Two Sides, Same Coin: A Review of Exit, Voice and Loyalty by Albert O. Hirschman (Tags: #dmingml #dminlgp #exit #hirschman)
DMIN 537 / Thinking Globally, Leading Locally / Jason Clark
Russ Pierson
Two Sides, Same Coin:
A Review of Exit, Voice and Loyalty by Albert O. Hirschman
#dmingml #dminlgp #exit #hirschman
The tea-party right finds the hippie-scented movement in lower Manhattan repellent, but it and Occupy Wall Street are two sides of the same coin. “Take Back America,” the initial tea-party battle cry, would work for those in Zuccotti Park as well. The disagreement is about which America needs to be taken back, and from whom.[2]
* * *
Occupy Wall Street (OWS) and the Tea Party movement are remarkable postmodern phenomena in the recent incarnation of these not-so-United States. Reading Hirschman’s classic book, I thought often of both the Tea Party and OWS—especially as I wondered about the incredible dissatisfaction voters on both sides of the aisle seem to have with incumbents of every stripe:
Across a wide array of measures, Americans are now as dissatisfied with Congress as they were immediately before the 2006 and 2010 electoral landslides that ousted the majority party in one or both chambers, according to a year-end United Technologies/National Journal Congressional Connection Poll.
One year after Republicans made the largest gains in a midterm House election since 1938, the survey finds Americans still restless, dissatisfied, and profoundly pessimistic about Washington’s capacity to make progress on the major problems facing the country.
In the survey, independent voters—whose shifts in allegiance helped trigger both the big Democratic gains of 2006 and last year’s Republican revival—display little faith in either party, and register a strong initial inclination to vote against their own incumbent member of Congress. Not only a solid majority of independents, but also a surprisingly large share of Republican and Democratic partisans, say they are reluctant to give either party control of both chambers, preferring instead a divided government where both can “act as a check on each other.”[3]
Could it happen? Could a third-party candidate develop a well-spring of support to sustain a viable alternative to the Democrats and Republicans?
Hirschman’s book is largely about economics, though he notes implications in other realms of public discourse—especially politics. But perhaps we should step back a moment and visit the essentials of Hirschman’s thesis.[4]
Exit and Voice
Hirschman envisions a market or a membership, with the inevitable ups and downs that impact the perceived quality received by the customers/members. In the end, there are two essential responses:
(1) Some customers stop buying the firm's products or some members leave the organization: this is the exit option. As a result, revenues drop, membership declines, and management is impelled to search for ways and means to correct whatever faults have led to exit.
(2) The firm's customers or the organization's members express their dissatisfaction directly to management or to some other authority to which management is subordinate or through general protest addressed to anyone who cares to listen: this is the voice option. As a result, management once again engages in a search for the causes and possible cures of customers' and members' dissatisfaction.[5]Loyalty
Exit and voice are not the entire story, however. There is a kind of wildcard: loyalty. If I am bound to a particular product, a specific brand or a certain party, it influences my response. It may make exit an unlikely option. If I am dissatisfied but intent on remaining loyal, I will use my voice to get the organization or product back on track:
… a member who wields (or thinks he wields) considerable power in an organization and is therefore convinced that he can get it ''back on the track" is likely to develop a strong affection for the organization in which he is powerful. As a rule, then, loyalty holds exit at bay and activates voice.[6]
Two Sides, Same Coin
When Frank Rich, cited in the epigraph above, writes that OWS and the Tea Party are “two sides of the same coin,” what can he possibly mean? At first glance, it would appear that they couldn’t be farther apart on the political spectrum. But many people have noted over the years that in significant ways, the farther one gets to either extreme, the more those extremes seem to come together. This makes the political spectrum more like a circle than a line.
This explains why someone like Ron Paul, a libertarian running as a candidate to the far right in the Republican primaries, can often come off sounding much like a liberal: “Ron Paul is one of the few Republicans who said he agrees with both the Tea Party and Occupy protesters.”[7] Paul sits atop the circle, in that interesting gray area where left and right seem to merge.
|
1 Ross Perot |
Hirschman actually addresses the American political system reasonably directly in chapter 6, “On Spatial Duopoly and the Dynamics of Two-Party Systems.” He accurately describes how the two parties tend to “move to the middle” in the course of the election, in order to attract as many potential voters as possible. But the US has never truly had a viable third party candidate in the modern era; the best that can be said of third party candidates is that they can occasionally take on the role of “spoiler,” drawing enough votes away from one of the other candidates so as to make a perceived difference. John Anderson (1980) and Ross Perot (1992) are two modern-era candidates who come to mind.
Still, Hirchman offers some provocative thoughts with regard to future possibilities for candidacies outside the two-party system:
It can be argued that it is probable, but socially undesirable, for parties in a two-party system to move ever closer together.…
… the average citizen may well prefer a situation in which a party with which he identifies closely has an even chance of beating one he sharply disagrees with, over a situation in which power is always held by a middle-of-the-road party which he neither likes nor dislikes strongly.[8]
In the Frank Rich piece profiling the OWS movement, he notes some of what seemed to be inherent inconsistencies in their rhetoric—particularly the deference given to the passing of Steve Jobs:
Those demonstrators who celebrated Jobs were not necessarily hypocrites at all — and no more anti-capitalist than the Bonus Army of 1932. If you love your Mac and iPod, you can still despise CDOs and credit-default swaps. Jobs's genius — in the words of Regis McKenna, a Silicon Valley marketing executive who worked with him early on — was his ability "to strip away the excess layers of business, design, and innovation until only the simple, elegant reality remained."
The supposed genius of modern Wall Street is the exact reverse, piling on excess layers of business and innovation on ever thinner and more exotic creations until simple reality is distorted and obscured. Those in [Sarah] Palin's "real America" may not be agitated about the economic 99-vs.-one percent inequality brought about by the rise of the financial sector in the past three decades, but, like class warriors of the left, they know that "financial instruments" wreaked havoc on their 401(k)s, homes, and jobs.
The bottom line remains that Wall Street's opaque inventions led directly to TARP, the taxpayers' bank bailout that achieved the seemingly impossible feat of unifying the left and right in rage against government — much as Jobs's death achieved the equally surprising coup of unifying left and right in mourning a corporate god.[9]
I said a moment ago that the US has never truly had a viable third party candidate in the modern era. But this is a decidedly different era from Reagan-Carter-Anderson or Clinton-Bush-Perot. As the two ends of the political spectrum twist and entwine themselves at the top of that political circle, is a third party candidacy a possibility in this political cycle—or one within the next several years?
I think Hirschman might say “yes!”
* * *
[1] Scott Stantis, Tribune Media Service, 2011.
[2] Frank Rich, "The Class War has Begun," New York, October 23 2011.
[3] Ronald Brownstein, "Congressional Connection Poll: Anger with Congress at '06, '10 levels," National Journal, December 12 2011.
[4] One excellent example of a quick-read synthesis on Hirschman (as well as an application for the Church) is offered by doctoral colleague, Tim Buechsel.
[5] Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, voice, and loyalty : responses to decline in firms, organizations, and states (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970), 4.
[6] Ibid., 78.
[7] Robert Michaelson, "Ron Paul Defends Occupy Wall Street," Amherst (New Jersey) Patch, November 22 2011.
[8] Hirschman, Exit, voice, and loyalty : responses to decline in firms, organizations, and states: 67.
[9] Rich, "The Class War has Begun."
