Jill Lepore Deconstructs Fear and Loathing of Elizabeth Warren

Elizabeth Warren

 Jill Lepore, in the 21 April New Yorker fulfills the highest aspiration of the literary critic in her review of Elizabeth Warren's new book, "A Fighting Chance," by placing it in an historical context. Lepore sometimes exasperates Mad Dog with strained incorporation of historical antecedents to modern events, but in this case she uses the life and work of Louis Brandeis to enrich our appreciation of what Elizabeth Warren is all about.

She begins with Warren's own stump speech, which terrifies and infuriates all the self made men of the right wing, the Republican part, the right wing talk show set. 
"There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody, You built a factory out there, good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You used other people's money. You built a factory and turned it into something terrific or a great idea--God bless! Keep a big hunk of it. but part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along."

This of course, gets to the heart of the Right Wing's fantasy about how much they deserve all their wealth and how nobody else is entitled to any share of it.

Warren is careful not to denigrate the effort of the man who took risks to build the factory or launch the idea, but what she is adding is the big "But."

Brandeis argued in a famous brief that women ought not be put in a position of having to work 12 hour days or lose their jobs. Brandeis argued in "Other People's Money" that monopolies of capital captured by big banks resulted in great harm, no matter how legally they may have been won. Three New York banks controlled more wealth than all the property in the twenty two states lying west of the Mississippi. Even if the bankers were angels, which they most assuredly were not, this could not be good for a democratic republic.

Rush Limbaugh would, of course, cry foul. This is not how the "game " is played. You cannot change the rules, especially if those changes disadvantage the winners.  And, anyway, the winners deserve to be in control.

Certainly, Mad Dog is familiar with the psychology. Mad Dog looked out from the chemistry laboratory window as his fellow college students danced by, in togas, on their bacchanalian way, with their arms around the girls they would take to bed,  and he heard his fellow pre-medical students mutter. "They're getting theirs now, but I'll get mine. And when I graduate from medical school and they are whining about how tough things are for them, it'll be my turn to laugh." The ants and the grasshopper.

And Mad Dog thought. Yes, you are working really hard and sacrificing the present for the future, but you are doing it in an Ivy League college, and you are working in a college lab paid for by someone else, and you are going back to sleep in your dorm room, paid for by somebody else--your parents, your bank, taxpayer dollars. 

When Mad Dog opened his office to practice medicine, he was lucky enough to not have to take out a loan. He had written a book which provided the capital. He was lucky to get it published. He had worked hard writing it, but he was still lucky. And the success of that book depended every bit as much on other people who sold it as on his own efforts.

Mad Dog had to hire a secretary. She had never finished high school. She answered the phones, made appointments, filed charts, took phone messages, called in prescriptions, created bills for the patients, collected their payments, billed Medicare, entered the payments into the computer system, and when she went on vacation the income in the office plummeted because the temporary worker replacement could never approach her productivity.  When the secretary was out sic, Mad Dog, thought, "I don't need her. I can do all this myself. I'll just work harder."  But Mad Dog learned quickly, that was a fool's errand.

Mad Dog paid her the same check every week no matter what. if she missed time for a doctor's appointment, had to take her husband to the doctor, had to leave early for a nightclub gig--she was a country singer on the side--Mad Dog still paid her in full. No time clock. When she asked why he was willing to do this, Mad Dog observed she often stayed late to finish up work, and he hadn't paid her any more for that. He paid her for doing the job, not by the hour. 

She was not above drawing her own lines:  She left for lunch at the stroke of noon, even if a patient was finishing up and on her way to the window and could have paid her bill right then. Lunch time was sacred.  She would not call repairmen for the photocopier or the computer or the telephone system. That was not her job.  When she finally left after 20 years, a new secretary did all that without a murmur.  But the fact is, that employee was essential to the financial success of Mad Dog's practice. Patients did not come to the office to see the secretary, but had she not been there, they could not have been scheduled at all, and no money would have been collected for Mad Dog's efforts.

So Mad Dog knows Warren is correct: Every self made man stood on the shoulders of others. Even Coltrane, who practiced hours every day, had to be taught the saxophone by someone and someone had to set up the clubs he played in. 

Jill Lepore

Lepore includes a scene from a dinner with Larry Summers who told Warren she had to decide whether she wanted to be an insider or an outsider. To be an insider, he told her, she could not break the rule: Don't criticize other insiders. Doesn't that just say it all about Larry Summers and the stupidity of those who think they know what the rules are and ought to be? I was surprised Lepore did not mention Lincoln and his shrewd and brilliant idea that he needed his critics close at hand, in his own cabinet. 

People like Summers, and Kissinger before him, always want to play the savant. The fact is all they know is how to promote themselves.

Lepore sums up her own take on Warren as she hurdles through the last page of her analysis: 1. Most candidates elected to office in the United States in the past two centuries abandoned their children.  2. Warren had better have the sense to turn a deaf ear to political advisers who will try to do with her what they had done with all others: "Include, when telling the story of their lives, gauzy intimacies, silly-little-me confessions of domestic ineptitude, stagy performances of maternal devotion, and the shameless trotting out of twinkle eyed tots."

Warren has fallen into that trap once before, as she ran for U.S. Senate, but who can blame her? She had never run for office before. She needed to trust someone and people were telling her how to win in the real world where the voters were not Harvard undergrads.

In the end, Lepore comes up with the most powerful image and statement of all. Warren tells about how Warren went to her grand daughter's crib and scooped the baby  up and held her, "Not because she needed it, but because I did."
And Lepore observes: "Her brief is really about the abandonment of children, not by women who go to school or to work but by legislatures and courts that have allowed the nations social and economic policies to be made by corporations and bankers. Writing about her children and grandchildren--rocking that baby--is more than the place where Warren leaves Brandeis behind. It's an argument about where our real debts lie."

Louis Brandeis

Where Our Real Debts Lie