Conservatism and the Power of Negative Thought

Welcome friends!

Every now and then I read one of the frequent articles that have been appearing in the mainstream press here in the USA recently that try to shed some light on the thoughts and attitudes of supporters of President Trump for the benefit of people like me who imagine they may have some idea of what traditional conservatives think but find the mindset of the particularly febrile and inconsistent subset of conservatives who support Mr. Trump quite a mystery.  One hears accounts of them saying all manner of curious things in interviews and focus groups and surveys including such notable utterances as they can’t think of anything President Trump could do that would make them not support him, the more people complain about him the more they support him, and if they had a choice between believing Jesus Christ or Donald Trump they would believe Donald Trump.  These kinds of rather puzzling statements don’t seem to represent an entirely rational or mature perspective on the world if taken at face value.  However, after thinking about it the requisite five minutes I think there may be one plausible explanation for this sort of behavior: these people are not concentrating so much on what they think would be helpful for others or themselves but on the other side of the coin so to speak: what they think will be annoying or damaging to others.  In the USA contemporary conservative ideology appears to be drawing largely on the perverse power of negative thinking.  As such the depressing and unrelenting negativity of current conservative ideology and rhetoric stands in stark contrast to the optimistic, pragmatic, and forward thinking philosophy of liberalism.  Perhaps it would be worthwhile to say a few words about that this week? ... 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!

Size Matters for Conservative Proto-Fascists

Welcome friends!

Do you ever have the annoying feeling of not being entirely sure you’ve said something you meant to say and indeed thought you probably said?  I’ve been having that feeling recently.  Certain things set me off and I’m thinking no need to bring it up again because I’ve discussed it all before but then I hesitate.  I hope I didn’t accidentally write it the wrong way around or bury it in the middle of some long winded digression or whatever.  I could look it up but I suppose there’s no great harm repeating myself.  With that thought in mind let me just banish one of these demons right now.  It involves one aspect of the multifaceted relationship between contemporary American conservatism and fascism: the tendency of American conservatives to equate what they characterize as big government with fascism.  Just grates on my ears on so many levels.

First of all I find something a little weird about this whole notion of big versus small government.  What are we talking about anyway?  The number of government employees?  The number of laws and regulations?  The complexity of the laws and regulations?  The areas of life affected?  The significance of the effects?  Because different definitions may imply different things... 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!

The Topsy-Turvy World of American Conservatism

Welcome friends!

I have to say conservatism here in the USA is pretty funny sometimes.  It’s so outrageously incoherent and idiotic one supposes no conservative could possibly expect anyone to take him or her literally or even seriously and yet one can never be entirely sure.  Why do they say the things they say?  Are they stupid?  Crazy?  Crafty like a fox?  After a lifetime of admittedly rather casual research I still don’t know.  What got me thinking about this issue yet again was some statements Dan Schneider, executive director of the American Conservative Union, delivered this year at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).  In a move reminiscent of Nazi Germany’s Night of the Long Knives albeit without the knives Mr. Schneider dramatically repudiated what has become known as the “alt-right” segment of the American conservative movement and ejected one of their main spokespeople who had apparently previously been attending CPAC events without incident for some time.  Don’t get me wrong.  Seems a sensible enough public relations move now these alt-right groups have become a more visible presence in our political and cultural life.  You may recall some of these people were in the news shortly after the recent presidential election celebrating Mr. Trump’s victory at a restaurant in our nation’s capital.  On that occasion the leader I mentioned earlier in the context of being ejected from this year’s CPAC had railed against Jews, quoted Nazi propaganda (in the original German mind you), explained his belief that America “belonged” to “white” people (or in his own crazy talk version the “children of the sun” apparently not fully comprehending the genetic mechanisms historically giving rise to different skin tones), and called out the following noteworthy slogans: Hail Trump!  Hail our people!  Hail victory!  His audience enthusiastically shouted these slogans back and several over excited attendees apparently gave the old Nazi stiff arm salute.  Got the picture?  To state the obvious I’m perfectly fine with mainstream American conservatives finally cutting these people loose.  Indeed, one can’t help but wonder what took them so damned long.  But then again a little later CPAC attendees enthusiastically endorsed as a true exemplar of bona fide conservatism the man the alt-right views as championing their extremist ideals: President Donald Trump.  For his part, President Trump informed the group, “you finally have a president,” and called his victory “a win for conservative values.”  But that’s just the sort of self serving hypocrisy one expects from American conservatives.  That’s not really what I wanted to address here.  No, the most notable element of the whole affair for me and the bit I’d really like to address in this post was Mr. Schneider’s fanciful denunciation of the alt-right segment of the American conservative movement as a “left-wing fascist group.”

I feel I just addressed the close association between American conservatism and fascism the other day but since conservatives insist upon bringing it up I suppose I might as well take another shot at it... 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.

Republicans, Nazis, and the Conservative Menace

Welcome friends!

Looks like this will be my last post for 2015.  Instead of doing an end of the year summary or clearing up any little stories I might have missed as I’ve done in the past I think one aspect of this last year was significant enough to warrant a final post all to its own.  Can you guess?  Yes, I’m talking about the rise of populist windbag politician par excellence Donald Trump; the one man who I feel most fully expresses the great garbage heap lying at the head and heart of today’s conservative movement.  What’s interesting about that?  Well, it seems to me we’ve never had a politician in this country so closely resemble one of our most despised foreign enemies from the dark days of the twentieth century, Adolf Hitler, and yet remain so beloved and admired by good old boy conservatives right across the USA.  It’s been an eye opener for me.  But that’s fine.  Knowledge is good.  Let’s talk about it... 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!

Conservatives Versus Democracy

Welcome friends!

Oh my gosh, it seems everywhere I look these days conservatism is rearing its ugly head or I suppose more accurately one of its two ugly heads (i.e., social and economic conservatism).  It’s actually a little unfortunate because I do have some rather amusing lighter subjects I wouldn’t mind getting into but who has the time?  I’m forever having to call out conservatives for their many and various affronts to common sense and decency.  It’s like a freaking full time job.  Well, I suppose somebody needs to keep an eye on them.  They sure can’t seem to monitor themselves in any way.

This time out I first considered writing a piece about conservative TV and radio personality Ted Nugent who was in the news a few weeks ago calling the president of the US a “mongrel.”  Oh yes he did.  Somewhat idiotic, wouldn’t you say?  Hasn’t the science of genetics demonstrated we’re all basically mongrels and have been for many millennia now?  I don’t know; maybe Mr. Nugent is an exception.  He may come from an unbroken and unadulterated line of provincial conservative jackasses going straight back to the Stone Age.  But I guess science has never really been conservatives’ strong point, has it?  I think if you mention anything along those lines you’re liable to be branded a liberal elitist egghead.  The Republican Party isn’t known as the Stupid Party for nothing.  At least Mr. Nugent’s assessment of the President’s racial credentials demonstrates what many of us have long suspected, which is that good old timey traditional racism is indeed alive and well in conservative circles in this country.  So it’s nice to get a little confirmation on that.  But that’s not really much of a story to hang a blog post on, is it?  Newsflash!  The conservative movement in the US is not very familiar with basic science and has racist elements!  Wha?  OK, I’m not very good at sarcasm, am I?

Fortunately I was spared having to write that particular post by an even more obnoxious pronouncement by our economic conservative friends in the form of elderly conservative billionaire Tom Perkins, who managed to get in the papers once again with his proposal we give rich people more votes than other people.  Yep, that’s the same guy who was in the news a few weeks earlier arguing that liberals and progressives are like Nazis.  I know, conservatives love their irony, don’t they?  Here we have one conservative spouting some racist claptrap about mongrels in the White House and another expressing his rather obvious distaste for American style democracy but, hey, in their opinion liberals and progressives are like Nazis.  Yeah sure buddy.  Whatever you say.  But if you follow my humble blog at all you’ll know we’re now getting into one of my pet peeves: the conservative campaign to denigrate and undermine our democratic system.  And them’s fightin’ words!  So let’s just talk a bit this week about the conservative elite’s hatred of democracy, shall we?

Now I know this discussion may be a little discombobulating or uncomfortable for some of my readers here in the US because we’ve been trained from early childhood to think democracy and capitalism go together hand in glove and since economic conservatives, the sort of conservatives I’m talking about this week, are always gushing about how much they love free markets and so on, one might think there must be some sort of logical flaw in my contention that (economic) conservatives don’t really seem to care very much for democracy.  Alas, the association between democracy and capitalism is nowhere near as close as many of us have been led to suppose.  I’m afraid it’s quite possible to be a big supporter of capitalism but have no particular love of political democracy or to be a big supporter of democracy but see some serious and potentially troubling issues with markets in some situations.  They’re actually eminently separable ideas.

So where does this idea they must always go together come from?  Well, I suspect it’s probably more a case of historical coincidence than anything else.  Shall we take a little stroll through history?  Well boys and girls, a long, long time ago and for a depressingly long time after that we had neither capitalism nor democracy.  We had plenty of rich people of course but they made their money the old fashioned way: they killed people, took their land and cattle, and passed them on to their heirs.  Let’s just be charitable and call it martial prowess.  Of course we also had plenty of politically powerful people.  That would be the king or queen and his or her cronies.  And it turns out the rich people and the politically powerful people were essentially the same people.  So in that sense I suppose we had a pretty harmonious (at one level) blend of economic and political power that lasted for many excruciating centuries and led to all manner of social ills.  

Fast forward a bit and eventually technology, manufacturing, and trade developed sufficiently for some people to get rich for reasons other than killing other people and taking their stuff or kissing up to those who did or who had ancestors who did.  I know, awkward.  The annoying new kids on the block had plenty of economic power but they didn’t really have direct access to political power.  Change was in the air.  And that change took the form of a renewed interest in the theory of political democracy, an idea from the ancient world that had lain dormant for many, many years.  So one thing led to another and we ended up with democracies.  I assume you know voting in these early democracies was limited to rich people and landowners and so on, right?  So I presume that’s when the idea capitalism and democracy must go together first took hold.  Historically they both arose in contrast to older forms of economic and political power.  By the way, I believe this was probably the first incarnation of the “conservative” and “liberal” terminology.  At this time the conservatives were the people who were all about keeping the existing patterns of political power and economic privilege, so supporting the king and the nobility or whatever, while the liberals were all about making sure the new breed of rich capitalists got their share of power and privilege.  That’s where modern economic conservatives get off calling themselves “classical liberals.”  Anyway, getting back to our story, the advent of democracy got things a bit more in balance again because the people with economic power once again had some access to political power as well.

But nothing stays the same, does it?  One thing led to another and we eventually ended up expanding the concept of political democracy to its modern form with essentially all adults being able to vote on certain things anyway.  Now how much of that expansion was due to people getting caught up in the theory of democracy and how much was due to the further dissemination of some degree of economic power to a greater and greater share of the population through contemporary methods of production or what have you I don’t know and it doesn’t really matter here.  The point is for some reason or other the hoi polloi (i.e., people like you and me) ended up getting a modicum of political power in addition to a modicum of economic power.  Now as long as the nouveau riche needed the concept of democracy in their fight against the traditional establishment of their day I suppose they were fine with it but of course as time went on and the old head bashers and their descendants gradually lost more and more of their political and economic clout conservatives’ interest in democracy began to wane a bit.

Fast forward again to the present and it’s now become rather apparent market economies tend to concentrate economic power, or least that’s been the case for the past several decades here in the US, and a whole new shipment of awkward has arrived.  We now have a situation in which economic power is highly concentrated in the hands of a relatively small elite but our allegiance to the democratic ideal means at least some political power is diffused throughout the entire population.  Well, to a degree anyway.  I’m not suggesting for a moment the guy living under the bridge has the same political clout as Mr. Moneybags.  Rich people obviously have much better access to political power in our system than do poor people.  They pay for campaigns.  They dominate the media.  They go to fancy fundraisers.  They are wooed and coddled by politicians of all stripes.  How do you think the Republican Party became so dominant in this country for so many years?  But according to some conservatives like Mr. Perkins it’s just not working or not working as well as they think it should anyway.  When it comes to actually voting on political candidates they still have only one measly vote, the same as a poor person.  So once again we’re having a certain divergence between the people with economic power and the people with political power and that contradiction or instability is now becoming rather apparent in this country at least.  At least some wealthy conservatives have plainly started to see democratic government as their primary enemy.  They’ve detected some problems in how we apportion votes.  They’re aghast they’re limited to the same number of votes as you and me.  They’re becoming increasingly concerned with limiting the scope of democratic government.  They now apparently see political democracy mostly as a forum for Nazis and commies and other problematic sorts to lead them down the road to serfdom.

OK, enough history.  The bottom line is I think we can expect to see a lot more discussion and debate about the legitimacy of democracy and the role of democratic government than we have in some time.  So let’s get into it a bit right now, shall we?  I know this social conversation is really in its early stages and maybe people don’t really see the need to get into it quite yet but no time like the present.

Now I’ve probably gone over some of this before but let me just start out by making the obvious point that the ethical bases of political power in a democracy are rather different from the ethical bases of economic power under a market system.  On the one hand you have people who are more impressed with the ethical credentials of political democracy than with the ethical credentials of the distribution of economic power via any particular market.  I suppose most liberals are probably in this group.  Anyway, as a liberal I can say the idea everyone in a given social and political system should have a say in what goes on makes a sort of intuitive sense to me.  We’re all in it together, right?  In contrast, I may have mentioned before I’ve always had some difficulty attributing a huge amount of ethical significance to financial success in particular markets.  Yes, it might in some cases show determination or hard work or business perspicacity or whatever, which I suppose are laudable traits, although I’m not entirely convinced those particular traits bestow any particular political wisdom, and actually I’ve always felt plenty of poor people work hard and show a great deal of determination merely to survive.  However, it has always seemed to me in other cases financial success might show some things that are not quite as attractive: acquisitiveness, greed, a certain lack of ethical impediment to potential ways of making a buck.  In yet other cases it seems to me more neutral forces may be at play: people just being in the right place at the right time, knowing people, inheriting money, being born with some unusual talent, winning the lottery.  In terms specifically of voting I don’t really see managing to be rich is necessarily indicative of any special claim to political or ethical wisdom so it doesn’t bother me at all a poor man has the same number of votes as a rich man.  Indeed, in my view a poor man might very well be smarter, more knowledgeable, more ethical, more reasonable, more humane, more ... OK, I’m getting boring now .... but you know what I mean, more of anything you name that might be relevant to voting than a rich man.  So of course I really couldn’t go along with the idea rich people should have more votes than other people.

On the other hand you have economic conservatives who I think generally place greater ethical significance on economic power.  These people believe financial success implies all manner of laudable traits and behaviors and that rich people are superior to everyone else in some universal sense, although some of them might use a mangled sort of utilitarian argument to reach this conclusion if they don’t really comprehend the philosophical limitations of the form of utility used in economic theory.  For these people it makes no sense rich people should be limited to the same number of votes as poor people.  They feel political power should be distributed like any other good or service in a market economy.  In a market system the most trivial desires of the wealthy take precedence over even the most vital concerns of the poor.  Why should rich people not expect the same consideration in the political realm?  It should be the same ethical argument, right?  If you can afford to spend more on voting then you should have a greater say either because you evidently perceive it to be more important than other people or because you have established a sort of ethical right to do so by virtue of having done whatever you needed to do to obtain the necessary funds to enable yourself to spend more even though you actually feel no more strongly or perhaps even less strongly about it than poor people.

Alongside this issue of the ethical foundations of different power structures I think we also have some empirical issues about which I believe opinions tend to differ.  One of the big issues in this context is what type of power structure is more stable.  Again, on the one side are liberals like me who associate social stability mostly with democracy.  As I’ve explained before, I think democratic systems have a number of traits that encourage stability.  You know, the good thing about democracy is it gets everyone involved and talking and buying into whatever we end up doing at least to some degree.  That’s not to say you can’t still have problems. You might have minorities that can never muster the political clout to defend themselves in the political arena and so on, so you might need some additional measures, but it’s better than the alternatives.  And with democracy you can change things up in response to new developments.  It’s flexible.  Nothing is ever finished and carved in stone.

On the other side of the aisle you again have the economic conservatives.  Now I think many of these conservatives view democracy as a great destabilizing influence that must be curtailed and limited as much as possible.  In contrast, they see market systems and their resulting allocation of economic power as the epitome of the just society.  According to this perspective, political democracy is little more than a source of capricious interference with the ethically more significant distribution of economic power.  To these people, the ideal and most stable society is one where you set up certain economic and legal structures and then sit back and allow the market to function like a magical piece of clockwork we need never revisit or adjust again.

So you see what I’m saying, right? We’re not really all on the same page here.  To put it bluntly, some of us like democracy and some of us don’t.  And that’s basically one of the fundamental disagreement between liberals and economic conservatives.  For liberals like me, if we get ourselves into an unstable situation involving the distribution of economic and political power then we must give precedence to democracy and if that means revising in some way the distribution of economic power to bring things back into line then so be it.  For conservatives the response to this type of instability would be to maintain the existing distribution of economic power at all costs and to instead revise our system of distributing political power, perhaps by changing the number of votes as suggested by Mr. Perkins or perhaps by doing away with voting entirely as advocated by the fascists of the not so distant past.  It’s a rather different debate than the one that separates liberals and social conservatives, which involves liberal trying to preserve a sphere of personal liberty in the only context in which it makes sense to do so: the context in which one’s actions do not significantly impinge on other people.  Anyway, when I talk about doing battle with the two headed monster of contemporary conservatism this is the sort of thing I’m talking about.  It’s a rather serious issue, don’t you think?  You should join me in defending the liberal ethos.  Contribute, volunteer, talk to people, run for office, write inane blog posts.  Do whatever the hell you like, but please do something.  Do it for democracy and liberty.

References

Tom Perkins’ big idea: The rich should get more votes.  Charles Riley.  February 14, 2014.  CNN Money.  http://money.cnn.com/2014/02/14/investing/tom-perkins-vote/index.html?iid=Lead

The Austrian Connection

Welcome friends!

It’s the funniest thing.  I was just writing last time about how American conservatives have gotten into the rather annoying habit of referring to their political and intellectual adversaries as Nazis and commies and hey presto I happened to read a rather funny article by the always entertaining E.J. Dionne that bears on just that subject.  The starting point for Mr. Dionne’s discussion was a statement ultraconservative politician Ron Paul (former Representative for the state of .... drum roll please .... Texas; in case you had to ask) made during the 2012 presidential campaign season: “We are all Austrians now.”  

WTH?!  Could this be why conservatives always seem to be living in some type of parallel universe?  Because they’re all Austrians?  OK, I suppose I’d better explain a bit before we continue.  First of all, the “we” in that sentence presumably refers to American conservatives or perhaps the particularly virulent subset of American conservatives that support so-called “libertarians” like Mr. Paul.  One thing’s for sure: I know it can’t refer to Americans in general because I’m an American and I’m not an Austrian.  Secondly, we’re obviously not talking about Austrians in the normal sense of the word, that is, in terms of national identity or allegiance.  Mr. Paul was not suggesting American conservatives have any special relationship with the country of Austria.  We’re talking about the co-called “Austrian school of economics” (or that’s what they call it here in the US anyway; I’d be willing to bet they don’t call it that in other places, such as Austria).  In case you’ve forgotten or managed to avoid ever having learned in the first place (in which case I salute you) the “Austrian school of economics” is named for two illustrious Austrian immigrants who were moderately influential academic economists back in the mid-20th century: Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises.  Personally I think it’s a bit funny to insist on calling them and their followers the “Austrian school of economics” as both gentlemen emigrated from Austria as young men.  Mr. Hayek spent most of his working life first in England and then the US, while Mr. von Mises lived in the US from age forty or so.  But I guess if we called them and their followers the “English” or “American” school of economics things would get even more confusing so let’s just go ahead and keep referring to them as the “Austrian school” for want of a better term.  (If you don’t mind I’ll just keep the quotation marks throughout since we’re not all academic economists and I’d hate for anyone to get confused and think we were talking about Austrians in any more general sense, which wouldn’t be fair to our Austrian friends.  Economists living in Austria are basically on the same page as economists living in any other country.  They don’t follow a special school of economics.)

Now I suppose you’re wondering what’s so special about the “Austrian school of economics” compared to, say, the neoclassical school of economics I’m usually talking about?  Well, I think the most salient point for our purposes is that as a practical matter adherents of the mainstream neoclassical school of economics are just a heck of a lot more careful about how they handle value issues and hence what they are willing to say about broader social and political matters than are adherents of the “Austrian school,” who like many other conservatives have trouble seeing the limitations of economic theory and imagine their ostensible insight into that theory gives them a suitable basis for a complete system of social and political philosophy.

I suppose to avoid confusion somewhere down the road I should clarify that the “Austrian school” initially had mostly to do with what economists refer to as macroeconomic issues, that is, the analysis of large scale economic phenomenon such as unemployment, and thus was formerly most commonly contrasted with other schools of macroeconomic theorizing such as Keynesian economics.  So they made their name so to speak arguing that government  activity cannot really help the economy even in the case of demand side slumps.  Of course at some point during the Great Depression we tried it and it pretty much worked so the conventional opinion is they were apparently mistaken.  However, it takes a lot more than that to convince some people, especially when value issues gets mixed in with empirical issues.  And in this case the significance of the value issues eventually became all too obvious.  The “Austrians” really, really wanted government to fail because they had witnessed the rise of fascism in Germany, didn’t like what they saw, and became highly suspicious of or maybe we should just say paranoid about government in general.  Thus, for the “Austrians” the idea government might ever play any positive role in society was anathema.  They considered any discussion along those lines to be little more than a not very subtle means of allowing fascists in through the back door.  I mean, I understand where they were coming from and I’d probably have had the same reaction if I had been there myself.  Indeed, I’d probably have insisted on any number of  unlikely proposition such as, I don’t know, wearing brown shirts can make one’s brain go funny.  I guess sometimes people can overreact a little to these sorts of traumas, do you think?

Now back when I was studying economics in ... well, the year doesn’t matter ... we all considered the “Austrian school” to be very much a strange and rather archaic outlier in the field of economic thought.  It’s not that we considered them complete crackpots per se, more like people who were clearly motivated much more by their own ideological biases than by either rigorous logic or empirical results.  From my own possibly somewhat idiosyncratic perspective as a budding liberal I considered neoclassical economic theory insufficiently rigorous with respect to how it handled value issues, which I concluded pretty early on led to certain conceptual errors I’ve discussed a number of times now in previous posts.  (See My Own Favorite Posts at the bottom of the page or probably any of the posts tagged as having to do with economic theory in the labels section.)  But you know, I had the impression mainstream neoclassical economists were at least trying to think straight about value issues.  Well, I had that impression about some of them anyway.  Nevertheless, I’ve always sympathized with people who reject economic theorizing as too intellectually sloppy and polemical to warrant further study.  I think that’s a rather drastic reaction to what is now for better or worse a very influential way of making sense of the world, but never mind.  However, the way neoclassical economic theory handles value issues is a beacon of clarity and rigor compared to how the “Austrian school” handles those issues.  I’ve just never really understood people who reject standard economic theorizing to go in that direction.  It’s like out of the frying pan into the fire.  But I guess you have to be in the right frame of mind, and that frame of mind I think must involve value issues one perceives to be so important the dictates of rhetorical effectiveness overwhelm the rather more level headed dictates of logic and reason.  Note that I’m not talking right now about the actual values held by devotees of the “Austrian school.”  As I’ve said before I’m actually fine discussing any perspective on values issues one cares to take.  That’s not the problem at all.  I love to discuss ethical issues.  Let’s get it on!  But we’re not even at that point.  What I’m talking about right now is how certain people discuss value issues.  I’m saying my impression is that adherents of the “Austrian school” of economics do not appear to recognize the limitations of economic theory and the severely attenuated conceptualization of utility used in that theory and therefore are not really defending their values in an appropriate way.  I’m suggesting they use economic theory as little more than a rhetorical device to advance values they are not arguing for directly and honestly.

Let me give you an example of the type of thing I’m talking about.  In addition to his more serious work on macroeconomic issues I mentioned previously Mr. Hayek is also famous or perhaps even more famous for authoring a book with the rather frightening title The Road To Serfdom in which he argued the typical conservative line that any government activity beyond the sort of activity wealthy conservatives find personally useful, such as defending property rights, leads inevitably to the erosion of personal freedom and thus puts us all on the road to serfdom.  So, for example, if the government uses any form of economic stimulus to break a demand side slump and get people working again then one thing will follow another and we will all end up as slaves.  Of if the government provides some help to unemployed people or poor people then, again, we will all inevitably become slaves.  Or if the government changes the tax rates to make them a bit more progressive and spread the wealth around, well you know in that case we’ll all become slaves right away.

For me it’s just such a strange way of thinking about the world.  For one thing, it doesn’t seem to attach any significance at all to the issue of the relative legitimacy of different forms of government.  Basically any government activity Mr. Hayek doesn’t approve of ends up being branded a harbinger of slavery.  It doesn’t seem to matter what anyone else thinks about it at all.  I mean, shouldn’t it matter if we’re talking about the government of fascist Nazi Germany, the government of the Stalinist USSR, or the government of the USA?  It doesn’t matter if we have democracy or not?  All governments are essentially the same?  Then what did we fight all those wars for?  No, but seriously, I think for me this must be the single most serious and dangerous failing of modern conservative thought.  They just don’t seem to have any appreciation of the value of our democratic form of government.  It gives me the creeps.

For another thing I just can’t understand what they think or want to suggest is so different and special about government activity they like and accept, such as enforcing current distributional arrangements via contracts and property rights (and police and jails).  Why doesn’t that government activity also lead us down the road to serfdom?  I mean, there’s certainly a lot of it about, right?  Here in the US we have loads of prisons and lawyers and cops and all that.  I don’t see much minimization going on.  Should we do away with these oppressive governmental institutions and become anarchists?  OK, that’s what they call a rhetorical question.  The answer is pretty obvious.  I’m just saying when you think about those types of questions enough to hit upon the obvious answer, that we’re all better off if we accept some government activity to resolve these conflicts of desires so we don’t have to shoot it out on the street whenever we’re at cross purposes, then you’ll also understand the rationale for using democratic government to pursue broader social aims, such as creating a stable economy that distributes resources in an equitable, just, and appropriate way (with the details depending on one’s ethical leanings, which as I said before is something we can talk about and is intellectually speaking one step away from the point I’m trying to make here).  My point is simply that we’re not really talking about the pros and cons of serfdom here, are we?  We’re talking about the pros and cons of various types of government activity in light of various opinions about how we should resolve interpersonal conflicts on an ethical basis.  Looking at the issue as though it has to do with freedom versus serfdom demonstrates a distinctive form of confusion I think is rather similar to that of anarchists who perceive only the restrictive aspect of government power and can’t seem to recognize the corresponding liberating aspect.  Yes, a law against violent crime constrains one’s impulse to bash someone over the head with a rock and thus clearly limits one’s freedom if that’s what one had in mind to do.  However, it also makes one a bit less leery of walking down the road next to the old village rock pile, doesn’t it?  Such a law enhances one’s personal freedom in that respect.  The discussion about how to handle interpersonal conflicts of desire, such as whether one should be able to hit someone else on the head with a rock, should be about the ethical resolution of these sorts of interpersonal conflicts, not about the red herring of how important we all feel it is to be free.

Lastly, the anti-government hand wringing of the “Austrian school” just doesn’t comport with my own feelings at all.  Sorry conservatives.  I realize the US government does all manner of things these day and consequently conservatives probably suppose I must feel myself to be little more than a serf, but I just don’t really feel much like a serf at all.  I feel I have quite a bit of freedom actually.  I think I probably have more personal freedom than nearly anyone else in the world.  And where I’ve given up some of my personal freedom because other people are involved I think it sort of makes sense.  That’s what happens when you live in human society.  Sometimes you can’t do whatever you want because you have to consider how your actions affect other people.  I don’t know, maybe we need to talk a bit about how we define the word “serf.”  I know I talked a little bit in an earlier post about what I was calling wage slavery, which I suppose might sound suspiciously like a form of serfdom, but in that case I was just talking about the typical conditions of life under a market economy.  (November 28, 2013)  I realize market systems only work if they’re backed up with government power to enforce the rules but I didn’t really mean to imply I felt the government was at fault for making me a wage slave by enforcing a market system.  In a democratic system like ours the government does more or less what we tell it to do via the voting booth.  That’s why I was talking about it in the first place.  I was wondering what, if anything, we can or should do about the phenomenon.

So have we made any headway into understanding the enduring mystery of the conservative mind?  Well, I’m not sure.  We have Mr. Paul’s assertion that American conservatives are now all “Austrians,” that is, adherents of the somewhat weird blend of economic, social, and political theorizing known as the “Austrian school of economics,” which paints democratic governments as trying to enslave their populations if they regulate the economy or pay any attention to distributional issues and so on.  And yes, I suppose that does help us understand why conservatives always seem to be charging their opponents with being Nazis and commies.  But for me the underlying mystery remains.  Why do they find that particular perspective so appealing and persuasive?  They didn’t escape from Nazi Germany themselves.  Do conservatives like multibillionaire Mr. Perkins, who I wrote about last time, really feel they are in danger of becoming serfs if our government tries to help out poor people?  Or are they just talking funny because they’re trying to manipulate other people into continuing to allocate them disproportionate economic power and they know most Americans (including especially liberals like me) place a great premium on personal freedom and don’t really like Nazis very much?  And if the latter is what’s going on, are they all in it together, winking at one another behind closed doors as conservatives are wont to do, or is it more a matter of moneyed bigwigs supporting and encouraging sincere ivory tower academics, provincial amateur philosophers, and late night radio talk show hosts and other media types?  How can we ever know for sure?  Who can we talk to straight?  Anyone?  Hmm, that’s a tough one.  Well, I suppose that’s what makes trying to understand conservatives such an entertaining if maddening project.  I guess all we can really do is just keep trying to talk as honestly as we can about our own values and beliefs and see what happens.

References

An economic school has led to gridlock in Washington.  Dione, E. J.  Washington Post.  February 9, 2014.  http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/ej-dionne-jr-an-economic-school-has-led-to-gridlock-in-washington/2014/02/09/12de8df0-9020-11e3-b46a-5a3d0d2130da_story.html?hpid=z6.

I See Nazis

Welcome friends!

I suppose you read about the elderly conservative multibillionaire Tom Perkins who wrote a letter to the Wall Street Journal the other day in which he claimed that Occupy Wall Street political activists and other progressives are like latter day Nazis?  Indeed, according to Mr. Perkins “progressive radicalism” is the natural descendant of Nazism.  Oh my gosh!  No, no; I didn’t mean oh my gosh we’d better start drafting people to fight against this new threat to our existence!  I meant oh my gosh what a load of c__ p!  It’s funny but it’s also a little weird, isn’t it?  Well, I suppose I might as well say a few syllables on the subject.  Everyone else has.

Of course, as many others have pointed out, the first thing that jumps out at one about Mr. Perkin’s statement is just how utterly preposterous it is.  Indeed, one can’t help but wonder if the guy is actually familiar at all with the historical phenomenon of Nazism or if he was just using the N word as a sort of generic slur.  After all, I don’t think it’s any big secret the actual historical Nazis were enthusiastically supported by people pretty much like Mr. Perkins himself, which is to say the wealthy industrialists and financiers of the time not only in Germany but other countries as well, such as Henry Ford here in the good old USA.  Yes, these economic and social bigwigs apparently saw the fascists primarily as a means to combat the encroaching Red Menace (by which I mean communism, not the type of “socialism” that appears in the term “national socialism,” which was a rather different beast indeed).  Nor do I think anyone could seriously describe the historical Nazis or their supporters as progressives or liberals in any sense.  They were not really proponents of the working man.  At least I don’t think anyone would have expected to see much in the way of unions or strikes or anything of that nature in the Third Reich.  Not unless they wanted a jackbooted kick to the head.  And I certainly don’t think anyone could claim they were motivated in any way by any sense of egalitarianism.  Their philosophy was your stereotypical elitist Ayn Rand / Friederich Neitsche / American conservative claptrap about the Great Man (and Great Woman I suppose) struggling valiantly against a sea of worthless moochers and takers.  Poor people, working people, and just average people like you and me were basically cannon fodder and units of production.  I suppose the Nazis may have tried to promote some sense of social cohesion and groupthink as a means to consolidate their political control but it was hardly the sort of thing one might hear from progressive activists here in the US.  It was more like everyone needs to get in line and follow the big shots because Germany is number one, everyone is against us, and the only way we’ll ever succeed is if everyone shuts up and does what they’re told with no further questions.  When was the last time you heard a progressive activist in the US talk like that?

But I digress.  Delving into the utter inaptness of Mr. Perkin’s remarks is not really a very interesting subject to me.  I don’t usually waste my time on such laughable nonsense.  No, I’m really more interested in why conservatives apparently feel compelled to keep saying things like this.  Let’s face it, in the past several years American conservatives have gotten into the rather bad habit of saying all manner of outlandish things, which often seem to involve Nazis for some reason.  Perhaps you recall shortly after the financial crisis of 2008 conservatives were already painting President Obama as a Nazi because he proposed some new financial regulations to prevent similar economic meltdowns in the future.  If you recall the news stories at the time I think the actual claim was that the prospect of additional regulatory oversight of Wall Street shenanigans was the moral equivalent of the Nazis invading Poland during WWII.  And then even further back we had some conservative blowhard or other talking about “liberal fascism” or some such rot.  Make no mistake about it.  This isn’t a one off by any means.  The idea that liberals and progressive are like Nazis has been a consistent theme in conservative thinking (or at least talking) for some time now.

But why?  Well, two main possibilities come to mind.  One is that contemporary conservatives are just very attracted to ludicrous histrionics and overblown rhetoric and consider saying outlandish things an appropriate way to motivate their overly excitable and apparently rather ill informed base.  The other is that there is something so unique about the mindset of wealthy conservatives in this country they honestly see themselves as about to be victimized by latter day Nazis in the guise of liberals and progressives.  Let me discuss both of these possibilities in turn.

The case for a conservative attraction to overblown rhetoric seems fairly strong to me, especially when one considers the way they’ve gotten into the habit of blowing everything and I mean everything out of proportion.  You know what I mean.  The president is a foreign Muslim radical who is determined to undermine the Constitution!  That type of thing.  One presumes they just don’t think they’d get very far saying anything reasonable about anything.  In this context the default characterization of anyone who disagrees with them may well be that they are Nazis.  After all, who really likes a Nazi anyway?  Here’s an example from an actual exchange in Congress.  Non-conservative, “The tax rate on the profits from investment income seems totally incommensurate with the tax rate on wages, which we think may raise some distributional concerns particularly in the long run.” Conservative, “You’re a Nazi.”  (That wasn’t a real exchange by the way.  Just a bit of humor to lighten the tone.  But it might have been real, don’t you agree?)

Moving up a level in terms of potential substantive content is the possibility conservatives feel liberals and progressives are like Nazis because they don’t share conservatives’ hatred of government or more accurately hatred of government insofar as it does anything beyond looking after the interests of wealthy conservatives.  If you recall the Nazis didn’t mind big government at all.  Mind you, they were famous for their antipathy to democratic government, the type we have here in the US.  Unfortunately, the distinction between different forms of government seems to be pretty much lost on modern American conservatives.  Anyway, you see what I’m saying, right?  If you set aside the bit about different forms of government you could say liberals and progressives are like Nazis because they appreciate the need for government.  That at least some conservatives may be thinking along these seems likely to me because when conservatives aren’t calling people Nazis they’re calling them commies, which again is kind of funny if you think about it in a historical context.  It would probably come as a big shock to the old timers to learn one can be both a Nazi and a commie.  But it does make one look for the commonality, which again I suppose would be that both the Nazis and the communists saw a role for government.  So that just brings me back to a theme I’ve discussed in many of my previous posts, which is that I think this argument or really insinuation I suppose is probably the biggest and most dangerous load of utter BS I’ve ever heard in all my life.  I really feel a little silly having to explain this but there’s a big difference between the form of democratic government we have here in the US and the totalitarian governments of the Third Reich and the Stalinist USSR.  If you go about glossing over this rather significant fact and prefer to talk about government in the abstract then I’m sorry to have to tell you but you’re not doing anyone any favors.  You should think about the impact you might be having on the feeble minded who may take what you’re saying at face value rather than appreciating it for the outrageous rhetorical flourish it is and I presume you mean it to be.  And if we’re talking about the proper role of democratic government then I think we’re talking about something I’ve discussed many times before.  Distributional issues involve what amounts to interpersonal conflicts of desire and, yes, we need government to resolve those sorts of conflicts if we’re going to resolve them in an ethical manner.  The question is not or at least should not be which solution generates a smaller government according to some particular metric.  I mean, if you really want to minimize government just let people shoot it out on the streets.  You don’t need any government at all for that solution.  Ask someone from Somalia.  The question is and should be how can we resolve the issue in an ethically satisfactory way and whatever size of government that solution requires is apparently the size of government we need.  In this case the real source of conservatives’ concerns seems rather obvious.  Under our current distributional arrangements they are the recipients of a vastly disproportionate share of our economic resources and they’d like to keep it that way.  So the solution that brings that about is naturally the solution they would like to convince other people involves not behaving like a Nazi or a commie, the proper size of government, and so on.  The other solution, the one where we change something up to get a bit more resources flowing to some other people, is what they would like to convince everyone is what a Nazi or a commie would do.  The size of government in that case would obviously be totally wrong.  In other words, it’s different when I do it.

Moving up to the final level of potential substantive content is the possibility conservatives are not just talking in a particularly flamboyant way but are expressing what they really feel: they are besieged by the modern equivalent of Nazis who are about to break all the windows in their various mansions in a replay of the historical Kristallnacht pogrom and perhaps even pack them off to murder camps in the countryside.  Sound pretty far fetched?  I mean, we’re talking about some of the most economically and politically powerful, privileged, coddled people in the entire country and hence world.  Ironically, however, that’s what I think makes this last possibility somewhat plausible.  You see, the most salient feature of conservatives in this country must be their massive sense of entitlement and self worth.  Remember according to the conservative social philosophy the distribution of resources in a market place and especially the particular market place we have here in the US is imbued with great ethical significance, so the fact they are multibillionaires implies to them that ethically speaking they are many, many, many times more important than average schmoes like you and me.  They’re Very Important People and no place more so than in their own minds.  That presumably is why they consider it perfectly appropriate we should allocate to them sufficient economic resources to allow them to indulge their every passing whim while other people suffer the various ills of relative economic deprivation and do things like sleep on the street, go without necessary health care, be driven to desperation and drug use and crime, witness the lives of their children and loved one being destroyed by unwholesome environments they are too poor to escape, and so on.  Given this overall mindset I don’t think it’s unreasonable at all to suppose many conservatives consider what would appear to most average people as some relatively trivial financial setback for someone in their situation, say a small decrement in their vast wealth from a change in the tax rates or what have you, as the moral equivalent of what would seem on the surface to be a much more drastic problem for people like you and me, such as being dragged off to a murder camp in the middle of a forest by a bunch of angry baboons.

Well, I just don’t know the answer.  I’ll keep an eye on this issue and see if I can make any headway.  Not that I think it should take any attention away from more serious questions such as for example what to do about the incredible wealth and income disparities that have developed in this country over the past several decades.  But it is an amusing question, don’t you think?  Do rich conservatives really see Nazis everywhere or are they just talking funny?  How could one ever tell?  I feel like I’m back in my introductory epistemology class.  Well, maybe if I can get a few more Nazi sightings in different contexts I might be able to piece it all together.  I’ll keep you posted.

References

What in the world: Comparing progressives to Nazis and free speech in the UK.  January 27, 2014.  BBC.  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-echochambers-25922096.

Billionaire apologises for Nazi comment in bus row.  January 28, 2014.  BBC.  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-25930215.