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Anatol Lieven: There is no 'New Deal' in today's America

[The writer is a senior research fellow at the New America Foundation and author of America Right or
Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism.]

The next few months in the US may indicate the answer to a central question of American life today: whether the present system is capable of serious reform. If the recent combination of natural and man-made disasters does not stimulate debate on such reform, then the future looks bleak indeed.

The issue is not whether such reform can take place quickly, but whether American society is capable of talking seriously about it. The actual implementation of radical change, in the US or elsewhere, does not occur without a crisis. At present, such a crisis is being prevented by the willingness of China and Japan to buy US debt, sustain US consumer spending on their exports and allow the Bush administration to go on cutting taxes. But this situation is fragile. By radically increasing the US budget deficit and emphasising the future costs of global warming, hurricanes Katrina and Rita have underlined that fragility and helped to draw the contours of future crises.

The last existential crisis of the US political and economic system was the Great Depression from 1929.
That crisis was overcome thanks to President Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. But the intellectual underpinnings of the New Deal had been developed by progressive thinkers in America over the previous 40 years. In Germany or France today, serious reform at present may be politically unfeasible - but at least the issues have been debated and solutions will be at hand if circumstances change. In the US, by contrast, serious reformist thinking is largely absent not only from the political parties but also from the mainstream media and most think-tanks. Of course, it exists, but mostly in politically powerless journals and institutes, not places that really help form elite opinion and state policies. The parties are paralysed by the influence of powerful groups devoted to defending the status quo. The media and think-tanks are also largely disabled by their links to political and economic interests. In the wake of Katrina, the mainstream US media won praise for finally daring to criticise the Bush administration. But there is little sign of their readiness to analyse deep flaws in the US system. The exceptions are race and poverty, issues raised so glaringly by Katrina that only a totalitarian system could avoid mentioning them.

Among the fundamental issues absent from public discussion is the political patronage system, in the areas of jobs and financial allocations. Strong criticism has been directed at the Bush administration, quite rightly, for its appointment of unqualified political cronies to senior posts. What no one asks is why the US, alone among developed countries, has such an extensive system of political appointments to vital and highly technical government jobs. Such questions would be considered to reflect lack of patriotism. More importantly, the political parties cannot raise this issue as they are both dependent on patronage to raise funds and gain support. The think-tanks cannot discuss it because too many of their members dream of becoming assistant deputy something or other after the next elections. But at least the media should be able to talk about this.

Similarly, both Congress and the Democratic politicians of Louisiana have been criticised, quite rightly, for senators' colossal diversion of scarce federal funds to pork-barrel projects in their states - something that contributed directly to the disaster in New Orleans.
But no one asks why the US system allows opportunities for pork-barrel politics on this scale....
Read entire article at Financial Times (UK)