To paraphrase a line from a Tom Clancy book, Executive Orders:
"The Constitution is a reasonable document, designed to allow reasonable men to come to reasonable conclusions."
Since our country's inception, this has been an accurate description. Issues may have been contentious, leading to fistfights, duels, even a civil war, but in the end that statement has held true. Through all the discordance, reason rose to the top, and as a result America prospered.
Today however, reasonableness seems to be the last word you might use to describe our political system. We've resorted to allowing companies to under-fund pensions in order to keep our roads and bridges from falling any further into disrepair. House Republicans have spent weeks raising heck over the humanitarian crisis at the border, only to have their own attempt at fixing it fall apart before their eyes. A bill to sue the President, however, sails through in no time. The only appropriate description here is gridlock, complete and total gridlock.
What happened here? How have we gotten to this point?
To unpack the beginnings of this disaster, and to take a peek at how this crisis might resolve itself, follow me below the fold.
There's one thing we need to establish before we go any further. From the beginning, America's ruling class has consisted of the WASP. I of course mean the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (male), and those who think like them. I feel this is not a contentious declaration.
Now because there are no absolutes in life, within that subset of the population there existed a range of views on how the country should operate, covering the political spectrum from left to right. True to the median voter theorem centrist policies were adopted, both because fringe ideas held little support withing the ruling class and because they understood that their prosperity depended upon the success and happiness of the average citizen. It would do them no good to implement legislation solely to their benefit, at the expense of the populace, and risk being voted out at best, or an armed rebellion at worst. Clearly, the best course of action is to do things that are in the best interest of the country and go along for the ride, taking a generous cut for yourself along the way.
This system eventually came apart at the seams on Black Tuesday when the US stock market crashed, throwing the country and the world into the Great Depression. Those at the top of the pile had run amok, spending and speculating like mad under the delusion that the good times would never end. After 4 years of an economic death spiral and crushing unemployment, FDR brokered the New Deal.
The New Deal is now seen as a historic moment in US economic policy, and as a validation of the economic theories of John Maynard Keynes, who contended that the continuance and deepening of the depression was a problem of insufficient economic demand. The economy had lost a huge number of consumers who retained the ability to purchase goods and services. This is called a "demand shock" in economic parlance, that is, the economy experienced a catastrophic loss of demand. Following this, producers of said goods and services reduced output, reducing hours, eliminating jobs, all of which were logical actions in the interest of self preservation, but they only exacerbated the issue. The economy was in a demand death spiral, with no way out.
Now, a country's Gross Domestic Product is simply the aggregate sum of all final goods and services produced within a year. A common and simple way to compute it is to add up all the spending by all entities:
GDP = C + I + G + NX
C is consumer spending, I is investments, G is government spending, and NX is net exports. The New Deal embraced the idea that when consumer spending and investment craters, government, especially one that issues its own currency, can and must step in and fill the spending gap to maintain and manage the fall in GDP. Put another way, the government must replace, as best it can, the loss of demand in the private sector via public spending. This spending can take the form of direct purchases, transfers to individual citizens, tax reform, among others. Keynes ideas were quite controversial at the time, and he attempted to find support for them in Europe, to only minor success. The New Deal was an experiment of his theories on the grandest scale imaginable, and they worked. But the fight over the implementation was brutal, and within it we find the roots of the problems that plague us today.
The fight over the New Deal and its Keynesian ideas centered on the proper role, power, and scope of the federal government, whether tax rates should be raised on businesses and the affluent, the merit of providing monetary assistance to the poor and out of work, the rights and power of labor/unions, and objection to the governments proposed regulation of the free market (stop me if you've heard this all before). Now FDR won some of these battles and lost some, but by and large he won, and the American public supported it. And by definition, if someone wins, someone else has to lose.
Why do all those objections look familiar? Because the losers didn't take it well. FDR did what was necessary for the greater good of the country, but doing so required stepping on the toes of the people who had for so long made all the rules and were used to getting their way. And instead of accepting that they lost, accepting they might have been wrong, they took the loss personally. And because they turned it into a personal affront, they blinded themselves to reality. Even after the clear success of the New Deal and its philosophy, the adherence to their ideas did not, and has not wavered. It is here we find the true heart of the Conservative movement, who I will call the FiscalCons.
The FiscalCons are today embodied in the Koch brothers. They embody a radical conservative/libertarian philosophy, advocating for a future of minimal governance, nonexistent market regulation, and a social order where only the strongest, or richest, are able to prosper and make what few rules remain. Put more simply, they seek one thing, and one thing only. Power. They wish to set the playing field to benefit them, and let the rest of the chips fall as they may. If they were able to buy an election, like they tried so hard to do in 2012, the consequences would have been catastrophic for not only America and it's citizens, but possibly all of humanity.
But the FiscalCons have a problem. And they're called the SocialCons.
The SocialCons emerged from the aftermath of World War II. The terrible loss of life on the battlefield was the result of of humanities new-found ability to quickly and efficiently produce and move about the implements of war. From rifles to bombs to tanks to planes to ships, the machinery of death was mass produced and ferried to the front lines. Add to this the unspeakable horror of the Holocaust, the systematic effort to exterminate fellow human beings for the most specious of reasons, and the war took a very real toll on the collective psyche of humanity. We were forced to confront the very worst aspects of ourselves writ large.
Americans dealt with this by turning to their religious roots, and there they found comfort. They found a safe space, where the world functioned in a known and predictable way. The merits of this can be debated, but psychologically it's not altogether an unreasonable or unexpected reaction. Of course not every person reacted in the exact same way, but macro effect was to create a country that by and large thought and felt the same way.
So at the end of WWII, less than 15 years after the contentious fight over the New Deal, we had a populace looking to put the war behind them and move on to bigger and better things, a huge manufacturing base built up and ready to expand, and perhaps a bit of a messiah complex stemming from our huge role in ending the second worldwide conflict in 20 years.
And here a marriage of convenience was born. The FiscalCons saw an opportunity, and they grabbed it. They lassoed the collective energy of the nation, pointed it in the direction they saw fit and spurred them on, sure that they were riding off into the sunset of the future of their choosing..
Fast forward to today.
The SocialCons are crumbling. It is a fact that within free societies, social values inevitable and progressively liberalize, and the SocialCons have lost the moral high ground. Religious identification falls off a cliff among younger generations compared to older. All this leads to a social marginalization of their views and as a result, a loss of political influence. The FiscalCons have spent decades pandering to the SocialCons to gin up votes, but this no longer works. In the process, they riled up a segment of their base to such levels that they are no longer controllable. The Tea Party monster is lose.
Even worse for the FiscalCons, not only is their base becoming social pariahs, the democratization of information is spelling doom for their economic theories. Unlike any other society throughout all of human history, we have a near absolute and complete record of our recent history. We have documentation showing exactly what we did, we have the empirical data to see and evaluate the effects of our choices, and even better we have the ability to disseminate that information to every citizen freely and instantly. For some economic issues, like say the idea of stimulus to end a deep recession, there really is no need to speculate about what may or may not happen. We know what happens. We know what people and businesses do.
Bringing it back to my thesis, we are witnessing the end of American Aristocracy. The political forces that seek power for the sake of power, that seek to enrich themselves first and the majority second, are on one hand being pulled off the cliff by the horse they hitched their cart to years ago, and on the other watching all of their lies and half truths being exposed for the shams that they are.
We stand on the brink of, for the first time in our history, truly being a nation of the people, by the people, for the people.
It won't be perfect. We are human, and as such we will err from time to time. But as intended, reasonableness will rise to the top.