From Tim Eagan at NYT a few days ago, the “Off Brand Presidency”
“[President Obama] campaigned for activist government, a less confrontational foreign policy, a business-friendly way to a green revolution. A liberal. Or, to use the term favored by those who are afraid of the lingering toxicity of that word – a progressive…President Barack Obama is making it safe to be a liberal again – and showing how meaningless such labels can be.
“His first lap reveals not so much about him as it does the country he governs: a nation willing to follow a man whose policies they may not fully believe in…In a recent Pew Center poll, Americans were asked to describe Obama in a single word; the top of the list was “intelligent.” Not black, which is what historians dwelled on. Not socialist, which is what the pickled cranks of the far right have called him. In his 100th-day news conference, Obama had a bit of my-burden-is-great tone, while going out of his way to reject cartoon liberalism. ‘I don’t want to run auto companies,” he said. ‘I don’t want to run banks. I’ve got two wars to run already.’”
Eagan is correct in all of his observations about President Obama. But I question him when he posits that the nation willingly follows “a man whose policies they may not fully believe in,” because that assumes that most people have considered his policies, confirmed themselves to skepticism regarding his policies, and then affirmed their willingness to “follow” the President’s agenda. Rather, I think the nation doesn’t give a care what the president’s policies are, nor what they portend in the general arrangement between individual rights and the state. Instead, the nation’s only desire is to see that its standard of living does not materially decline. This is not a true collective desire expressed by the exercise of popular sovereignty, but rather an individual and intensely narcissistic desire that happens to dominate among a broad majority of potential voters, and is expressed by omission of any demonstrated feeling whatsoever.
The many whom Eagan describes as being open-minded, are more likely simply apathetic. They have apathy, and many perhaps disdain, for the discussion that surrounds dualism of liberal/conservative or Republican/Democrat, and by extension are more or less apathetic to the whole social structure. I would bet that more people than Eagan would be estimate, would if pressed very readily admit that both political parties are generally corrupt, and beholden to the same interest: campaign contributions. However, these same people remain generally apathetic because there is no legitimate third party, and there is no loud cry for one. There was an extremely high level of interest in the 2008 Presidential election, but it was popular in the same way that a sporting event was, it captured the hearts of the voters–but not their minds.
Most people only participate and change course when they get uncomfortable or frightened. For instance, the Democrats took the legislature in 2006 because Iraq was going very badly, and that scared people and disturbed them. And Obama was slightly trailing McCain in 2008 in electoral votes, but when Lehman failed in September that scared people, made them uncomfortable, then Obama surged ahead and never looked back. So when we do get change, its really just apoplectically switching from one bought party to another–its never been a studied, carefully considered shift in the national values, rather its been a reaction to the fear of a decline in material standards. Is this tyranny of the apathetic majority?
Another example of apathy: You can’t find 100 people outside of the CPA lobby that are advocates of the current income tax system, but do you ever think its going to change? We have a super majority of citizens who agree that the tax code is damn inefficient , and wasteful, and too complex, but we can’t tackle the problem. Even the Sec. of the Treasury couldn’t get his shit straight. We are the only country that has to figure this stuff out for ourselves, rather than getting billed by the government. We have a super-majority of people who want it changed, but they don’t really want it changed, because it might be uncomfortable to do away with the loopholes and write offs that the current byzantine structure provides. The many, the masses, the voters are simply concerned with being able to keep up a certain level of consumption and access to the material fruits of the debt economy, and whatever policies most quickly deliver the maintenance of their standard of consumption will be favored by the consumers. Whether such policies are socialist or classical, liberal or laissez faire is of no concern to the American.
The danger in all this is that the structural implications of those policies go largely unquestioned and unanalyzed by the many who brought Obama to power. These are the poll respondents who account for his “approval rating.” Like his predecessors, we have not seen any real political philosophy from the President, outside the decision to enact those policies aimed at keep people driving their autos, eating Ruby Tubesteak, shopping at the mall, and paying their cable bill. Its often couched in terms of “jobs” and “getting people back to work,” but jobs for the sake of jobs, work for only the sake of maintaining a level of consumption, is nihilistic and destructive. Its the ideology of the cancer cell: growth for the sake of growth.
Eagan suggest something of this apathy in his last paragraph on that post, though he is much more kind: “They are parked, for now, in a lane of open-mindedness, along with the 75 percent of Americans who see Obama as a “strong leader.” If their president also happens to be a liberal, they don’t care – so long as he succeeds.” Calling the American mass “open-minded” gives them for too much credit. Succeeds at what? For most voters, I think the answer is: “Succeeds at increasing or maintaining my standard of living.” This is precisely where the influence of a mass of uneducated, largely apathetic voters comes in: “you can do whatever, you want, Mr. President, as long as it means that I can get paid and support a certain level of consumption for myself and my family, by god!”
At first glance this might seem like a from of American pragmatism. But this sentiment is not pragmatic, because it’s not reasoned or thoughtful enough to rise to the level of philosophy. However, discussing pragmatism is certainly appropriate after 100 days, and it is fair to say that Obama’s operational policy so far is high-pragmatist. As Eagan wrote, “Obama’s broad support points to an old American character trait – pragmatism.”
One way that American apathy is revealed is that we have no real radical figures in our culture or politics. Has America really been moved by any radicals since Martin Luther King? And don’t say Obama, because he’s not a radical just because he’s co-opted the language of change. The American proles don’t really want change, they want to talk about change, they want to dress up the status-quo and call it change. But they are a afraid of real change, because change means uncertainty, and change is uncomfortable. How can you get through your net-flix queue, after all, if someone goes out and upsets the social order?
So, where are our leaders and poets, where are our Lord Byrons and Bob Dylans, where are our Jacobins and Castros? From this vantage point all I can see is Caesar. God, we could really use George Carlin today–he never hung out with the elites, never needed to please and social climb, so he was free to rail against the entirety of the establishment, all organized religion, all organized parties. He told the truth and we laughed because it was true. Unlike Alan Greenspan, whose hamartia was the desire to please people, and we worshiped him like a hero. (Read Maestro, by Bob Woodward.)
There are honest voices out there today, and they are more mainstream than perhaps Tim Eagan would like to admit, but those voices are slightly out of the earshot of most voters. For instance, when you have someone like Simon Johnson writing in one of the most widely circulated and oldest journals of American opinion, The Atlantic, this month that:
“The finance industry has effectively captured our government…elite business interests–financiers, in the case of the U.S.–played a central role in creating the crisis, making ever-larger gambles, with the implicit backing of the government, until the inevitable collapse. More alarming, they are not using their influence to prevent the sorts of reforms that are needed, and fast, to pull the economy out of its nosedive. The government seems helpless, or unwilling to act against them.”
-And nobody says or does anything, then the only possible conclusion is apathy or cognitive dissonance. There is no outcry…and I don’t think its because our leaders regard this MIT professor and former director of the IMF as a crack-pot, its because they know that the American voter largely does not care. Therefore it wouldn’t matter that the above was published in The Atlantic rather than Time. (who reads anymore, anyway?)
This sentiment is not only expressed in print, its also in Radio and on TV. Only a few days ago, in a radio interview Dick Durbin said “And the banks — hard to believe in a time when we’re facing a banking crisis that many of the banks created — are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And they frankly own the place.” Its not just Durbin, Barney Frank echoed that same sentiment last night on Real Time with Bill Maher.
But, again, where is the outcry? Its not apparent, because for now most people still don’t care.
One of the sources of their apathy is the degradation of the meaning of money and finance all together. When people ask, “where does money come
from,” and the answer is: “the government just makes it up;” and when the follow up question is “then why does money have any value,” and the answer is “because everyone believes it does,” most people really can’t stand to deal with the true fragility and fundamentally arbitrary nature of something they put so much value in as money, so its more comfortable to just turn off those thoughts. And can you blame them? After all, bankers, realtors, investment advisers and the lot have been lying to us for so long. Over the last 8 years we created 17,000 AAA rated securities, but in reality only 4 companies were worthy of that designation. Why? Because, Wall Street alchemists created the illusion of value. It’s just made up, like the value of the Dollar itself. When your pension fund is broke because it invested in crap lies, what is the reaction of the voter–nothing yet, but perhaps when these pension funds go bust which could very well happen in the next couple of months we could see some geezer riots. But don’t expect Joe Six Pack who is not in line for a pension to get involved.
Standard of living increased over the last 12 years because of a massive build up in credit (read: debt), and a concomitant explosion in the money supply thanks to the Chinese buying our debt. We have had one bubble economy after another, first stocks, then real estate. Excessive private and public debt was the reason for the crash of 2008. The solution so far to our problem of too much consumption and too much debt, has
been to encourage more consumption and more debt. No objection from most Americans–given the choice of having the Federal balance sheet taking on tens of trillions of dollars of more debt, or having one’s employer go out of business, the average voter will have the government go into unthinkable levels of debt any day of the week, and twice on Sunday. The only value-system at work is the overriding desire to keep consuming–at any cost. This doesn’t mean that Joe Six Pack bears any overt hostility to the fate of our Republic, really, its just that when it comes down to tough choices, he couldn’t give less of a shit.
Now, lets bare it: I voted for O, and I think he’s a real righteous dude. After all, there is no way I could have ever, ever cast a vote for Sarah Palin. So, I am not one of those “pickled cranks of the far right” calling Obama a socialist. Like I said, so far he’s just pragmatic. And as Judge Posner said, pragmatism has “no inherent political valence.” But, in being bare, its okay to say that President Obama’s pragmatism is a very Social Democratic version that bespeaks traditional socialist values. His pragmatism and socialism get wrapped up in each-other.
Contrary to the vitriol that came out of McCain-Palin last year, “socialism” is not a bad word. Even though its been co-opted by the right and made into synonym for the occult, its just as legitimate a form of government as any other. And it is a legitimate check on the concentration of all the wealth and power in the hands of a small group of capitalists (note, however, that power is more concentrated at the top now than it ever has been, despite the efforts in the West of post-war Social Democrat governments). What’s insidious in Obama’s pragmatic socialism is that it pretends to be in favor of a free market system, and even worse, pretends to be even-handed, when its more and more obvious that certain financial elites and others of the priviligencia are directing the hand of policy. As President Obama said, he doesn’t want to run banks and auto companies, he just wants to be the one who decides which banks and businesses fail and which ones succeed.
I make no value judgment about socialism, but I am calling out that it is intellectually dishonest to pretend that we haven’t witnessed a fair bit of it since September 2008. We are developing a form of socialism that benefits financial elites at the highest level, and inculcates the middle-classes at the other levels with the anesthetic of consumption. If we’re going to have a type of pragmatic socialism, we need to know the rules, and it should be transparent. (Also, as an aside here, as we have written on this blog before if we are going to have socialism than we vote for the Swedish rather than the Venezuelan model that we seem to be sliding into…you know, universal health-care, free tuition at all colleges and all that.)
When we have a voting population that really has no care for its relationship to the state, and will tolerate anything as long as their living standard is propped up, it doesn’t matter whether the prevailing system is liberalism or socialism. Neither do deficits and debt matter, because the highest value is present consumption. The fate of future generations has largely been ignored, both economically and environmentally, because we have to keep spending and consuming. This implies that we largely have no values, or at least we can’t agree on any. Therefore, pragmatism makes some sense.
Posner, in Overcoming Law, argues that a pragmatic case can be made for liberalism. Societies which adhere most closely to liberal tenets have produced and are likely to produce better consequences than those societies embracing socialism, social democracy, moral conservatism, or fascism. Furthermore, liberalism and pragmatism mesh together neatly: “Liberalism . . . is the political philosophy best suited for societies in which people don’t agree on the foundations of morality, and pragmatism is the philosophy of living without foundations.” Our society has no moral foundation, and the only value we agree on is that we like money and we like consumption.
So, where will we go with this experiment in pragmatic socialism? Is apathy just doomed to persist as the prevailing American value? N. N. Taleb points out that thirteen centuries of peaceful ethnic coexistence in Lebanon exploded overnight into brutal, completely unexpected civil war. Everyone assumes America is too complacent for class warfare in the literal sense to erupt. Perhaps, but the world will not be on the Dollar Standard for ever, and when currencies start to slide its very hard to put the brakes on. And if that happens, people will experience a very sudden and very painful decline in their standard of living. I’m not saying that such a thing is imminent, but that it’s structurally possible, fundamentally unpredictable, and should not be discounted.
Our best hope is that the effort by present policy-makers to re-inflate the credit bubble that drives the consumption economy won’t work, and that other countries will gradually rather than suddenly turn away from the USD. Yes, this will adversely impact Americans’ ability to continue consumption at present levels. However, people can consume less and have a better quality of life. And in the process, perhaps this country will discover some values–any values. Hopefully liberal values and freedom will still figure prominently in that future system, but so too should the values of deferring some consumption in favor of future generations, so that they will have a least a fighting chance. For now, the inheritance of the future seems to be only debt and pollution–oh, and also all these vacant subdivision and strip malls whose best hope for the future is to become a skate-park, thanks for that, Boomers.
Post Script Links:
“For Obama Justice Must be Pragmatic” 5/3 Sunday NYT
