Welcome friends!
As the conservative movement here in the USA has increasingly taken up nativism, racism, nationalism, and other bits and pieces of European-style right wing fascist-style claptrap one may reasonably wonder what remains of my original characterization of the domestic conservative movement as a two-headed monster composed primarily of economic conservatives on the one hand and religious conservatives on the other. (I believe I later revised that to a three-headed monster to give equal billing to what I called political conservatism although later still I speculated political conservatism was likely simply economic conservatism in a political guise so I wasn’t entirely sure it warranted its own head on the beast.) I’ve always been particularly and possibly inordinately interested in economic conservatism because as a one-time student of economics myself I’ve long considered economic conservatism to be rooted in both limitations and misunderstandings of neoclassical economic theory as summarized by my kindred spirit Hansel Krankepantzen in his You Tube video and Kindle e-book on economic theory and distributional issues. Briefly economic conservatism is the notion government activity should be restricted to trying to bring real world markets acceptably close to the perfectly competitive ideal (although how close is close enough is of course left conveniently indeterminate) after which all will ostensibly be right with the world and in particular everyone will get exactly what’s coming to them at least as long as democratic government doesn’t muck up the works. The great bugbear of economic conservatism is that one will object to the distributive results of a perfectly competitive market system or really the inevitably flawed market system we actually have and hence be tempted to use government to revise those results by providing some sort of assistance to those who may be struggling economically, which is forever characterized by conservatives as “socialism” and thought to lead directly and inevitably to communist authoritarianism, a less than optimal economic output, and a whole host of social ills generally involving the ostensible disappearance of incentives and personal responsibility.
The curious fact now as I’ve mentioned various ways in various previous posts is that the vast bulk of conservatives no longer appear to take this theory very seriously, which suggests quite strongly what we liberals have long suspected: traditional economic conservatism long ago ceased to function as anything other than empty political rhetoric not taken seriously by those proclaiming it or those receiving those proclamations. For example, one important component of contemporary American conservatism is apparently the notion American workers must be protected from immigration of both the legal and illegal variety by such Draconian measures as separating young immigrant children from their parents, calling out the US Army to defend the border against what is marketed at least as an invading horde of poor and threatening foreigners, and building a Great Wall along our southern border. This theme is of course in direct and rather stark contrast to the importance placed on the free movement of labor and capital within economic theory. According to traditional economic conservatives with their mangled understanding of economic theory a so-called Nanny State protecting a nation’s workers from competition from more highly qualified or cheaper labor arriving from abroad via caravan or tunnel or boat or indeed any other route or mode of transport would represent socialism at its most menacing and destructive.
The same phenomenon can be seen in the so-called economic nationalism of contemporary American conservatism in which government is expected to set up tariffs and engage in trade wars and so on to protect and encourage American industry. Again, traditional economic conservatism based on neoclassical economic theory would suggest if foreign competitors have a competitive advantage on whatever it happens to be we should be perfectly happy to allow capital and labor to move there.
In addition one of the great irritations of traditional economic conservatives has long been the apparent success and hence acceptance of Keynesian economic thinking in which fiscal policy including deficit spending can be used to offset market contractions. The implied usefulness if not necessity of activist government in keeping the economy on an even keel is of course inconsistent with the traditional images of invisible hands and cosmic clocks and everything running smoothly with no need of human intervention that haunted the imaginations of traditional economic conservatives for so long. And yet today American conservatives gleefully run up the deficit with tax cuts with no commensurate reductions in spending in an apparent attempt to goose the economy and preempt the sort of catastrophic economic failure that has long been a hallmark of conservative administrations exemplified most recently by the Bush administration in 2008.
In place of the happy albeit unfounded and profoundly misleading message of traditional economic conservatives that everyone will be made better off if we simply encourage perfectly competitive markets and shrink the economic and social role of democratic government the prevailing conservative economic vision now appears to be a rather darker and more sinister affair of national against nation, industry against industry, worker against worker, with government serving as a sort of feudal overlord dispensing and withholding economic favors based on one’s fealty to the king.
This has led to the creation of a curious sort of creature one might characterize as the Wooly Headed Ancient Conservative: men and women who failed to appreciate the insincere and rhetorical nature of traditional conservative economic ideology and now haunt the world lamenting that conservatives are no longer conservative and so on. These people never got the memo that conservative economic ideology was never real; that it was only a simplistic and flawed fable that proved useful to some people at for a while in the development of modern conservatism and has now served its purpose; that it’s not now and never was a real thing. The wealthy conservative elite no longer feels it must hide its lust for power with studiously muddled thinking and pseudo-intellectual mumbo-jumbo. They’ve found a new stratagem. There’s a new game in town. It’s time conservatives put away childish things like traditional conservative economic ideology and embraced the brave new world of European-style anti-democratic, racist, nativist, nationalistic, authoritarian, elitist, religious, plutocratic, proto-fascism. And it’s time all right thinking Americans turn and face the conservative threat to our way of life head on in words and at the ballot box. Long live American democracy! Long live the liberal ethos!
This has led to the creation of a curious sort of creature one might characterize as the Wooly Headed Ancient Conservative: men and women who failed to appreciate the insincere and rhetorical nature of traditional conservative economic ideology and now haunt the world lamenting that conservatives are no longer conservative and so on. These people never got the memo that conservative economic ideology was never real; that it was only a simplistic and flawed fable that proved useful to some people at for a while in the development of modern conservatism and has now served its purpose; that it’s not now and never was a real thing. The wealthy conservative elite no longer feels it must hide its lust for power with studiously muddled thinking and pseudo-intellectual mumbo-jumbo. They’ve found a new stratagem. There’s a new game in town. It’s time conservatives put away childish things like traditional conservative economic ideology and embraced the brave new world of European-style anti-democratic, racist, nativist, nationalistic, authoritarian, elitist, religious, plutocratic, proto-fascism. And it’s time all right thinking Americans turn and face the conservative threat to our way of life head on in words and at the ballot box. Long live American democracy! Long live the liberal ethos!
