Post-Peak Liberal ~~~ Life on the Downslope
http://blog.postpeakliberal.com
Post-Peak Liberal
How Will We Live?
I can't find much commentary on this in the media, but it struck me as one of the more bizarre but possibly portentous things I've heard in a while. Detroit Mayor Dave Bing recently floated a plan to shrink Detroit. The details are still forthcoming, and it is of course a highly controversial scheme that may never happen (and Bing may indeed have a few screws loose, as critics have pointed out). But as we sink further into the Long Emergency, this may be the kind of thing we need a lot more of, as conventional solutions and programs die on the vine of economic collapse.
As most know, Detroit has become the poster city for urban blight and the decline of American manufacturing. Its population has dropped from 1.85 million in 1950 to less than 900,000, with the result being that much of the city is vacant and even returning to feral conditions. The area of the city has simply become too large for the remaining inhabitants, and the tax base just can't support the sprawling infrastructure that was once the pride of American industrial achievement. So Mayor Bing is proposing to downsize the city and relocate residents to a more compact set of neighborhoods, where services can be consolidated and delivered to citizens. How this would happen is still up in the air, but it will likely involved creative (critics say draconian and illegal) use of eminent domain.
I doubt that an ambitious plan like this will ever happen. Even if it does make sense logistically and financially, the moneyed powers that actually control the land that would be seized and developed would probably tie things up in court for years. Unless, that is, as some critics of Bing claim, the whole thing is actually a back door sweet deal between the mayor and business interests, designed to reap profits from the development itself. Then it might have a chance, but would still suffer from the usual development problems: over-reliance on luxury condos, upscale retailing, fickle sports financing, and the like.
But the simple fact that the mayor of a major American city is talking about shrinking things down to a manageable size is a good indicator of just how fast the business-as-usual ideas about 'progress' are fading into impossibility. As Jim Kunstler continually predicts, large centralized systems of all kinds will not fare well in the future, due to the overall entropic effects of Peak Oil. Top-down megaschemes that require trillions of dollars of federal funding and massive bureaucratic administration will just not be possible, especially as the economy stays in a high unemployment situation. The ratios of work to pay to consumption will just not support a tax structure robust enough to resurrect the past lives of full employment, hyperconsumption, and maximum growth. Those ships have sailed (and sunk).
So considering that schemes like Bing's Detroit contraction might become more common in the years ahead, what does that mean for our overall lifestyle? How might we be living in the next five, ten, or twenty years?
Obviously, the overriding issue of the immediate future is the economy. If unemployment stubbornly pivots around the 10% mark for the next year and a half or so, as most experts are predicting, we're looking at major realignments in the psyches of American workers. Long-term unemployment for people who are willing to work is devastating. Men especially are raised to peg their identities to career and achievement. If the job market continues to stay 'soft,' expect depression, rage, and violence to rise. The Democratic regime in power seems determined to hoist itself on the petard of health care reform. But if the current Rube Goldberg boondoggle of corporate giveaways and oppressive personal mandates gets passed, it will serve as the Lexington and Concord of the Tea Partiers, and a conservative revolution will be fully afoot. Of course, the GOP has no real plan to actually accomplish any of the things that its angry rhetoric promises, so after a few years they will probably be booted out again (see this post for more). This is a dangerous situation that the major parties are courting, one that could very easily slide over into the rise of a homegrown strongman who will push all-in on the mobilizing power of hate speech, scapegoating, minority persecution, and military governance. Think it can't happen here? Think again. You can't dump a trillion bucks a year into the military, while allowing the rest of the country's infrastructure to go to pot, and not expect some kind of extremist demagogue to grab the machinery of war and turn it against parts of the domestic population. Without real leaders in Washington who are willing to tell us the truth about certain things, we'll be in trouble.
On the practical side, the actual arrangements of the American Algorithm will likely totter and fail. There were more than two million home foreclosures in 2009, a record year. So far, 2010 is shaping up to be even worse, as many foreclosures delayed by procedural requirements finally go through, and long-term unemployment continues its assault on personal income streams. Families that are already leveraged to the hilt in personal debt are just not able to find any relief from cratering property values and the general glut of available housing units. We can't forget that the real estate bubble was about drastic overbuilding of housing stock, so the country is awash in empty cul-de-sac houses and cookie-cutter crap condos. As people continue to get tossed out of their homes (figures suggest one out of every 418 housing units received a foreclosure notice in February -- see previous link), while no one is around who can actually afford to move in to the vacated units, expect vast increases in squatting, as people cross the mental Rubicon of not giving a fuck about legality versus necessity.
At some point, the long-term decline in economic activity, combined with the severe indebtedness of the government and the populace, will spawn new living arrangements. More cities will likely contract, like Detroit, as tax bases continue to erode and sprawled-out service areas prove no longer operable. Similarly, the vast tracts of suburban strip malls and their surrounding housing developments will become half empty and dangerous. Oil pushed above $80 a barrel again this week, so families that are already pounded by unemployment and income strangulation are ill-poised to afford to double their expenditures on gas. Credit cards are going to max out, and many people will be looking at their last full tanks before the end. I don't see a big future for a way of life that depends on hundreds of miles of driving per day, for every conceivable function. Expect the retail strip suburbs to give way to urban and small town clustering.
We keep hearing jobs, jobs, jobs from our pundit class. Dems are getting beat to shit for fudging around on health care for the last year and a half, instead of really getting in there and creating jobs. Republicans, who will likely sweep into full power in the next two cycles, promise to turn loose the power of the economy by cutting taxes, shrinking the federal bloat, and making America a glorious and proud place for heroic entrepreneurs again. Of course, it's all hogwash. The GOP did nothing of the sort the last time they had full control, and they won't do these things if they ascend again.
After all, the problem is not lack of growth. The American economy has been hugely productive over the last few decades, no matter who is in power. Despite some temporary downturns, we have had steady economic growth for a long time. Lack of growth is not a real issue. In fact, growth itself may be the problem, both ecologically and socially. We don't need jobs, jobs, jobs -- per se. What is really needed is a different spreading of the productive fruits of the overall economy. Let's remember that crucial graph from Les Leopold's The Looting of America:
This is where we can see how in the early 1970s, wages for regular workers became unhitched from what their productivity dictated they should be paid. The divergence of what people are paid vs. what they should be paid based on their productivity is the basic source of all of our economic woes today. All of that surplus value, real value created by workers, has been funneled upwards and captured by a small elite of investors, corporate chieftains, and financial wizards. This is what has created the highest levels of income and wealth inequality since the 1920s. This is why people have virtually no savings and no means of support to fall back on in hard times. This is why cities like Detroit are turning into urban wastelands. The economic value of the last four decades has been secreted away to private and corporate coffers, never to be seen again.
Net time, we'll look at just what this inequality has done to America, and what might happen if we leveled the playing field.
March Miscellany
No huge, sprawling piece this time, just a couple things I saw this week -- thought I'd share.
He's listed in the Links section of this blog, but I can't recommend Jim Kunstler too many times. His non-fiction masterpiece is The Long Emergency, probably the best book I've read in the last 10 years, and the greatest overall look at the Peak Oil situation. Most view him as a crank and a pessimist, but he really has the perfect combination of technical knowledge and biting satire, which makes his writing stand out above the usual Peak Oil crowd in quality and scope. He has a kind of dire/droll thing going on, fantastic. His older books on the suburban crapscape are also must reading: The Geography of Nowhere and Home From Nowhere. More recently, he wrote a novel about living life in the Long Emergency. It's called World Made by Hand, and it is a poignant, scary, but ultimately hopeful treatment of what could be a much simpler life for all of us. There is a separate website for this novel here. Check it out for the beautiful music alone. I believe he has also just finished the follow-up book to World Made by Hand, so that should be out soon.
In any case, check out a little blurb from this week's Clusterfuck Nation, Kunstler's excellent weekly blog. This is that dire/droll style that I can't get enough of:
As I mentioned last time, I am making my way through the excellent book The Spirit Leve: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger. When I'm done, I'll put up a longer piece on inequality, the most under-treated but most important trend in understanding the current American dilemma. Initially though, what is most surprising is how many social and economic variables are negatively impacted, in huge ways, by increased inequality, even when adjusted for overall levels of wealth. In other words, even amongst rich countries, it's the socioeconomic spread between top and bottom that makes the difference, not the absolute levels of wealth. Relative outcomes are far more important than absolute ones, which is surprising. But we'll come back to that later. For this piece, I just wanted to highlight a little blurb as relates to health care:We are left, finally, with a so-called health care system so cruel and unjust that the Devil himself in consultation with the most demonic lobbyists, and perhaps a little input from historical politicians such as Caligula, Ivan the Terrible, Heinrich Himmler, and Pol Pot could not construct a worse way of deploying the fruits of modern science. It has gotten to the point for most of us where we dread a visit to the doctor more for the bureaucratic consequences than the health issues themselves. Your gall bladder may have to come out, but it's much harder to face the booby-trap clause in your health insurance that will result in you getting stuck with a $123,000 bill for surgery and attendant procedures (including the $500 tylenols). Three months later, of course, the re-po man is towing your car and the mortgage "servicer" has foreclosed on your house, and your life (even without that pesky gall bladder) has become a permanent camping trip next to a drainage ditch.I am personally not confident that we will do anything to address the failures and inequities of so-called Health Care. As a general thing, I have to say that this recent exercise only seems to prove the now permanent impotence and impairment of the federal government. In The Long Emergency we have entered, real governance is likely to devolve downward to the community level, and it may be unrealistic to expect any real action from on high. Things have just gone too far at this point. We have blown past the thresholds of hyper-complexity so that further hyper-complexity only make things worse. At more than 2,000 pages, the current Health Care Reform bill is surely an exercise in the diminishing returns of grotesque additional hyper-complexity.
Let's consider the health of two babies born into two different societies. Baby A is born in one of the richest countries in the world, the USA, home to more than half of the world' billionaires. It is a country that spends somewhere between 40-50 per cent of the world's total spending on health care, although it contains less than 5 per cent of the world's population. Spending on drug treatments and high-tech scanning equipment is particularly high. Doctors in this country earn almost twice as much as doctors elsewhere and medical care is often described as the best in the world.
Baby B is born in one of the poorer of the western democracies, Greece, where average income is not much more than half that of of the USA. Whereas America spends about $6000 per person per year on health care, Greece spends less than $3000. This is in real terms, after taking into account the different costs of medical care. And Greece has six times fewer high-tech scanners per person than the USA.
Surely Baby B's chances of a long and healthy life are worse than Baby A's?
In fact, Baby A, born in the USA, has a life expectancy of 1.2 years less than Baby B, born in Greece. And baby A has a 40 per cent higher risk of dying in the first year after birth than Baby B. Among developed countries, there are even bigger contrasts than the comparison we've used here: babies born in the USA are twice as likely to die in their first year than babies in Japan, and the difference in average life expectancy between the USA and Sweden is three years, between Portugal and Japan it is over five years.
Isn't it remarkable that we don't hear stats like this, explained so clearly, in all the brouhaha surrounding the health care bills? I guess it's not that unusual, since most mainstream news programs rely on ubiquitous ad spots for boner pills.
The American Straitjacket
Here are a couple of quick plugs/recommendations.
Check out this new article in the latest Atlantic Monthly: "How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America." The author Don Peck makes a compelling and distressing case that the base unemployment line is not going to return to 'natural' rates of 5 or 6%, but will instead oscillate around the higher numbers we're seeing today (8 to 10% or higher) for many years to come. This higher baseline rate will wreak havoc on the culture of work and our social fabric, and will be especially damaging to the psyches of the unskilled, older men, and new entrants to the workforce. In usual liberal fashion, Peck does not advocate any kind of change to the overall American social form (One Person-One Job/One Family-One Dwelling), as this blog does. Rather, he looks for a return to a "more normal jobs environment," even though his own article points to that not being a real possibility. But it's a compelling piece nonetheless, so check it out.
Also, I highly recommend Neal Gabler's book from 1998, Life: The Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality (paperback is from 2000). Gabler offers an ambitious but spot-on thesis about the gradual emergence of entertainment as the dominant cultural force in America. He ranges across the history of print and visual media, showing how the production and consumption of entertainment have seeped into our news, our politics, and most frighteningly, our personality-formation itself. He is a little light on the interaction of entertainment with consumption and the consumer-based psyche, but it is an impressive work, and definitely worth your time. I was reading this both before and after my recent. first-ever visit to Los Angeles, so it provided an interesting backdrop for seeing the spiritual center of American entertainment. I hope to have a posting on my California trip sometime soon, if I can get my thoughts together.
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Turning to the current economic and political situation, we continue to flail around as winter comes to a close, amidst earthquakes, balmy Olympic games, and the eternal wrangling over health care. There is a kind of strange, dreamlike quality to the last several weeks, as real lives stand still or deteriorate, while world events course around with apocalyptic theatricality. Regular families on the ground desperately need help, or at least a narrative that makes sense of our problems. Instead, we get more staged outrage from our politicians, more escapism from our culture, and more dire warnings from our media, sprinkled with the usual lifestyle set-pieces that are becoming more surreal by the day. Meanwhile, the Long Emergency tightens its fingers around our throats.
Why can't we get any honest discussion or action from our political leaders and our media figures? Why is everything still cast along the same talking points like consumer confidence, housing starts, daily DOW and Nasdaq movements, interest rate changes, and the like? Why is our historically-unique situation being addressed with the same tired tools and tirades that have been floating around for decades?
The uncomfortable answer is that we are wrapped tightly in an ideological and systemic straitjacket, many years in the making. And even more disturbingly, there will be no wriggling out of this thing if we listen to the same people and institutions that stitched it up in the first place. Times are unusual, so business as-usual, no matter how spruced-up for a 'new millennium,' will prove utterly useless in tackling the emerging realities. There is a lot of rage out there, best exemplified by the Tea Partiers. But we better get used to NOT getting help from the 'normal' places, no matter how new the packaging.
So continuing our stretched metaphor, what are the main threads of this American Straitjacket? What are the primary straps, and where did they come from? Why can't we expect help from the traditional sources?
- Economics: As we have highlighted many times previously, but particularly here, the Post-War economic climate in America really starting changing in the mid-70s, when overall productivity and growth started to diverge from worker pay. Due to many factors (globalization, de-skilling of labor, technological changes in finance, legal changes in corporate structure), the main fruits of American capitalism started to drift upwards to a small elite. Completely aside from whose 'fault' this is, we're just talking objectively about a massive increase in economic inequality in America (I am currently making my way through the groundbreaking book The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger, so look out for a coming post on the real social costs of inequality). The brute fact is that the top 1% of households in America probably control more wealth than the bottom 90% of the population (exact wealth measurements are tricky, since 'wealth' is not subject to the same reporting requirements as income, and much of it gets off-shored). But again, completely aside from the moral 'rightness' of such an arrangement, it cannot be disputed that magnitudes of economic inequality like this sharply reduce our flexibility in tackling a broad recession. Most families have virtually no breathing room to handle long-term economic deterioration. They are leveraged to the hilt, living one paycheck to the next, with most of their money-streams locked up in rising living, health care, and educational costs. The American economic dividend from decades of growth has been spirited away to elite corporate and individual coffers, and will thus not be available for addressing our great recession. The only quick economic option left in America is a top-down restructuring of the federal tax structure, one that would massively tax the rich and redistribute the wealth to the lower classes. However, this won't happen, because.....
- Politics: As John Dewey famously said, "Politics is the shadow cast on society by big business." We all know it, but it is seldom called out in such precise terms. Corporate elites have become the federal government. As we have noted before, a major myth in political discourse is that private and public power are separate. In reality, inequalities in the economy have allowed for moneyed interests to completely capture the electoral and policy-making processes of the government. Big Corporate and Big Government power go together like couches and asses, and our national politicians are almost all corporate lawyers or businesspeople. We have covered this before, so we don't need to rehash here. But suffice it to say, our two major parties are not designed to cope with changing conditions. They are designed for winning elections, raising money for those elections, and then serving the funders of those campaigns. Ideologically, the purpose of contemporary politics is to sound like you are serving a wide range of people, while in reality hewing to an extremely narrow view of society, which is.....
- Neoliberalism: Amidst all of the conservative bullshit bluster about Obama's creeping socialism, it needs to be endlessly pointed out that, to update Richard Nixon ("we are all Keynesians now"), we are all neoliberals now. In the broad landscape of economic theory, contemporary "conservatives" and "liberals" are both part of the same family, called "neoliberalism." Roughly, neoliberalism holds that society is best served by maximum market freedom and minimal interference by the government. The role of government is to create or bolster legal and economic frameworks, both national and international, in which private free markets can flourish. In regards to individuals, families, and communities, neoliberalism sees people as maximizers of self-interest via market choices (i.e., consumption), as opposed to political citizens per se. So again, the government's role vis-a-vis actual people is to create frameworks in which people can maximize their financial earnings potential, for discharge into free markets. In this wide view, Democrats and Conservatives simply disagree on how to maximize support for private businesses and free markets. Dems tend to push for more support on the individual-earnings side of things (better schools, more unemployment support, legs up for the disadvantaged), whereas the GOP would rather beef up the direct support for businesses. But neither side doubts the overall neoliberal project: economic growth, government support for free markets. maximum economic output, full employment, privatized morality, economic efficiency as the highest social goal, maximum legal protection of corporate property rights, etc. Nowhere in popular political discourse are these tenets challenged; or at least, challenges don't get much attention. Why? Well, .......
- Mainstream Media: In the points above, what is starting to emerge is an interlocking system for support of the status quo. Economic inequality creates political centralization, which spawns similar justifying ideologies, which then lend structural support back to the very conditions creating the inequality in the first place. It's a kind of feedback loop of power, and we can envision this loop as the tightening straps of the American Straitjacket. And like a constricting snake, as the loops draw tighter, less outside air can get into the trapped body. In our metaphor, the outside air that is being blocked can be see as alternative ways of organizing our collective life. Into this mix, the mainstream media fits nicely as another constricting band. We don't need to dwell on the media too long here, because the relationships are simple. Inequality in the economic sphere has produced hyper-concentration in the media. We all know the background. Big companies gobble up TV stations, networks, radio stations, newspapers, and magazines. Most mainstream media outlets are now part of much larger corporate conglomerates, and are thus simply one investment area among many. Like any other cultural product, the media must sell advertising space by getting good ratings or circulation numbers. And as Neal Gabler detailed in Life: The Movie (see link above), the relentless logic of the entertainment business reshapes the media into a grand amusement edifice. Gabler relates this from Nixon speechwriter Raymond Price, on the relation of media and politics: "Voters are basically lazy, basically uninterested in making an effort to understand what we're talking about. Reason requires a high degree of discipline of concentration; impression is easier. Reason pushes the viewer back, it assaults him, it demands that he agree or disagree; impression can envelop him, invite him in, without making an intellectual demand....The emotions are more easily roused, closer to the surface, more malleable" (Gabler, p. 103). Thus the horserace motif in politics. Entertainment sells, and since entertainment is highly concentrated into a few behemoth outlets, politics enters the game of selling itself. The Campaign-Entertainment Complex becomes king. And because the mainstream media are themselves businesses, they convey the same overall neoliberal support for maximum consumption, economic growth, full employment, etc. Alternative messages about reducing consumption for environmental reasons, or purposely constricting the economy to de-marketize functions that can be handled outside financial transactions, or overhauling property laws to maximize non-corporate collective ownership patterns -- these things will never get airtime in a corporatized media environment. This is why mainstream media coverage of our current economic crises, even in the most 'serious' venues, never strays beyond the boilerplate neoliberal ideas about how to 'get the economy' moving again with jobs programs and 'getting people back to work,' or getting investments rolling again, or growing consumer confidence, etc. Different answers are difficult to come by inside the straitjacket.
- Consumer Culture: Of course, it would be a miracle if the vast interlocking institutions and systems detailed above were not ultimately mirrored within the hearts and minds of actual people. But of course, they are. As consumer capitalism has reached full-stride, Americans are now born and raised in the incubator of The Product. Children are exposed to epic levels of advertising, especially television, with obvious implications for learning and psychological development. People who are awash in electronic commercial communication will obviously develop short attention spans. We become desensitized to all manner of stimuli, especially violence and sexual titillation. The psychology of advertising has made us profoundly narcissistic and unable to empathize with others. Conservatives are on target when they attack contemporary culture as debased, offensive, materialistic, and godless. They just lay the blame at the wrong doorstep (college professors, atheists, PC-police and feminists), instead of acknowledging that successful corporations themselves are responsible for undermining the virtue of the traditional. The triumph of consumer culture is devastating for any alternative ideology that challenges economic growth and maximum consumption. The possibility that a society could decide that non-economic values were worth pursuing through political action is, in the current climate, bordering on ridiculous. After all, what else is there besides getting Paid in Full? People express their values in the marketplace only, and consumption is thus our highest form of worship. It's not difficult to see how this consumption-centered view of personal existence is spiritually stultifying, psychologically-numbing, and ultimately empty. But inside the American Straitjacket, there is little alternative.
So this is where we are right now. We live inside an interlocking straitjacket of economy and culture. All of the major institutions through which we operate are part of this very narrow view of the world. Markets are good. Production and consumption are good. The government exists to maximize individual's access to the marketplace, and their ability to contribute to it. From the other end, the government's role is to grease the skids for businesses to provide energy to the markets. If all of this is humming along nicely, there is little for citizens to do, except vote for the party that has kept the system going well. When times get tough, like they are now, our duty is to keep throwing people out until we get dudes in there who get things 'back on track'. The media and the people are expected to shout their scripted outrages until somebody gets in there and starts getting things pumping again.
What's missing inside this tight ideological system is a broader view of things, like the natural world in which we actually exist. Note how rapidly the climate change debate has subsided, now that our neoliberal system is in tatters. It's not that we're no longer in danger of massive catastrophe. It's just that there is no wiggle room for people in a massively-unequal economic system, one that depends on maximum consumption and full employment, to talk about voluntarily reducing their throughput of anything.
Or what about a larger discussion on property-ownership, land-use, outdated and harmful zoning, and tax policies to support non-corporate but cooperative ventures of all kinds? The country is now awash in the detritus of residential and commercial construction bubbles. There are empty buildings all all kinds sitting all over the country. There are huge parts of entire cities (Detroit, anyone?) lying unused and useless. How about a massive, local government seizure of land and property via eminent domain, with redistribution to people who will actually do things with the resources? Again, because these people would probably not contribute anything substantial to the hyper-concentrated consumer economy, there are no discussions of this sort.
Our straitjacket prevents the inhalation of any novel air from outside the system itself. But we're going to need as many new approaches as possible as this long national decline continues. The more we struggle to make the straps of our outdated garments fit over the bulgings of new realities, the more valuable time we will lose. I guess we need a sort of Houdini Project to get out of the whole damn thing once and for all.
Tea Parties in Cop Land
"Look Sheriff, I'm sorry to have awoken you from your slumber, but you blew it! You had your chance, and you blew it!!"
-- Robert DeNiro as Lt. Moe Tilden (Cop Land, 1997)
As I have mentioned numerous times on this site, I have great sympathy for the conservative temperament. In many ways, I actually feel more affinity with the conservative outlook than the usual "progressive" one. I can identify with the desire for a return to, or a preservation of, an earlier way of life. After all, that's what "conservative" means, a conserving of the valuable things of the past. Newer does not always mean better, and we have indeed tossed aside many of the things that have historically defined our country's greatness. I even look back on the 80s with nostalgic cultural longing, not because of the Reaganesque political scene, but because that seemed to be the last period of relative cultural lightness, a time when there were still un-, or at least under-commodified aspects of life. So I do not throw my hat in with those who disparage the Tea Partiers as crazies and bigots, although there are certainly isolated pockets of looniness, as there are with any broad movement.
But like many conservatives, I have a strong preference for decentralized power. This may sound strange to those who have been force-fed the idea that all liberals are Big Gubmint Big Spenders. So instead of thinking of the political spectrum as a line (with the left on one side and the right on the other), envision a circle, with both left and right converging at opposite poles, based on centralizing or decentralizing tendencies. This is not the best graph below, but it's the best I could find online, and it will do for now (from http://daveeriqat.files.wordpress.com/2008/12/political_spectrum.png).
Visualizing things this way, we can see that not all people on the left want big government, centralized control, and top-down direction of our economy. I myself tend towards the decentralized view from the left, which can roughly be labeled "anarchic," although I prefer decentralist as a general term, due to the pejorative connotations associated with anarchy. As a decentralist liberal, I believe in limited government, localized control, and individual freedom, much as "libertarians" do. So I really can identify with much of the Tea Party agenda, in principle. I understand where they're coming from, because I also feel that huge, top-down bureaucracies are inherently inefficient, bloated, and liberty-sapping. Centralized control usually reduces the freedom and power of small-scale actors, and should thus be avoided whenever possible.
Unfortunately, liberals of my persuasion are now in the position of Lt. Moe Tilden (Robert DeNiro) talking to the local sheriff (Sylvester Stallone), who has finally come around to help out, but too late. "You had your chance, and you blew it." There have been radical lefties warning of the dangers of bloated government and runaway spending for years now. We have been detailing the corruption of federal politicians, the dangers of pay-for-play policy-making, the capture of the electoral system by "special interests" -- the whole shebang. From this perspective, the current Tea Party enthusiasm is a couple decades late to the game. As such, their groping around for a platform to address our current difficulties is ill thought-out and inconsistent. So while I admire their finally coming to grips with the big picture, their incomplete understanding of what's happening will probably end up doing more harm than good, and will certainly not do anything to change the entrenched status quo.
What do I mean? Let's look at the Tea Party platform more closely. These are "Non-Negotiable Core Beliefs," as listed on www.teaparty.org.
- Illegal Aliens Are illegal.
- Pro-Domestic Employment Is Indispensable.
- Stronger Military Is Essential.
- Special Interests Eliminated.
- Gun Ownership Is Sacred.
- Government Must Be Downsized.
- National Budget Must Be Balanced.
- Deficit Spending Will End.
- Bail-out And Stimulus Plans Are Illegal.
- Reduce Personal Income Taxes A Must.
- Reduce Business Income Taxes Is Mandatory.
- Political Offices Available To Average Citizens.
- Intrusive Government Stopped.
- English Only Is Required.
- Traditional Family Values Are Encouraged.
- Common Sense Constitutional Conservative Self-Governance is our mode of operation.
We'll leave aside the illegal alien thing for now. I have never been too involved in the immigration debate, so I can't speak too well on that that. Suffice it to say that it seems to be a staple of many conservative platforms, and I'm fine with enforcing the laws as strongly as possible.
So we're on to "Pro-Domestic" employment, which is a fairly unusual formulation. I assume that this means that we should prevent global outsourcing of jobs and enact policies that reinvigorate domestic production. This is of course a worthy goal, and would likely be accepted all across the political spectrum, in that limited wording. But how do we do that? Clearly, this would involve the repeal of free trade agreements and the enactment of protective tariffs, to allow higher labor-cost American businesses to compete. While not an expert on international trade, I have a feeling that we would get pummeled by China were we to try and enact such a protective agenda. But then again, maybe there are other ways of getting Pro-Domestic employment going, especially in the taxation realm, which we'll deal with below. I just wanted to point out that encouraging domestic production is not as simple as it sounds.
So lets move on to the next one: "A Stronger Military is Essential." The word 'stronger' is an interesting one. Certainly, no one would object to a 'strong' military. But a 'stronger' one? That implies that the one we have now is too weak, which is simply not the case. The base Pentagon budget in 2009 was $653 billion, but when we add in the supplemental costs of Iraq and Afghanistan, and other aspects of veteran care and loan servicing, the actual military budget is around $1 trillion -- PER YEAR. This represents 54% of the annual federal budget and, staggeringly, 47% of global military spending.
{NOTE: The government and many commentators try to cook the numbers by lumping in Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid with regular outlays. This is a misrepresentation, because these are trust fund programs, sourced separately from discrete taxation regimes. And while they may have their own funding problems (which are also generally exaggerated by pundits), they should not be included with the ongoing expenditures of non-trust fund budget items, like the military. This tactic of conflating trust fund and regular spending started during the Vietnam War, to make military spending seem smaller. Source: www.warresisters.org/pages/piechart.htm}
And just a reminder: we still have over 900 official military installations around the globe. Our military spending is roughly as much as the rest of the world combined. We spend more that all of Europe, China, Central/South/East Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Russia, and Latin America put together. It thus seems a little strange that the Tea Party crowd would want a stronger military, considering their other goals for small government. But we'll get to that too.
We can cover the economic points together, since they are all really one complex of problems. But first, let's dispense with the other one-offs.
- Gun Ownership is sacred: I'm fine with that, as a general decentralist. Until the Constitution is changed (I assume that's what they mean by sacred, and not something Biblical), the right to bear arms is guaranteed. I have no problem with that.
- English Only is Required: I'm fine with this too, even though it's really more of a curmudgeonly complaint than anything substantive. I get as frustrated as anyone else when I can't understand what my waiter is saying to me, but I generally don't want to then force him to take English classes. And I'm not exactly sure what forums they're talking about for application. Do they just mean schools, that there should be no bilingual or multi-lingual programs offered? Well, schools are locally controlled; so in the decentralizing spirit, communities should be able to offer curricula in whatever language they want, if it serves their needs. If they're talking about other institutions besides schools, I'm still not sure how the Tea Partiers justify top-down enforcement of English with their desire for limited government. This speaks to a general inconsistency in the whole platform, which we'll cover in our summary below.
- Traditional Family Values Are Encouraged: Again, we're into the uncomfortable contradiction of the Tea Partiers wanting the government to keep their hands off our money but on our genitals. If the government shouldn't interfere in our places of businesses, why should they have their mitts on our bedrooms? Why is the federal bureaucracy so inept when it comes to financial matters, but suddenly sacrosanct when it comes to how we should organize our families? Again, maybe I'm misreading the application point of this plank. Maybe it's not the government itself that should encourage family values, but just a kind of free-floating American wholesomeness that will emerge when all of the other parts of the Tea Party agenda are put in place. Even if that's the case, this still just feels like a culture war throw-in, designed to fire up anti-gay sentiment and harness that bigotry for fund-raising or electoral mobilization. After all, last time I checked, there are plenty of men who like women, and vice versa, since we are actually biological entities. Family values don't really need government encouragement to thrive, but that's another issue for another day (you can see more on the whole gay rights issue here).
OK, let's get to the heart of the Tea Party energy: economic issues. Most of the non-negotiable core beliefs are of an economic nature: Pro-Domestic Employment (covered above), Special Interests Eliminated, Government Downsized, Balanced Budget, No Deficit Spending, No Bail-Outs or Stimulus (illegal), Reduced Income Taxes, Reduced Business Taxes, and Political Offices Available to Average Citizens (this one does not sound like an economic issue, but it really is -- more below).
All of these things go together, and on the surface, they seem to accrue to a fairly simple, overall goal, which is the final plank of the platform: Common Sense Constitutional Conservative Self-Governance. This is the refrain we hear, and will hear, in all of the campaigns that harness the Tea Party energy: we must return the government to the people, and the people's money to the people. We have to get rid of all the wasteful, bloated, self-serving, pork-laden, laziness-rewarding government spending. It's time for sensible, restrained, common-sense government again.
It sounds good, doesn't it? It sounds so simple. But as we have detailed many times on this site, this conservative narrative has the luxury of opposition. It harnesses people's rage over dire economic conditions, and funnels it into channels that will, when the elections are over, continue to cut the same debilitating course of action deeper and deeper. How can this be? How could the righteous Tea Party spirit, which even warns against Republicans like Sarah Palin as possible turncoats and deceivers, be co-opted by the forces of the status quo? As usual, the devil is in the details; or, in this case, in the complexities.
- Let's take a couple innocent-sounding points first: Special Interests Eliminated and Political Offices Available to Average Citizens. We have all heard the stats. There are around 13,000 registered, full-time lobbyists in Washington, roughly 24 for each member of Congress. Hundreds of millions are spent each year on lobbying, and legislation itself is often written by the actual "special interests" themselves. But the first thing we have to note is that "special interests" is really just euphemism for "corporations." I would imagine that in the Tea Party universe, corporate lobbyists are really just part of the "business community," whereas the real "special interests" are those horrible union people, the ACLU, the trial lawyers, and other nefarious commie-types. But the dollars tell the real story. The vast majority of special interest dollars are spent by corporations. The finance/insurance/real estate sector alone spends 10 times what all organized labor spends on lobbying. Trial lawyers spend about 8% of what health industry companies spend. All "ideological/single issue" lobbying combined is less than half of what the electronics/communications companies spend. So when the Tea Partiers talk about eliminating special interests, then we're into the realm of getting corporate money out of the federal government. How in the hell would we do that? Well, it would involve a complete revamping of our electoral process, which dovetails with the other Tea Party goal of getting "average citizens" into office. We would need to drastically reduce the cost of running for federal office. In 2008, it cost about $1.1 million to win a seat in the House. For the Senate, it was $6.5 million. As usual, incumbents won over 90% of the seats, and a quarter of the seats in the House were financially unopposed (source: Center for Responsive Politics). Obviously, these incumbent campaigns are not being financed by $5 donations from Aunt Ethel. This is corporate money buying candidates for favorable legislation (i.e., pork). This is pay-for-play. A few million bucks spread across multiple campaigns can return hundreds of millions in subsidies and tax breaks; otherwise known as a good investment. So how do we get rid of that "special interest" influence? Certainly not by giving more legal rights to corporate "free speech" (sic), as the Supreme Court did recently. No, it's clear from other democracies around the world that the only way to limit corporate influence over government is to enact one or all of these reforms: Proportional Representation instead of winner-take-all districting (in every country where this is in place, vibrant multi-party systems have emerged -- more here); Instant Runoff Voting (which eliminates the Spoiler Effect and encourages ideological diversity); Public Financing of Elections (which sounds expensive, but is actually much, much cheaper than plowing billions of corporate dollars into the electoral process); Seasonal Limits to Political Ads (it sounds repressive -- but in practice, it can be combined with free, non-advertising airtime for candidates to express their views); An Absolute Ban on Lobbying (punishable by criminal bribery proceedings). Are the Tea Partiers ready to push for any of these actual reforms that would get "special interest" influence out of government? Somehow, I doubt it. The system is too entrenched. Instead, we'll likely see empty promises like the ones made by Scott Brown in Massachusetts, noble candidates espousing libertarian rhetoric on the campaign trail but then bowing to the necessities of the pay-for-play system once in office. And I really don't blame the candidates. That's what they have to do to raise the multi-millions necessary for election. The actual, concrete changes suggested above are hard, but they are absolutely necessary to accomplish any measure of smaller government. And real liberals have been calling for these changes for years.
- The rest of the Tea Party economic planks (balanced budget, no bailouts or stimulus, reduced taxes) are completely predicated on the above bullet-point. None of these things are going to happen if corporate influence is not reduced via massive electoral reforms. Sure, many GOP candidates will run for office on tax cuts, and win. And if the GOP takes control this year or in 2012, we'll probably get massive tax cuts. But unless the corporate pay-for-play system is eliminated, bloated spending will continue, and the pork projects will go on, especially in the military. The burden will shift from income and corporate taxes to some other place, likely consumption taxes, which are highly regressive. After all, roads have to be paved, and schools have to be heated. And a trillion dollar military doesn't pay for itself. There will be tax clawbacks somehow and somewhere, only through back doors, and with less fanfare than the tax cuts. And we'll be even worse off than now, because the general systemic flaws will not have been addressed.
Alright, that's long enough on specifics. You get the general idea. While I do admire the active nature of the Tea Parties, and their outrage over the status quo, they are late to the game and their platform is a mess. There is no real effort to think through the logical inconsistencies in their free-form rants, especially in their strange desire for a financially non-intrusive but culturally-dictating state. They will, however, continue to gain in strength, and they will likely define the terms of the next couple election cycles. But as I noted in an earlier post, the best place to be over the next few years is out of power. It will be much easier to run against current office-holders, as things deteriorate. Call it the luxury of opposition. The party that is out of power does not bear the burden of actually having to make things work, and they can spout pleasant platitudes with no repercussions.
In this case, the Tea Party crowd has the luxury of pretending that some kind of Ayn Randian universe is actually possible, even though the deification of the self-made entrepreneur has virtually no basis in economic history or current global reality. There is one huge blind spot in conservative ideology in general, and the Tea Partiers are no exception: the idea that Public is somehow separate from Private, that Big Government has nothing to do with Big Business. Indeed, Big Business is absolutely dependent on Big Government, and with the corporate pay-for-play system in place, they are actually the same thing. Our federal government is almost entirely composed of corporate lawyers and businesspeople. It's the same guys! The real political choice is not between right and left, public and private -- it is centralized power vs. decentralized power, as the circle graph at the beginning of this piece shows.
Most conservatives only see the danger inherent in centralized government power. But centralized private power is even more dangerous, because it eventually captures public power for itself anyway, fusing things into a true plutocratic system; i.e., fascism. There is no virtue inherent in economic activity, in and of itself. Business is not intrinsically good. And indeed, with the godlike powers assumed by the modern corporation, business interests that have captured public power can do exponentially more damage to our country than any other type of activity imaginable, including terrorism. At issue is the nature of freedom itself, which Cicero defined as 'participation in power.'
I would encourage liberals and progressives to reach out to the Tea Party crowd, to further debate and discussion. Demonization and dismissal would be a tragic mistake, because much can be learned from the conservative rage over centralized abuse of power. Liberals themselves need to have their own game sharpened, especially about the viability of top-down social and economic engineering. And I would hope that both sides come to understand the overall picture of the Long Emergency, and the ultimate need to craft a completely new, collective social form. This will be absolutely necessary for the long road ahead.
The POTUS Position: Obama's State of the Union Address
"We were sent here to serve our citizens, not our own ambitions."
-- President Obama (State of the Union Address, 1/27/2010)
Pretty good speech from the President last night. I wouldn't say it struck me as too different from his previous speeches, at least in format and tone. Of course, he is a magnificent orator: smart but not overbearing, serious but playful, parental but not scolding. He tends to cast out a lot of policy buckshot in his speeches, and last night was no exception. I always get this vague feeling that every Obama address is like a fresh beginning, a series of "we need to start...."(s). And while that is a great style for campaigning, it's starting to wear thin as he gets further into his term. But that's just a minor, stylistic quibble, for now. Let's get into the speech itself.
These are my general observations on the address, from watching last night and reviewing the text this morning. There were four recurring points that Obama scattered through the whole thing. These are different than the overall ideological structure, which we'll get to later. These are just nuggets that kept popping up.
- Reprimands on Partisan Gridlock -- By my rough count, Obama lectured Congress on the evils of partisan bickering, grandstanding, and obstruction almost 20 times. While he mentioned that both parties were at fault, he clearly noted that the Republicans bear the brunt of the responsibility. He especially called them out for their supermajority shenanigans. He also reminded his own party that they still have large majorities in both houses, and that they need to man-up and get things done. I thought this trope was the strongest part of the speech. Obama came off as the serious adult in a room of embarrassed but snickering children, and the best line of the night was the one that sits at the top of this posting. The President has been relentlessly hammered from his own party for hewing to his bipartisan approach amidst the serial rebuffs of the GOP. But to his credit, Obama stuck to his guns last night, maintaining that he will not give up on building bridges to the Republican side of the aisle. Of course, when your general policies are pro-corporate and neoliberal, that makes it much easier to hold hands with your plutocratic buddies in the other party. But that's another issue. Suffice it to say, Obama came off as supremely Presidential in his scolds on hyper-partisanship.
- Reminders of Bills in Progress -- Several times, and slightly related to the reprimands mentioned above, the President reminded the people that many of the strategies he was proposing (jobs bill, climate bill, green energy investment, etc.) had already been passed by the House, but had not been acted on by the Senate, or had reached some other impasse in the legislative process. By doing this, he is informing the American people that he can only do so much as an executive -- it is the legislative branch that must actually craft the laws that implement policies. Obama has done this in the past, but he was particularly effective last night. Again, he was positioning himself as the adult in the discussion, prodding Congress to stop f'ing around and start delivering on the promises.
- Wall Street Bashing -- Many commentators were expecting, or maybe just hoping, that Obama would go whole-hog populist and ramp up the rhetoric against Wall Street, to take advantage of national sentiment. But while Obama did take some early digs, comparing the bank bailout to root canal surgery, it was not a theme that wound through the speech. Instead, he kept reminding us that the large banks are absolutely necessary for a properly-functioning economy. And while they are in need of re-regulation and reform, and need to be balanced by a robust community banking sector, they cannot just be scapegoated and destroyed to satisfy popular bloodlust. Now, depending on how cynical you are, you can see this one of two ways: it's either a mark of Obama's intellectual maturity and courage, sticking to his overall conception of the national economy; or, it's a comforting sop to the very institutions that helped bankroll his campaign. Either way, Obama did a fairly masterful job of starting off with Wall Street jibes, but then subtly weaving the banking sector back into the story as a crucial part of economic recovery.
- Tax Cuts -- Many thought that jobs jobs jobs was going to be the refrain in the State of the Union. But instead, what we got was tax cuts, tax cuts, tax cuts. I stopped keeping count after a while, but I would bet that tax cuts or tax credits were mentioned over 30 times. Again, you could see this cynically, as an absolutely necessary response to the free-floating Scott Brown-type anxiety swirling around over bailouts and government waste, or holistically, as part of his overall ideological understanding of the American economy (more on that below). Really, it's just a blending of the two. It defuses some of the populist conservative anger, and it fits in perfectly with the wonkish, neoliberal agenda.
So those were the recurring thematic nuggets that I noticed in the speech last night. But when you start looking at the ideological framework of the whole address, as well as the nitty-gritty substance of policy recommendations, things start to get murky. Stylistically and strategically, Obama's speech was brilliant, as usual. He set the right tone, communicated equally well to both the Congress and the wider American citizenry, and generally reset his short time in office within the larger context of general trends from the previous decades.
But what is the President's real understanding of the causes of and the solutions to the current recession? And what is his overall ideological picture of how labor, compensation, and economic development interact? At the very beginning of the speech, Obama makes this observation: "This recession has also compounded the burdens that America's families have been dealing with for decades -- the burden of working harder and longer for less." Now, this little gloss on declining wages appears within a larger description of other forms of economic decay, and a key indicator of Obama's view on class inequality is that he never returns to this theme that real household income and wealth have been steadily declining for decades, despite improved worker productivity.
In a previous set of posts on the Future of Work, I made the argument that this decoupling of wages from productivity, which actually began in the 1970s, is a crucial part of the massive shift of wealth away from the broader middle class to the corporate/investor elite. And as Les Leopold noted in his seminal book The Looting of America, this capture of wealth by a small elite is the main creator of the serial bubbles that the American economy has gone through in the last 20 years. It's really that simple. The American economy has been growing and growing, and workers have been improving their productivity, but the fruits of that economic success have been funneled upwards to a small number of beneficiaries. This excess capital then gets loaned back to the workers who created it, at exorbitant rates of interest, or it gets plowed into exotic and risky financial instruments that eventually unravel and collapse into dust. And of course, all along the way, huge executive salaries are sucked out of the system and whisked away to individual bank accounts (domestic and abroad), never to return.
There are other factors involved in the mass transfer of wealth from the middle and lower classes to the elite: the legal evolution of the corporation, technological unemployment and the de-skilling of labor, globalization and the offshoring of manufacturing, the hyper-sophistication of financial instruments made possible by computerization, etc. But there can be no mistaking the overall effect: inequalities in wealth and power are the most important political and social issues, for they are the root of almost every other problem with which we are dealing. Class warfare must be acknowledged, embraced, and waged. It's that simple. The more we tap dance around appalling facts like this [The top 1% of Americans control more wealth than the bottom 90%], the more we will spin our wheels.
What makes this situation even more intractable is that our mainstream politicians cannot talk about this class inequality, because one of the main features of this concentration of power is the capture of government itself by these same interests. With our winner-take-all electoral structure and loose campaign finance laws (made looser last week by the ridiculous Supreme Court decision on corporate funding of ads), the elite corporate and investor classes have literally become our government. It's not that the "special interests" have too much control over our government. They are our government. The Congress and the Executive branch are entirely made up of corporate lawyers and businesspeople, mostly rich ones. They fund each others' elections, then gerrymander the districts to ensure universal incumbent reelection. They come from and return to the lobbyshops and corporate boardrooms, writing each others' legislation and funding each others' pet projects. And on and on.
In short, it's very difficult for any national politician to long preserve the image of a true outsider, since by the time they get to the national stage, they have already been vetted, funded, and trained by the prevailing elite that controls the entire electoral process in the first place. This is why we only get pro-business, neoliberal, pro-growth politicians. All other dissenting points of view are weeded out at the beginning, starved for funds and necessary corporate media coverage.
From this perspective, one can see how ultimately anemic Obama's overall approach to the economy is. When he turned to the discussion of jobs and how to create them, we were right back into the eternal laundry list of policy approaches: a jobs bill (not much substance on what exactly is in this jobs bill), $30 billion for small banks to loan to small businesses, a green energy bill, a climate bill, new plants and equipment investment, financial regulation, funding for science research and innovation, an export initiative, trade bills, school loan reform, mortgage refinancing, and of course, health care reform.
Now, even though the general response to the speech has been positive, I find myself throwing my hat in with conservatives when I see yet another smorgasbord of programs like the ones mentioned above. I understand their perspective that this model puts too much of the economy's success into the hands of centralized bureaucracies. It just sounds like more spending on more stuff, even despite Obama's pledge to cut taxes and freeze discretionary government spending for three years (who thinks that's actually going to happen?). The guy is smart, to be sure, but his speeches tend towards a wonkish posturing, a rattling off of big ideas that will likely never materialize into improved conditions on the ground. No matter how lofty the intentions, top-down programs run by a centralized corporate elite are not likely to accrue many benefits to the regular guy on the street.
Behind all of these programs, I believe, is a flawed model of what our civilization could and should be. It is the conventional view of most of the political and corporate elite, to be sure, but that doesn't make it any less deficient. Basically the stance is that economic growth is good; it is government's job to foster economic growth on the macro-level, and allow individuals and families to reap the rewards on the micro-level. The government should thus help all businesses grow, by creating incentives towards investment in human and physical capital. Government is also responsible for maintaining an overall atmosphere of fairness and accountability in the markets, by providing regulation and oversight to prevent big players from abusing citizens. Other supporting frameworks for economic growth that are maintained by the government are education and national security.
This whole ideological system is so commonplace now amongst our political and media elite, that it's hard to see how ultimately empty it is. The country is essentially viewed as one large, harmonious machine for churning out economic growth. Education makes better workers, better workers make more money, more money means more investment, more investment means more jobs, more job mean more stuff, more stuff means happier people, happier people do whatever happy people do. At no point do truly important and interesting things come into play for consideration, and the controlling metaphors are never challenged. For example, endless economic growth inside a finite natural system is a tragic absurdity, and the unraveling of every major natural system on the planet is ample evidence of that madness. Or, how about the growing evidence that the One Person-One Job/One Family-One Dwelling social form is profoundly unsatisfying psychologically, resulting in epidemic levels of depression, anxiety, obesity, domestic violence, and drug addiction? Or the continued systematic disenfranchisement of African Americans, especially men, administered by a bogus drug enforcement policy that hides economic superfluity under the guise of criminality, giving us the largest prison population in the world?
In essence, the evidence is mounting that there will be no return to our old way of life, with full employment and maximum consumption and college for all. The lesson of the recession should be that too much of our prior economic activity was devoted to just keeping the system itself going. People served at the whim of the economy, not the other way around. We overworked and overspent, much of it just to distract ourselves from how dehumanized our social and natural environments had become.
Business interests are not the same as human interests. We are not part of a massive, harmonious machine where profit and work and economic growth all fit together in a neat little package. Freedom does not equal more stuff to choose from, and more stuff does not bring us fulfillment.
OK, I've already rambled on way too long, so I'll close with some great words from Michael Lind, in the latest issues of The Baffler.
But in the late twentieth century, the language of the corporate boardroom and the consulting firm replaced the language of Lockean republicanism. The individual was a firm, and the child was a start-up. Teachers were venture capitalists tasked with the mission of how best to invest "human capital" in a classroom full of fledgling enterprises competing with billions of other human firms in the new, borderless global marketplace.
Never mind that in reality, four-fifths of the U.S. workforce toils in the domestic service sector, engaged in activities that can only be performed in the United States and are immune to foreign competition. Never mind that, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, most of the jobs to be created within our borders require only a high school education plus brief on-the-job training. To continue in the vein of our age's overmastering marketing rhetoric, policymakers regard such data as lagging indicators. In the financialized discourse of post-Cold War America, the human capitalist has supplanted the citizen, to be equipped with tools by the investor-state and then sent out to flourish of fail in competition with legions of unseen rivals in the new global economy.... We have witnessed the financialization not only of the American economy but also of the American mind.
Michael Lind, "The O-Word" (The Baffler, Vol 2, No 1)
As great an orator as Obama is, we should recognize that he is but the most eloquent advocate of this worldview. I believe the strands of this social form are coming apart, and our paramount task as a nation is to either create something completely new or suffer the protracted buffeting of entropic collapse.
What if There is No "Recovery"?
This is the text of a rejected Op-Ed I sent into the Boston Globe, so it's a little less in-depth than usual. But I didn't want to let it go to waste.
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“When there’s trouble in Massachusetts, there’s trouble everywhere!” With these words from his victory address last week, the improbable Senator-elect Scott Brown may have augured a far broader state of affairs than he intended. He was, of course, speaking of impending woes for Democrats, big-government types, and aloof political elitists. But Brown’s election is likely a sign of an inevitable series of events that will force Americans to come to grips with a single terrifying question: What if there is no recovery?
Sometimes, despite the usual cliches about the rapid turnaround of the Washington news cycle, the long-term political future clicks into focus like the background of a Dutch landscape. The conventional wisdom, which seems accurate in this case, is that the Massachusetts outcome is a bad omen for Democrats in the midterms this fall. The GOP will certainly pick up seats, although retaining minority status. Then in 2014, there will probably be a massive reversal of power, with the Republicans taking both houses of Congress as well as the Presidency, sweeping the Obama hope-topia into the dustbin.
We can grant credence to this long prediction due to the political corner into which we have been painted by our two mainstream parties. Above all, the Democratic and Republican machines are designed to perform three interlocking functions: win elections, gather money to win those elections, and serve those funders via beneficial legislation. When conditions on the ground demand solutions that fall outside of these limited functions, our two parties struggle. They resort to the same tired narratives that have proven valuable in campaigns past, but are ill-suited to fixing the multiplicitous waves of decline that are lapping at our shores. Over the next few election cycles, we can thus expect a kind of musical chair politics, where the greatest electoral advantage will be the ability to run as outsider. Paradoxically, to actually be in power will be the wrong place to be, as Obama is finding out right now.
During these pendulous times, each major party will flail around for more creative ways to dress up their stock platforms. So we will hear more of the neo-trickle-down shtick that Scott Brown used to such effectiveness: ‘Taxes are bad! Tax cuts are good! Give us our money back! Unleash the entrepreneurial power of America!’ All very seductive claims, to be sure, but ultimately much too simple to address the macro-trends in globalization, wealth concentration, and technological unemployment that have completely changed the ratios of work and reward. On the Democratic side, there will be more calls for stimulus packages, better financial regulation, green job programs, etc. Again, much of this looks good on paper, but as conditions deteriorate and the tax-base for such endeavors enters permanent decline, the fiscal mechanisms for such projects disappear.
Ultimately, all of this inertia comes from a misunderstanding of the current recession. Liberals and conservatives both see our predicament as an anomaly caused by the housing bubble. Each see different demons in this bubble formation (do-gooder government interference in the market on one side, or greedy financial speculation on the other), but almost all commentators see recovery as possible, once all of the bad mojo is worked out of system.
But what if this is a misreading of our situation? What if the housing bubble was just the latest in a series of speculative misadventures made absolutely unavoidable by an overall structure that funnels the vast majority of the nation’s economic output to a very small financial/corporate elite? In this long view, American economic growth and productivity have been steadily surging for decades, but became uncoupled from worker compensation in the mid-1970s. Regular people have thus been working more and better, but getting less, with the resulting surplus being captured by the investor classes. All of that extra capital had to go somewhere, so it was shunted to serial financial instruments that promised outlandish returns. Of course, these instruments and their subsequent bubbles proved volatile and unsustainable, to say the least. It is a mistake to think that all of the myriad jobs that grew up around these bubbles will somehow come back, now that the hyper-speculative conditions that gave rise to them are gone.
The reality that will have to be acknowledged, before any type of recovery is possible, is that the fundamental relationships between labor, compensation, and economic growth have been inexorably altered. Labor input, in conditions of global competition and relentless technological de-skilling, is just not that valuable any more, in an overall sense. Certainly, there will continue to be many valuable jobs in America -- well-paid, skilled, and secure. But true full-employment, where anyone willing to work hard can get ahead and support a family, will recede as a realistic possibility, no matter how many job summits or small-business tax cuts we throw down.
How will America react to these new conditions? It's hard to say. As healthy men and women continue to get tossed out of work and home, and are unable to find new arrangements, the desperation, anxiety, and rage will build. As the major parties swap the unenviable positions of leadership, the finger-pointing and scapegoating will intensify, as their plutocratic, election-crafted narratives fade into disutility. This is unfortunately a recipe for either totalitarianism or unfettered empire-building. Excess popular energy will have to go somewhere, and the main pathways are internal persecution of undesirables or elimination of external evildoers. People will turn to strength, which in times of trouble tends towards hubris and cruelty.
A different, less-horrifying path would confront head-on the changing relationships of work, consumption, economic health, and individual reward. Our leaders should acknowledge that the full-employment world is behind us, but also that this is a development which opens up expansive new opportunities for cooperative endeavors of all kinds: in housing, business ownership, local government, and regional planning. Federal and state policies should be recrafted to create new tax and legal frameworks for pushing resources away from centralized planning towards autonomy at the smallest levels possible. In a very short time, it will become obvious that the individual and the family are simply not adequate home bases from which people can approach the wider spheres of government, economy, and environment. The creation of new collective social forms will prove to be the next great American project. But this will require a new kind of leadership from above and a cultural change from below.
What Can Brown Do For (To) You: A Massachusetts Postmortem
"When there's trouble in Massachusetts, there's trouble everywhere -- and now they know it."
-- Scott Brown (Victory Speech from 1/19/10)
There has been much weeping and gnashing of teeth across the great Commonwealth of Massachusetts this week, as well as a lot of proud conservative swagger. Both are well-earned or well-deserved, depending on your perspective. The amount of national ink spilled over the recent special Senatorial election, in which Republican Scott Brown upset Democratic dauphine Martha Coakley, has also been prodigious. Only hindsight will tell us whether or not this remarkable event was a historic bellweather for epic political change, or simply a one-time confluence of unique factors.
Last time, I outlined what I think will happen in the next couple election cycles: significant gains this fall for the GOP, but probably not majorities; then larger victories in 2012, resulting in Obama's ouster and recovered Republican majorities in both houses of Congress. After that, the "Musical Chair Politics" effect will kick in again, and the sitting party will get their clocks cleaned in 2014 and beyond. As I outlined last time, we're really into a situation where the last thing you want to be as a politician, come election season, is actually in power. It's going to continue to be the advantage of the adversary, as conditions deteriorate in the Long Emergency. SInce both of the main parties are completely owned by corporate interests (no, that's not quite right -- the major parties are actually made up of corporate interests: it's the exact same people), neither of them have any type of true, substantive policy agenda that could turn things around for the country. So I think we'll see a lot of pendulous action in the next few elections, where each side will be content to hone their outsider shtick to perfection, loudly shouting that the other side is messing things up because they're in bed with the "special interests" (just a reminder that a corporation that gives you money is part of the "Business Community," while one that gives cash to your opponent is a "Special Interest"). So the short attention span American public will continue to throw the bums out every couple years, and the other bums will fill the void until it's their turn to get slapped down. Not a pretty picture, and national collapse may preclude this neat unfolding anyway. But you get the idea.
In any case, enough of that. Let's get on to the Brown-Coakley race, and what it means for Massachusetts, America, health care reform --all that stuff. I won't belabor these things for very long, since plenty of other folks have jumped into the fray with their opinions and interpretations. We'll just look at a couple nuggets, and use them to jump off onto tangents and bigger questions, per usual.
THE CANDIDATES
- Martha Coakley was not really the most exciting politician to come down the pike, and I don't really know why she was the anointed frontrunner in the first place. But she certainly wasn't horrible. I've seen worse. And she does come across as a fairly competent Attorney General, with a moderately impressive record in standing up to big insurance corporations and corrupt contractors from the Big Dig. The Big Dig angle is fairly significant too, since this bloated behemoth of waste and fraud is really the poster-child for Bay State cronyism. She could and should have made major hay with these portfolio pieces (more below), but evidently didn't. In any case, those people, especially at the national level, who are blaming the candidate for everything are certainly overstating. She wasn't an awesome presence, but in the indigoest of indigo states, she shouldn't need to be.
- Similarly, those who are painting Scott Brown as the next Ronald Reagan are a little too close to an open glue tube. This is a good lookin' guy, certainly, with an attractive family and a pleasant overall demeanor (who would have figured that Mitt Romney would only be the second best-looking dude to hold high office in Massachusetts in the past decade?). And he does stay fairly on point, except when he's pimping out his own daughters on national TV. But for God's sake, the guy is one of only five sitting Republican state senators in Massachusetts (out of 40 seats), leaving him with a resume thinner than Bernie Madoff's stack of holiday thank-you cards. But to be fair, Brown's got other non-legislative credentials (National Guard, part of the JAG), and we can't poo-poo those patriotic achievements. But he was running to be one of the most powerful 100 people in the country, and his campaign website (www.brownforussenate.com) is embarrassingly scant in details on policy and credentials. But to be fair, he does drive a truck, I assume to transport voluminous amounts of legislation back and forth from the State House to his modest home each evening. So there's that.
THE CAMPAIGN
- It should be fairly clear from my remarks above that I don't think the candidates had too much to do with the ultimate outcome of the race this week. Coakley was blah, but her actual achievements should have far outweighed the thin resume of Mr. Brown -- in normal circumstances. This is Massachusetts, after all, and we're not just liberal-leaning -- we're a fairly brainy bunch, no matter what our political tendencies. There are a lot of independents in the Bay State, just as there are everywhere nowadays. But even if they were pissed at the national picture, independents would not normally choose a nobody over an accomplished statewide office-holder like Coakley. But these were obviously not normal times, as we'll see below.
- But the conventional wisdom that has emerged is that Coakley ran a stupendously bad campaign, and that's why Brown won. There is, of course, ample evidence for this. She was slow out of the gate. She didn't do enough banner-buys on heavily trafficked websites. She went on vacation. She came off as elitist with some gaffes about Curt Schilling and the Yankees, and standing in front of Fenway Park in the cold (Jon Stewart even zinged her for that one). So sure, you could write this off to bad campaigning, I guess. But to my mind, if this was really so significant, it would be more of an indictment of voter stupidity and gullibility than it would be of bad campaigning. After all, what so many are clamoring for now is competence in government. Much of the country really has moved beyond the typical campaign gotchas and snark-attacks (albeit, probably and unfortunately only temporarily). I think there's revisionism in this blasting of Coakley's campaign, more smoke than fire.
- Brown, for his part, ran a good campaign. But again, the breathless adulation of his electoral brilliance is just more revisionism. He just didn't make any major mistakes, which is fairly easy when you aren't currently associated with the party that is presiding over the implosion of the American Way of Life. Americans have short attention spans, so it's easy to run a conservative boilerplate campaign, spouting the usual pablum about lower taxes and the evils of Big Gub'mint. You have the luxury of knowing that the people will have long forgotten that it was these very policies that exacerbated all of our woes for the last few years (but to be fair, I do not blame Dubya for everything -- regular readers of this blog know that I trace our present state of affairs back a long way, winding through leaders from both left and right).
- One interesting note is that Coakley's ideal campaign would have been very tricky to pull off. She could have run as an outsider Democrat. She could have said that she was not going to just be a rubber stamp for Obama's agenda, but would instead stand against the fat cat corporations who are looting America. She could have highlighted her history of fighting big business corruption, and vowed to take that battle to her led-astray colleagues in the Senate. Of course, this would all have been tongue-in-cheek, with a knowing nod to Harry Reid and Obama on the side. But even though it would have been substantially dishonest, it likely would have defused Brown's outsider shtick and delivered a solid Coakley victory. The hard part would have been the primary, where she could not have gone too far in bashing the present Democratic powers without falling victim to her significant challengers. It's worth remembering that Coakley really blew her financial wad in the primary, and had meager resources with which to start the race against Brown. It would have been extremely difficult to run as an uber-Dem to win the primary, and then transform into an outsider for the general. But it would have worked, in my opinion.
THE STATE
- This level really deserves more attention than it's getting from the mainstream media. I guess it really can't be otherwise. I mean, how many people in Osh Kosh really care about what some nimrod in Peabody says about the wicked hack douchebags in the State House? But this really was a significant part of the electoral puzzle. If you look at the town-by-town map, you can see the Coakley supporters clustered in cities and the typical liberal enclaves of the Berkshires and the end of Cape Cod. Most of the towns (and thus the state) were for Brown. Non-Bostonians in Massachusetts are sick of what they see as rampant one-party arrogance and corruption. Our last couple House Speakers are under indictment. There was the 16-year epic debacle of the Big Dig, the largest highway and graft project in US history, so far over-budget that it will not be paid off until 2038. There's the saga of the Bulger brothers and their intimate enmeshment with law enforcement, state government, and brutal street crime. On and on.
- Massachusetts, in essence, is almost too blue. Now, I don't mean that people are too liberal. I like "liberals," in the older sense of the word: generous, giving, broadminded, unafraid of change. What I mean is that there is no systemic outlet for non-liberal views. The Democrats have had such a stranglehold on state politics for so long that massive reservoirs of resentment have built up. Monopolies are not good, in politics or business. One-party rule has resulted in too much corruption, nepotism, cronyism, insiderism -- the works. Disgruntled conservatives and independents dine on the endless streams of ressentiment porn served up by the Boston Herald and Fox 25 (the local Boston Fox affiliate). "How did this city worker get a $300 thousand a year job, and then only show up for work three days out of every month? Find out, as we confront this hack SOB in his driveway at 6AM! Next, on FOX."
- You get the idea. I think the people of Massachusetts were sending a message, to be sure. But as much as it was a message to the national Democrats, it was equally a shot across the bow of state Dems, including Governor Deval Patrick. The state has become a kind of symbol for the corruption of one-party rule, in need of dressing down.
THE NATION
- Finally, we get to the national scene, and I'll spend less time here, partly because there is a lot of quality stuff out there already, better than I can give. But also, I won't dwell here because I'm not totally freaked-out and panicked about the whole thing. Yah, Massachusetts elected a Republican Senator. Get over it. The world will go on. The time to panic is not now -- it was two years ago, five years ago, ten years ago. In reality, we should have been in slow-motion panic (wait, is that possible?) since the dire warnings of Dwight Eisenhower about the military-industrial complex in 1961, or the "Malaise Speech" of Jimmy Carter in 1979. In general, we have to pull ourselves away from this up-and-down obsession with the electoral horserace, where we are alternately panicked or oblivious, depending on whether it's the right time of year.
- Sure, Scott Brown's victory can be seen as the proverbial shot across the bow of the national Democratic Party and the President. But remember, Brown is only in for two years, and he will likely face a much stronger challenger next time around. And in the meantime, hello -- the Dems still have a substantial majority in both houses of Congress. The idea that 41 Republican Senators spell a death-knell for all-things liberal and good is preposterous, and shows just how pussy-ish the Dems have become.
- And then, let's remember the whole Musical Chair Politics metaphor. For the next few cycles, whoever happens to hold power when the electoral music stops is going to get pounded. Why? Because the long-term macrotrends that are unraveling our national economy and civilization are not going to be altered by another stimulus package, or a sweeping round of tax cuts, or by health care reform, or by the heroics of a John Galt entrepreneurial class. The Long Emergency is going to continue its glacial creep downwards, and our two plutocratic national parties are going to get scraped along and ground to dust in its inevitable march. We should be adjusting to these these macro-trends and creating the new social forms necessary to survive in a much different world, not worrying about the ascent of a hunky, truck-driving Senator.
Musical Chair Politics
"Politics is the shadow cast on society by big business."
-- John Dewey
Some polls have Coakley way ahead, some have the race in a dead heat. Who knows where the actual numbers sit? But the early spin from the GOP camp is that win or lose, the Republicans have already won in principle, making a horse race out of a contest in the bluest of all blue states. Now, if the race finishes up close, the Republicans really are correct in their assessment, and the omen for the mid-terms this fall is obvious. Barring a miraculous economic recovery, the Dems are in for a shellacking. I don't know the actual numbers of how many seats are expected to be hotly contested in the Senate this time around, and I've heard that the Dems will likely preserve majorities in both houses, albeit smaller ones. It's too early to really worry about that stuff, and it probably doesn't matter much in the long anyway.
Why? Because we're basically into an almost intractable political situation in the US, where the biggest liability in the years ahead will be to actually be in power at the time of any given election. It will be much easier, as economic and ecological conditions continue their entropic unraveling, to rail against the ruling party than to actually propose something constructive and helpful. And maybe the best thing of all, party-politics speaking, would be for Presidential and Congressional power to be split, so that each camp can blame national deterioration on good ol' gridlock. Think about it: who would actually want to be in control of the national situation right now, especially with an American attention span that can only process a few months of 'history' at a time, at best?
I envision a pretty successful mid-term season for the GOP this fall -- not majorities, but healthy gains certainly. Then, I would expect Obama to be a one-term President (again, excepting some enormous economic turnaround in the next year and a half), with Republicans taking back the White House and possibly the whole Congress (at least one half, I would say). But then, since the Republicans have no actual plans that will right the ship of state, despite their caterwauling about fiscal discipline and small government, they will cock things up again, and be in line for their own comeuppance in 2014. At which point the cycle begins again. Except that we likely won't make it that far with business as usual. More probably, there will be some major systemic breakdowns at the most basic levels of society and economy, and we will have either succumbed to more draconian, totalitarian leadership, or, hopefully, will have pulled the energy out of the whole top-down corrupt plutocracy from below by creating more sustainable social forms.
But back to the musical chairs analogy. How did we get to the point where it may be more advantageous, for electoral reasons, to be out of power than in? To understand this strange state of affairs, it may be helpful to return to the subject of two of the earliest posts on this blog site: The Conservative Story and The Liberal Story. In these posts, I outlined what I believe to be the rough contours of the main narratives that conservatives and liberals use to understand the world. For political operatives and wonks, ideas and sound-bites and polls are all-important. But for regular people on the street, what really matters are the stories in their heads about why things are the way they are. Humans are story-telling animals, and narrative structures are how we remember, categorize, and prioritize experience. The Culture Wars of the last few decades are thus really not about ideologies, but about the stories we tell ourselves.
The dominant feature in both the conservative and liberal narratives is theodicy. In theological terms, theodicy is the question of evil. Why do bad things happen to good people? Who or what is the devil? How do people overcome evil?, etc. But in the political realm, I think that our conservative and liberal theodicies are designed to explain the American Fall: that is, how did we go from the triumphant, muscular, dominant player in the world after WW2, to the debt-ridden, flabby, China-dependent, oil-dependent, culturally-debased crapscape we have now? Both mainline parties have to explain this general perception of American decline, not because it is the most obviously-important question or the most accurate framework for understanding reality (indeed it isn't, in my opinion). But accounting for America's fall from grace is necessary for two reasons: to address the general American mood of national pessimism, and to win elections in a winner-take-all electoral structure.
I encourage you to go back and read my full accounts of the Conservative and Liberal Stories (links above), but here are the quick versions. Conservatives see American decline as the result of liberal ungratefulness for, and rebellion against, the bedrock institutions that created our superiority in the first place: God, family, and country, not necessarily in that order. Like a spoiled teenager, we have mocked and abandoned these vital conservative institutions, instead embracing the reckless destruction of sexual license, cultural obscenity, and vocational laziness. In the conservative story, the virtues of civilization don't just happen; they must be guarded, cultivated, preserved, and vigorously defended. Without this jealous and diligent defense, our country has gone down the slippery slope of relativism, secularism, and blasphemy.
In the liberal story, the triumphs of WW2 were followed up by the full flowering of the incipient American ideals of freedom and justice. Blacks, women, and gays all made heroic strides in the 60s and 70s, winning rights that had for centuries been squashed by oppression and marginalization. These movements were not ungrateful and pointless rebellion, but rather fulfillments of the greatest values inherent in the founding of the country. All are created equal. Unfortunately, this project of equality and justice, which may have eventually made its way to economic rights for all, was derailed by a conservative backlash. Regressives of all types came out of the woodwork, to defend the ingrained privileges of race, gender, and religion. The Old Boy network and the entrenched white power structure could not abide the emerging autonomy of the masses, so they repackaged their bigotry and sexism as a battle over religious and cultural morality. Wedge issues like abortion and gay marriage were thus ginned up as acceptable proxies for more nefarious motives, operating as maximum mobilizers of electoral energy.
Ah, elections. This brings us to the other part of our major political narratives, and why they're not very good at explaining reality. In the paragraphs above, we looked at the general theodicies of conservatism and liberalism. Both have elements of truth, and both are, in some way, crafted to address the free-floating anxiety of an American public that senses long-term decline. But as a genuine picture of what has caused the major socioeconomic shifts of the last few decades, neither story even comes close to be satisfactory. Where is the ecological component, the understanding of how global economic and population pressures are squashing every major natural system on the planet? Where is an objective account of technology and its long-term impacts on the ratios of work-hours to salaries to macro-economic health? Is there any type of attempt to explain the general emergence of massive imbalances in power and wealth, both between countries and within many advanced countries like the US? Where is the recognition that consumerism is the prime mover in what many, both liberal and conservative, perceive as the dumbing-down and increased violence of our culture? Where is an account of how race relations are intricately tied up with the steadily-ballooning prison population and cycles of poverty? Rural blight and the collapse of family farming?
You get the idea. In area after area, our main political stories have nothing to say about the real levers of change, and how we might cooperatively attack the challenges of the present and future. Instead, we're subjected to morality plays, scapegoating, blame games, and oversimplifications of the stupidest sort. We're told that Democrats are evil socialists who want to destroy religion and set up a world government. Republicans are all knuckle-dragging gay bashers, hypocritically concerned with fetuses more than actual, full-fledged people. Voting records and omnibus spending bills are data-mined for endless attack ads about how Joe Blow wants to rape my babies or burn the elderly for winter heat.
Why all this crap? Because our political narratives are built for just one thing: winning elections. They are not there to uncover the truth, or advance the condition of the country, or pursue any kind of sustainable civilization. Like all aspects of business, the political outlook is short-term. Will it help me return a profit in the next quarter? Will it win the next election? And as the American electoral landscape has evolved over the last few decades, the business of winning elections has essentially become the entire political process itself. The actual legislative, executive, and judicial guts of the system have been completely given over to plutocratic interests, leaving nothing but the horserace crap for us regular citizens to sup on.
Really, nothing will change this political inertia in the near future. There are no "reforms" or "regulations" that can reverse the capture of government by big business. The only things that could even come close to turning around this charade of representative government are not likely to be implemented by those who would be ousted by the same innovations: proportional representation, public funding of elections, hard campaign spending caps, instant runoff voting, etc.
So prepare yourselves for some bumpy rides in the next couple election cycles. But don't despair, because in the new situation of musical chair politics, set within the downslope of the Long Emergency, today's crushing defeats are just preludes to the next cycle's inevitable reversals. As these spectacles continue to unfold, their ultimate ridiculousness will emerge eventually. Here's hoping that we will have turned our attention to more substantial, bottom-up arenas of potential social change in the meantime, rendering all this mainstream political posturing superfluous.
Hopecast for a PostPeak Decade
Well, the Naughts (or Oughts, or Empties) are over, and we thus prepare for a new decade. Last time, we did a kind of selective review of the last decade, which at bottom proved to be period of profound self-delusion, cultural illusion, and massive sociopolitical inertia, as serial waves of collapse lapped against the shores of our civilization.
What might the decade ahead hold for us? Rather than do straight-up forecasting, or a wish list of things I hope to happen, let's put together a kind of quasi-utopian fusion of the two: what can we expect to happen in the best of all possible scenarios? We'll try to create a amalgam of things that are likely to happen, and positive things we can do to make them happen. We can call it a "Hopecast,", for lack of a better term (or actually for lack of my brain-power this morning -- depths of winter here in New England, where everything is cold and stark and bereft of moisture).
- Collapse of Centralization: As the great Jim Kunstler is constantly reminding us, huge centralized bureaucracies of any kind, public or private, require a lot of physical and other kinds of energy to hold together. Large-scale enterprises that try to push human behavior away from natural tendencies must be continually coerced in some way or another, and coercion requires energy. Entropy, devolution, and creative destruction from below are continually eating away at all projects that concentrate power. We're seeing this now, as the Obama administration and Congressional Democrats shovel trillions of dollars into various failing, centralized systems: the War on Terror, the finance-industry plutocracy, business-friendly health care "reform," etc. In many respects, the instincts of the Tea Partiers are right on; they are correct in their distrust of huge, sprawling, federal spending, and the future indebtedness of their progeny. These top-down megaplans will all sputter, totter, and likely fail, due to the changing conditions of oil availability, the erosion of the planet's natural systems, and the declining value of labor (see my 3-part series on The Future of Work). Of course, the huge patch of willful blindness in the neo-grassroots conservative worldview includes: the culpability of their own GOP heroes in the ballooning of government; the unjustified pass given to a $1 trillion-a-year military establishment, which is somehow magically exempt from government inefficiency; and the utterly bogus idea that the "private" sphere of business is somehow different from the "public" sphere of the federal government (check the conditions on the ground, my conservative friends -- Big Guvmint and Big Business are the same dudes!). The awful truth of the last four decades is that power and wealth have become unsustainably concentrated into the hands of a very small elite. And rather than "share the wealth" (God forbid!), this cohort will hang onto their privileged position until the end, with the result that the supporting structures underneath their rise (mass consumption, political apathy, externalized environmental damage) will just dissolve, and the whole rotting mess will unravel.
- The Rise of Localism: This will be both a necessity and an opportunity. With the hollowing out and bankruptcy of centralized power systems, there will be a massive turn to our immediate physical and economic environments, and we'll need to rehabilitate them with gusto. Right now, we're seeing a designer precursor of localism. Well-to-do liberals and other progressive activist types have been pushing the Buy Local, Think Global thing for a while. And certainly, we can see the quickening pace of local produce and organic food production. Farmers Markets and Community Supported Agriculture are expanding at a rapid clip, which is a good thing. But when we look at the localization that will be necessary after the collapse of federal and state budgets, we're really talking about exponentially more radical change, especially when we throw in the massive shifts that will happen when Peak Oil gains more traction (global supply lines will shrink, personal motoring will prove problematic, air transport will be transformed to an elite activity, etc.). We're talking about major restructuring in how we arrange our living quarters, our labor patterns (more below), and the physical landscape itself. This will necessitate wholesale changes in land ownership laws, collective finance policies, zoning standards, infrastructure maintenance, etc. We should be looking at how to create multi-use, collective, self-reliant localities. As the financial resources of federal and state bureaucracies dry up, these upper levels of government should be going with the localizing flow, not fighting it. That means rewriting laws to make it easier and more rewarding for people to organize financially and physically on the local scale. Any policies that encourage hoarding of property and capital should be scrapped, and the legal standing of corporations should be drastically curtailed. I know this sounds pie-in-the-sky right now, but I think conditions will make these adjustments viable more quickly than one might imagine.
- Work: The December '09 jobs report was not good. After a small positive blip in November, the nation shed 85,000 more jobs in December, leaving the base unemployment rate at 10% and the full un-underemployed stat at 17.3% (and that's actually a lowball number, in my opinion, especially when we include the burgeoning prison population). Most economists see a continuing erosion in the months ahead, with the base rate approaching 10.8% by October. Everyone is holding their breath for a "turnaround," but I don't think it's coming. Like the recession in general, we're not seeing just a temporary setback in employment ratios, which will reverse itself once economic growth gets going again. What the serial economic bubbles (tech stock, real estate, credit card debt, health care) really mean is that we've been artificially propping up huge swaths of the economy with fake balance sheets, shady accounting, unsustainable financial instruments, and reckless lending and borrowing. The jobs spun out of these bubbles are thus not stable, permanent positions. And the overall collapse in leveraged lending means that these bubble jobs will not come back. Companies are going to continue to run leaner and meaner, utilizing less full-time labor and plowing more cash into labor-saving technological investments, which will exacerbate the jobs picture further. In the long view, we have simply de-skilled too much of the labor market to expect anything approaching the kind of purchasing power that we enjoyed in the bubble decades. We are no longer a nation that knows how to grow its own food, make and repair its own tools, and create and sustain its physical architectures and infrastructures. Oh sure, these things get done; food is grown here, and stuff is made here, roads get paved, and buildings get built. But large proportions of the population are not involved in these functions any more. The post-war shift to a service industry economy of "symbolic analysts" has really put much of our populace at risk of superfluity, and we're reaping the whirlwind now. I would not expect "full employment" to return any time soon, if ever.
- Bringing Functions in House: For a culture that places so much of its individuals' self-worth and identity on career, it is difficult to see the great opportunity present in the unraveling ratios of full employment. But as we encounter more long-term unemployment (the average jobless stretch now sits at 29 weeks, the longest since data started being collected in 1948), there is going to be an enormous pool of talent and time, millions people who will be ready, willing, and able to do countless tasks outside of the market economy that has jettisoned them. As the formalized, monetized economy continues to deliver products and services with less and less compensated labor, we should look to "re-laborize" as many of those functions as possible through de-monetized alternatives. This is similar to "import substitution" in global macroeconomics . Countries can certainly gain from international trade, but an overdependence on outside entities for everything leads to vulnerability. Self-reliance should thus be sought in some spheres. Similarly, if families and communities have to purchase all of their needs through the marketplace, they are overly vulnerable to downturns and recessions, as we are seeing. The freed-up labor from long-term unemployment can thus be seen as a giant opportunity to increase non-monetized self-reliance. There's just one problem: the current social form (One Person-One Job/One Family-One Dwelling) is not adequate to the task of de-formalizing economic functions. So we need another shift, which is....
- New Forms of Collective Living: I know, I'm banging the same old drum here. But what can I say? Repetition is one of my main weaknesses -- maybe it's good for the soul. In any case, I really am convinced that the long-term trends in employment ratios, environmental degradation, and cultural collapse point to the absolute necessity of creating a new form of collective living. As a reminder of my general outlook, I view human nature through a long lens. We are the product of millions of years of human, proto-human, and mammal evolution. Those processes have shaped and molded us to thrive in certain types of social and ecological conditions, what biologists call EEA (Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness). As social primates, we require very specific settings for full development: intense, tribal groupings of 80 to 150 people or so, in intimate contact with natural surroundings. In the long view, the last 10,000 years of written history are just a blip; they cannot change the underlying needs of an organism that has been millions of years in the making. We need contact with many intimates, both human and natural, to fully mature -- and the current arrangements do not deliver. We overconsume, overindulge, drug ourselves, distract ourselves, transport ourselves to fantasy worlds -- all to fill the void opened up by having profoundly dehumanized social forms. As the great Paul Shepard noted, our recent social forms have cut us off from normal human ontogeny, resulting in a society of sick individuals. We need intense, close relationships with people, animals, trees, rocks, and rivers. Without these, we do not properly differentiate between internal and external, between self and Other, especially in the crucial adolescent period. We become, therefore, a narcissistic culture of grasping children, recreating juvenile patterns of hyper-competition and hyper-indulgence. Taking a step back from our "normal" lives, it is not hard to see how profoundly lonely and unsatisfying our current social forms are. We simply do not have enough intense interaction with other people or the natural world, and much of our consumer capitalist economy is predicated on churning out marginally-satisfying substitutes for these empty places.
- The Cooperative Weapon: In the years ahead, I think it will become increasingly clear that social and economic tinkering will not do the trick. There's this kind of pathological inertia right now in mainstream political discourse, a desperate desire to believe that, at some point, all of our old mechanisms will kick out their slumber and start delivering money and success and growth again. All we need to do is weather the storm, clean up some of the excesses and inefficiencies, and the great deity of the American Economy will unstick its giant treads from the frozen ground of recession and start churning along, finally carrying us back to the hallowed ground of vigorous consumption. I just don't think this is going to happen. What we are going to need is a different kind of home base for people, something radically different than the current American Algorithm, which will die a slow, painful, bewildering death. Now don't get me wrong, there are a lot of good causes and trends out there that are worth pursuing, and I'm sure a lot of them will be crucial parts of a successful American future: green jobs, sustainable energy, campaign finance reform, a redefined legal standing for the corporation, local manufacturing, etc. But I don't believe any of these things will get us pointed in the right direction if the base American social form stays the same. If we continue the One Person-One Job/One Family-One Dwelling social form, and fight to preserve it all costs, we will have lost the opportunity. These arrangements are simply flawed at their most basic levels: the rates of consumption are too high for ecological sustainability; their reliance on full-employment does not mesh with the emerging ratios of labor to economic output; their fundamentally atomizing nature cuts off community and group involvement at its root; they are intrinsically conducive to loneliness and anxiety, which gives artificial fuel to unneeded consumption. By contrast, collective social forms are able to attack virtually every systemic problem at once: collective ownership reduces individual risk, grouped purchasing reduces individual expenditures, combined mortgages/rents free up time for internal self-services, shared products reduce impacts on the environment, etc. In short, the current socioeconomic arrangements don't provide enough breathing space for individuals and families to get control over their finances, their time, their physical space, and their social activity. But collective social forms would provide a more powerful home base from which to attack changing conditions. More give, more flexibility, more room to evaluate and act.
- Retreat from the Consumer-Based Personality: With the rising importance of gear and gadget over the last couple decades, it is frightening to behold just how stuff-centered people have become. Now, I'm not just talking about people being greedy and "materialistic." Something much more profound is happening. The concentration of mainstream media, the proliferation of digital content, the ubiquity of the web, the explosion of personal electronics -- these are all reshaping the neural pathways of the modern consumer. People's attention and thought patterns are becoming hyperfocused on the ever-changing flow of packaged visual and audio content, which does not allow for broad scope, careful analysis, or historical perspective. These issues have been covered from every angle by able commentators, so we don't need to rehash here. But suffice it to say, a nervous, impatient, overstimulated populace accustomed to endless titillation is not well-equipped to deal with long term decline and macro-trends in social and ecological disintegration. And there is a chilling potential for American vulnerability to theocrats and dictators, provided that they can deliver some kind of motivating stimuli. But on the hopeful side, I do see a major opportunity with emerging collective social forms. As mentioned above, much of the energy of modern capitalism comes from the excessive consumption that compensates for the psychological bankruptcy and loneliness of the social form itself. When you take an inherently gregarious social primate evolved to live in intimate tribal settings, and then stick it into the arid atmospheres of the nuclear family and the modern workplace, you're going to end up with epidemic unhappiness and despair, conditions that can only be soothed with stimulants, baubles, and the virtual escapes of electronic media. But remember, that tribal primate is still in there, lurking in the breast of every person, honed by millions of years of evolution. It is there to be leveraged at any time, ready to flower forth if environmental conditions appropriate to its full development re-emerge. In this light, if we choose or are forced to create more collective social forms in the coming years of the Long Emergency, I believe that a lot of the overconsumptive energy of consumer capitalism will drop away, as people once again learn the simple pleasures of hanging out with their own kind. We all know that the best things in life are interpersonal. No sitcom can compare to the uncontrollable laughter that often comes in group get-togethers. As interesting as celebrity gossip is, we're much more alive when we dish the dirt on our compatriots at a social gathering. Watching sports on TV is sometimes good, but who doesn't feel more exhilarated with a romp or game in a field or on the beach? Think back to some of the peak experiences in your own life. My bet is that most, if not all of them, involve spending quality time with larger groups of family and friends, and not getting the high score on some video game.
Really what we're talking about in the near future is a cultural change, in the fullest sense. One American way of life is passing away, and its replacement has yet to be determined. Understandably, as our economic and ecological support structures melt down around our ankles, we're upset, anxious, and terrified. We desperately want someone to come in on a white horse and rescue our full-employment, our suburban mini-manors, our cheap gas, our easy second mortgages, and our mall shopping sprees. The Democrats and the Republicans continue their epic game of musical chairs, hoping that they're not the party in power as we careen from one election cycle to the next amidst continuing decline.
And in the worldview of the culture that is passing away, our problems look insurmountable, what I have earlier called "Concentric Circles of Collapse," or "Russian Nesting Dolls of Catastrophe." We seem to be embedded in vast, interlocking sets of problems: overpopulation, overconsumption, natural-systems collapse, economic recessions, global terrorism, cultural debasement -- you name it. But in reality, almost all of these intermeshed problems draw some energy from the basic social form of One Person-One Job/One Family-One Dwelling. It's not that this social form is the exact cause of everything bad in the world -- of course not. But a general shift to a more collective lifestyle would start drawing the wasted energy out many of these systemic logjams, all at the same time. We just need to have the creativity and the courage to see the world with new eyes.
Here's hoping that we can find those new eyes in the coming years.
And in the worldview of the culture that is passing away, our problems look insurmountable, what I have earlier called "Concentric Circles of Collapse," or "Russian Nesting Dolls of Catastrophe." We seem to be embedded in vast, interlocking sets of problems: overpopulation, overconsumption, natural-systems collapse, economic recessions, global terrorism, cultural debasement -- you name it. But in reality, almost all of these intermeshed problems draw some energy from the basic social form of One Person-One Job/One Family-One Dwelling. It's not that this social form is the exact cause of everything bad in the world -- of course not. But a general shift to a more collective lifestyle would start drawing the wasted energy out many of these systemic logjams, all at the same time. We just need to have the creativity and the courage to see the world with new eyes.
Here's hoping that we can find those new eyes in the coming years.
All for Naught: A Decade of Inertia and Illusion
We had fed the heart on fantasy,
The heart's grown brutal from the fare.
-- William Butler Yeats
Well, I guess it's time to do the obligatory review of the last decade: the Oughts, or the Naughts, or the Zeds, or whatever they're called. I don't really have any desire to do a chronological laundry list of the ins and outs of the last ten years -- there are plenty of those reviews out there already. Instead, let's look at a few events through the lens of inertia and illusion, two of the most salient features of the last decade.
(On a side plug, I highly recommend Chris Hedges book, The Empire of Illusion, from which I pulled the Yeats quote above. Hedges is a stellar columnist for www.truthdig.com, and you can see his stuff here)
We cruised into the Oughts fresh off the roller-coaster ride of Bill Clinton's two-term presidency. Standard liberal boilerplate, especially during Dubya's dog days, was that Clinton's reign was a glorious time for America, especially the economy. Deficits were down, portfolios were up, and sax music danced across the late-night airwaves. Of course, we should now know that this interpretation of Clinton's legacy is false. Sure, things looked good for some. But in reality, the 90s were the heyday of financial deregulation, the continued dismantling of the social safety net, and the ascent of glorious free-trade. The tech-stock bubble inflated and deflated, a precursor to the future housing bubble. And the disparity in wealth between the haves and the have-nots continued its frightening surge.
This is the inertia we carried into the new decade. Powerful forces were eroding the value of labor, squashing out the middle class, and concentrating power in fewer and fewer corporate hands. But there was little that regular people could do to stem the tide, and we ended up quasi-electing a monumentally underwhelming Good Ol' Boy to high office in 2000. Dubya was really the epitome of what many in the country desperately wanted to be: simple, optimistic, straight-shooting, and swaggering. That pill Gore was a total buzzkill: stiff, boring, effete, intellectual, and wonkish. Plus, he kept pointing out depressing stuff, like the earth cooking in its own juices. Who needed all that bringdownishness? With a major assist from the mainstream media's War Against Gore (see www.dailyhowler.com for the gruesome details), as well as the joke that was the Supreme Court, we had our pretend President. Dubya can be seen a giant wish by middle America that we had not become an utterly compromised plutocracy, despite the obvious fact that Bush had raised hundreds of millions from corporate interests for his campaign (as had Gore). Any hope that we could have a real populist or libertarian, anyone from the right or left who could speak and act against concentrated power, was out the window. Instead, we got the guy who talked like Mayberry RFD but acted like Enron.
And then, of course, the defining moment of the decade: September 11th. You can check out some of my older posts on 9/11 here and here, to get some background on my thoughts on the subject. But suffice it to say, our national response to the attacks, despite some early hopeful signs, was utterly illusory and delusional. Instead of using this profound tragedy as an opportunity to more fully engage a world with which normal Americans were woefully out of touch, we lurched into feel-good tales of national innocence and then Chuck Norris-type rage. We allowed the spectacle of the attack to overwhelm the paltry reality of the perpetrators themselves, and thus embarked on a multi-trillion dollar campaign of revenge. At every turn, we were cajoled, encouraged, and intimidated by the military-industrial-mainstream media cabal into supporting expensive, ineffective, and counterproductive assaults and occupations in Mesopotamia. We acted out a national script qua Steven Seagal movie, taking out the Muslim trash with gusto, albeit with a few hundred thousand innocent civilians as well (nobody's perfect). Of course, the legacy of these self-indulgent fantasy wars is still with us, and the American public is growing increasingly uneasy, choking down the acidic vomit of occupation and nation-building as the domestic economy melts into air.
Skip ahead to the rear-bracket tragic bookend of the Oughts, the massive recession/depression that began in earnest last fall, and in which we are obviously still embroiled. The standard interpretation of events holds that our current woes are really an aberration, an unfortunate (albeit huge) blip on an otherwise positive national trajectory of economic growth. In this other feel-good story, we would have been fine if there had just been better financial regulation (liberal take), or if do-gooding socialist-types had not forced mortgages on unworthy borrowers (conservative take). But if the system can be cleansed of these malfeasances, we can get back to the business of "recovery," whatever that might mean.
Of course, this is again a complete fantasy, a profound misreading of the current landscape as just a real estate bubble problem. The forces that have brought us to this place are long and powerful, stretching back to the mid-70s when labor-productivity began to diverge from wages. We have seen wealth and power slowly and inexorably concentrate into a ruling elite over the last few decades, and that class has taken control of the government and the corporate media, obscuring the slow-motion coup d'etat. Again, inertia rules the day, because the levers that move events are so deep and potent that regular people on the ground have very little ground from which to mount any meaningful challenge. So we tell ourselves that our problems are temporary, and we flail around for as many scapegoats as we can find: terrorists, socialists, immigrants, social deviants, bankers, Tiger Woods -- whatever. In place of real thought and action, angry self-righteousness rules the day.
Finally, let's look at the most important emerging reality of the last decade, one that paradoxically gets a lot of attention, but really not enough: the accelerating decline of every major natural system on the planet. Global warming gets the lion's share of the focus here, but climate change is just one piece of a distressing and terrifying whole. The list is nauseatingly familiar: collapse of world fisheries, massive deforestation, depletion of fresh water, build-up of toxic chemicals, wholesale erosion of global topsoils, breakneck species extinctions, etc. Most life and earth scientists believe that there are no significant systems or processes that are actually improving. Virtually everything is coming apart at the seams.
So sure, reducing greenhouse gases is important, and recycling more stuff is good. But the overriding illusion is that there is nothing intrinsically wrong with consumer capitalism itself. We just need greener and smarter jobs and products; and in fact, there is enormous opportunity for sustainable economic growth, if we can just get the right kinds of cutting-edge technologies researched, funded, and financed. Why, just weatherizing our homes and workplaces will save billions and billions, which we can then plow into wind turbine research and solar panel manufacturing.
The reality is much harsher. The trembling of the earth's systems is a sign that the basic algorithms of our civilization are askew. We are simply too large a presence on the planet, and we need to make massive reductions in our numbers and our technologies. We cannot have endless growth, economic or otherwise, within a finite system like the earth. All countries, rich and poor alike, will need to make enormous adjustments in their social forms to avoid the looming famines and dislocations on the horizon.
Cruising along in the background is Peak Oil. All of industrial civilization can be seen as the briefly-flowering portion of petro-depletion. We built all of our systems on the upslope of oil extraction, resulting in unsustainable ratios of energy to economic output and human well-being. As we continue on the downslope of Peak Oil, long-term trends in pricing and availability will render most centralized systems inoperable, so most grand plans on national and international levels will forever be out of reach.
Here's hoping that we can cast off the illusions and inertia of the Oughts, before the planet starts casting us off as the cancerous species we seemed determined to become.
