists and social democrats support the same theoretical political and civil rights.  They part company on whether economic opportunity is enough, or economic rights are essential to make the civil rights real.

The social democrats see no rights where the rich man and the poor man have equal rights to sleep under the bridge at night.  Words like “civil rights” and “constitutional rights” are dear to the traditional liberal and socialist alike, but unaccompanied by words like “income equality,”  “guaranteed living wage,” “wealth redistribution,” and “distributive justice” they are an illusion to the thinking of social democrats. Liberal capitalists support the protection and expansion of individual civil rights, but social democrats believe you can’t have meaningful civil rights and if you don’t have relative economic parity and economic justice.   

            There is an example in our own state among the left that illuminates the division.  Liberal capitalists are an enormous part of the LGBT coalition.  They and the social democrats both support amending Indiana’s Civil Rights Act to prohibit discrimination based upon sexual orientation.  However, the social democrats want the Act greatly strengthened as part of the amendment.  Merely including sexual orientation as a protected category will not provide any more substantive protection to LGBTs, nor raise an economic legal threat against discriminators, because the Indiana Act is toothless.  Merely adding sexual orientation to the Act’s protected categories will be a huge symbolic victory for the LGBT community.  However, it will have no life changing benefit for middle class and less prosperous LGBTs.  Not a single lesbian worker, gay wait staffer, bisexual retailer, or transgender person will be any better off than they are today.  It will only make the left feel good, the right feel bad, and the capitalist managerial class feel relieved.

            There are also examples in our nation.  The Supreme Court is more racially diverse and gender diverse than at any time in its history.  But it is not as jurisprudentially diverse and socially democratic as it was from the 1930’s to the 1970’s.  This summer it is poised to abolish the right of public sector unions to charge non-members money for representing them in collective bargaining about their jobs and terms of their employment, even where they are not charged for union funds spent on political matters.  In fact the union has to work for non-members and members alike to protect their free riders’ employment under the guise of free speech. 

Such a ruling is myopic and class biased.  Virtually the same justices disdain allowing shareholders to ask for money back or dividends awarded for their corporation’s use of the shareholders’ investment for political activity.  The straight-faced rationale—lawyers call it a “factual distinction”—are ‘it's easier to quit and find a new job in protest than it is to sell stock.’  This is a characteristic liberal capitalist position repugnant to every social democrat.  It reflects some justices’ view from Mt. Olympus where they hold life-time jobs, hire and fire at will, and put their investments in blind trusts.

            The left needs to stand for equality and liberty meaningful to those who are not rich.  The left should eschew self-identification with the more cultured, feted, affluent, and sophisticated social strata and class.  Cowboy capitalism’s free-market economics is protected and supported by, and intertwined with this class, in and out of government.       

            The liberal capitalist works very well with the conservative capitalist.    Corporate capitalist interests are advanced by social stability, especially if it produces political and economic acquiesance.  At the end of January, a group of eight U.S. Senators—four Republicans, three Democrats, and one Independent—introduced legislation to slow and complicate regulatory oversight of business and industry by federal agencies such as the Financial Protection Bureau, bank regulators,  and product, investor, environmental, and workplace, safety regulators.   The Democrats were Senators Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.), Mark Warner (D-Va.), and Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), and the “Independent” Angus King, Jr. (I-Ma.). 

            Social democrats believe the right of the LGBT community to invest, buy a home, or have a job is chimerical if the investment, home, job, and pay are unavailable to 90% of the LGBTs.  Such a right for 10% is a wrong for the 90% who lack the economic right to make it real.  Civil rights and economic rights together make Human Rights, the only real rights.