The New Centrism

 

Via By David Leonhardt, via the New York Times, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler, via Tony Wikrent, via Ian Welsh: "Why Biden May Matter"

But one major part of Biden’s agenda has a decent chance of surviving. It was the idea that animated much of the legislation he signed — namely, that the federal government should take a more active role in both assisting and regulating the private sector than it did for much of the previous half-century. 

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The philosophy didn’t originate with Biden, but he meaningfully shifted the country toward it, first as a candidate in 2020 and then as president. He moved the Democratic Party away from decades of support for trade liberalization and imposed tariffs on China. He pursued an industrial policy to build up sectors important to national security (like semiconductors) or future prosperity (like clean energy). And his administration was more aggressive about restraining corporate power than any in decades, blocking mergers, cracking down on “junk fees” and regulating drug prices.

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The rationale for this new approach was simple enough: The previous consensus — the neoliberal order, in Gerstle’s terms — failed to deliver on its promises.

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For most of the past 50 years, the federal government moved toward a more laissez-faire approach to the economy. Tariffs and tax rates plunged. Regulators allowed corporations to grow larger. Presidents of both parties supported these changes, to differing degrees, and argued that the inevitable march of globalization demanded them.

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These same presidents often promised that the changes would bring more prosperity to American workers and more freedom to the rest of the world. “It didn’t turn out that way,” as Sullivan said in a 2023 speech explaining Biden’s approach. Democracy has retreated, and China and Russia are more authoritarian. In the U.S., incomes for most families have grown frustratingly slowly. Many measures of well-being — including life satisfaction, loneliness, marriage and birthrates — look grim. The United States today has the lowest life expectancy of any high-income country.

In many respects I don't think any of this is new.  Reagan wasn't into "free markets."  He was into de-regulation for his corporate patrons and for protectionism whenever the general trend towards shipping unionized US-American jobs overseas got out of hand.  (I normally wouldn't link to the fanatical, drooling imbeciles of the Mises Institute, but search engines suck so much shit these days that I'll take what I can get.)  Here's yet another right-wing search result which sympathizes more with Reagan's "long game" of moderate protectionism for certain industries either to stave-off perfidious Democratic legislators who wanted even more protectionism, or to cushion industries that were undeniably in crisis.

Both of these sources neglect to mention the gigantic subsidy to US-American industry of Reagan's military spending.  At the time it was impossible, politically and technically, to ship military production overseas and that meant billions and billions of dollars every year for that sector of the economy.  (Forty years later however, we see that even a great deal of that production has been outsourced and the USA is incapable of expanding its military-industrial output to supply Ukraine.  Furthermore, "defense" spending is marked by so much corruption that US-American military hardware is infamously expensive, complicated, and prone to breakdown.  And the USA's aviation industry has been hollowed-out due to corporate greed and corruption.)

The main purpose of Reagan's "free trade" policies was to lower labour costs for corporate America by allowing it to ship jobs to low-wage countries.  And that purpose was realized.  And that purpose has been what has animated all presidents since Reagan.  Occasionally, "free trade" starts to hurt this or that important sector of the oligarchy and it is reined in.

Right-wing critics of "free trade" point to the way rivals such as Japan (and now China) "cheat" by keeping their currencies artificially low.  To the extent that that may be true they have a point.  But US-American presidential administrations [again] aren't concerned with "free trade" or "fair competition."  They're interested in higher profits and breaking the US-American labour movement.  Their thinking is often short-term.  (Which isn't exactly fair.  The Lewis Powell Memo provided a multi-decade, long-term plan to neuter and then destroy the forces that had made the critique of corporate power mainstream by the 1960's.  And in so doing, Powell was just one of several initiatives that I remember reading about but can't be bothered to look up at the moment.)  But the main thing [again] isn't the glory of "free trade" but the weakening of labour and higher profits.  If those are the goals, then the fact that Japan, or China, are manipulating their currencies (or other countries are suppressing their working classes through terrorism) isn't considered very important.

Doing these searches and reading these crappy websites has made me realize again the brain-dead stupidity of most "free trade" devotees.  It is a simple fact that if you open your economy to any and all competition some of your domestic manufacturing will suffer.  If you never had much of an industrial base to begin with you won't be able to develop one and you will be forced to be a raw materials exporter.  (Or, possibly, you can let foreign industry locate in your country and exploit your workers and take all the profits they want from their labour.)

Protectionism means tariffs or import quotas.  Tariffs are a tax on imports.  Taxes on imports make them more costly for consumers.  (So does oligarchic price-gouging!)  The point of the tariffs though, is to make it possible for domestic manufacturers to create a domestic industry which will produce the higher value-added product which will (hopefully) employ the workers who will obtain a share of the higher added value.  Also, the creation of a high added value industry will provide domestic markets for suppliers to that industry.

Of course, if all this is done under capitalism, the owners of these protected industries will prefer to produce at the highest level of profit.  The best way to do this is to keep tariffs high enough that foreign competition can't compete even though domestic production is substandard and overpriced.  Because who wants to buy top-of-the-line equipment and invest in training of the latest methods when you can simply produce crap and force the public to pay for it because you've bribed the government to protect you?

The free trade of [at least some] goods has its benefits.  The fostering of domestic industries [through some form of subsidy or tariffs] has its benefits.  It's called "economic development."  There never was and there never will be a world of friendly nations, all at peace with each other, all working together trading what they are "naturally" best suited to produce to bring the fruits of the earth and human ingenuity to all the world's happy consumers.  A great deal of Britain's industrial output at the beginning of their industrial revolution was based on an empire that was created by state-financed and directed military policies.  Germany, Japan and the United States all developed behind protectionist tariffs.  After 1945, the USA tolerated European and East-Asian protectionism to build those economies to prevent domestic discontent developing into communist political movements.

This is all connected to the ideological struggle between capitalism and democracy.  The capitalist-imperialist system developed in Europe and through such methods of military conquest, slavery and the violent suppression of the poor, came to dominate the world.  But within it resistance movements arose.  Movements against slavery.  Movements against imperialist rule.  Movements for worker power.  Movements for democracy and human rights.  At the same time capitalism came under strain from its own internal contradictions.  A declining rate of profit.  Oligarchic concentration.  Larger and larger financial panics.

World War I, the Russian Revolution, the Great Depression, and the discrediting of "free markets" that the successful state-managed economic revival in World War II produced a temporary fostering of full employment policies, the trade union movement, and industrial development initiatives around the world.  The society that developed under those conditions was the society that Lewis Powell was ranting against.

The neo-liberalism described by Leonhardt began to be implemented by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.  (Actually it was quietly initiated by Jimmy Carter and Paul Volcker.)  And it went into overdrive when the Soviet Union imploded and the USA's oligarchs thought that history had ended. 

The elite trend against "free trade" and de-regulation is a result of failure.  It turns out that when you deliberately impoverish the bulk of the population they subsequently have less money to spend on your products!  And when you provide them with credit to make up for falling incomes more and more of them go bankrupt.  And when you ship all your production to China so as to obtain huge short-term profits, they might figure out how you do things and take over your markets.

In what may rightly be labelled a genius move, the same corporats who were conspiring to destroy the working class invested in mass media.  Talk radio, subsidized by oligarchs, became a medium for right-wing propagandists like Rush Limbaugh. [May he Rot In Piss.] Ronald Reagan [racist, senile, stupid idiot] deregulated media and allowed all forms of communication from newspapers to television networks to become highly concentrated as well as freed from any obligations to fairness towards other points of view or to truth or the public interest.

This degenerate political movement behind Trump is the result of decades of right-wing drivel being delivered into people's brains on a daily basis.  At the same time as the right-wing was employing the old standards of racism, patriarchy and guns and religion, the liberals are only able to utter platitudes that were themselves used as a substitute for the steady stream of lies that they'd otherwise have to make when they spoke about social welfare programs and environmental protections and job security guarantees that they had no intention of genuinely implementing.  Besides lies and platitudes, the Democrats also scolded people for having the wrong opinions about the social issues of the day.  It's wrong to be sexist or racist or homophobic.  The Democrats weren't going to do anything to really help oppressed people.  But they were going to criticize open bigotry against them.

The final analysis is that we have a political culture designed to reward all the stupidities that maintain the status-quo with an intellectually bankrupt zombie [neo]-liberalism that now only discredits whatever values it ever had and thereby provides fodder for the yahoos who look at vermin like Trump or the Ford brothers and see heroes.

But even these degenerate shit-head politicians can tell the system is failing.  The evidence is too plain for anyone who isn't a liberal or a coddled mainstream economist living in a bubble of delusion.  They'll blame Affirmative Action, or nowadays DEI ("diversity, equity, inclusion") policies.  They'll blame China (the place the oligarchs sent everybody's jobs to).  They'll blame "illegal" aliens (and genuine refugees) for stealing jobs that nobody else will do.  They'll come up with any sort of shit-for-brains excuses.  (And liberal propagandists will retort by insisting that everything is fine.)  But since none of these scapegoats are the real source of the problem, things will continue to deteriorate and even the yahoos and chumps might get so angry that the whole gravy-train of theft might derail.

Especially in 2008 when Wall Street criminals created a real-estate bubble in order to turn mortgages into arcane financial products so that they could conjure tens of billions more dollars in imaginary "wealth" until the bubble (based on fraud) exploded, which caused a financial panic and depression, and for which the governments of the world bailed them out with what was left of the incomes and wealth of ordinary people.

Donald Trump was the degenerate right-wing response to this catastrophe.  Bernie Sanders was the humane, left-wing response.  Trump destroyed the Republican stooges with their continued adherence to discredited neoliberalism and rode on the apparent charisma he has with the sort of people who look at such a monstrosity and pledge their lives to it.

Sanders inspired huge crowds but was derailed by Democrat Party [anti-democratic] machinations and cynical, bullshit charges of misogyny.  (Because his opponent was the anointed front-runner, Hillary Clinton, mistress of the game of Democratic Party politics but a bat-shit crazy, war-monger, incompetent, out-of-touch, corrupt, psychopath, but who is a woman and therefore opposition to her can only be based on sexism.  [This is what I mean by the Democrats' misuse of social issues.].)

Sanders was cheated.  But Hillary lost.  Trump was obnoxious.  Sanders ran again.  This time Elizabeth Warren manipulated the concept of feminism and the Democrats again shamelessly sabotaged their own primaries to give the nomination to the senile, authoritarian, corrupt, game-playing Joseph R. Biden.  People held their noses and voted for Biden to defeat Trump, but also because Biden took on some of Sanders' policies because of their popularity and because there was a "squad" of vaguely leftist congresspersons who were still noteworthy as they hadn't totally sold-out yet.

Of course, once elected, Biden did maybe half of what he promised.  Abandoned such promiese as the Public Option without even mentioning them again.  Centrist, pro-Democrat commentators now complain that Biden didn't advertise the good things he did.  That's true.  He didn't do that because for long periods of time he was being hidden from the public due to his mental incapacity.  That, and, a little thing called GENOCIDE, helped to derail the Democrats.  Biden was forced to drop out of the race because his stupid party finally figued out that a senile, doddering old man simply can't be sold to the electorate.  So they replaced him with another empty-headed psychopath, Kamala Harris, who was unable to mask her uselessness and her immoral support for GENOCIDE.

The long and the short of it is the new centrism is a sullen, confused acceptance of the failure of the zombie status-quo.  But as long as everyone (the left included) persists in their various delusion, the longer the zombie will shamble around devouring our brains.