[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] If America Declines ...

Wed Apr 16 06:32:51 MDT 2008

... Don't Expect Anyone to Talk About It

by Kevin Phillips

AlterNet (April 08 2008)

The following is an excerpt from Kevin Phillips' newly-released book,
Bad Money (Viking, 2008).

Rarely in US history has a president, especially a two-term president,
been so unpopular at a time when the Congress, captured in the midterm
elections by the opposition, is held in no greater regard. In such a
case, the norm is for the two to fight, with one side gaining the edge.
But that has not been true of George W Bush and the Democratic Congress
elected by running against him in 2006.

The two sides have gone after each other in a fashion, but more often
they have simply talked past each other to their separate party
constituencies, repeating familiar commitments to keep the true
believers on each side somewhat more contented than the unimpressed
independents - those who bulk so large in the sixty to seventy percent
of voters convinced that the country is on the wrong track. Most office
holders on both sides seem to rest easier if everyone stays away from
uncomfortable themes, even ones in the headlines, like costly US
overreach in the Middle East; the reckless expansion of private debt, as
well as the federal budget deficit variety; the new economic (and
political) dominance of the financial sector; and the mounting
probability that the nation will have to choose between desirable energy
supplies and global warming measures. After all, what you can sidestep
today might go away tomorrow.

True, the public is not impressed - "no guts" and "living in a dream
world" are frequently heard descriptions of politicians. However, most
big party contributors tend to donate based on established relationships
and sympathies or on nonideological desire for access, not on
philosophical engagement. No parallel to the simultaneous public
distaste for a president and his opposition Congress comes to mind, but
then modern polling goes back only to the 1930s. Let me stipulate:
despite the obvious salience of predicaments like oil, climate, the
volatile dollar, run-amok debt and credit, the housing bubble, and
imperial overinvolvement in the Middle East, I would be the last to say
that any more than five to ten percent of the electorate would favor a
2008 debate over American decline. Average voters do not.

In these matters, history does not merely urge caution; it demands
skepticism - and about both public attention and likely governmental
achievement. It is necessary to consider two other symptoms of weak,
even failed US politics: the entrenchment in Washington of a staggering
array of interest groups, which has engendered a soulless political
dynamic of perpetually raising and dispersing campaign funds; and the
further, bipartisan trend toward what can only be called a politics of
inheritance and dynasty.

Money politics and entrenched interests

The English-speaking peoples, when filling in new lands, had a certain
naviete about the power of entrenched interests and how these could be
subdued by locating a political capital in a remote federal preserve far
from the existing centers of (corrupting) urbanity and wealth. The
capitals were thus located in backwaters at a time when geography
trumped media (Washington, DC, Ottawa, and Canberra); but today, those
names have become shorthand in their respective electorates for (1)
metropolitan areas with strikingly high (and recession-resistant) per
capita incomes; and (2) hothouses of seething interest-group
concentration where elected representatives, shedding whatever
grassroots fealty they may once have possessed, often train to retire
after ten or twelve years to triple or even quintuple their salaries by
becoming lobbyists.

As an aspiring theorist four decades ago, I developed a belief that the
realignments seen in US presidential politics every generation or so had
an (idealized) cleaning-up component. The victors, with a mandate of
sorts from an annoyed electorate rearranged in new party coalitions,
came to the capital city and purged it of the used-up elites of the
crowd that had just been voted out. Some of that occurred after Thomas
Jefferson's election in 1800, Andrew Jackson's in 1828, Abraham
Lincoln's in 1860, and Franklin D Roosevelt's in 1932.

At any rate, it didn't happen after the 1968 election, although
Republicans held the White House for twenty of the next twenty-four
years. And it certainly hasn't happened since. Congress and the White
House have been in the hands of different parties two-thirds of the time
since 1968, so the United States has progressed to a new kind of
interest-group influence: the simultaneous entrenchment in Washington of
the "used up, don't want to go back to Peoria" elites of both major
parties. This electoral duopoly is in turn protected by various state
and federal election and campaign-finance laws that make it hard for new
parties to take hold or flourish. It's not that there aren't differences
between the parties; it's just that they are limited differences and
ones often reflecting cultural polarization.

In the early 1980s, an American sociologist by the name of Mancur Olson
published a book called The Rise and Decline and Nations (Yale
University Press, 1984). Its thesis was that decline comes because after
many years of success, a nation's political and economic arteries get so
clogged with special-interest groups that its life-giving circulation of
ideas and elites is impaired. Countries that are beaten in wars and
occupied receive a new lease on life because their old interest-group
structures get uprooted. He dwelled on Britain, the United States,
Australia, and New Zealand, none successfully invaded or occupied over
the last few centuries, as examples of impaired political and economic
circulation. Olson misjudged the links between inflation and political
failure, but his interest-group focus may have a partial utility in
explaining political and governmental entrenchment and decline.

If one goes back and looks at the capital cities of the four previous
leading world economic powers, in later eras attempts were made to
divide, abandon, or relocate them. Capitals in both Rome and Spain were
relocated - in the fifth century AD the Roman capital moved to Ravenna,
and Spain's for a while moved from Madrid to Valladolid. Concern about
elites that were calcified and verging on permanence worried people
then, too.

Parties and factions can also run out of creativity. British party
politics was chaotic in the decades between the two world wars, which
limited innovation and complicated any prospect of renewal. There is
little more to be said for US party politics in the early 2000s. The
Republicans were discredited by eight years of failure in war,
diplomacy, and fiscal honesty, and the Democrats won no laurel wreaths
for effective opposition. Institutionally, the 180-year-old Democratic
Party and the 150-year-old Republican Party have, over the last forty
years, uprooted themselves from what were their constituencies and
allegiances as late as the 1960s.

Gone on the Democratic side is the southern and western geography of
opposition to northeastern financial elites under the aegis of Thomas
Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, Franklin D Roosevelt and Harry S Truman.
Instead, there is a new Democratic politics of new national elites -
financial, high-tech, and communications. The Republicans, in turn, have
lost many of their old, post-Civil War northern and western
constituencies and biases, turning to the South and the interior West
and a combination of old-line northern business elites and the Sun Belt
power structure so ascendant in the late twentieth century. For both
parties, the bottom line is usually the same: the bottom line.
Fund-raising. Money. Comparative rootlessness makes it easy.
_____

Reprinted by arrangement with Viking, a member of the Penguin Group
(USA) Inc, from Bad Money by Kevin Phillips, the author of many books.

http://www.alternet.org/story/81652/

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