While the Democrats have virtually anointed Barack Obama to be the presidential candidate, the Republicans are yet to find a credible, sensible nominee.
A party cannot live without votes, but it cannot live for votes alone.
Henry Fletcher, Chairman of the Republican National Committee, 1935.
THE candidates hustle from one state to the next, from a stump speech to a debate, from a television studio to a fund-raiser. The white heat of the coverage exaggerates every gaffe and ignores almost all the substantive policy debates. But there is little to exaggerate in this particular crop of Republican Party hopefuls. Their run-of-the-mill bizarreness needs no magnifying glass.
The presumptive nominee to take on President Barack Obama is former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, a former finance capital man who has run as far from his own gubernatorial record as possible. Romney's wealth stands somewhere between $190 million and $250 million. With homes strewn across the beautiful landscape of the United States, Romney is plainly of the 1 per cent. Yet, it is Romney who has pulled up his sleeves and is trying to play the man of the people against Obama, who comes from a modest middle-class background (but went to Harvard University, which allows Romney to mock his elitism). There is something plastic about Romney, who changes his positions to suit the audience, and who seems to lack the basic pith of integrity. Where he is consistent, however, is in his ruthless disregard for ordinary people. I like being able to fire people, he said in New Hampshire, at a time when the national unemployment rate is just below 10 per cent, with 5.6 million Americans among the long-term unemployed who see no prospect for work.
Behind Romney is a gallery of political circus clowns. There is Rick Perry, the Governor of Texas, who cannot recall his own political platform (and seems to prove the point that Texas' Governors do not require a high intelligence quotient). There is Newt Gingrich, a petulant former Speaker of the House who has a penchant for intellectualism. But Gingrich's ideas are recycled versions of old-line conservatism repackaged as brilliance, and Gingrich himself is more like an actor playing a college professor. Authenticity is not Gingrich's hallmark, nor is consistency (he led the charge against Bill Clinton for committing adultery while he himself was having an affair). There is Ron Paul, an ideologically committed libertarian, whose affinity to the ideas of Ayn Rand often takes him to reasonable positions (anti-war, for instance), but which more often allows him to enter very bizarre territory (he opposes the Civil Rights Act on the grounds that it threatened property rights, the right to do what you want in your own establishment, including decline service to those whom you do not like). Finally, there is Rick Santorum, the former Senator from Pennsylvania, whose obsessions linger around a hatred of homosexuality and a disregard for a woman's control over her own body.
The passions of these men seem far removed from the serious problems that bedevil the U.S. On foreign policy, the Republicans are catatonic all of them want to bomb Iran, and Rick Perry even wants to return the ejected U.S. troops to Iraq. There is no war that does not impress them with masculine ardour.
On domestic policy, the needle bends firmly to the social issues, with the keywords being God, family values, abortion, and same-sex marriage. These culture wars have been ongoing since the 1960s with a serial tedium that strikingly does not exhaust the voters. What it does is to rile up a slice of America, one that is, for instance, anti-abortion, and get these people to be the fervent activists for the most socially conservative candidate (Michelle Bachman was the favourite until she left the race, and now the Brahmins of Evangelicalism want their standard-bearer to be Santorum). These are the activists who then volunteer to make the phone calls and go door to door to rile up enthusiasm for their particular candidate. For these volunteers of the Republican Party, the culture wars are precisely the central issue for the future of America.
Discussion of the economic collapse takes place, but only in a cultural context. Romney blamed Obama for not fully believing in America and wanting to turn the U.S. into Europe. If only he believed in America, Romney remarked snidely, matters would be different. What this belief would entail is hard to surmise. Obama's policies have moved social life directly into the arena of austerity (in this way along the grain of what is taking place in Europe), and what the Democrats are doing is not far from what the Republicans would like to do: draw down the deficit, shrink the economic activity of the state, free up corporations to lead the recovery, and rely upon the shibboleths of neoliberal economic policies.
There is very little daylight between the economic programmes of Romney and Obama, with the real distinctions being one of emphasis and temperament (Obama would never say that he likes firing people, even as his government desiccates the public sector). The theatrical attempt to say that Obama is a socialist is part of this difference of emphasis. There is nothing socialistic about Obama's economic policies. But it plays well to the cheap seats, with Romney telling the Conservative Political Action Congress in 2009, I gotta get through this speech before federal officials come here and arrest me for practising capitalism.
That the most powerful ruling class on the planet cannot field credible, sensible candidates for their preferred party is bewildering. How is it possible that the American wealthy can only produce such mediocre people, many of whom delight in not being worldly or in being unnecessarily belligerent? Over the past 30 years, U.S. society has become increasingly unequal, with the rate of inequality rising steadily through this most recent recession. The very rich (the 1 per cent) have been able to rake in the bulk of social wealth, while the vast majority (the 99 per cent) has struggled to hold onto the crumbs. The U.S. is set to be a more unequal society than Mexico by 2043 (it is already more unequal than Pakistan and Iran). Home foreclosures strip the meagre assets of those who aspired to be the middle class, and rising college costs (with student debt at $1 trillion) dispossess the ladder of upward mobility of a few of its rungs.
The facts of economic deprivation have dented the main cultural cement of the U.S., the American Dream. Rather than acknowledge this problem, Romney and the Republicans have sought to deny it, to cavil at the idea that the American century is over. They have been able to reduce the economic debate into a cultural one.
Romney, who worked at Bain Capital for much of his career, was one of those who moved the system towards the kind of inequality we see now.
Jeff Madrick wrote in The New York Review of Books of Romney's kind of robber barons, There is constant pressure to keep wages down by the CEOs in order to push up stock prices. This is the modern-day Robber Baron equivalent. Corporate takeover and leveraged buyouts have had the same effect: they build up cash flow by cutting expenses in order to pay off the debt they took on for their huge acquisitions. This is how Wall Street helps create a culture in which it is considered okay for a company to fire workers while giving its CEO a giant raise.
It is the culture from where Romney emerges, and it is for this world that Romney carries water. It is also the culture of the political class in general. Half of the members of the U.S. Congress count their wealth in the millions, and while the net worth of Americans fell by 8 per cent from 2004 to 2010, that of the elected politicians rose by 15 per cent. There is a great disjuncture between the people and their deputies. For a party that remains wedded to policies that widen social inequality because it is firmly in the pockets of the main wealth absorbers, the only way to appeal to the masses is through its unique brand of populism. This populism goes in two directions.
First, there is the concentration on social issues, and the fixation on the culture wars. Here the standard-bearer is Santorum (with Perry and Gingrich). Second, there is the deep ideological commitment to free markets and to less government intervention. Here the actual standard-bearer should be Ron Paul, who is most consistently against government intervention. However, Paul is perhaps too severe in his consistency. Romney, on the other hand, made his career in finance, was more a jobs cremator than creator, and was not averse to government bailouts and regulation as long as it helped along finance. Nevertheless, the commentariat of the Right has already anointed Romney as a hero of capitalism (this was the verdict of Suzy Welch, wife of General Electric's mogul, Jack Welch, who said of Romney that he is an American hero to people who believe in free enterprise, or he should be).
To hold together these two sides of the Republican Party requires a populist who is able to allow his or her personality to be the issue, with eyes averted from the party's programme. Ronald Reagan was perhaps the last Republican capable of this magical task, which is why Reagan remains the talisman for the candidates; each compares himself to the master of manipulation. The Romneys and the Santorums, the Perrys and the Gingrichs cannot rise to the role, looking more farcical by their imitations.
Meanwhile, on the Democratic side, Obama has been virtually anointed to be its candidate. That Obama has disappointed his liberal base seems to be no longer relevant. He has, after all, been kinder to the bankers than to the 99 per cent; been more muscular in his foreign policy than George W. Bush in his second term; and for a constitutional lawyer, he has been rather cavalier with civil liberties when he signed the National Defence Authorisation Act.
Little of liberalism remains in the Obama agenda. A few sops to the base come with a stiffer tone in Obama's speeches, and with mild regulation from a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The terrifying mediocrity on display on the Republican side finds Obama at an advantage: he might be as friendly to the banks, but at least he is not crazy.
Most polls, even those from Fox News, show Obama beating Romney by a few percentage points. That seems to be the trend towards the November election. It is once more an election about temperament and not about policies. No reasonable discussion about inequality and economic stagnation is on the cards. The deck chairs of the Titanic have been reupholstered.
COMMents
COMMents
SHARE