I. Narratives and Cultural Talismans
Our national political narrative and lexicon is dominated by personality politics and cultural totems. Part of what is/has driven us to this point is a legacy of what are referred to as the ‘culture wars’; pathologies of culturally diverse societies. Culture wars are, simply, disputes over what the dominant cultural influence on society ought to be fought in political, social and physical spaces on class, religious and racial fault lines. The battles are rooted in disagreements over issues that reflect the differing moralities of culture; the abortion issue is one example. Many of these issues are not classically liberal or conservative, though we persist in using these terms to describe political orientation. The result is that we have bleached almost all meaning out of labels that were once used to delineate between the two mainstream vantages in our political culture; liberal vs. conservative.
These words, liberal, conservative, left, right, once had a political meaning, but their appropriation by culture warriors and their application to culture wars have rendered them largely meaningless in a political context. They exist as a cultural identification. Witness videos of people waiting in line to have a book signed by Sarah Palin who cannot identify or explain their support in even rudimentary terms, or people who support Obama on the grounds that he is going to bring people together and is a transformative, once in a generation figure rather than political policies they agree with. Liberals are stereotypically urban, interested in a broader swath of culture and art, and pretentious, not all that concerned or judgmental about who is fucking who, idealistic and given to woolly headed ideas. Conservative stereotypes are suburban, rural, like sports, operate from the gut, are clear about right and wrong, and other generalities that do little to describe political beliefs, but much to delineate cultural archetypes. That these are stereotypes are hollow and not even very useful in a cultural capacity is beside the point. Nonetheless writers like David Brooks have seized upon these vacuous s labels to carve out a niche for themselves as cultural scribes.
An acquaintance of mine, Jonathan Merritt, whose brother is a good personal friend, is a devout Christian who comes from a very ‘conservative’, rightwing culture and family. He has tacked slightly to the ‘left’, mainly on environmental issues, in the past 4 years and a ‘conservative’ author on the rise, having just published a book and penned editorials in several nationally known forums. I have been following his blog for about a couple of months. I put liberal, conservative, and left in quotes above because those labels get to the heart of the post about the empty meaning of these labels.
The Huffington Post has invited Jonathan to write at their site and Jonathan
expressed hesitation about accepting for fear of being labeled a ‘liberal’ at his blog. I find this concern, not to put too fine a point on it, hilarious.
Merritt’s trouble is that these labels were once used to describe political stereotypes but become cultural identifiers, though our – and his- awareness of this transition has not caught up. Mr. Merritt’s worry that merely writing at a ‘liberal’ web site will make him a liberal, as though one could catch a political outlook simply by hanging with the wrong crowd, which makes no sense. The contents of his writing and his position are secondary to who reads and publishes him. In a cultural context, he is correct to worry. One can hardly help assimilating and adopting the customs of a foreign culture when immersed in it. ‘Liberals’ write for HuffPo, ‘conservatives’ write for RedState. Does that mean if Redstate published Gore Vidal, Vidal would be a conservative? Is Vidal even a ‘liberal’? To extend this a bit farther out, these cultural identities give many an easy out for dismissing political positions that we do not agree with. “I won’t read that, it came from Huffington Post. I won’t consider those arguments, a conservative made them.” We reject political arguments on the grounds that come from a foreign culture and are therefore inherently untrustworthy.
Deep confusion exists when we try to retrofit these labels onto a circumscribed set of political positions. Take me; most of my political beliefs are outgrowths of a small set of axioms that I take for granted; one is that any form of authority must continually justify both their existence and actions. Where institutions are found to be unjustified, we ought to take action to dismantle them. Where actions are unjust, we ought to seek to stop them. The default position for many people is completely at odds with this; they believe the burden of proof is on the critics who take issue with authority, that authority does not need to justify itself or actions, which are implicitly justified when coming from authority. Richard Nixon once commented in disbelief that his actions would be questioned as a matter of legality, “when the president does it, it is not illegal.” Or, more recently, the ‘liberal’ columnist Joe Klein explained his default position in support of the government’s circumvention of the FISA court to place wiretaps, “People like me who favor this program don't yet know enough about it yet [to oppose it].” This disagreement about the nature of authority is the root of many political disagreements and does not fit within a ‘liberal’ vs. ‘conservative’ narrative. (And by the way, the United States was founded, in part, on an explicit rejection of default justification of authority.)
During George Bush’s presidency, it was ‘liberal’ to question the president’s actions and now it is ‘conservative’ to do so under
Obama even though the policies have remained mostly the same (we will return to the topic of policy succession to get into specifics.) Conservative and liberal are meaningless as descriptors of political beliefs, but as cultural talismans they can tell you if you are the kind of person who identifies with a tough talking cowboy who takes no guff from swine or a world travelled, professorial thinking man.
II. The Confusion of Conservative and Liberal Politics
One supposedly conservative position is advocacy of limited government. The answer to the obvious question, “limited for whom?”, is the subterranean meaning that largely exists in a cultural context. Comparing the last 8 presidencies in terms of inflation adjusted dollars spent on government, number of public sector jobs as a percentage of population, and government spending as a percentage of GDP reveals that Bill Clinton was the most fiscally conservative president; Ronald Reagan, considered a small government conservative archetype, was average. Overall, there was not much difference from one president to the next and Democrats scored slightly better. Yet still, the beliefs of small government conservatives that conservatives shrink the government’s influence in our lives and liberals expand it remains. Why?
Any real, rather than perceived, differences between the two parties are not really based on a small vs. big government framing. ‘Liberals’ are for providing slightly more services to the poor; health care reform, for example. ‘Conservatives’ are for providing more services to the wealthy; much of this appropriation has traditionally flowed through the military industrial complex. Both parties are in the main beholden to wealthy interests. One can also look to TARP to see how this works. Some liberals rhetorically committed to shoring up housing on behalf of mortgage holders or revamping the eroded regulatory bodies supposedly in place to prevent the kind of rampant speculation melt down that occurred, conservatives rhetorically railed against adding any strings to government money for the wealthy (though they did not use the term welfare to describe this largesse), and the end result was largely favorable to business interests. I cite TARP and health care reform explicitly because both have received wide bipartisan support and both have been structured much on the behalf of concentrated, private interests, whatever the rhetoric from ‘liberals’ and ‘conservatives.’ Supposedly ‘liberal’ initiatives like health care reform are
cynically legislated on behalf of the wealthy interests.
Let us return to the statements about authority above. Small government conservatives base their position on the premise that a larger government smothers personal liberty. The terms they use like ‘nanny-state’ or ‘welfare dependency’ resonates with subterranean meaning for them. Their dystopia is something out of Ann Rand, an out of control government who caters and cares for everyone at the expense of individual imitative and competition, which are required for progress. The first problem is that the concern for spending for the poor vs. welfare for the rich is out of whack with the actual federal budget – indicating there are racial and class resentments roiling under the surface. A second problem is that the ‘conservatives’ tend to ignore the creeping militarism of our society and generally consider a beefy military and wars as good. They do not offer much protest for the erosion of civil liberties and the war on drugs. (Note: This is not true in every case; some of the biggest critics of all the above are conservatives like Andrew Bacevich, but this is my point – that our political labels are more cultural totems than political. The distinction here is the outlook on authority – anti-authority liberals and conservatives have more to agree about on these issues than their pro-authority liberal and conservative counterparts.) The more rural, conservative geographical regions of the country are tax money sinks and the more urban, liberal cities are tax sources, putting the question about limited government for whom into even starker relief. (Barry Goldwater, the grandfather of the cranky, small government conservatives, came from a family that made its business with a lot of help from the government.)
A problem with small government conservatives and libertarians who base their critique on personal liberty is that they ignore, or simply dismiss, the possibility that tyranny is rooted in power and that power comes in more than the form of government. Conservatives tend to conflate regulation of industry and tax rates with freedom, which elides the reality that government and business do not exist independently in our system. The government is a tool for business or citizenry to use for protection. Where would business be without the system of patent law and intellectual property? Or private ownership? Where would citizens be without labor protection laws? Environmental regulations or food safety inspections (Note: we are in the process of finding out the answers.)?
‘Conservatives’ frame government meddling in business as implicitly oppressive and believe in getting government out of business. This ignores the ways government enables business and creates the space for business to exist and protects their profits, nurtures emerging industries with massive public subsidies and protects existing industries with legislation. Virtually every feature of our modern economy spent decades in the 20th century at the public teat; airplanes, computers, semiconductors, would not exist if the government hadn’t funded them from the 1950s onward and in the first few decades the government footed almost 100% of the costs of R&D for these sectors. Broadening the scope, the path for emerging economies in every country through recent history has been enabled by government protections and subsidies. ‘Liberal’ and ‘conservative’ elites do not agree or see the validity in this point and their efforts have resulted in legislation like NAFTA and beleaguered economic institutions like the IMF or World Bank. Almost without fail, their economic mandates where followed has led to collapse and where ignored has led to prosperity.[1] This brings us to the ‘liberal’ position that recognizes the danger of business interests encroaching on personal liberty, or harming people with unscrupulous schemes to increase profit and seeks to curb these excesses with regulatory bodies like the EPA, FDA, and so on - except for the liberals who think the best course is to create safety nets to catch the falling bodies and are in complete agreement with deregulation when industry asks, such as the telecommunications act in the 1990s, NAFTA, and the nature of the economic bailout under Obama and the health-care reform, where to take just one issue, the pharmaceutical industry has benefited immensely from government protection of re-importation of cheaper drugs from foreign markets - getting government out of pharma would hurt them, so they are fighting,
and winning, tooth in nail to keep government on their backs.
The dominant form of authority in our society, concentrated wealth, exploits people and creates or co-opts other forms of authority like the government for protection. Rural farmers at the receiving end of large agro-corporations like Monsanto’s lawsuits know this well. Monsanto relies upon courts and legislation to enforce patent laws, interpret the law to make possible the patenting of life forms, coerce farmers to throw away seed so they have to buy again every year, sue farmers who do not throw away their seed or farmers who simply offer seed cleaning services, farmers who do not buy their patented, genetically engineered seed but whose fields are cross-pollinated by a neighbor who does. Farmers, stereotypically conservatives who are also beneficiaries of massive public welfare for their crops, make a living at the short end of the stick of justice with respect to agro-business corporations. (If this article gets confusing every time we try to apply these ostensibly political labels, you are getting the point.)
It is in the people’s interest to protect themselves from forms of economic tyranny; the government is a tool that business and citizen constantly fight over. If small government conservatives neutered the government under the belief that they are preventing tyranny, they are doing nothing more than creating a banana republic out of the United States; something I would argue that elites are aware of and through a clever system of propaganda (e.g. What’s good for General Motors is good for America) and advertising have conflated cultural awareness with political affiliation.
Consider the history of
our financial services sector. We exited the depression with regulatory agencies that had real grit and over the next several decades business co-opted them, eventually precipitating a couple of financial disasters in the last few decades; worse still, the result of this has not been a retaking of the regulatory agencies on behalf of the public, but a massive transfer of wealth to those same interests – largely because they have so thoroughly captured the government that their exists little imagination or will to get through this situation without catering to these special interests. The outraged, and thus far impotent, public has failed to retake the tool of government from business and forge a solution to financial calamity more favorable to them.
We have the increasingly meaningless labels like conservative and liberal, labels that predict less about politics than cultural identification. How is being against wars in Iraq or Afghanistan generally liberal or conservative? Or crying foul with how TARP has been funded an implemented? Or the nature and necessity of health care reform? Or not believing generally in scientific inquiry? Dismissing global warming science? All of the possible stances on these issues are cultural bins that do not take into account the most important measure of one’s outlook; not the conclusions, but how one came to those conclusions. Are you against escalating the Afghanistan war because you have a problem with the violence there, or because you don’t think it is a wise use of taxpayer dollars and soldiers, or because you think we should use those resources to invade Iran instead?
Our government, as democratic institution, is a tool to protect each other and has been a historically effective protection agency. However, the ebb and flow is such that the wealthy and powerful eventually capture whatever protection mechanism we dream up, so it is not enough to pass some protective legislature, form regulatory bodies and walk away from them; the efficacy of any reform as a form of protection for the people from business interests where their interests conflict requires maintenance. As currently constituted, the system is rigged against the people who do not have millions of dollars to throw at officials, do not form lobbying groups, do not have mass media campaigns at their disposal, and are effectively atomized and divided against one another over culture war conflict on racial, ethnic class, religious, gender and regional grounds. We are preoccupied with celebrity, virtual and sports entertainment industries and have busy enough lives trying to scratch out a living that bigger picture concerns and activism are unwanted, unaffordable luxuries. Far easier to concede and place faith or trust in messianic, public figures that we identify with culturally, and thereby trust they will do what is right by us. We expect them to be holistic shamans, military leaders, economic magicians and founts of knowledge – largely on the basis of cultural affiliations and sympathies, carefully nurtured and ruthlessly catered to by massive public relations campaigns – also known as elections.
II. The Great Man Fallacy
A recurring political statement here is forceful disagreement with the ‘liberal’ notion that the presidency of George W. Bush represented a radical departure from prior administrations, that something had been thrown wildly out of whack during his reign and we only need to return to a not too distant past of respectable norms and behavior. The calamities in Iraq and Afghanistan, the cynicism of the regulatory bodies like the EPA, FDA, the Fed, etc., the erosion of civil liberties, the use of torture abroad, the burgeoning military state, calamitous economic policy crafted for, of and by industry interests are not exceptional to the George W. Bush Administration. And it is neither conservative nor liberal to point this out and criticize it for its excesses.
The American government’s history of torture extends over a century to the Philippines. The assault on our civil liberties has been ongoing for decades in the form of the drug war, first declared by Richard Nixon and continued by every president since then, despite Obama’s rhetorical end, has not undertaken any actions to end it, and he has explicitly endorsed the controversial civil liberties policies of his predecessor under the banner of the war on terror. We have been invading foreign countries directly or by proxy non-stop since WWII. [2] The capture of government regulatory bodies by business has been ongoing for decades as well and Obama Wall Street heavy economic team puts any Bush-specific canards to rest on that score. [3] That is not to say there are not marginal improvements or degradations from one presidency to the next, there are, but on the whole there are far more consistencies and vectors already in place to follow. Obama has embraced the Bush doctrine of foreign policy in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance, which reserves the privilege of the United States to invade countries preemptively – an explicit rejection of the norms of international law we helped right after WWII. He has escalated the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, themselves continuations of policies originating in the previous 4 administrations and maybe even further if you accept that geopolitical concerns over oil factored and continued to factor into our Middle Eastern policy, to the Carter Doctrine and beyond to the post WWII policy planning. Clinton’s Iraq sanctions policy was at least as cynical and only a few shades less deadly than W. Bush’s; his bombing of Serbia just as cynical a use of military power and propaganda as W. Bush’s. Clinton’s economic policy gave us NAFTA and cuts to welfare for poor. Much of the regulatory reform that helped precipitate the recent economic collapse passed under his watch; though these were also continuations of Reagan. And so on.
Our mish-mash of cultural and political labels, such as conservative and liberal, effectively help to mask these continuations. Liberals are likely to trust leaders they identify with on a cultural level to enact the same policies and political platforms they once despised and questioned under leaders whom they did not identify with. Therein lies one explanation for the abrupt switch of allegiances that has occurred from Bush to Obama; liberals are now on board with whatever the government is doing, trusting that Obama is a good man trying his best to do what is right in his heart. Conservatives under Bush made similarly vapid expressions of support. As expected, many formerly credulous, jock-sniffing conservatives are dogged critics of Obama, whose policies are almost indistinguishable from Bush’s. In the extreme fringes of lunacy, we have people inspired by and obsessed with Obama’s birth certificate to pair with the 9/11 Truthers, equally obsessed and enraged by the unshakeable belief that the government participated in (or knowingly allowed to happen) the terrorist attacks of 9/11.
The problem, from my perspective, is not that W. Bush was so much different and dangerous than prior administrations, but that he was too similar. To get caught up in a politician’s personality, to place any trust at all in them, is to lose one self in bogus cultural-political distinctions. There is no great man that will come to power and radically change things for the better of society or our species because there is no space for him or her to exist in our political system as it currently exists; and no space will exist unless people, en masse, do the work to open it up.
Notes:
[1] See Ha-Joon Chang. Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism.
[2] On torture see McCoy, Alfred. A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror
For a list of U.S. interventions see Blum, William. Killing Hope: U.S Military and C.I.A Interventions since World War II
[3] For the details of the financial industries domination of the Obama Administration, see Matt Taibbi’s series of articles in Rolling Stone Magazine through 2009
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