Zombies aren't just on TV. And they're not just shambling across the pages of low rent fiction. They're really here... only they're bigger than you might have expected.
Because it's not individual humans who have succumbed to a mystery virus that leaves them rotting but upright—it's institutions. It's state agencies. It's police departments. Federal departments. It's whole nations. We're living in the sagging shadows of institutional zombies, of twitching, mindless shells that still carry some resemblance to the thing they used to be. They're... representational. Metaphorical. Propped up by memories and animated by platitudes. Only they're dead. Or worse than dead.
In a lot of zombie movies, the monsters appear by mistake. It's a disease out of space, or an unanticipated side effect of some sincere, but careless, science experiment. Our zombies don't have such a relatively innocent origin story. The decay of major social institutions into lurching heaps didn't happen that way. Their effectiveness, their intent, their brains... were surgically removed.
Come on in (under the shadow of this red rock) and lets see who was wielding the scalpel...
From the time of our government's founding, there was deep concern about whether a democracy could actually be made to work. "A Republic, if you can keep it," was more than another cute Franklin quip. It reflected worries that the Constitution being woven around the upstart idea of self-governance would not be sufficient to maintain genuine representational government in the long (or even short) term.
Some portion of that concern was focused on the idea that the wealthy would soon turn the fledgling Republic into an aristocracy by a different name. A good deal more concern was concentrated on fear that the poor, enfranchised by the power of the voting booth,would either act out of ignorance or malice toward the wealthy. That, and a good dose of bigotry and misogyny, would be why voting rights were often limited to white male landowners right up through the middle of the 19th century. It's the power behind Jim and all the little Crows. It's the reason that today we have states where people well off enough to own a car are automatically enfranchised to vote, but those who don't... aren't. From the beginning, the tip of the pyramid has worried that they'd be toppled by the base.
Consider this other Franklin quote.
When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic.
This quote is interesting for two reasons. First, because it's so perfectly malleable in its expression of the threat that "the people" pose to "the republic" that it's been used to attack everything from Social Security to Health Care, as well as to express a general dislike of the
hoi polloi. Second, it's interesting because Franklin never said it. Neither did de Tocqueville, or Hamilton, or Jefferson, or any of the other people to whom this quote is generally attributed.
This pseudo-quote, and all the others that run along the lines of "a democracy can only exist until the majority discovers it can vote itself largess out of the public treasury" or "the American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money," actually go back only to a 1951 article in an Oklahoma newspaper, where the original was attributed to Alexander Tytler.
In truth, even Tytler (also known as Lord Woodhouselee--a British aristocrat and frequent critic of the whole idea of democracy) never said any such thing. The "quotes" appear to be whole-cloth inventions of the Oklahoma editor. However, this didn't stop the quote from being revived in speeches by Ronald Reagan (who had a great fondness for ahistorical quotiness), and didn't stop it from being used again and again since the 1980s. Over the years, conservatives have worked the quote up the attribution scale, attaching it to various names, until we've arrived at the point where a quick Google will point you at numerous sites definitively attributing the quote to Benjamin Franklin.
And... there you go. Benjamin Franklin said our republic would be destroyed by greedy poor people. Take that, liberals!
That's zombie America in a nutshell. Not the quote. The progress of the quote.
You start with the idea that "the people" are a threat to "the republic," as if there is some way in which you have have a representational government without reference to the governed. But of course, "the people" here isn't really the people. It's poor people, female people, black people. Other people. The people who don't understand the noble (and deeply capitalistic) purpose of the Great Experiment, but who only want to twist the government into something that benefits them. Which clearly distracts from the God-given attention that should be going to the rich. And corporations, of course.
Stage two of the epidemic comes when you mix this quote with something realio-trulio said by an actual American president.
Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.
That's from the midst of a speech that buckles together states rights, the importance of "individual genius" over collective effort, and the insistence that the first purpose of government is the destruction of government.
Here are three paragraphs from Reagan's first inaugural address, the same one that included the "government is the problem" quote.
In the days ahead I will propose removing the roadblocks that have slowed our economy and reduced productivity. Steps will be taken aimed at restoring the balance between the various levels of government. Progress may be slow—measured in inches and feet, not miles—but we will progress. Is it time to reawaken this industrial giant, to get government back within its means, and to lighten our punitive tax burden. And these will be our first priorities, and on these principles, there will be no compromise.
On the eve of our struggle for independence a man who might have been one of the greatest among the Founding Fathers, Dr. Joseph Warren, President of the Massachusetts Congress, said to his fellow Americans, "Our country is in danger, but not to be despaired of….On you depend the fortunes of America. You are to decide the important questions upon which rests the happiness and the liberty of millions yet unborn. Act worthy of yourselves."
Well, I believe we, the Americans of today, are ready to act worthy of ourselves, ready to do what must be done to ensure happiness and liberty for ourselves, our children and our children’s children.
Get that? It's not subtle. It's not hidden. It's the agenda of the last four decades and counting. It's the statement that to save our nation, we have to treat our government like a threat.
It may surprise you, considering Reagan's cruise to victory, that these ideas were actually fabulously unpopular at the time. When Reagan was elected, fewer than a third of Americans felt like Welfare should be cut. Even fewer wanted an overall decrease in government size. Not only did a large majority support social programs, but a plurality of Americans in 1980 wanted government aid to be significantly expanded. Those numbers barely moved through Reagan's term as president.
There was another basic problem with the ideas ferried into office by Reagan: they didn't work. Tax cuts did not miraculously energize the economy, regulation cuts did not bring on a rush of investment or jobs. As had been proved in previous economic cycles, not just in the United States but in many nations, flattening the tax structure only led to greater income disparity and decreasing regulations only made it possible to obtain labor at a reduced cost. The institution of this policies had the immediate and lasting effect of greatly accelerating the concentration of wealth in the country.
Like the people vs. republic quote, the nonsense of Reagan's policies were initially obvious to everyone.
So what I’m saying is that it’s, it just isn’t gonna work and its very interesting that the man who invested this type of what I call a voodoo economic policy...
George H. W. Bush
What happened after that? What happened is that it didn't work. The new conservative economics failed to generate the economic benefits that their supporters predicted. They failed just as everyone who had seriously studied the issue said they would.
And then everyone acted as if they succeeded. Only two years later, then Vice President Bush was disputing that he had ever uttered the word "voodoo" in association with The Master's economic thoughts. Very Serious People began to act as if the ludicrous assumptions of Reaganomics were worthy of consideration.
Not only the Republicans and the think-tanks that rolled out the fight against Death Taxes and Government Overreach treated these ideas as if they were not just rational but proven. The media began to repeat Republican memes as if the Laffer Curve were a mathematical rule, and not a fantasy created entirely for PR purposes. Worse still, Democrats began to act as if they had to apologize for supporting democracy.
The reason that conservatives lionize Reagan is not because he heralded the high point of conservative popularity. It's because he made the previously unthinkable commonplace. He introduced the infection. He made it possible for an invented quote that was originally attributed to a outsider critic of America, to be re-conceptualized as a core principle dear to our Founding Fathers. He convinced Americans that democratic government was un-American.
Ever since, conservatism has been more than just an argument about tax rates and regulatory boards. It's become an open and honest war on the whole idea of governing. By opening a gap between "the people" and "the republic," the intentional murder of the American government was turned into something that could be supported as "patriotism."
That's not an entirely new idea, of course. See poll taxes, poll tests, poll... poles. And naturally, see Mr. Crow. What's new in modern conservatism is that, like honey badgers, they just don't care.
At first the crippling of institutions by design proceeded with some caution, but it accelerated rapidly. By 1992, it was clear that Democratic politicians had made a fundamental error. Despite continuing issue polls that showed wide support for progressive policies, Democratisin the Senate, House, and soon the White House were not just partaking of the government-as-obstacle language of Reagan, but actively moving toward positions that had little popular support. They were on-board the zombie express.
When Newt Gingrich led a government shutdown at the end of 1995, the reaction might have been taken as a referendum on the speed of the government's unraveling. Polls continued to show that the public supported progressive positions, and the Republicans had diminished their brand in the shutdown. Instead, Democratic politicians embraced the rhetoric of the Republicans. Clinton's 1996 campaign called for "reducing the burdens of unnecessary regulation" including cutting nearly half of the regulations from the Department of Education and significantly weakening the EPA—even though both agencies enjoyed majority support. The campaign called for "eliminating, consolidating, and privatizing government," and bragged about what had been eliminated—among other agencies, the Bureau of Mines, a loss which contributed to weakening review of mining regulation and enforcement, reversing years of improving mine safety.
Clinton's deregulatory rush earned no respite in attacks from the ever-more-hungry government deconstructionists on the right, but he never stopped trying. In February 1999, Clinton was finally acquitted of impeachment charges in the Senate. In November of the same year, Clinton signed the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, eliminating most of the protections that had been in place since the 1933. This action was the primary move in setting the stage for massive "creativity" in the derivatives market and collapse of the banking industry in 2008.
Clinton wasn't alone. It wasn't just that Democrats had compromised again and again with positions that enjoyed little popular support. It was that Democrats had adopted the language and the basic proposition of Reagan: government was bad and the proper response to any regulation was to remove it. The idea of "job-killing taxes" or "burdensome regulations" has become so ingrained, that it is treated as if it needs no supporting evidence. Which is very, very good for Republicans, since the evidence doesn't exist.
When is the last time you heard any journalist or politician note that regulations exist for a reason, generally to address a known problem, or that the "over taxed" American corporations are actually the most profitable enterprises ever to exist on the Planet Earth. I'm betting it's been awhile.
While Republican economics hasn't functioned to generate either the revenues or jobs that were promised, those same policies have been very effective in crippling the government. Through defunding, deregulation of private industry, and legislative limits on government action, the last 40 years, and the last 20 in particular, have been a festival period when it comes to turning government into exactly the sort of ineffective hulk that Republicans had always claimed it was.
In theory, these actions continue to be highly unpopular. Polls still show high levels of support for many progressive positions, though that support has eroded along with all respect for those in elective office. It doesn't matter. In the last two midterm cycles, Republicans have discovered anti-government El Dorado. They've found that, having solidly identified themselves as the anti-government party, they can actively work against the government, no matter how openly, and people will pay them to do it. Pay them both in ludicrous amounts of funding from the 0.1% who want the government destroyed to their benefit, and also pay them at the polls, where "I hate government" is so generalized that it benefits the party of government hate, even if that party generates the incompetence that provides the source of hate.
This, folks, is an end state. A death spiral. A government eating perpetual zombie machine.
This is the Pete Rose problem, the why baseball is horrified about players betting on baseball problem. Republicans have discovered that they can be richly rewarded to throw the game. Which, in any game, is game over.
But hey, they couldn't have done it without the media, and without unprecedented wimpery from the Democratic Party. No matter how blatantly Republicans stoppered-up Congress with intentional dysfunction, the media was there to put it down to "partisan gridlock." No matter how federal, state, and local agencies are made ineffective, often by re-routing much of their funding to private schools, private prisons, and private soldiers—Democrats almost never raised a finger to shame those who ran off with the bucks. After all, billionaires who create for-profit schools based on what sounds good to them are never to blame. Prison corporations that extort money from the families of the poor just so their incarcerated family members can have clothing and food, are never at fault. Instead, failure will be blamed on the few public employees trying to hold the edifice together. And their failure will be used as an excuse for a fresh injection of zombie virus in the next round.
Crippling of institutions by design is not something that stops when the government is 10 percent less effective or 20 percent cheaper. Remember Mr. Norquist and his bathtub? Yeah, well ... the tap is running.
And hey, don't think you can get on a boat and hide from this plague overseas. The zombie infection doesn't stop at our borders. In fact, you might say we learned the art of zombie making Over There. Long before Reagan, we'd wandered into a foreign policy that used destabilization as a means of weakening possible threats. The big foreign policy discovery of the last 40 years hasn't been how to destabilize a government, as we've done in Iraq. It's been that instability itself can be an unending source of fun and profit, a perpetual motion machine of misery. The War on Terror is a declaration that we will stamp out instability, by generating instability. As far as the right is concerned, you couldn't have a better plan.
Destabilization as a tactic has led to zombie nations. They're blooming everywhere— nations that can't form a coherent government that has the support of its own people. Instead we get regions, factions, mountain warlords, and transient "states." None of which represent military threats, but all of whom are good for making the kind of fear that justifies an even bigger dose of destabilization.
Destabilization at home has come (mostly) without bombs, but by violence both physical and political, it has created zombie Congress, zombie agencies, and zombie states (howdy, Kansas!). Zombie domestic policy has left us with hollow, non-responsive agencies and programs.
But both far and near, we're still at the stage in which the response is to be to punish the zombies, instead of those who are making them. If you've ever watched a zombie movie, that's not exactly the way to a happy ending.