Surfacing for a split second's gasp for air, I noticed that the incomparable Jerome a Paris, an intellectual force at both the European Tribune and dKos has posted a diary that makes an urgently necessary point in the midst of the present financial distress. I'll excerpt it, but strongly recommend everybody read it all (it's quite short). Here's his thesis:
The current financial crisis literally begs for the left to reclaim the political initiative and say out loud some hard truths about the devastating economic policies of the past 25 years inflicted upon the world by Reagan and Thatcher with the support of the neo-libs and the rightwing noise machine.
Unless these points are made, the wrong lessons will be drawn from this crash.
Because make no mistake about it, the sole cause of this bubble and its consequences is the feudalist economic ideology of the right.
It pays to remember that no small part of the problem here is that neoliberal orthodoxy has come to define the whole spectrum of American partisan politics, that the "moderate" ever-rightward-drifting wing of the Democratic party (a wing that gets represented in online discourse as the "DLC," which is in fact just one of the symptoms of a broader phenomenon involving the corrupting influence of incumbency in a corporatized and cynical media establishment that enables the right while temperamentally identifying with the left, the very traditional corrupting influence of Machine politics, and many other factors) has an unhealthy disdain for the very idea of good democratic governance that differs in degree not in kind from the disdain of the Movement Conservative Republican party -- a disdain that has been tempered in the Democrats mostly by the fact that they remain beholden to embattled labor and to professional associations connected with the humanities (teachers, lawyers, caregivers, and so on), and which is now, fortunately, confronting the transformative energies of the people-powered politics of digital networks.
Anyway, while it is clearly the Republican party that identifies most ferociously with idiotic market fundamentalist rationales for confiscatory wealth concentration and unaccountable incumbency, it is crucial to realize that the "mainstream" Anglo-American left has been suffused with the same ideology as the right all the while pretending to represent an organized alternative to neoliberal orthodoxy, thereby helping to silence and demoralize real efforts to educate, agitate, and organize alternatives.
This matters, because the partisan left still lags far behind the open networked left (else, would we still be in Iraq, else would we still lack single-payer healthcare, else would Bush tax cuts for the rich remain in force?) and so it is vitally necessary that we make very basic rhetorical points like the one Jerome a Paris is making here as clearly, as widely, as repeatedly, as loudly as possible. Because however obvious and commonsensical we know the argument for democracy against incumbency to be, and however facile and nonsensical we know the arguments for the "emancipatory efficiencies" of so-called "natural" and "spontaneous" markets to be, it is simply not the case that many (if any) of the actual representatives and bureaucrats and talking heads who implement policy are anything like on the same page with us yet.
Jerome a Paris lays out the case we must keep in mind:
Blaming rating agencies and computer models, as is being done, or focusing on the bits of data that still look fine (the meaningless unemployment rate, the wealthy-confiscated average growth, the absolute level of the Dow Jones), are just a way to avoid the real debates, the ideological ones: [the debate] over the supposed superiority of the "efficient markets" to drive economic behavior, [the debate] over the insistence that things be valued in dollars (discounted cash flow) or be worthless, [the debate] over the idea that greed is good and leads to socially acceptable outcomes.
Notice the wholesome rhetorical work of this formulation. Quite apart from whether or not democratic commonsense prevails in every argumentative encounter, it is already a key accomplishment to manage to transform what have come to be foundational neoliberal assumptions, taken for granted, beyond question, "only natural" into ongoing debates, with contestable stakes and with demonstrable stakeholders. Precisely because established elites (among them elected representatives and political pundits across the spectrum) have become so utterly habituated to the terms of neoliberal orthodoxy it will always be emancipatory to open them to question (for they are profoundly questionable), even when our own democratic alternatives fail to prevail in a particular debate.
The formulation continues:
The core of the Reagan-Thatcher revolution is that greed (especially that of financiers capturing future cash flows of the real world for their personal, immediate profit) spontaneously improves the common good... and that all regulations and taxes that limit it should be dismantled.
Well, we're about to see the price of that grand collective delusion. But we should not mistake our target. Bankers and financiers should be made to pay for their follies but that is only a small part of it. The big thing is to blame it on the failed, and utterly dangerous, ideology of the efficient-markets/ society-doesn't-exist/ government-is-the-problem crowd.
Otherwise it will start again -- and not only that, but their proposed remedy WILL be lower wages, fewer worker rights, lower taxes and the other usual "reforms."
[T]he fact that a bubble is now publicly acknowledged [even by those who for so long denied it while profiting from it] ensures that there will be a major economic correction, irrespective of whether there is a full financial meltdown or not. There will be pain. There will be calls for bailouts. There will be further pressure on the lower and middle classes to bear the brunt of the price. [My emphasis.] Unless we have a coherent alternative economic discourse on the crisis -- that of strict regulation of the financial world (real regulation, not the busybody but pretend kind like we have right now), financiers and their paymasters, the wealthy, will continue to capture wealth, even as the pie shrinks.
This is exactly right, and it is here that we can grasp the necessity of this sort of primarily interrogative rhetoric. The recommendation of the constructive alternative of "strict regulation of the financial world" is given far less attention here than is the demolition of the terms of the neoliberal orthodoxy that articulated the forces yielding the catastrophe and which is all too likely to provide the basis for the institutional response to that very catastrophe.
It is crucial to recognize that every constructive response will be measured against this neoliberal orthodoxy (and found wanting) until the orthodoxy has been opened to question. So long as we fail to interrogate the assumptions of neoliberal orthodoxy we can expect that incumbents will turn to those very orthodoxies for the solution to the problems generated by their adherence to the same orthodoxy. It's "only natural" that they would do so. This isn't just a matter of scoundrels behaving in self-serving ways (though all too often that is what it amounts to), but a matter of people turning to the analytic tools actually at hand to cope with difficulty.
But, for another thing, it should not seem a negligible or "merely negative" accomplishment to genuinely democratic politics, surely, to break the crust of convention and in so doing open the space for and thereby provoke the critical collaborative problem-solving which will actually yield constructive and positive alternatives. I'll return to this point in a moment.
The piece concludes with a forceful contrasting of neoliberal as against good government worldviews. I know that many will bristle at the emphasis here on "blame" first, on the "negativity" of the case being made (at least, I'm assuming this will be so simply because even many of my most sympathetic readers chastise me for such "negativity" on a regular basis). You will notice that even in the delineation of the "positive" contrast to neoliberal orthodoxy here, the alternatives are first formulated in negative terms (what things are not, before what things should be). I am inclined to say that this is not a mistake but a necessary recognition of the force of the orthodoxy against which radical democracy must address itself, a recognition of the priority of interrogation over construction even in the moment of offering up alternatives. Again, I'll return to this point a bit at the end. For now, let's look at the formulation Jerome a Paris is proposing:
This is what needs to be blamed, again:
[1 T]he ideology of greed…: the idea that being selfish is somehow good for others as it creates more wealth, and thus that unregulated markets are good for society);
[2 T]he idea that only financial valuations give worth to anything…;
[3 T]he notion that wage inflation is bad but not asset price inflation (money going to the poor is bad, money going to the rich is good);
[4 T]he shockingly lax monetary policy of the past decade (when markets go up, fueled by what is essentially easy public money, it's capitalism at work; when markets go down, because of poor investments by the rich, it's a systemic crisis and the rich need to be bailed out or else);
[5 T]he cheerleading… of finance as the new engine of growth and wealth creation (industry, balanced budgets, communities are [castigated as] communist and evil);
[6 T]he unraveling of existing regulations (like Glass-Steagall) in the name of market efficiency, and the corresponding death of those old engineering concepts, resiliency, safety margins, redundancies, and of old old ethical ideas: reputation, community, duty to future generations.
This suggests a very simple political discourse; fighting these above trends with positive messages.
[1] Wealth [Commonwealth?] is not defined by how the richest fare, and should not be counted via how much they accumulate, but only by how the poorest amongst us are doing.
[2] Society is not doing well when the rich get richer, but when communities care for their members, leave no one behind, and do not focus exclusively on how much money one has to rank and judge members. Richer does not mean better. Together is better.
[3] Things built to last are the most valuable, even if they create no profit today. Infrastructure, education, careful nurturing of rare resources are investments that pay for all in the long run and can be handed over to future generations. Many government tasks are investments, not costs.
I think that this sort of "negativity" is simply a basic recognition of the prevailing state of affairs -- pretty much a bare minimum precondition for facing the realities at hand, the real costs and real suffering in the world -- and that anything that would not be denigrated for such "negativity" will too likely function primarily as an apologia for the status quo, however well-intentioned the proponent. I quite understand that the future belongs to those who inspire hope most of all and that "negativity" is not the best thing in our bag of tricks to elicit hope. But, again, it seems to me that the interrogation of customs mistaken for natural inevitabilities and the right assignments of cost and blame for avoidable suffering and injustice function to clear the necessary space in which the people themselves will gather to offer up the diversity of their own "positive" and problem-solving alternatives to the status quo and that this clearing, however negative it may seem to be on the face of it, is better seen as condition of emergence of constructive but also democratizing "positivities."
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