Corporate Counterattack Continues

An Institute for New Economic Thinking article summarizing historian Nancy Maclean’s new book (Democracy in Chains) about Nobel Laureate economist James Buchanan gives us glimpse at one possible big picture framing for current events. 

It helps us see common threads loosely connecting the otherwise incoherent thinking and talking and acting on the far right, now sadly and increasingly including our current president (who formerly had no real ideology but now appears to have been seduced by the most craven wing of his plutocratic country club pals).

If it feels like everything we have been building since WWII is crumbling around us. This story suggests this is not far from the truth…and since this crumbling benefits some as it harms others…not by accident. Everything? Really? That is the plan.

“Buchanan focused on such affronts to capitalists as environmentalism and public health and welfare, expressing eagerness to dismantle Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare as well as kill public education because it tended to foster community values. Feminism had to go, too. Buchanan considered it a socialist project.”

Unlike ‘sunny’ libertarians like Ayn Rand, this strand, with generous Koch funding, is uninterested in making government efficient and only interested in “tearing it out at the root.” Thus, the communication strategy of identifying government as ‘the problem’ to undercut efforts to use government institutions to craft democratic solutions. The root to tear out is democratic decision making—powerful government (under the unconstrained control of the wealthy) will still be needed to, as political scientist Ira Katznelson once said, ‘manage the consequences of choosing to live in a capitalist society,’

In case this seems like we must be putting words into Buchanan’s mouth, here is him in his own words: “Despotism may be the only organizational alternative to the political structure that we observe,” the economist had written in The Limits of Liberty.  

In The Republican Noise Machine, David Brock (a former journalist for the far-right) outlines the communication strategy: sow doubt, distrust and confusion to gradually reduce confidence in the institutions and processes and attitudes and behaviors of democratic governance (think civility crisis today, and its most triumphant practitioner—our president).

In Distorting the Law, we see a brilliant analysis of just one prong (the tort reform movement) in this loosely coordinated effort.

These two books make it clear that today’s most familiar talking heads, expert commentators, think tank scholars, ‘news’ networks (Fox, Washington Times) and interest group lobbyists did not get there by accident. Dominating the news media, the same forces created their own publishing houses and changed law (eliminated the Fairness Doctrine for instance) to make it possible for talk radio and cable news to explode. Combined with well-funded training for federal judges, academics, journalists…an alternative information system was created—from K-16, news and entertainment, scholarly and applied.

“The Koch-funded Virginia school coached scholars, lawyers, politicians, and business people to apply stark right-wing perspectives on everything from deficits to taxes to school privatization.”

In today’s news we read about Republican efforts to pass a constitutional amendment requiring government budgets to balance each year. While this sounds like an idea worth considering, it is a Trojan horse to make it impossible for democratic governance to work. Just like endless budget cutting of public schools has resulted in a loss of confidence in public schools and more calls to cut their budgets, this is an effort to impoverish the public sector so it cannot challenge, let alone constraint, wealthy plutocrats.

This is not new. But it is happening like a slow burn. In some ways this is always happening: rust never sleeps. Democracy is not the next step on a steady progression of human history. It has always been the product of a struggle. And there is no reason to imagine we are somehow immune from the outcomes of this struggle we observe elsewhere.

“MacLean illustrates that in South America, Buchanan was able to first truly set his ideas in motion by helping a bare-knuckles dictatorship ensure the permanence of much of the radical transformation it inflicted on a country that had been a beacon of social progress. The historian emphasizes that Buchanan’s role in the disastrous Pinochet government of Chile has been underestimated partly because unlike Milton Friedman, who advertised his activities, Buchanan had the shrewdness to keep his involvement quiet. With his guidance, the military junta deployed public choice economics in the creation of a new constitution, which required balanced budgets and thereby prevented the government from spending to meet public needs. Supermajorities would be required for any changes of substance, leaving the public little recourse to challenge programs like the privatization of social security.”

This is a sustained assault on shared values and community. A sustained assault on environmentalism and public health because the wealthy (falsely) believe they can insulate themselves from the dangers in private enclaves. An eagerness to dismantle Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, and public education, however, does create public harms that private enclaves (with a strong government enforcement power) might provide protection against.

And as we privatize all of these, on the ‘reasonable’ argument that this is prudent fiscal policy, we also expand police powers, suppress voting turnout and voting rights, manufacture a crisis in public retirement plans, compel arbitration to deny due process, denying clean air and water, living wages and decent housing, allowing our public infrastructure to crumble, because there is a deeper conflict in play here. Taking these changes together we…

“radically alter power relations, weakening pro-public forces and enhancing the lobbying power and commitment of the corporations that take over public services and resources, thus advancing the plans to dismantle democracy and make way for a return to oligarchy. The majority will be held captive so that the wealthy can finally be free to do as they please, no matter how destructive.”

Buchanan and others like him provide the scholarly support for these policies. We should not take this lightly, simply because we are offended by what appears to be an unsustainable cold-heartedness.

MacLean interprets an essay by Buchanan to mean that people who “failed to foresee and save money for their future needs” are to be treated, as Buchanan put it, “as subordinate members of the species, akin to…animals who are dependent.’”

This is the type of sound bite that seems to make sense. It silences someone in an argument. But it really only makes sense in retrospect. After one has already stumbled into a comfortable place in the world, it becomes a lot easier to forget all the lucky breaks, to overlook how clueless we were most of the time, and in doing so make it possible to judge uncomfortable others as lazy failures who just needed to plan ahead.

This article was worth reading. Makes me want to read MacLean’s book.

Since I am always astonished at the crazy conspiracy theories that get traction, I wonder, is this my own private conspiracy theory? Am I failing to see this as a crazy notion because it makes sense to me and is that what is going on with others I see as just losing their minds or hateful? A question for another time.