I have thought about posting something like this for a while. I have probably waited too long and it has lost something of its relevance. Because, luckily, George W. Bush's term is about to end and there is no neo-conservative president-elect succeeding him, so my theory is not as frightening as it once might have been. But keep in mind that it would have taken just one more conservative Supreme Court Justice and the agenda would not have met a lot of resistance anymore.. But the voting people as a majority didn't fall for the same old strategy this time. Now Barack Obama has to clean up the mess, the mess that probably was not entirely unwanted by the Neo-Conservatives.
Remember the tell-all book by former Bush press secretary Scott McClellan? The permanent campaign? Well, what differenciates the campaign from the political climate we are used to? Certainly, a campaign is a time of simplified messages. You need to get your message through, you need to establish an image of yourself, people need to know why they should vote for you, and why not for the other guy. It doesn't have to be much. 2-3 keywords and a little bit of context. For example, in the end, Barack Obama's campaign came down to the word "change" and the message "John McCain is like George W. Bush".
However, there was always more to Obama's message than this - and it became obvious with the collapse of the housing bubble at the end of the campaign. The criticism of the whole neo-conservative economic theory that had lingered under the radar, suddenly moved to the forefront. John McCain never had an adequate response apart from planless actionism. Sarah Palin campaigned on as if the collapse had never happened. She continued to throw out her one-liners and hateful rhetorics that reduced McCain's platform to a raging anti-movement against intellectualism, science, cities, race, religious tolerance, social tolerance, and economic changes. It was as if Sarah Palin had no clue what was going on...
Maybe she didn't, maybe she did... remember that she couldn't answer Katie Couric's question about the newspapers she reads? Well, it's not that she didn't read at all, but what she read. It was material from the extreme right-wing, from the John Birch society, for example. Of course, that didn't quite fit to the small-town major from Alaska, the hockey mom. But make no mistake, she was, and is, a member of the neo-conservative circles, either a real player or just a rather clueless product of it, that have ruled the USA for the past 28 years.
It's common knowledge now that the Republican Party uses social wedge issues to get people to vote against their economic interests. But I want to emphasize just how strong the grip of the GOP on the people was. The Reagan coalition was a combination of several distinctive developments that all came together under the grandfather personality of Reagan: the Southern Strategy of Nixon, racism as the main argument against the Democrats; the evangelical movement that emerged as a counter-culture to the counter-culture of 1968; and the neo-realistic school of international policy as exemplified by Henry Kissinger, the Nixon/Ford administration, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. Also, don't forget that the Republican Party never accepted the New Deal and the bigger role of the federal government since then. The Republicans saw the New Deal as a historic mistake that needed to be undone.
So, if you were not a Republican you could be labelled a traitor, a heathen, a terrorist, a socialist or communist, a troublemaker, soft on crime, a weakling, wavering, french, soft on foreign policy and maybe against your own race, if you were white. And if not, you were lazy, probably an illegal immigrant or in a different conflict with the law, either related to burglary or drugs. That's how the Republican Party fought their way back to power, from Nixon, to Lee Atwater, to Karl Rove. It was all timed to reverse the course of the nation, once there was a neo-conservative majority in every branch of government.
With Reagan it all came together. With the moral superiority of the evangelicals, the conservatives tried to turn back the clock. The social progress of the 60's had to be reversed, social programs were attacked, the tax system was changed, the old New Deal regulatory systems were weakened or destroyed. Government became the enemy, and in a way, the Reagan/Bush/Bush governments fought against themselves (the Clinton government wasn't quite innocent either). In a way, the government wasn't meant to succeed. To cover up weak economic performance, foreign policy served as the device to stay in power, from the aimless Star Wars Defence program, the fight against the evil empire, the Axis of evil, to the unjustified 2nd Iraq war.
A conservative government simply wasn't meant to be successful as an economic player, or it would have justified the New Deal programs. Remember that, according to Reagan, goverment never was the solution it always was the problem. So a successful economic policy would have destroyed that belief. No wonder that Reagan and Bush Jr. let the debt explode. The government HAD to be rendered unable to act if the ideology was meant to succeed. And of course, the massive debt helped to justify any further reduction of the welfare state. Neo-conservatism was a self-justifying ideology.
Another popular slogan of the neoconservatives was/is the call for tax-cuts, at best down to zero. It is still being promoted by Grover Norquist and Newt Gingrich, the pair that basically represents the 2nd generation of Reaganomics. Well,of course, everyone wants to have more money, but it's also no wonder that the gap between the rich and the poor got bigger, because as a wealthy person, you have more options to increase your wealth, especially in an unregulated financial market. Your average Joe probably doesn't see that the massive amount of debt leads to inflation, that the crumbling infrastructure makes transportation more expensive, that many of the benefits of the tax-cuts are taken away at another point and the best the middle-class can hope for, is for things not to change.
Neo-conservatism actively worked to change the electorate. Remember, people are most attracted to populism when they are in danger of losing the most. The upper middle-class had no problem to vote for Obama because they could afford a slight rise of taxes. But the lower middle-class couldn't afford it so their fears could be instrumentalized to make these people vote against their economic interests. The bulwarks of conservatism are in places that are under siege, like the white South, fearing to lose its jobs to minorities. It's in neighborhoods with older people, and less educated people, that see the effects of immigration and thus, try to augment the differences between themselves and these immigrants, although, socially, they are on the same level. And while the tax system will never allow these people to climb up the ladder, because the people above them are always able to move quicker, they still have to have got something they can lose to be attracted to conservatism. If you have got nothing to lose anymore, you will probably not vote at all, or you will vote for more social programs. Maybe you see where I am going, the one possession that turned people into conservatives, was the house.
The housing bubble was a product of the Bush Jr. goverment that wanted to keep people in the suburbs and on the countryside, because the Republican Party had lost the urban areas by the 2000's. Urban areas also force people to get along with their neighbors. They concentrate lots of social and ethnic backgrounds. They require infrastructure and flexibility - everything that works against conservatism.
So you see, for the suburban and rural conservative losing the house was a constant possibility, so any tax increase, any social program was a threat to the own existence. The spread of the population across huge suburban and rural areas, which is a true American tradition actually, also worked to idolize the typically big American cars. It is a waste of energy and nurtures the fossil fuel fetish.
But there is another reason why the middle-class had to be on the brink of losing everything. The Republican Party, and the Neoconservatives especially, have always depended on the only government sector they didn't want to shrink - the military. From "Top Gun" to President Bush in front of the "Mission Accomplished"-banner, the heroification of the military under any circumstances was another compagnon of the Neoconservative era. The Army had to be an attractive place to work to get enough voluntary recruits. It had to be a stable job in unstable times. It needed to be a good place to work, even if you had to go to prison for a joint or a similarly petty crime. Yes, for many young people, the Army had to be the only place left to work at. Otherwise, the hawkish neoconservative foreign policy would have lacked the human ressources to wage their blending wars - and a draft would have been a far too big role of the government, so there had to be a system of "forced voluntarism".
In short, The Neoconservative agenda worked to remodel the electorate into a highly conservative state. The Reagan Revolution was a true ideology that offered easy answers on every subject of policy: Strong on foreign policy, up to the point that the removal of a foreign dictator is justified by itself, against EVERY counterargument. Smaller government in every sector, except from the military, re-christianization to strengthen social wedge issues, racism in the South, evangelicalism in the plains states, libertarianism in the West, trickle-down economics in the north-east. It all worked together to ensure the electoral support until the expansion of the government after the Great Depression was reversed, even if it meant destroying the functionality of the government. In the end, America would have looked like a voluntarily fascist state. The army would have provided the safest jobs. There would always be an enemy to fight, Communism, Muslims, terrorists, Iran, Palestine, Syria, and who knows what next. The tax system and radically free market would have ensured that a small elite remains at power indefinitely. There would not have been a real political alternative, because of ideological litmus tests at every stage of the way (the Justice Department, Sunday mornings, what you eat, if you respect the flag, and so on and on...).
I believe that Obama would have won even without the economic collapse, but we are now facing a repetition of history. 1929 has come back, although the situation is not as bad as it was back then, not yet. As long as foreign countries are willing to buy American debt it will be fine. Government is about to expand massively, Obama is already building a new New Deal. Let's see if the Republican Party, once again, disappears into the political wilderness for a few decades.
Remember the tell-all book by former Bush press secretary Scott McClellan? The permanent campaign? Well, what differenciates the campaign from the political climate we are used to? Certainly, a campaign is a time of simplified messages. You need to get your message through, you need to establish an image of yourself, people need to know why they should vote for you, and why not for the other guy. It doesn't have to be much. 2-3 keywords and a little bit of context. For example, in the end, Barack Obama's campaign came down to the word "change" and the message "John McCain is like George W. Bush".
However, there was always more to Obama's message than this - and it became obvious with the collapse of the housing bubble at the end of the campaign. The criticism of the whole neo-conservative economic theory that had lingered under the radar, suddenly moved to the forefront. John McCain never had an adequate response apart from planless actionism. Sarah Palin campaigned on as if the collapse had never happened. She continued to throw out her one-liners and hateful rhetorics that reduced McCain's platform to a raging anti-movement against intellectualism, science, cities, race, religious tolerance, social tolerance, and economic changes. It was as if Sarah Palin had no clue what was going on...
Maybe she didn't, maybe she did... remember that she couldn't answer Katie Couric's question about the newspapers she reads? Well, it's not that she didn't read at all, but what she read. It was material from the extreme right-wing, from the John Birch society, for example. Of course, that didn't quite fit to the small-town major from Alaska, the hockey mom. But make no mistake, she was, and is, a member of the neo-conservative circles, either a real player or just a rather clueless product of it, that have ruled the USA for the past 28 years.
It's common knowledge now that the Republican Party uses social wedge issues to get people to vote against their economic interests. But I want to emphasize just how strong the grip of the GOP on the people was. The Reagan coalition was a combination of several distinctive developments that all came together under the grandfather personality of Reagan: the Southern Strategy of Nixon, racism as the main argument against the Democrats; the evangelical movement that emerged as a counter-culture to the counter-culture of 1968; and the neo-realistic school of international policy as exemplified by Henry Kissinger, the Nixon/Ford administration, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. Also, don't forget that the Republican Party never accepted the New Deal and the bigger role of the federal government since then. The Republicans saw the New Deal as a historic mistake that needed to be undone.
So, if you were not a Republican you could be labelled a traitor, a heathen, a terrorist, a socialist or communist, a troublemaker, soft on crime, a weakling, wavering, french, soft on foreign policy and maybe against your own race, if you were white. And if not, you were lazy, probably an illegal immigrant or in a different conflict with the law, either related to burglary or drugs. That's how the Republican Party fought their way back to power, from Nixon, to Lee Atwater, to Karl Rove. It was all timed to reverse the course of the nation, once there was a neo-conservative majority in every branch of government.
With Reagan it all came together. With the moral superiority of the evangelicals, the conservatives tried to turn back the clock. The social progress of the 60's had to be reversed, social programs were attacked, the tax system was changed, the old New Deal regulatory systems were weakened or destroyed. Government became the enemy, and in a way, the Reagan/Bush/Bush governments fought against themselves (the Clinton government wasn't quite innocent either). In a way, the government wasn't meant to succeed. To cover up weak economic performance, foreign policy served as the device to stay in power, from the aimless Star Wars Defence program, the fight against the evil empire, the Axis of evil, to the unjustified 2nd Iraq war.
A conservative government simply wasn't meant to be successful as an economic player, or it would have justified the New Deal programs. Remember that, according to Reagan, goverment never was the solution it always was the problem. So a successful economic policy would have destroyed that belief. No wonder that Reagan and Bush Jr. let the debt explode. The government HAD to be rendered unable to act if the ideology was meant to succeed. And of course, the massive debt helped to justify any further reduction of the welfare state. Neo-conservatism was a self-justifying ideology.
Another popular slogan of the neoconservatives was/is the call for tax-cuts, at best down to zero. It is still being promoted by Grover Norquist and Newt Gingrich, the pair that basically represents the 2nd generation of Reaganomics. Well,of course, everyone wants to have more money, but it's also no wonder that the gap between the rich and the poor got bigger, because as a wealthy person, you have more options to increase your wealth, especially in an unregulated financial market. Your average Joe probably doesn't see that the massive amount of debt leads to inflation, that the crumbling infrastructure makes transportation more expensive, that many of the benefits of the tax-cuts are taken away at another point and the best the middle-class can hope for, is for things not to change.
Neo-conservatism actively worked to change the electorate. Remember, people are most attracted to populism when they are in danger of losing the most. The upper middle-class had no problem to vote for Obama because they could afford a slight rise of taxes. But the lower middle-class couldn't afford it so their fears could be instrumentalized to make these people vote against their economic interests. The bulwarks of conservatism are in places that are under siege, like the white South, fearing to lose its jobs to minorities. It's in neighborhoods with older people, and less educated people, that see the effects of immigration and thus, try to augment the differences between themselves and these immigrants, although, socially, they are on the same level. And while the tax system will never allow these people to climb up the ladder, because the people above them are always able to move quicker, they still have to have got something they can lose to be attracted to conservatism. If you have got nothing to lose anymore, you will probably not vote at all, or you will vote for more social programs. Maybe you see where I am going, the one possession that turned people into conservatives, was the house.
The housing bubble was a product of the Bush Jr. goverment that wanted to keep people in the suburbs and on the countryside, because the Republican Party had lost the urban areas by the 2000's. Urban areas also force people to get along with their neighbors. They concentrate lots of social and ethnic backgrounds. They require infrastructure and flexibility - everything that works against conservatism.
So you see, for the suburban and rural conservative losing the house was a constant possibility, so any tax increase, any social program was a threat to the own existence. The spread of the population across huge suburban and rural areas, which is a true American tradition actually, also worked to idolize the typically big American cars. It is a waste of energy and nurtures the fossil fuel fetish.
But there is another reason why the middle-class had to be on the brink of losing everything. The Republican Party, and the Neoconservatives especially, have always depended on the only government sector they didn't want to shrink - the military. From "Top Gun" to President Bush in front of the "Mission Accomplished"-banner, the heroification of the military under any circumstances was another compagnon of the Neoconservative era. The Army had to be an attractive place to work to get enough voluntary recruits. It had to be a stable job in unstable times. It needed to be a good place to work, even if you had to go to prison for a joint or a similarly petty crime. Yes, for many young people, the Army had to be the only place left to work at. Otherwise, the hawkish neoconservative foreign policy would have lacked the human ressources to wage their blending wars - and a draft would have been a far too big role of the government, so there had to be a system of "forced voluntarism".
In short, The Neoconservative agenda worked to remodel the electorate into a highly conservative state. The Reagan Revolution was a true ideology that offered easy answers on every subject of policy: Strong on foreign policy, up to the point that the removal of a foreign dictator is justified by itself, against EVERY counterargument. Smaller government in every sector, except from the military, re-christianization to strengthen social wedge issues, racism in the South, evangelicalism in the plains states, libertarianism in the West, trickle-down economics in the north-east. It all worked together to ensure the electoral support until the expansion of the government after the Great Depression was reversed, even if it meant destroying the functionality of the government. In the end, America would have looked like a voluntarily fascist state. The army would have provided the safest jobs. There would always be an enemy to fight, Communism, Muslims, terrorists, Iran, Palestine, Syria, and who knows what next. The tax system and radically free market would have ensured that a small elite remains at power indefinitely. There would not have been a real political alternative, because of ideological litmus tests at every stage of the way (the Justice Department, Sunday mornings, what you eat, if you respect the flag, and so on and on...).
I believe that Obama would have won even without the economic collapse, but we are now facing a repetition of history. 1929 has come back, although the situation is not as bad as it was back then, not yet. As long as foreign countries are willing to buy American debt it will be fine. Government is about to expand massively, Obama is already building a new New Deal. Let's see if the Republican Party, once again, disappears into the political wilderness for a few decades.
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