America’s Elephant In The Room
By
David Michael Green
25/09/08 "ICH'
-- -
The second most astonishing thing about American politics is
that John McCain and Sarah Palin have a respectable chance of
winning the White House in 2008. (Or, for that matter, that any
Republican could have a shot at any office for which the
Democratic candidate hasn’t suddenly died on the stump.)
Yeah, yeah, I know. Barack Obama has a funny name. He’s
relatively young and inexperienced. Oh, and – have you heard? –
he’s also black. But, just the same, I mean, c’mon. A Republican
could win the presidency in 2008? You gotta be kidding, right?
All of this is deeply related, in multiple ways, to what is
without a doubt absolutely the first most astonishing fact of
American politics. And that is that conservatism (I prefer to
call them ‘regressives’) isn’t the most repudiated ideology this
side of cannibalism. And that regressive practitioners of this
hateful disease masquerading as a political philosophy haven’t
been tarred-and-feathered, hung, drawn and quartered, then run
out of town on an electrified rail. And that any red-blooded
American wouldn’t infinitely prefer in this day and age to be
called a pedophile, a terrorist or a European – heck, or all of
the above combined – rather than a conservative.
I mean, seriously, people. Now that Wall Street has imploded,
potentially taking down with it the entire global economy in a
fun reprise of the 1930s, what more could possibly be necessary
to repudiate a set of ideas for which a good day is when
thousands of people don’t die (again) as a result of anyone, let
alone the world’s sole superpower, subscribing to something so
astonishingly stupid? Really, is there anything that the
regressive agenda has touched so far that hasn’t completely
turned into a pillar of salt? Not only do these nice pious
Christians show every evidence of actually being the antichrist,
they’ve also managed to be the anti-Midas as well.
The scope of the destruction is breathtaking to gaze upon. The
rapidity with which American affluence and power and respect and
responsibility were converted into their opposite numbers is
mind-boggling. But the most astonishing thing of all is the
absence of repudiation. Not from subscribers, of course. That
army of clones was so existentially terrorized in their
impressionable years by some toxic stew of religion, racism,
sexism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, anti-communism and/or some
other forms of anti-otherism – along with a sinking economic
status – that their cold, stiff fingers will never be pried from
the politics of guns, gays and god. Especially now, when they
can also add to their fears the blame for being so spectacularly
wrong about everything imaginable these last decades. Who would
want to own that?
But what about the rest of us? What, indeed. We still live in an
America where almost nobody dares call themselves a liberal. But
what’s even more bizarre – and I mean like
watching-a-Twilight-Zone-marathon-in-Wonderland-sitting-there-with-Alice-and-frying-on-acid-while-listening-to-In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida-(“here-comes-the-drum-solo-man!”)-backwards-and-at-half-speed
kinda bizarre – is the degree to which conservatism has not
become a dirty word and a rejected ideology. For my money, this
is the single most absolutely anomalous political curiosity
currently to be found in what is surely one of the most
curiously anomalous polities that ever existed. Oh, and, for the
record, it turns out that that bit about ‘my money’ is quite
literally true – a whole bunch of it has already been spent on
the various insanities of this backwards ideology, and probably
a lot of yours too.
But I digress. What is conservatism, and how should it be
regarded? Like any ideology, it has lots of flavors and
sub-cults, many of which don’t necessarily get along with each
other, and certainly don’t agree on which conservative projects
should be given priority at any given time. All the same, I
think we can boil the ideology down to a few key concepts –
indeed, ones that even our regressive friends would agree
accurately represent the ideological program.
Traditionally, well... tradition has been key, as a matter of
fact. One key tenet of conservatism is to avoid change.
Reactionaries go even further, preferring the (typically heavily
mythologized) world that grandpa inhabited. Economically,
conservatism is all about low taxes, low government spending
(except when it comes to cops and bombs), balanced budgets, low
regulation of the private sector and privatization of any
service which might otherwise be provided by the government.
This is why conservatives love to describe themselves as the
ideology which maximizes freedom, but this turns out –
shockingly, I know – to be a lie. Indeed, it first turns out to
be a lie because in practice supposedly conservative governments
break most of their own economic rules catalogued above. Saint
Ronald The Reagan quadrupled the national debt by irresponsibly
slashing tax revenue (especially for the rich) and massively
increasing spending. Before he sold out the country for his own
career aspirations, George H. W. Bush described that formula as
“voodoo economics”. He ought to know. His voodoo spawn was not
to be outdone by any White House predecessor. Or even all of
them. Lil’ Bush has followed an irradiated version of the same
formula as Uncle Ron and has now doubled all the national debt
which was incurred by his 42 predecessors. Combined. Very
‘conservative’, eh?
But the even bigger lie is that the supposed ideology of freedom
from government doesn’t even pretend to extend outside of the
economic sphere. Ladies, would you like to control your own
bodies? Better try another ideology. Real conservatives don’t
even want you to have access to birth control or divorce, let
alone abortion. Want the freedom to decide who you can sleep
with, what you can do in bed (even if you’re a married hetero
couple), and who you can marry? Oops, you stumbled into the
wrong philosophy, brother. And don’t even get me started on
substances of various sorts one might choose to imbibe, even to
stay alive while undergoing chemotherapy. Freedom? Guess again.
Unless of course you mean the freedom to live the life
prescribed for you (but not themselves) by the likes of Jerry
Falwell, Mark Foley, Larry Craig or Newt Gingrich, based on
their selective misinterpretations of some obscure text written
by hermit politicians 4,000 years ago in the Palestinian desert.
(Where people are still fighting over ownership of the sand to
this very day – hey, let’s follow that model!)
Lastly, conservatism means hawkish aggression in the face of
potential threat, real or imagined. Abroad, that translates into
sending in the Marines or small nuclear devices to deal with
pesky former clients who’ve now gotten a little uppity in their
ambitions. Domestically, that means lots of cops, lots of
judges, lots of jails and lots of electric chairs (but only for
little people, of course, who can’t afford good lawyers).
So that’s the formula – and, again, I doubt even conservatives
would dispute this rendering: traditionalism, the pretense of
small government in the economic sphere, big government in the
social domain, big stick abroad and on the streets.
But here’s the part that they won’t admit to, despite the fact
that it is inescapably true. Indeed, precisely because it is
true, and because of where it leads. And that’s this: This is an
ideology that has been tested. Nobody can say that George W.
Bush, or his cronies in Congress or his enablers on the Supreme
Court have pulled any punches these last eight miserable years.
But the truth is, it runs a lot deeper than even that. With the
exception of Bill Clinton’s moderately and sporadically
progressive social policies, it’s actually been a solid thirty
years of conservative politics in America, including Clinton’s
economic policies, which were indistinguishable from anything
you’d get out of Wall Street or off the GOP convention platform
of any given year. Ever since Reagan, and in some ways even back
to Carter, Washington has been all about implementing a
conservative agenda of tax cuts, deregulation and privatization,
unraveling feminism, gay rights, civil rights and the
Constitution, along with interventions abroad and mass
incarcerations at home. In short, it would take an obscene
distortion of truth – of which regressives have so often shown
themselves singularly capable – to argue other than that we’ve
had a very thorough and robust test of the ideology these last
decades, and especially under George W. Bush.
So, hey, how’s it all turned out? Can you say “unmitigated
disaster”? Not even John McCain, who nowadays will say anything,
argues that we’re better off than we were four years ago. He, of
course, neglects to mention the degree to which he’s been part
of the problem, and now even seeks to extend it another four or
eight years.
Let’s start with national security. The “grown-ups” who were
supposed to come to town and show Clinton Democrats how to do
government right were so obsessed with their little pet Iraqi
project that they were asleep at the switch (if not behind the
wheel) during America’s worst national security crisis ever.
Then they went to war against the supposed perpetrator of that
crime in Afghanistan, until they got bored with it all and sent
the troops to Iraq instead. The upshot has been two endless wars
completely un-won seven years later (at least one of which was
also completely unnecessary), a broken American military, global
hatred toward the US, massive ‘defense’ spending equal to more
than that of every other country in the entire world combined,
and a polarized and deceived public at home. Quite a score-card,
eh?
It gets better. At home, the highest national surplus ever was
rapidly turned into the greatest national deficit ever, adding
and compounding now to nearly $10 trillion in debt (and rapidly
rising), twice what it was (then falling) when the Little Bush
came to Warshington. That’s $66,666 (hey, don’t all those sixes
mean the devil is nearby?) per taxpayer, for those of you
keeping score at home. If Bush’s massive tax transfers (commonly
but erroneously referred to as cuts) are continued, as McCain
vows to do, that number will explode even more than it will
still be mushrooming anyway without them. Meanwhile, the dollar
is lower in value than ever, the trade deficit is astronomical,
inflation is rising behind gas and food prices climbing off the
charts, and a steady diet of regressive deregulation has
jeopardized the entire global economy, requiring taxpayers to
ante up another trillion bucks to rescue us from the
depredations of the robber baron elites, whose vision of
capitalism – abetted by their cronies in government – is that
all profits go to them and all risks go to stupid regular
people.
What a great economic record, eh? Since the 1970s, when the
right side came to bat, polarization of wealth in America has
increased to banana republic proportions. The rich now account
for half of the income in this country – up from one-third
during the liberal period of the 1930s through the 1960s – and
the middle class has actually lost ground, despite an economy
that has been fairly steadily growing over the last decades. It
ain’t rocket science, folks. Cut the legs off of unions, apply
pressure to workers to keep them too frightened to organize,
globalize jobs abroad and reward their export with tax
incentives, change the structure of the tax system to favor the
rich – guess what’s going to happen? Guess what has happened? Of
course, it hasn’t hurt to also throw in a few scary foreign
boogeyman monsters, racism, homophobia and some other nifty
tricks to keep voters distracted long enough to loot their
wallets.
The record outside of foreign and economic policy is hardly any
better. Healthcare in America is a disaster, made worse by
another eight years of standing by watching conditions
deteriorate, and letting a sexually-obsessed American Taliban
dictate policy on stem-cell research and anything else even
remotely related to genitalia and other evil things. That whole
idea of using government to reward cronies and political
stormtroopers turns out to have worked just about as well as it
did back in the nineteenth century – before we abandoned it the
first time – as Heckuvajob Brownie so well demonstrated during
Katrina. And won’t history be kind to the regressive right for
denying that global warming was a massive threat to humanity,
and then blocking solutions once it became undeniable that it
was? Or attempting to destroy the International Criminal Court
(hmm, wonder why?). And so on, and so on...
These are the reasons, altogether, that Bush is the most widely
reviled president ever seen in polling data, and that many
notable historians have abandoned their traditional reluctance
to weigh in on any subject that isn’t half a century old and
have gone ahead and declared the Bush presidency the worst in
over 200 years of American history. But we need to remember that
Bush, of course, is only the most visible manifestation of an
entire regressive movement, which is as completely predatory as
it is patently a failure.
So the real question is, how come ‘conservative’ isn’t a dirty
word today, a label that any politician outside of Mississippi
would run from as if it were the Ebola virus? The answer, I
think, has principally to do with marketing, and also with the
will and motives of the so-called opposition party. I remember
George Bush the Elder, carrier of the demon seed, mercilessly
hammering the hapless Mike Dukakis across the 1988 campaign as
“a liberal”, spitting the word out as if it was the worst
epithet imaginable. Week after week, Dukakis said nothing, as
his poll number slid into the basement, missing the obvious
retort of “If you mean someone who favors Social Security,
Medicare, school loans, the GI Bill, civil rights, equality for
women, protection of free speech and the Constitution – then,
yeah, hell yes I’m a liberal!” Week after week he was silent,
that is, until finally I saw him do it live, with my very own
eyes. He copped to being a liberal. On the very last day of the
campaign. In San Francisco, no less. Brilliant.
What’s happened is that the regressive right has been wildly
successful at one of the only two things they’re good at (the
other being theft), which is marketing lies. The
Atwater/Rove/Schmidt machine is fairly brilliant at using fear,
smear and queer to turn night into day, black into white, Palin
into Truman. Nowhere does this show up so clearly as in the
contrast between policy preferences and the ideological
self-definition of voters. On issue after issue – yes, even
including guns, gays and taxes – Americans definitively line up
in favor of liberal positions, often by huge gaps. They want
national healthcare, they want regulation of guns, they support
equality for women and gays, they oppose ‘free trade’, they
favor government steps to ameliorate the polarization of wealth
in America, they want to protect the environment, they approve
‘big government’ providing more services, they want the minimum
wage raised, they support stem-cell research and massively
oppose Terri Schiavo-type government interventions into personal
morality, they strongly support abortion rights and oppose
repealing Roe by a two-to-one ratio. Nowadays, they’re even
giving up on the death penalty.
But then these same people have, over the last thirty years or
so, self-identified as conservatives to the tune of about 30
percent of the population, versus liberal on the order of about
20 percent. And while there are decent arguments to be made that
the public doesn’t understand ideological labels as well as they
might, or that the other 25 percent or so calling themselves
moderates are really liberals, the more important point has to
do with marketing success. Who in America wants to be labeled a
‘liberal’ today? It’s still a dirty word, even though all its
policy prescriptions are widely held, and even though
conservatism has been monstrously and emphatically disastrous.
This is the product of a marketing coup of first proportions, a
stunning Madison Avenue success at, well, putting lipstick on a
pig. You could see it, most recently, at the Republican
Convention last month, where neither George Bush nor Dick Cheney
nor even the word Republican were anywhere to be found, and yet
people bought into loads of the claptrap about Sarah Palin.
Democrats would have been hopeless and morose with a hand like
the one Republicans have dealt themselves in 2008. The GOP, on
the other hand – them boys know how to peddle soap, man.
Meanwhile, the Dukakis tradition, well preserved by the likes of
Gore in 2000 and John Kerry and still somewhat by Barack Obama
today, continues to illustrate one of the few things a
conservative ever got right – namely, Edmund Burke’s oft-quoted
observation that all that is required for evil to prevail is for
good men to do nothing. But there’s good and then there’s good.
As another famous old quip notes, many progressives during the
New Deal era came to Washington to do good and stayed to do
well. One reason that regressivism has been so miraculously
successful as a set of politics while being simultaneously so
disastrous as policy is surely because of Democratic cowardice.
But, just as surely, another is because far too many donkeys are
nearly as bought into the corporate predatory nexus as are the
elephants (and I don’t mean Babar).
Why does this all matter? Well, for the same reason that eight
years of Bush/Cheney matters, and that the very real prospect of
a McCain presidency followed by a Palin presidency matters.
Political battles are half-won or lost, in advance, by the
framing and labeling which precede the actual contests. The
right understands this so well, which is why, among other of
their successes, liberal is a dirty word, and the press has been
successfully labeled with a liberal bias. Progressives – or at
least Democrats – are clueless about this stuff. They’ve never
worked on Madison Avenue. They’ve never been driven by a
rapacious ambition toward infantile self-aggrandizement. They’ve
never had to sell gold-plated cappuccino machines or Hummers to
idiot consumers just itching to depart with their own money in
order to salve their raging insecurities. No wonder they can’t
win elections.
It’s astonishing, if you think about it – how much can be sold
on the basis of so little substance. Put it this way: I’d be
willing to bet there isn’t a day that doesn’t go by in which
Karl Rove doesn’t salivate all over his Dockers, dreaming of the
kind of empire he could build if he had the material
progressives have to work with. An angry public, policy
agreement on virtually every issue in the public sphere, a hated
government powerfully representing the opposing ideology. What
more could you want? It’s true, conservative voters are
incredibly susceptible to fear-based political appeals, and tend
to have the critical analytical faculties of a pile of rocks.
Still, it’s been a very long time since the cards were stacked
so heavily in favor of a progressive tsunami in America, and the
right knows it. And they alternate between sheer astonishment
and giddy joy as they contemplate the utter inability of
progressives to pick up that ball and run with it.
Those, like Rove, in the regressive controlling class cannot
believe their good fortune in not being completely chased from
the field of play, as if they were transsexual Nazi pedophiles
advocating for the national agenda a confiscation of all private
property and America being annexed as a province of Bolivia.
“Goddam, I’m good” Rove tells the guy in the mirror each morning
as he shaves, I can assure you. And he’s (very) right, I can
also assure you, provided you take the talented meaning of the
word ‘good’, not the moral one.
But imagine if progressives were half as good, especially with
all the material they now have to work with.
They could be the chemotherapy for the country’s conservative
cancer we’ve so badly needed for so long now. Instead of an
America on life support, we could once again be a healthy
polity, growing and thriving.
And the regressive disease could be banished from the body
politic forever.
David Michael Green is a professor of political science at
Hofstra University in New York. He is delighted to receive
readers' reactions to his articles (
dmg@regressiveantidote.net , but regrets that time
constraints do not always allow him to respond. More of his work
can be found at his website,
www.regressiveantidote.net
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