by Thomas Frank
Sometimes when I watch the Washington Democrats in action, my mind goes back to the tragically incompetent British general staff of World War I, ordering assault after gigantic assault, only to see their armies annihilated one after another. But still they kept at it, ordering up another round of the exact same thing, playing by the gentlemanly rules of combat, never doing anything remotely clever, and always completely surprised when the other side introduced them to twentieth-century warfare in some brutal new way.
It is that same blindness, that same fixed thinking, that we see in the strategizing of the Washington Democrats. No one among them seems to have wondered if bailouts might be done in a different way, or foreseen that Republicans might not play by the debt-ceiling rules. They try what Clinton tried; they are astonished to see it fail. And so they try it again. The Washington Democrats will no more acknowledge the possibilities of other tactics than they will abandon Georgetown and move en masse to some burned-out quarter of Baltimore. Instead they deride their liberal critics as impossible dreamers—or as “fucking retarded,” in Rahm Emanuel’s famous phrase—and try what worked for Clinton one more sorry time.
It is not hard to think of ways that Obama and Company could have stopped the resurgent Right in its tracks, had they wanted to. To begin with the most obvious, Obama and Company could have put themselves at the forefront of populist anger against Wall Street rather than making themselves the embodiment of the cronyism the public despises. They could have captured the outrage of small business by promising to break up the big banks or resuming antitrust enforcement. Another tactic might have built on the well-known facts that Tea Partiers hate NAFTA, and that they’re hardly alone: why not announce that it’s time to reexamine the nation’s disastrous free-trade deals? Still another: As everyone knows, the newest Right has enjoyed amazing success spreading fears that liberal economic moves will automatically erode basic freedoms. Why not undercut this silly idea instead of allowing it to fester? End the Bush administration’s domestic wiretapping program. Demand the reregulation of Wall Street and the repeal of the Patriot Act.
One reason Democrats didn’t do these things, perhaps, is that it’s easier to focus on the lunacy of the rejuvenated Right than on the main sources of its ideas. Tea Party leaders are so colorful, and their protest signs are so nutty, that dismissing them is more attractive than engaging them. And so the paranoid/racist moments in Tea Party history are singled out and obsessively commented upon,* while its vastly more significant free-market streak is either regarded as camouflage for what the libs know to be its real payload—some kind of theocratic white supremacy—or else simply ignored.
Unfortunately, the other side wasn’t calling for theocratic white supremacy. The threat haunting our time was not some sort of Klan comeback; it was economic disintegration. Bank fraud, bailouts, bonus grabs, BP: these were the burning issues of 2010, and the Democrats pretty much left them to take care of themselves. Instead, they built an enormous Maginot Line on the antilunatic frontier and sat there waiting while the attack came down an entirely different route.
Terminal Niceness
None of these shortcomings should be pinned on President Obama alone, despite his emotional aloofness and his academic background. They are a reflection of the party he leads and the voters for which it increasingly speaks. After all, Barack Obama is not the first Democrat to offer “competence” as the answer to a period of deeply ideological governance; that was Michael Dukakis back in 1988. And President Obama seems like Demosthenes when his remarks on health care are compared to the town hall disasters presided over by his tongue-tied, detail-dazzled Dems in 2009.
The problem is larger than him; it is a consequence of grander changes in the party’s most-favored group of constituents. No one has described the new breed of Democrat better than … Barack Obama. “Increasingly I found myself spending time with people of means—law firm partners and investment bankers, hedge fund managers and venture capitalists,” reminisced the future president in his 2006 book, The Audacity of Hope.
As a rule, they were smart, interesting people, knowledgeable about public policy, liberal in their politics, expecting nothing more than a hearing of their opinions in exchange for their checks. But they reflected, almost uniformly, the perspectives of their class: the top 1 percent or so of the income scale that can afford to write a $2,000 check to a political candidate. They believed in the free market and an educational meritocracy; they found it hard to imagine that there might be any social ill that could not be cured by a high SAT score. They had no patience with protectionism, found unions troublesome, and were not particularly sympathetic to those whose lives were upended by the movements of global capital. Most were adamantly prochoice and antigun and were vaguely suspicious of deep religious sentiment.7
“I know that as a consequence of my fund-raising I became more like the wealthy donors I met,” Obama confesses a few paragraphs later.8 So he has. And so has his party. Modern Democrats don’t do things the way Roosevelt and Truman did because their eye is on people who believe, per Obama’s description, “in the free market” almost as piously as do Tea Partiers. Class language, on the other hand, feels strange to the new Dems; off-limits. Instead, the party’s guiding geniuses like to think of their organization as the vanguard of enlightened professionalism and the shrine of purest globaloney.
As a result of their retreat from populism, Democrats have spent the last several decades systematically extinguishing opportunities to broaden the base of their support. They did little, for example, as their former best friends in organized labor were scythed down by organized money. This was no ordinary misstep, by the way. Labor is one of the last institutional bearers of an ideology capable of countering the market-populist faith; had its voice been strong in 2009, things might have played out very differently. Instead, Obama and Company pretty much sat on their hands as the percentage of unionized workers in the private sector sank lower than at any point in the twentieth century. The fatuity of it all, one would think, has surely become obvious to Democrats: they have permitted nothing less than the decimation of their own grassroots social movement; the silencing of their own ideology. Thanks to this strategy, large parts of America are liberal deserts, places where an economic narrative that might counterbalance the billionaire-pitying wisdom of El Rushbo is never heard and might as well not exist.
The effects of a wrenching recession, on the other hand, aren’t likely to touch the new, well-to-do Democrats directly. They know bad things are happening, yes; they express concern and promise to help the suffering, of course; but the urgency of the recession is not something they feel personally. It is not a challenge to their fundamental values. It is, rather, an occasion for charity.
Oh, but a country where everyone listens to specialists and gets along—that’s a utopia these new Dems regard with prayerful reverence. They dream of bipartisanship and states-that-are-neither-red-nor-blue and some reasonably-arrived-at consensus future where the culture wars cease and everyone improves their SAT scores forevermore under the smiling, beneficent sun of free trade and the knowledge industries.*
Not even from our society’s most gifted political critics did we hear anything different. A few days before the 2010 election, for example, Jon Stewart, the perceptive and often ferocious comedian, tried to answer the various Tea Party marches and Glenn Beck rallies with a protest of his own, which he called the “Rally to Restore Sanity,” otherwise known as the “million moderate march.” It brought a crowd of several hundred thousand to the National Mall in Washington, DC, where they bought “I’m with Reasonable” T-shirts and listened to Stewart’s speech about ordinary Americans getting along with their neighbors regardless of political differences.
Now, there was something noble and even Depressionesque about Stewart’s invocation of the common man, and I agree with much of what he said on that occasion. But it is more than a little strange to gaze out over a land laid waste by fantastic corporate fraud and d
eclare that partisanship is what ails us and that reasonableness is the cure. Like the national Democrats, Stewart focused on process and expertise and surface etiquette while the real drama was elsewhere: in the mounting unemployment rate, in the still-lingering shock of the bailouts. Conservatives were out in the cul-de-sacs of America following their strategy from the seventies—“organize discontent”—and here were the liberals, on the mall in DC, trying to save the day by organizing civility.
Conclusion: Trample the Weak
In 1944, the Hungarian historian Karl Polanyi told the story of what he called the “utopian” idea of the “self-regulating market”—and of what happened when theorists and dreamers tried to put that utopia into effect. “To allow the market mechanism to be the sole director of the fate of human beings and their natural environment,” he wrote, in a celebrated passage, “would result in the demolition of society.”
Robbed of the protective covering of cultural institutions, human beings would perish from the effects of social exposure; they would die as the victims of acute social dislocation through vice, perversion, crime and starvation. Nature would be reduced to its elements, neighborhoods and landscapes defiled, rivers polluted, military safety jeopardized, the power to produce food and raw materials destroyed.1
When Polanyi wrote those words, the experience of the Depression had just persuaded the world to forswear any further pursuit of that deadly free-market dream. Society periodically and instinctively tried to defend itself against the depredations of the market, Polanyi wrote, and for decades, the world assumed that this pattern was a natural one. Another economic crisis, and you’d get another New Deal.
But this time around we saw a new pattern develop. After the market vandalized American society along precisely the lines Polanyi described—plus a few bonus ways that neither he nor anybody else saw coming—society fairly begged to be trashed again. Its most influential protest movement demanded that America lace up its running shoes and chase the market utopia even more energetically; that we “trample the weak” instead of coddling them.2
Moneyed interests understand that with no second FDR, no incorruptible new cop on the financial beat, no return to the rules that once made banking boring but safe, they have nothing to fear from us, and may do as they please. This is the real tragedy of the Great Recession.
And should we continue down this path, it is fairly certain how matters will unfold. Investment banking will eventually recover from its brush with mortality, and it will romp again like an elephant loosed from its cage. As regulatory enforcement diminishes, financial frauds will of course multiply, growing grander and more lucrative in the future just as the subprime fiasco was grander than Enron, and Enron was grander than the financial scandals of the eighties. Anyone else with a viable monopoly strategy will have much to look forward to. The health-care industry, for which patriots shed so many tears in 2009, will hold on to its ability to impose costs, comforted by the knowledge that many Americans would apparently prefer to throw Medicare overboard than do something to rein those tycoons in. Ditto for the megalomaniac schemes of the software industry. The oil barons. The defense contractors. This land is assuredly their land.
But the scenario that should concern us most is what will happen when the new, more ideologically concentrated Right gets their hands on the rest of the machinery of government. They are the same old wrecking crew as their predecessors, naturally, but now there is a swaggering, an in-your-face brazenness to their sabotage. We got a taste of their vision when they reconquered the House of Representatives in 2010—in the name of a nation outraged by economic disaster, remember—and immediately cracked down on the Securities and Exchange Commission, the regulatory agency charged with preventing fraud on Wall Street. They brought the Obama administration’s one big populist innovation—the brand-new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau—under a sustained artillery barrage, proposing ingenious ways to cripple the new body or strip away its funding. And during the debt-ceiling crisis of 2011, they came close to bringing on the colossal train wreck that they have always said we deserved.
Given a chance actually to run the government of the most complex economy on earth like a small business, they will slam the brakes on spending and level the regulatory state. Dare we even guess at the consequences? At the levels of desperation the nation will hit when they withdraw federal spending from an economy already starving for demand? At the orgy of deceit into which Wall Street will immediately descend?
This, though, is for certain. As the nation clambers down through the sulfurous fumes into the pit called utopia, the thinking of the market-minded will continue to evolve. Before long they will have discovered that certain once-uncontroversial arms of the state must be amputated immediately. One fine day in the near future, it will dawn on them that the FDIC, for example, just delivers bailouts under another name; that the lazy man down the street should no more get his money back when his bank fails than when the housing market fell apart. What are interstate highways and national parks, they will ask, but wasteful subsidies for leeches who ought to be paying their way? What is disaster relief but a power grab by the losers who can’t get themselves out of the path of a hurricane? And though public schools have been under assault for decades on charges of rampant secularism, the time is not far off when the freeloading by poor kids will be the factor that galls our leaders most.
Social Security, of course, will be one of the first institutions to go on the chopping block, as the essential injustice of protecting the weak dawns on them. Why should society pay for the retirement of someone who hasn’t been responsible and collected Krugerrands? The older generation had a rendezvous with destiny, their hero FDR used to say, and soon it will occur to America’s class-war populists that every slow-moving moocher and senior-parasite needs to make that rendezvous—which is to say, that appointment with the human resources guy at the local big-box store.
Every problem that the editorialists fret about today will get worse, of course: inequality, global warming, financial bubbles. But on America will go, chasing a dream that is more vivid than life itself, on into the seething Arcadia of all against all.
Notes
Introduction
1. As far as I can tell, the first to use a form of this metaphor was Representative Eric Cantor (R-VA), who told the Washington Independent reporter Dave Weigel in September of 2009 that the movement was an “awakening in America.” “Instapundit” Glenn Reynolds, writing in the Washington Examiner on February 7, 2010, was so affected by a Tea Party convention that he upped that description to a “Third Great Awakening.” Michael Reagan, son of the former president, made the same point in his syndicated column for September 16 of that year, calling the Tea Party movement “A Great Awakening,” while “Signs of a 21st Century Political Awakening” is the subtitle of Don’t Tread on Us, a coffee-table book of protest placards, published by WND Books in 2010.
2. Dick Armey and Matt Kibbe, Give Us Liberty: A Tea Party Manifesto (New York: Harper Collins, 2010), p. 8.
3. See the excerpt from Sidney Blumenthal’s book that appeared on Salon.com on April 24, 2008. It is important to remember that Blumenthal, never one to underestimate the dynamism of conservatives, also presciently acknowledged that conservatives had not accepted this verdict and could very well decide to turn farther to the right: “The radicalization of the Republican Party is not at an end, but may only be entering a new phase,” he wrote.
Loss of the Congress in 2006 is not accepted as reproach. Quite the opposite, it is understood by the Republican right as the result of lack of will and nerve, failure of ideological purity, errant immorality by members of Congress, betrayal by the media, and by moderates within their own party. They may never recover from the election of 2004, when they believed their agenda received majority support and they ecstatically thought they were the “Right Nation.”
4. Sean Wilentz: “Conservative Era Is Over,” U.S. News & World Report, November 24, 2008. Francis Fu
kuyama: “The Fall of America, Inc.,” Newsweek, October 4, 2008. Politico: Daniel Libit, “‘Deregulator,’ Our Old Friend,” October 1, 2008.
5. Charles Blow: New York Times, May 16, 2009. Kathleen Parker: Washington Post, November 29, 2009. Stu Rothenberg: see http://rothenbergpoliticalreport.com/news/article/april-madness-can-gop-win-back-the-house-in-2010. Of course, Rothenberg was hardly alone in this prediction; at that stage in the cycle, nearly everyone believed the Republicans’ day was done.
6. There have also been several valuable studies of the Right’s racial attitudes in recent years. One conducted in 2010 by political scientists at the University of Washington found that “true believers” in the Tea Party movement held less charitable views of blacks than the general population. (You can read about the study at http://depts.washington.edu/uwiser/racepolitics.html.) A study of Tea Party rhetoric from that same year, on the other hand, discovered few instances of overt racism; instead it found that the Tea Party’s concerns were overwhelmingly with economic policy. (See “Few Signs at Tea Party Rally Expressed Racially Charged Anti-Obama Themes,” Washington Post, October 14, 2010.) Most interesting is the 2009 study of the Right by Stanley Greenberg titled The Very Separate World of Conservative Republicans. The report concluded: “Instead of focusing on these intense ideological divisions, the press and elites continue to look for a racial element that drives these voters’ beliefs—but they need to get over it.… We gave these groups of older, white Republican base voters in Georgia full opportunity to bring race into their discussion—but it did not ever become a central element, and indeed, was almost beside the point.” Read the full report at http://www.greenbergresearch.com/articles/2398/5488_The Very Separate World of Conservative Republicans 101609.pdf.