If you read VS Naipaul’s book on Islam (“Among the Believers”), all faults of Islam are attributed to an imperfect following of the original strictures as laid down by Mohammad. L. Ron Hubbard posited the same for Scientology, and I imagine everything from the Vedas to Catholics to Mormons to Ayn Rand fall into the same trap – the reformers thinking their reforms were the end of the line, the last step towards perfection.

Nevertheless, I don’t think there’s much positive to be gained by assuming *the worst* of every one of these either. The conceit of the total putdown of a worldview, “the Conservative Movement was just a Trojan Horse for neoliberalism” etc, is breathtaking. Like, people swallow this whole hog, vs. “one part of the conservative movement had a hidden agenda of neoliberalism”, or some recognition that no, American Conservatism hasn’t been goosestepping across parade grounds despite its many faults.

That liberal democracy has missed so much about human nature while offering great improvements should at least give us pause, especially when it’s largely been on its heels here for some time (Europe seems to be better off). One of the areas where liberalism reigns supreme is predicting the absolute worst outcomes, even while proposing tangible solutions and implementing them – i.e. the guy at the gas pump still insisting he’s going to run out of gas in 20 miles. We are often pessimists, undercutting our own progress (decrease in war, in pollution, in diseases, poverty, fossil fuel output; improvement in agriculture yields, alternative electric production, vaccines to prevent illness and death, steadily improving conditions for women…). And then we often refuse to acknowledge any decent points of conservatives, preferring to posit that half of the American electorate is just Cro-Magnon knuckledraggers. [oddly we’re switching positions in that many liberals or Democrats or whatchamacallits are discovering that no, the Russians really aren’t our brothers, as conservo-Repubs find themselves bizarrely allied with them – yet we still find it hard to look back at Reagan and give him any credit. Similarly, while the 2016 DNC break-in is a virtualized foreign power-enabled version of Watergate, Nixon *did* draw down troops from over half a million in Jan 1969 to 24,000 just 3 years later – a performance we wish either W or Obama followed.

Except I have a feeling had Hillary won we’d have run into a similarly misguided quagmire summarized by, “It works in practice, but will it work in theory?” The Republicans/Conservatives spent years building up their religion based on “the business of government is business”, which worked so well (and I find *in part and within reason* unobjectionble) that Democrats incorporated it into their modern outlook – or at least tried to, since it’s been a point of contention from from the far left ever since, and denied by the right since it works their side of the street.
[In an ideal universe, politics and politicians could grow up, so that our debates of 2018 would be miles ahead of those in 1936 or 1953. Instead, ours are largely miles behind – it’s almost as if as society moves forward, politics must move backwards to balance it – but I digress]
Take the OLA as mentioned – rather than a “too big to fail” mechanism, it’s a “too big to let free fall” result. A colleague yesterday was complaining that the Brits had lost 24billion pounds on bailing out RBS, but I noted that that was a hedge against losing even more – from RBS & similar institutions going down in 2008. Yes, supposedly we got our money back from bailing out the Big 3, but that wasn’t our goal – it was to salvage an industry and millions of people behind it (including dealerships et al, which were a 2nd thought oddly enough – hiding in plain sight).
This *is* a measure of conservatism tied to pragmatism that even liberals might agree to (including the supposed head liberal, Obama himself, though he never struck me as terribly liberal even in 2006 – “liberal enough”, he might say). But while liberals could swallow the painful medicine, the idea of reducing bankers’ bonuses or providing stimulus to the little people at the same time was a bridge too far.
But this untaken bridge was a betrayal of traditional conservatism (is that a redundancy or an actually useful term?). The conservatives supposed problem with liberals economically was that they forgot that Keynes proposed stimulus in bad times and belt-tightening in good, but that liberals thought every year was a good year to spend. The conservatives stayed true to their business side of the street, and ignored the “hard working man in the street” except as a trickle-down effect as is doctrine post-Reagan.
And what’s largely happened to conservatives is that they’ve created laundry lists upon laundry lists, as exemplified by the teabagger “revolution”, while getting further and further from the logic that originally inspired these lists. I mean, Hamilton makes for a good play, lots of sharp rhetoric to sing about, whereas Paul Ryan and Rand Paul make Britney Spears look intellectual, and let’s not even consider what a Mitch McConnell or Tom “The Hammer” DeLay songfest would sound like.
And when we ask why the Conservatives didn’t do their homework, complete their task when they had all the power, all control, aside from “the dog ate it”, the real answer was, “we didn’t think it necessary”. The reason had gone out of it – it had turned into an empty vessel, a scourge to thrash Democrats with, but not a wrench and a hammer to actually build something.
The Marx piece was quite compelling – it wasn’t that it ignored the tyrannies that picked up its call – like the whip the Republicans have, Marxism has been used similarly, with destructive results. Yet we remarkably find ourselves in the position where indeed Business (or the owners) is co-opting all excess fruits of production for itself, and becoming more and more efficient at doing so, harvesting the “low hanging fruit” and leaving the high fruit for government or other suckers to go after. And the idea of redistribution in Marxism, long a bit contentious as rewarding those who refuse to work, now seems to have new vigor and justification, where we see the dreams of those who did buy into the system and worked their butts off for decades only to find themselves cut off with no lifeline – forgotten and SOL rather than actually vilified. (in fact, they’re still “glorified” as the mythical worker, even as the fruits of that labor are siphoned off and not replaced). The cronyism & Tammany Hall resurgence of Trump and his cabinet and indeed all the GOP leadership (Broidy & Cohen were the new heralded finance deputies of the RNC, no?), along with the craven corrupt flip to Russians as new paymasters (never mind that we’re much richer than Russia – if we chose to legalize crony capitalism, it’d be a much bigger payday than Putin could afford) signifies the death of conservatism through both over-messaging and the sheer dilution of principles into overshouting the other in a “Tastes Great”/”Less Filling” commercial existence.
Yet I also mentioned the problem on the left – we talk about “poverty”, but indeed world poverty has come down, yet we become earnest protectionists as soon as that poverty effort affects us. We’re all up on “Putin bad” now that it’s politically expedient, but efforts to rein in Russian expansionism over the last century – including post-1999 – has often been dismissed as simply being too hawkish. Much of the effort against global warming is being won through market mechanisms and scientific progress – which would go faster without all the conservative obstruction, but likely would *not* have needed the 10’s of trillions that we supposedly needed to spend immediately.
The biggest issue is that while the conservatives have forgotten reasons for what they’re doing, liberals frequently forget mechanisms and consequences, whether methods to drive income or lower pollution or ensure equality or improve education – resisting over exhuberance is often called “neo-liberal” and other terms implying old fashioned and backwards and cheap, but the fact is that few things are slam dunks, and the debate and bickering between both sides *had* been useful, but the empty-headed kneejerk approaches of the last few years have left us in a muddled, largely unexciting mess. Fortunately the liberal dem side still has some up side to work with, but we shouldn’t get too cocky – we still don’t really have a winning margin over the Norquist “drown-gov-in-a-bathtub” type flat-earthers, there’s lots of ways we can water down the seriousness of reforming women’s issues, environmental ones, race relations, et al. Part of our brand as the “adults in the room” has been accepting complexity and hard work, not easy solutions whether left or right. Now that the right is committing hara kiri both figuratively and practically, it’d be nice if we took the steps to both prevent a return to the silliness of yesterday as well as take the steps past the current predicament. Yes, there can be a crisis of winning too easily, as the Trump situation shows well. Oddly enough, we’d be in a much worse situation if they’d only been a little competent. I keep getting drawn back to the Foundation Trilogy – philosophy measured in galactic time is a bit different than national politics, but the crises can be more informative.