Trotsky's Ghost: Part Two

The right wing's explanation for the current economic malaise bear a remarkable similarity to the position it takes on climate change (already a euphemism they engineered for the more stark and direct "global warming"); the right, in keeping with its state corporatist bias, effectively exports responsibility for the crisis, creating the illusion that some natural process is at work rather than its being a quite clearly man-made disaster.  Great credit must be given to Naomi Klein, whose The Shock Doctrine lays bare the right wing's tendency to see in every disaster an opportunity to erode the public interest in favor of private profit, but what we are currently witnessing goes beyond even Klein's dark scenarios in that the right is engineering this disaster.
     This evening, National Public Radio broadcast an interview with Paul Krugman on the occasion of the publication of his new book, End This Depression Now!  Krugman, whose Nobel Prize should have been for tenacity, has consistently beaten the drum in his New York Times column for more spending as a way out of what he courageously labels a depression.  There is a certain poignancy in this man, ironically hired by none other than Paul Bernanke to his Princeton teaching post, to foreswear vanity and fashion and attempt to get out the truth, becoming virtually a voice in the wilderness.  Like most prophets, however, the good doctor seems to suffer from a kind of tunnel vision.  This is the way it goes: Krugman knows that current policy is counter-productive, that more spending is needed to resuscitate an economy in depression, not less.  When asked why his former boss and now head of the Fed, Bernanke, will not implement what he must know is the needed cure, he shrugs, cocks his head to the side and speculates that the man must be under a lot of pressure to stay the current course.
     Krugman simply seems incapable of seeing the obvious.  Yes, he must get credit for calling a spade a spade, for laying out a viable plan for recovery and for being unflagging in his devotion and energy when it comes to the needs of a populace about which he clearly cares.  He will even place the blame where it belongs.  For example, he acknowledged in the radio broadcast that it is true that the richest elements in our society would suffer a bit financially for the gains made by the vast majority were we to reinfuse the economy with cash and allow a 4% inflation rate, and that only by raising more voices like his can there be any hope of turning things around.  What Krugman seems unwilling or incapable of doing is seeing the larger picture. 
     The right's clear policy is to throw oil on the flames of the current depression.  It wants a depression.  Not only does the Republican Party do anything and everything it can to stand in the way of improving the economy, (even if it means harming the lives of millions of Americans), it makes no effort to keep the strategy a secret.  On the contrary, it loudly proclaims the strategy, practically from the rooftops.  In fact, we have heard such phrases as "starving the beast" as far back as the Reagan administration.  Our latter day iteration of the same construct is the use of "gridlock" as an actual "strategy".  After an apparently dazed and confused electorate gave Republicans a majority in the House of Representatives in the 2010 elections, the cry went out:  "Two more years of gridlock and then the White House!"
     Through the years following the Great Depression of the 1930s, most Americans would have found it unthinkable to dismantle the social safety net that we associate with New Deal reforms.  Thirty years of right wing propagandizing and historical revisionism, however, has brought us to a crossroads in which the right is now insisting on what in the playground would be called a "do-over."  "Let's have another depression.  Bring it on!"  Only this time, we will let the market do its magic, unfettered by socialist ideology.


     If all of this seems a bit mad, reminiscent of medieval religious battles, there are good reasons for it.  There has always been a strain in right wing philosophy based on the belief that the ordinary man cannot deal with freedom from worrying about his fate.  It is seen as dangerous to established order.  It emerges in what is often described as the "mean-spiritedness" of right wing ideologues experiencing the rapture.  Take a good look at Paul Ryan, for example, whose lean mien, glazed eyes and inappropriate smiles could get him a part in a drama on the Spanish Inquisition.   Or consider the fretting of Rick Santorum over sexual freedom.  For the right, the "only thing we have to fear is freedom from fear itself."  One of the ironies in all this is that although the right finds the roots of America's cultural deterioration in the revolutions of the 1960s, there has clearly been more vulgarity, crassness and social deterioration introduced since the inception of the Reaganite counter-revolution than anything we witnessed among peaceniks and flower children.  The latter groups seem innocent, even wholesome, compared to two generations bred on unharnessed commercialism and despair for the future.  Television, which provides a kind of CAT scan of the culture, (and which even in the 1950s was already being described as "a vast waste land"), has, under a regimen of deregulation and corporate freedom, filled the airwaves (or now, signifcantly, the cable wires) with fluttering vampires, ghosts, angels, psychics and reality show strivers whose competitions hearken back to the dance marathons of the Great Depression.
     In the present climate, wholesome young professors of economics who see a possible remedy to our economic problems, who, in other words, still believe in reform, may be a bit out of their league.  The portents are now out there for something more dramatic than a mere tweaking of the economic dials by the Federal Reserve.