One of the most interesting aspects of the last three years has been observing the gradual change from a near-universal condemnation of the banking sector from the general public to a much more traditional, partisan debate based along conventional party political lines. In short, whereas for a time both left and right were united in their attacks on the power of Wall St and the City of London, after a while they reverted to type and turned on each other.
We should of course note that even to begin with, these groups weren't all angry about the same things or for the same reasons. The traditional socialist left abhorred the bankers as representing everything that was wrong with capitalism, as they saw it: the wealthy leveraging their money and power to exploit the working and middle classes. The libertarian right, by contrast, didn't acknowledge the finance sector as being true capitalism at all. On the contrary, they regarded the central banks with their fiat currencies as delivering a corrupt form of power that was nothing like the free market, but instead a kind of corporatist kleptocracy whose abuses were of a piece with the height of union power in the 1970s. (Charles Moore expresses this point of view in a recent article in the Telegraph.)
Of the two positions, I find the second the more coherent, but it's been illuminating to observe that those on the right and left have often ended up bickering with each other rather than trying to fight a common foe. Leftists frequently assume that those on the right must be their enemies, and must therefore be supporters of the finance sector. Going on the attack, they often alienate those with whom they might have found common ground on this issue. Meanwhile, those with a right wing bent often get drawn into defending the free market against the leftists and seemingly forgetting that a short while ago they had identified the modern finance sector as a classic example of a market that was NOT free. Thus confused about their primary enemy, they start treating some nebulous concept of socialist overspending as the cause of recent problems. Nowhere is this confusion more evident than in the case of the Tea Party in the USA. Originally conceived as an angry antithesis to the neocon wing of the Republican Party which had delivered billions of taxpayers' dollars to Wall St, and following the lead of anti-Fed constitutional fundamentalists such as Ron Paul and Peter Schiff, it was soon hijacked by the Koch brothers and Fox News, and convinced in large part that its main enemy was government spending on social programs. Bizarrely, it is now engaged in attacking Barack Obama for all the wrong reasons: instead of focusing on his cowardly deference to Wall St (described beautifully by Eliot Spitzer here), they are merely playing the tired old game of accusing him of being a socialist, something the mainstream Republican party could have done perfectly well by itself.
Part of the issue appears to be that those on the left and right regularly forget what their position is really about, and fall into the trap of attacking common markers of their true enemy rather than the enemy itself. Specifically, the left wing, which ought to focus on people becoming wealthy through corruption, monopoly, nepotism, exploitation and the denial of equal opportunity, often focuses lazily on wealth in and of itself. Meanwhile, the right wing assumes regularly that the only people who would complain about others getting wealthy through unjust means must be poor, and making their complaints only out of jealousy. Both of these analyses are misguided. Left wingers ought to recognize that it is possible to become very wealthy while enriching your fellow citizens at every step, the personal wealth being a just reward for the excellent goods or services generated. Similarly, right wingers ought to bear in mind that it is perfectly valid to resent a subset of the wealthy not simply because of their wealth but because of the manner in which they became wealthy. Getting rich by trying to build a monopoly that can extract wealth from the public by exploiting a power imbalance is entirely different from getting rich by creating a gadget or service that is enjoyed and bought willingly by millions of people. It's not where you are that's important; it's how you got there. And the argument is that the bankers, taken en bloc, have got there through unfair means. Attacking their wealth itself - their salaries and bonuses - is a red herring and a mistake. The issue is whether or not they have been able to accrue that wealth without providing goods and services commensurate with the rewards received.
