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But this peculiarly
American creed took a severe hit after the crash of 1929, and wealth ceased to
be equated with godliness. While the
number of Wall Street suicides has been exaggerated in national memory, Jesse
Livermore, perhaps the most famous of the Wall Street speculators, shot
himself, and so did several others of his profession. There was then still a lingering
old-fashioned sense of shame now generally absent from the über-rich. While many of the elites hated Franklin
Roosevelt -- consider the famous New Yorker cartoon wherein the rich socialite
tells her companions, "Come along. We're
going to the Trans-Lux to hiss Roosevelt" -- most had the wit to make a
calculated bet that they would have to give a little of their wealth, power,
and prestige to retain the rest, particularly with the collapsing parliamentary
systems of contemporary Europe in mind. Even
a bootlegging brigand like Joe Kennedy Sr.
reconciled himself to the New Deal.
And yet, tycoons like Henry
J. Kaiser constructed the Hoover Dam and liberty ships rather than the
synthetic CDOs that precipitated the latest economic collapse. In the 1950s, many Republicans pressed
Eisenhower to lower the prevailing 91% top marginal income tax rate, but citing
his concerns about the deficit, he refused.
In view of our present $15 trillion gross national debt, Ike was right.
General Motors CEO and
Secretary of Defense Charles E. "Engine Charlie" Wilson said he believed "what
was good for the country was good for General Motors, and vice versa." However clumsily, he expressed the view that
the fates of corporations and the citizenry were conjoined -- a view that is a
world away from the present regime of downsizing, offshoring, profits without
production, and financialization. The
now-prevailing Milton Friedmanite economic dogma holds that a corporation that
acts responsibly to the community is irresponsible. Yet somehow in the 1950s our country eked out higher average GDP growth rates than those we have
experienced in the last dozen years.
After the 2008 collapse,
the worst since the Great Depression, the rich, rather than having the modesty
to temper their demands, this time have made the calculated bet that they are
politically invulnerable -- Wall Street moguls angrily and successfully rejected
executive-compensation limits even for banks that had been bailed out by
taxpayer funds. And what I saw in
Congress after the 2008 crash confirms what economist Simon Johnson has said: that Wall
Street, and behind it the commanding heights of power that control Wall Street,
has seized the policy-making apparatus in Washington. Both parties are now in thrall to what our
great-grandparents would have called the Money Power. One party is furtive and hypocritical in its
money chase; the other enthusiastically
embraces it as the embodiment of the American Way. The Citizens United Supreme Court decision of
two years ago would certainly elicit a response from the 19th-century populists
similar to their 1892 Omaha platform, which called out the highest court, along
with the rest of the political apparatus, as rotted by money.
We live in a nation brought to the verge of
moral, political, and material ruin
Corruption dominates
the ballot-box, the Legislatures, the Congress, and touches even the ermine of
the bench. The people are demoralized. " The newspapers are largely subsidized or
muzzled, public opinion silenced, business prostrated, homes covered with
mortgages, labor impoverished, and the land concentrating in the hands of
capitalists. The urban workmen are
denied the right to organize for self-protection, imported pauperized labor
beats down their wages. " The fruits of
the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few,
unprecedented in the history of mankind, and the possessors of these fortunes,
in turn, despise the Republic and endanger liberty.
From the same prolific womb of governmental
injustice we breed the two great classes:
tramps and millionaires
It is no coincidence
that as the Supreme Court has been removing the last constraints on the
legalized corruption of politicians, the American standard of living has been
falling at the fastest rate in decades. According
to the Federal Reserve Board's report of June 2012, the median net worth of
families plummeted almost 40% between 2007 and 2010. This is not only a decline when measured
against our own past economic performance; it also represents a decline
relative to other countries, a far cry from the post-World War II era, when the
United States had by any measure the highest living standard in the world. A study by the Bertelsmann Foundation
concluded that in measures of economic equality, social mobility, and poverty
prevention, the United States ranks 27th out of the 31 advanced industrial
nations belonging to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Thank God we are still ahead of Turkey,
Chile, and Mexico! But barely.
This raises disturbing
questions for those who call themselves conservatives. Almost all conservatives who care to vote
congregate in the Republican Party. But
Republican ideology celebrates outsourcing, globalization, and takeovers as the
glorious fruits of capitalism's "creative destruction." As a former Republican congressional staff
member, I saw for myself how GOP proponents of globalized vulture capitalism,
such as Grover Norquist, Dick Armey, Phil Gramm, and Lawrence Kudlow, extolled
the offshoring and financialization process as an unalloyed benefit. They were quick to denounce as socialism any
attempt to mitigate its impact on society.
Yet their ideology is nothing more than an upside-down utopianism, an
absolutist twin of Marxism. If millions
of people's interests get damaged in the process of implementing their
ideology, it is a necessary outcome of scientific laws of economics that must
never be tampered with -- just as Lenin believed that his version of
materialist laws were final and inexorable.
If a morally acceptable American conservatism
is ever to extricate itself from a pseudo-scientific inverted Marxist economic
theory, it must grasp that order, tradition, and stability are not coterminous
with an uncritical worship of the Almighty Dollar, nor with obeisance to the
demands of the wealthy. Conservatives
need to think about the world they want: do they really desire a social
Darwinist dystopia?
The objective of the
predatory super-rich and their political handmaidens is to discredit and
destroy the traditional nation state and auction its resources to themselves. Those super-rich, in turn, aim to create a
"tollbooth" economy, whereby more and more of our highways, bridges, libraries,
parks, and beaches are possessed by private oligarchs who will extract a toll
from the rest of us. Was this the vision
of the Founders? Was this why they
believed governments were instituted among men -- that the very sinews of the
state should be possessed by the wealthy in the same manner that kingdoms of
the Old World were the personal property of the monarch?
Since the first
ziggurats rose in ancient Babylonia, the so-called forces of order, stability,
and tradition have feared a revolt from below.
Beginning with Edmund Burke and Joseph de Maistre after the French
Revolution, a whole genre of political writings -- some classical liberal, some
conservative, some reactionary -- has propounded this theme. The title of Ortega y Gasset's most famous
work, The Revolt of the Masses, tells
us something about the mental atmosphere of this literature.
But in globalized
postmodern America, what if this whole vision about where order, stability, and
a tolerable framework for governance come from, and who threatens those values,
is inverted? Christopher Lasch came
closer to the truth in The Revolt of the Elites, when he wrote, "In our
time, the chief threat seems to come from those at the top of the social
hierarchy, not the masses." Lasch held
that the elites -- by which he meant not just the super-wealthy but also their
managerial coat holders and professional apologists -- were undermining the
country's promise as a constitutional republic with their prehensile greed,
their asocial cultural values, and their absence of civic responsibility.
Lasch wrote this in
1995. Now, almost two decades later, the
super-rich have achieved escape velocity from the gravitational pull of the
very society they rule over. They have seceded from America.
Now an Independent, Mike
Lofgren served 16 years on the Republican staff of the House and Senate Budget
Committees. He has just published The
Party Is Over: How Republicans Went
Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted .
The American
Conservative is the home of
independent, intelligent conservatism. Follow
@amconmag .
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