by Ralph Nader
There is an obvious explanation for the president’s own state party platform containing so many planks directly opposed to what the White House was saying and doing. This document was the product of the motivated, workhorse libertarian-conservative wing of the Republican Party; it has similar comparisons with Republican state platforms in other Southern states.
It turns out the Republican Party has a double life: the main party dominated by corporatists and the adjunct party relying on conservatives and libertarians to produce the margin of votes for victory in elections. The corporatist Republicans let the libertarians and conservatives have the paper platforms and the core ideological issues, pat them on the back at party convention time, and then move into office, where they are quick to throw out a welcome mat for Big Business lobbyists with their slush funds, who are anything but libertarian or conservative in their demands.
Where Do Action-Inducing Ideas Come From, and What Are Their Effects?
The people who wrote this Texas platform view themselves as political inheritors of the ideas of the major conservative and libertarian thinkers and writers, relying on selected abstractions from these scholars to shape their understanding of politics. Yet most people who call themselves libertarian or conservative, like most self-styled liberals, are not politically active. (Later some emerged as the early Tea Party activists.) Half of either camp does not even vote. But when it comes to elections, those who do go to the polls reliably vote for those candidates whose rhetoric is closest to their vernacular.
A common observation about how people come to self-select their political identities is that they mostly flow from regular daily experience, family upbringing, and the likes and dislikes they develop in life. They rarely come because they read Lincoln Steffens or Ayn Rand or listened to Rush Limbaugh or Jim Hightower. These personages largely serve to reinforce experiential and hereditary dispositions and prejudices. Reinforcement can either enrich and broaden one’s beliefs or render them even more absolute and distanced from reality on the ground. In a bipolar political climate manipulated by the power structure, guess which of the foregoing effects is dominant when people tune out the other side?
It is instructive to note that when conservatism was at its lowest ebb as a movement in the early 1950s, William F. Buckley started the comeback by, in 1955, launching the National Review with the belief that ideas matter. Its pages were filled with conservative philosophy wrapped around calls for a stronger military defense to counter godless communism, the elevation of private enterprise over public investment, and the pushing back of the “heavy hand of government” from populist directions. The National Review was mostly routine corporatist fare in “conservative” garb.
Like Buckley, all movements of any import look for intellectual authorities, whether they are Ludwig von Mises or John Maynard Keynes, Adam Smith or Karl Marx. That’s where they get their connected “Big Picture,” with sweeping explanations and justification for the way the world works or should work. Call it “philosophy,” “theory,” “doctrine,” or “dogma,” but do not underestimate its value in solidifying adherents around a common perspective and quest. Such philosophies prove especially effective when they are systems of belief that are categorical and abstract in their content, as opposed to more flexible systems of thought that leave options open for revision and factual persuasion. The former are often called “ideology,” while the latter are often termed “rationalism” or, at their apex, “science.”
Ideological belief systems most often prevail over rationalist thought systems. Political, social, and religious movements attest to this point. But, as is widely known, the ascendance comes with a price exacted from the reality that does not fit the theory of its vested adherents. Theory has its place in helping to organize thought and feelings, motivate future trends, create values of right and wrong, and offer predictions of the future. But taken as dogmatic marching orders, which are not subject to regular discipline or exposed to refutations, theory becomes a barrier to free thought, flexible strategy, and tactics for action. It becomes a conceptual prison.
To circle back to a previous thought, I noted many good people want to believe in a framework, a set of abiding and directing values that makes sense to them. But these secular frameworks and opinions can end up harming more than helping, as they become so autocratic they prevent loyalists from testing their applications in the vortex of political debate and alliances. The next step is knee-jerk prejudgment and ostracism of others who wear different political labels. No meetings over lunch. No reading of each other’s polemics. Just speak the slogans to the convinced.
We see that people who adopt a rigidity of this kind are easy prey for eager commercialists, those mega-builders of concentrated economic power, with their political servants and open checkbooks, who falsely label themselves conservatives. I have not met a conservative who calls himself a corporatist, but I have met many a corporatist who masquerades as a conservative—the better to forge a false communion with authentic conservatives as a way to increase the giddy power of the corporate state.
In these pages we explore a different kind of communion by taking labels and doctrines down the abstraction ladder until they fall away and reveal the common core of people’s humanity, which finds expression in factual realities, and the many senses of fairness and fair play that appear right where people are interacting every day—their workplaces, neighborhoods, marketplaces, public spaces, and the all-encompassing physical environment. This inquiry does not expect that people will shear off from their political beliefs and values and become factual ethicists. Humans cannot live by facts alone. But embracing facts informs beliefs and judgments and gives values the grounding for possibly greater meaning. As Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World, declared, “Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”14
People’s Shared Values: Envisioned But Seldom put into Practice
Consider, for example, Walmart workers. They may label themselves liberal/progressive or libertarian/conservative, but there are some things they could agree on. About a million Walmart workers either make between $7.25 and $10.75 an hour or are required to work considerably less than forty hours per week at or above $10.75, so that they earn less than $10.75 times forty hours a week. The CEO, Mike Duke, works full-time and makes $11,000 an hour plus benefits.15 Don’t they want some job security and the benefits workers have in many other Western countries? Don’t they also want a voice in decisions that affect them? But too many do not believe they can even join together to demand that Walmart give US workers the fairness and respect that Walmart by law must give its workers in Canada or Western Europe. They are not unlike the self-labeled liberals and conservatives (LibCons or LCs) who, for the time being, have ceased to believe in themselves as citizens who can make a difference.
Is the sense of futility of the average Walmart worker surprising? Since they were youngsters, our educational systems, atomized culture, and top-down oligarchic structures urged on them a sense of powerlessness. Whether as children or adults, these workers absorbed little sense of civic history, local or national; they weren’t exposed to stories of those aggregated community activities in the past that have produced what is freer, fairer, and most democratic about our society. But those who have fought for democratic freedoms knew something that is being forgotten. Freedom should be described, they knew, as the Roman Marcus Cicero defined it: “Freedom,” he wrote, “is participation in power.”
Bearing in mind what Abraham Lincoln called the importance of “public sentiment,” let us note that at the concrete levels of daily life, with its deprivations, fears, hopes, and joys, when people are faced with factual choices and possibilities, undisguised by the wrappings of “pitiless abstractness” and generalized theories, they expect fair play, the essence of the Golden Rule. At this level, shucking ossified theories about human behavior, open minds band together against the few, driven, monetized minds that are deciding for the many the determinants of their
livelihood. Open minds stand against those ever hungry to take away our constitutional power and concentrate it against us, those plutocrats and oligarchs who perfect flexible tools of control that would have frightened but not surprised Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, who grimly foresaw the dangers of the few gaining too much power.
As noted, people do have wide agreement on many ends, though they may disagree vigorously on the timing or pathways to those ends. From Walmart workers to nurses to schoolteachers, who doesn’t want peace and prosperity, honest government and honest corporations, fair taxation, less waste, and more opportunity? They are right to want those things, but they are seeing them from the ground. The competing, self-styled intelligentsias who fill our media do not normally start there. Their minds contest on the plane of principles, philosophies, ideologies, or doctrines, while they ignore the details—most of the details, that is, except who pays the piper.
A Tale of Three Senators
I saw this last point, about the important detail of who has a vested economic interest in a given outcome, play out in a visit to Senator Strom Thurmond at his storied office one afternoon in 2002. Its walls were filled to the high ceilings with signed photographs of presidents and other notables, proclamations, certificates, and plaques commemorating a half century in the US Senate. If Strom Thurmond was known for anything, it was his championing of states’ rights, which is the idea that the federal government should not interfere with a state’s prerogatives. That’s why I was sitting across from his desk that afternoon. The Senate was considering legislation that, if enacted, would federalize and therefore preempt the states’ historic common law of torts in the area of medical malpractice (S. 1370). I argued the case on conservative and historical grounds, echoing his own career-long rhetoric on the subject and noting the opposition to this bill by his longtime colleague, recently retired Democratic senator Fritz Hollings. Senator Thurmond listened politely and replied that his concern about the bill was the danger of “frivolous” malpractice litigation in the states, to which I factually responded that this fear had little supportive data and was being handled by state judges when they see it. He didn’t say outright that he was voting for federalization. However, he later voted on the Senate floor, on the losing side, to allow the Senate to consider preempting state malpractice laws. The medical industry had long ago gotten him on their side. That seemed the one detail that was important to him.
An instructive contrast rests with the change of mind that Senator Hank Brown adopted just before the crucial Senate vote to approve the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995, when Bill Clinton was its supportive president. The story starts with feedback I was getting after visiting numerous members of the House and Senate to persuade them to oppose the WTO. It became clear that neither the senators, nor the representatives, nor their assigned staff on the matter demonstrated any assurance that they had read the five-hundred-fifty-page treaty, called a “trade agreement” by Mr. Clinton to avoid the two-thirds vote required by the Constitution for treaties.
The people on Capitol Hill had a year to read through what was the largest single surrender of local, state, and national sovereignty in US history. All treaties involve giving up some sovereignty, but this one was the grand slam and it had enforcement teeth. The WTO, conceived largely in secret between government officials and corporate lawyers, was sent to Congress on an autocratic fast-track procedure prohibiting amendments and severely limiting time for debate. Antidemocratic autocratic procedures predictably lead to autocratic outcomes. With the enforcement tribunals in Geneva, Switzerland—closed to the press and public—the WTO embraced far more than trade, as Global Trade Watch director Lori Wallach has pointed out, reaching into so-called nontariff trade barriers, like countries having higher consumer, environmental, and worker protections than other signatory nations.16 Having such protections got your country in trouble with WTO rules, which would have the force of federal, though not constitutional, law in the United States the moment our government signed on. Higher safety, health, and economic protection standards could be challenged by countries with lower or no such regulations as barriers keeping out their exports of automobiles, food, chemicals, endangered species, fauna and flora, medicines, and more. Our courts, regulatory agencies, and legislatures are bypassed by these unelected Geneva tribunals from which there is only an internal, not an independent, appeal from the WTO decision. Punishment could be fines, trade retaliations, and demands for outright repeal of the offending superior national or state standards.
Senator Hank Brown called himself a free trader. As a conservative Republican from Colorado, he had voted for NAFTA in 1993. One day in 1994 he received, as did all other members of Congress, a challenge letter from me. I would give a $10,000 contribution to the lawmaker’s favorite charity if they would sign an affidavit certifying they had read the entire text of the WTO treaty and then would be willing to answer questions about its contents in a public forum open to citizens and the media. Only Senator Brown replied, and while he did not want the donation made, he accepted the challenge. About two weeks later, in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee meeting, with the reporters and camera people ringing the room, he answered all twelve questions accurately. He then declared that, as a free trader, he was so appalled by the antidemocratic provisions within the WTO agreement that he was going to vote against it and urge everyone else to do so.
Why did he vote against it? Because Hank Brown went from the abstract slogan—free trader—and immersed himself in the realities of what the WTO was: a transnational, secret, autocratic system of control inimical to our democratic system of governing, which includes open courts. He went down the abstraction ladder and found that his fundamental conservative principles of prudent public governance were violated in powerful and varied ways. He saw that hundreds of pages of rules were in effect regulations without recourse, pressures on the United States for often having higher standards than many of the other 128 country signatories to the agreement. It is remarkable how doing one’s homework can correct stereotypical thinking.
Take conservative Iowa Republican senator Chuck Grassley. I went to see him in 2007 to ask for his leadership, given his seniority on the Senate Finance Committee, in pushing faster for legislation he supported that would require the full text of all federal contracts (above a minimum amount) be placed online for all to read, report, scrutinize, or challenge. Before I got started, he asked, “What’s going on with your Democrats?” He had just come from a committee meeting where “liberal” Democrats Chuck Schumer of New York and John Kerry of Massachusetts opposed his position requiring hedge funds to pay taxes on their commissions as ordinary income rather than the present, much lower 15 percent capital gains rate. He left little doubt that he believed Wall Street had gotten to them.
Corporatism, which so often targets conservatives, is increasingly targeting so-called liberals and creating the opposite type of convergence than the one this book is promoting. This sinister convergence between Democrats and Republicans beholden to the corporatist message often confounds outside citizen groups, who expect a greater difference between liberals and conservatives in this two-party duopoly.
All these overlaps can become confusing, which is why one quest in this book is to pull back the curtain of corporate camouflage and political duplicity. People need more awareness of how corporate pressures lead to the forked tongue of elected men and women. While this book notes and recommends a convergence on the common ground of increased democracy and people’s power, it also records the mirror image at the top, where so-called conservative and liberal politicians forget their labels when they join together at the trough of corporate largesse on the way to fronting for the corporate agenda.
2
Conservatism’s Authority Figures: Principles Versus Dogmas
If all the revered conservative philosophers agree on one principle, it is that conservatism is not a dogma, not a catechism, not a rigid belief system—as they accuse Marxi
sm of being. They believe in liberty too much to even want a system of prescriptive rules. Rather, they see conservatives as attaching primacy to established institutions, traditions, and orderly ways that have met the test of time and temper while viewing with keen skepticism any untested, upsetting ways of thinking and doing.
Since established ways and institutions usually reflect the existing distribution of power, wealth, and property, conservatism has been associated with societies where the few dominate the many, ultimately through the use of the police force when all other silent and overt repressions fail. Plutocrats and oligarchs attach themselves to the label “conservative.”
Nonetheless, conservatism has received a bad rap over the past century, and its philosophers have been misused, distorted, and sometimes willfully mischaracterized in order to propagandize the public mind and cover crass commercialism with a moralistic, philosophical camouflage.
Adam Smith, First Victim of Corporatist Mishandling
Has any moral philosopher and political economist been more manipulated by the power brokers than Adam Smith? In their war against regulation (critics would say against “law and order”), taxation, and government spending, combined with their defense of bigness, monopolies, and oligopolies, and their imbalanced use of the law to their advantage, corporatists have cited Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” over and over again.
Writing in England about the time of the emerging American revolt, Smith produced two prodigious achievements, The Wealth of Nations (1776) and The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). They reflected an immensely nuanced mind able to conceive thoughts from the constants of human nature, nourished by social and individual morals and sympathy, and a deep understanding of the realities of the emerging industrialization and merchant trade of Britain with nearby nations. At the time, the use of large joint-stock companies—limited liability firms owned by shareholders—was breaking down the old order of agrarianism and craftsmanship. Smith’s suspicion of government regulation proceeded significantly from his belief that such restraints favor the privileged interests that want to entrench their economic advantages through the force of law. (In the twentieth century, this belief was updated as “regulatory capture” by famed University of Chicago conservative economist and Nobel laureate George Stigler.) More prophetically, Smith foresaw what Robert Monks described as “four underlying dangers in the joint stock company, predecessor to the modern corporation. He observed that these entities tended to seek: unlimited life, unlimited size, unlimited power, and unlimited license.”1 Smith, way back in the eighteenth century, worried about these managers “of other people’s money” and the separation of ownership from management’s controls.