Robert Reich

In 1814 John Taylor wrote:

“There are two modes of invading private property; the first, by which the poor plunder the rich … sudden and violent; the second, by which the rich plunder the poor, slow and legal.”

That quote sits at the beginning of Robert Reich’s new book: “Saving Capitalism”. I am reminded of it because the current and extraordinary chaos in the Republican party has claimed another prize.

David Brook, in today’s New York Times, is pining for something that disappeared a long time ago. The Reagan ‘revolution’ ended whatever Brooks thinks of as ‘conservatism’.

I have a lot of sympathy for Brooks. He lives in a past populated by elegant Edwardian era values. Where the workers knew their place; the elite was privileged and understood its role as protectors and nurturers of a society they husbanded for future generations. They knew, of course, that their children would inherit their privilege and that they too would pass society forward unsullied by the buffeting of new ideas that could be contained or isolated as ‘harmful’ to the traditions they valued.

His problem is, of course, that his world had disappeared even by the mid 1800’s. The tumult of industrialization, the rise of an urban working class, the diminution of the importance of land, the demand for social reform, the abolition of patriarchy and its religious foundation, and the rapid advance of science that unhinged the dominance of ancient knowledge had all done their work by the time the late 1800’s value system he lauds so much reached its apogee.

The advance of democracy and its unrelenting attack on privilege did away with the world Brooks so admires. And the counter attack we now know as modern conservatism was launched in the late 1970’s precisely as a radical attempt to undo that advance. Conservatism then had to become, not the preservation of what was around us in the 1960’s and 1970’s, but its abolition. It became an attempt to return the rights of privilege to the wealthy and to large businesses – two groups whose lives had been altered most by democracy.

The counter revolution was remarkably successful because of the very attributes Brooks so dislikes. It was radical, brazen, unilateral, narrow minded, intellectually shallow, uncouth, shrill, and above all brutal. It hyped fear and loss as its keys to unlock acceptance by the masses. Fear of the ‘other’, fear of change, fear of the future, and loss of control were all constantly pressed into the voter’s minds.

The ultimate goal was to sell a very raw form of capitalism as an ameliorative to the difficulties we encountered as the US reached the limits of its world power, and as outside influences began to slow the extraordinary growth of the 1950’s and 1960’s down to a more normal and historically representative rate. Americans resented the intrusion into their wonderland and sought a fix. The Reagan/Clinton/Bush era is the result: a steady social transformation; political complicity in the upward redistribution of wealth; an acceptance of mediocre technological advance that destroys rather than creates jobs; an abandonment of social cohesion; a turn against the poor and underprivileged; and the undoing of democracy wherever it frustrated the elite.

This rightist radicalism was abetted and given intellectual rigor by that part of the economics profession proselytizing so-called ‘free market’ doctrines. The libertarian leanings of that ilk of economist, so profoundly anti-democratic and apparently blind to the anti-social ramifications of its quasi-scientific program, infected right of center politics and remains a key aspect of the continuing radicalization of our political discourse. Reagan did not dream up the extreme anti-government sentiment we now know him for. It was inherited from Hayek and his followers like  Friedman at Chicago.

Classical economics, being the articulation of capitalist values as it was, had always been stained by its ideological starting point, Hayek’s hatred of government and Friedman’s determined libertarianism simply built upon this foundation to justify the current attack on democracy and the re-instatement of the privileges of ownership.

It took a hundred years of hard graft to mitigate the evils of capitalism. It has taken half that time to undo much of that progress. Perhaps the worst part of the radical program is that current distaste and mistrust amongst voters for government. This insidious undermining of the very institutions that were put in place to protect and nurture the middle class means that they are now seen by that group as being the causes of their undoing.

Capitalism is back.

What I find most alarming in the Brooks argument is that he elides his own culpability. He and all the others on both sides of the so-called political center, turned a blind eye to the depth of the radical program unfolding before them. They kept hiding behind anachronistic visions and ideas such as ‘opportunity’. America has long ceased living up to its mythological stays as a land of opportunity. Yet these centrists continued to advance the opening up of opportunity as if it could possibly have value when the society in which it would flourish had been eliminated by the concentration of income and wealth. In such a highly stratified society opportunity becomes an illusion which, when revealed, unleashes a backlash of cynicism and unrest.

By denying the radical nature of the program people like Brooks abetted its rise. They acted as its protectors by covering its flanks and warding off criticism as being ‘leftish extremism’.

So: welcome to the reality you helped put in place David. I look forward to your response. I hope it isn’t yet more tepid whining.