Forecast
The bivariate danger of the US two-party system is that citizens do not vote for anything and it is easy for a small group of radicals to gain control of a party during the primary. By not voting for anything is meant the phenomenon seen in voter turnout: Citizens in the US turn out to vote only if they are unhappy with the state of affairs, in which case they vote against the party in power. It is akin to a ceremonial ritual like sacrificing an ox or priest or king at the altar to get change. It harks back to atavistic fears and their superstitious remedies. The fact that a small group can gain control of a party during primaries has been seen repeatedly in US elections. If voter turnout is small, primary turnout is minuscule and can be manipulated at a "grassroots" level. By the time "the people" finally vote to throw the rascals out, they may be left with a choice of a group in power they dislike and a group of cannibals clamoring for power.
Assuming that there will exist historians in the future, one of the important questions they will ask will be when and how did the US transform from oligopolistic "capitalism" to militarism or military socialism. People love to quote Eisenhower's famous warning about the military-industrial complex, but it seems that they have not understood its mechanization in a social context. The rambling discussion of the preceding pages has attempted to give an intuitive picture of what actually occurred and is occurring. I fear that Eisenhower's warning has tricked the populace, who continue to seek a monolith and ignore the core of a government by corporation that has become a synonym for capitalism with none of the classical meaning. (Certainly Adam Smith would find within the current corporate controlled financial and governmental structures a form of the mercantilism to which his own work was a critical reaction.)
The legal superhumans called corporations that grew out of the industrial revolution in the US were not driven by government spending on "defense." The US military was not a massive standing presence before WWII. The US did engage in military adventures, but its reach came almost exclusively from industrial prowess backed by a small military. The corporations have grown into the government, and in reality there is no boundary between public and private sectors and has not been since the late 19th Century. Maybe there never was such a boundary. The pervasive control of the financial life of citizens by corporations has grown even as laws have been enacted to limit the brutal oppression of workers. No more legal sweatshops, no more child labor, no more excessive hours for small wages.
Instead, modern US society has become materialistically affluent. Most of its citizens consider the US to be the nation with the highest standard of living in the world. The price they pay for living in it is a form of serfdom in which they are no longer considered citizens but consumers. Their purpose in life is to acquire stuff by incurring debt and hence indenturing themselves to a social system that is in some respects akin to feudalism; they have become cattle for the corporations to graze and milk. They are not bound to the land, to a single fief, but that condition cuts both ways. They must pick some lord to whom to sell their labor or they are not able to gain any of the basic necessities of life. And it is a benefit to the liege lord to be able to unburden itself of commitment to the vassal. So the consumer-cattle dream of being independent, but independence is costly unless one can rise to seigniory. For example, in the US self-employment often means that healthcare becomes a luxury until one attains 65 years of age. And even that concession is considered outrageous to many conservatives, though a significant portion of their number is umbilically attached to the state via this mechanism or others against which they rant.
What is clear with a big-picture overview of the US since WWII is that it is becoming unstable as a society. Despite laws to regulate corporate abuse of their liegemen, the social engineering of Ronald Reagan has guaranteed that the rising materialistic expectations trickle down to the serfs at great cost. The money his administration created out of thin air has caused significant and persistent inflation that is born as a stealth tax by those who have gained less of this freshly printed means of exchange. Meanwhile highly publicized tax cuts have given those receiving the bulk of this nouveau high-powered money far more advantage, allowing them to rise above the inflation. No matter how much the politician yammers about tax cuts putting more money into the pockets of working class Americans, the reality is that when money is created in the quantities of the Reagan years, the tax cuts are less than negligible for all but those amassing the booty. The tax cuts for the average wage earner are more than offset by the loss of purchasing power of the eroding wage. This instability is most apparent during recessions, particularly recessions as serious as that which Obama had to face on coming into office. The difficulty of this recession, as with Bush the Younger's recession after the collapse of the internet bubble and also with Reagan's recession with concomitant inflation in part due to the oil embargo, is the fact that jobs become scarcer. The vassals indentured to the overlords through the debt which becomes ever easier to acquire, debt to finance their pursuit of a steadily more costly American dream coupled with rising expectations for their progeny, become cannibals. They cry out to devour other nations and also their fellow countrymen. "Me," that is the cry of the cannibal.
To borrow a metaphor from mathematics, it is as if the US is on a trajectory oscillating toward an equilibrium with each discrete electoral step. That equilibrium will end with the nation of functional illiterates who are not given to any sort of reasoning voting into power a government of cannibals much to their taste in the moment of that last step.
How does such an event unfold? There are numerous scenarios that might branch out of the current social situation. In fact, there are hordes of commentators, all too ideologically blinded to discern the reality of the situation, who nonetheless sense the danger like wild animals in an approaching fire or flood. Not all of them are lobbyists or entrenched political figures or paid yammerers on television or radio. For example, Jim Rogers, the investor and commodities guru who moved his family to Singapore to escape the cultural influence of the US, is aware of the dangers of the US financial situation. But one must take some care in equating wealth with understanding of financial situations or with intellect of any sort. Most commonly, wealth is acquired by a combination of luck and perseverance in pursuing it as the goal. Sometimes intelligent people gain wealth by accident, but the most intelligent and creative people tend not to pursue riches. Consider Albert Einstein or James Joyce or Élie Cartan or Norbert Wiener or T. S. Eliot, to name five who did the bulk of their work early in the twentieth century; money was only a concern as it regarded survival. One might, in fact, state a social law that people whose main goal and preoccupation in life is the accumulation of money are never gifted intellectually (and a corollary that people who work only for money provide substandard service). The need for wealth is itself an indicator of modest intellectual means, since the pursuit of wealth is not stimulating enough to captivate the brightest intellects. However, that is fodder for another essay.
There are then two major issues in the discussion above. First is the social condition resulting from the stealth financial engineering of Ronald Reagan that redistributed wealth upward by printing money, thereby creating a stealth tax on the middle class while distributing the great bulk of that wealth to an upper-class who had their taxes reduced relative to that money creation. Then there is the cultural condition in which all underlying values outside of religion, and even often within religion, are replaced by monetary value. We would have to say that someone like Einstein or Wiener were social deviants because their major life goals were irrational, not even hinting at a path to wealth. Along with this new valuation of worth is the reinforcement of wealth as wisdom, which was always present but never as the sole criterion. It goes hand in hand with the circularity that executives who are paid a lot of money are worth the money because they are paid the money (never mind their horrendous fuck-ups.) This has led to CEOs who go from position to position leaving ruin in their wake even as they seldom do little of value, a paradox. They are mostly ceremonial figures, as Veblen pointed out over one hundred years ago, but they do have the power to destroy social organization if they act.
But it goes deeper than that.
A look at television, especially commercials, makes it all too apparent that typical residents of the US are afraid of life. They worry their children will injure themselves on some device that they themselves played with or around as children, that people from other nations do not fear. They go to inordinate lengths to buffer their children from imagined dangers; they go to inordinate lengths to insure themselves against all potential dangers. For example, cell phones are not enough to protect the driver of an automobile. Now navigation devices like GPS must be hooked to a mobile phone system to automatically call for help in case of an accident. Drugs are pushed as ways to fend off the potential dangers of too much cholesterol or to prevent stroke or heart attack, often regardless of whether these are actual problems. Fear sells as well as or better than sex.
Americans are not only cowards, they are superstitious and illiterate. They need government protection against exploitation because they are not able to understand simple contracts or the consequences of contractual commitments they make. So even as people protest legal restrictions they clamor for more regulation of daily life and its dangers. If one really believed in the Free Market, would not regulation of the airline industry be unnecessary? Let The Market take care of it: Airlines that crashed repeatedly would soon find themselves out of business, would they not? How many conservatives would countenance that solution?
Along with the propensity for comic book fears, the US consumer seeks comic book heroes — cartoon characters like Batman, Spiderman, God, god, or Sarah Palin. Or maybe soon Erik Prince. This goes with the cartoon education they receive, ceremonially certified as educated but unable to read or reason, let alone understand technical instructions or arguments. It is part and parcel of the consumer society in which only money matters, in which the citizen is trained to be a consumer who lives in debt for things. And hence lives in fear of losing those things, since they are the only values in life. Of course, there is the blah-blah regarding family and god and other stuff, but the main goal for the family is to ensure the offspring want for nothing and gain more wealth than the parents', while keeping to some form of organized superstition. Religion has become materialistic in any case, since with the Protestant reformation came the idea that not only will God reward the good later, but also now — with stuff. Material prosperity is taken as a sign of God's good graces.
To listen to someone like Jim Rogers preach that a nation cannot spend its way out of a recession raises a number of questions. Probably that is true in the long run, but in the long run we are all dead. That it works in the short run was proven by Reagan, who spent the US out of recession with massive budget deficits and a massive public debt resulting from printing money. It seems that Rogers (along with conservatives) has a dual message embedded within his asymmetrical logic: One is that all the Democratic spending is dangerous (which is likely true in the long run, as is Republican) while the second is that a financial collapse either would not happen because The Market would not allow it (a form of religion or superstition) or would be good since then The Market could take over. Implicit in the second (and perhaps also in the first) assumption is that all those peons out there with their heightened expectations about the future for gaining more stuff and keeping the stuff for which they are already in debt should simply give up their material dreams. Even as the people preaching this are almost invariably super-wealthy. Certainly Rogers is. So are Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh. And the peons who ditto this cannot imagine their own pain when they are the losers. The wealthy advocates of other people giving up materialism will not lose. Rogers may have moved to Singapore, but it is doubtful many US consumers would want to live the life of a typical resident of Singapore. So while Rogers sees the surreality of US society, a social structure built on conspicuous consumption financed by debt, an entire nation taught that the only life worth living is that of the rich and famous and that anyone living in the US can attain it, or worse, deserves to attain it, he does not sense that it cannot be put back in the bottle, something Hayek at least acknowledged. So buy now and pay later remains the mantra; printing money has made this material acquisition possible, but has also made it ever more expensive and ever more unattainable in the long run. Not everyone will become a farmer no matter how much Rogers hawks the idea.
In the US, freedom is the ability to acquire things.
The trouble with those like Rogers (for example, John Mackey, according to whose penned portrait by Nick Paumgarten in a recent The New Yorker is a self-righteously superstitious, irrational, incessantly-reading functional illiterate (can't comprehend the grade school sophistry of the ham-fistedly hortative penny-dreadfuls of Ayn Rand) with an infinite ego-to-brain ratio; Mackey is the founder of a politically correct Safeway that peddles herbal remedies, orgone boxes, pyramid power and $30-a-pound Salmon to New-Agers with more money (or credit) than sense) is their own childish belief in comic book capitalism. They cannot understand that it makes no sense to preach to these people to abandon their dreams of and right to the same lifestyle as Rogers'. I think Limbaugh at least understands that much: He would likely be in favor of poor laws or poor houses or debtor's prisons or simply executing the poor. Or letting them die on the streets. But the peons who support this agenda do not understand that they will be among those sacrificed. They cannot understand that all these alarmist messages intersect in the debt load problem; outside of that, the messages are all nonsense scattered across terms and ideas without significance outside the individuals spouting them. And the peons do not realize that they are being told to give up their lavish lifestyles predicated on debt. They have already shown a great propensity to deny what they don't like, no matter how objectively it sits on their faces. The rich who are telling them to let it all go will eat them, not vice versa.
This is the heart of the matter: Take away the dreams of fulfilled rising expectations and you will bring out the cannibal driven by greed and fear. A cannibal nation will emerge that will make Hitler's Germany seem benevolent.
The population of consumers is unconcerned about anything until it affects their personal finances. Then they panic. It is like the decisions of the majority of those who invest with their 401Ks: Buy high and sell low in stampedes of greed followed by panic. So as the US steps along in discrete elections, it will eventually converge to a militarist regime to its liking, one clever enough or forceful enough that the consumer-citizens will not be able to get rid of it, one clever enough to rig the machine, or forceful enough to change the machine, to ensure they are not ever voted out of office. The super-cannibals will have taken over. If they can appeal to a majority of consuming cannibals, the old form of Republic will not be missed, even with more serious recessions and potential financial collapse as the militarists pursue their dreams of world domination. Look to the Soviet Union for an idea of how it will look, though not how it will play out. Militarism is not something that can be supported indefinitely. But the citizen-consumers will choose militarists to lead them beyond unstable equilibrium, to war and collapse. Short term solutions are the hallmark of the US and denial is easier to abide beyond the point of unstable equilibrium.
When will this happen? Will it be by degree? As to the second question, history teaches us that such transitions do not evolve by degree, not continuously, but occur as an essential singularity. Perhaps since there is a bifurcation, a better metaphor might be a catastrophe in the mathematical sense.
Let's get more specific. I believe that within ten years, and possibly beginning as early as 2012, the nation will be in the hands of militarist social conservatives as a single party system. The Republic, such as it is now, will be gone and almost no one will miss it. The White House will be held fixed; Congress will be marginalized, neutered, controlled and perhaps even dismantled; the Supreme Court would be no obstacle since the number of sitting justices is not Constitutionally fixed and can be reduced to one (the President?), and ignored or dissolved in any case. The democracy will become a one-party system.
Already the seeds of such an outcome are latent in the two-party system, as discussed in the early paragraphs of this section. If, for example, the financial condition of the US deteriorates with growing or lingering unemployment, the citizens in their major role as consumers will have become angry enough at the party in power to throw them out. But with the two party system that leaves only one alternative, a party that can easily be taken over in a primary election by a minority of militarist social conservatives. Judicious application of fear and mythology can lead to promises that in essence will require an emergency in which Congress is abolished if necessary, or simply controlled as under Bush the Younger early in his term. For example, the Hayek myth of economic liberty could be invoked to require that the party in power remain in power until such liberty is established. One already hears such a call by the "Tea Party Patriots" who wish to impose their will on the nation and remove by force a popularly elected President, perhaps the first one not elected by fraud since 1996. Listen for the call to save the Constitution by getting rid of opposition parties and suspending the Constitution. The comic book understanding of the Constitution and the inability to recognize contradictions will make such an idea widely popular.
The mythology of the US as the power that has single-handedly defeated evil in the world since WWI would be applied to justify massive military spending which is a form of fiscal stimulus. Already President Obama, as "liberal" as he is, has invoked this very myth with great irony as he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize. He used the word evil just as did his predecessor, a word with no meaning, a word of purely emotive content. He raised the most popular example of an "evil," the man Adolph Hitler, whose armies were defeated by the Soviet Red Army, not by the US and Britain which only helped to mop up. Of course, Obama repeated the myth that it was the US that destroyed the evil of Hitler.
President Obama called for a crusade. He asserted that war could be morally justified, implying that the war ostensibly against al-Qaeda could be morally justified. He did not argue for self-defense, which would be a legal justification though the idea is not well-defined: Witness the trial in Austin, Texas, a few years ago in which a citizen who chased down and shot in the back an unarmed man he found breaking into his car, killing him, was acquitted on the basis of self-defense. Or the police in London who executed a Brazilian man who had done nothing to incite them. But still, at least killing in self-defense is in some sense legally objective and legally justifiable. Killing for moral reasons is not legally justified.
One assumes that a morally justified war would have to be fought against evil. The words morally justified have no more operational significance in a global setting than does the word evil. They are only locally defined terms, and even then not globally within national or cultural boundaries. Mostly they are religious terms, which are never meaningful even within religions. What is morally justified to one is not morally justified to another. Worse, what is moral to one is immoral to another. The word moral has no meaning beyond the person using it. When someone claims that something is morally justified, or moral, you cannot be certain that they intend what you understand unless they delimit the term completely, which is to make it operational. There has been no such delimitation made by the President. In essence, we can assume that morally justified = moral = holy, so that a morally justified war is a holy war. A crusade.
The President would have been more honest had he argued for the need to dominate the Middle East. This would have been true. The invasion of Iraq was to set up a satrapy, and though we are already declaring victory, that outcome is not clear. But it is doubtful that we can establish a satrapy in Afghanistan or Pakistan (or Uzbekistan). Anyway, such an honest admission would be impossible.
Implementation of a militarist government that is not the same kind of Keynsian stimulus program that Reagan implemented, a money-printing regime, will require cuts that Reagan could not make. And Obama cannot make such cuts, either. But the conservatives will likely dismantle any semblance of social welfare, including Social Security, Medicare and even free public education. They can confiscate what remains of the Social Security money, which will stay in the black for ten more years anyway, and they can find creative ways to dispose of the resulting destitute elderly. Perhaps work camps. José Saramago gave a chilling forecast of possibilities in his novel Blindness.
There are other requirements for such a takeover. Scapegoats are critical: As discussed earlier, there are Muslims, illegal immigrants as an excuse to demonize Hispanics, and most importantly, liberals — who, as the Tea Party Patriots rant, must be wiped out. And one must not forget the poor. They are one of the reasons the US has lagged behind: The liberals and the non-whites and the incorrigible poor, especially poor whites who have no viable excuse for being poor. Poor people are perfect fodder for military service, at least the young ones. Instead of public education, have a draft that allows those with money to buy out or hire a replacement. After all, such a draft was established in the Northern states during the US Civil War. (Such a device might avoid the difficulties brought about by the draft during the Vietnam conflict, which was the major impetus for the protests that are the reason the draft is not in effect now (during the Civil War this sort of draft caused riots; see for example, James Ford Rhodes, History of the Civil War, Chapter VIII).) Together with a standing military draft there could be poor laws requiring the unemployed to work in public service other than the military for subsistence or other more drastic penalties, and there could be debtor prisons. This would also increase employment opportunities within the ever-expanding security forces. The military elite would be the mercenary forces already brought into service for both logistic, garrison and clandestine duty by Bush the Younger's regime and kept on by Obama's. Perhaps they could be folded into the standing military as advisers, trainers and officers. In this way, the military apparatus and the security apparatus and the espionage machine could grow together to fight not only external enemies, but also internal enemies. After all, unrest could not be countenanced during an emergency. It would be amusing to see those conservatives who believe their guns would stop such tyranny wiped out in the blink of an eye.
A propaganda machine is not a problem. Already there exists the mechanism of Fox News, which declares itself as opposed to all policies of any but the conservative party, and considers that fair and balanced reporting. This includes opposing not only liberals, but all Democrats and also many Republicans, the so-called RINO Republicans, the libertarian Republicans and maybe even the fiscally conservative Republicans, though they might be mollified with an end to taxes. It is entirely possible to deny spending as did Bush the Younger with his military spending kept off the budget. So if the deficit is only determined by budgetary considerations, it is perfectly possible to deny a deficit. Then the budget could always be balanced, even as the government spends more than it takes in by creating money as Hayek and Friedman explain.
News could be controlled more than it already is. This would not be difficult, given how easy most media journalists find it to change their world views as they make careers within new realities. And the Hollywood propaganda machine could be ginned up again, since it has so little trouble inculcating the mythos of the US in WWII or giving us the likes of Rambo or Chuck Norris defeating the enemy to whom we lost in that inconvenient Southeast Asian country. One wonders when we will get a film glorifying the heroes of the US Navy who shot down a commercial Iranian airliner as it took off in July of 1988.
Will the military support such a move? It would be more meaningful to ask if the military would be necessary for such a move. We have seen in recent years within the professional military a distinct distrust of civilian governments that are not blatantly militarist. That is not a surprise. It was always a tension before WWII, but that military was small and ill-equipped. Perhaps the military could be privatized into a force with a highly paid mercenary component that would control a large force of draftees from the poor. That would be similar to the mercantilist policies (and resultant companies with their own military forces) that Adam Smith attacked in Book IV of his classic The Wealth of Nations.
Note that if there were a multiparty system with viable political parties, this would be a more difficult scenario to mechanize, but it would not be impossible. Only perhaps slower to arrive.
I believe that if the US economy does not improve in early 2010, there will be takeover by Republicans controlled by militarists who call themselves conservatives. And I believe that this time, they will make sure that the crisis that sweeps them into power keeps them in. One of the great fallacies of the liberals (who call themselves progressives) is that the nation is becoming more liberal. That would be false. The only reason Obama won election was fear and panic regarding the economy that Bush the Younger fucked up. In four years the citizen-consumer will have forgotten that miserable mistake and could, in the name of freedom and saving the Constitution and taking back the country, end the Republic as we know it.
But as I said, I doubt many citizens would feel a loss. The poor will make the perfect fodder for the military machine. A draft based on a lottery that allows those with means to buy their way out by hiring means-less dupes as stand-ins would mollify the elite. Now there is a true Republican free-market solution for military service, unemployment, and of course the scourge of those fucking poor people who refuse to grab the brass ring.
Remember that the militarist conservatives are not fiscal conservatives. For them, government spending for "defense" is not spending. This is part of the Reagan doctrine, to deny the resultant deficits and debt from defense spending funded by freshly printed money. This was adapted by Bush the Younger who refused to put his war costs into the budget, thereby denying his regime was spending money. To rephrase Goldwater, Printing money in the defense of liberty is not printing money.
The US is in the process of falling into the hands of cannibals. I would say, in fact, that the militaristic movement calling itself conservative is a movement of cannibals. But US consumers are also cannibals, and amongst them are the brainless and soulless living-dead conservatives who will eat your brain and the brains of all your neighbors.
Special thanks to Bob Friend for his many suggestions regarding presentation, a valiant effort to fix my unruly prose.
Jim Chaffee is an old guy who writes about what he knows: sex, violence, mathematics and dumbasses. His first science fiction pieces were weapon systems proposals to the Air Force. These days he's pondering which country will be best for immigration to escape the coming US military state. His crime novel, São Paulo Blues, which pisses off a lot of people who read it, is available at The Drill Press, where you'll find details regarding this book and others by authors such as Tom Bradley, Robert Levin, John-Ivan Palmer and Mickey Z. It also publishes three online journals in English and one in Portuguese.
Comments (closed)
Omar
2010-03-10 09:27:31
Really interesting original relevant stuff. Thank you.