Part 4 (1/2)
Have you !!
That 99 percent of us will not, in fact, prosper in some every-man-for-himself Rand-land is a fine point that pretty ht They do not really coovern, abolish taxes, and restore the gold standard would be people like that coal-mine CEO-or that the fate of most of us would be closer to that of the country's es and powerless to do anything about it
Those who think they have so to look forward to in the libertarian future would do well to reread the faed where Rand illustrates the breakdown of society with a colossal train accident Rand arranges this disaster in such a way that the crash is attributable not to soance of one of the train's passengers, a powerful politician who forces the train's crew to proceed into a dangerous tunnel And then, in a notorious passage, the narrator goes through all the other passenger cars on the train and tells us why each casualty-to-be deserves the fate that is coovernment loans; another doesn't like businessulator; a fourth foolishly thinks she has a right to ride on a train even when she doesn't personally own the train in question For each one of these subhumans, the sentence is death
For a reader like me, Ayn Rand's alnant point For the h, I sohtforward syled rationalizations for the death or huame is finally up for the whiners of the world, they exult The first shall be first Root, hog, or die
CHAPTER 9
He Who
One sunny ie Library in Port Townsend, Washi+ngton, to work on the project that eventually beca to a much-publicized poll, a majority of Americans now believed the word ”socialist” described President Obama well Conservative entertainers were in full-throated denunciation of the collectivists running Aainst overreaching governe Republican victory that fall
And yet none of the fears propelling the country to the right were even close to being realized Lying on one of those big, old-fashi+oned tables as I walked into the library was the new edition of the Guardian Weekly, the British newspaper; its headline proclaimed, ”Capitalism Is Still the Only Game in Town” By then it had been three years since the first shocks hit international credit ed The free-y was still in the saddle, the paper reported; the creed of Davos still ruled the world; the near collapse of the financial systeh official froland told the paper that ”there have been far fewer repercussions than there were after the 1930s”
”Then there was a real contest in the world about as the right model for a modern society, and the crash convinced ht way forward, but there has been no echo of that this tiulating their financial industries, but broadly speaking, the direction the world had been y Capitalisht about the hardworking A to the Tea Party's clanging eainst the socialist takeover, swearing to resist the leftist usurpers in Washi+ngton, and there in the paper a central banker was explaining that none of it had happened From the Neeek ”socialism” cover to last week's bestseller about liberal tyranny, it had all been a false alar to be rounded up for the Gulag Capitalis to be abolished The financial crisis hadn't put radicals in charge of Areement with appearance that the force of it seey; its way of perceiving the world around it-or, ; its ability to keep the fear of a Martian invasion stoked for years despite the Martians' stubborn refusal to appear
What kind of ht to brush off truths that everyone else can see so plainly? What backfiring fornition convinces them that critics of bailouts were in fact responsible for those bailouts? That deregulation is not the problem but the solution? That Ayn Rand is the hero rather than the villain of the present disaster? What allowed this treence between fact and appearance?
An End of Ideology?
To understand, we ht want to take into consideration other exaht cast our eyes back over the long, elobal warht recall the Bush adovernment scientists and those who doubted the official rationale for the Iraq war We ht examine the GOP's tenacious adherence to the ”supply side” theory of budget-balancing despite that theory's persistent failure to work
We ht falsehoods that the conservativeits articles of faith: Its idea that the Franklin Roosevelt administration either caused or worsened the Great Depression That progressives have been in control of the nation ever since the days of Woodrow Wilson That George W Bush was just pretending to be a conservative That bond traders are ordinary workers That governe meltdown and its every little rae ideas that soht hold about Barack Obama's true birthplace, or his secret army, or rote his first book) There is no level of scrutiny peret by After reviewing such a list, a certain variety of liberal likes to apply the word ”liar” to the leaders of the Right But that's not the whole story Yes, there have been attempts to deceive in some quarters, and even deliberate misrepresentation of the facts froly, there is a certain reroupthink that seeht withdraws ever farther into a world of its own
That Aly separated from social reality is not soical result of decades of increasingly specialized oes back at least to the days of sociological worries about the ” to our perceptions Ironically, one of the most memorable expressions of this fear comes in the Tea Party's favorite movie, Network, where the Howard Beale character-the one Rick Santelli and Glenn Beck were so widely coullibility of his audience: ”We deal in illusions, man None of it is true But you people sit there day after day We're all you know”
These days A” into enclaves filled with people who think and vote just as they do-little Galt's Gulches scattered all across the fifty states The Internet, of course, has provided a gigantic playground for self-segregation-that's the reason it exists; those who don't follow the rule are ”trolls” There are separate sites for conservative social networking and conservative dating Like-ers often link only to one another-it is considered a political sin to reference the other side2-so that their readers' minds won't be contaminated by exposure to contrary views
Conservatives inhabit a ”very separate world,” declared the De in 2009; a place of intense group identity where Fox News is the medium of record and the president is believed to follow a ”secret agenda” that is invisible to the rest of the nation This culture of closure also gives us the phrase ”Don't Believe the Liberal Media”-the slogan of the Media Research Center, an iton When you consider that, by the standards of the MRC, virtually all traditional in to understand that the center is calling for a deliberate cognitive withdrawal froh recent developments in mass co, it is also true that times of economic catastrophe induce people to wall theht philosophical structures When the credibility of tradition is shredded, it should not surprise us to see people retreat into pure utopianisht-to-be when the actually-is really sucks Despite the sy hasn't ended in the Great Recession; ideology has triuent Idealism
”I don't read books,” a Tea Party activist once told the historian Jill Lepore ”I read blogs”3 The line struck a chord withof late, Part of Our Time, Murray Kempton's classic study of ”the co the thirties-Communists and fellow travelers,the blog-reading rebels of the conteht the raphical sketch of J B Matthews, a oneti both roles with the sauity, the saular quality always to know in a flash without ever having learned”5 ”Matthehat he wished to see, and he had no need of books for knowledge,” Kees to the USSR in those days, and Keht face-to-face with the spectacular catastrophe taking place in the Ukraine: the man-made famine of 1932 Here is how Matthews dealt with this e situation: he ”insisted that there was no such thing, and anyway, look at India He kne to protect hinition”6 As did many of his comrades So many, in fact, that the persistent blindness of the Americans who visited the Soviet Union in the Depression would eventually becoraphy Lefty after lefty ed to overlook as actually happening to the Soviet people Reviewing the blithe reports of these clueless tourists many years later, the novelist Harvey Swados marveled at how ”the will to believe often triumphed over the evidence of the senses”7 What made this possible, Swados continued, was that the thirties were a tient idealise the certainty of the believers (until the 1939 nazi-Soviet Pact, that is) Malcolhtly differently: it was an ”age of faith” With social traditions shattered, people thought they had to sign up for one side or another in a coht, ”either light or darkness, but nothing between”8 And so a generation of thinkers put themselves under the discipline of a clique of political con men They convinced themselves that the laws of history were symmetrical, mathematical, predictable, and fully at the coeneralissimo They ”set out to be redeemers,” mourned Murray Kempton, and they wound up as ”policemen” They excommunicated one another from their tiny Marxist conclaves over completely theoretical bits of trivia, they fully expected the world to soht themselves to produce awful, cartoonish art9 It was not really a ical Left There was a corporate version as well: the doctrine of positive thinking, and it was just as vehemently idealistic and as closed to the evidence of the senses as was the coe of faith” was in effect whether one riting proletarian fiction ora positiveone's mind in order to filter transmissions between oneself and the outside world
In his towering 1937 bestseller, Think and Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill urged a kind of self-hypnosis on readers: they were to deliberately plunge thetheir future prosperity-and one day success,would1936 bestseller, How to Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie urged readers to adopt a systeanda of the senuinely felt, and therefore had to be deliberately cultivated: another act of faith
The Consolation of Dogent idealism like this has continued to thrive in the dark corners of A our own experience with economic decline it has flourished as never before No, there has been no Marxist revival, but in their runtled ones have chosen the next best thing Inflexible dogmatism is, after sociopathic shrillness and fast trains, one of the great selling points of Atlas Shrugged; the absolute, airtight correctness of Rand's views on all things is always played fortissimo in the novel, always spoken with maxiht the dogard for the author's views A the Rand cult, ”'objective reality' hat Rand said it was,” remembers the libertarian writer Jerome Tuccille
”Morality” was conformity to the ethic of Ayn Rand
”Rationality” was synonyreement with the ideas of Ayn Rand was to be, by definition, irrational and immoral There was no allowable deviation under the tenets of [her philosophy] Objectivisht10 When they weren't banishi+ng one another from the inner circle of the Rand cult, the novelist and her folloere deterarette s Or that ulation Rand warred on environmentalists, whoress; and against American Indians, whose expropriation was deserved because their culture transgressed her philosophical syste of this sort crops up constantly is in professional econo bubble itself could probably not have happened without the resolute determination of econo , superefficient market
The list of heavy economic thinkers who denied that there was a bubble in the real-estatenaious one of the driven upward by fundamentals, as theory says such prices alh, was the econoainst fraud in financialbelief that financiers were so keenly rational and so zealous to protect shareholder value that they simply would not allow fraud to happen That fraud, in fact, happened in all sorts of catastrophic ways and at many different levels made no difference; theory canceled it all out12 Abstract reasoning like this is not solely the province of advanced thinkers; another place where you find it is, of course, the Glenn Beck e a recent performance by his former fave British rock band Muse on his radio show in February 2011, the host declared that he had changed his roup, that for all their rebel lyrics they didn't get what the conservative revival was about after all Why didn't they get it? Because they were Europeans And Europeans, as everyone knew, have had very few gliland won the Second World War, they didn't go into freedom That's where the Road to Serfdom came from Because Winston Churchill andthe wrong direction And it didn't go to freedom, it went to the Road to Serfdom
Beck is correct that The Road to Serfdom, the famous 1944 book by the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek, ritten as a critique of British politics, a warning that Labour Party socialisht lead eventually to totalitarianism The book's weakest point, as critics have observed over the years, is that Hayek's o enthusiastically socialist after the war, it never abridged its traditional freedoms of speech, assembly, the press, and so on The country even reversed itself in the seventies and swung energetically back in the direction of theall that because a favorite work of political conjecture published in 1944 predicted so else Markets have to be free, or else other freedoic was simple: markets weren't free after the war; therefore freedoenerally, leaving the whole continent sadly ignorant of ”real freedo Mr Beck this one last ti reminded me of those thirties leftists on their trips to Russia They saw freedom in the Soviet Union because they wanted to; Beck sees unfreedoht to be there That old ”will to believe” still blithely overrules the ”evidence of the senses”
We notice this intransigent idealis for it Senator Jim DeMint, for example, makes a point closely related to Beck's in his 2009 bestseller, Saving Freedom: We Can Stop America's Slide into Socialism The nations of western Europe, he tells us, capitulated to ”the siren song of socialism” after World War II and soon thereafter ”declined into econonation”13 As it happens, this is incorrect, and in a really monumental way As a brief check with the annals of reality re those very postwar years that France, Italy, Belgiu socialisreatest boo to Senator DeMint's theoretical guidelines, this is ination, and therefore socialis book, in fact, the senator seems to advance on his quarry not by proofs and demonstrations in the conventional sense, but by a process of abstractthe 2008 presidential debates, DeMint criticizes the then senator Barack Obaulation” DeMint does not counter this state that ulation; he siuments and is therefore a man of ”socialist principles”14 DeMint's object here is not to refute; it is to unmask, to close down an unacceptable mental operation There is only one way that believers in freedom can interpret the meltdown of 2008, and they must stick to it whether it fits the facts or not
A taste for ht also explain Senator DeMint's fondness for fairy tales He introduces one chapter with a s and another with soerbread Man We have noticed this infantilizing tendency elsewhere in the resurgent Right, and here, as well as in those other instances, its implication is obvious: that political econoood and evil Government is the wicked witch, while the er of freedo on here is not merely a withdrawal into si for, the answers are al the free-market dream for thirty-soht us, the rown, the more financial bubbles have blossomed and burst, the more political corruption has metastasized, the harsher the business cycle has become One caused the other; that's the ”siht doesn't so much simplify reality as idealize it They're in a place where beliefs don't really have consequences, where premises are not to be checked, only repeated in a louder voice It is as though the frightening news of recent years has driven them into a defensiveness so extreme that they feel they ether
In Pursuit of True Capitalis in 1936, the culture critic Gilbert Seldes ripped the minds of his countrymen Purists of all political stripes were in voice in those days, and none of the To ”the radical critic,” the New Deal obviously didn't go far enough; it left the capitalist system intact To ”the reactionary,” the New Deal reforms were objectionable for the opposite reason: they meant ”the capitalist system has been destroyed”15 It is this latter complaint that concerns us today, and Seldes provided a helpful gloss on its long history People hadlabor unions to exist would destroy capitalish, the form of capitalism they had in those days died, to be replaced by ”capitalis” The end-tiovern railroads in the 1880s, and again the end of the world came to pass Capitalism died, to be replaced this ti and Federal regulation”16 Life went on
Today, as in Gilbert Seldes's time, the fear that true capitalisain Now, as then, only absolutes seeenius for prag, complicated history of political compromise that actually built our econoeddon, some wretched rapture in which losers forever lose and the honorable are finally freed froation to the inferior
That there is no such thing as pure capitalism is a subtlety that eludes them What they pine for is a system that can never exist, that has never existed, and that will never exist And with every inch they bring us toward that ugly utopia, our society's deterioration accelerates But still they keep on, blinking out the facts of the past as well as the disasters their badmatters but the dream, and in its pursuit they will risk our prosperity, our health, and yes, even our honor
CHAPTER 10
The Silence of the Technocrats
Well, reader, we've had a lot of fun poking holes in the things conservatives say, haven't we? They blow off the facts when they feel like it; they swipe syu you used to hear on the Glenn Beck show see session at Lubyanka prison It is preposterous It is contemptible
But you knohat it's better than?
It's better than nothing