Welcome friends!
I was watching a movie from the 1980s the other day and it reminded me of something I’ve long been interested in and indeed have likely discussed a number of times before: the historical development of that influential element of the right wing conservative movement here in the USA concerned with fighting what they call “activist” democratic government, so groups like the so-called “libertarians,” devotees of so-called “Austrian” economics, and fans of market-based fake “anarchism” (so-called “anarcho-capitalism” or something along those lines). The most interesting part of that development to me is the relationship of that element of the American conservative movement to the worst excesses of the self-indulgent late stages of the similarly egoistic albeit rather more genuinely anarchic and nominally “leftist” utopian hippiedom of the 1970s; an echo of that fascinating and complicated era of popular American culture between the folk singing, sincere as all get out, idealistic, socially conscious progressivism of the 1960s, and the smug, oleaginous, cynical, money grubbing, proudly egoistic, Greed is Good, “yuppie” movement of the 1980s. Maybe I’ll discuss that a bit more today.
One of the popular tropes you’ll find in artifacts of American culture from the 1980s is that, in the immortal words of then president Ronald Reagan, (democratic) government is not the solution to our problems, it’s the problem. In fairness to Mr. Reagan, he may have been speaking specifically about a particular problem at the time, but the quote was widely taken as a statement of a broader principle of conservative ideology. The popularity of Mr. Reagan and the conservative movement at that time is reflected in films of that era in which every US government employee is dutifully depicted as, at best, a mean spirited, pencil pushing prig, and at worst, a wily super villain of near supernatural abilities. Many of these depictions still resonate with conservatives today such as, for example, the high handed, perpetually angry, emotionally unstable EPA inspector in Ghostbusters whose puny mind and unreasonable enforcement of draconian regulations nearly allows NYC to be overrun by ghosts, or evil slime, or threateningly foreign sounding Eastern Europeans of the supernatural sort, or whatever it was. Lucky for us the boys managed to sock democratic government in the eye and save the day. Conservatives are still fulminating against the EPA and I would suggest the character of the evil EPA inspector in that particular film could just as well have been written yesterday. Other films seem rather less fortunate in that department. In the particular film I was watching, a gratingly irritating bit of juvenile claptrap named Coneheads, the requisite US government villain took the form of a cold-hearted functionary intent on rooting out illegal aliens, the joke being the illegal aliens in this case were not desperate, struggling families from south of the border but the extraterrestrial Coneheads themselves. I know. What a jerk, right? Leave those aliens alone! Except, of course, unlike the evil EPA inspector of Ghostbusters the evil immigration official of Coneheads is actually right up conservatives’ alley just now. Indeed, if they were to have any criticisms of the character today it would likely be he was too incompetent or perhaps too humane or lenient to effectively eject the lovable Coneheads thus preserving American culture. Funny. Seems the two films straddled the line between two opposing notions of what we all were talking about when contemplating the evils of activist democratic government. And that really is the root of the issue, isn’t it? It was never simply the general proposition that activist democratic government is inherently bad, but that political democracy allows activist democratic government to sometimes end up doing things one does not personally support.
To make sense of this, it may help to appreciate the 1980s stock character of the evil US government functionary originated with popular opposition to the Vietnam War in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The basic idea at the time was the “establishment,” including the military, the police, the courts, and indeed often democratic government itself, was not to be trusted. It was an anarchic, nihilistic mindset that was popularly associated with a sort of swoony, unmoored liberalism or leftism of the utopian variety and roundly despised by conservatives of the day. However, at some point some conservative group somewhere apparently realized conservatives themselves could make use of those themes to construct a bit of popular rhetoric to advance their own agenda. They did so by peeling off the activist democratic government they had long opposed under the influence of bad economics, in which markets are seen as panaceas and democratic government as unnecessary at best and harmful at worst, and identifying that specifically as “the establishment,” thus allowing the other erstwhile components of “the establishment” to go unchallenged and immune from criticism and revision. They did so by emphasizing the ills of democratic government not in the context of lawless utopian anarchy but in the context of their preferred baseline of markets, property rights, contracts, laws, police, prisons, militaries, etc. The legal and perforce ethical baseline associated with those institutions receded into the intellectual background to such an extent these conservative spinmeisters convinced many people those institutions were not, themselves, simply artifacts of the now despised political democracy, but natural laws or divine edicts or some such thing having no particular relationship to democratic government and law. The result is that a generation of what would have formerly been called, and are now again increasingly called, economic and political conservatives, became confusingly miscast as fake “anarchists,” fake rebels, people presented as carrying the banner of the let it all hang out, do what you want, self-obsessed hippies of the 1960s striking a blow against the strictures of democratic government and law and society itself, but really in their case doing so on behalf of existing power relationships and arrangements, on behalf of rich folk and the institutions that reflect the interests of rich folk, that is to say, on behalf of what real hippies of the day would have recognized as “the establishment.” Basically, they became what amounts to right wing anti-democratic fascists.
This coup of political rhetoric has led to all manner of peculiar and seemingly lasting consequences for our public conservation here in the USA. One notable example is the ascendency of wealthy, corrupt, lawless, power mad, anti-democracy businessman Mr. Trump to the White House based partially on the populist conservative notion the man is an “outsider” intent on taking on “the establishment.” Old timers, of course, will recognize immediately that the man exemplifies everything about the establishment those in the late 1960s and early 1970s who were concerned about such things wanted to fight against. It has also led to such comical notions that hoary free market ideology from the nineteenth century is a bold new idea no one has ever yet considered or tried because of opposition from “the establishment,” and that people like Ms. Rand and other “libertarian” writers of her ilk invented the revolutionary new ideas of selfishness, egoism, and greed, and it’s only the reactionary small mindedness of “the establishment” that prevents the power of their astonishing new discoveries being put to proper use. In other words, the American conservative movement’s bit of cynical nonsense and repackaging of bad ideas has done a lot to make the popular public conservation about political, economic, and social issues here in the USA what is today: ignorant, idiotic, confusing, dangerous, and unintentionally comical. All reasonable people will want to fight the intellectual rot of the conservative movement if only to discuss these important issues in a reasonable and responsible way.
