American Conservatism Is Undemocratic

A much more appropriate version of the American flag.

Recently Thomas Frank, author of What’s the Matter with Kansas and The Wrecking Crew was on Bill Moyers’ Journal where the two had an outstanding conversation about contemporary American conservatism. If you have twelve minutes to spare at some point, I highly recommend watching it.

The main thrust of Frank’s argument in The Wrecking Crew is that American conservatives want to create a culture of government failure: It’s a good point of departure for what I am going to discuss:

What conservatism in this country is about is government failure. Conservatives talk about government failure all the time, constantly. And conservatives, when they're in power deliver government failure…And sometimes from design...

Not always from design, but often. The Department of Labor, for example, the conservatives when they’re in office, routinely stuff the Department of Labor full of ideological cranks. And people that don't believe in the mission.

And the result is that it doesn’t—they don’t enforce anything. Towards the very end of the Bush-era, the Department of Labor had been whittled down. It was a shell of its former self. And at the very end of the Bush Administration, one of the government accountability programs did a study of the Department of Labor. And, I’m smiling, because it's kind of amusing. It was like an old spy magazine prank.

They made up these horrendous labor violations around the country and phoned them in as complaints to the Department of Labor to see what they would do, okay? They responded to one out of ten of these, you know, where they called in as like, “Well, we got, you know, kids working in a meat packing plant during school hours. You know, can you, you going to do anything about that?” “No.” Or you look at something like the Securities and Exchange Commission. These guys are supposed to be regulating, you know, the investment banks, okay? Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, that sort of thing. These guys were so under-funded, and not just under-funded, but you had people in charge of it who didn’t believe in regulating Wall Street.

As I noted in my post about the conservative backlash to Howard Zinn’s The People Speak on History, government is obviously geared toward maintaining the status quo. It will not change unless pressured to do so by the masses. While we should always be skeptical of government, we should also realize that government can be a positive outlet through which to exercise the power of the people.

American conservatives will have none of this. They are concerned with people power only insofar as it will help elect politicians who want to make government—and thus by extension the general population—virtually irrelevant. In this way, contemporary American conservatism is extremely undemocratic, as it seeks to discredit or destroy the role of government even where it is welcomed as in the cases of social security or Medicare. As a corollary to this, what is termed the “free market” is understood by conservatives to be the be-all end-all of society. If only the government would get out of the way, they say, the market would provide us with everything we need.

Except they don’t want government totally out of the way. As a reservoir of taxpayer money for corporate subsidies and the Pentagon budget, conservatives very much want government involved in the “free market.” America’s military expenditures are a good illustration of this, and rarely do they come under fire from either party for being too high despite the fact that the U.S. military budget is about $600 billion more than the world’s second highest total, which belongs to China, a major U.S. trading partner. One of the worst kept secrets of the Pentagon budget is that its immense size has more to do with military Keynesianism and pork-barrel spending than national security. The lesson that many economists learned from World War II was that heavy government spending could lead to substantial economic growth. After the war, the way to keep up America’s wartime economic boom, they argued, was to keep arms expenditures relatively high even in peacetime. Over the next several decades, trillions of dollars in taxpayer money would be invested into the private sector for arms and technology. Many of the technological developments that came as a result of public funding turned out to be useful for civilian purposes as well as military, such as computers, the internet, cell phones, and GPS.

Standard free market principles dictate that when investment results in the successful and ongoing production of a commodity or service, the investors receive a return on the capital they provided toward that very end. But the “free market” envisioned by American conservatives is quite different. In this scenario, the taxpayers do not get a return in the traditional sense of the word, but rather an opportunity to simply purchase that which their money made possible—cell phones, computers, etc. Applying conservative “free market” principles on a smaller scale for a moment, imagine that your friend wants to start a restaurant and convinces you to invest say, $5,000 in startup capital. A year later, his restaurant is booming with business. When you ask him for a return on your investment, he tells you that you may stop by anytime during business hours to buy a nice meal and that this is your share of the spoils.

This is the exact same principle at work with the Pentagon budget.

Or take the now-forgotten misnamed Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005, incidentally passed by a Republican congress with Democratic support not long before the housing bubble collapse/foreclosure boom of 2007-08. A very anti-capitalist piece of legislation, this law makes it more difficult for individuals and businesses to file for bankruptcy under Chapter 7. Not surprisingly it was fervently supported by the credit industry who had been lobbying for a bill like it for years. Under this law, many debtors wishing to file for bankruptcy have had to file under Chapter 13 of the federal bankruptcy code, which requires that a certain percentage of the total debt be paid back within five years, rather than simply liquidating existing assets for repayment purposes as under Chapter 7.

Lending is an inherently risky endeavor. While some loans carry less risk than others, there is always the possibility of default. Lenders assume the risks in the hopes of reaping interest on the principal. Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn’t. Either way, free market principles dictate that it is up to the lenders to assess the risks involved and determine whether a loan would be a good investment. Free market principles also dictate that it is not up to the government to help investors recoup losses because they made bad loans. (A lesson unfortunately not recalled by Congress during the TARP vote.) In fact, now that they found themselves with stronger government-guaranteed protection from defaults, and with no provisions in the law for curtailing the issuance of predatory loans, creditors became even more cavalier in their lending, at least before the housing crisis.

These examples are typical of the conservative position of the role of government vis-à-vis the “free market.” Rather than the government having no role, as conservatives like to proclaim, time and again they have shown that they believe government should intervene in the markets, and always on the side of business. As such, American conservatives favor the “redistribution” of wealth to the already well-off through these and other mechanisms, such as tax cuts, which apparently in and of themselves constitute a comprehensive economic policy.

Regarding health care, one of the few coherent arguments against a government-run insurance option emanating from conservatives was that the government would be able to undermine private insurance because government doesn’t need to make a profit. And that’s absolutely correct. But what does that say about the state of American conservatism when Republicans can offer, as an actual argument, that even though the government can provide affordable health care to millions of Americans, such a program would be unfair because the private sector would not be able to compete? Here again we see the high priority given to markets by American conservatives: people have a right to profit from health insurance, but they don’t have a right to health insurance. And given medical costs, not having a right to health insurance essentially means not having a right to health.

The appearance of the “death panel” myth in the public discourse on health insurance last summer seemed quite effective in convincing some of the more ignorant citizens that the government is evil. Again, by extension, this means that democracy is evil. Implicit in the American conservative message is that the population has to be taken out of the equation, with their representatives serving only to dismantle the last vestiges of a once functioning democratic society in order to make way for the wonders of “capitalism.”

Of course, the U.S. doesn’t have capitalism. What we have instead is a corporatist system, which may very well be the inevitable sum of capitalism plus dysfunctional democracy. But conservatives are not concerned about the democratic deficit in American society. Indeed they welcome it. In their eyes, the people (government) have to get out of the way so the markets can do their thing, even if it means marginalizing the majority of the population.

- Max