This was originally a social video
What’s your defining political belief?
I’ve been thinking about that because on this app, and others, there’s a loud and often vicious argument among people most Americans would place somewhere left of center. Liberal, progressive, leftist, socialist, Democrat — those words do not mean the same thing, and I usually try not to wade into that labeling fight, either as a journalist or as someone who studied political science.
But I do think there’s a fair and useful question underneath it all: what is your foundational belief? Mine is this: I am deeply skeptical of concentrated power.
That’s one reason I keep coming back to the economist John Kenneth Galbraith and his idea of countervailing power. I’m also drawn to the old republican distinction between imperium — domination by the state — and dominium — domination by private power. I was taught: Neither is freedom. Neither is justice.
In my reading of history, governments can do enormous good or grave harm. So can corporations. So can unions, parties, movements and media institutions. All of them are made of people, and people are capable of both building and abusing power.
So when somebody tells me the answer is to deregulate everything and let the market rule, that sounds foolish to me. But when somebody says we should just concentrate power in the state, or in some other supposedly righteous institution, that sounds foolish too.
At the extremes, corporatists and communists can start to sound strangely similar: both are comfortable with too much power in too few hands.
So one rule I come back to is simple: where is power most concentrated right now, and how do we diffuse more of it outward? To me, that’s one of the best jobs of every generation of activists, advocates and journalists.