The Anti-Gates
Bob Gates has made quite a name for himself by being ‘that sensible guy’ — the one who cuts through the rhetoric and tells it the way it is. In this vein he fits alongside other ‘serious people’ such as the infamous Simpson and Bowles who, as you might recall, made a great name for themselves back in the days when the world was ending because of our Federal debt problems.
And just like Simpson and Bowles, Gates is simply defending the status quo. Or, rather, trying to re-assert the dominance of the older status quo he is fearful we are losing.
In his latest attempt to burnish his serious reputation he lectures us on the kind of president we ought to elect.
Clearly he doesn’t think much of either Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders because both are clumped together repeatedly as representative of who we ought to avoid.
Gates is wrong on many counts. Let me enumerate them:
First: let’s all stop this nonsense about equating Trump with Sanders. This equation is a tell-tale sign of faux centrism. It has become an obsession of ‘serious’ people who want to appear sensibly grounded in facts and not wild eyed ideas. Trump is an inexperienced demagogue. Sanders is a battle hardened politician from the left. Trump has no core ideas he simply rattles the cage and stirs up the passions on popular hopes and fears. Sanders offers a long and well thought out response to issues that may be neither popular nor new — but he has thought about them for a long time. Trump is a bombastic bully who appeals to emotion. Sanders is a skilled debater who appeals to reason. I could go on, but the point remains the same: Trump and Sanders are not equivalent. That they sit on opposite sides of the political spectrum does not make them equivalent.
Second: Gates gives us the standard centrist debating points about the American political system. It is designed he reminds us to do nothing. Well he doesn’t say it quite like that, but the implication is clear. The American political system is designed to enforce compromise and thus preserve the status quo Gates prizes so highly. It does not permit heavily partisan movement because of the division called the separation of the powers. This separation is a deep flaw: it prevents the emotions of the electorate being expressed and thus vented before they build into toxic anger. Ironically it is the existence of this toxic anger that Gates seems most to fear.
Perpetual compromise is precisely what has sent America down the path to economic inequality and social divide. Had, at any point, the partisan views of either side been fully expressed in actual policy the nation could have responded with rebuttal or affirmation at the next election. Instead neither side of the divide has ever properly felt it has ‘won’ and neither side can say its ideas have been fully tested or that they have succeeded or failed. Hence the anger within the electorate. No one is satisfied. And the problems persist.
Third: this latter point is vital. Under normal circumstances where crises are few and people generally feel both secure and prosperous, the system of compromise is adequate: it prevents anyone rocking the boat and thus threatening that secure prosperity. But when society is manifestly stressed either by external threats of internal failures, persistent compromise simply serves to act against the installation of a solution. Conversely, it can allow the emergence of false solutions in circumstances where the ‘centrists’ or ‘serious people’ see problems or threats to their preferred status quo.
It is this latter problem that dogs us so vitally today.
Our so-called centrists are heavily vested in the policies that have produced the lack of secure prosperity that the majority of people are now bridling against. They represent the neoliberal view of the past forty years and are steeped in the foreign policies of post-Soviet American world domination. Their lens is sullied by this narrow perspective.
The Bowles-Simpson solution to the debt ‘crisis’ is a good example. It was a highly biased set of proposals that placed the burden for crisis resolution firmly on the shoulders of those who had least responsibility for the problem in the first place. It took for granted constraints on spending and taxation that were political choices and not ‘facts’. It thus expressed a preferred and privileged point of view and not the kind of objectivity or ‘centrism’ its supporters pretended it had.
Gates falls into this category of faux sensibility when he argues that the next president needs to talk to the people truthfully. By this I take it he means that the ‘truth’ is a set of values or ideas that Gates agrees with. Sanders invective about inequality would probably not be seen, in this light, as truthful – perhaps the world is too complex simply to load neoliberalism with the blame. Or Trump’s attacks on immigrants are not, presumably, tapping into nativist fears that whilst noxious, are also real.
Lastly: Gates for all his self-regarding seriousness is hapless in his naivety. His opinion is actually a cry for help. The world of the last sixteen years – he casts the blame of being too ideological equally onto the last two presidents – is, in his eyes, proof that we need to revert to management by consensus and to avoid the foolishness that ideologies of either side might be a better guide to policy. In other words the blame for the so-called gridlock is not the antiquated system Gates so reveres, but the attempt to search for partisan solutions. He wants us to drain ourselves of ideas and to settle back into a world of sensible management by people like himself who are bureaucratically capable, well-informed (by which he means having similar ideas to his own), and firmly attached to the status quo.
What he totally misses is the tumult of the past few decades and the rapid change being thrust upon the masses. Whether that change is the deterioration in the prosperity, the rapid change in social norms that threaten their traditional values, or the perception of potential external existential calamity, they all have a common thread: they demand a response from outside the comfort of the neoliberal status quo gates sits in the center of.
The people are angry, not so much about the gridlock, but more about the total disregard of their interests by erstwhile centrist policy makers like Gates. It is this lack of response that irks, not the gridlock that is often blamed for this lack of response.
Gates is oblivious to this difference. He is oblivious to the central fact of our times: the political system has been co-opted and is being run to the advantage of a few. The vast majority are correct in believing that their views are not taken into account. The co-option means that the process of compromise is simply a method for enforcing this advantage enjoyed by a few.
Another great irony of Gates opinion is that he lauds both FDR and Reagan as being pragmatic yet strong leaders. Does he not realize that they both ushered in political epochs of radically different natures and they upended the status quo they found? That is not compromise. It is radical response to circumstances. And it works within the American system only under duress and when leadership can undermine the defenses of the centrists who are dug in defending the past.
The success of both FDR and Reagan is that they redefined the center. Radically so. One shifted it leftwards. The other back rightwards.
So, to respond to the accumulated angst being expressed as anger by voters, our next president needs to redefine the center and not simply acquiesce to the old center. And that requires ideas. It requires us to have clear choice. Do we go further right? Do we go back more to the left?
Gates refuses to give us that choice. Which is why his advice is so wrong.
But on one point I agree.
Trump is not a valid representation of the choice to shift further right. He is, as I said above, simply a demagogue and bully. Ted Cruz is the better representative of the far right’s desire we move more rightwards. Cruz is the analogue to Sanders. All the rest are simply moe of the same.
And it is more of the same that is making voters so angry.
