Tom Watson, contemplating the increasing probability that John McCain and the Republicans are going to get clobbered at the polls in November with a kind of grim glee, quotes Howard Wolfson on the reasons for the GOP's impending rout:
The economy is simply bigger than the rogues gallery that John McCain is conjuring up.
Why is this? Why won't the swiftboat tactics work this year?
Its easy to lose sight of it in the day to day coverage, but the collapse of Wall Street in the last weeks was a seminal event in the history of our nation and our politics. To put the crisis in perspective, Americans have lost a combined 1 trillion dollars in net worth in just the last four weeks alone. Just as President Bush's failures in Iraq undermined his party's historic advantage on national security issues, the financial calamity has shown the ruinous implications of the Republican mania for deregulation and slavish devotion to totally unfettered markets.
Republicans and Democrats have been arguing over the proper role of government for a century. In 1980 voters sided with Ronald Reagan and Republicans that government had become too big and intrusive. Then the economy worked in the Republicans' favor. Today the pendulum has swung in our direction. Republican philosophies have been discredited by events. Voters understand this. This is a big election about big issues. McCain's smallball will not work. This race will not be decided by lipsticked pigs. And John McCain can not escape that reality. The only unknowns are the size of the margin and the breadth of the Democratic advantage in the next Congress.
I think there are some things missing from Wolfson's last paragraph there---Vietnam, Watergate, Iran. I'm not sure that in 1980 people were siding with Ronald Reagan the Republicans as much as they were tired of listening to Tod Koppell begin every night's broadcast with "Day whatever of the hostage crisis..."
In 1980 the economy was shaky but getting better, but I think Americans were tired of 15 years of feeling bad about themselves and were open to the Reagan's cheerfully brutal opinion that we could end feeling easily just by rolling up our sleeves, spitting on our hands, and throwing our weight around abroad and at home.
But come 1984, with the economy in relatively good health---after Reagan had nearly tanked it with GOP supply-siderism and then been forced to abandon that by Democrats, reality, and maybe the ghost of his one-time idol, Franklin Roosevelt, to adopt a more responsible, that is more Democratic, economic policy---people probably were more willing to believe that the days of big government were open, cut taxes, damn the environment, greed is good, let the inefficient farms fail, let all the number twos look out for themselves, let the party begin! USA! USA! USA!
What they were accepting wasn't so much a philosophy or an argument as it was permission to stop giving a damn.
Republicans and Democrats have been arguing over the proper role for more than a century. They've been at it at least since 1868, when in the aftermath of the Civil War the old economy based on small farming, small manufacturing, small shop keeping, and black chattel slavery had been replaced by one that would over the course of the rest of the century be more and more based on large manufacturing and wage-slavery.
Republicans believed that it was the role of government to let the owners and bosses run their businesses any way they wanted to. Democrats believed that it was the role of government to prevent the owners and bosses from running over working men and women in the process of running their businesses.
This wasn't really an argument between differing philosophies. It was a war of competing interests that was often fought with guns and in which men and women, poor men and women, died. But because the forces of Progressivism, which, to be fair, for a long time included many Republicans, had the weaker hand, they needed to make their case to the world and so they developed arguments and philosophies. The forces of the owners and the bosses were content with a "philosophy" that could be pretty well summed up as "We can do whatever we want."
It was essentially a feeling, an attitude, that they gussied up by talking about it in French. "Laissez faire!" Which meant nothing more than let the greedy do what the greedy want to do and somehow this will all work out for the best of everyone.
What they never mentioned was that "everyone" was another word for "us." Those who weren't "us" weren't anyone.
You would have thought that "argument" was settled once and for all in the few years after October of 1929.
Nope.
For going on eighty years now there has been no new Republican philosophy of government, no theory, plan, or idea. There has only been that attitude.
We can do whatever we want.
We're in charge. God or nature or simply the power that comes from might making right put us in charge. And because we're in charge, we can do whatever we want.
No government run by someone who is not one of us can tell us otherwise.
We can dump our poisons and pesticides in whatever body of water is nearest.
We can hire whomever we want and pay them however much we feel like paying them while giving them as many or as few benefits as our whims please us to give and if this means that we pay ourselves millions for running our companies into the ground while begrudging those of you who clean up after us a decent day's wage, that's our right.
We can turn a hill into a hole in the ground, a forest into a desert, a wetland into a subdivision or a strip mall, a beach into an oil slick, a tundra into another oil slick, your backyard---as long as you're not one of our we---into an industrial wasteland, we can take any plot of ground we covet and turn it into any sort of eyesore or environmental blight if there's even the slightest possibility we can make a buck out of it.
We can take as much government money as we're in the mood to take and use it however we want to and feel no obligations or responsibilities and when the time comes we'll spend it on parties for ourselves and on lobbyists who will go to work making sure we don't have to pay any taxes we don't feel like paying or adhere to any rules we find inconvenient.
We can shoot wolves from helicopters.
We can steal elections, get over it.
We can start wars without cause and purely for profit.
We can arrest, detain, deport, spy on, throw into prison anyone we declare "other."
We can torture.
In the 1950s, another group of "we" began to coalesce. This was a humbler, less prosperous we, a middle class and working class we, a we who felt that they'd been born to rule just as surely as the owners and the bosses felt they had.
This was a we as in "We were here first."
They were a scared, anxious, jealous we who thought in terms of us and them, as in "What are they doing to our country?"
And somehow, in a way I still don't understand, this second we got themselves mixed up in their own heads with the first we. They got the idea that the party of the owners and the bosses was their party too. Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan and other paid demagogues on the Right were happy to keep them mixed up about this, happy to make them feel as if by letting the owners and bosses, the rich and the privileged, own more, boss more, make more, enjoy more, they too were somehow part of the us that ran the show, that their "we" could do whatever the other "we" wanted too.
Many of the second we were people whose lives, or whose parents' lives, had been wrecked by the first we's "philosophy" of government, whose lives, or whose parents' lives, had been saved by Franklin Roosevelt and the Democratic Party. But somehow it was more important to them to feel like they were members of the first ruling-class we than to join with any thems in order to improve their own lots in life and protect themselves from the crimes, whims, and depredations of that first ruling-class we.
Wolfson doesn't mention it but after a decade of Reagan and the first George Bush trying to pretend to be Reagan the Republicans lost the "argument" again by driving the economy into a ditch.
This time, though, after Bill Clinton and the Democrats pulled it out again, it didn't take two generations for people to forget that.
In 2000, George W. Bush was cheered into office as the true heir of Ronald Reagan his father was too responsible to be.
Here we again, after eight years of "we can do whatever we want" government, and people are apparently willing to side with the Democrats. The Republicans have lost the argument again, and wouldn't it be nice if this time it stayed lost?
I wouldn't count on it. After about 1938 the "We can do whatever we want" philosophy of government ought to have been recognized as what it was, a variation on "Let them eat cake" and anyone making the case for it treated as if they were making a case for a return to monarchy.
Oh, well put. I think that another factor in 1984 was Ueberroth's successful corporatization of the LA Olympics. I think it created an attitude: "It made a profit! We can do anything! Who needs those boycotting Commies anyway! Our way is best!"
And away we went, further down the hill (not up to the shining city, but down to the valley below, culminating after a slight bump between 1993 and 2000 with the GWB torture-condoning, financial system-collapsing, spy-on-everybody security state we have now.
Posted by: Linkmeister | Wednesday, October 08, 2008 at 05:45 PM
It isn't hard to figure out how Republicans got average people to think that the ruling class's interests were identical to their own. We admire rich people and think they are winners, while people who need help are losers. Who wants to identify with weaklings and losers?
The wealthy and their political allies kidded people into believing that only losers needed protection and help. "Big shots don't depend on stuff like Social Security. They invest their own money and live off the proceeds. After all, aren't you smarter than the government?" The problem is, you aren't in a financial league with the big shots. If they drop a few million in the stock market, they aren't living in a refrigerator box, but you sure as hell will.
The wealthy and their allies also created a false sense of security in the generations that moved from blue to white collar jobs. People thought that because they got a college degree, and went to work in suits, that in effect they were on a par with the bosses. The bosses never believed any such thing. They just believed these new workers were suckers with nice suits and no union security.
People are disdainful of workers who depend on unions to protect their jobs, too, because all winners are individualists. They overlook the fact that the wealthy are the biggest union, in and of themselves. They will stick their hands out for goodies in a minute. When 9/11 happened, people needed a little time to get over their shock and ask for help. The airlines didn't even wait till the fires banked before asking the feds for help. That's the difference between self-shaming people who need a handout, and shameless people who step right up for goodies and don't even blink.
Posted by: Linda | Sunday, October 12, 2008 at 08:00 PM