Part 5 (1/2)

As a result of their retreat from populism, Democrats have spent the last several decades syste opportunities to broaden the base of their support They did little, for exaanized labor were scythed down by organized money This was no ordinary misstep, by the way Labor is one of the last institutional bearers of an ideology capable of countering thein 2009, things ht have played out very differently Instead, Obae of unionized workers in the private sector sank lower than at any point in the twentieth century The fatuity of it all, one would think, has surely beco less than the decirassroots social y Thanks to this strategy, large parts of America are liberal deserts, places where an econoht counterbalance the billionaire-pitying wisdoht as well not exist

The effects of a wrenching recession, on the other hand, aren't likely to touch the neell-to-do De, yes; they express concern and proency of the recession is not soe to their fundamental values It is, rather, an occasion for charity

Oh, but a country where everyone listens to specialists and gets along-that's a utopia these new Deard with prayerful reverence They dream of bipartisanshi+p and states-that-are-neither-red-nor-blue and some reasonably-arrived-at consensus future where the culture wars cease and everyone i, beneficent sun of free trade and the knowledge industries

Not even froifted political critics did we hear anything different A few days before the 2010 election, for example, Jon Stewart, the perceptive and often ferocious comedian, tried to answer the various Tea Party marches and Glenn Beck rallies with a protest of his ohich he called the ”Rally to Restore Sanity,” otherwise known as the ”ht a crowd of several hundred thousand to the National Mall in Washi+ngton, DC, where they bought ”I'm with Reasonable” T-shi+rts and listened to Stewart's speech about ordinary Aardless of political differences

Now, there was so noble and even Depressionesque about Stewart's invocation of the coree with much of what he said on that occasion But it is aze out over a land laid waste by fantastic corporate fraud and declare that partisanshi+p is what ails us and that reasonableness is the cure Like the national Democrats, Stewart focused on process and expertise and surface etiquette while the real dra une shock of the bailouts Conservatives were out in the cul-de-sacs of Aanize discontent”-and here were the liberals, on thecivility

Conclusion: Traarian historian Karl Polanyi told the story of what he called the ”utopian” idea of the ”self-regulating market”-and of what happened when theorists and dreamers tried to put that utopia into effect ”To allow the market s and their natural environe, ”would result in the de of cultural institutions, hus would perish from the effects of social exposure; they would die as the victih vice, perversion, crime and starvation Nature would be reduced to its elehborhoods and landscapes defiled, rivers polluted, military safety jeopardized, the power to produce food and raw materials destroyed1 When Polanyi wrote those words, the experience of the Depression had just persuaded the world to forswear any further pursuit of that deadly free-market dream Society periodically and instinctively tried to defend itself against the depredations of the market, Polanyi wrote, and for decades, the world assumed that this pattern was a natural one Another econoet another New Deal

But this time arounda new pattern develop After theprecisely the lines Polanyi described-plus a few bonus ways that neither he nor anybody else saw coain Its most influential protestshoes and chase the etically; that we ”tra them2 Moneyed interests understand that with no second FDR, no incorruptible new cop on the financial beat, no return to the rules that onceto fear froedy of the Great Recession

And should we continue down this path, it is fairly certain howwill eventually recover froain like an elephant loosed froulatory enforcerowing grander and rander than Enron, and Enron was grander than the financial scandals of the eighties Anyone else with a viable y will have much to look forward to The health-care industry, for which patriots shed so many tears in 2009, will hold on to its ability to ie that many Americans would apparently prefer to throw Medicare overboard than do soalomaniac schemes of the software industry The oil barons The defense contractors This land is assuredly their land

But the scenario that should concern us ically concentrated Right gets their hands on the rest of thecrew as their predecessors, naturally, but now there is a swaggering, an in-your-face brazenness to their sabotage We got a taste of their vision when they reconquered the House of Representatives in 2010-in the naed by economic disaster, remember-and ie Co fraud on Wall Street They brought the Oba populist innovation-the brand-new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau-under a sustained artillery barrage, proposing ingenious ways to cripple the new body or strip away its funding And during the debt-ceiling crisis of 2011, they ca on the colossal train wreck that they have always said we deserved

Given a chance actually to run the government of the most complex economy on earth like a s and level the regulatory state Dare we even guess at the consequences? At the levels of desperation the nation will hit when they withdraw federal spending froy of deceit into which Wall Street will ih, is for certain As the nation clah the sulfurous fu of thethey will have discovered that certain once-uncontroversial arms of the state must be amputated immediately One fine day in the near future, it will dawn on them that the FDIC, for example, just delivers bailouts under another naet hishways and national parks, they will ask, but wasteful subsidies for leeches who ought to be paying their way? What is disaster relief but a power grab by the losers who can't get theh public schools have been under assault for decades on charges of ra by poor kids will be the factor that galls our leaders most

Social Security, of course, will be one of the first institutions to go on the chopping block, as the essential injustice of protecting the weak dawns on them Why should society pay for the retireerrands? The older generation had a rendezvous with destiny, their hero FDR used to say, and soon it will occur to A moocher and senior-parasite needs to make that rendezvous-which is to say, that appoint-box store

Every probleet worse, of course: inequality, global war a drea Arcadia of all against all

Notes

Introduction

1 As far as I can tell, the first to use a form of this metaphor was Representative Eric Cantor (R-VA), who told the Washi+ngton Independent reporter Dave Weigel in Septe in A in the Washi+ngton Examiner on February 7, 2010, was so affected by a Tea Party convention that he upped that description to a ”Third Great Awakening” Michael Reagan, son of the former president, made the same point in his syndicated colu the Tea Party ns of a 21st Century Political Awakening” is the subtitle of Don't Tread on Us, a coffee-table book of protest placards, published by WND Books in 2010

2 dick Armey and Matt Kibbe, Give Us Liberty: A Tea Party Manifesto (New York: Harper Collins, 2010), p 8

3 See the excerpt from Sidney Blumenthal's book that appeared on Saloncom on April 24, 2008 It is important to remember that Blumenthal, never one to underestimate the dynaed that conservatives had not accepted this verdict and could very well decide to turn farther to the right: ”The radicalization of the Republican Party is not at an end, buta new phase,” he wrote

Loss of the Congress in 2006 is not accepted as reproach Quite the opposite, it is understood by the Republican right as the result of lack of will and nerve, failure of ideological purity, errant iress, betrayal by the media, and by moderates within their own party They may never recover froenda received ht they were the ”Right Nation”

4 Sean Wilentz: ”Conservative Era Is Over,” US News & World Report, November 24, 2008 Francis fukuyama: ”The Fall of America, Inc,” Neeek, October 4, 2008 Politico: Daniel Libit, ”'Deregulator,' Our Old Friend,” October 1, 2008

5 Charles Blo York Titon Post, Novepoliticalreportcoop-win-back-the-house-in-2010 Of course, Rothenberg was hardly alone in this prediction; at that stage in the cycle, nearly everyone believed the Republicans' day was done

6 There have also been several valuable studies of the Right's racial attitudes in recent years One conducted in 2010 by political scientists at the University of Washi+ngton found that ”true believers” in the Tea Party eneral population (You can read about the study at deptswashi+ngtonedu/uwiser/racepoliticshtml) A study of Tea Party rhetoric from that same year, on the other hand, discovered few instances of overt racism; instead it found that the Tea Party's concerns were overwhelns at Tea Party Rally Expressed Racially Charged Anti-Obaton Post, October 14, 2010) Most interesting is the 2009 study of the Right by Stanley Greenberg titled The Very Separate World of Conservative Republicans The report concluded: ”Instead of focusing on these intense ideological divisions, the press and elites continue to look for a racial eleet over it We gave these groups of older, white Republican base voters in Georgia full opportunity to bring race into their discussion-but it did not ever become a central element, and indeed, was alreenbergresearchcom/articles/2398/5488_The Very Separate World of Conservative Republicans 101609pdf

7 A the Scope of the Tea Party Moveton Post, October 24, 2010

Chapter 1 End Times

1 Christina Romer, ”Lessons from the Great Depression for Econos Institution, March 9, 2009, p 2

2 All of these facts are drawn fro Bernstein, The Lean Years: A History of the Ao: Hayes 317 and 422

3 According to Jonathan Alter, The Defining Moment: FDR's Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope (New York: Si here on the suraphy of the econo economics at Harvard at the time See Richard Parker, John Kenneth Galbraith: His Life, His Politics, His Economics (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), pp 12, 48, 77

5 The line comes from The Green Pastures, a popular 1930 play by Marc Connelly

6 Similar statements litter Drucker's first book In the econoer explain or understand his existence as rationally correlated and co-ordinated to the world in which he lives; nor can he coordinate the world and the social reality to his existence The function of the individual in society has become entirely irrational and senseless” Peter Drucker, The End of Economic Man: A Study of the New Totalitarianism (New York: The John Day Company, 1939), p 55

7 Nation's Business: as quoted in Williaacy (New York: Colue that once struck ht but which now, in the aftermath of 2008, seems bluntly accurate is this summation by the historian Richard Pells in his 1973 book about writers and thinkers in the thirties, Radical Vision and Aht in the Depression Years (New York: Harper & Row, 1973): The sense of total collapse, of a society in various stages of decomposition, had a profound effect on most Americans-intellectuals as well as ordinary citizens The depression meant more than simply the failure of business; it was tonatural catastrophe, much like an earthquake that uprooted and destroyed whatever lay in its path It gave A that their whole world was literally falling apart, that their traditional expectations and beliefs were absolutely less, that there was no personal escape from the common disaster It propelled the individual into a void of bewildere, quoted in Charles A Andrews, ”'I', June 1935, p 209 Wrote Coolidge's biographer William Allen White of the sae and his pride in the power of brains and wealth was toppling” White, A Puritan in Babylon: The Story of Calvin Coolidge (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1938), p 432

9 Warren Susman, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon, 1984), p 172 Writers and intellectuals: see Malcole of Faith,” New York Times Book Review, December 13, 1964 Robert McElvaine, The Great Depression: America, 19291941 (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1993), p 202

On the other hand, in Bowling Alone, the sociologist Robert Putnaht,” because membershi+p in all manner of professional and civic associations shrank instead of increasing as in the periods before and after

10 Alan Brinkley, Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression (New York: Vintage, 1983), p 22

11 ”But onder what to put in its place, we are extremely perplexed,” Keynes continued John Maynard Keynes, ”National Self-Sufficiency,” Yale Review 22 (1933): 761

12 Andrew Mellon is quoted in The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover: The Great Depression, 19291941 (New York: Macmillan, 1952), p 30

13 One place the idea was tried was in Detroit in February 1933, where the local tycoon Henry Ford refused to join the effort to rescue a large local bank ”'Let the crash co Jones continues thusly: ”If everything went down the chute there would be a cleaning-up process, [Ford] said, and everybody would then have to get to work Whatever happened, he said he was sure he could again build up a business, as he still felt young” The result, though, was the catastrophic Michigan bank panic and a ”bank holiday” that led to the complete national bank shutdown the next ly, Fifty Billion Dollars: My Thirteen Years with the RFC (New York: Macmillan, 1951), p 62

14 Williaer Jr, The Politics of Upheaval (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960), p 85 The president of the Aressman, but its main backers were the DuPont family, the Koch brothers of their day The speech in which this passage occurs was called ”The New Deal vs Deue in 1936