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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