New Liberal Lessons
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The End of History. |
"Idiot, n. A member of a
large and powerful tribe whose influence in human affairs has always been
dominant and controlling. The Idiot's activity is not confined to any special
field of thought or action, but "pervades and regulates the whole." He has the
last word in everything; his decision is unappealable. He sets the fashions and
opinion of taste, dictates the limitations of speech and circumscribes conduct
with a dead-line."
--Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary
After eight years of catastrophic leadership drawn from farcical good old boy networks and fatcat rich Ivy Leagues, can liberals get a little Marxist again? Like talking about class? Out of sheer necessity, to save our country?
Because Marx wasn't just talking about boosting the poor. He was talking about overall economic efficiency. You may remember your boss using the term. Fatcats may hiss and limbaugh (v-intransitive) at the mention of Marx, but efficiency they cower before like those tribesmen from Indiana Jones. When their companies were on top, they justified their compensation solely in terms of efficiency. What sweet revenge to knock their skulls in with their own false idol!
Meanwhile, Marx's big efficiency theories--which framed the aristocrats as parasites--were supposedly soundly trashed by history. So the free market thinkers have believed themselves unassailable. Since communism was largely botched by human laziness and mediocrity, the only alternative is the free market. And boy, has that free market been pleasuring itself lately! But what if the free market could be botched by human laziness, corruption and mediocrity? What if it has been?
Suddenly we see the spectre ofMarx, filthy, climbing up out of that godforsaken dustbin like some grizzled bum. He's yelling long-assed sentences in German, bread and cigarette butts in his beard, and he's pissed. Exactly how much wealth was transferred to the rich again over the last three decades? And why? How rationally are markets determining compensation? And how easily could we repair this crisis by either the government or the institutions themselves simply reducing the paychecks of the overpaid?
While it's true the free market can work some magic through incentive, so can socialism. You could, for instance, terrorize people strategically. Yeah: Stalin was really successful driving industrial growth in the 1930s. That's why everybody in the third world emulated him. Maybe you best and bright missed that when you were getting hazed in that Ivy League fraternity initiation ritual. He had growth that woulda made a corporate executive sob with joy!
America's current crop of fatcats look an awful lot like those comical, corrupt Soviet buffoons that reliably popped up in most communist states. Why wouldn't they? Look at how big and bureaucratic international corporations have become. The corporate boardroom might as well be the Politburo. The presence of a Trotsky is intolerable to mediocrities.
The real question is why liberals and conservatives couldn't anticipate the bureaucratic bloat wouldn't reliably produce entrenched, incompetent crooks and scum. After all, they've managed to come out on top in every other human social arrangement. But while some liberals gave up and accepted the free market, like Clinton, others were too busy chasing their Rousseau morality tales to attack craven corruption and stupidity.
You'd think at least liberals, with their intellectual tradition stretching back to the Enlightenment, could process this simple, familiar model: there's a parasitic class of morons in charge for no other reason than they have power. In many cases, they're robbing from ordinary people. Often they're using people as virtual slaves. The only figleaf for their robbery was that they were right for the job, and the market is the only game in town. Now their flimsy justification for their huge, shameful wealth transfer has vanished utterly.
So the time to attack has come, but what do you attack? It helps to think of what you might attack if you lived in a Soviet society, but had totally free expression. Well, here's the fun, punk rock aspect to the new liberalism: you can attack everything. Pundits on TV, ties, Powerpoint presentations, that lady in the job interview that judges you by your haircut, your boss, people who say "going forward." They're all part of the problem. The decision-makers have stolen your money and crashed the plane into the side of the mountain. The dynamics by which companies, government and media choose their leaders are all suspect.
Attack with shame. Doctors who make too much money: you're causing the healthcare crisis. Illiterate executive morons: you tanked your company and should do data entry. Lawyers who shouldn't even exist: well, everyone's always hated you, admittedly.
Liberals are accustomed to being argumentatively powerless. That's because the conservatives thought they knew better than you. The market rules absolutely. But with the power of the efficiency critique, you can hurt the rich. In conventional wisdom, liberals have been painted-in as losers who want inefficient government to manage money, excessively taxing the rich and boosting the poor. Sheer disgust for human beings became a conservative talking point. They used it to get tens of millions of misanthropic, self-loathing Americans to listen to talk radio.
Take back misanthropy! They created a dummy "liberal elite" to rail against. Well, we've got a real elite now, and they look pretty disgusting! Entertainingly so! Puke all over yourself thinking about those halfwit broker bastards fattening their coffers and laying waste to your 401(k). Be sick at what doctors charge, and how lawyers work to jack up the prices. Write a letter to your local cable news station and tell them to fire the pundit who's been consistently wrong for ten years about every--single--thing. It's FUN railing against elites. That's why bitter, angry people listen to Limbaugh and his world's-going-hell routine.
But even at their direst hours in recent decades, no mainstream liberal coherently articulated the obvious. It was always evil corporations, never stupidly-run corporations. An executive's judgment and acumen being worth $10,000,000? Even guys worth $200,000 a year? These are mostly absurdities. Economically inefficient absurdities, I might add, from the macro-perspective.
A lot of these people are glorified excel macros, dullard number-crunchers, lacking the talent and judgment of a Fillipina housemaid. The free market fables are dead. The corruption could only last as long as the big institutions didn't tank, and overpaid imbeciles with certain seeming talents could keep playing the tulip-mania job market. No more.
So liberals, it;s time to ditch that blank slate, people-lovin morality tale you've been shilling. It's time to get mean. This is class conflict in the old Bertrand Russell sense: us against a gang of corrupt, Un-American thieves and incompetents who are ruining our lives. If you can't fire 'em (they are after all in charge most places), let's at least shame and hurt them. And as quickly as their paychecks bloated after Reagan, the economic crisis might shrink their compensation and raise yours. Maybe get you a little health insurance. Perhaps lower the absurd housing prices. And we can have fun heaping scorn, and throwing some overpaid fatheads out on their worthless asses. Everyone likes to see the elite get taken down a few pegs. So take 'em down!
With the free market consensus, the rich managed to bloat the rich and super-rich classes until they resembled an old-school aristocracy. Americans intuitively hate aristocrats. The old talking points are dead. If the economy really does go down, it'll be time for a liberal revolution, where compensation is controlled not by market forces or the government, but by shame and consensus creating saner, more efficient and fairer institutions that benefit everyone.
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