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2 DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA The perfect storm of campaign
2008 By Steve Fraser
Will the presidential election of 2008
mark a turning point in American political
history? Will it terminate with extreme prejudice
the conservative ascendancy that has dominated the
country for the last generation? No matter the
haplessness of the Democratic opposition, the
answer is "yes".
With Richard Nixon's
victory in the 1968 presidential election, a new
political order first triumphed over New Deal
liberalism. It was
an
historic victory that one-time Republican
strategist and now political critic Kevin Phillips
memorably anointed the "emerging Republican
majority". Now, that Republican "majority" finds
itself in a systemic crisis from which there is no
escape.
Only at moments of profound shock
to the old order of things - the Great Depression
of the 1930s or the coming together of imperial
war, racial confrontation, and
de-industrialization in the late 1960s and 1970s -
does this kind of upheaval become possible in a
political universe renowned for its stability,
banality and extraordinary capacity to duck things
that matter. The trauma must be real and it must
be perceived by people as traumatic. Both
conditions now apply.
War, economic
collapse, and the political implosion of the
Republican Party will make 2008 a year to
remember.
The politics of fear in
reverse Iraq is an albatross that, all by
itself, could sink the ship of state. At this
point, there's no need to rehearse the polling
numbers that register the no-looking-back
abandonment of this colossal misadventure by most
Americans. No cosmetic fix, like the "surge", can,
in the end, make a difference - because large
majorities decided long ago that the invasion was
a fiasco, and because the geopolitical and
geo-economic objectives of the Bush administration
leave no room for a genuine Iraqi nationalism
which would be the only way out of this mess.
The fatal impact of the president's
adventure in Iraq, however, runs far deeper than
that. It has undermined the politics of fear
which, above all else, had sustained the Bush
administration. According to the latest polls, the
Democrats who rate national security a key concern
has shrunk to a percentage bordering on the
statistically irrelevant. Independents display a
similar "been there, done that" attitude.
Republicans do express significantly greater
levels of alarm, but far lower than a year or two
ago.
In fact, the politics of fear may now
be operating in reverse. The chronic belligerence
of the George W Bush administration, especially in
the last year with respect to Iran, and the
cartoonish saber-rattling of Republican
presidential candidates (whether genuine or
because they believe themselves captives of the
Bush legacy) is scary. Its only promise seems to
be endless war for purposes few understand or are
ready to salute. To paraphrase Franklin Delano
Roosevelt, for many people now, the only thing to
fear is the politics of fear itself.
And
then there is the war on the constitution.
Randolph Bourne, a public intellectual writing
around the time of World War I, is remembered
today for one trenchant observation: that war is
the health of the state. Mobilizing for war
invites the cancerous growth of the bureaucratic
state apparatus and its power over everyday life.
Like some over-ripe fruit this kind of war-borne
"healthiness" is today visibly morphing into its
opposite - what we might call the "sickness of the
state".
The constitutional transgressions
of the executive branch and its abrogation of the
powers reserved to the other two branches of
government are, by now, reasonably well known.
Most of this aggressive over-reaching has been
encouraged by the imperial hubris exemplified by
the invasion of Iraq. It would be short-sighted to
think that this only disturbs the equanimity of a
small circle of civil libertarians. There is a
long-lived and robust tradition in American
political life always resentful of this kind of
statism. In part, this helps account for wholesale
defections from the Republican Party by those who
believe it has been kidnapped by political elites
masquerading as down-home, "live free or die"
conservatives.
Now, add potential economic
collapse to this witches brew. Even the soberest
economy watchers, pundits with PhDs - whose dismal
record in predicting anything tempts me not to
mention this - are prophesying dark times ahead.
Depression - or a slump so deep it's not worth
quibbling about the difference - is evidently on
the way; indeed is already underway. The economics
of militarism have been a mainstay of business
stability for more than half century; but now, as
in the Vietnam era, deficits incurred to finance
invasion only exacerbate a much more embracing
dilemma.
Start with the confidence game
being run out of Wall Street; after all, the
subprime mortgage debacle now occupies newspaper
front pages day after outrageous day. Certainly,
these tales of greed and financial malfeasance are
numbingly familiar. Yet, precisely that sense of
deja vu all over again, of Enron revisited, of an
endless cascade of scandalous, irrational behavior
affecting the central financial institutions of
our world suggests just how dire things have
become.
Enronization as normal
life Once upon a time, all through the 19th
century, financial panics - often precipitating
more widespread economic slumps - were a commonly
accepted, if dreaded, part of "normal" economic
life. Then the crash of 1929, followed by the New
Deal Keynesian regulatory state called into being
to prevent its recurrence, made these cyclical
extremes rare.
Beginning with the stock
market crash of 1987, however, they have become
ever more common again, most notoriously - until
now, that is - with the dot.com implosion of 2000
and the Enronization that followed. Enron seems
like only yesterday because, in fact, it was only
yesterday, which strongly suggests that the
financial sector is now increasingly out of
control. At least three factors lurk behind this
new reality.
Thanks to the Reagan
counter-revolution, there is precious little left
of the regulatory state - and what remains is
effectively run by those who most need to be
regulated. (Despite bitter complaints in the
business community, the Sarbanes-Oxley bill,
passed after the dot.com bubble burst, has proven
weak tea indeed when it comes to preventing
financial high jinks, as the current financial
meltdown indicates.)
More significantly,
for at least the past quarter-century, the whole
US economic system has lived off the speculations
generated by the financial sector - sometimes
given the acronym FIRE for finance, insurance and
real estate). It has grown exponentially while, in
the country's industrial heartland in particular,
much of the rest of the economy has withered away.
FIRE carries enormous weight and the capacity to
do great harm. Its growth, moreover, has fed a
proliferation of financial activities and assets
so complex and arcane that even their designers
don't fully understand how they operate.
One might call this the sorcerer's
apprentice effect. In such an environment, the
likelihood and frequency of financial panics
grows, so much so that they become "normal
accidents" - an oxymoron first applied to highly
sophisticated technological systems like nuclear
power plants by the sociologist Charles Perrow.
Such systems are inherently subject to breakdowns
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