Welcome friends!
November 7, 2020. Oh my goodness. Truly a red letter day for the ages. The day we here in the USA finally found out the results of our recent presidential election. It was a vastly more important presidential election than the previous one, and not just because of the apparent absence of the well documented foreign interference that muddied the results last time, but more importantly because all American voters knew exactly what they were voting on this time. There had been a great deal of speculation that conservatives and Republicans didn’t really know what they were getting with Mr. Trump the last time, that he was an unknown, a one off, a loose canon. When he was revealed over time to be a dishonest, corrupt, nepotistic, greedy, egoistic, secretive, cruel, incompetent, wannabe authoritarian dictator, a great many Americans wondered if we would see a massive popular repudiation of the man including from his conservative and Republican base. The answer came loud and clear. We did not. Conservatives and Republicans showed up in even greater numbers than in the last election to ecstatically and enthusiastically support the man and do everything they could to keep him in the White House. They were not put off at all by what they had seen. Far from it. They loved it. They supported it one hundred percent. Fortunately for all of us, an even greater number of American voters were motivated to finally get off their backsides and prevent conservatives and Republicans from succeeding this time around. In the past four years, Mr. Trump has managed to inflict a rather remarkable amount of damage to our democratic institutions and traditions, the rule of law, the professionalism of our civil service, the economy, the standing of the USA internationally, the environment, the national debt, race relations, public health, and a great many other things. There was understandable concern about what further damage he might manage given an additional four years in office and indeed reasonable doubt about whether American democracy would even survive in any recognizable form. As it is, we seem to have given ourselves a little respite, a few moments to collect our thoughts. But surely a few moments only. The briefest of time outs. American voters did see fit to return to Congress the Republican politicians who unquestioningly and completely supported Mr. Trump the past four years in everything he said and did including notably corrupt Senate kingpin Senator “Moscow Mitch” McConnell (Republican - Kentucky). The long term future of American democracy is still very much in doubt. So let’s take a few moment to consider the two primary forces I believe are threatening to end American democracy at this time: racism and bad economics. Yes, I considered other important forces and currents in contemporary conservatism, including religious bigotry, nativism, and nationalism, but I really believe the two I just mentioned predominate.
Racism, the American Cancer, is the festering wound bequeathed to our nation by our so-called founding fathers. It is a bit of intellectual claptrap originally designed to provide a convenient if rather far fetched rationale for the slave labor required by immoral and greedy early European colonists to make a buck and build fancy manor houses on other people’s land. Later, it served famously as the primary cause of our most divisive and brutal domestic conflict, the American Civil War, a nauseatingly destructive bloodbath which one hundred and sixty years later still marches on in the minds of many Americans. Since that time it has been the inspiration for countless murders and other outrages against innocent men, women, and children. It was largely traditional American racism that was behind the immediate and automatic outrage and backlash against former President Obama, our first partially “black” president, an abomination for many. It is racism that underlies the obvious rural versus urban dimension of our current political struggle as racially homogenous rural areas fear and despise our thriving, diverse, cosmopolitan cities, the home of what they see as a dangerously racially and culturally heterogeneous and hostile cultural “elite” of the educated and competent that is perpetually out of step with their simple, time honored traditions. It is racism that underlies the geographic dimension of our current political situation with the deep southern states of the old confederacy voting always and automatically en masse in support of anti-democracy conservatism and the Republican Party, with the notable exception this year of the standout southern state of Georgia, home of the major thriving southern metropolis of Atlanta. It is racism that underlies as well the similarly single minded devotion to the conservative and Republican cause of the remote, sparsely populated Great Plains states, famous historically for their racial pogroms, lawlessness, corruption, and bloody mob violence. It is racism that makes conservatives and Republicans view the artifacts of American democracy generated in the distant past, before our more recent demographic changes and in many cases before even the extension of the vote to non-“white” citizens, as fundamentally different in character and far superior to the artifacts of modern American democracy, with its suspiciously swarthy and unreliable electorate. It is racism that leads conservatives and Republicans to their obsessive attempts to manipulate our voting system, gerrymandering voting districts, thinking always of new and inventive strategies to complicate and curtail voting. It is racism that has enabled arch conservative and Republican Mr. Trump to turn reasonable protests against apparently disparate police treatment for racial minorities into a charge that inchoate, lawless anarchism has taken hold in our American cites. It is racism that makes conservatives and Republicans see any and every attempt by our democratic government to help struggling people in terms of an us against them struggle against racial minorities and their allies that they imagine are trying to pick their pockets and destroy the ethical nature of our economic system. The racism of large segments of the population of the USA, both of the implicit sort and more recently of the rather more explicit, old school sort, remains one of the most vital and important drivers of American culture and politics. Racism alone may have the power to one day end American democracy.
Bad economics, a form of insincere and manipulative political rhetoric based on common and carefully cultivated misunderstandings of normative neoclassical welfare economics, is an independent but also very powerful generator of anti-democracy sentiment here in the USA. I discuss it often, although not as often as formerly now Hansel Krankepantzen is on the job. Bad economics suggests chimerical perfectly competitive markets or near enough approximations of the same (risibly assumed to equate to “free” markets in the vernacular) lead to socially optimal results if only democratic government can be prevented from “interfering” with them. That’s not really what neoclassical welfare economics says, of course, and is inconsistent with a well known feature of neoclassical welfare economics called distributional indifference, which derives from the definition of “utility” on which neoclassical welfare economics is based. Any given market result really has no normative or ethical significance until and unless democratic government assigns it normative significance based on synthesizing the subjective ethical or normative views of the populace on distributional and other controversial ethical issues not addressed within neoclassical welfare economics. What neoclassical welfare economics really says is that democratic government is absolutely essential to achieving socially desirable market results, not the opposite, that socially desirable market results can only be achieved if democratic government is eliminated or at least prevented from getting involved. Here in the USA, it’s largely the immense cultural popularity and significance of bad economics that makes so many people unrealistic, unreasonable, utopian, anti-democratic, and looking forever for scapegoats they imagine are “rigging the system” against them, as well as fighting a never ending war of the imagination against wily “communists” and “socialists” who fail to see the light and are cast as stock villains trying forever to muck up the works of the amazing clockwork mechanism for good that would prevail in their absence. If you’re interested in knowing more about bad economics and how it works its rhetorical magic, the best thing you can do is take a look at Hansel Krankepantzen’s blog, or if you’re a big spender his short book / pamphlet, and he’ll set you up and get you appreciating what’s really going on in that department a great deal faster than any competing resource in my opinion. And I should know. Because I’ve read them. And I thank you very much.
All joking aside, we’re not out of the woods here in the USA by any means. The forces of anti-democracy conservatism and Republicanism, based in sickly but powerful currents of American culture, racism and bad economics, and supported by vast economic wealth and foreign despots, is a foe not easily vanquished. It has its hooks in many millions of Americans and has proven it can make them do the most amazing, unlikely, and reprehensible things. If you live here in the USA, you should help me fight the dangerous influence of contemporary American conservatism and Republicanism. If you live abroad, be on your guard against conservative and right wing poison arriving from these shores. Know what it is, how it works, how to fight it. Stockpile the antidote. Prepare yourself, or like liberals and other democratic leftists here in the USA, you may find yourself one day suddenly, unexpectedly, on the ropes, fighting for your democracy like you’ve never had to fight before. Long live democracy!
