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http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/08/17/11040
The Plot Against Liberal America
by Thomas Frank
August 17, 2008
The most cherished dream of conservative Washington is that
liberalism can somehow be defeated, finally and irreversibly, in the
way that armies are beaten and pests are exterminated. Electoral
victories by Republicans are just part of the story. The larger
vision is of a future in which liberalism is physically barred from
the control room - of an "end of history" in which taxes and onerous
regulation will never be allowed to threaten the fortunes private
individuals make for themselves. This is the longing behind the
former White House aide Karl Rove's talk of "permanent majority"
and, 20 years previously, disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff's
declaration to the Republican convention that it's "the job of all
revolutions to make permanent their gains".
When I first moved to contemplate this peculiar utopian vision, I
was struck by its apparent futility. What I did not understand was
that beating liberal ideas was not the goal. The Washington
conservatives aim to make liberalism irrelevant not by debating, but
by erasing it. Building a majority coalition has always been a part
of the programme, and conservatives have enjoyed remarkable success
at it for more than 30 years. But winning elections was not a bid
for permanence by itself. It was only a means.
The end was capturing the state, and using it to destroy liberalism
as a practical alternative. The pattern was set by Margaret
Thatcher, who used state power of the heaviest-handed sort to
implant permanently the anti-state ideology.
"Economics are the method; the object is to change the soul," she
said, echoing Stalin. In the 34 years before she became prime
minister, Britain rode a see-saw of nationalisation, privatisation
and renationalisation; Thatcher set out to end the game for good.
Her plan for privatising council housing was designed not only to
enthrone the market, but to encourage an ownership mentality
and "change the soul" of an entire class of voters. When she sold
off nationally owned industries, she took steps to ensure that
workers received shares at below-market rates, leading hopefully to
the same soul transformation. Her brutal suppression of the miners'
strike in 1984 showed what now awaited those who resisted the new
order. As a Business Week reporter summarised it in 1987: "She sees
her mission as nothing less than eradicating Labour Party socialism
as a political alternative."
In their own pursuit of the free-market utopia, America's right-
wingers did not have as far to travel as their British cousins, and
they have never needed to use their state power so ruthlessly. But
the pattern is the same: scatter the left's constituencies, hack
open the liberal state and reward friendly businesses with the loot.
Grover Norquist, one of the most influential conservatives in
Washington and the "field marshal of the Bush plan", according to
the Nation magazine, has been most blunt about using the power of
the state "to crush the structures of the left". He has outlined the
plan countless times in countless venues: the liberal movement is
supported by a number of "pillars", each of which can be toppled by
conservatives when in power. Among Norquist's suggestions has been
the undermining of defence lawyers - who in the US give millions of
dollars to liberal causes - with measures "potentially costing
[them] billions of dollars of lost income". Conservatives could
also "crush labour unions as a political entity" by forcing unions
to get annual written approval from every member before spending
union funds on political activities. His coup de grâce is that the
Democratic Party in its entirety would become "a dead man walking"
with the privatisation of social security.
Much of this programme has already been accomplished, if not on the
precise terms Norquist suggested. The shimmering dream of
privatising social security, though, remains the great unreachable
right-wing prize, and the right persists in the campaign, regardless
of the measure's unpopularity or the number of political careers it
costs. President Bush announced privatisation to be his top priority
on the day after his re-election in 2004, although he had not
emphasised this issue during the campaign. He proceeded to chase it
deep into the land of political unpopularity, a region from which he
never really returned.
He did this because the potential rewards of privatising social
security justify any political cost. At one stroke, it would both de-
fund the operations of government and utterly reconfigure the way
Americans interact with the state. It would be irreversible, too;
the "transition costs" in any scheme to convert social security are
so vast that no country can consider incurring them twice. Once the
deal has been done and the trillions of dollars that pass through
social security have been diverted from the US Treasury to stocks in
private companies, the effects would be locked in for good. First,
there would be an immediate flood of money into Wall Street; second,
there would be an equivalent flow of money out of government
accounts, immediately propelling the federal deficit up into the
stratosphere and de-funding a huge part of the federal activity.
Business elites
The overall effect for the nation's politics would be to elevate for
ever the rationale of the financial markets over such vague
liberalisms as "the common good" and "the public interest". The
practical results of such a titanic redirection of the state are
easy to predict, given the persistent political demands of Wall
Street: low wage growth, even weaker labour organisations, a free
hand for management in downsizing, in polluting, and so on.
The longing for permanent victory over liberalism is not unique to
the west. In country after country, business elites have come up
with ingenious ways to limit the public's political choices. One of
the most effective of these has been massive public debt. Naomi
Klein has pointed out, in case after case, that the burden of debt
has forced democratic countries to accept a laissez-faire system
that they find deeply distasteful. Regardless of who borrowed the
money, these debts must be repaid - and repaying them, in turn,
means that a nation must agree to restructure its economy the way
bankers bid: by deregulating, privatising and cutting spending.
Republicans have ridden to power again and again promising balanced
budgets - government debt was "mortgaging our future", Ronald Reagan
admonished in his inaugural address - but once in office they
proceed, with a combination of tax cuts and spending increases, to
inflate the federal deficit to levels far beyond those reached by
their supposedly open-handed liberal rivals. The formal
justification is one of the all-time great hoaxes. By cutting taxes,
it is said, you will unleash such economic growth that federal
revenues will actually increase, so all the additional government
spending will be paid for.
Even the theory's proponents don't really believe it. David
Stockman, the libertarian budget director of the first Reagan
administration, did the maths in 1980 and realised it would not
rescue the government; it would wreck the government. This is the
point where most people would walk away. Instead, Stockman decided
it had medicinal value. He realised that with their government
brought to the brink of fiscal collapse, the liberals would either
have to acquiesce in the reconfiguration of the state or else see
the country destroyed. Stockman was candid about this: the left
would "have to dismantle [the government's] bloated, wasteful, and
unjust spending enterprises - or risk national ruin".
This is government-by-sabotage: deficits were a way to smash a
liberal state. The Reagan deficits did precisely this. When Reagan
took over in 1981, he inherited an annual deficit of $59bn and a
national debt of $914bn; by the time he and his successor George
Bush had finished their work, they had quintupled the deficit and
pumped the debt up to more than $3trn. Bill Clinton called the
deficit "Stockman's Revenge" - and it domin ated all other topics
within his administration's economic teams. With the chairman of the
Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan himself speaking of "financial
catastrophe" unless steps were taken to control Reagan's deficit,
Clinton was soon a convert. He got tough with the federal workforce.
So-called virtues
George W Bush proceeded to plunge the budget into deficit again.
Indeed, after seeing how the Reagan deficit had forced Clinton's
hand, it would have been foolish for a conservative not to spend his
way back into the hole as rapidly as possible. "It's perfectly fine
for them to waste money," says Robert Reich, a former labour
secretary to Bill Clinton, summarising the conservative
viewpoint. "If the public thinks government is wasteful, that's
fine. That reduces public faith in government, which is precisely
what the Republicans want."
In 1964, the political theorist James Burnham diagnosed liberalism
as "the ideology of western suicide". What Burnham meant by this was
that liberalism's so-called virtues - its openness and its
insistence on equal rights for everyone - made it vulnerable to any
party that refuses to play by the rules. The "suicide" that all of
this was meant to describe was liberalism's inevitable destruction
at the hands of communism, a movement in whose ranks Burnham had
once marched himself. But his theory seems more accurately to
describe the stratagems of its fans on the American right. And the
correct term for the disasters that have disabled the liberal state
is not suicide, but vandalism. Loot the Treasury, dynamite the dam,
take a crowbar to the monument and throw a wrench into the gears.
Slam the locomotive into reverse, toss something heavy on the
throttle, and jump for it.
Mainstream American political commentary customarily assumes that
the two political parties do whatever they do as mirror images of
each other; that if one is guilty of some misstep, the other is
equally culpable. But there is no symmetry. Liberalism, as we know
it, arose out of a compromise between left-wing social movements and
business interests. It depends on the efficient functioning of
certain organs of the state; it does not call for all-out war on
private industry.
Conservatism, on the other hand, speaks not of compromise, but of
removing its adversaries from the field altogether. While no one
dreams of sawing off those branches of the state that protect
conservatism's constituents - the military, the police, legal
privileges granted to corporations - conservatives openly fantasise
about doing away with the bits of "big government" that serve
liberal ends. While de-funding the left is the north star of the
conservative project, there is no comparable campaign to "de-fund
the right"; indeed, it would be difficult to imagine one.
"Over the past 30 years, American politics has become more money-
centred at exactly the same time that American society has grown
more unequal," the political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul
Pierson have written. The resources and organisational heft of the
well-off and hyper-conservative have exploded. But the org
anisational resources of middle-income Amer icans . . . have
atrophied. The resulting inequality has greatly benefited the
Republican Party while drawing it closer to its most affluent and
extreme supporters."
In this sense, conservative Washington is a botch that keeps on
working, constructing an imbalance that will tilt our politics
rightward for years, a plutocracy that will stand, regardless of who
wins the next few elections. And as American inequality widens, the
clout of money will only grow more powerful.
As I write this, the lobbyist-fuelled conservative boom of the past
ten years is being supplanted by a distinct conservative bust: like
the real-estate speculators who are dumping properties all over the
country, conservative senators and representatives are heading for
the revolving door in record numbers.
Plutocracy
The Democrats who have taken their place are an improvement,
certainly, but for the party's more entrepreneurial leaders
electoral success in 2006 was merely an opportunity to accelerate
their own courtship of Washington's lobbyists, think-tanks and
pressure groups staked out on K Street. Democratic leaders have
proved themselves the Republicans' equals in circumvention of
campaign finance laws.
Throwing the rascals out is no longer enough. The problem is
structural; it is inscribed on the map; it glows from the
illuminated logos on the contractors' office buildings; it is built
into the systems of governance themselves. A friend of mine
summarised this concisely as we were lunching in one of those
restaurants where the suits and the soldiers get together. Sweeping
his hand so as to take in our fellow diners and all the contractors'
offices beyond, he said, "So you think all of this is just going to
go away if Obama gets in?" This whole economy, all these profits?
He's right, of course; maybe even righter than he realised. It would
be nice if electing Democrats was all that was required to
resuscitate the America that the right flattened, but it will take
far more than that. A century ago, an epidemic of public theft
persisted, despite a long string of reformers in the White House,
Republicans and Democrats, each promising to clean the place up.
Nothing worked, and for this simple reason: democracy cannot work
when wealth is distributed as lopsidedly as theirs was-and as ours
is. The inevitable consequence of plutocracy, then and now, is
bought government.
This is an edited extract from Thomas Frank's "The Wrecking Crew",
published this month by Harvill Secker (£14.99)
© Thomas Frank, 2008
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Discuss this story
104 Comments so far
lwhunt330 August 17th, 2008 11:08 am
The plot against liberal American has been most effectively achieved
by the Washington Democratic leadership. They don't want to go back
to get off of the gravey-train of corporate money any more than the
Republicans. Every freedom lost has been with their participation.
Every corporate Republican rip off has been with them driving the
getaway car.
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