Let me stress, straight away, I'm not suggesting the Tea Party are physical terrorists. But in conversation yesterday an idea occurred to me.
Suicide bombing changed the whole environment of terrorism. Suddenly we faced people for whom what had been presumed to be the ultimate deterrent - risk of their own death - held no threat. The terms of engagement changed, utterly. No one has yet worked out how to deal with it.
The Tea Party may be politically similar. As has become clear in their attitude to the discussions going on in Washington, they don't care about their chance of re-election when negotiating on the budget deficit. All they care about is killing the government. The normal sanction of political life - the loss of office - holds no threat for these people. That changes the rules of engagement. We don't know how to deal with it yet.
Both groups are extremist. Of course they're operating in radically different ways. But both have the aim of destroying what, for reasons of dogma, they consider to be the enemy which the vast majority would consider otherwise. And in the process they're quite willing to sacrifice their own selves.
It's not how we think democracy works. I'm not yet sure how we handle it.
It could be the death of democracy. For two thousand years China was governed, in theory, by an impartial bureaucracy with entry decided by examination. You could buy education and coaching to get through but on the day it was up to the individual to perform. For almost all that time China was the economic, social and technological leader. In the last few decades this system has, in effect, been reintroduced with the university entrance substituting for the old civil service examination. If you were in the Chinese leadership looking at the shennanigans of the West would you really want to change?
The Tea Party is pure astroturf, which is why it doesn’t care about re-election. The Koch brothers are no different from Murdoch. They are powerful enough to blackmail governments and con naifs into doing what makes only the uber-rich richer, no matter how disastrous it is for the economy as a whole.
“Trickle down” and “austerity” were both words coined to describe Hooverian policies. The first caused the 1929 crash and the second made recession into a depression. And the rich got richer back then as they are now, because the “smart” money drags the “stupid” money into the bubble and then catches all the money that falls out when the bubble bursts because that’s what “smart” money does. It’s why they’re still pushing for these extraordinarily irresponsible economic polices, of course.
Thirty years ago, when this neolioberal insanity took hold, it was hard to argue on anything other than theoretical grounds, but now we can actually look at the evidence. Were UK, US, and global GDP growth higher or lower in the postwar period before Reagan/Thatcher than since? Did Keynes really smooth out boom and bust, or have they got boomier and bustier in recent decades?
You can’t experiment on economies very easily, so the evidence will never be perfect. But it is getting really very obvious if you look at the data, as most economists have been pointing out for some time. The oil shocks of the 1970s were used by those with power to reinstitute policies that were and are well known to be disastrous, based on an economic theory so unsophisticated it can only explain unemployment in terms of workers fancying a bit more leisure time (but, oddly, does not suggest solving that problem by increasing wages). 99% of us have had little or no real-terms payrise in the last 30 years. At some point, even the very well paid are going to realise that the massive drop in GDP being paid out in wages affects them too, and rather a lot of them are starting to realise it.
You defeat the Kochs and the Murdochs of this world by exposing their methods. Murdoch was the agent of his own destruction for the same reasons I suspect Cameron and colleagues will be of theirs. The sheer arrogance of power that has never faced serious challenge, and the complacency of individuals so out of touch it barely seems to have occurred to them that their power rests on their credibility.
Expose them, and they lose everything. Every credible economist in the world is pointing and laughing at Osborne’s austerity babble, but we only ever get to hear what the bankers are saying. That is an absolute scandal, and it is as much an issue about BBC cowardice in the face of government threats as it is government cowardice in the face of threats from the uber-rich.
Seumas Milne nailed the connections in today’s Guardian, as he so often does: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jul/20/scandal-exposed-scale-elite-corruption
Murdochalypse is our chance to end this, if none of the villains manages to limit the scope of the connections being made. They’ll try, of course. If we want to defeat the Tea Party (on both sides of the pond), we have to find ways to prevent them. The rest will follow. People aren’t stupid, just information-deprived.
To continue the July 1914 analogy, the Tea Party are like the German military, exemplified by Hindenburg and Ludendorff, in World War One – repeatedly gambling everything on outright victory rather than compromise one inch on their principles – in the Germans’ case, their war aims. The Germans could have got Russia out of the war in 1915 but refused to compromise on the ground they’d gained in Poland; could have kept the USA out of the war but refused to compromise on their reckless and disastrous submarine campaign; could have got a compromise peace at the end of 1917 after Russia left the war, from a strong position, but, instead, gambled all on the long shot of total victory in their 1918 spring offensives. No doubt the analogy will continue where there will be a massive crisis caused directly by their obstinacy and stupid policies and then, like Ludendorff in September 1918, will throw their hands up, blame their opponents (like Ludendorff blamed the “civilians”) and propagate a propaganda myth about the disaster having been caused by a “stab in the back.” I’ll bet austerity will be justified as not having worked due to state interference and over-regulation, which is generally the catch-all scapegoat for any and all market failures, even those most egregiously and obviously purely market-based e.g. the US subprime market collapse.