Longtime poster thereisnospoon has an interesting diary up now on the Rec List that I think buries the lede -- or at least the big problem with its take -- about halfway through. Spoon's point is that the enemy of progressivism is "fundamentalism," of all stripes. And there is something palatable about the equivalence between Islamic radicals and Christian fundies, between the still screaming Maoists of South Asia and the poseurs appropriating the name of the Boston Tea Party back home.
It seemed to me that he was missing part of the story, though, until on re-reading I realized that he had actually mentioned it, but briefly enough that one could easily gloss past. Yet the inclusion of this group within his condemnation changes the thrust of the commentary, so I'm extracting it from his text to give it some prominence.
"The end result of all of these fundamentalist beliefs," he writes, "is mindless tragedy, violence and death." That's not so controversial when the subject is "Christian and Islamist fundamentalists," nor would one raise much of a stink my attributing this effect to racist bigots or even many self-proclaimed Marxists. One can well say of them, as he does, "there is evil in this world that harbors no excuses for its actions: its name is fundamentalism."
Well and good. And then there is this:
Market fundamentalists elevate the "free market" as a divinely infallible authority, attributing even the most obvious market and corporate failures to intrusions of "big government", and offer up only more deregulation, tax cuts and the occasional military coup as a solution.
I don't know is spoon intended that we put two and two together like this, but when we do -- well, this is a hell of a thing to say. It is, very plausibly, true. But it is out of the experience of most of our lives -- most of us who work for corporations and those who groom them, at least -- to say that they are the equivalent of Falwells and Dobsons, bin Ladins and Zarqawis, Limbaughs and militias, Stalins and Pol Pots, in our lives.
Are market fundamentalists really fundamentalists? There's a good argument that the answer is "yes," but it seems a less natural, a more disturbing conclusion than painting all of the others, as spoon suggests, with a single brush.
I think that, on reflection, many of us would acknowledge areas where the comparison between market fundamentalists and these other groups fail. As someone who wavers between social democrat and democratic socialist, I can see value in market solutions to problems, just like I can see value in religion as a means of using social bonds to call us to be our better selves. And perhaps it is only the getting publicly bailed out for trafficking in collateralized debt obligations or befouling a fifth of the country's coastline that becomes the equivalent of molesting altar boys or sacking Byzantine villages. But it's still tempting to roll the comparison around on the tongue for a while and see how it really feels. Are market fundamentalists really fundamentalists? What if they are?
If they are, then we here in this country would be about the last to realize it, because market fundamentalism is as much the medium through which we travel as water is for fish, Radical Islam is for Waziristan, or toxic racist reaction is for much of rural and exurban America. It's so pervasive that one just doesn't see it. The notion that we have to take what the masters of the economy inflict on us becomes as natural-seeming as the notion that we must endure the storms, fires, and floods that angry gods were once seen as imposing on us.
Are they as bad? Are they as bad? Do market fundamentalists truly deserve to be painted with the same single brush as the others? I'm not going to say they are and I'm not going to say they aren't. I will say only that considering the possibility -- that "denaturalizing" the role that the Greenspans and Gramms have had in our society -- is probably a giant step ahead on the road to wisdom. Don't come to a conclusion, just test out the idea in your mind: maybe these everyday heroes, lionized in the media and culture, really ought to be classified with these other monsters. What a wild thought.