The Role of Government
In an article entitled “Weak states, poor countries” the economist Angus Deaton says:
Europeans tend to feel more positively about their governments than do Americans, for whom the failures and unpopularity of their federal, state, and local politicians are a commonplace. Yet Americans’ various governments collect taxes and, in return, provide services without which they could not easily live their lives. Americans, like many citizens of rich countries, take for granted the legal and regulatory system, the public schools, health care and social security for the elderly, roads, defense and diplomacy, and heavy investments by the state in research, particularly in medicine. Certainly, not all of these services are as good as they might be, nor held in equal regard by everyone; but people mostly pay their taxes, and if the way that money is spent offends some, a lively public debate ensues, and regular elections allow people to change priorities.
Corporate consolidation and monopoly power
Antitrust laws were put in place to make open markets more competitive and to encourage free enterprise. With the Reagan presidency antitrust enforcement virtually ended.
In the article “Democrats must become the party of freedom” Barry C. Lynn argues that corporate consolidation and monopoly power are the main drivers of inequality and are at the root of America’s most pressing economic and political problems. For instance Lynn says that while Paul Ryan wants to phaseout Medicare to control costs, he ignores the monopoly power of giant hospitals and pharmaceutical giants and their role in healthcare costs. Lynn also says that one of the by-products of monopolization is that business is becoming concentrated in a cities mainly along the coasts, leading to great regional inequalities. Monopoly also provides the wealthy with the funds to distort politics.
Barry Lynn goes on to argue:
Donald Trump has proved that economic populism is smart politics. If Trump perfected a version of dangerous populism, based on resentment, xenophobia, and paranoia, then anti-monopolism is smart populism. Americans—all of them—have every right to be angry. A main job for Democrats now is to explain that they should direct that anger not at immigrants or China, but at monopolists and the policies that empowered them.
Anti-monopolism will also provide Democrats with many other political benefits. It will, for instance, help provide a fix for the party’s Electoral College problem, which has bitten Democrats hard twice in the last sixteen years.
Barry Lynn concludes his essay with a quotation by Franklin Roosevelt:
The last time we faced such threats, after the rise of the plutocrats in the early decades of the twentieth century, it was the Democrats who spoke directly to the fears of the citizenry. Consider Franklin Roosevelt’s words in 1938. “The liberty of a democracy is not safe,” he said, “if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is Fascism—ownership of Government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. . . .Among us today a concentration of private power without equal in history is growing.”
Identity politics and the welfare queen from Chicago
In an article that appeared in The New Yorker Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie says:
Now is the time to recalibrate the default assumptions of American political discourse. Identity politics is not the sole preserve of minority voters. This election is a reminder that identity politics in America is a white invention: it was the basis of segregation. The denial of civil rights to black Americans had at its core the idea that a black American should not be allowed to vote because that black American was not white. The endless questioning, before the election of Obama, about America’s “readiness” for a black President was a reaction to white identity politics. Yet “identity politics” has come to be associated with minorities, and often with a patronizing undercurrent, as though to refer to nonwhite people motivated by an irrational herd instinct. White Americans have practiced identity politics since the inception of America, but it is now laid bare, impossible to evade.
The oligarchy in the United States has a history of using the divide and rule tactics of race to advance an anti-government corporatist agenda. The narrative of the “welfare queen” puts forward the idea that when the government functions and services that many whites take for granted are extended to disadvantaged communities, it becomes “giving free stuff to those people”.
The assault on labor unions and the collective bargaining power of workers, tax cuts for the rich, cuts to social programs, deregulation and privatization have led to an upward redistribution of wealth and have contributed to inequality last seen during the Gilded Age. In 2016 Donald Trump comes along and manages to persuade enough white voters in the Rust Belt that their problems and anxieties are being caused by Mexicans, Muslims and “liberal elites” in Washington.
The war on science
In their pursuit of power free market idealogues have also had little compunction about forming an alliance with Christian fundamentalists.
In an article in Scientific American Shawn Otto says:
Over the last 25 years the political right has largely organized itself along antiscience lines that have become increasingly stark: fundamentalist evangelicals, who reject what the biological sciences have to say about human origins, sexuality and reproduction, serve as willing foot soldiers for moneyed business interests who reject what the environmental sciences have to say about pollution and resource extraction.
The environmentalist George Monbiot says:
Over this time, I have watched as tobacco, coal, oil, chemicals and biotech companies have poured billions of dollars into an international misinformation machine composed of thinktanks, bloggers and fake citizens’ groups. Its purpose is to portray the interests of billionaires as the interests of the common people, to wage war against trade unions and beat down attempts to regulate business and tax the very rich. Now the people who helped run this machine are shaping the government.
I first encountered the machine when writing about climate change. The fury and loathing directed at climate scientists and campaigners seemed incomprehensible until I realised they were fake: the hatred had been paid for. The bloggers and institutes whipping up this anger were funded by oil and coal companies.
Has bipartisanship been hurting the Democratic Party?
There was a time when there were people in the rest of the world who admired America’s self-correcting system of government.
As I understand it, bipartisanship is when two opposing parties representing different perspectives on a problem, thrash out a compromise agreement that seeks to advance the common good.
My argument is that bipartisanship can only really work if the commitment of the different political parties is, first and foremost , to the common good and when a civic republican ethos dominates public life.
But as the New York Times said: “The Republicans are trading health care for the poor for tax cuts for the rich.”
It is one thing to be pro-business, but it is something entirely different when Republicans are willing to sacrifice the health and well-being of millions of Americans on the altar of their fealty to an uncompromising free market ideology.
When Barack Obama became president in 2009 the economy was in free fall and unemployment rose from 4.7% in November 2008 to 10% in October 2009. Yet on the very day of his inauguration some Republicans met at a steak house and plotted ways to undermine his presidency in spite of the damage that it would do to the country. These are not the actions of people for whom the national interest and the public good are are a top priority.
In their pursuit of power and in the service of a hardline ideology Republicans have been trashing many of the unwritten rules and norms that underlie democratic governance. For 10 months Republicans obstructed Merrick Garland’s nomination to the Supreme Court.
Paul Krugman asks:
“Were Democrats rewarded for cooperating with George W. Bush? Were Republicans punished for their scorched-earth opposition to President Obama? Get real.”
The Republican Party and the right-wing media have had considerable success in misdirection and scapegoating the Democratic Party and the much maligned “managerial class”. On the other hand the Democrats have been less effective in holding Republicans accountable for the real-world consequences of an anti-government pro-corporatist agenda.
The Democrats weren’t the ones to break politics. But one thing that I know is that the Democratic Party will have to find ways to make the Republicans take ownership of the harsh and cruel consequences of their attempts to impose a dark Ayn Randian vision on society.
Teoleological thinking
The Democratic Party has not been untouched by the anti-government revolution Movement Conservatives have been fomenting for the past 50 years. But I strongly disagree with those who say that there is little difference between Democrats and Republicans.
As civic-minded Republicans have been marginalized and free market ideologues, evangelical fundamentalists and ethno-nationalists have gained control of the Republican Party, teleological thinking that equates function with purpose has come to dominate the party.
Movement Conservatives absolutize freedom. But I would argue that human agency cannot entirely be divorced from what happens in the natural world. And we also have to contend with a complex multi-causal reality.
Movement Conservatives talk of the “tyranny of technocracy” and accuse bureaucrats of despotic behavior. And so rather than critical evidence-based policy analysis and engaging in a contest over the best means to achieve desirable ends, critics and and political opponents become “enemy of the people” The intimidation and delegitimization of the mainstream media has been a decades-long project of Movement Conservatives. And right-wing media outlets have become experts in the politics of personal destruction. We know what happened to John Kerry, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
Liberal democracy
Jonathan Chait argues that liberalism and conservatism do not represent different sides of the same coin. The differences are epistemological with liberals favoring government instrumentally and conservatives opposing government ideologically.
In his farewell address President Barack Obama also talked of the threats to democracy:
“Without some common baseline of facts, without a willingness to admit new information and concede that your opponent might be making a fair point, and that science and reason matter, we will keep talking past each other, making common ground and compromise impossible.”
At the same time Liberals do not necessarily always agree with the bureaucrats who enforce regulations in order to protect the environment. And this is why they place such a high premium on freedom of speech, the free flow of reliable and verifiable information, critical analysis of available evidence, open dialogue and tolerance for a diversity of opinions.
P M Carpenter says:
“To retain one's idealism is a noble thing; to practice pragmatism in the grinding pursuit of achievable idealism is a public service — less noble, perhaps, but of real and practical benefit.”
The age of fossil fuels
I was in a state of shock on the 9th of November last year. Hillary Clinton wanted to turn the United States in a clean energy superpower. She was also enthusiastic about the job creating potential of renewable energy.
As Derek Thompson said Donald: Trump campaigned as a populist but is governing as a plutocrat.
Maybe it was unrealistic to think that there would be a smooth transition away from fossil fuels to renewable energy and new green technologies and more environmentally sustainable ways of producing goods and services. Trump’s appointments and actions since he has become president seem to give credence to a theory that he wants to keep the United States locked in the age of fossil fuels.
Resistance
Jonathan Chait argues that even though Donald Trump plans to destroy Barack Obama’s climate legacy, the green energy revolution has taken on a momentum of its own.
In 2005 George W. Bush’s attempts to privatize Social Security were met with a huge popular revolt. We have been witnessing the same popular resistance to the attempts to repeal and replace Obamacare. Maybe the Women’s Marches, the Marches for Science and the Peoples Climate March are also signs of democracy being revitalized.
