Drive, He Said

The long, dark nightmare of the Bush Administration is over, and while we’re cleaning up the mess, I’d like to suggest that we allow ourselves a brief moment to sit back and ponder what lessons there are to take from what we’ve all just been through. We clearly are at a turning point in our nation’s history, and not just because we elected Mr. Obama as President. We’ve also seen some of our most cherished principles challenged, and our beliefs about ourselves confronted with some ugly realities. While ‘absolute’ statements may be premature, there are some important inferences we can draw from the years since the Reagan era, which will be useful to recognize when coping with the difficult times ahead.

Neo-Conservatism is dead. Like it’s old arch-nemesis, Communism, it needs to be quickly relegated to the trash heap of history. A mutant, non-viable offspring of classic Conservatism, it was a creature spawned on ideology rather than common sense. It’s underpinnings, a semi-religious fervor for Adam Smith’s ‘free market,’ was one of it greatest weaknesses. As the last few years have so well demonstrated, we can now see that no such creature truly exists. No market can ever stay free in the truest sense, because those who become successful in it immediately limit competition, raise barriers to entry, control the market through heavily-lobbied legislation, and over time become the well-entrenched oligarchies we see today in energy, finance, etc. This situation occurred in the late 1800’s with the Trusts, and it took – yes, the US Government to finally break them up, just like it took the US Government to bail our collective fannies out of this crisis. Without the regulations, oversight, and penalties necessary to control market forces, what rational person would assume that all of this would not happen again?

The myth of the ‘purity’ of the free market, so seductive to generations of reactive right-wingers, has been revealed to be a poor basis for a political philosophy, though not necessarily as an economic one. That distinction is critical. An economic system is just that – a system for handling our material needs... not a religion, not a philosophy, not anything other than a method for people to regulate the exchange of goods and services. Under certain conditions, the market is an excellent engine to drive production. However, under other conditions, it rewards cronyism, creates oligarchies, and denies basic subsistence to those not well equipped to operate within its confines. Though an excellent producer of wealth, it is, in social terms, a poor distributor, as anyone who’s observed the US healthcare system can attest.

Remember - any human system, capitalist, socialist, or otherwise - is inherently imperfect, subject to the full, rich palate of self-indulgent vagaries the human character possesses. As such, periodic adjustments to this factor or that policy are always necessary to ensure the health and stability of civil society. Neo-Conservatism, by eschewing political flexibility for a rigid, blinder-encumbered ideology, found itself unable to adapt to the needs of the society it purported to serve.

The metaphor of the automobile may prove an ironically apt one. Free market capitalism can be compared to a powerful engine that can crank out prodigious quantities of goods and services, but in and of itself has no steering mechanism. Up until recently, that function was accomplished by the abiding political philosophy of the times - a moderate, liberal, humanitarian overview that has prevailed since Franklin Roosevelt. Simply stated, it was that the price of living in a free society is that a portion of the resources generated by that system must go to assure that the needs of society as a whole are met, and that markets, in order to function for optimum stability, must be regulated. The counterbalance, or steering wheel, if you will, for the engine is this political philosophy as expressed by the will of society through its elected government. Every force needs an equal and opposing force to balance it, and whether one looks in physics or in society, the principle holds.

The popular emergence of Neo-Conservatism (as opposed to classic Conservatism, which was once a useful counterweight to the fiscal excesses of those wishing to be re-elected) in the 1980’s removed the steering wheel from the vehicle. Unaided by any moral guidance other than voracious greed, the automobile predictably wound up in a ditch, awaiting the government tow truck. This scenario is still playing itself out, and the full consequence of the unfettered markets of the last eight years has yet to be fully understood, much less repaired.

Nevertheless, even as rationality is slowly reinstated, it is of paramount importance that we take this historic opportunity, while the paucity of the free market as a political system stands fully exposed to public view, to reconfigure society in such a way that amoral market forces can never again be allowed to determine the welfare of our citizens, but rather be harnessed so that social stability is, and always will be, the order of the day. In other words, don’t toss the engine, but by understanding its nature and its proper role in society, it can be controlled in such a way that the benefits of it’s energy are enjoyed by all. By educating future generations to both the dangers of unregulated markets and the benefits of careful steering an able vehicle, we will have gone a long way towards completing the Driver’s Training course we apparently still need.