Welcome friends!
I suppose you may have noticed the flurry of articles comparing the political movement of our president-elect Donald Trump and his conservative Republican Party to that of Adolph Hitler and his Nazi Party so many years ago in early twentieth-century Germany? I suspect it’s probably rather difficult to avoid noticing certain similarities. Of course conservatives themselves have been preemptively calling their political opponents fascists and Nazis for some time now so I suspect some people must assume it’s all a bit of tit for tat but I really don’t think so. I thought this time out I’d discuss yet another point of similarity this time involving economic ideas.
If you’re interested in history at all you may recall the little mustachioed monster of fame originally rose to power in Germany the conventional democratic way. Yes, like vampires of film he only managed to wreak his havoc after having been duly invited in. Of course in his case the havoc didn’t literally involve sucking blood but rather dismantling the democratic institutions of the nation and going on to murder millions of his countrymen and various other people besides. By all accounts the initial impetus for his rise was a rather severe economic depression and the inevitable social divisions and in particular racial divisions the economic meltdown and social instability dredged up from the darkness of ages past.
In this context I think it’s important to realize one of the great and abiding mysteries for economic conservatives everywhere is why they don’t always do as well as they feel they ought to do under free markets. It’s not much of a mystery or issue for liberals and leftists who believe markets don’t always perform that well anyway, which is to say markets can break down and exhibit instability, many types of markets have undesirable characteristics and results (monopolies, monopsonies, oligopolies, oligopsonies), certain common conditions render even gold-standard perfectly competitive markets problematic (externalities, information and other power asymmetries), and markets of any description do not necessarily do a very good job distributing goods and services to the people one might think should have them under any particular theory of social justice. No, the problem for liberals and leftists is the relatively straightforward although obviously still quite daunting issue of how to fix the problems with markets to make things turn out better.
Conservatives are in a different mental place altogether. They accept the free market as a panacea for all the material and distributional issues a society may face so if problems remain despite the presence of an apparently free market that’s really a rather remarkable state of affairs. The primary way conservatives have historically attempted to explain this great mystery is that yes, market systems are inherently flawless and fantastic and so on, but someone is “rigging” the market behind the scenes as it were to make it not work out right. Sabotage or I suppose as conservatives might say sabatoogie. For Hitler and the Nazis the shadowy culprit was international Jewry. One can imagine this wasn’t the most difficult sell in the world at that time and place given the rather obvious otherness of Jewish people in the context of self-adoring European nationalists and racists, the troubled history of Jewish people in Europe since the Middle Ages, and more prosaically the fact some Jewish people had managed to do pretty well for themselves under the prevailing market system. Make no mistake about it. Although the Nazis fashioned themselves “socialists” and talked a lot about collectives in certain cultural and military contexts when it came to economic matters they were pretty much conventional economic conservatives. They didn’t challenge the economic elite of the nation and in return the economic elite of the nation didn’t challenge them. They were all about keeping labor in line and leftist labor agitators out. Their goal was an unholy merging of big business, (undemocratic) government, and the military machine. Hitler won the support of most of the upper classes in the Germany of the day because he basically represented a potential money making opportunity for them. Obviously it didn’t end too well. Can’t do much with smoking rubble and a big pile of corpses. But by the time they figured out which way the wind was blowing there wasn’t a whole lot they could do about it.
Here in the USA we have a roughly similar sort of dynamic going on right now. Conservatives have been talking up the magic of the marketplace as they have been these past two centuries or so but as was the case in Germany in the early twentieth century some workers just aren’t doing all that well financially. Liberals are trying to explain why that might be the case in terms of technological change and the rise of more effective international competition and more generally just trying to get people to think realistically about the distributional issues associated with market systems but of course conservatives aren’t having it. They’re too busy looking for the scoundrels who have been rigging the markets to make them not function as they should. They know it can’t be the economic elite or captains of industry because under conservative philosophy those are the people responsible for all good things in the world and the most deserving of our respect. It must be someone else. You can tell they have something like this on their minds because they’re always talking about taking the country back from someone. But who? And how did they get hold of the country in the first place?
I suppose a few American conservatives accept the traditional antisemitic line endorsed by the Nazis but not very many. We just don’t have the history for that sort of thing to really take root. We didn’t have medieval pogroms or Christian crusades. We have lots of immigrants from all over the place and always have had. We like to talk about religious freedom. Some nativist groups have gotten on that wagon over the years including the neo-Nazis and KKK but it’s a bit of a hard sell for the man in the street. No, in an American context the much more tempting and satisfying scapegoats are the so-called “black” people, the descendants of the slaves the old-timers kidnapped and brought over to work in their fields and who did a lot to build the country into what it is today. That despicable but surprisingly long-lasting labor and social arrangement generated a type of social cancer that has proven quite difficult to eradicate or sometimes simply to contain: racism. According to this theme markets are not working properly because our darker hued compatriots and possibly their illegal immigrant allies (and misguided liberals of course) have captured the government and are using it to wreck markets and funnel resources to the undeserving. As I’ve noted before the story doesn’t entirely make sense to me according to the available facts because poor “black” people have been doing just as badly as poor “white” people and I think even a little worse and most illegal immigrants are struggling economically as well. But I suppose the theory is that even though they’re trying to wreck markets and funnel resources to themselves they must not be very good at it because all they’ve managed to do in practice is wreck markets. So in the eyes of conservatives the solution to our problems is to take the political system back from the people who have captured it, “black” people and their foreign allies, and put it back under the control of people who understand how the market is meant to work and will presumably not mess with it: rich old “white” people. They would like to find a permanent solution and are forever thinking of ways to limit and shrink democratic government and correspondingly expand the power of the autocratic economic elite but they can only do so much at one time.
Of course, one must admit our conservatives are not nearly as bad as their historical counterparts. No one has suggested carting anyone off to death camps in the countryside. Not yet anyway. I would find that reassuring were it not for the fact we’re not really comparing apples to apples. Germany in the era of the Nazis went from the social turmoil of a lost war through an epic economic depression to the upheaval of total war. One supposes these conditions must have had some influence on the complete moral meltdown we all remember today. Here in the USA we’re having it relatively easy right now. We have some economic problems that are particularly acute in some areas of the country but overall we’re not doing so badly. We have some ongoing military conflicts but not really anything beyond what is more or less normal for us these days. We’re basically on a pretty even keel right now and yet the person the American public chose as their president was Donald Trump. One can’t help but wonder if Germany in the 1930s had been doing as well as we are today would Hitler and his party of dimwitted goons have gotten anywhere near the reins of government. Or would they have spent their lives railing against the system in some Bavarian beer hall? Or flip it around. Let’s say Trump’s economic incompetence and anti-regulatory zeal unleashes a major 1930s style depression. People in the so-called “heartland” are out of work. They’re going hungry. They’re fearful for the future. What will their philosophy suggest was the cause of the calamity and what do you suppose they will see as the solution? Or let’s say a major war breaks out. I mean a big one. Nuclear. Biological. It’s us against them and our backs are against the wall. But who is us anyway? Does it include the people conservatives formerly suspected of attempting to steal the country from them? Will we need to come up with a final solution to the enemy within?
Let’s not let our arrogance get the better of us here. We’re not immune to the forces that blighted Germany in the not so distant past. History can repeat itself and will unless we fight tooth and nail to make sure it doesn’t. All pepped up and ready to argue with all your might against the ignorant and destructive forces Mr. Trump has ridden to political power and clearly plans to nourish and encourage the next four years? Ready to stand up for our American way of life and our shared values of democracy, reason, kindness, and humanity? Good. Let’s meet the new year head on and fight the noble fight together.
