Putting Andy Burnham in Perspective

Considering the recent change of both the head of Britain's Labour Party and the British government I am more inclined to write here of the fall of Keir Starmer than the rise of Andy Burnham. As I have been saying since the 2024 General Election, Starmer became head of government with only very weak electoral support--the election's outcome not the "landslide" victory of the Starmer-led Labour Party over the Sunak-led Conservatives the illiterates of the press kept talking about but relative to preceding elections a collapse in the vote for the country's two principal parties. The Tories suffered the worse collapse (a significantly worse one), due to their fourteen years in government defined by the assault on working people that was "austerity," the bungle of Brexit, the "let the bodies pile high in their thousands" (mis)management of the pandemic, the good old-fashioned currency crisis instigated by classically neoliberal compulsive, never-mind-the-funding upper-class tax-cutting--and unhelped by the way in which the Tory leadership's ill-timed gestures toward "diversity" went down (however cowardly the British press were about calling out the racism in public). But the collapse was still undeniably a collapse of both parties.

As one may imagine, with the party of government doing so much to alienate the electorate it was no mean feat making the opposition party as unpopular as it managed to become by 2024--and Keir Starmer did work hard indeed to make that happen. Whatever its limitations Jeremy Corbyn had risen from obscure backbencher to leader on the strength of the enthusiasm of the Labour base for his challenge to the centrist-neoliberal-neoconservative-Blairite-New Labour politics as usual that Labour's supporters despised, to the elites' horror that the discontents might actually amount to something (with, bespeaking that horror the Guardian turning viciously on Corbyn, because actually positioning oneself against neoliberalism had consequences now). Professing honest fealty to the old Blairite line was going to get Starmer nowhere, so he instead posed as a socialist with an explicitly social democratic platform of a kind whose abandonment could not be finessed in the usual Establishment politician way. That sufficed to win Starmer the leadership, after which, electability within the party running counter to what the media elite respect as electability at General Election time, he wasted no time in distancing himself from that platform on the way to brazenly casting it aside as he pointed to the pandemic as an excuse, leaving no doubt about his centrist-neolib-neocon--Blairite-New Labour--colors. (By and large a socialist, or even just social democrat, critic of capitalism that they are, sees crisis as a time to double down on reform. Discarding it as an expensive luxury is not what leftists do, but rather what centrists do because an expensive luxury is what they generally regard concessions to working people as being--and friend and foe alike got the message.) And then because that was still not enough to make Starmer carrying-a-Ming-vase-across-a-polished-floor-electable in their eyes, he set about purging the left from the party too.

Meanwhile, just as the Tories' appeals to diversity would seem to have alienated its supporters while failing to draw new voters, so did Starmer's groveling before business, filling the air with the sound of drums as he did his bit to force-march Britain and the world into World War III, and brutalizing migrants and refugees, do nothing to help Starmer with his natural base as he failed to win over the voters abandoning the flailing Tories, not that he could have expected to do so, of course, the issue not winning voters but making himself tolerable to an Establishment whose preferred party of government as an occupant of 10 Downing Street has historically not been his own. And so however unpopular with the public his doing so was, like the good neoconservative he was, Starmer "stayed the course," so that when the General Election finally came he ran with an Election Manifesto in which his promises of four years earlier had been kicked to the curb, replaced by open fealty to the Blairism Britons had rejected again and again. Given that support for the Tories was collapsing even faster that sufficed to carry the General Election--it can seem, by default--after which he went from one debacle to another. Indeed, it bespeaks the frailty of Starmer's position that the Not-So-Loyal Opposition's exploitation of his fellow Blairite Peter Mandelson's ties to Jeffrey Epstein, cynical and shabby as it patently was, sufficed to lever Starmer out of the Prime Ministerial residence not just via the approach of sex scandal so beloved by a coprophagic media and political dirty tricks gamesters, but someone else's sex scandal, in an echo of the Profumo affair.

By contrast Burnham's rise seems a less dramatic thing--neither indicating a left turn as Corbyn's ascent did, nor a right turn as Starmer's did, just a lowest common denominator replacement for the fallen Prime Minister of a party in crisis, the more in as he has come in with fewer, vaguer promises in comparison with what Starmer used (very cynically) to see Corbyn to the door. If a certain kind of "liberal" commentator sees grounds for "hope" in Burnham it also seems possible to, extending the Profumo analogy, see in him a passing, soon-to-be-forgotten placeholder figure like Alec Douglas-Home ("Who?" many of you are no doubt saying) between now and the next change of the party of government, except that with the Tories' apparently still-ongoing Strange Death of Liberal England-evoking collapse as a political force it seems far from certain that the Conservatives will be the challenger to beat in an election by the ordinary rules of the game coming no later than mid-2029. After all, the collapse in support for the two big parties meant much of the vote going to "third" parties, with the Nigel Farage-led Reform UK perhaps on the road to replacing the Tories as the preferred "party of the right" in line with the trend all too clear in the ascent of the National Rally in France, and the Alternative for Germany in that country (both of which parties might make their ascent even earlier given France's presidential election next year, and Germany's schedule calling for a general election no later than early 2029). Considering the latter two prospects with the "gender identity" of their leaderships in mind I'm sure our identity politics-obsessed Establishment is gushing Hillary Clinton-style over the prospect of "new" firsts. (The first female French President! The first openly LGBTQ+ German Chancellor and head of any Group of Seven government! And one with a "partner of color" too!) However, the real story is what officially far right governments in Europe's Big Three (counting an Italy governed by the far right since 2022, the Big Four) will mean for those countries, for Europe, and for the world.

"No One Could Have Seen it Coming": On the Next Crash

After financial crashes Establishment spokespersons are quick to make a cliché of the insistence that "No one could have seen it coming." This is, of course, a lie (not falsehood, lie), but one which elites much desire to have promulgated--to such a degree that Nassim Nicholas Taleb has made a career of trafficking in Donald Rumsfeld "unknown unknowns"-like rhetoric about "black swans" on its behalf. (Patriotism may be the last refuge of the scoundrel, but cheap epistemological nihilism must at least be competitive with it.)

It is not at all hard to see why. It is far more convenient for elites to say "No one could have seen it coming" than to tell the truth that "Yes, a lot of us were complete idiots, but a lot of us knew the risks, because this has happened again and again over the last three centuries and people far smarter than our so-called brilliant selves have worked out sophisticated theories about it that predicted pretty much what would happen very accurately, but the rich were still getting richer, and we didn't dare slam on the brakes because that's what really matters." Because that wouldn't go over so well with the public. Additionally, to say "No one could have seen it coming" conveniently delegitimizes those who did see it coming, spoke up, sounded the alarm. Thus does the commentary ceaselessly enjoin us to remember that economists predicted fifteen of the last six recessions or somesuch, and think of anyone who did "see it coming" as just the broken clock that's right twice a day rather than having had superior insight into the matter, or shown greater frankness about it, such that they are undeserving of attention.

Thus does the Establishment clear itself of responsibility, as it throws discredit on those who do not tow its line, permitting it to continue monopolizing the discourse, to the dismay and contempt of all those who actually care about the truth, and the public interest, and other such things despised by those who malign "ethical" politics as they insist on "civility" and deference to Establishment experts rather than holding the powerful to account and no one having any memory whatsoever.

Given that the AI bubble may be in a late phase it would not surprise me to hear all this disgusting garbage dutifully trotted out again, along with other clichés of such situations as the obfuscation of the cause of the crisis through heavy use of the word "we"; much pointing of the finger at working people's fecklessness; the direction of inordinate attention to a few particularly blatant criminals whom the confused could mistake for the authors of the crisis (a Ken Lay, a Bernie Madoff) as the real sources of the crisis in the creation of a neoliberal griftopia go unaddressed; insistences that the proper thing is to let the disaster run its course without government stepping in, except to rescue the businessmen who created the disaster because of the pragmatic necessity of that, as they tell everyone else "Personal responsibility" ("Welfare for corporations, not people!" would be the "free marketeer"'s slogan if they were at all honest); dismissal of the public's suffering with claims that it had been living it up irresponsibly and needing a chastening to remind it of "what really matters in life"; and the trajectory of economic life that generates such catastrophes working out for the best in long run, and the necessity of "faith" that it is so. (Remember that commercial they ran after the dot-com bubble where people looked at the camera and said "I have faith in the market?" I would not be surprised to see the like again.)

However, if this mendacity, cynicism and extreme stupidity are only to be expected of the elite we have, it is not quite so easy to foresee how it will go over with the public. Certainly going by Thomas Frank a far from irrelevant percentage bought into such nonsense back in 2007-2008, enabling the champions of high finance to wrest victory from the jaws of defeat, to indeed double down on their policies in that way that has been the legacy of Barack Obama and his successors in the Democratic Party, the Tea Party, the Freedom Caucus. Yet they also generated a great deal more discontent in doing so, not least because the world never really recovered from that shock, and while it is hard to say just how the public understands the situation, it may well be that some of it is getting more skeptical of the old pieties (if the horror of our centrists over the possibility is anything to go by). Meanwhile the notorious hucksterism of a Silicon Valley that, however little a media still celebrating it acknowledges it, or even seems to understand it, has in the public view gone from representing capitalism at its best to all the public despises about it, as seen in the disgust figures like Elon Musk and Larry Ellison arouse in it, and their fatuous promises (remember "full self-driving by 2015?"), are all very strongly associated with the current mess. The result is that it will not be so easy this time to shift the blame from high finance to working people the way they did when telling everyone that rather than bankers, brokers and deregulators the culprit behind the real estate-driven crash was "the poors buying houses they can't afford," with all that means for the aftermath of the bubble's bursting.

The AI Bubble: An Update

A year ago to the day I published a post asking whether the valuations of companies involved in the artificial intelligence field bearing no relation whatsoever to their earnings and driving the American stock market capitalization's so far out of proportion to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the United States as it had become, did not indicate a bubble. My answer to that question was that, barring really spectacular, practical technological advances entering real life use in a very short time the answer had to be "Yes"--all as an onrush of genuinely revolutionary tech into our lives within the coming months looked a lot less likely than the bubble not just being proved a bubble, but even the bubble's having already burst by the time I got the post up.

Instead here we are a year later with the soaring valuations still in the stratosphere, all as I cannot think of a single really significant in-our-actual-lives technological development that has come out of it. Unless I have missed something truly immense it seems to me that what has happened with the share prices of Elon Musk's Tesla, by way of which a minor maker of luxury cars came to be "worth" vastly more than all of the major producers put together because of promises that became punchlines many, many years ago ("Self-driving cars by 2015!"), is happening with the entire "artificial intelligence" sector as the hucksters of Silicon Valley stage their biggest, most dangerous, most contemptible, con yet.

Considering this extraordinary testimony to how unbelievably irrational the Market can be I fully appreciate the role played by creditist monetary policy which subordinates every other imperative and good to keeping the action going at the tables in the globalized, digitized, cyber-casino; the ever more pointed preference of investors for buying assets over actually investing in make-a-commodity-for-a-profit production that the unhinged deregulation of the last half century has so much enabled; the employer's ancient hatred of actually paying "animated instruments" wages to work that has left them susceptible to the lunacy that the day when they will no longer have to do is imminent; and the fact that never in the field of the finance was so much of the world's wealth concentrated in the hands of so few, or those few so far out of their intellectual depth. (I suspect that of those calling the shots on Wall Street, or even the MBAs and J.D.s of Silicon Valley the credulous call "tech geniuses," very few could even begin to explain what an AI chip is, even as their betting the house on them made the once relatively minor NVIDIA a $5 trillion corporation and the world's most valuable company.)

That this latest demonstration of the idiocy of the relevant social stratum may cause a far bigger crash than we saw in 2008 on an economy much frailer than it was in 2008 is, for now, something that does not seem to concern the self-proclaimed "masters of the universe," still believing their billions and the unswerving deference of the Best Government Money Can Buy will one way or the other mean they never lose a thing, that on the contrary when the crash comes, as those "thought leaders" most combining extreme obtuseness, self-satisfied complacency, sociopathic callousness and raging sanctimoniousness in their mediocre and generally sorry persons have said again and again through modern times, it will all work out for the best ("It will purge the rottenness out of the system. Values will adjust") as still more of the world's wealth ends up in the hands most deserving of it ("enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people" --they are always sure that "enterprising" means them) as the public get a well-deserved and overdue chastening, with another bout of hard times reminding them "what really matters in life" ("high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life"--the aforementioned thought leaders, of course, also sure that this means people other than themselves). In the meantime their champions in the right-wing press crow over the making of the first trillionaire in history (for all about five minutes--these are paper fortunes, after all, as paper as in a game of Monopoly) as they fall all over themselves to sneer at the envious that said oligarchs "earned" and "deserve" the money they (supposedly) have. Not everyone buys this dreck, especially among those have-nots those oligarchs are so eager to see chastened and reminded of "what really matters in life," who actually work for their money (and work for the oligarchs' money, too, however little anyone desirous of mainstream respectability admits it). But then the latter count for nothing with those who make opinion, or policy, today, which is exactly how the world came to be in its present position in the first place.

Rationalizing Alienation

On the left there is a longstanding critique of the terms of work for an employee under capitalism entailing multiple "alienations." Simply put, on the job they are not in control of the product or process of their labor--what is done with what they produce, and their work activity in producing that. During that work process to produce that product they do not control they are also required to ignore all their other human needs, desires, potentials and interests in favor of "getting the job done," while also being compelled to in all this see in their fellow humans competitors rather than comrades, with all that means for the particular human needs of solidarity and community. More recently, in the age of the "service economy" especially, the worker is increasingly required to deny their own personality by putting on a false face at work--appearing cheerful in front of the customer regardless of how they really feel.

The thinkers commonly identified with this thought are, of course, anathema to mainstream opinion, which is likely to respond with outrage at the mere mention of these ideas. Yet the fact remains that, certain far from unimportant theoretical differences notwithstanding (the leftist sees the extraction of surplus labor as part of the alienation, the orthodox economic thinker rejects any such notion out of hand), they do not actually deny the basic alienations. Instead where the leftist sees these attributes of capitalist life as oppressions and, along with other failings, grounds to desire its replacement with a different system, the mainstream holds that acceptance of the alienations described here is not only socially necessary (how else meet society's material requirements?) or morally obligatory upon society's members (who must contribute if they are to have a claim on the "social product"), but as personally edifying, the gracious endurance of the alienations--the subordination, the focus on assigned tasks to the exclusion of all else, the competitiveness against others, etc.--the essence of what it is to be mature, an adult, a man, and that indeed if work's requirement of all this did not already exist it would have to be invented, a sentiment we see in the sneering of the conventional at the prospect of a post-work society. Of course, others have different ideas about that--and indeed one may imagine that many more than dare admit it would be a lot happier being done with the whole thing.

Of Modern Education's Hidden Curricula

The contemporary reader of books written as late as the nineteenth century are apt to find them using a good many familiar words in unfamiliar ways, like "education"--today associated with a primarily academic schooling, but back then more often used to refer to the broader and fuller raising, upbringing, edification of a human being (as in The Education of Henry Adams).

Where education in today's narrower sense is concerned (though one can also see it as relevant to our "education" in the broader sense), some have spoken of "hidden curricula." Those writing of the hidden curriculum as, for example, Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis did in their hugely important Schooling in Capitalist America tend to mean by it the fact that the American public school as classically constituted not only taught the officially emphasized "Three Rs" of readin', 'ritin' and 'rithmetic, but the unofficially yet no less importantly emphasized obedience to authority, diligence in assigned tasks of no intrinsic interest to them, punctuality, the tolerance of boredom and physical or mental discomfort, self-identification with group and task, etc.. Reflecting the fact that the intent was not to educate an elite but rather a working class that, in the wake of the industrial revolution, elites wanted conditioned for work in mills and factories requiring persons as close to the old employer's ideal of the "animated instrument" as possible. (Indeed, the hidden curriculum can often seem to take precedence over the open academic one, and a student's assimilating it be the more important in determining their life outcome.)

Still, one can argue that this is not the only hidden curriculum at work, with what some have said about the male upbringing traditionally (which, given changes in expectations about gender, seems to apply increasingly to women as well) as one deliberately brutal and brutalizing for the sake of preparing them for a brutal and brutalizing status-resource competition in adulthood seemingly relevant. The frequently severe, commonly punitive, often invidious character of so much of what goes on in the classroom, with its gradgrinding, its disciplinarianism tending toward what American soldiers once called "chickenshit,", its grading and its rankings, its subjection of students to so much experience of failure, inadequacy, inferiority, can certainly seem part of a hidden curriculum intended to teach that. So too such aspects of the matter as physical education with its heavy attention to sport and its mentality; the social dynamics among the students that reproduce the social hierarchies and pressures for conformity existing in society broadly; the "No one likes a tattletale" tolerance of schoolyard cruelties like bullying; and much, much else the cultural traditionalist hastens to defend with such profundities as "Boys will be boys."

However much some will hasten to defend them, the two curricula are far from perfect means of realizing their own purposes. Most obviously the two curricula clash with each other, with the training to be an animated instrument clashing with the training to be a brutally self-seeking competitor, all as there are other dissonances. Certainly the hidden, behaviorally-oriented curriculum makes students cynical about even their most essential academic training as merely a set of hoops to be jumped through (with all that means for their ability or willingness to be serious about learning anything), and this just the tip of the iceberg where the associated alienations are concerned, from which some suffer more than others. Even going beyond the more socially recognized forms of marginalization (race, gender) to consider those all too often mischaracterized as "privileged," there is little question that those who are in other ways socially disadvantaged (e.g. working class, as most Americans actually are, even as the media presents a middle classness that is probably really the low end of "rich" as the societal norm), or who are "different" or more sensitive than others, or "creative" or "independent," or introverted or neuroatypical, or just awkward or unlucky, or any of a great many other things, suffer more injury from the arrangement than their peers who are not, with this frankly a feature rather than a bug (such traits are not desired by the System, and the people in whom such traits are not valued), and in many a case carry around more hurt from the injuries as a result (the sensitive, the introverted, etc. taking life's blows all harder, with these blows in childhood and youth no exception).

Indeed, it seems a great many of the more vulnerable or less fortunate suffer and hurt enough that rather than making them into the self-interestedly competitive animated instruments society demands much of what they experience in this "schooling" turns them away from all that, turning people who under less wretched circumstances might have been high achievers making exceptional "contributions to society" toward rejecting "the game" altogether, and spending their lives going through the motions because life has left them with no other choice, and at the same time nothing more to hope for than going along to get along. Or pursuing hopeless "fantasy" careers that are if anything more likely to worsen their alienation as they much more often than not find their usually painful and lonely pursuit of the life they hope for thwarted. (How many set out to be writers, for example, in part because this seems their only chance to escape all that they would rather not endure in life?) Or, if they can get away with it, for as long as they can get away with it, spending their days playing video games in a parent's basement, as (speaking from responses I have seen to my own scholarship and media-cited publications about social withdrawal in online fora!) they envision "the good society" as one that will leave the unwanted in peace to do that. Faced with all that it is truly the stupid whose only answer is to display the conspicuous callousness of snarling "Suck it up" in their faces, and indeed not just the situation but the discourse about it yet more wearisome testimony to the synonymousness of the conventional wisdom with injustice, misery and brutality-apologizing and admiring pessimism, misanthropy and authoritarianism.

Of Occupational Choice

Americans make a great deal of the word "choice," be it the "choices" society allows, or the "choices" an individual makes. They tend to be less eager to acknowledge that as a practical matter one's range of choice often does not extend beyond their bank account, with that range very limited indeed for most. Certainly this is the case when we speak of the world of work. Unless one is independently wealthy one's range of choice is not likely to include their not devoting their adult lives into old age to some form of labor as the price of physical survival, with this underlined by those choices that are not available to you once the fact of having to work has been accepted. If you hope to have freedom, in the sense of not being subordinate to another person and enjoying control of the hours of your life; if you want security in your condition; if you want a low-stress existence where you can go at your own pace; if you want time and opportunity to enjoy culture and pursue other passions; if you want to work to live rather than live to work--all very plausible, natural, things for people to desire--you will have a very hard time finding a position that offers any of these, let alone all of them. The best you are going to get (contrary to, for example, the stupid myth of the Frasier Crane-like "cultured doctor" the media flogs) is a job that offers none of these things, just somewhat more prestige and pay, a chance to acquire some more material things, than another line of work would provide. Indeed, our educations are substantially oriented to crushing the hope of any other kind of life, reconciling them to being a mere "animated instrument" performing the alienated labor the Great God Market requires, with anyone so much as confessing a desire to be anything else apt to bring on ironic sneers and sarcasm, if not outraged reactions, from one's nearest and dearest.

Meanwhile even where the particular form of that labor is concerned there are, again, definite limits. They must choose from according to the range of their talents, or rather, what society is prepared to recognize as the range of their personal talents for which an employer is prepared to pay anything at all. (No matter how talented one is as a novelist, for example, there just aren't many paying opportunities here--because "society" doesn't value that--while even if you are brilliant at something society will pay for, well, you have to prove it, and if you don't test well . . .) And then even after that the question of what resources of time and money available to them to gain the needed credentials will be relevant, the more in as you have to get them far in advance of any hope of employment, with all the risk involved that. (Survive the Fury Road that is the path to graduating from medical school, and you will find that there isn't a Residency out there for everyone. As to the lucky ones who do land a Residency . . . hey, ever read Samuel Shem's House of God? Or checked out what med school graduates bear in the way of student loans in the wake of such expenses burgeoning far beyond anything Shem's generation saw in their day? One ought not to forget that that has to be set against the money they hope to make in the "good job.")

All this, of course, makes it no surprise that those who do go along can be so harsh with those who haven't (they sacrificed everything on the altar of "work"), be it as professionals treating the general public high-handedly and exploitatively, or the bitter old householder growling that he shouldn't have to pay taxes to feed poor children; and that so many look for any alternative they can, like betting it all on a "fantasy career," or pursuing the dream of overnight riches in that way already central to the American character and the American scene going back at least to the Hawkinses in Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner's The Gilded Age, and which have successively made day trading, house flipping, and the mining of crypto all so popular in our time. It also reminds the clear-seeing and clear-thinking that so much of what people in this society conventionally celebrate as "choice" is in fact a matter of "dilemmas," as genuinely meaningful choice is a thing enjoyed solely by the truly privileged, those who don't have to worry about money.

Monopoly and the American Political Spectrum

The vast bulk of what the United States' professional commentariat writes about the American political spectrum is, of course, drivel--as is especially evident in the way that its personnel toss about words like "right" and "left" and "center." Two minutes' study of political science suffices to make them look ridiculous--but that is two minutes more than all but a handful of the population puts into it. Still, a matter like the emergence of monopolies in economic life and what to do about them seems an occasion for clearing up, at least, the difference between right and center and left on this matter, and the issue of where they all stand in contemporary American politics.

The right defines monopoly in the narrowest possible terms (just as it defines "choice" in the broadest possible terms). Accordingly it sees actual monopolies as very rare occurrences, while in line with its extreme "faith in the market" downplays the harm they do, and action against it as a cure worse than the disease. Per Joseph Schumpeter, anything short of one hundred percent control of the market is not a real monopoly at the extreme end, while in their view market forces continue to discipline even such monopolies--because the monopolist must expect rivals to emerge if they fail to "deliver the goods" with regard to efficiency and pleasing the consumer who is king in this vision of the economy, where the gale of creative destruction is ever blowing. Besides, many here are prepared to argue that the hope of monopoly rents for at least a while is not just to be tolerated out of respect for the rights of property, but a necessary spur to entrepreneurial activity--all as their horror of government interventions in the economy as not just hopelessly inferior to "market forces" in outcome but a threat to "freedom" means that even if monopoly ends up entailing costs it is best to let well enough alone.

The center is less sanguine about monopoly, but it is a believer in market forces and their discipline. The difference between itself and the right is that wonderful a thing business is not quite so much a slave to them as the Schumpeterian vision suggests, with situations existing where they cease to be effective, such that markets need a bit of help from time to time. Monopoly, not just in the sense of the "natural" monopolies they acknowledge as existent in areas such as utilities (water, power, rail lines, etc.), but even monopoly more loosely defined (where the issue is not 100 percent control of a market by a single entity but a handful of firms controlling the bulk of market, "oligopoly" in the definition others use), is one such case, since such preponderance within the market is quite enough to let them shield themselves from market forces in meaningful degree. (Thus did the mid-century centrist John Kenneth Galbraith regard the country's larger industrial firms as largely outside the market, instead existing in a "planning system." Where this is concerned their preferred solution is helping market forces along by breaking up the monopoly, reducing one giant, all-controlling firm to a group of smaller competing firms whose competitiveness with one another will mean room for market forces again, with their spur to efficiency. One may question their actual enthusiasm for this course in practice--the centrist, at the level of theory as well as practice, quickly reaching for excuses for government inaction (they, too, prefer markets to a government they tend to prefer tread lightly), and tending to be less than vigorous about the matter in practice. However, they do at least allow for the possibility.

By contrast the left is no worshipper of market forces. Rather it is defined by its critique of market outcomes, which holds such outcomes to not just be inegalitarian or unjust but increasingly suboptimal with regard to efficiency. It also tends to see the emergence of monopoly as suggestive of market forces having run their course in a particular domain--all as market forces at any rate become decreasingly the solution (capitalism having a definite expiration date, so to speak--and that likely to have been quite some time ago). The result is that the left's answer to the situation is not attempting to "bring the market back," but rather collective ownership of the means of production and their use not for the maximization of private profit but the satisfaction of human need. The result is that rather than trusting markets to make sure monopolists are on their best behavior, or even settle for "breaking up" a monopoly to open the way to the play of market forces yet again, they are apt to advocate the nationalization of the monopoly.

All that should make at least two realities clear to the reader. One is that the center is in its thinking far closer to the right than it is to the left--in line with the reality that what is called centrism has in theory and in practice been an anti-leftist conservatism from the start (in spite of the pretensions of the "horseshoe theory"). The other is that anything that can be called a "left" is all but excluded from the mainstream--for those who would speak of nationalization, rightly or wrongly, are simply not heard from in it, their views expressed only at the margins of the discourse. By the same token, so long as nationalization is unspeakable within the "safe spaces" mainstream opinion provides for orthodoxy as a matter of course anyone who speaks of the left as anything but a marginal presence in the American political dialogue is simply participating in the hyperbolism and obfuscation that have done so much to muddle American discussion of public affairs for nearly a century.

Jeffrey Epstein, Neoliberal Icon

Being what it is the media tends to be averse to helping the public understand what one calls "the big picture" in regard to, well, anything it takes up. Naturally where the economy--an area where the media's aversion to big picture thinking is particularly strong--is concerned one does not hear the media use words like "neoliberal," or that word which so much describes "Actually existing neoliberalism," "financialization," in spite of its indispensability to any such understanding. For no intelligent person can deny that the neoliberal era has seen the financial sector (Finance-Insurance-Real Estate) not only wax much larger relative to the economy as a whole (as, by contrast, manufacturing stagnated and shrank), as measurable in precise, empirical ways, as shown by a comprehensive examination of investment, the makeup of value added, exports and Gross Domestic Product, the growth and distribution of assets and profits.

Moreover this quantitative change has gone along with a qualitative change in which finance not only accounts for much more of economic life than before, but is positioned far more centrally within the economy, its priorities determining the private conduct of business--and the policy of government. Thus, among much, much else, the intensity of mergers and acquisitions activity, which has led to the increasing financial ownership of non-financial firms--epitomized by the positions of State Street, Vanguard and Black Rock relative to the Standard & Poor's 500. Thus the running of industrial firms not on industrial principles but, in line with "shareholder value" and its short-termism the imperatives of the financial firms owning them, which has in so many cases seen industrial giants unmake themselves as they became financial houses themselves. Thus the extreme fixation of the business world on the stock market, the capitalization of which is so consistently remote from anything warranted by "fundamentals" when one goes by the conventional yardsticks (e.g. the "Buffett Indicator"). Thus the loose monetary policy we have, which if enacted in the name of Keynesian (or rather, bastard Keynesian) excuses ("We must sustain job creation!") have as their real motive keeping speculators in cheap cash for the sake of keeping the asset buying and selling going as, in John Maynard Keynes' image from his General Theory, the development of the economy is a matter of bubbles on a whirlpool of speculation rather than speculation being bubbles on a steady stream of enterprise.

As one might guess, such fundamental transformation of the economy has its consequences--social and even cultural. There is the decimation of industrial employment, and the inflation of asset values, which, along with the transformation of everything into a good rendered for private profit individually purchased on the market, has so consistently raised the cost of living relate to income. There is the mass delusion that everyone can somehow get through the play of paper values, as if this was not a matter of claims on stagnant or even declining "real" values--the stock market's surging having nothing to do with the actual availability of food, shelter, and other utilities, with the delusion that it is endlessly promoted by those telling the public to think of a house as an investment rather than the consumption that it really is for those who need a roof over their heads. And of course there is the conduct of those who come out ahead in the ludicrous and profoundly unfair game (there are those who can reasonably expect bailout, those who will be paying for the bailout), all of it famously dramatized by such figures as Honore de Balzac in the novels of the Human Comedy as his masterpieces Cousin Bette and The Splendors and Miseries of Courtesans. So it all goes in this age in which working people can't afford houses, or health care, where the fever dream that is crypto just goes on and on, how Jeffrey Epstein played Pimp to the Superclass is equally characteristic of it. Indeed, if human civilization somehow manages to get through this loathsome period in its history to have any history afterward, it will leave its legacy of images for later people to remember it by, and Epstein's smug face next to the faces of the presidents, princes and oligarchs exalted by idiot admirers as the great and the good will be one of them.

The Mainstream Media's Political Labeling

I have for some years now been writing about the mainstream media's biases, and the ways in which its business, professional and ideological imperatives determine its particular approach to "informing the public." For the purposes of this post two aspects of that are of importance. One is their taking an exceedingly limited view of what counts as a legitimate source of information or opinion, identifying as such the holders of high office, or simply great wealth, and the elite and "Establishment" in general, as they contemptuously ignore everyone else--like social activists, independent experts and whistleblowers. The other aspect is how this deference to the Establishment leads to their usually "one siding" their coverage of the issues, while on those occasions when there is a conflict among those they see as legitimate what is at issue is usually a matter of minor disagreements among those who are elite and Establishment--as seen in the disagreement between those who simply don't intend to do anything really serious about the reality of climate change and so gull the public with greenwashing, talk of carbon footprint, etc., and those who want to make it an outright thoughtcrime to point out the existence of climate change--to which said media respond with the ignorant or cynical presentation of the particular form of "false balance" that is their "both sidesism."

As said favoritism toward "Establishment" sources of information, and elite opinion, suggests, the mainstream media, which is in its intellectual premises not at all liberal in any meaningful sense but rather deeply conservative in the manner describable as centrism, shows great interest in what the right thinks, says and does, and affords it an abundant platform, while doing the opposite with the left. Consider, for example, how after the shock of the 2016 presidential election a New York Times which had never been lacking in right-wing writers, declared that they needed to get more of them in the name of more fully representing the spectrum of opinion and providing a better understanding of what is going on in the country in its pages, and snarled at its disapproving readers that they were being "intolerant," in the way exemplified by their justification of their hiring notorious right-wing troll Bret Stephens, and defending his beginning his tenure at the Times with a piece of climate denialism passing off his accustomed political hackwork as thoughtful "skepticism." By contrast, even with the media panicking over socialist, "Communist," even "Marxist" sympathies (they say) spreading like wildfire among the country's population one does not see the Times, in the name of the principle they cited when excusing their hire of Stephens, going out to enlist even a single genuine left-wing columnist, do we? Especially when we think of "left" as not meaning the likes of Abundance peddler Ezra Klein but rather people who use terms like "surplus labor value?"

Quite naturally the media's double standard in regard to right and left extends to their use of political labels in relation to political figures, parties, tendencies, objects, and of course, ideas. Labeling, pursued rigorously, entails at least the possibility of examination, scrutiny, classification, alienation in the Shklovsky-Brecht sense of making us really see what is in front of us, and enable us to think critically about it, rather than taking it for granted and passively acquiescing in it. All activities of the mind to which the centrist is ill-disposed as such because of their (characteristically conservative) suspicion of critical thought in the social sphere and encouragement of "the masses" in it, it is consistent with this that they show great circumspection about so much as simply identifying the right as the right. Moreover, when they do countenance labeling they consistently label very gently. Thus will they never say "reactionary," or "fascist," however accurate a descriptor those terms may be, never going further than "arch-conservative," with even that a rarity, "conservative" more common as they call many a conservative a "liberal" (as indeed they tend to do when they refer to centrists like themselves). Moreover, they are prepared to take issue with anyone who would characterize those personages in any other way. Should someone merely call a "conservative" who does not desire to be labeled a "conservative" that the media (however much that desire smacks of tactical posturing) are apt to regard the denial sympathetically, and start splitting hairs about the meaning of the term as they set the bar for what would count someone as being a "conservative" very, very high indeed. ("Yes, they never met an upper-class tax cut they didn't like, yes they want to privatize Social Security, yes they cheerlead for every war, but twenty years ago they voted against an anti-gay measure. Feel stupid calling them conservative now, don't cha?")

In the process the media does a great deal to make the ideas of the right a taken for granted part of the mainstream discourse, and indeed the conventional wisdom of that discourse if not axiomatic for the right-thinking, be the issue the hazily libertarian economic ideas that led John Kenneth Galbraith to coin the term "conventional wisdom" in the first place (e.g. business is a maker, government a taker); the view that income and wealth are the measure of wisdom, virtue, accomplishment, worthiness, and people of a higher social class accordingly "better" and "more important" than those from a lower one ; those not so favored have no one and nothing to blame but themselves for their lowliness; those in charge are "smarter" than everyone else (unless they didn't do what the oligarchs want, in which case the correct response is contempt or worse); and the unquestionability of respect for, and obscenity of disrespect for, their valorization of those things they refer to as "faith," "family" and "patriotism"; etc..

By contrast the same media are rather less squeamish about pinning labels on the left and what it presents to the public, with the opposite effect, prompting scrutiny and alienation and criticism and non-acquiescence, all as, indeed, they accommodate those who resort to pejorativeness, wariness, tactical hyperbole against the left. Thus as those of the mainstream media reflexively attack anyone who lays a charge of fascism against anyone on the right, and even require one to think carefully before they use so comparatively mild a term as "conservative," they accord a free pass to the right's sloppiest, most exaggerated, most scare-mongering use of terms for their enemies such as "socialist," "Marxist" or "Communist," never calling them out for the tactic. (Just as in the view of conservatives like themselves "ideology" is a sin exclusive to the left, so is the use of "political language," the center not calling out the right for its choice political language.) The double standard is the more provocative, and consequential, because however inconvenient some on the right many find it to be labeled right-wingers for their purposes, in a political milieu where the left has so much been treated as outside the bounds of legitimacy, its speech outside the bounds of that political speech which is protected, are much more easily put on the defensive by it, and their denials rather less likely to be respected. ("Are you now or have you ever been . . .") In the process just as the media does a great deal to make the ideas of the right conventional wisdom, indeed normal, they make the ideas of the left, about economic life, about human equality and the rights of the many to control over their own lives, about skepticism toward faith, family and patriotism, etc., seem strange and threatening and out of bounds, thoroughly "de-normalizing" them.

The double standard is built into their centrist brand of conservatism which, behind the bad faith deployment of the horseshoe theory, fundamentally sees the right as legitimate, so much so that it will almost never declare even extreme rightists beyond the pale (falling all over itself to interview, profile, platform them instead, even putting in a good word for the Andrew Tates now and then) as it turns a hard face to even the mildly leftish, because its whole way of thinking is fundamentally illegitimate according to their conceptions. Accordingly no one who would call out the double standard is likely to be allowed anywhere near their platforms, while even if they did allow them they would be befuddled at the challenge--precisely because the distinction between an almost entirely legitimate right and an inherently illegitimate left is so foundational to what passes for thought with them that, the more in as we are a long way from the days when the center displayed the intellectualism of an Arthur Schlesinger or Daniel Bell, they would simply lack the words in which to explain their view, let alone present anything that could be called reasoning in its defense.

The "Brown-Mondon Thesis" and the Ascent of Kulturkampf

In their study of mainstream media coverage of "populist" movements some years ago the academics Katy Brown and Aurelien Mondon observed the media's tendency to "deflection" as they divert attention from elite instigation, leadership, exploitation to make the movements seem bottom-up expressions of genuine popular feeling; "euphemization" and "trivialization" as they put less threatening labels on or brush off the aspects of the movement's agenda acceptable to the mainstream (e.g. racism), with "populist" itself a key linguistic element in the process; and "amplification" as they make them seem not just more broadly-based but larger and more popular than they really are. (An astroturfed group of extremist far rightists from the fringe? Heavens no, they are a grass-roots movement of ordinary decent citizens, the very salt of the earth, whom the coastal elites have sadly forgotten . . .)

Brown and Mondon's highly empirical analysis was oriented toward the discourse of the moment, which remains our moment. However, one may argue for the tendency being an old one, rooted in aspects of the media's operation that were by no means recent developments at the time (Brown and Mondon acknowledge aspects of the "propaganda model"), with the culture war now so widely taken for granted exemplary of them. It was what was then the far right that declared the "culture war" and insists that the central conflict in contemporary American life is between progressives and traditionalists over matters such as the place of religion in public life, and norms of sexuality and family structure, due to "real" Americans (Euro-American and Christian and especially White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, rural and small town, "heartland"-Southern and Western) finding themselves besieged by a civil rights movement gone "too far," and a counterculture that was ever an obscenity--and being "mad as hell," aren't "going to take it anymore." And it was the media's unquestioning acceptance of the right's narrative that produced the image of a country divided between "Red" and "Blue," rather than seriously countenancing the argument that the culture war was not a product of bottom-up, grass-roots concerns, but rather the What's-the-Matter-with-Kansas?-like manipulation of the electorate by political elites in the now centuries-old way of using "culture" to divert attention from their practical (i.e. economic) concerns, and corral some of those voters behind politicians with otherwise unpalatable political platforms in a massive, longstanding, piece of deflection (from elite agendas to supposed popular concern), trivialization/euphemization (as the media coverage downplayed the frank racism, sexism, etc. of the culture warrior's vision, which undeniably reaches toward a restoration of the past that would put "minorities in their place," or even remove them from the picture, while rolling back the gains by women, etc.) and amplification (as the hardcore "culture warrior" was made to seem much more representative of the American public than they really are)--the more in as those who challenge the strenuously cultivated conventional wisdom about the issue get such short shrift in the press. And then because the proponents of the culture war, with the media's help, succeeded in building it up, the media said they had to spend that much more time covering it, intensifying the attention to the culture war, and culture warriors, yet again.

That particularly prominent aspect of the culture war that has been the campaign against abortion rights is exemplary. The Supreme Court's decision in Roe vs. Wade (1973) that established the unconstitutionality of any denial of abortion rights was actually made by a conservative-dominated Court to virtually no controversy at the time; what was then the far right in the country had to work tirelessly to propagandize the public against the decision to produce an exploitable controversy ; all as in spite of that poll after poll showed that the opposition, if greater than before, remained a minority, a solid majority of Americans consistently supporting the Roe vs. Wade decision and the reproductive rights it protected down to the present. However, one would never guess that from the media coverage of the issue, which as it deflects attention from a history of elite political maneuvering, normalizes what was previously an extreme political position, and amplifies the support for that position, implying, often more than implying, a country for which this was naturally at the top of the agenda ever since the Supreme Court made its decision in a malignedly more "liberal" era, and which has since been intensely (and nearly evenly) divided over it.

As it has gone with the culture war and the battle over abortion rights so prominent in it, so has it gone with economic libertarianism and the alt-right, the Dark Enlightenment and the manosphere, climate denialism and the Great Replacement, the Tea Party and any other right-wing tendency or program one cares to name, in every case an elite role and agenda written out of the story as the media presents what may be marginal and extremist as a bottom-up expression of genuine popular feeling, the true Voice of the People which they naturally, rightly, lavish with respectful attention, abundantly platform, treat with the utmost circumspection as they put on a great show of endeavoring to understand what they do not necessarily agree with--while chastising anyone who would criticize them for it . Indeed, even where what they face is simply too much for them to accept and they do take a more critical stance (and it must be admitted that the blatant ascent of right-wing extremism in the last decade has made it very hard for many media figures to not do so in some degree), there are decided limits to their breach of the platform. Not the least of these is their readiness to accept the premise that the extremism they have a harder time normalizing is the expression of the darkness of disoriented mass man the stuff of so much irrationalist theorizing about "totalitarianism" rather than manufactured above their heads for the sake of recruiting shock troops to serve the much more material imperatives of the rich and powerful that are at the heart of everything the right has done in the past, and does today.

Revisiting Conservative Liberalism

As I have described it "conservative liberalism" entails a conservative usage of classically liberal institutions for conservative ends, with conservative thinking shaping their theorization, organization and administration. Thus you get a political society premised on the liberal-recognized rights of life, liberty and property, and limited, rule-of-law-bound, representative government, leaving a large private sphere in the arrangement we think of as "liberal democracy and capitalism." Yet this rights-based political society with its limited, representative government is premised not on the liberal's reliance on reason, egalitarian views or desire for progressive, emancipatory change, but rather a deep pessimism about human reason; elitist defense of a highly unequal social structure, privilege and the "social order" they underlie; and a consequent aversion to change; that together determine who gets political power, and how they exercise it. Thus does conservative liberalism set "property rights above human rights," the limitation of government above representative government, and capitalism above democracy in an arrangement designed to thwart alteration rather than enable it. Realizing this scale of valuations partly through a distribution of political authority along lines that not only make any change not strongly and durably backed by the elite exceedingly unlikely (checks and balances, etc.), but also partly by cutting non-elite groups out of the system of rights and representation to varying degrees (formal limits to the franchise in the old days, a the rejection of limits to the rich and powerful in leveraging their advantages to decide elections and otherwise influence office-holders) conservative liberals tirelessly defend the "compromise" on the basis of the view that property is the foundation of freedom, markets as the locus of freedom and the state rather than private actors as the great threat to that freedom, and that any alteration to the arrangement would produce a more oppressive order rather than a more equal or democratic one.

One may speak of the United States as having been established as a conservative liberal polity with the ratification of its Constitution in the eighteenth century and that it has remained so ever since. However, as represented within the country's political life by the politicians, parties, media outlets, public intellectuals afforded any significant platform, and the agenda to which participants in mainstream dialogue are obliged to limit themselves if they want to remain participants in it, it seems possible to say that conservative liberalism (especially in its "centrist" form) more completely circumscribes "legitimate" political discourse in America than it does in any of the other major conservative liberal states synonymous with "actually existing" liberalism. Indeed, it is telling that even those ordinarily spoken of as "liberals" in the American dialogue are, in classical terms, highly conservative in their philosophical premises (especially where "liberal" really means centrist), as the American political mainstream can seem to offer nothing but differing "flavors" of American conservatism to the voter in that way Gore Vidal summed up all too well when he wrote of the country as having but one party, the Property Party, with the Democratic and Republican parties its "two right wings." Underlining all of this is how ready the "liberals" ever are to "reach across the aisle" as they preach "bipartisanship" in the name of "consensus" and "unity" (even where the right is nowhere near so "pragmatic" or "civil" or "pluralistic" as they are), and how they never deign to extend a hand to those to their left in like manner, in only one aspect of the marginalization of the left to such a degree that there has never been a major, nominally left, labor or working class party in the United States.

The conservative liberal conventionally holds that this is the natural expression of the country's culture, be it the right speaking of "Americanism," or the center speaking of an historic "consensus" behind the principles and arrangements described here, with both conventionally attributing the faintness of dissent in any way describable as radical, and especially class-based, anti-capitalist dissent, to this. By contrast those affiliated with that marginalized dissent, inclined to see conservative liberalism as mere "bourgeois democracy" or oligarchy ever threatening to turn into something more formally illiberal than that, and alert to how claims for "tradition" and "consensus" obscure hard realities of power, stress instead a host of historical factors that prevented the left's becoming a force such as it has been elsewhere in the Western world. Thus do they point to the extreme incohesion of a racially divided American working class continually fragmented and re-fragmented by a flow of diverse immigrants with highly varied personal aspirations that employers and other power-holders cynically played off against each other; the intensively cultivated illusion of the possibility of and aspiration to upward mobility; and the extreme violence with which the champions of the status quo have met any challenge to it from such dissenters, and the ways that all this came together to successfully (though not necessarily permanently) undermine the development of any sort of working class, labor or left politics. However, even as they point out that there were times when it was stronger than conservative liberals admit, they do not dispute the extreme limitation of left tendencies as a practical force in American politics, or how profoundly this has shaped American political life. Indeed, they least of all dispute the extent to which the prejudices of the right are the conventional wisdom of society; the anti-intellectualism and overall tepidity of American political debate; the slightness of reform efforts and the fewness of concessions to working people in America; the consequent condition not merely of extreme socioeconomic inequality by the standards of the industrialized liberal states of the West, but extreme inequality in political power; the conception of just what freedoms like the freedom of speech mean so pointedly seen in the past few years; and how all these are far easier to understand when one acknowledges the fundamental fact of conservative liberalism.

The Rhetoric of Deindustrializers: Thoughts

Once upon a time it was common for the champions of economic orthodoxy to dispute the fact of America's deindustrialization. Some of these would say that really everything was fine, better than fine, that the closure of steel mills and auto plants and other durables-producing heavy manufacturing facilities so painfully felt in the Midwest as the old Steel Belt became the Rust Belt was actually a sign of economic renewal, the "sunset" industries of the dirty old smokestack type making way for the clean new "sunrise" industries of the FUTURE! The brilliant economy of the "information age" people like Alvin Toffler were talking about where everything would come from the control of--INFORMATION! Others admitted that there was a problem, but regarded the setbacks as minor and quite easily fixable, without the need for any sort of government intervention. (An industrial policy? Heavens no! Just trust in the entrepreneurs to save the day!) Still others admitted that the problem was not so small, but that it simply had to be borne because government is so inherently worthless as an economic manager, turning everything it touches to crap, or because "globalization" was a force that could not be stopped, or both, so that public action would be as futile as it was harmful and it entirely up to the American worker to embrace the Way of the Market rather than whine "Who moved my cheese?"

The denials of deindustrialization's reality and significance already looked flimsy to every intelligent observer in the 1980s. After all, contrary to the propaganda those who spoke of deindustrialization were not simply reacting emotionally to the hemorrhaging of manufacturing jobs, real and worrisome as that was. They also noticed that in spite of the promises that the Reagan tax cuts, regulation-killing, labor-crushing and monetary devaluation would prompt a surge of competitiveness-renewing industrial investment no such surge ever materialized; that the manufacturing trade surplus that paid the country's way had become a structural manufacturing trade deficit of unheard of proportions; that key sectors such as the machine tools sector without which no country may be considered a first-rate economic power (the lathe is not so rudimentary), were dying. They also knew that all this was entirely predictable given any honest reading of the empirical facts of history, and the body of theory built on that which enabled America to become an industrial superpower in the first place. And it was testimony to their comprehension of the situation's substance that dissenting observers, and the broader public, challenged the orthodoxy again--albeit to no real effect, election after election seeing the public betrayed on this score in the manner exemplified by the contrast between Bill Clinton's campaign platform in that key election of '92 and actual policy record afterward.

The result was that in spite of endless corporate welfare (not least by way of the military-industrial complex and the shale boom a fossil fuel-loving government happily enabled]) things kept going from bad to worse in ways few could ignore. Admittedly economists drew a veil of obscurity over the matters of industrial investment and output with specious claims about technological change rendering attempts to identify historical trends in the data wrong-headed--such that few registered how the previously heady growth of the manufacturing sector's assets and value added stagnated after the 1970s (with the figures for value added in the traditional heavy industrial areas collapsing). However, seeing General Motors going hat in hand to Congress for bailout because they had become more financial house than auto maker and really blown it; and wondering what ever happened to that American icon Thomas Edison's General Electric (wasn't that "genius" Jack Welch supposed to have "made it great again?"); and noticing that the country's principal export was oil, while its imports now included (Russian!) rocket engines for Pentagon satellite launches; complacency was increasingly confined to the most fanatical free trade ideologues. Indeed, the success of Donald Trump in campaigning on this very issue in 2016 , and winning in significant part because of the votes he got in that Rust Belt ground zero territory of the industrial collapse, signaled the end of whatever appearance of credibility the dismissals of deindustrialization had ever had--not that everyone admitted it, of course. Rather the house pseudo-intellectuals of the hooked-on-neoliberalism Democratic Party spun tales about having actually been defeated on the terrain of "culture," not the economy. And a decade on they are still at it, as their lie (not "falsehood," lie) that a cohort of young men brainwashed into reactionary views by "manosphere" figures like Jake Paul and Logan Paul and Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate by themselves put Trump into office. (I say again, lie: as the Validated Voter Tables show, males 18-29 voted for Harris against Trump by a margin of 51-46 percent, as you can see for yourself on line 171 of the Pew Center's Excel document.)

The result is that the old rhetoric about deindustrialization's supposed nonexistence is dead. However, that is not the case with the pattern of the rhetoric that was used to delay recognition of the issue--namely that the champions of orthodoxy told us that "it" wasn't happening, or that if "it" was happening it didn't matter, or that "it" was happening and did matter but doing something about it would be worse than doing nothing 'cuz Markets give us optimal outcomes and any refusal to kneel before the Great God Market will mean suffering His Wrath. Indeed very often the same "Good School"-graduated Establishment "expert" would throw all of these totally inconsistent claims in our faces at once--because just as the facts didn't matter consistency didn't either, the only thing they had to stick to, the only thing about which they cared to be consistent, that government cannot, must not, do anything that Big Business and its beneficiaries would find at all bothersome, like implement an industrial policy that would get in the way of the super-financialization that had Wall Street partying like it was (pre-crash) 1929. Not so much a matter of arguing for a position as distracting, confusing, overwhelming the listener or reader and viewer as a substitute for argument because genuinely persuasive argument based on the facts is impossible, those well-acquainted with that issue will likely have found this familiar. Certainly they may recognize it from how the same sorts who denied that deindustrialization was happening, or at least that anything ought to be done about it, now engage in "climate inactivism," telling us "It's not happening," and "Okay it's happening but it's trivial" and "Okay it's happening and it's not trivial but we shouldn't do anything 'cuz Markets" in the same cynical breath. The tactic shouldn't work, but it has had its undeniable successes, mainly because it has such powerful interests behind it, though both memory and critical thought being in short supply makes the work of the manipulators much easier than it otherwise would be.

Conservative Liberalism and "Freedom of Speech": Some Thoughts

One may plausibly regard the history of the "freedom of speech" as the history of argument over what precisely it means to have "freedom of speech"--the nature and proper limits of that freedom. In the twenty-first century West, and certainly the United States, the "culture war" and the broader backlash against "political correctness"; an atmosphere of "forever war" and all it has wrought; and elites' successful channeling a critical portion of popular discontents into ever more blatant xenophobia that their mainstream media have normalized rather than stood fast against; have greatly undermined the earlier, post-colonial and post-civil rights movement, societal consensus rejecting racist and sexist attitudes, views, speech, action and public policy as unacceptable in the societal mainstream, and in public life.

In the resulting situation the far right has presented its defiance of the old consensus and those who stand by it as an heroic defense of the freedom of speech. However if the right has defended the right to make racist and sexist statement, it has also attacked those who criticize such statements as inhibiting to "free speech" as represented by statements of the former kind--and so held, implicitly and explicitly, that out of respect for the freedom of speech the anti-racist and anti-sexist ought to shut up. Given that, as Emmanuel Todd explained, freedom of speech could only mean that the right of both the bigot and the anti-bigot be absolute, this has meant the right in the name of free speech practicing a double standard in which racist or sexist statement is an entirely legitimate exercise of the freedom of speech, challenge to such statement the opposite, censorious, and meriting suppression in the name of freedom itself.

Of course, looking at the double standard in which the far right stands up for the racist's freedom of speech as they attack the critic of racism's freedom of speech, many see this as a matter of hypocrisy (supporting the freedom of speech, but only when it suits them), or cynical pursuit of advantage (wielding "free speech" as a club against their enemies). And certainly hypocrisy and cynicism are never a rarity in politics. Nevertheless, it would seem a mistake to reduce the matter to just hypocrisy and cynicism, with the particular form of the liberalism prevailing in the Western world generally and the United States particularly today less inconsistent with such double standards than may appear the case to those wedded to a textbook conception of what "liberalism" means. What one may call the "actually existing liberalism" of the Western world, and especially the U.S., may be termed "conservative liberalism," a conservative usage of liberal institutions which fashions those institutions according to conservative principles, preferences and priorities so as to serve conservative ends. Thus one gets the rights-based polity with a limited, representative, rule-of-law-bound government that liberal theory prescribes. However, that rights-based polity with its limited, representative, rule-of-law-bound government is organized by elites to uphold an unequal, property-based, elite-privileging and elite-dominated social order. Reflecting not the classical liberal's rationalism, egalitarianism and emancipatory intent but the conservative's rejection of all these in favor of a stress on human irrationality, human inequality, and the desire to preserve the social hierarchy that exists in the name of the dangers of change, so that it insulates the foundations of elite privilege (property and its prerogatives) from government power; makes the implementation of change in policy and law such as would be threatening to those foundations exceedingly difficult (as seen in an emphasis on "checks and balances" and "constitution-worship"); and formally or informally excludes those groups which may have an interest in change from access to political power (be it in formal exclusion of them from the franchise, or less formal disadvantaging of them through, for example, laws in such areas as campaign finance permitting the rich and powerful to translate their private advantage into public power).

Accordingly, under conservative liberalism liberal freedoms, of which free speech is one of the most basic, are subordinate to the maintenance of the existing social order (put bluntly, the structure of privilege); their legitimate and protected exercise is identified with their exercise in defense of, or at least in a manner inoffensive to, the maintenance of that order; and the limits of their allowable exercise with the limits of that exercise's compatibility with the maintenance of that order. Thus to speak in defense of the institution of property is a legitimate exercise of such speech; but to speak against property as such to run up against its limits under this logic. Of course, this is rarely spelled out explicitly, especially in a political society which has historically been strongly averse to explicit discussion of ideology--with such aversion, indeed, itself a fundamental aspect of conservative thought. However, it is not wholly unknown, with an excellent example of the laying bare of the logic the case that the security services of the conservative liberal Federal Republic of Germany has made against socialist activists. Their argument has run that because the German constitution's provisions uphold the right of private property a socialism that challenges private property is "unconstitutional," permitting those services' otherwise unconstitutional subjection of them to surveillance from which other political groups have the right to be exempt--the right of property here coming in ahead of the right of free speech in an especially blatant manner.

If one is less likely to see the position stated so baldly in the United States, the same thinking has nevertheless been implicit in the long history of the infringement of the exercise of free speech by socialists and others that have challenged the property system and elite prerogative more broadly in the U.S.. One may also argue for the principle's applying within the country's arguments over race and sex. If they are less central from the standpoint of societal order than the matter of property, society's traditional hierarchies of race and gender have likewise been relevant to that order from the conservative standpoint (indeed, the current climate seeing conservatives become less and less inhibited about saying so in so many words). Accordingly, just as in their view "legitimate" free speech defends the rights of property rather than challenges them, "legitimate" free speech from the conservative standpoint defends "traditionalism" (i.e. traditional hierarchies) in race and sex, while that speech which criticizes "traditionalism" in these respects is at best less legitimate and less sacrosanct--with conservatives' commitment to this position no less forceful for their so rarely spelling it out.

"Cold War Liberalism": Thoughts on a Major Misnomer

At a glance there may seem nothing to take issue with in the term "Cold War liberalism," conventionally used to indicate a version of American "liberalism" characteristic of the Cold War period--a political commitment to the reform of capitalism even as they fought Communism, in contrast with their reform-opposing counterparts of the "conservative" right. Yet the use of the term "liberal" here has been misleading. A support for reform of the welfare state variety, for example, does not by itself a liberal make--the belief that it is so a particularly American misconception reflective of an American conservative tradition that, in contrast with its European counterparts, has been especially uncompromising in its defense of economic privilege, and almost as a badge of honor, contemptuous of political philosophy and historical fact. Thus does it miss the reality that modern reformism actually began with conservatives anxious to ward off more threatening challenges from the left (as seen in the Germany of Otto von Bismarck), a tradition that the "Cold War liberal" certainly carried forward--as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., the foremost of the Cold War liberals, was well aware, looking to New Dealerism as part of the Cold War itself in the most significant single statement of the ideology, The Vital Center (1949), with the Cold War liberal's squeamishness about "Big Government" and infringements on the prerogatives of businessmen, and its inclination of them to a minimalism in the area of reform, underlining the essentially anti-leftist thrust of their support for change.

That centrality of Anti-Communism to the Cold War liberal's thinking points to a more fundamental problem with the characterization of the "Cold War liberal" as a "liberal" than the nature and limits of their reformism. This is the fact that in opposing themselves to socialism, in its "actually existing" or any other variety, the Cold War liberal did not do so on the basis of the liberal principles of the Enlightenment--respect for reason as a basis for understanding and acting in the world, and with it also the rationality of individual human beings, humans' equal possession of inalienable rights, and the possibility and necessity of progress. Rather the Cold War liberal did so on the basis of the conservative principles of the Counter-Enlightenment, insisting on defining humans through the darkest reading of their capacity for irrationality; the limits of reason's efficacy in understanding and arranging the world; the incompatibility of equality with freedom in ways explicitly connected with a defense of a system of property, classes and privilege; and a pessimistic view of the chances for ameliorating "the human condition" as they demanded instead that old euphemism for preservation of the existing structure of privilege at any cost, "order." Indeed, Schlesinger, who seems to me describable as, in that phrase Upton Sinclair once used, a "cruel-souled zealot of pessimism," takes a mean-spirited delight in taunting the straw men of which he made progressives ("Let us not sentimentalize the millennium by believing we can attain it through . . . revision of our economic system. We must grow up now and forsake the millennial dream") in a book which opens with his case for aristocratic "leadership," gloomily preaches about the "chastening truths of Christianity" regarding Evil and Original Sin, sneers at what he characterizes as the simple-minded eighteenth century view that man could "live by logic alone," harps on the indispensability of property and private business to a free society and impossibility of replacing organic development with design, and bashes not just "socialists" or even "progressives" but the "liberals" he despises as soft-headed dupes of Communist conspirators (yes, the so-called leader of Cold War liberalism despised liberals and said so over and over again in so many words!), in a case he made citing intellectual pillars of the right from the Sith Lord Joseph de Maistre (hailing his cynicism regarding the utility of constitutions in making a better world) to Joseph Schumpeter (whom he relied on so heavily in, among much else, his argument for aristocratic political leadership). Indeed, though it is hardly necessary to make the point that this is a fundamentally conservative case, a close reading shows that Schlesinger's argument was entirely in line with what his important conservative contemporary Russell Kirk delineated as the six canons of conservative philosophy; while Schlesinger's specifically political-economic views, if not perfectly libertarian in the manner of the members of the Mont Pelerin Society (if only up to a point, he was a reformist), contains nothing that would have kept him from signing that society's Statement of Aims. And lest one wonder, Schlesinger is not some anomaly among the "Cold War liberals," his ideas consistently borne by the lot, with Daniel Bell's The End of Ideology, if anything, a more refined statement of the essentials, as for his part Richard Hofstadter explicitly recognized what I refer to here as Cold War liberals as the true conservatives of the age.

How is it that all this went over so many people's heads? I suppose that it wasn't just yesterday that we in America got stuck with a pack of illiterates for the un-intellegentsia of the mainstream. Even then fewer people actually examined the Cold War liberals' writings for themselves, let alone had the background to understand them, than is generally appreciated, all as the Cold War they so helped to promote itself had a generally deadening effect on the intellect. And it only got worse afterward, with that deadening effect increasingly taken for granted. (At the time Irwin Ross wondered at, and called out, the ostensibly pox-on-both-your-houses, horseshoe theory-minded "anti-extremist" Schlesinger's combination of vehement opposition to leftist extremism and complete unconcern for the extremism of the right; later readers wouldn't even do that.)

However, it is only fair to admit that other factors were also operative, not least the extent to which Cold War liberals so often dressed up the more blatantly Counter-Enlightenment content in modern language--rather than thundering about Original Sin and Evil speaking of Freudian psychology, as few registered that they amounted to the same thing, a weaponization of despair about the human condition against the champions of hope for a better world. There was the way some of Schlesinger's colleagues blunted the edges of what he had to say, like his view of the implications of his politics--that what the more critical recognize as Big Business-dominated oligarchy, tempered by a little reform now and then, was the least-worst option for modern societies from the standpoint of freedom, with the political scientist Robert Dahl making a career of passing off such oligarchy as democracy and "consensus" in works like Who Governs? and Polyarchy. At the same time, just as figures like Dahl went further than Schlesinger in delegitimizing discontents with a very unequal order of things, the Cold War liberal "big tent" of the day did see people of exactly the "liberal" and "progressive" types Schlesinger despised rally to the center for lack of a more leftward option, and in the hope that the center provided, as it claimed to do, a basis for pragmatic redress of societal problems, with some of the center's intellectuals honorably representing it. Thus just as there was a Robert Dahl there was a John Kenneth Galbraith, who would ultimately make a case for "American socialism." Still, one does well to recall that the more progressive of those figures in the end never had much influence over Cold War liberalism's course, that if being "liberal" was part of fighting the "Cold War" being "liberal" was subordinated to the Cold War. One side of this was that the Cold War liberal ever hastened to say the job of reform was already done and no more necessary, claiming poverty had been made a thing of the past until someone shoved in their face the fact that it wasn't (as Michael Harrington did in The Other America). Then even when they couldn't pretend poverty had been whipped they were ever ready to sacrifice reform at home to fighting enemies abroad--New Dealerism to World War II and the Cold War that began long before the fall of Berlin, the Fair Deal to Korea, the Great Society and its War on Poverty to that war the center so much more wanted to fight, the War in Vietnam that was to leave America so much poorer.

Of course, having established that the term "Cold War liberalism" obscures rather than illuminates the reality of the phenomenon to which it refers what might be a better alternative as a descriptor for the phenomenon? It seems to me that the often synonymously used term "corporate liberalism" was suggestive of the truth, bespeaking the accommodation of reformism to the prevailing system. And for all its own potential for confusion "centrism" seems to me a still more useful descriptor than that, taking "liberalism" altogether out of the matter, especially when we remember that the centrist's reason to stand "in the center" is not the "objective," "non-ideological," above-the-fray thinking of centrist pretensions, but rather a matter of their conservatism, safely in line with the American tradition prevailing from the country's beginnings "conservative liberalism." Within that framework one may speak of the center as embodying the less rigid, more pragmatically adaptive side of this conservative liberalism than the more tradition-bound avowed right. However, in the 2020s it can seem that we haven't seen much of that adaptive side at the level of practical politics for a half century--and certainly since the Neo-Liberals (and neoliberals) got the upper hand in the Democratic Party in that way absolutely consolidated by Bill Clinton's ascent to the party's and the country's leadership. Turning the older centrist's admission that "Yes, capitalist society has its problems, but we can and will make them right" to "It is what it is, whatever, get over it," and in so doing make a Schlesinger, who supported such reforms as Tennessee Valley Authority-style projects and national health insurance, look like a raging leftist by comparison.

One may take that as having meant that there just wasn't much practical pressure to adapt, certainly not in comparison with the Cold War era when in the face of Communist ideological challenge the Cold War itself was a reason for the "Cold War liberal" to be "liberal" (on occasion, at least). Yet looking at the country's economic decay and social crises, and the way in which they have nurtured extremism (if mainly the rightist extremism Schlesinger and his alte kameraden so little feared), one may very easily draw a much more critical conclusion about whether centrism fulfilled the mission it set out for itself--at least, in public.