American Conservatism and European Conservatism

Welcome friends!

I was reading an article in the newspaper the other day about the collapse of the American conservative movement as a serious or ostensibly serious intellectual enterprise and the paucity of writers who have thus far attempted to address that phenomenon.  The article mentioned famous conservative gas bag George Will as one of the few who have.  He’s apparently put out a book on the topic entitled “The Conservative Sensibility.”  Based on the few points the article I was reading provided on Mr. Will’s book I think I’ll give it a pass.  Sounds rather like more of the same self-serving claptrap I’ve come  to expect from conservative authors.  What makes me think so is that according to the article I was reading Mr. Will argues in his book that American conservatism has “almost nothing to do” with European conservatism, which he said is “descended from, and often is still tainted by, throne-and-altar, blood-and-soil nostalgia, irrationality, and tribalism.” Mr. Will apparently paraphrases the Iron Lady (former UK Prime Minister Thatcher) in observing that “European nations were made by history, the United States was made by philosophy.” According to Mr. Will, American conservatism is a project that seeks to defend the original philosophy of the Founding Fathers, “classical liberalism,” which ostensibly promotes limited government and the veneration of individual liberty.  Yeah, sure.  In the words of the great stereotype of the plain talking American pragmatist: what a load of crap.

It seems to be quite a thing with conservatives these days to make stuff up and discuss the world not as it really is but as they would like it to be or maybe as they would like others to think it is.  Surely at least we can agree that the current incoherent state of conservative ideology as expressed by the Republican Party and their current champion Mr. Trump, certified as bona fide conservatives by basically every conservative group in the nation, the conservative infotainment and media industry, and pretty much every man or woman in the street who describes himself or herself as a conservative, runs exactly counter to Mr. Will’s contention that American conservatism is based on philosophy rather than more pragmatic and variable bases.  Indeed, I would suggest the vast majority of conservatives tend toward disinterest or sometimes downright antipathy to philosophy of any sort, which is part of the famous anti-intellectualism the conservative Republican Party touts at every opportunity.  Mr. Trump in particular has made quite a point of saying how much he loves uneducated people, and while anyone can do philosophy or at least appreciate philosophy a bit of education certainly makes it a bit more likely.

What I think Mr. Will fails to comprehend is that the “classical liberalism” philosophy he apparently takes so seriously himself and imagines other American conservatives to have taken seriously was never really a very serious philosophy to begin with.  It was always a pragmatic rhetorical exercise designed to buttress and expand the economic and political power of the wealthy elite.  And that, of course, is also the eternal objective of European conservatism.  American conservatism and European conservatism are simply two faces or aspects of the same movement with strategies and tactics that have sometimes varied due to local national conditions.  For a long while American conservatives like Mr. Will for example were able to use their misleading, baby-level hash up of economic reasoning and their rather dubious and incoherent political philosophy to keep people in line using hot air alone. However, that approach hasn’t been working as well of late, perhaps because most average social media and internet obsessed Americans have just stopped paying much attention to even baby level philosophy or perhaps because Americans on average have become incrementally better educated and have come to appreciate the particular philosophy American conservatives have been peddling these past several decades is just not very good philosophy. As a result American conservatism has gradually drifted into areas that are as traditionally American as apple pie but portrayed by Mr. Will as more typical of foreign European conservatism, that is to say, nationalism, nativism, racism, authoritarianism, and so on.  As a result the leaders of the American and European conservative movements get along famously today.  They’re very much on the same page.  Their former apparent antipathy was likely simply an impression caused by the American elite correctly forecasting that the European elite’s attempt to concentrate their economic and political power and do away with political democracy was doomed to fail and it was not in their best interests to get on board at that time.  A difference in strategy or timing more than objectives or values.

Anyway, it’s hard to interpret Mr. Will’s insistence there’s some fundamental difference between American and European conservatism as anything more than the wishful thinking of an aging agent or hired gun for the American elite who wants now to portray himself as something rather more serious and substantial.  One can sympathize of course.  No one cares to be shown up by events as a tool, a useful idiot, someone who was so myopic or easily manipulated that he fell hook, line, and sinker for a body of work that was always meant to be a rhetorical device to manipulate the unwary and uneducated.  Perhaps the man is a true believer and perhaps not, but one thing is clear, he will apparently claim to be so until his dying day. 

References

Why American conservatism failed.  Fareed Zakaria.  July 4, 2019.  The Washington Post.  https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-american-conservatism-failed/2019/07/04/bf221ddc-9dd7-11e9-9ed4-c9089972ad5a_story.html?utm_term=.baa1fc2167de.

Sticking It To The Little Guy

Welcome friends!

Have you been following the news at all about those protests in France relating to some previously scheduled albeit apparently now abandoned plans to increase taxes on fuel?  Quite a commotion.  Apparently a few people even died from the odd accidents and mishaps that can attend such chaotic goings on.  Of course, if you live here in the USA you’re probably thinking what the heck do I care?  Who knows what the French people or their government get up to?  What’s it got to do with the all-important moi?  I care as much about popular unrest in France as I do about all the political chaos surrounding Brexit in the UK.  Well, yes, there is always that perspective.  Other people.  I’m telling you.  What can you do?  However, I couldn’t help but notice certain parallels between the current political situations in France and the USA.  I wonder if, like Brexit in the UK, the news out of France may be the sort of thing a few more people here in the USA might want to think about for a few moments.  Let me explain.

It seems many French voters fell and fell hard for President Emmanuel Macron in the last election.  Why?  No idea really, but perhaps it involved his promise to implement the usual “sweeping economic reforms” center right politicians routinely tout to improve a nation’s economic well-being likely involving tax cuts, reduced regulations, and just in general promotion of market solutions.  Pretty standard stuff.  As residents of the USA understand very well this sort of thing generally turns out to be great news for the well-to-do who don’t really need or want anything anyway and are more than happy to have government sit around and do a whole lot of nothing beyond enforcing their own property rights (let’s not go crazy in the minimizing government department; there must be limits!), but it usually represents a bit of a mixed bag for everyone else.  Typically what happens is some national level economic metrics might rise a bit in the short run if you’re lucky, maybe GNP goes up a notch and unemployment falls a notch, but most of the longer term economic gains go where anyone who understands real economics and how real markets work would expect them to go: the already very rich or in the case of the USA the already very, very rich.  Precious little of any gains from these sorts of policies tends to trickle down to the little people, by which I mean people like you and me and even more financially unfortunate cogs in the great machine of modern post-industrial life.  In a few years the little people generally end up back where they were but relatively poorer and a little more desperate.  Whenever one sees a faux populist politician rallying the people for sweeping economic reforms of the center-right variety one should prepare to deal with some rather cranky people sooner or later.  We have a roughly similar dynamic going on here in the USA where a certain portion of the vast multitude of economically struggling people in this most wealthy of nations voted for corrupt conservative fat cat and old time faux populist politician par excellence Donald Trump presumably at least in part in response to his call for sweeping economic reforms designed to “make America great again.”  Well, I suppose in Mr. Trump’s case it wasn’t all about a pretend interest in shifting some money toward economic struggling people in certain regions such as the Midwest and South and certain industries such as fossil fuels and manufacturing; he also had some racist, nativist, and religious claptrap in there as well to accommodate a range of right wing opinions on what made America great in the past in their eyes, but anyway I think a good deal of his campaign blather involved the usual sweeping economic reforms.  As one might expect America post-election is basically the same as before albeit a bit more polluted, a bit less functional, a bit angrier, and with some very, very rich people who are even more satisfied with themselves and some struggling people who are apparently happy enough at the moment but likely soon to see their quality of life decline yet again and probably rather precipitously this time I’m afraid given the number Mr. Trump and the Republicans have done on the national debt.

As conservative free market ideology contains a rather high percentage of what is known in the vernacular as bullshit they must of course find some rhetorical approach to deal with the curious fact that even after sweeping economic reforms the government sector seems to have an awful lot of work to do in terms of fixing up market outcomes.  They could of course always just tell the little people to go to hell as the powerful economic / political elites did in the pre-democratic good old days of traditional pre-modern conservatism, but I guess that’s typically not now considered “center right.”  I think that’s now considered more “hard right.”  Medieval king / rich guy worship revisited.  Fascist self-styled ubermenschen.  Pouting mafia dons with silk suits striking stirring poses.  That sort of thing.  If we’re talking about “center right” and we’re saddled with a still somewhat functional government sector trying no matter how half-heartedly to make life bearable for the little people we’re left with an intriguing question.  Who’s paying for all that socialistic largesse?  Funny you should ask.  Well, in the case of President Trump and the conservative Republican Party here in the USA no one is paying for it.  They’re running massive deficits and appear entirely content to leave a bloated national debt to young people to handle some old way some old time in the future presumably after our glorious orange leader has taken his final jet to that great gated community in the sky.  (I meant the one with the Pearly Gates, not his palatial condo in Manhattan.)  So that’s one way to do it.  Apparently, his soul mate President Macron hit upon a different response to the old, old question of who’s paying the bill for improving market outcomes in this case not only in terms of expenditures but also in terms of reducing the consumption of fossil fuels: squeeze some cash out of that portion of the population the French conservative elite apparently consider least able to defend themselves in any meaningful way and who are anyway considered unimportant and disposable if not positively undesirable under global conservative economic ideology: the little people, the  non-rich, the ninety-nine percenters.  So, instead of leaving a big old mess on the carpet for future generations to clean up a la the American Republican Party he paired what one must suppose were the customary huge tax cuts for businesses, banks, CEOs, stock owners, themselves, and basically just rich people in general with an offsetting tax hike on the sort of things the little people have little choice but to consume such as fuel for example; one example of the sort of tax known in the trade as regressive, in this case a consumption tax that affects little people disproportionately because the item being taxed and the resulting tax itself represents a greater proportion of the available budget of the little people, as opposed to a progressive tax such as for example a graduated income tax or an inheritance tax, both understandably despised by one percenters and their conservative lackeys and cheerleaders.

On the one hand, I suppose one must respect Mr. Macron’s attempt at relative honesty and forthrightness on the issue of taxes.  It’s almost as though he thinks center right political ideology and the flawed or really conventionally misinterpreted economic theory on which it is based are real and might actually work as advertised, as though he sincerely fails to understand one cannot really take up important economic matters of this sort without dealing in some way with the inevitable distributional issues economists and conservative pundits work so strenuously to sweep under the carpet.  It’s all rather endearing in a naïve sort of way compared to the snarky, winking, self-serving “I know I’m lying and you know I’m lying and my followers know I’m lying but I have to say it anyway so let’s just get on with it” sort of thing we’ve been getting recently from conservatives here in the USA.  Rather an odd reversal of the usual roles isn’t it?  How unfortunate and embarrassing for Americans to be ahead of any European at all in the snarkiness rankings let alone the French.  Ouch!  But yes many conservatives here no longer even bother espousing the old “we’re being neutral on distributional issues” wink-wink nudge-nudge line of claptrap they learned from academic economists any longer.  They just let it all hang out.  The people who have economic power, the wealthy elite, the one percent, should have it because they’re very special people indeed.  The poor on the other hand can do everyone a favor and drop dead the sooner the better.  If we need to deal with some social issue like global warming or anything else really then obviously it should rightfully come on the backs of the disposable, worthless poor rather than the deserving, meritorious rich.  Given the choice between the two I probably prefer the genteel albeit faux neutral approach to the aggressive, in your face, anti-social, Ayn Randian conservative approach so common today.

On the other hand, one struggles to understand how Mr. Macron and his center right buddies came to think of the little people of France as politically weak and defenseless chumps.  Ask people anywhere in the world to name a country where average citizens are likely to stand up for themselves and take to the streets and barricades if necessary and one of the most common answers would probably be France.  Honestly.  The image of the busty lady and the little lad with a pistol charging down some cobblestoned street all hell breaking loose around them must surely pop into most people’s heads immediately.  I guess with French conservatives not so much.  In the case of President Macron I imagine a sharply dressed fellow relaxing on some ornate divan in a drawing room in the Elysee Palace, adjusting his cufflinks perhaps, sipping his roasted to hell and back coffee (just the way I like), then noticing all the mayhem on TV and proclaiming, “Wha…?  Street protests?  Here?  In Paris?”  I mean, it’s a funny sort of image.  One wonders if he wouldn’t have been better advised to follow the lead of President Trump and just put off the inevitable day of reckoning as long as possible.  Pass the buck as we say here in America.  Pull a fast one.  Slip one over on people.  Grab as much cash as you can carry and hope enough water passes under the bridge before the bill arrives that the hapless little people will be unable to put two and two together and figure out why despite all their enthusiasm for coddling and advancing the interests of the poor billionaires of the nation their own quite often rather precarious economic situation continues to decline.

Brexit of course is a rather different beast based more on scapegoating than on instituting sweeping economic reforms per se, which ironically makes it rather similar to the other big project President Trump and the Republican Party have been pursuing here in the USA: demonizing foreign nations and their nefarious agents immigrants of both the legal and illegal variety.  I suppose if you’ve already done your sweeping economic reforms, rich people are metaphorically swimming in money, the government is barely functioning, and the little people are still tanking, even the slowest witted village idiots may want to hear some bedtime story beyond the call for yet more sweeping economic reforms.  They want a story explaining why despite what they’ve been told the market isn’t really doing all that much for them.  It seems the story conservatives go to in this case is that market systems are fabulous, mystical works of Mother Nature that must not be tampered with for any reason (unlike, let’s say, the climate), and would of course quickly solve everyone’s economic issues were it not for devious scoundrels acting behind the scenes rigging the system and making it not work out right.  Like who?  Well, I guess the modern version of the story they tell in the UK these days is all about Europe and European immigrants.  Actually I suppose here in the USA it’s also about Europe, but also Asia, and Africa, and other parts of the Americas and …. well, let’s just say the whole world.  Honestly, how can one expect the market to work its magic when we have so many scoundrels interfering with it?  President Trump recently fashioned himself “a tariff man” and has famously done as much as he can to whip up right-wing hysteria over the veritable army of desperate and impoverished immigrant children invading the country and so on.  It’s like we got in a time machine and went back to 1920.  Exactly how old is the man anyway?  It’s all rather odd, but I guess to look at it from their perspective conservatives have to say something.  They can’t just sit there like dummies with silly grins on their faces throwing diamonds in the air and laughing hysterically.  (Yes, some dummies do that.  Not all of them, but the fancy ones.)  One supposes after the economic golden age Mr. Trump’s followers confidently predict will result from his trade wars and tariff schemes and tear gassing of immigrants fails to materialize on schedule we might just see a few street protests ourselves.  Could happen in the UK as well once the Shangri-La of post-Brexit Britain turns out to be rather less impressive than anticipated.  Well, no, not really.  Cancel that.  I suppose I have a little trouble imaging British people taking to the streets or manning a barricade for any reason except perhaps to throw bouquets of flowers to the Queen or Prince or what have you.  I think they probably just keep a stiff upper lip, drink themselves into a stupor, put on a funny costume and serve tea to the lord of the olde manor, then knife their neighbor on the way home and steal his or her wallet to make ends meet.  Actually, I guess I don’t really see many citizens of the USA doing much agitating either.  Probably just take some sort of illicit drug then shoot their neighbor and steal his or her wallet to make ends meet.  It’s one of the things I think many Americans and British people have in common: a complete and ingrained inability to directly confront self-serving elitist claptrap in any unified or politically significant way.

Thinking about the various ways the wealthy and politically powerful elites of the USA, the UK, and France attempt to play their respective populations just now has made me think how in olden days the rich folk of the world seemed rather better coordinated.  I’m thinking of rich and powerful autocrats and their kin and hangers on strutting about fairy tale castles chopping peasants’ heads off and so on.  That was pretty much all of Europe wasn’t it?  Or really the entire world I suppose.  In those days they really knew how to come together and royally screw the little people.  Watching the different national tribes of rich folk trying to find creative ways to screw their respective populations these days is like watching some sort of cat parade.   I suppose they’re trying to a certain degree.  President Trump and the Republican Party are clearly doing the best they can to seek commonalities with the wealthy elite in at least some nations, such as Russia, going so far as to coordinate with them on propaganda techniques, fake news, alternative facts, and so on.  And President Trump at least plays well with that Prince of Arabia who had his goons murder and dismember that journalist a while back.  The man has also reported falling in love with the murderous dictator of North Korea.  I suppose the conservative elite of the USA has even tried to make common cause to a certain extent with the Conservative Party of the UK in terms of excoriating immigrants and playing around with trade barriers and tariffs as weapons in what they apparently now perceive or wish to portray anyway as a zero-sum war between national economies.  And in terms of political rhetoric relating more to domestic markets they agree in a broad way with their French counterparts as far as waxing eloquent on the beauty of the free market and the need for sweeping economic reforms.  But then we get the funny just run up the deficit versus tax the hell out of the poor schmucks debacle.  Don’t these people ever talk to one another?  Get your act together folks!  Or could it be coordinated in the sense of we’ll try this and you try that and we’ll compare notes later?  Or are these sorts of policy inconsistencies part of their grand strategy to confuse the little people?  You know, we French conservatives are nothing like our American cousins.  We take our national debt very seriously and are very concerned about global warming.  Also, we don’t eat so many cheeseburgers.  If that’s what’s going on I’m afraid it’s not really working.  Well, OK, maybe it’s working in general right now but it’s not working in at least one case.  I’m a little guy, and I just can’t see that all that much difference between the two.  And you know what?  I think the fog may be starting to clear just a bit for others as well.  One happy day the little people of all democratic nations will use their voting power to construct societies that work well for everyone and not just for those at the top.  It could never be otherwise in the long run because the liberal ethos is eternal.  The desire for a just, functional, and well-ordered society is an enduring element of human nature itself.  The rich elite have long liked to fashion themselves akin to sharks and lions and hawks and other solitary predators but the human race is really more akin to the ant and the bee.  Our power comes ultimately from communication, cooperation, taking what those in the past have given us and adding a little something of our own for the yet unborn.  A human being living the life of a solitary and all devouring predator is a waste, a farce, a tragedy, an affront to nature.  Love live the liberal ethos!  Long live the human race!

Addendum

Recently President Macron has been in the news discussing how the concerns of the protestors are in many cases justified and floating the notion of raising the minimum wage, which should have his center right buddies all in a tizzy.  American conservatives would rather throw themselves from the parapets of Trump Tower than address an issue like ethically unacceptable wages at the low end of a market determined pay scale.  Seems Mr. Macron may not be as studiously dismissive of distributional concerns as one might have reasonably supposed.  Nice recovery.  Vive la France!

Brexit, Trump, and the Anti-Social Tendency of Conservative Ideology

Welcome friends!

How about those Brexit negotiations?  They seem to be shaping up into what our British friends might call a bit of a shambles.  Actually I suppose that’s what we Americans might also call it, which doesn’t seem very clever.  I wish I knew another expression for a shambles that would be more unique to the UK in honor of their apparently perpetually wounded sense of nationhood.  I tried to look it up online just now but I ended up back at shambles.  Oh well.  The point is I think pretty much everyone agrees at this point it is indeed a bit of a shambles although I did read Prime Minister May is gamely attempting a Pee-Wee Herman-esque “I meant to do that,” just not sure anyone’s really buying it.  But you know maybe it was fate the best word to describe the thing would be common to American English and English English or I suppose more properly the rather clunky sounding UK English (some days you just can’t win).  Indeed, I can’t help but see certain similarities between the waving of the old red, white, and blue on both sides of the Atlantic and to see shades of Brexititis in President Trump’s rejecting trade treaties and savaging our traditional allies and trading partners.  Maybe it’s just me but I wonder if they might be related in some way such as for example the pervasive undercurrent of conservative economic ideology in both the UK and the USA.  I know I’ve written about economics the last few times out but here I am again.  I must have economics on the brain just now.  There’s a scary thought.  Well, let me try to get it out of my system so I can talk about something totally different next week.

As I’m sure I must have pointed out before many, many times one of the distinctive and conceptually funny things about conservative economic ideology is the hoary image of the national economy working like an old eighteenth century Deist gentleman’s watch.  We might need to collaborate as a society in constructing the watch or to be brutally literal the legal institutions and conditions associated with the “free market” (or to be theoretically correct the all too elusive perfectly competitive market but never mind) but once we collaborate to get things set up we will all do as good as we can and everyone will ostensibly get exactly what he or she deserves if we all just focus on our own greed and spare nary a thought for our fellows.  Properly considered or anyway as originally conceived by our bewigged ancestors the system was meant to serve everyone originally in the utilitarian sense of bringing the greatest happiness to the greatest number and later, when they eventually realized that argument doesn’t really hold water, in the more Old Testament sense economic justice will be served.  “Free market” economics was considered the natural accompaniment to political democracy because surely everyone would demand that system which would serve them best if not materially as originally thought then at least in the sense of a shared satisfaction that economic justice will prevail.  In that sense one might think of old time conservatism as an offshoot of other socialist ideologies that take as their ultimate objectives the welfare or at least interests of society at large.

Of course as fate would have it a funny thing happened along the way.  In their zeal to prevent other people mucking up the gears trying to help the less fortunate conservatives began to stress more and more the second step of their two step program for attaining social nirvana.  All too soon the institutions and conditions associated with the market were not something we could count on others to understand or to agree with.  We were no longer all on the same page.  As a defensive reaction the rationale for the institutions began to take on a non-human and other worldly air.  They became associated with natural laws but not those of the god of the Deists looking after his flock with a system plain to all who cared to look but with the cold hard inhumanity of outer space.  The free market was good and fair whether other people understood it or agreed with it or not.  Political democracy became suspect as the mechanism by which do-gooders and leftists of all description might foolishly thumb their noses at the universe and meddle in things that ought not to be meddled in.  Democratic government became dangerous and something to be minimized and neutered.  People who cared for other people or had different notions of economic justice became the “socialist” bogeyman of the conservative intent on enslaving others and destroying economies and societies.  Co-operation with other people and indeed even thinking of other people became suspect.  The Me Generation was born with boundless greed, egotism, and hubris hating the thought of ever compromising with or indeed acknowledging the existence of any other living being.

When this twisted monster child of once noble conservatism encounters any form of society it cannot control it strives mightily to throw it off in a rage of righteous indignation.  Here in the USA conservatives have long raged against our democratic federal government.  While that sentiment appears to have subsided somewhat not being based on any principle really beyond their perceptions of our government’s ability to give them what they want when they want it there are yet other groups determined to enforce their will upon the Great I.  International groups like NATO, trade organizations, allies trying to trap us into their little treaties.  It’s an outrage conservatives simply cannot abide.  Their ancient clock says its time for personal greed and the unbridled lust for power not the time to work with others people toward common goals.  In the UK they have Brexit.  They don’t need no stinking EU!  Here in the USA we have that great orange man-child President Trump pouting and stamping his little feet in the White House, followed everywhere by his weak and sycophantic toadies in the Republican Party rushing to find his blanket or binky in the hopes he may vomit out more coin their way.

Does that sound about right?  Maybe I’m seeing things.  Societies don’t always work out.  Civilizations fall.  Nations fall in love with themselves and go to war on behalf of their beloved.  Happens all the time.  It’s a story as old as time.  But hard to avoid the feeling those unfortunate events are a great deal more likely to occur if one starts with the conservative anti-social sentiment that giving a thought to one’s fellow man is the root of all evil than with the notion we humans are at heart social animals and that the wealth and power cooperation and coordination brings is both our essence and our destiny.  Long live the Liberal Ethos!

Muslim Immigration

About time we had some good news right?  Seems our friends in France have managed to beat back the always unpleasant Le Pen clan and reaffirm their commitment not only to all things French as they certainly should but also to Europe and even more expansively the world.  After the UK packed it in and the USA abruptly took leave of its senses and joined the circus I really wondered if the Europeans would follow suit and go on holiday as well.  Thankfully that does not appear to have been the case despite our good frenemies the Russians trying to pull a Trump on them at the last moment.  Got to love the French.  Tougher than they seem sometimes.  Not all brie and a nice bottle of wine that’s for sure.  Anyway, I thought this might be a good excuse to take one more shot at the whole immigration issue as it appears to be a pretty big deal overseas.  Well, here too I suppose but not really the same thing.  Folks in Europe are a lot closer to all the mayhem going on in the Middle East right now, have done a lot more to help the refugees from that benighted region of the world, and have been trying to assimilate people a lot more foreign and sometimes dangerously anti-social than the occasional bad hombre arriving in the USA from our long suffering neighbor to the south.  So let me say a few more words this week about immigration with Muslim immigration as the specific example.

First let me just say this issue I feel has nothing or should have nothing really to do with how one personally feels about the religion of Islam... Sorry but only selected archived (previous year) posts are currently available full text on this website.  All posts including this one are available in my annual anthology ebook series available at the Amazon Kindle Bookstore for a nominal fee.  Hey, we all need to make a buck somehow, right?  If you find my timeless jewels of wisdom amusing or perhaps even amusingly irritating throw me a bone now and then.  Thank you my friends!

American Conservatism and Nazism: The Economic Dimension

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.

Brexit

Welcome friends!

How about the UK voting to leave the EU?  Maybe like me you don’t follow European politics very closely but I bet you heard about that one.  Kind of a big deal.  Of course you may have heard about it without realizing it.  For a while I thought Brexit was some notable foreign personage we here in the US just don’t know much about, like Rooney or anyone named Nigel.  Eventually I decided to do my duty as a citizen of the world and read up on this mysterious Brexit and I discovered the word actually refers to British exit from the EU.  Yes, it seems so many EU states talk so frequently about leaving the EU they had to come up with a shorthand way to refer to the phenomenon so for example Brexit, Frexit, Grexit, etc.  Of course, from my perspective across the giant ass pond known as the Atlantic Ocean I don’t really care too much one way or the other.  Nor is the UK exiting such an arrangement particularly surprising to me.  I’m actually a little surprised there is an EU given Europe’s history of violence, nationalism, and greed.  But it did get me thinking a little bit about when federal political unions work and whether my smallish brain might say anything sensible on the subject in the context of a short and flippant blog post.  It’s actually a bit of a tricky area.  Here in the USA we celebrate the war ending our political union with Great Britain and the war that prevented some of our own states ending their political union with other states.  Humans being social animals I suppose people choosing to come together under one political system must represent an advancement of human civilization and be good in that sense but it’s also rather apparent it doesn’t always work out so well.  After boiling up a modest sized cup of coffee and thinking about it for the requisite ten minutes I decided to comment on two things Brexit brings to mind for me: distributional issues and political legitimacy.  Hey, come on.  It’s Brexit!  I should say something, right?  So let’s dive right in.

First, distributional issues matter!  Oh, did I say that before?  Yes, I’ve found whenever strange things happen in this world distributional issues cannot be far away.  I suppose that’s because we’re just not very good at talking and hence thinking about them.  Not hard to understand why.  It’s a bit awkward because of the implied conflict.  No one would like implicit conflict to become overt and of course one superficially attractive way to prevent that is to just not talk about the implicit conflict and hope no one notices.  Of course, that’s not a real solution because the implicit conflict exists and people are bound to notice it sooner or later.  And while one is resolutely not thinking and talking about it all kinds of funny things are liable to happen.  Then I guess a completely different source of silence on distributional issues is that those with economic power in any given system just don’t like the little people discussing such matters.  (No, I’m not talking about the Munchkins; I’m talking about you and me baby.)  It makes them nervous.  The inevitable result is people put off discussing these issues until funny things start happening and then they start foaming at the mouth like a pack of lunatics.

I bring up distributional issues because as far as I can tell one of the big issues some people in the UK had with the EU was the EU policy of free movement of labor between member states.  I’m sure I’ve mentioned before that from a distributional perspective the problem with free movement of labor is it reduces the bargaining power of existing labor, which is actually kind of a big deal because in some or let’s just say most distributional systems around today that’s the only thing that really matters for the wages of normal working people.  Under the sort of labor market arrangements that exist in the UK and USA the only bargaining chip the average Joe has is scarcity.  Either one has to have some attribute or skill that causes one to be scarce like being eight feet tall and able to bounce a ball or writing a fascinating blog every couple of weeks (yeah right) or labor in general has to be scarce, which isn’t bloody likely but I guess can sometimes happen in conditions approaching full employment.  Under normal conditions one’s wage is not based on what one actually does or how well or efficiently one does it or anything else of that nature.  As one can see from the experience of the USA over the past several decades the owners and CEOs capture most of the surplus from those sources.  No, in most situations one’s wage depends mostly on whether or not the firm can find someone or something cheaper to do the job.  So of course if you bring in a bunch of unemployed or underemployed people from someplace else who are willing to work for a lot less for whatever reason then the living standards of the workers already in whatever locale we’re discussing will plummet.  Every American knows the way to bust a union is to bring in scabs.  Same concept.

Now some people in the sort of distributional systems we’re discussing aren’t bothered by this at all.  CEOs looking for cheap labor are fine with this arrangement.  They’ll actually get paid more themselves for making the company more profitable.  People who own stock in the company might be pretty happy as well depending on how significant that particular stock is for their income or wealth.  And people who have money or are getting money some other way are usually just looking for a cheap toaster so they’re probably quite happy as well.  Or maybe that’s not entirely fair.  Some of them may also like the idea of helping out the unemployed and underemployed people entering the system even if it means some people already in the system struggle.  Hey, foreigners are people too.  My point is no one but a worker already in the system is likely to see a problem.  Well, OK, other people might see a problem if total demand goes down enough to matter to the overall economy because then we might be talking about a recession that could affect whatever source of wealth they’re drawing upon themselves but otherwise not really.  They most likely think everything is fine until a bunch of pissed off poor people chuck a rock through their window one fine evening.  Then it’s a big freaking mystery.  How did that happen?  Oh my goodness!  I came home with my cheap toaster and feeling pretty good about myself for helping all those struggling immigrants and suddenly Brexit!  Right upside the head!  I hate to think of anyone hurting their brains trying to think through such convoluted matters so let me just put it this way.  People need money.  People need jobs.  If a nation’s way of handling this most basic of social issues is to dump most of its citizens in a big room and let them fight it out like a pack of starving rats while a few people at the top focus on further enriching themselves and scouring the shops for cheap toasters and maybe helping poor people from other regions get a slice of pie just be prepared that one day something funny might happen.  And I don’t mean ha ha funny.

Second, political legitimacy matters!  If one is going to form a political union with some other people everyone involved has to not only buy into the notion they have some things in common and should coordinate with one another but that the coordinating system is fair and legitimate.  Now I’ve never really looked up the details of how the EU works because, you know, I’m American and we just don’t usually follow that sort of thing very closely, but I’m guessing it’s basically OK.  I sometimes rib my European friends but I’ve never said they were idiots.  They know as much about democracy as anyone else.  But what seems funny to me is despite the presence of this overarching federal EU government the only thing I ever seem hear about in this country is the national politics of various European nations.  Why is that?  I mean here in the USA we have the federal government and then we have various state governments but we hear a lot about the federal government, which kind of makes sense since that’s the bit that ties us together as a nation.  Europe seems to have gotten things a bit out of balance as far as I can tell.  Indeed, I found I was completely incapable of naming anyone in the EU government until I read an article on Brexit and discovered the president or whatever of the EU is some guy named Juncker.  Did you know?  I mean, something isn’t right.  The head of the EU should be a big deal, like the president of the US.  Who gets elected to the EU parliament should be a big deal, like who gets elected to the US Congress.  Why does no one know who the hell they are?  Is anyone taking it seriously at all?  Does it not actually do anything?  I read a little article on EU politics the other day that said although there are pan-European political parties the norm is that the citizens of each country just discuss things on their own and then elect some local guy to represent their interests in the EU parliament and that’s the end of it.  I’m not entirely sure Europeans really see themselves as one body of people with a common heritage and set of values who really should be united in a common political framework.  More like a bunch of competitors trying to get one over on everyone else.  That’s not going to work.  Particularly when one adds distributional issues to the mix.  Here in the USA we all know people in some states get more back in government benefits than they put in while the reverse is true in other states.  It’s OK because we’re part of the same freaking country.  If people are tanking in one part of the country it seems perfectly fine and correct to most people the rest of the country should help them out.  If some people in some states act like idiots well it’s all in the family.  I’m not sure Europeans think the same way.  My impression is their inclination upon seeing a fellow member state in any sort of trouble is to find some way to capitalize on the situation.  That’s no way to run a country.  Or even a pseudo-country.

Well, I feel that’s really all I’m comfortable saying about Brexit just now so maybe we can wrap it up.  We can keep it short this week.  Political unions are great in my opinion.  Indeed, I look forward to the world government conservatives are always fretting about because then we’ll finally have a political system that can address global issues.  But we clearly have a heck of a lot of work to do before that can happen in terms of working out some thorny issues and disagreements in the political, social, economic, and philosophical realms.  Can’t force human evolution.  Has to come naturally.  Apparently we can’t even manage a European government right now.  Oh well.  Let conservatives have their little celebration.  They earned it.  The UK and EU had issues they just couldn’t work out.  Hooray!  We have the rest of history to get our act together.  We’ll try again another day.  One day we’ll have enough experience and insight to make it work.  That will be a day the rest of us can celebrate.  (And yes, I did notice the interesting way conservatism has entered the discussion.  I’ll have to write a little something on that later.  Hint:  Some conservatives focus on one thing and some on another but don’t waste your time trying to see how it all fits together because it doesn’t.  That’s why conservatives are at one another’s throats right now in the US.  Kind of funny really.)

The Happiest Blog Post on Earth!

Welcome friends!

Happy New Year everyone!  I think 2014 is going to be the best year ever!  I really do!  Yeah!  OK, yes, I realize I say something along those lines every year but hope springs eternal as they say so let’s all put our best foot forward and just do the best we can and see what happens.  Sure beats the alternative of moping around waiting for everything to fall to pieces.  To commemorate the auspicious occasion I thought I’d write up a relatively happy post this week. Not that any of my posts are particularly unhappy but I suppose I may get a little too critical sometimes.  Anyway, I thought I’d start the year off with some thoughts about a little holiday trip I made to Disney World, that center of garish colors, plastic smiles, and juvenile marketing that rises like a magical shopping mall from the swamps of central Florida.  All kidding aside, the trip did give me a few things to think about so I might as well take a moment to share... Sorry but only selected archived (previous year) posts are currently available full text on this website.  All posts including this one are available in my annual anthology ebook series available at the Amazon Kindle Bookstore for a nominal fee.  Hey, we all need to make a buck somehow, right?  If you find my timeless jewels of wisdom amusing or perhaps even amusingly irritating throw me a bone now and then.  Thank you my friends!