I was in Phoenix over the weekend to help celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Poisoned Pen Bookstore and mark the launch of the short-story collection, Phoenix Noir. For those of you with thin skins, be proud of the cool new restaurants downtown. And that Barry Schoeneman of Men's Apparel Club, who sells the best suits for the lowest prices in America and has toughed out a retail-hostile downtown for more than 4 years, is moving to a bigger store uptown, but still in the central core. And if you care (I don't), there are still plenty of hip, skinny, rich people at Snottsdale nightclubs despite the overall depression. More gravel. Less shade. More vacant lots. Fewer completed projects. Light rail still succeeds (gloat). Yea, my hometown.
But what caught my attention most was not this or even another well-intentioned civic project rolled out in the Information Center. It was an article on the front of the Viewpoints section, beneath pieces trumpeting this well-intentioned project. It was headlined, "A rebuttal: Why I am a conservative," by the "school choice movement" activist lawyer Clint Bolick, who now has what seems to be a well-endowed sinecure at the local Krack-Pot "Think" Tank. I thought: Why is this a rebuttal? The reactionaries have won in Arizona and the efforts of the latest well-intentioned project will go nowhere. They, not Bolick, should be the rebuttal to the ruling reactionary/growth status quo. But it was just bad newspaper design. Bolick was chastising my former colleague Richard Nilsen who had the guts to write an op-ed saying why he was not a conservative. In Arizona this is an enterprise akin to trying to teach opera to pigs (it's futile because it can't be done and it irritates the pigs).
Read and enjoy. But the biggest problem with the argument is that the "conservatives" that rose to prominence after 1980, and especially 1994, didn't want to conserve. As Sam Tanenhaus makes clear in his new book, The Death of Conservatism, today's "conservatives" are radicals, with little connection to the Burkean conservatives who sought to conserve the best of the old, showed respect for tradition and custom, etc. But thanks to the fecklessness and corruption of the Democratic Party, these radicals still control the agenda.
Thus, Bolick can recycle the familiar right-wing talking points as brilliant original insights. Although he gave President Obama "the benefit of the doubt," the events of the past eight months have eliminated that naive trust in a "liberal." Bolick writes, "I wanted change, all right, but not to 'fundamentally transform' the nation that, despite its faults, is the greatest in all history."
This, of course, is the endlessly repeated meme of the well-funded, tightly disciplined right-wing propaganda machine. (Hell, they could have given me an endowed chair at the "Goldwater" Institute and I would have written the same thing, knowing the words to the song so well). This is what passes for the intellectual side of "conservatism" today, along with its screaming-scary talk radio brother. As usual, they cast themselves as the beleaguered defenders of freedom always about to be overrun by a tide of "liberalism" -- never mind that the right has been in power for the past three decades. The reality of the Obama presidency is better captured by Saturday Night Live and the less funny reality of trying to triage the monumental disasters left behind by George W. Bush, the only "movement conservative" ever to occupy the White House. So not much has changed. Most especially, the moneyed elites are still very much in charge of this SOCIALIST!!/fascist/communist/vegan hellhole that Obama has created. ("First they came for our cigarettes in bars, next they came for our text-messaging while doing 60...")
The dark irony will be lost on most Americans who live in a perpetual haze from television, ignorance of history, long driving and endless electronic distractions. The revolution has already happened.
"Fundamental change" is the M.O. of the "conservatives." They celebrate "creative destruction." They vehemently opposed many of the elements that built the triumphant America of the 20th century: the New Deal, Social Security, civil rights, voting rights, Medicare, Medicaid and the unions, progressive taxation, educational opportunity and other pillars that established the great American middle class. They also oppose the essential features of a healthy capitalism: competition, regulation, transparency, fairness and prevention of highly concentrated industries, cartels and monopolies. They are particularly hostile to the notion that government must stand as a counterweight for the average citizen against the power of big business and what FDR called "the economic royalists."
They would undo all this.
In fact, they have been at work on the project since 1981 with considerable success. The America I grew up in has been fundamentally changed and in virtually every case it has been for the worse. This change has not come from the fullness of time or an act of God, but from the public policies enacted by "conservatives" and the craven (and bought off) Democrats trying to appease the "conservatives."
Where were these supposed defenders of this great nation when Wal-Mart was destroying main street; when bad trade deals were devastating the Midwest; when the banksters got deregulated; when American wages were stagnating and benefits going away? Where were they when the backbone of mid-century America, the public school, was being destroyed by budget cuts (I know: blaming the teachers and their unions). No, they were fine with change of quite radical nature when it was going their way.
These "conservative" policies have been discredited in every instance by the facts on the ground. But a lazy and cowardly media can't get the story straight. The people's brains have been fried. The winners in this radically changed society seem to have the power to keep things moving in their direction. America did not melt down enough last fall to provoke real change -- which would actually be a counter-revolution against the radical remaking of our nation by the right.
Oh for President McCain, and, especially, Vice-President Palin.
Great post, Mr. Talton.
I am frequently amazed, almost embarrassed, by the callowness of conservative rhetoric today. Clint Bolick certainly doesn't disappoint:
"I've always been on the side of freedom. I just haven't realized until now that fighting for freedom-based change is profoundly conservative."
As opposed to those who are on the side of slavery, of course. Honestly, Lenin wouldn't dream of stooping to such puerility.
The question is, freedom for whom? The adherence to "freedom" as an abstract principle always seems to favor property rights when these come into conflict with constitutional freedoms such as those of speech and assembly.
Do workers have the right to freely organize unions, bargain collectively, and withhold their labor (e.g., strike), or do employers have the right, because they own the property where such activities take place, to fire those who attempt to organize fellow workers, to threaten workers with the loss of their jobs en masse if they should unionize, and to force workers to attend propaganda sessions where acts of intimidation and disinformation are practiced without restraint, while those seeking to educate their fellow workers are forbidden to conduct such activities on the premises?
Actions speak louder than words: rhetoric notwithstanding, what concrete actions do conservatives take to demonstrate their support for "freedom"? China and Mexico have plenty of paper freedoms: what determines freedom in practice is a government sufficiently empowered and funded to monitor and enforce such freedoms as a practical matter, despite the determined resistance of powerful private interests.
Instead, conservatives crippled the labor laws, nominated anti-labor ideologues to leadership positions in the very agencies charged with protecting the rights of workers, placed regulatory barriers in the way of those would would enforce labor rights and cut their funding, and saw to it that while complaints of labor law violations soared, judicial review and prosecutions for such violations were reduced to a trickle.
Conservatives also supported direct executive action against labor (e.g., Reagan) and supported the nomination or appointment of right-leaning activist judges bent on undermining labor rights, as well as the removal of those determined to respect those rights.
In the final analysis, conservatives support mainly freedom of exploitation: not enumerated in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights, but near and dear to their purses, er, hearts.
In fairness to Mr. Bolick (and as a point of accuracy) he appears to differ substantially from most of his fellow conservatives in opposing welfare for big business and the expansion of the national security state. In that he is quaintly regarded by most of today's Republicans, who understand the exigencies of politics: without a constituency of wealthy private interests to support them, they would have no power base: the days when they could appeal to Jim Crow sentiment are long gone, and the battle against homosexuals is not an appealing substitute. Like the demimonde they are coy but know the price of everything.
Posted by: Emil Pulsifer | October 05, 2009 at 06:01 PM
Speaking of The Beatles...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clE30lD2d4o
Posted by: Emil Pulsifer | October 05, 2009 at 06:59 PM
The right succeeded because they convinced enough "haves" that there was no reason to worry about the "have nots". Liberalism became defensive and then sclerotic. It could veto the worst excesses of the radical-right agenda but it no longer had any compelling arguments of its own. To an eerie extent, this paralleled the apogee and decline of America as an empire. Vietnam midwifed a syndrome where the greater the humiliation, the more weirdly compulsive the flag-waving became. The tax code and regulatory framework was the battlefield where the greatest damage was done but the culture war was the call to arms. Odd, then, that the culture is as vertiginously liberal as any time in our history. Straitlaced societies don't produce Glenn Becks. Maybe this is just an internal contradiction of a market economy where anything goes, including - ultimately - economic security.
In Europe, center-right parties have reclaimed power. Yet, there's no call to rollback social democracy. The safety net is secure, health care guaranteed, and the debate is not urban vs rural demographics so much as neo-liberals vs old-guard social democrats.
America nearly got there but race was the trench that stopped the advance. The American right could only win by inflaming racial bitterness. It won because it pitted Americans against one another along with their competing narratives. The South won this civil war, and its treacly sentimentalities are now unassailable "truths".
Obama's neo-liberalism is woebegone because there's no rallying battle-cry but just a whimpery "change" mantra. We're at this point because of specific historic events but most Americans don't know this history. They know the Limbaugh gloss on contemporary history and that cognitive dissonance is all the right needs to daze Joe Sixpack.
As we can see all around us, this is not going to end well. The "haves" will vote for policies that protect their assets and enclaves. Those outside will be increasingly at the mercy of a dysfunctional government. We did this to ourselves to spite the ordeal of change that was, paradoxically, our best hope.
Posted by: soleri | October 06, 2009 at 07:48 AM
Soleri wrote:
"In Europe, center-right parties have reclaimed power..."
This seems to be the dominant media meme in the United States, and yet, as a response to the German election it's rather misleading.
True, the SPD (Social Democrats) took a beating, losing 76 seats, and going into opposition for the first time in 11 years, but let's take a look at where those votes went.
The tally on the left:
The Alliance/Greens gained 17 seats. Die Linke (Left Party) gained 22 seats. So, more than half of the seats lost by the SPD went to parties further left of it. (Die Linke in particular, being composed of former Communists and another party "opposed to the neo-liberal concensus" formerly called the Labor and Social Justice Party before the merger.)
Now the tally on the right:
The CDU (Merkel's party) gained a total of 14 seats -- far less than Die Linke gained. The CSU ("sister party to the CDU") actually lost a seat. The big winner on the right is the FDP, which gained 32 seats. (The FDP is pro-business and wants tax cuts as well as "tax simplification", but opposes social conservatism.)
So, the left gained 39 seats and the right gained 47 seats. So, in fact the right gained only 8 seats in a 622 seat parliament (Bundestag).
Even that doesn't tell the whole story, because the size of the Bundestag (total number of seats) increased to 622 seats from 614 seats in the last election (2005), due to obscurities of the German election system involving something called "overhang seats". Note that the gain of seats on the right is exactly equal to the number of new Bundestag seats. I cannot claim a proper understanding of such arcane matters, but it's possible that some of the gains to the right coalition (now ruling) were the result of nothing more than technicalities. In any case, a shift of 8 votes scarcely indicates a sea change in German political attitudes.
The biggest difference is that the SPD has consistently refused to form a coalition with Die Linke, the largest left party after the SPD. So, instead of pulling together, the left has been pulling apart.
Also note that voter turnout was a record low (for Germany) of 70.8 percent. I don't know if, in Germany, apathetic voters are typically working class and thus more likely to be left-leaning (or at least, to have left-leaning class interests) as is the case in the United States.
Posted by: Emil Pulsifer | October 06, 2009 at 08:52 PM