Godfrey Hodgson: America’s election faultline
Wall Street has collapsed. Its fourth biggest
investment bank, the 158-year-old Lehman Brothers, has collapsed, its shiny
building bought at a knock-down price by the red coats from Barclays. Merrill
Lynch, the thundering herd of people's capitalism, has been bought by Bank of
America in a fire-sale. AIG, the biggest insurance company in America, has been nationalised, as were Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, responsible between
them for half the mortgages in the
United States (see Ann Pettifor, "America's financial meltdown: lessons and prospects", 16 September 2008).
Abroad, the United States has been told to
buzz off by the new government of Pakistan, a relatively democratic regime
compared to the one the George W Bush administration had given $11 billion in
mostly military aid. General David H Petraeus has left his post as
commander-in-chief of United States forces in Iraq, not proclaiming victory as
his president expected him to do, but warning bravely that a long struggle lies
ahead there (see Patrick Cockburn, "Iraq: Violence is down - but not
because of America's 'surge'",
Independent on Sunday, 14 September
2008). In the Black Sea region, the inability of the United States to protect
its protégé in Georgia is painfully manifest, while
attempts by vice-president Dick Cheney to recruit Ukraine into a grand alliance
against Russia are also in vain.
The Republican philosophy at home, and the
Republican policy abroad, have both failed utterly. Yet the Republican
candidate, John McCain, has pulled level with or is in some polls even ahead of his Democratic opponent, Barack Obama. How
can this be? How could anyone, confronted with this cosmic mess, vote for the
Republican politicians who caused it?
The outsider
narrative
For well over a century Wall Street was
Republican, and the Republicans were Wall Street. The Republicans presented
themselves as the cautious guardians of fiscal probity. Under their rule,
deficits have ballooned and the credit of the American government is dependent
on then tolerance of the state bankers of China.
Since the Vietnam war, Americans have not
quite trusted the Democrats to safeguard national security The Republicans have plausibly maintained
that the foreign relations of the United States were safer in their hands.
Their once magnificent economy has been shaken to its roots by the policies of conservative
Republicans, yet so far there is little sign of the voters calling the
Republicans to account. At a time when tens of millions of Americans have good cause
to worry about their homes, their mortgages, their jobs, the price of food and
the price of the gasoline on which the whole structure and geography of their
society depends, the election campaign only reluctantly pulls itself away from an obsession with trivia, personalities,
even gossip (see "The lost election year", 15 May 2008).
Republican tax policies, those of George W
Bush and of John McCain alike, have turned the United States - for the first
time since the lifetime of JP Morgan - into a class
society, where chief executives, corporate lawyers, stock- market traders and
sports stars make hundreds of times more money than less privileged Americans.
The United States, which as recently as the
1930s still produced most of the world's oil, is now increasingly dependent on
imported energy. Detroit's "big three", which once made most of the world cars
and trucks, plead with the government to be bailed out with $25 billion of corporate welfare. In the
years of conservative Republican ascendancy, economic growth in America has
been at a lower rate than either in the American past or in many other parts of
the world. Statistics show that most of what growth there has been, has gone to
the top few per cent of the population.
This is no coincidence. It is the direct and - it
is hard to avoid concluding - the desired result of Republican "trickle-down"
policies. So why, again, do the victims of these
policies, of arrogant incompetence at home and abroad, not rise in their
righteous anger and boot the rascals out?
The reasons are many, and they explain much of
what has gone wrong with American democracy. They lie in what might be called
metapolitics, at a deeper level than the swordplay of a political campaign.
For one thing, many conservative voters in
what are known as the "red" states do not see Wall Street as Republican. They
see it as eastern. Their Republican party, the party created by Richard Nixon
and Ronald Reagan, the party of John McCain and Sarah Palin, prides itself on
having destroyed the power of the eastern, moderate Republican elite, the party
run and typified by Thomas Dewey, Wendell Willkie,
Nelson Rockefeller, John Lindsay and Gerald Ford.
By all traditional measures, those men were
conservative. They were staunch defenders and in many cases grand beneficiaries
of capitalism. They were fiercely
anti-communist, preachers of fiscal caution and social stability.
The new Republican party has neither sympathy
nor respect for that moderate tradition. It prides itself on being radical, on
its contempt for "the establishment". William Kristol, the spokesman of the younger generation of
neo-conservatives and now a columnist on the New York Times, has even artfully declared his welcome of the
current "wreckage of torpedoed establishments and the shards of overturned
conventional wisdom" (see "Both Sides Now", New
York Times, 14 September 2008).
It is a remarkably self-denying position, for
no journalist or publicist in the country represents the new establishment in
the Republican party more than the son of the veteran polemicist Irving Kristol. Yet as absurd as it is on the surface, there
is a twisted logic to this posture.
East, south, west,
north
The new conservatives really do consider
themselves outsiders, even as they constitute a new establishment. For this,
there are geographical, historical, racial and ideological reasons, or at least
explanations.
Many years ago a Republican politician leader
in senator McCain's adopted home of Arizona, (who was a close ally of the first
of the new Republicans, senator Barry Goldwater) explained to me why he and his Arizonan
friends hated the federal government. Their state, he said, was a colony of
Washington. The federal government owned most of the land: as national parks, national
forest, Indian reservations or air-force bases.
The attitude of the Republican
vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin is a manifestation of the same
syndrome. Alaska thinks of itself as the last frontier, a land of libertarian
entrepreneurs. Yet it is largely dependent on the federal government and on oil
companies whose ownership base is on the east coast of the United States or
abroad. Palin rages at Washington. But she and her fellow Alaskan Republicans
are pensioners of Washington. The old Republican political machine in Alaska
was primed with federal money by senator Ted Stevens, the long-term chairman of
the senate appropriations committee and the man who could open the tap to flood Palin's hometown, Wasilla and the
other tiny settlements of the "last frontier" with federal dollars. Palin's
generation of Alaska Republicans, for all the claims to radicalism and
freshness, represent a new version. The American west - or perhaps more accurately
successive American wests, given the dynamic nature of the unfolding frontier -
saw itself over several generations as the empire of liberty, the nursery of
independent entrepreneurs. Yet the west's businessmen - from the railwaymen to
the mining barons, from the real-estate developers to the defence-industry
employees - lived off the bounty and the taxes of what they saw as the
profligate, decadent east.
They were able to do so because the west
(California excepted) is, thanks to the US constitution's original "great compromise", grossly over-represented in congress. Many of its states - Palin's Alaska, Cheney's
Wyoming, Idaho, Montana and the Dakotas among them - have fewer inhabitants
each than many English counties; but each gets two senators, the same as New
York, Pennsylvania or Ohio.
The racial dimension of American politics
connects this east-west axis to the north-south one. It is most directly influential
in the south, which has been a reliable source of Republican votes in the
electoral college since the 1970s. The modern Republican party is, to a greater
extent than it is often considered polite to mention, the unintended
consequence of the civil-rights and anti-poverty legislation proposed by the
John F Kennedy and enacted by the Lyndon B Johnson administration in the 1960s.
As African-Americans began to vote in much the same proportion as whites,
conservative southern Democrats became Republicans, and the Democrats became
the party of the liberal-left.
Many of the architects and prominent champions
of the new conservatism - for example George W Bush himself, and current
or former senators and congressmen such as Trent Lott of Mississippi, Jesse Helms of North
Carolina, and Phil Gramm of Texas, Tom DeLay and Dick Armey of Texas, Newt Gingrich of Georgia
- have been southerners.
Trent Lott is especially typical of many of
the new conservatives who moved from the Democratic to the Republican party in response to the growing number of
African-American voters in the south.
Lott rose to be Republican leader in the senate, but he began his political
life as a Democrat, and was even associated with the White Citizens' Councils,
known to southerners at the time as the country club Ku Klux Klan.
Many white southerners, both before and during
the civil-rights revolution saw the south as an economic colony of the north
and specifically of Wall Street and the City of London. They had been brought
up to hate and fear Yankees - the abolitionists who had defeated the
Confederate south in a bloody war, and the "carpetbaggers" who afterwards
imposed a humiliating peace on them which for a time included efforts to bring
some degree of equality to southern Negroes.
This remembered and endlessly repeated version
of history goes far to explain the new Republican party. All these reasons -
geographical, historical, racial - combined to create a new conservative
ideology (see "From frontiersman to neocon", 24 April 2003).
We and they
One of the key ideas of this ideology is what Thomas
Frank has called "market
populism". This is the idea that liberals are an elite, and that the elite is
liberal. This equation is absurd enough. It is not the case that most
millionaires are liberals, even less that most millionaires are liberals. It is
linked to the even less plausible, but equally popular notion that a government
elected by the people's votes is less to be trusted with the people's welfare
than Wal-Mart or Coca-Cola - or than the "masters of the universe" who sold
sub-prime mortgages to people in trailer-camps and then wrapped them up so
cunningly in derivatives that they were bought by ostensibly cautious bankers
(see Willem Buiter, "The end of American capitalism
(as we knew it)", 17 September
2008)
Such ideas, however, have "traction", not
least with the very working-class white voters in industrial states that have
been wasted by Republican policy (see Thomas Frank, The Wrecking Crew, Macmillan 2008). The McCain campaign has had
great success in presenting its
candidate - the descendant of Mississippi slave-owners, the son and grandson of
admirals, whose wife is worth $200 million dollars - as a plain citizen, in
contrast to his opponent, son of a single mother in marginal economic
circumstances and an African father.
In part, of course, this is due to
unscrupulous manipulation of political advertising and media management. Yet
the failure of a rough half of the electorate to see that they are being
persuaded to vote against the true interests of their country and of themselves
is not only the result of cynical political machinations.
At the root of the mindset that allows so many
Americans to ignore real political
issues and to identify themselves as moose-hunters, Confederate rebels
or defenders of a lost small-town paradise, there lie deep and passionately
held, if questionable, beliefs. Deepest of all, perhaps, is the idea of
American "exceptionalism": the conviction, taught in high-school textbooks and
preached from pulpits, that the United States is morally different, morally
better, than other societies, that it is destined, by God or history, to bring light,
if necessary by force, to a world living in darkness (see "Can America go modest?", 10 October 2001).
If you believe that, and many Americans do, then you can easily be
persuaded that the "other" threatens the national destiny and even the divine
purpose; perhaps especially if he has dark skin and his middle name is Hussein.
A familiar, tempting polarity of this kind can be made to seem more vital even
than the fragile health of the American economy, the insecurities of work and
housing and health, the perils resulting from failed policies in Iraq and Pakistan,
or the survival of the global environment. Whether the voters can resist its charms in sufficient numbers this time, the remaining weeks of this extraordinary election will tell.