Shuffle Further to the Right

Here’s a question for the voters of the nation. Why has the great state of Delaware sent forward one like Christine O’Donnel, the Palin-endorsed tea-partier, as the republican candidate for the Senate? As I write this, I will assume she couldn’t possibly be elected, but I wonder, seriously wonder, if there isn’t an element of wishful thinking in my assumption. I think of myself as an intellectual, if one can identify oneself in that way, and I do believe, as Lee Harris suggested, writing for Policy Review, that “a political movement ought be motived by ideas and that a new political movement should provide new ideas.” The tea-party provides very little in the way of ideas – at least the sorts of ideas that could be seriously considered – but Harris is correct, I think, in observing that the tea-party is not about ideas, but attitude. It is not “the deliberate articulation of a well-thought-out political ideology, but rather the expression of an attitude – the attitude of pugnacious and even truculent defiance” captured , evocatively, by the slogan “don’t tread on me!” While it may cause us pause, and “perhaps we should consider the possibility that American’s intellectual elite has become radically out of touch with the visceral sensibility of a large chunk of their nation’s population,” nevertheless, it is extraordinarily difficult for one like me to take it all seriously, and without doubt most of what actually comes from the mouth of one like Christine O’Donnel is thoroughly repugnant to me, except – and it is a big exception – viscerally, I feel some of the same pugnacious defiance.

Everything about Christine O’Donnell is questionable. She has lied repeatedly about her education, misappropriated campaign funds, and failed to pay taxes, the last not in the principled way of “civil disobedience,” but in the more mundane way of incompetence, evasion, or perhaps most likely incompetent evasion. The list will no doubt grow as the campaign heats up. Having said this, however, her misrepresentations and evasions may well be her strongest qualifications among those who put the check next to her name on the ballot. For those about to lose their grip on the lower rungs of the middle class, it’s not difficult to see one’s self in Christine O’Donnel l. Although it may indicate some lingering desire to be among the “intellectual elite” and some simmering resentment at being excluded, even among the “intellectual elite” of the republican party, why not lie about one’s education? In the end, an elite education is all smoke and mirrors, empty arguments on empty subjects, or worse cynical subversion of the truth, is it not? That she misappropriated campaign funds to cover her living expenses, to cover her rent and other personal expenses, may be more endearing than alarming to those who attended her rally at the local Elks club. Ditto the debts and back taxes. For a growing number of Americans, the assertion that “she’s just like us,” is less a recognition of studied noblesse oblige, as would be the case for most Senate candidates, more a simple recognition of facts – the facts of many people’s lives.

In the end, though, she is a poster child for the lowest common denominator – or more charitably, the next to lowest common denominator – among those who generally subscribe to the republican social agenda. She has checked all the boxes. She is against science, suggesting that evolution is “soft science,” but leaving open the question of what might consititute “hard science.” She is against illegal immigration, even favoring “tough penalties for business that hire illegal immigrants,” though I strongly suspect the immigrants themselves would bear the brunt of even tougher penalties were she appointed mama rabbit of the country. She is against gun control, and, perhaps most strikingly, she is against sex, or at least adulterous sex, and all that is tainted by sexuality. She is against abortion and stem cell research, while favoring chastity, to the point of taking on a role in an abstinance organization that denounced masterbation as a form of adultery.

In short, O’Donnell typifies what Hayek observed to be “almost a law of human nature, that it is easier for people to agree on a negative program … than any positive task.” Although there is little or no intellectual consistency behind this amalgam of “positions,” there is a good deal of emotional consistency – little logos, but a good deal of pathos – the vituperation of fear, anger, and resentment. It is almost shamefully easy to point out the xenophobia and the deep suspicion of science that is, on the one hand barely comprehensible to the lay public, and on the other a clear challenge to human, much less racial superiority. As Harris points out, however, doing so accomplishes little. Not too long ago, while visiting my home town in Nebraska, a denizen of the VFW club suggested that the country would be much better off if someone put a bullet in “that nigger’s head,” meaning President Obama. He raised his middle finger in a traditional gesture, then bumped it against his forehead to show precisely where the bullet should enter. The fear, anger, and resentment bubble up from a place that the “intellectual elite” have long since left behind, just as I have long since left rural Nebraska behind. At the very very least, we have eliminated overt racisim and other forms of bigotry from polite public discourse, but it is naïve to think that we have eliminated them from the hearts and minds of heartland America. It is equally naïve to think that the pugnacious and truculent defiance of those being left behind is somehow benign.

In this regard, Ms. O’Donnell has some natural rhetorical advantages. Not unlike her mentor Ms. Palin, she is conventionally attractive with a white cherubic face that we want to credit with goodwill, even intelligence. To give her credit, she is for “a private sector, free market approach to economic recovery.” It is, of course, just this that plays into the hands of the republian minority who are precisely what she is not – well educated, corporate technocrats with the sorts of disposable income that would make her campaign debt of $20,000 pocket change for a night out with the wife. She is clearly an embarrassment to the republican elite, and she clearly sounds an alarm or two because it is not entirely clear that the sentiments she represents can be controlled, but I suspect that the arrogance of the existing elites will out. So long as she and the other tea-party candidates can be controlled – so long as Ms. O’Donnell’s aversion to the deadly sin of avarice is not quite so deeply seated as her aversion to lust – it wouldn’t, from a republican perspective, be the worst thing if she were elected. So long as her support of a free market approach is simply a repetition of received opinion, and so long as she goes with the flow of wealth from other people just like her to those global elites who, I suspect, have little in common with her, either in values or in tastes, it might not be the worst thing, from a republican perspective, if she were elected. Nevertheless, by building their base around an incoherent amalgam of social issues, the visceral appeal of which serves as a distraction from their core agenda of corporatization and the continuing concentration of wealth, it seems the republican party has let a rattlesnake loose in the room.

Shuffle to the Right

Professedly, the republicans do not want more government, indeed they are vociferously, if not actually, opposed to expansions of federal power. That goes especially for the realm in which, traditional, left-leaning socialists have wanted power – the economic sphere. Again, it is a question of values, and the pre-eminent value is freedom – economic freedom as the precursor to all other freedom. If economic control is “the control of the means for all our ends,” and I do believe it is, then it is reasonably clear that my sympathies lie with Hayek and the laissez faire republicans in this regard. It isn’t terribly difficult to ennumerate the failure of almost all attempts to build the great sociiety through planned, programmatic redistribution of wealth. Government entitlements, if they are distributed blindly, are often allocated to those who are, by most measures of personal worth other than economic wealth, the least entitled. The deserving may get their share – which is, perhaps, better than nothing – but more often than not, the undeserving get their “share” as well. It violates precepts so deeply embedded in our psyche as to be genetic – a fairness gene. People should get what they deserve, and one doesn’t need to read Weber to understand the equally deep connection between perceived effort and perceived worth. While we might look on in envious fascination at those who come by their wealth arbitrarily – winners of the genetic lottery, the Paris Hilton’s of the world – we do not admire them, and we do not think them successful. Indeed, if we are envious, we are sanctimoniously so, our envy tinged with a sense of moral and ethical superiority likewise so deep as to be genetic -- an Horatio Alger gene.

All would be well if the republicans really believed in laissez faire economics as a prerequisite to the full development of human, if not individual, potential – if this really were, in some substantive way, the land of equal opportunity where the best person wins. It’s not, of course, and I think privately most republicans would assent to John Jay’s sentiment that “the people who own the country ought to govern it.” There is some sense in this, and it reflects nothing more than a thorough-going paternalism – the time honored assertion that, “so long as you’re under my roof, you’ll obey my rules.” The question, of course, is who own’s the country, and in this repect, I think Chomsky is right when he asserts that “the question was answered by the rise of the private corporations and the structures devised to protect and support them.” I will return to this is more detail in later posts, but I don’t know how there could be much doubt that, as more and more wealth is concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, so too is power. In an interesting set of side notes, the CEO of Hewlett-Packard, Mark V. Hurd, ousted for ethics violations and sexual impropriety, was given a severance package of $12.2 million, and it didn’t take him long to find employment elsewhere, landing a lucrative new position with Oracle. As the Times also reports, that the board of Gleacher & Company, a New York investment bank, expanded its board last year to include not only Marshall A. Cohen, who served as a director of American International Group until its near collapse in 2008, but also Henry S. Bienen, who served as a director of Bear Stearns from 2004 until its resuce by JP Morgan Chase in March 2008. Such appointments, “highlight how the directors of the companies at the center of the financial crises – AIG, Bear Stearns, and Lehman itself – still play an active role in the governance of corporate America.”

In short, those who presided over the decimation of my retirement fund, have simply played a game of musical chairs, as it should be, of course, if those who own the country should govern the country – this based on the likely presumption that the perpetrators of the collapse are also among the 2% of Americans earning more than $250 thousand, among those who command the lion’s share of American wealth. As McChesney points out in his introduction to Chomsky’s Profit over People, the republican agenda “works best when there is formal electoral democracy, but when the population is diverted from the information, access, and public forums necessary for meaning participation in decision-making” – the sorts of economic decision making that makes a significant difference in the lives of people. The republican agenda works best when political debate is limed to “minor issues.” One could consider any number of “issues,” ranging from “abortion” through “immigration” to “gay marriage” to get a feel for how distracting it all is. If the republican party is to have any popular (or populist) appeal, it must attach itself to “issues” that have great emotional, but little economic impact. I do not doubt, not for an instant, the sincerity of those who align with the republican party because it is anti-abortion, anti-illegal alien, pro-death penalty, and anti-gay marriage, but no matter how resolved, such “issues” are unlikely to have much impact on the daily lives of most people. For those republicans not among the 2% who control the majority of the nation’s wealth and who are, apparently, too big to fail, appealling to the visceral antipathy to those who are sexually promiscuous, those who are not-like-us, those who do not profess the fundamental Christian values on which this country were founded, and et cetera,is powerful rhetoric, but poor reason. It distracts the heartland folks, the Wal-Mart Hippies, from the almost painfully obvious fact that the republican agenda lies elsewhere and has few of their economic interests at heart.

Shuffle to the Left

The democrats, for their part, are most clearly half-socialist. They tend to want greater government control where socialists have traditionally wanted greater control, in the economic sphere. It is, after all, a question of values, and ultimately the value most sought by the democrats is “justice” – more precisely, “redistributive justice.” There is little doubt that the rich are getting richer, the poor poorer. The census is expected to announce soon that about 45 million Americans, or about one is seven of us, fall below the poverty line – that between 19 and 20 percent of children live in poverty – and that those impoverished are disproportionately black and Hispanic. Few, I think, will cheer when the report comes out, but oddly the report will appear in an election year when democrats, those most likely to take steps to redress the imbalance, are also most likely to take fire for the increase.

Nevertheless, the democrats, generally speaking, want to insure that all get a fair share of the great American pie, and since, within our republic, the only means available to redistribute wealth is the tax code and the resultant federal budget, their reputation as “tax and spend” is partly deserved. Assuming that all other matter were maintained at the status-quo, tax increases would be needed to pay for the social programs and entitlements, and those increases would disproportionately impact middle class tax-payers. There is no reason for the status quo to prevail, and recent moves by the democratic to end the tax exemptions for the those Americans earning over $250,000 a year will have some robin hood effect, even if those effects will only have marginal impact. The recent bail-out program for the banks, however, seems a betrayal of faith, particularly as planned bonuses for the executives of the same sinking banks seemed to go forward without hesitation. The health care plan, at least in its intent, seems to be within the faith, extending entitlements with a blind eye to all differences, with the one possible exception of income – any inherent differences that might likewise impede progress in redressing economic disparities between peoples. Whether black or white, Hispanic or Polish in origin, gay or straight in sexual proclivities, Muslim or Christian in religion does not matter, unless of course it is to take affirmative action to compensate for past or present intolerance of the individual qua individual.

Implicit in the half-socialism of the democrats, of course, is a recognition that “economic control is not merely control of a sector of human life which can be separated from the rest,” as Hayek put it, but rather “the control of the means for all our ends.” As Hayek goes on, “the ultimate ends of the activities of reasonable beings are never economic. Strictly speaking, there is no ‘economic motive’ but only economic factors conditioning our striving for other ends. What in ordinary language is misleadingly called the ‘economic motive’ means merely the desire for general opportunity, the desire for power to achieve unspecified ends” – to achieve, in the words of Jefferson, “happiness.”

Any attempt at redistributive justice – any attempt to insure a more equal distribution of opportunity and the power to achieve unspecified ends – would be fine, of course, if it actually left the ends unspecified. Ultimately, it cannot, at least not without justifiable public outcry. If the government were to simply increase my opportunity – if it were to give me a check for $500, I could use it to buy a prostitute or use it to buy groceries for my children – whatever increased my store of “happiness.” Ultimately, however, few would argue that it is better, from a social perspective, if I were to spend the money on groceries for my children, rather than a prostitute, who in turn might spend it on groceries for her children, or a drug habit. No one knows up front, and since it is, in part at least, my wealth that is being redistributed, I might want some say, however dilute, in how it is spent. As it turns out, redistribution of wealth works best within formal electoral democracies, in part because one can count on the electorate to exercise outrage and demand controls, and so it is that government largess, always comes with strings attached. It is a redistribution of wealth for groceries, for health care, for education, or some other socially sanctioned purpose, as it should be. And of course, as those who have come to the tea party know, the control doesn’t end with the specification of purpose. It is not merely money for groceries, but for specific types of groceries, and there are forms to be filled out and hoops to jump through to secure it, and so it goes.

Progress on the Road to Serfdom

I should probably confess from the outset that I am a liberal, not of the contemporary sort, but of the classical sort. Having said this, however, I know that I’ve lost half of you already. In the topsy-turvey world of political discourse today, the so-called liberal part, the democrats, are far from liberal, and the so-called conservative party, the republicans, are close to being “liberal,” if not in their acts, then in their professed ideology. I am a “liberal” of the old school, characterized by Hayek in The Road to Serfdom, as “respect for the individual [person] qua [person],” with “the recognition of [one’s] own views and tastes as supreme in [one’s] own sphere, however narrowly that may be circumscribed, and the belief that it is desirable that [people] should develop their own individual gifts and bents.” By this measure, both democrats and republicans are half-socialists.