Page, “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens,” Perspectives on Politics 12, no. 3 (2014): 564–81.
3 Pew Research Center, “Beyond Distrust: How Americans View Their Government,” November 23, 2015: 35; and “Most Say Government Policies Since Recession Have Done Little to Help Middle Class, Poor,” March 4, 2015: 1. To avoid clutter, we omit URLs for online sources when they are easily locatable via search engines or available by subscription only.
4 Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (New York: Bantam, 2003), 841.
5 Dewey, “The Need for a New Party,” 163.
6 This argument draws upon the work of many prior analysts. For more detail and citations to relevant studies see Kevin A. Young, Tarun Banerjee, and Michael Schwartz, “Capital Strikes as a Corporate Political Strategy: The Structural Power of Business in the Obama Era,” PAS 46, no. 1 (2018): 3–28; Beth Mintz and Michael Schwartz, The Power Structure of American Business (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1985). Structural power is often neglected, however, perhaps because it is not easily quantifiable. It forms part of what David Lowery calls “the dark matter of influence”—hard to measure but omnipresent. “Lobbying Influence: Meaning, Measurement and Missing,” Interest Groups and Advocacy 2, no. 1 (2013): 8.
7 Some analysts argue that conflicts among corporations prevent them from acting in unison. However, this argument neglects the many mechanisms, from overlapping boards of directors to social clubs, through which businesses can make collective decisions. See Young et al., “Capital Strikes.”
8 Expressing a common view, Charles Lindblom argues that business disinvestment is “an automatic punishing recoil” that follows from any threat to maximum profitability. “The Market as Prison,” Journal of Politics 44, no. 2 (1982): 325. In contrast, the leading US business magazine acknowledges the major subjective element in investment decisions: “Our review of data going back to 1950 considered a host of variables related to investment, including the output gap, business confidence, capital depreciation, and interest rates. It showed that business confidence, or what John Maynard Keynes liked to call ‘animal spirits,’ along with the basic laws of supply and demand, are more important drivers of investment.” Tim Mahedy, “A Lot of Huff for a Little Puff,” BW, March 11, 2019: 31.
9 Some revolutionary governments have opted to radicalize when faced with this choice, for example in Cuba in 1959–1961 or, to lesser extents, Chile in 1970–1973 and Venezuela in the mid-2000s. On Venezuela see Oliver Levingston, “Venezuela: The Political Economy of Inflation and Investment Strikes,” Links, February 10, 2014.
10 For a more detailed theory of capital strikes and business confidence see Young et al., “Capital Strikes.”
11 Emerson Electric CEO David Farr quoted in Elizabeth Williamson and James R. Hagerty, “The New Political Landscape: Executives Await Friendlier Climate,” WSJ, November 4, 2010: A6 (first quote); Financial Services Forum CEO Rob Nichols quoted in Donna Borak, Victoria Finkle, and Joe Adler, “Consensus Is Elusive on TBTF, Big-Bank Subsidies,” AB, April 23, 2013; Jena McGregor, “Tim Cook, the Interview: Running Apple ‘Is Sort of a Lonely Job,’” WP online, August 13, 2016 (second quote); Julie Creswell, “Cities’ Offers for Amazon Base Are Secrets Even to Many City Leaders,” NYT online, August 5, 2018; Richard Lachmann, “Amazon Is Waging Class War,” Jacobin, February 20, 2019.
12 Elizabeth Williamson, “Obama Says Tax Breaks Should Now Spur Hiring,” WSJ, February 8, 2011: A4; White House Office of the Press Secretary, “Press Conference by the President,” November 3, 2010; Jackie Calmes, “Obama Offers to Cut Corporate Tax Rate to 28%,” NYT, February 22, 2012: B1; Elizabeth Williamson and Jonathan Weisman, “Obama Courts Business Support,” WSJ, January 19, 2011: A4; Jon Schwarz, “Hillary Clinton Hints at Giant, Trump-Like Giveaway to Corporate America,” Intercept, June 27, 2016.
13 For instance, in the 2018 elections the finance, insurance, and real estate industries alone contributed almost eight times as much to parties and candidates as labor unions did. Even in the 1970s, when organized labor was much stronger than it is today, the business press noted that, unlike labor unions, corporate lobbyists for the Business Roundtable enjoyed “direct access to the highest levels of the federal government” (“Business’ Most Powerful Lobby in Washington,” BW, December 20, 1976: 60). Unless otherwise noted, all campaign finance and lobbying data cited in this book come from the Center for Responsive Politics, opensecrets.org.
14 Dan Clawson, Alan Neustadtl, and Mark Weller, Dollars and Votes: How Business Campaign Contributions Subvert Democracy (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1998).
15 Laurence H. Shoup, “Election 2008: Ruling Class Conducts Its Hidden Primary,” Z Magazine, February 2008: 31 (quote); Brian Schwartz, “Wall Street Executives Are Hearing from Cory Booker, Kamala Harris and Other Democrats as They Gauge Interest in Possible 2020 Presidential Campaigns,” CNBC.com, January 8, 2019. See also G. William Domhoff, The Powers That Be: Processes of Ruling-Class Domination in America (New York: Random House, 1978), 129–67.
16 Thomas Ferguson, Golden Rule: The Investment Theory of Party Competition and the Logic of Money-Driven Political Systems (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 42.
17 Here we are speaking to a classic debate about the roots of business’s political leverage. Whereas instrumentalists emphasize the origins of individual policymakers, structuralists argue that state institutions and capitalist control of the economy constrain all state officials, irrespective of their platforms or intentions. Both schools are right: individuals and structural relationships both matter. Our contribution to this debate lies in our synthesis of the two camps’ insights, our emphasis on the structural power of disruption wielded by capital, and our argument about how mass resistance can alter the balance of forces among elites. For a concise example of the debate see Nicos Poulantzas, “The Problem of the Capitalist State,” and Ralph Miliband, “Reply to Nicos Poulantzas,” in Ideology in Social Science: Readings in Critical Social Theory, ed. Robin Blackburn (New York: Pantheon, 1972), 238–62.
18 On the Obama administration there is a vast literature of very uneven quality. Some highlights include Paul Street, The Empire’s New Clothes: Barack Obama in the Real World of Power (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2010); Jeffrey St. Clair and Joshua Frank, eds., Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2012); William F. Grover and Joseph G. Peschek, The Unsustainable Presidency: Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Beyond (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); Paul Street, They Rule: The 1% vs. Democracy (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2014); Noam Chomsky, Who Rules the World?
