About That Lying Thing
Harold Meyerson gets to the heart of what bothers me about Bush's economic policy. Whatever else my disputes with Republican foreign policy and social policy, I'm not in principle opposed to a Hayekian economic programme, and in the alternate universe in which Republican elected officials act like adults, there's a significant chance that I'd be a Republican. But as Meyerson writes, the Republicans understand perfectly well that the popular ideological consensus is firmly behind the New Deal welfare state:
Politically, however, Social Security is facing the gravest crisis it has ever known. For the first time in its history, it is confronted by a president, and just possibly by a working congressional majority, who are opposed to the program on ideological grounds, who view the New Deal as a repealable aberration in U.S. history, who would have voted against establishing the program had they been in Congress in 1935. But Bush doesn't need Karl Rove's counsel to know that repealing Social Security for reasons of ideology is a non-starter.Rather than attack New Deal liberalism as a political philosophy, the administration prefers simply to lie until confronted with the truth and then strike the pose of victims. With such witting accomplices as these, they continue to get away with it.
So it's time once more to fabricate a crisis. In Bushland, it's always time to fabricate a crisis. We have a crisis in medical malpractice costs, though the CBO says that malpractice costs amount to less than 2 percent of total health care costs. (In fact, what we have is a president who wants to diminish the financial, and thus political, clout of trial lawyers.) We have a crisis in judicial vacancies, though in fact Senate Democrats used the filibuster to block just 10 of Bush's 229 first-term judicial appointments.
Here's a line to consider next time you go door-to-door in the heartland: "Don't you silly fucks get it? They have nothing but contempt for you, and they'll keep stuffing bullshit down your throat until you make them stop."
posted by Finnegan @ 7:59 PM
1 comments
1 Comments:
How then to explain the demolition of the U.S. welfare system in the '90s? And the cultivation of a virtually unregulated world market over the past three decades? And the casual acceptance of new so-called "post-Fordist" modes of production, in which low-paying, insecure, part-time work is increasingly the norm? Evidence suggests that there's a distinct possibility that quite the opposite of what you believe is true: that, in fact, the American ideological consensus is on the whole Hayekian, and that the only thing maintaining the semblance of an American welfare state (i.e., preventing the total eclipse of the welfare system) is the very untenability and self-destructiveness of a truly free market. What is frightening is the great possibility that Bush will succeed, not the fact that he's manipulative.
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