Category: Politics

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Human Nature in Nature Blog Politics

Thoughts on Reading Lester Thurow’s The Future of Capitalism(1998)

Meet the Enemy

Darwin’s theory of evolution clinched it: We humans evolved just like and along with ants and ant-eaters, butterflies and bison, and all other Earthly living beings. What, then, sets us apart? Some might say it’s that we’re intelligent; maybe others would point to tool-use and technology; many still say it’s that we have a soul.

Without precluding other answers, I would sum it up this way: What sets us humans apart is that we think. We are highly social beings who think. With thought comes choice; and with choice comes morality and ethics. All that makes us more than the sum of our physical selves which may be, at least in part, what we mean by soul. Thinking also makes it possible to review the past, plan the future, and design tools and ways of life. So, symbolic thought, language, in the context of our being highly social beings, are part of or behind all other possible answers to what sets humans apart from all other Earthly life.

This very thing that makes us distinctively human, and the most successful species on the planet, is also our greatest challenge. In the immortal words of Walt Kelly’s Pogo, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” Our human lives are based in thought which is both rooted in and shapes our cultures. The ideas by which we live fundamentally shape the lives we live, and often the lives of other beings we ourselves need to survive.

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We and we alone on the Planet design (whether we know it or not) how we live based on what and how we think. As anthropologist Clifford Geertz puts it, “thinking is a social act, and one is therefore responsible for it as for any other social act. Perhaps even more so, for, in the long run, it is the most consequential of social acts.”

Geertz goes on in this article with a sensitive and insightful account of anthropological fieldwork in what he calls “the new states,” and others call “the third world”; but I’m going to stay with his identification of thought as a social and moral act.

Different peoples in different cultures learn to think in different ways about themselves and their world. Not that all these thoughts are conscious, or recognized as such. There’s a lot of custom, and habit involved in the very different ways of thinking, feeling, believing, acting, and ingrained practices in the mix in every culture. But one way one way or another it all boils down to thought.

Further, that great diversity of cultures around the globe illustrates what I said above: that how we humans think—the story we tell ourselves about ourselves and the world around us—shapes how we live. This, I think, is what Geertz is talking about.

But why is this self-reflective realization “chilling”? Well, as Geertz suggests it makes us personally responsible at deeper levels than perhaps we had realized for the ideas and beliefs we hold and their real-world consequences. As the truth of it sinks in, it takes such comforting notions as a distant God, or fate, or destiny, or some supposedly natural economic system, or a presumedly fixed human nature, out of our moral equation. Now we can’t pass off responsibility to such distant beings or abstract forces. We ourselves are responsible for ourselves in the here and now. Woah!

It’s up to us. If God created us with minds and souls, he/she gave us some core principles to live by in the example and words of Jesus and other great teachers and now leaves it to us to use them and challenges us to get it right. She/he doesn’t step in like an over-protective parent to fix what we break. If we ourselves simply evolved into mind and spirit—if mind and spirit and moral compass evolved into the universe with us—then with that also comes the responsibility to figure it out, and live with the intelligence and moral compass that is our evolutionary birthright. Either way it’s up to us. For all practical purposes, it seems, we’re alone with ourselves at the cutting edge of intelligent and moral life in our small corner of a big universe.

Taking responsibility—that’s what grown-ups do. So this realization that we and we alone are responsible for how we think and its real-world consequences—if we really understand it and take it in—that would mark a milestone in humans becoming responsible grown-ups in the universe and on the Planet we share and are part of along with its other living beings. But it’s complicated, no question.

Human Life is Complicated

Like other living beings on our Planet we humans act within webs of possibilities and constraints. What makes us different, special, is our ability to think about what we do—to make self-reflective conscious decisions based on what we know (or think we know); and, crucially, the values we have. This is what makes us responsible in the sense just discussed. And on top of that we can change what we know and what we value with new knowledge and greater insight.

Think about it! Take your dog, for instance—that (thinking) is what he doesn’t do. At least not in the sense we’re talking about here. When you put down her bowl of kibbles she doesn’t sit on her butt and scratch her ear and think about it. He doesn’t worry that they might make him gain weight, or that other dogs out in the world are starving, or that there might be a cockroach hiding in there. She doesn’t double-check their best-before date, read the ingredients label, think about their cost, or wonder about the environmental impacts involved in their manufacture. She eats them. Life is simple. He’s the very personification of “Don’t Worry, Be Happy!” When he’s finished gulping them down he wags his tail and takes a nap on the couch or asks to be let out in the yard to play, or whatever. It’s a lot, lot more complicated for us.

I’ve come to these reflections in round-about ways after reading a couple of chapters beginning with Chapter 13, “Democracy Versus the Market,” in a book that’s languished on my shelf for I don’t know how long. The book is The Future of Capitalism by the late MIT economist, Lester Thurow. I started reading with Chapter 13 because its title caught my attention when I took the book down and idly thumbed its Table of Contents before consigning it to the box for the Rotary book sale; but now after I finish I’ll go back and read the rest of the book from the beginning before it goes into the box (if it does).

How Can We Get Society Right If We Get Human Nature Wrong?

Based on what I’ve read so far, it’s clear that for an economist Thurow thinks widely and deeply about our society as a whole. It’s an old book now, published in 1998; but much of it couldn’t be more relevant—which is kind of scary in itself. Almost all the trend lines have only gotten worse faster. Anyway, what Thurow says about our present circumstances got me thinking again about human nature—and about what we as a modern Western society think about human nature. That’s what I want to share now.

I’ve been interested for a long time in how humans shape our societies and economies around core beliefs about human nature and its place in the wider natural order of things. In that light, some of Thurow’s observations about mistaken thoughts at the foundation of the capitalist economic system stand out. Since the economic system we’ve put in place dominates—by way of expanding commodification and privatization—ever more aspects of our lives, this is an important issue.

A misguided view of human nature, Thurow says, animates capitalism. This error actually contributes to capitalism’s success so far including some of the values we cherish, like individualism, being “productive,” and personal initiative; but it also contributes to today’s unprecedented economic and social turmoil and the very real hazards of climate change and other environmental problems.

But maybe we don’t have to give up on capitalism entirely. Perhaps those positive values of capitalism could be grounded in truer and more positive understandings of our human nature.

What does Thurow mean by saying that capitalism gets human nature wrong? He puts this quite clearly:

“The conservative (capitalist) view of government,” Thurow writes, “sees men in a violent state of nature submitting to central authority in exchange for security and stability. Chaos, the lack of private property rights, essentially leads to the need for government. But historically it wasn’t so. Capitalism’s conception of government is precisely backward. Groups came long before individuals. Social support and social pressure is what makes humans human”


Thurow, L. C. 1996 The Future of Capitalism: How Today’s Economic Forces Shape Tomorrow’s World. New York: William Morrow and Co., p. 275

As an anthropologist I have to say that we’ve known this for a very long time now. It’s nice to see others apply this knowledge in their areas of expertise. Thurow, the economist, focusses on economic dynamics and related economic and social problems; but I think he’d agree that this error, this distorted and dismal view of human nature he’s describing, is the key driver of those dynamics. Thurow elaborates further:

“No significant group of human beings has ever lived in an individualistic state of nature. No set of individual savages ever got together to decide to form a government in their own self-interest. Government or social organization has existed as long as humankind has existed. Instead of existing first and being subordinated to obtain social order, [p. 276] individuality is a direct product of [our] social order. Over time individuals have gradually gained rights vis-à-vis the community rather than giving up some of their individual rights in order to gain the benefits of community. Social values informed individual values and not the reverse. Individuality is a product of community rather than something that must be sacrificed to community” (Thurow 1998: 275-276).

Well said! Others in different fields and from different perspectives identify the same error underlying capitalism, as I mentioned in an earlier post on obsolete “Zombie Ideas.” To illustrate his point Thurow points to the Dark Ages.

“In the Dark Ages the public was squeezed out by the private. … In our societies just as in the Dark Ages, the private is gradually squeezing out the public. … Almost by definition feudalism is public power in private hands. … In the Dark Ages as now, there was no vision of how one made a better life. … Today there is a similar lack of vision. Something is going wrong, but no one knows how to fix it” (p.164-167).

But maybe we do know how to fix it. Thurow doesn’t say in so many words that the mistaken view of human nature as naturally violent, self-interested, greedy, and chaotic that he catalogues is an—maybe the major—underlying cause behind the dysfunction we see in our Western democratic capitalist countries. But based on what he does write it’s certainly fair to ask whether, finally, this error has caught up with us? A case could be made. It is, after all, a fundamental error of thought and judgment—a wrong, limited, and we can now say ignorant view of what we humans are and can be. Problems could show up in various ways in any economy or society built up around such an error. Thurow himself documents such many problems throughout his book, and at least suggests this mistaken idea of human nature as a root cause:

“What is the story that capitalism tells to the community to hold the community together when capitalism explicitly denies the need for community? Capitalism postulates only one goal—an individual interest in maximizing personal consumption. But individual greed simply isn’t a goal that can hold any society together in the long run” (p. 257).

Greed & Fear

A key part of capitalism’s mistaken view of human nature is the notion that blind greed not only defines the natural human condition but ultimately is a good. Everyone striving and competing for themselves drives Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” of the market, and, so the theory goes, in the end benefits everyone. (Everyone, that is, except the marginalized, drug-addicted, and homeless who seem to become more numerous on our streets every day, and those in the underdeveloped corners of the world economy. Capitalist ideology not only justifies extreme inequality on the one hand, and the ever more visible homeless on the streets of the world’s richest countries on the other; the visible homeless also serve a purpose. They introduce another fear factor, another motivator for other citizens to work hard and conform. Who wants to live, and die, like that?)

Based on its theory of human nature, capitalism runs on greed and fear. Like other socioeconomic systems it creates self-fulfilling prophecies whereby its members, at least in much of their public and work lives, respond to those ideas and the actions they motivate that define it as a system. We humans, swimming in our seas of ideas and knowings and beliefs, make the culture that makes us. We need a better story to tell ourselves about who we are.

A Better Story

Fundamentally, then, wrong thoughts based on inadequate knowledge add up to misunderstandings of human nature that result in problematic and even dangerous outcomes. We need a different, more accurate, and better story to tell ourselves about ourselves, about who we are. Fortunately, we already have that better story—one that’s empirically-based, authoritative and complete. It comes from anthropology, history, biology, systems theory, and other up-to-date sciences that correct the mistaken view of human nature that capitalism is based on.

So, according to modern science what is that better story? That question takes us back to the beginning of this essay. What really ultimately makes us human? We can now be sure that capitalism has it wrong. It isn’t our drive to accumulate or win or dominate—you find those drives way down on the evolutionary scale. What makes us human is our ability to think and learn and feel and value, to strive to be better, to care for others. To paraphrase Thurow, our human nature isn’t bestial, it’s cultural.

There are consequences to designing our way of life on that foundation of wrong ideas that underlie the capitalist system. That’s a harsh reality, but it is our reality. No invisible hand, no mechanistic economic or political system, no distant God, no pre-ordained destiny, will save us from ourselves. We have to design our own cultural and social and economic systems that make us who we are; and if they are to reverse the dangerous social, economic, and environmental trends we see today, they will have to be based not on false ideas of human nature motivated by greed and self-interest, but rather on what most makes us human: our intelligence and moral sensibilities.

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Human Nature in Nature Blog Politics

The Twisty Language of Politics: What Does Being “Liberal” or “Conservative” or “Neoliberal” Mean?

Like everyone else who thinks or talks or writes about current politics, words like “liberal,” “conservative,” “liberalism,” “neoliberal,” fly glibly from my tongue or off my keyboard.  It’s just about impossible to talk or write, or even think about current politics without them.

But what do they mean?  Different things for different folks, evidently.  At least, they have very different emotional charge depending on who uses them in what context—so much so that communication across political divides often seems difficult or impossible. Today many “conservatives,” for instance, make “liberal” a dirty word, almost a curse. (In recent decades an ascendant “conservative” movement made the term so negatively loaded or ambiguous that many who might call themselves “liberal” substitute “progressive.”)

But on the other side, “liberals” in turn often view “conservative”or especially “neoconservative” in an equally negative light.  Esteemed political theorist Wendy Brown (University of California at Berkeley) finds 

"a left political moralizing impulse that wants everything the right stands for to be driven by nefariousness, smallness, or greed, and everything we do to be generously minded and good, an impulse that casts Us and Them in seamless and opposing moral-political universes.”

 

Conflict and Confusion, Doubt and Disorder

Picture by nettlebee, downloaded from Pixaby.com 2018-07-29

In the United States our political language has become so bent and twisty, so much a language of emotion rather than meaning, of reaction rather than reason, that we’ve just about lost our ability to communicate with each other across political divides.  I’ve known families who can’t even talk politics around the table.  Instead of reaching for agreement, or at least for understanding the other guy’s position enough to enjoy the challenge of honest debate, they get mad.  To keep the peace, they make politics a taboo topic at the table.

♠

Manufacturing Doubt, Creating Controversy.  True, politics is conflictual—a contact sport, as it were.  And of course the language of politics reflects discord as well as causes it.  But any game needs rules. On the larger political stage, outright disrespect for truth, and cynically manipulating meanings to create social division and conflict for the sole purpose of exploiting them, are out-of-bounds if we want a functional democracy. There is that larger context to be considered.  I’ll get to some of my own ideas on that later.  But for now, let’s look at some definitions beginning with the words “liberal,” and “neoliberal.”

Definitions are boring, I know.  But in today’s politics, it’s a place to start. Words matter, and these words that define our political life are important.  We should come to terms with them (pun intended). Getting more clarity in our language can help to head off those who would manufacture doubt and create controversy for their own ends.  Besides, the key terms we’re looking at here open windows to the modern soul, and to some of the complexity and perplexity of our time.

As we’ll see, what these words refer to is either broadly misunderstood (in the case of“liberal”), or almost invisible (in the case of “neoliberal”—although it now defines our culture, our world).  That may seem like a strong claim, but read on and you’ll see what I mean.  We’ll never get full agreement these terms, not in my lifetime; but exploring them is useful anyway.

The Word “Liberal”

My old (1981) three-volume Webster’s dictionary has a large page of dense type devoted to the term. In the realm of politics, “liberal” refers to a political party devoted to “ideals of individual esp. economic freedom, greater participation in government…and the reforms necessary to achieve these objectives.” And again, a person who is “an adherent or advocate of liberalism, esp. in terms of individual rights and freedom from arbitrary authority.”

That sounds like a good thing.  “Liberal,”“liberalism” are terms that stand generally opposed to centralized, authoritarian or feudalistic societies. Valuing the individual and personal freedom is the core of liberal ideology; but it leaves lots of leeway for different ideas about how to put it into practice, as we will see.

Going beyond thumbnail definitions, the on-line Encyclopaedia Britannica has a good overview.  It begins with a concise definition of liberalism as that “political doctrine that takes protecting and enhancing the freedom of the individual to be the central problem of politics.” Free markets are part of that; but depending on how they are set up and administered, markets also readily concentrate wealth and power.  The resulting inequality and poverty and their accompanying social ills veer the other way, eroding individual freedom.  Some liberals—those who really do focus on the freedom and well-being of individuals—think that governments have a legitimate role to play in protecting individual freedoms against market excess.

The Encyclopaedia’s accompanying brief article on neoliberalism spells that out. “Liberalism,”it explains, “evolved over time into a number of different (and often competing) traditions.” Liberals of all stripes believe in market freedom, a strong private sphere generally, and limits on governmental power, but they have developed contrasting views on the role of democratic government. Classical liberals who focus on market freedoms would cut government to a bare minimum—just enough to keep order and enforce market rules.  (At least, that’s what they say; not necessarily what they do).  But…

“Since the late 19th century, however, most liberals have insisted that the powers of government can promote as well as protect the freedom of the individual. According to modern liberalism, the chief task of government is to remove obstacles that prevent individuals from living freely or from fully realizing their potential. Such obstacles include poverty, disease, discrimination, and ignorance.”

In short, until recently modern liberalism was evolving toward greater latitude for democratically implemented intervention to protect individuals from the worst effects and excesses of free-market capitalism. This was a positive, evolutionary movement within the liberal tradition that kept the original focus on individual well-being as its guiding principle.  As the Encyclopaedia further explains,

Modern liberalism developed from the social-liberal tradition, which focused on impediments to individual freedom—including poverty and inequality, disease, discrimination, and ignorance—that had been created or exacerbated by unfettered capitalism and could be ameliorated only through direct state intervention.“

It became clear that unconstrained markets can run counter to the original basic liberal focus on expanding the sphere of freedom and well-being for individuals and families.  When the market sector relentlessly concentrates wealth and power, the “free market” becomes oppressive in its own right—as much or perhaps even more so than a strong democratic government that some free market enthusiasts oppose.

Corporations, the dominant free market institution—some of which grow larger than many governments—evolve under market opportunities and pressures (which are themselves creatures of government legislation and regulation) into huge top-down organizations that become the antithesis of the democratic ideal.  As they grow, some large aggressive corporations use their ever-increasing wealth and power to shape government agendas in ways that further their accumulation of yet more wealth and political power.

The Words “Neoliberal,” “Neoliberalism”

Now, what about neoliberalism? I wrote a little about the moral burdens of this now dominant ideology last time, and about some of the flawed “zombie ideas.” behind it in the post before that.  Now we’ll take a brief look at what a couple of very smart people say about neoliberalism’s conflictual relationship with democracy, and a little about its history.

This now dominant offshoot of classical liberalism represents a retreat back to an extreme anti-government stance that takes “market freedom” as its highest value, even over the freedom and well-being of individuals and families, or even of society, or the nation.  And just as before, when it became actual policy and got enacted as law, today’s version of market fundamentalism—marching under the banner of neoliberalism—leads to extreme inequality which ultimately can only be anti-democratic.

Political philosopher Wendy Brown has written an article that compares and contrasts neoliberalism and neoconservatism. You can find a lot written on neoliberalism, but this is one of the most deeply insightful discussion that I have seen, and is readily available on-line with the above link. I’ll summarize a few points, but recommend that you read the article for yourself.  You might have to go over a few passages more than once and look up some words (I did), but it’s worth it if you want to understand what’s happening in our world today.

Neoliberalism, according to Brown, is a form of government based on “market rationality” instead of on democratic principles. “ Equality, universality, political autonomy and liberty, citizenship, the rule of law, a free press” says Brown (p. 696) are the basic elements of political democracy that neoliberalism challenges or replaces “with its alternative principles of governance” based on economic principles and values. Although it’s all about the economy, neoliberalism is not just about the economy: it’s a philosophy of human society and culture at large.

Neoliberalism has been the dominant political philosophy implemented by U.S. administrations, both Republican and Democrat, over the last nearly four decades. It has also been sold to, or rammed down the throats of, other nations around the world. “Every age has an order, and ours is a neoliberal one,” says commentator Umair Haque.  Haque goes on to list five costs of neoliberalism, including economic stagnation, rising inequality, and “authoritarianism and extremism.”  

It’s indisputable that these problems have been on the rise over the past few decades.  In my mind, though, it is an open question whether neoliberalism is cause or consequence, or (as is generally the case in human affairs and other complex systems) both.  Either way it is implicated in them, and as it moves from being a fringe radical economic philosophy to governing principle—when it actually shapes government policy and legal decision- making—neoliberalism betrays the principles of liberal democracy.

That’s become crystal clear during the last four decades in which it has been the standard model.  Substituting market principles and values for democratic ones, the real social and cultural effects of neoliberalism are undemocratic, if not downright anti-democratic.  That’s ironic, since the founding aims of the movement, as stated, included advancing political freedom and the open society, and not just free market ideals.  A brief historical overview will help make sense of this paradox.  

So, just how did neoliberalism get a foothold among legal and political leaders, and then become the dominant paradigm, the prevailing conceptual frame, for setting policy and making governing decisions—for re-making Western culture in the image of the capitalist market?  And when did this happen?  David Harvey addresses these and related questions in his A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2006).  

Neoliberalism became ascendant in Britain with the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979, and in the United States with Ronald Reagan in 1980.  Thatcher and Reagan shared a common right-wing political philosophy, and became fast friends and allies.  Augusto Pinochet, backed by the U.S., brutally implemented neoliberal policy in Chile during the 1980s.

While the neoliberal version of classical liberalism became dominant only in the 1980s with Thatcher, Reagan, and Pinochet leading the pack, the ground-work was being laid for some time.  As described above, neoliberalism’s roots go back to the classical market-oriented liberalism of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  Those ideas were revived and reworked in the later 1900s by economist Friedrich Hayek and others who opposed not just Marxism and various forms of authoritarian government, but also Keynesian economics.  Keynesianism held that government can and should actively manage the market economy as needed, and became the standard economic model after the Great Depression until the 1970s.

Hayek convened a prestigious group of economists and philosophers to discuss and support his ideas, and begin articulating and spreading the basic tenets of what became neoliberalism.  They first met in 1947 at a Swiss resort called Mont Pelerin, and the group became known as the Mont Pelerin Society.   Prominent members included Milton Friedman, philosopher Karl Popper (for a time), Arthur F. Burns (of the U.S. Federal Reserve), and George Stigler, among others.  Growing numbers of conservative think-tanks often lavishly funded by wealthy donors followed in the wake of Mont Pelerin.  When the Keynesian consensus broke down under the oil shocks and high inflation of the 1970s, neoliberalism was poised to fill the gap.

Hayek strongly influenced Margaret Thatcher.  In 1979 Thatcher’s election brought to the office of the Prime Minister of Britain an inflexible commitment to neoliberal ideas.  Thatcher had, writes David Harvey in A Brief History of Neoliberalism (pp. 22-23),

“a fierce determination to have done with the institutions and [p.23] and political ways of the social democratic state that had been consolidated in Britain after 1945…. There was, she famously declared, ‘no such thing as society, only individual men and women’—and, she subsequently added, their families. All forms of social solidarity were to be dissolved in favour of individualism, private property, personal responsibility, and family values. The ideological assault along these lines that flowed from Thatcher’s rhetoric was relentless. ‘Economics are the method’, she said, ‘but the object is to change the soul.”

Again we see that neoliberalism as it developed became much more than an economic ideology or practice.  It puts in place as the governing principle of human social life an entire philosophy and culture based on fundamentalist free-market principles.  

Neoliberalism slid into place as a comprehensive and ubiquitous cultural world-view—so much so that it virtually defines our present reality.  Seeing the world through that particular lens, we don’t recognize it as one option among others. “So pervasive has neoliberalism become,” writes commentator George Monbiot,

“that we seldom even recognise it as an ideology. We appear to accept the proposition that this utopian, millenarian faith describes a neutral force; a kind of biological law, like Darwin’s theory of evolution. But the philosophy arose as a conscious attempt to reshape human life and shift the locus of power.”

Discussion & Conclusion: Liberalism & Neoliberalism

You can begin to appreciate the confusion of terms here: “liberal,” “classical liberal,” “progressive liberal,” “neoliberal.” (And we haven’t even gotten to “conservative” and“neoconservative”yet).  What to do? Here’s one small terminological suggestion regarding the terms classical liberal and neoliberal.  Since these closely related philosophies elevate and value the freely operating market above all other considerations—even, one might say, making it a fetish—let’s call them variants of “market fundamentalism.”  This seems to me to be the most descriptive and apt term to encompass or sum up what they’re really about.  Neoliberalism is the absolutist and now dominant “brand” of liberalism defined by its free market-fundamentalism.

In the bigger picture, then, political debates within modern societies actually occur between different versions of liberalism.  This is the insight of another perceptive thinker, the great Scottish social and political philosopher, Alasdair MacIntyre, in his 1988 book, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?  “The contemporary debates within modern political systems,” he writes (p. 392), “are almost exclusively between conservative liberals, liberal liberals, and radical liberals. There is little place…for putting liberalism itself in question.” Not surprising, if you consider that liberalism is a defining feature of the culture of modernity (but more on that another time too).

 

 

 

 

 

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Human Nature in Nature Blog Politics

Election 2016: An Unnatural Disaster—Some Concluding Thoughts

Head Scratching.

A lot of us are still scratching our heads. What, really, happened to bring about the unnatural disaster that the U.S. election 2016 is? How did Donald Trump get to be President of the United States? It’s hard not to keep worrying at it, like an irritating itch. So, one more time: Here’s some concluding thoughts that venture into some of the foggier bottomlands of American politics.

Why Are People Angry?  One Big Picture View.

First, one big picture view of the problem.   Trump is a climax of sorts, of the neoliberal craziness that began to worm its way into the center of our political and economic life with Reagan and Thatcher in the 1980s.  That anti-government, privatize everything mindset continues to wreak incalculable damage in the Anglo-American world.  With the economic collapse of 2008 and its aftermath, disastrously rising inequality, and now Brexit in Britain and Trump in the U.S., the chickens are coming home to roost.

Among other things, under the reign of neoliberalism in our politics special interests “captured” the establishments of both mainstream political parties.  People are getting it. And they’re mad.

Political campaigns in our current system need a great deal of money to win. Under current law, big corporations and the wealthy families who control them can front that money.  In the name of “free speech,” moneyed interests enjoy undue—and undemocratic—influence.

That makes both Republican and Democratic establishments even more beholden to big business and wealthy contributors. The neoliberal mindset that informs both party establishments’ economic and trade policies reflects their dependence on wealthy interests who disproportionately benefit from those policies.  This especially disappoints and angers traditionally Democratic voters who look to the their party to represent working families trying to make ends meet.

In the pain and chaos neoliberal experiments leave in their wake, people become yet more vulnerable to demagogues preaching even more extreme versions of the same failed ideas. That’s the simple story, and the irony, of the 2016 U.S. election.  But things are more complicated (they always are), so let’s consider more closely those people who voted for Trump and their various reasons why they did.

 

But Who?  Who Voted for Trump?

It’s become a cliché: People who voted for Trump want change. They’ve been left behind by the forces of global capitalism—by the outsourcing of jobs, by automation. They’re being squeezed, pushed down, by the “inevitable” concentration of wealth and growing inequality. They can’t any longer see a better life ahead for their children. They’re angry. And because they’re angry they buy into Trump’s populist rhetoric. They hope beyond hope that he will somehow address the very real problems in America that they sense and feel in their gut more than understand.

There is truth in that caricature, and it’s truth that we all need to pay attention to. They believed Trump when he said he would bring back a better America that they’re losing. We can all relate to that desire, even if we don’t think that Trump is the answer to their prayers. But they aren’t the whole picture.

If some voters, however deludedly, hope that Trump will set right real national problems in our society and economy that directly affect them, others just want to strike out, shake things up. Trump channels anger, and he drew people out to vote their rage. Trump channels fear and hatred of others, and his promises to build walls drew people out to vote their fear.

Yet others consciously voted for Trump as an “agent of chaos” who would “burn down democracy,” who would dismantle our established institutions of effective government.  Looking at Trump’s early appointments and actions, this may be the group that’s most closely getting what they want. And then there are the “alt-righters” who want to reel history backward beyond political correctness, feminism, the sixties, and even farther back to an old-new “age where men will be real men again, and women will be really grateful.” This ‘dark enlightenment,'” writes Laurie Penny, “rumbles alongside a massive revival in millenarian end-times fanaticism among the Evangelical Christians who overwhelmingly voted for a man some of them believe is the literal antichrist who will hasten the final return of Jesus and his arse-kicking angels to sweep the righteous to their reward.”

Those believers voted for a climax of evil out of which they think must arise an age (for them, but not for me) of endless bliss. Not very Christian of them, was it?

Yet others more cynical, smarter, lighter on their feet, and perhaps with large resources already, count on being able to cash in on the chaos. “Disaster Capitalism” at its best. Not very patriotic of them, though, is it?

 

The Sickness in American Civil Life.

Until now it was easier to dismiss the crazies and the evilly venal. They’re always with us, but thankfully usually more on the fringes and under rocks. This time, however, Trump not only pulled them out into the center of our public life but also drew many other more ordinary Americans into the same orbit. A range of Trump voters extends from duped to devilish. That that range has grown wide enough to actually elect Donald Trump President of the United States speaks to a spreading sickness in American civil life.

 

It’s a Paradox

Of course, in the real world Trump will make all the problems driving the turbulent, frothy tide of anger and despair that washed him into the White House incomparably worse. He is the ultimate agent of those special interests who have been working overtime to sell America down the river.

Trump himself symbolizes inequality. He parades his outsized wealth and publicly exhibits some of the worst, crassest, character structures and outlooks that can be associated with it. He does not represent the strong values that make Americans proud. He openly lies and cheats and gropes women. He’s friends with Russia’s Putin (of all people!), whose hackers meddled in our election to get Trump elected.  And now his cabinet picks have ties to Russian oligarchs.  All this was (and is) on the daily news, and broadcast around the world. The only positive value Trump represents is the one he publicly flaunts: economic success.

But even beyond all that, he’s poised to lead us in the same wrong direction as we’ve been going, that brought about the very problems that Trump voters want fixed. How does all that make sense?

 

There’s Even More to the Story

Selling Out Democracy

We should scratch our heads again. What made so many Americans vulnerable to Trump’s twisted message?  There has to be yet more to the story. Many hurt financially, as we’ve said, and the financial crisis of 2008 made worse for a lot of families. Media corporations that gorge on public controversy have been whipping up partisan frenzy. The commercialization of everything running rampant over the last several decades leaves individuals and families feeling disconnected and vulnerable.

Partisan warriors who ideologically hate government found a home in the Republican Party and gained control of government. To the best of their abilities they’ve been dismantling and crippling government programs that help people, and selling off the remains under the banner of “privatization.” But the “free market” that our democratic government is being sold into isn’t really free, and it hasn’t been working well for most people.

 

However inarticulately, on both the right and the left ordinary good people realized that their “representative government” no long represents them. They felt that the American government no longer represents AMERICA—America in the big sense: the America of freedom, of equality of opportunity, of liberty and justice for all.

Of course, that America never really existed, but we’ve been working on it; we’ve kept much of the dream alive; we’ve even made some progress: abolished slavery, gained more equal rights for women, established social safety nets however weak and tattered, instituted protections for vulnerable women and children, guarded the foundations of free speech and religious freedom.

But that America—the values it stands for, the principles written into its Constitution—is being sold down the river. And beyond their partisan differences, both parties are to blame. Voters figured that much out: Special interests—interests that don’t have America’s interest nor those of everyday Americans at heart—”captured” the establishments of both mainstream political parties.   People are getting it. And they’re mad.

Without better, more critical, more informed understanding (and how are they going to get that from our current mass media?) some guy who channels that anger, who promises to “make America great again,” who blames immigrants and brands refugees as murderers and rapists, who claims he will renegotiate international trade deals in America’s advantage and re-establish U.S. economic dominance, has a kind of twisted appeal. Much the same thing has been happening across the Atlantic with Brexit.

 

Buying a Bill of Goods

A lot of people in the United States have been sold a bill of goods. That’s the only way all the evident paradoxes of the 2016 election make sense. It didn’t happen all at once. It was one thing leading to another. That way, slowly, the whole groundwork of our society and culture shifts—and like the frog in a pan of slowly heating water, suddenly it’s too late.

So, we have to go back several decades to get a better sense of how the fiasco of 11-08-2016 unfolded—back to some early Republican party initiatives that mobilized deep-seated resentments to get votes. By then, the Republican party, at its core, had become the party that reliably represents business interests.

 

The Southern Strategy.

Confederate flag

The notorious “southern strategy” of Nixon and Reagan successfully drew many southern traditionally Democratic voters into the Republican fold by appealing to persistent racial tensions and lingering resentments from the American Civil War. (It’s easier believe if you’ve been there. We drove through parts of the rural South a couple of years ago, where Confederate flags proudly fly over people’s yards.) Manipulated emotions pulled often disadvantaged people into the party that reliably represents big business.

 

Emotions, Fears, Values.

Framing Public Debate.  The same thing was happening in other spheres of American life. At the same time as ideologically conservative interests and their extremely wealthy donors (what economist Joseph Stiglitz calls the 1 percent) worked to effectively capture the machineries of government, they also mounted a broad offensive to capture and frame public debate in their own terms.

Wealthy donors and corporations aggressively nurtured the growing conservative movement through the 1980s and ’90s, and into this century. They funneled money into right-wing media (talk radio), think tanks and strategists, and right-leaning professors. They marshaled armies of lobbyists to represented their interests, and of course bankrolled the campaigns of politicians who advanced their policies.

 

Bringing Universities to Heel.  They also worked to bring the universities themselves to heel. They cut public support for higher education and stepped into the breach with corporate funding, private enterprise, and much higher, even crippling, student tuition fees. Education at public universities that used to be nearly free when I attended now carries a hefty price tag.  Many students take minimum wage jobs to get through college, and even then graduate to working life with heavy debt. (It worked. Not much in the way of ’60s revolutionary fervor on campuses these days. American public universities today, often run more like corporations than institutes of learning, are not what they were when I was a graduate student in the late 1960s and early ’70s.)

 

Manipulating Emotions & Values.  As with so many successful sales campaigns, this one plays on emotions, fears, values. Republican strategists drew in social and religious conservatives by seeming to embrace their principled and deeply emotion-laden opposition to hot-button issues like abortion, and by championing “family values”—which among other things, for some people, means opposing gay marriage. (I wrote more about all this back in May 2016.)

They also appealed to other values like macho individualism, and to deep strains of anti-intellectualism in American life. They exploited regional differences (heartland communities against “eastern elites”). They called to generalized working-class resentment of impersonal controlling forces, symbolized in the cartoonish figures of crooked lawyers and venal politicians (many examples here of the pot calling the kettle black). Finally (as we just saw with the Southern Strategy), they appealed to persistent racism and xenophobia rooted in history and ongoing economic insecurity.

Even as far-right conservative interests and their super-wealthy backers got control of government, they worked hard to focus public resentment and blame on government. By blaming government, they divert attention away from themselves and the outsized concentrations of the nation’s wealth they were scooping up.

The more wealth the 1 percent control, the better they can game the system to get even more wealth. The more they control government, the less government meets the needs of ordinary people, whose resentment of government grows. Elected government fails the “legitimate expectations and aspirations,” of voters, as George Soros puts it, who then “become disenchanted with prevailing versions of democracy and capitalism.” It’s a vicious circle. Democracy itself has fallen into crisis, as Trump’s electoral win illustrates. (All the more so, given Putin’s involvement, and Trump’s loss in the popular vote count by nearly three million votes).

 

Basically, the bill of goods I just summarized aims to divide rather than unite. It aims to set one side against another rather than to build a better life for every American on common ground. It aims to further the interests of a few at the expense of the many.

(UPDATE, 2016-03-31: And now, March 31, 2018, more has come to light. The news is full of another story that further reveals further corruption behind Trump’s election and Brexit.  The story is complex, but here’s the gist as I get it:  The data-mining firm, Cambridge Analytica, headed by alt-right operator and Trump henchman Steve Bannon, illegally harvested personal information from more than 50 million Facebook users to target swing voters, preying on their preferences and emotions to nudge them toward voting for Trump in the U.S., and for Brexit in the U.K. https://qz.com/1240039/the-cambridge-analytica-scandal-is-confusing-this-timeline-will-help/

Both votes, as we know, were very close. Christopher Wylie, the whistle-blower who blew the case open testified before a U.K. parliamentary committee that Brexit might not have passed without that manipulation.)  

By Their Fruits (or Faults) Shall Ye Know Them.

Runaway Inequality & Voter Anger

Here’s the upshot: The 2016 election’s tone, its ugliness, its outcome, all took place in a particular context. It’s a context that didn’t just happen. It wasn’t inevitable. It resulted from policy decisions. Those decisions, based on the political snake oil of neoliberal ideology, benefited few and hurt many.  And now we see more clearly how manipulative and outright illegal political scheming also plays into the picture.

Growing inequality hand-in-hand with rising despair over government’s inability or lack of will to fix the problem, or even to do much of anything positive for the country, helped make voters more vulnerable to appeals that fanned their fear, anger, and “nativist” anti-immigrant biases.  All this set the tone for the 2016 presidential race.

 

Whatever party holds power in whatever office, people see their elected government stymied with gridlock or wallowing in indifference when it comes to positive measures to improve their lives.  This while it actively pursues trade deals and other legislation that benefit the already wealthy and their transnational corporations.  No wonder that so many working and middle class voters feel anger and frustration with the establishments of both mainstream parties—anger that Trump appealed to and focused.

 

Ideas–>Policies–>Consequences.

When you look directly at it, the bill of goods I just described, that so many Americans bought into, is not even credible. And, the proof is in the pudding. It fails.

It leads to the very failures that make so many Americans disillusioned and angry. And yet, many people still don’t seem to connect the ideas with the policies with the consequences.  Ideas–>Policies–>Consequences. Why? There has to be a deeper underlying mind-set, world-view, or philosophy at work that fuddles the issue and makes the bill of goods still seem believable in the face of its evident failures.

What ideas about human nature and society made that bill of goods ever even seem reasonable? What notions or ideology underlies the political maneuvering, the policies and

Image of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher at the White House.
‘No alternative’ … Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher at the White House. Photograph: Rex Features. Courtesy of Guardian News & Media Ltd

laws, that spurred galloping runaway inequality into its current harmful headlong course to begin with? What guiding principles set up today’s world?   It can all be summed up in a word that has become familiar to many over the last few decades: neoliberalism.

 

Neoliberalism—Political Snake Oil.

George Monbiot (click on the above link) describes neoliberalism as “The ideology at the root of all our problems…that, for most of us, has no name.” It has been assimilated as common sense; it is invisible and pervasive. There seems to be no alternative, and in all this is its power. Yet in reality it’s only as influential as we make it or let it be. Pedaled by far-right and moneyed interests, neoliberalism is a shabby bill of goods wrapped in concealing but flimsy tissues of invisibility and inevitability.

The neoliberal ideology, and the ideas it is rooted in, have done and are doing incalculable damage to our world, our societies, our selves. It is political snake oil, and we’ve bought it—along with much of the rest of the world.

But I think its time is about up. It has failed.  Dramatically.  Neoliberal thinking has reigned as a philosophy of government over the last three or four decades, and it has not brought about a better world. In fact, it has made thing immeasurably worse.

Even more, the underlying ideas it is based on, that justify it as a philosophy of government to begin with, have gone defunct. Neoliberalism roots in a view of human nature that belongs to a bygone era.  We know better now. We need to catch up in our politics and economics, to where we are with today’s more advanced understandings of human nature in nature.

But such deep cultural change takes time. That’s the problem.  Climate change, species extinction, resource depletion (to name a few) aren’t waiting for us to get smarter.  With so many serious, unprecedented, and developing problems facing today’s world, time is getting short.

(Meanwhile, if you want to read up on neoliberalism in more depth, I can recommend David Harvey’s books, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, and The Enigma of Capital, looking at what’s behind the recent collapse of the housing and capital markets in 2008.  And I’ll have just a little more to say about neoliberalism as political snake oil in my next post)

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