Neo-Dubya-Conservatism Kept the Lid On, and NOW Look!
February 16, 2009
by George Thomas
In these trying economic times….
The main difficulty I have with our loyal (harrumph) opposition’s harping on the feast of jackals they expect after Obama’s agenda fails, is that not one of them has yet articulated any alternative plan that would prevent the country (and the entire industrialized world) from dribbling down the figurative toilet.
Even the standard social evolutionary models that our oddball neoconservative friends cite, do NOT promise a painless recovery. The conservative do-nothing Hooveresque strategy involves very deep and very long descents into economic depression. True, any recovery of some form of Western Industrialism would possibly be quite adaptive, and many improvements could come with this fine package. Trouble is, it will require a wait of about, oh, say, years numbered in three figures. Until recently, the only scenario of this kind of civilization-collapse I could envision involved nuclear war followed by centuries and perhaps millennia of starting over, with imaginative Classical Florescences and Dark Ages parallels in some far future. I don’t think any of us alive wish to wait that long to fulfill plans we made in 2007 to buy that yacht, or that third mansion.
Oh, wait. I keep forgetting that I’m talking to the Little People, like myself (sigh)…..
Well then, alternatively, avoidance of mass bread lines and soup kitchen attendance by 90% of our neighbors also comes to mind.
Despite what fiscal-conservative neocons claim, their demands are not fiscally conservative, but pie-in-the-sky Wilsonian naivete and utopian pipe-dreaming. Standard consensus now is that the laissez-faire “invisible hand” thing may hold sway as long as things are working, but that government intervention is needed when things spiral out of (invisible) hand. If polls indicate that people are content to allow Obama’s policies to take a “long time,” keep in mind that, so far, any neoconservative alternative promises a much longer time.
Speaking for myself — I’ll keep you off the hook — I recently recovered from a bout of psychological brouhaha featuring a classic set of symptoms. These culminated in a “sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach,” coinciding with the period between the election in early November and the inauguration in mid January. My doctors were astonished when they noted this correlation, and have started a program of testing to see whether my unease was based on classic fight-or-flight reactions harking back to my earliest Lemur-like paleo-ancestors. Was this mere correlation, or was there a causal connection? Teams of psychological engineers are still messing with the electrodes to see if they can come up with corroborating clinical results as a test of the hypothesis. But so far the diagnosis has been that the Bush era of neoconservative dithering kept the lid on too long before the government intervention phase could kick in. Now the Obama “team of rivals” faces a nearly impossible task.
This was not how Keynesian models envisioned how government fixes would kick in.
Talk about a “perfect storm,” not only of economic factors meeting together at once, but of neoconservative opportunity to watch gleefully as Obama’s policies fail, and then crow later that they were right about deregulation and market-deterministic capitalism.
Trouble is, nobody can conceive of any venue in which neoconservatives may resume leadership other than a return to some form of feudal society after numerous, unpredictable institutional breakdowns have led to the collapse of the state systems currently propping us up — whether or not we like to admit this is so. Some decades ago a novel titled “A Canticle for Liebowitz” presented such a scenario: Generations of characters with vague, intellectual recollections of ancient civilization in once-recorded history, blundering through similar struggles toward some undefined, new civilization. I’ve never found a copy, but heard readings of it on NPR in the ’80s or ’90s.
This is heady, astounding, even depressing stuff we’re anticipating lately. Again attempting to speak for myself, I don’t sense any impending doom. The usual occasional error, false premises and understandable naivete I can handle. We protested Vietnam, and it’s over, but some of the causes remain within the country’s deep philosophical grounding and modern distortions thereof. I’m simply not wired to deal with breathtaking, absolutely complete naivete and ignorance on the part of my ostensibly elected government. Perhaps things wouldn’t be this way had the Bushies (1) acted appropriately toward intelligence re. terrorism, and (2) displayed any knowledge or interest in modern economic systems and international policies.
Like the tree falling in the forest when nobody is present to hear, we hollered foul at the time but we hollered in vain.
Comments
Comments »
-
Bob's Bail Out Plan by bobl-tlm
-
How Do You Like Deregulation Now? graphic politics by Dicky Neely
No comments yet.