Ideology or Science?

Probably both.

America’s ideological nightmare continues. So extreme are the Republicans nowadays that they have just thrown out, in a primary battle, one of their long standing Senators. Lugar from Indiana lost his reelection bid and is replaced for this November’s Senate election by Tea Party nominee. The only notable things about this new candidate is that he espouses open ideological warfare and has pronounced that the Republicans are not right wing enough.

Really?

Just this week the Republican led House passed a bill blocking the $55 billion reduction in defense spending mandated by last year’s debt ceiling deal. A deal they signed off on. Instead they proposed cutting $310 billion from sundry domestic spending programs like food stamps, low income household health insurance assistance and so on. This is all out class warfare. All out. There is no pretense. No attempt to dissemble. Not soft public face to hide the real intent. The Republicans are going all in on their attacks on the poor and disadvantaged in order to protect their defense industry sponsors and – at all costs – avoid raising taxes on higher income taxpayers.

This is absurd, divisive, and flat out nasty.

It rolls back the longstanding consensus in American politics about building and maintaining a safety net, and seeks to plunge us back into pre-Great Depression era social divisions. There is no other explanation for the extremism that now dominates the Republican Party.

I have friends who argue Mitt Romney will be able to ignore this vicious extremism and shift to the center as we approach the election. I reject this idea. He has not shown any significant ability or willingness to distance himself from the extremists. Instead he panders to them. In many ways he typifies modern Republicanism with his deep rooted attachment to market magic and its supposed all purpose all conquering solutions to all society’s ills. He believes, along with his party confreres, that if a problem is not amenable to a market magic solution then it is not a problem at all. He made his living on the cutting edge of the shareholder value revolution that contorted American business and tossed aside older values replacing them with the low wage, low cost, low benefits, and insecure employment contracts that have undermined our society and contributed to the rotting foundation of the economy as a whole. He is the very epitome of modern scientific management.

Which is not scientific at all.

Modern management theory, especially the concepts undergirding shareholder value, is based wholeheartedly on the pre-existing orthodox economic theory. That theory is not at all scientific but is an ideological construct designed specifically to defend and justify free market neo-libertarian social relationships. There is not an ounce of science involved in it. Science would at least try to explain the artifacts littering the real world landscape. Orthodox economics rejects that approach and substitutes for it the study of Platonic worlds – called models – that have no bearing on reality but which conform to the ideological preferences of the modelers. It is thus no surprise that those models produce results that justify slashing government which looms large as a muddying and malign influence in them.

Business strategists who pursue shareholder value nostrums are simply part of a widespread effort by orthodox economists to twist the workings of the real world to conform with the simple workings of their models. In an act of extraordinary vanity orthodox economists see their role as intervening in the world to modify it. This, they say, will result in a more perfect world. It will be, they argue, a world in which our resources flow naturally, without government intervention, to their best use.

It is also a Hobbseian nightmare – nasty, brutish, and short.

Orthodox economics sits at the heart of the American ideological nightmare. It provides intellectual cover for the pillaging of the poor and weak by the strong. For such pillaging is simply an expression of market forces. And market forces are pure. Are they not?

Not.

Economics has been exposed as an adjunct to politics. It is simply a tool kit for imposing on society a pre-existing ideological vision of how our resources should be allocated and the wealth produced shared.

If the Republicans are to be reviled for their attacks on the poor and their defense of the wealthy, so too are those who wrote the theories that justify those attacks.

Perhaps more so.