by Ralph Nader
Here is an opportunity for convergence that the extreme right wing would do everything it could to block, especially by relying on the absolutist, often sneering daily media presentations on their radio and cable talk shows, led by mega-millionaires Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Michael Savage (themselves being enriched by the corporate welfare of free radio licenses to use the public airwaves). As professor Robert Brent Toplin noted: “The militant right has distorted the meaning of conservatism to the point that . . . much that passes as ‘conservative’ does not truly represent the principles of intelligent, responsible, and thoughtful conservatism.”2
A column by the peripatetic reporter Nicholas D. Kristof in the December 9, 2012, edition of the New York Times provided a “heartbreaking” example of what can happen when the Left avoids forthright examination of some perverse incentives of poverty programs, which makes these programs sitting ducks for the extreme right while scaring off thoughtful, compassionate conservatives from finding any good in the broader goals of the programs.
Kristof was in Jackson, Kentucky—a poverty-belt area, long classified as afflicted with endemic unemployment. He describes “parents here in Appalachian pulling their children out of literacy classes. Moms and dads fear that if kids learn to read, they are less likely to qualify for a monthly check [of up to $698] for having [a child with] an intellectual disability.”3
Now suppose an unintimidated convergence climate was in existence forty years ago, when President Richard Nixon, adopting an idea of Milton Friedman advanced by Democrat Daniel P. Moynihan (Nixon’s White House advisor), called for a “minimum-income plan.” Nixon sent this proposal to Congress. If a convergence atmosphere had been in force, Capitol Hill’s Democrats and Republicans might have come together to discover that such a plan deserved passage. It never happened. Divergence reigned.
Once liberals begin to admit to some of their own shortcomings, they might look at their conservative counterparts and begin to learn that not only do conservatives have their own faults—this liberals already know—but they also have beliefs that are compatible with liberal thought.
Conservatives Divided
While in the Nixon days conservatives and liberals could not agree, this is not to say that conservatives themselves have been seeing eye to eye, then or now.
When Ronald Reagan—the Right’s all-time political hero—came along, he disappointed his more right-wing backers with arms control deals with the Soviet Union, raising taxes after lowering them, and, despite his antigovernment rhetoric, not reducing Big Government or its expenditures. He greatly increased the military budget and further tanked the regulatory agencies, but he never submitted a balanced budget proposal to Congress in his eight deficit-spiraling years in office. The hardcore Right accused Reagan of deserting the cause of anticommunism after his meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev, the architect of Russia’s perestroika. Reagan in his diaries implied that movement conservatives had misread him from the start. “I remind them,” he wrote, “I voted for FDR 4 times. I’m trying to undo the ‘Great Society,’ not the New Deal.”4
Today’s radical Republicans in Congress are trying to undo the New Deal. As Garry Wills has written, “Conservatism looks to the cohesion and continuity of society—what makes people band together and remain together with some satisfaction.” Wills obviously is losing some self-styled conservative leaders with that definition and many more self-described libertarians, whom Wills imperiously called people who live “in a dream world of hypothetical atoms interacting with each other dynamically. No society can ever be formed on the basis of individualism, togetherness deriving from apartness.”5
If Garry Wills believes that libertarians do not value “continuity and stability,” Russell Kirk went even further by considering libertarianism a threat to the republic. He said, writes Carl Bogus, “Libertarians believe that society revolves around ‘self-interest, closely joined to the nexus of cash payment,’ but that conservatives see society as ‘a community of souls, joining the dead, the living, and those yet unborn’ and cohering ‘through what Aristotle called friendship and Christians call love of neighbor.’”6 Further, “to talk of forming a league or coalition,” wrote Kirk, “between these two is like advocating a union of ice and fire.”7 It was not clear who was fire and who was ice.
Conservatives United Under False Colors
But the point here is that divisions between those whom liberals classify under the conservative umbrella are sharp, ongoing, and sometimes vicious, except when they are muted under the current superdome of corporatism, which twists those so labeled and so tempted in accordance with its timely imperatives, getting them to buy into its version of conservatism. That is to say that today’s right-wing governors, senators, and representatives mostly derive their compass from corporatism first and foremost, however much they attempt to connect what they are doing and not doing to previous political and philosophical high holders of the conservative banners. The corresponding temptation of liberal politicians also must choose between corporatism and their liberal antecedents. Once this reality is recognized, then the cards can be placed on the table for public deliberation, unencumbered by corporatists constantly recruiting both conservatives and liberals to adhere to their “principles.”
Politicians always search for high-level references and plausible public explanations for their unsavory, often unlawful, or cruel decisions. House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell have delivered enough short paragraphs with such references and explanations to a ditto-heading congressional press corps in recent years to demonstrate the importance of separating them from their facades and extracting their messages from their plausible packaging. Both start explaining their recent decisions with phrases such as “The American people are fed up with too much taxation, spending, and regulation.” If an intrepid reporter persists and asks a follow-up question as to why these political leaders are really taking this position, the staccato reply is “jobs, jobs, jobs” (but not wages) or “small business” (but not Big Business). No mention of “profits, profits, profits,” or “corporate power” or “executive bonuses” or “campaign contributions” or “the decision favors my leisure-time-supporting friends.” If all else fails to persuade, the stopper is trotted out: “conservative values on which this country was built.” Take away that doctrinal foundation, and the expedient house of cards begins to collapse and reveal: “These emperors have no clothes.”
Conservatives with Principles
Yet, as this book has repeatedly underlined, there are conservatives who take their heritage seriously and fight shy of corporate influences. Among such authentic conservatives can be placed the writers John R. E. Bliese, author of The Greening of Conservative America (2002), and Gordon Durnil, who penned The Making of a Conservative Environmentalist (1995).8 Both have as their aims the restoration and conservation for posterity of the planet—its air, water, and soil—using means that accord with conservative policies and mechanisms. They do not start out with the corporatist premise: we must do what is best for preserving the priorities of corporate hegemony, sales, profits, and bonuses.
More recently, Roger Scruton, the British philosopher and conservative intellectual, wrote a book elevatedly titled How to Think Seriously About the Planet, in which he asserted that “conservatism and environmentalism are natural bedfellows.” He champions “English tort law” as an effective mechanism for forcing businesses to internalize the toxic effects of some of their activities. But he devalues international treaties, like the Kyoto accords, as well as centralized bureaucratic dictates that replace local solutions and civic efforts. He sees that markets fail to make companies pay for the cost of environmental pollution and damage they cause. Scruton believes in the gestational effects of two important sentiments—love of home (what the Greeks called oikophilia) and love of beauty, whether of “the wilderness or roads without litter.” Reverberating with the thought of Edmund Burke, author Scruton asserts that “no
large-scale project will succeed if it is not rooted in our small-scale practical reasoning. . . . For it is we in the end who have to act, who have to accept and co-operate with the decisions made in our name, and who have to make whatever sacrifices will be required for the sake of future generations.”9
Then Scruton goes programmatically deeper into treacherous territory, breaking decisively with those relentless growth advocates who otherwise share his philosophical label, saying, “What is needed is not more growth but less.” Furthermore, ponder his windup, in which he chides conservatives who see “consumerism and technophilia as integral to the ‘market solutions’ that must be protected from the socialist state. In fact, it is precisely in the fight against consumerism that left and right should be united, establishing an alliance on behalf of the environment that would also heal the rift in our civilization.”10
Patrick Buchanan, a Populist Conservative
While unbiased liberals will see the common ground with these authors, it should be noted that there are also opportunities for convergence with that school of conservative thought deemed “populist conservatives.” The group has been most articulately championed and transmitted over the mass media by Patrick J. Buchanan and finds abundant exposition in his challenging book Where the Right Went Wrong: How Neoconservatives Subverted the Reagan Revolution and Hijacked the Bush Presidency. Full of pertinent quotations and historical references, the book expounds Buchanan’s belief that the cause of true conservatism—that of Robert Taft, Barry Goldwater, and Ronald Reagan—is being betrayed by the twin forces of neoconservatives and global corporations through three critical subversions.
First, US corporate globalization has shattered the domestic economy and the lives of its workers by exporting industries abroad under the auspices of NAFTA and the WTO treaties. “The Republican Party,” declares Buchanan, “which had presided over America’s rise to manufacturing preeminence, has acquiesced in the deindustrialization of the nation to gratify transnational corporations whose oligarchs are the party financiers. U.S. corporations are shutting factories here, opening them in China, [and] ‘outsourcing’ back-office work to India.”11
As a win-win proposition for the United States, “free trade is a bright, shining lie,” according to Buchanan.12 Ever larger trade deficits, now reaching three-quarters of a trillion dollars a year, mean the United States is exporting jobs, consuming more than it is producing, and becoming far and away the world’s largest debtor. When Federal Reserve chair Alan Greenspan was asked whether he thought the US trade deficits were harmful, his reply was: only if they persist. Well, how about our trade deficits in goods with other nations for the last thirty-seven years in a row?
In 1996, I sent letters to the largest hundred US-chartered corporations asking if they would institute a policy whereby at their annual shareholders meeting, the CEO and president would rise and in the name of the corporation—be it GM, Pfizer, DuPont, or any other—not in the name of the board of directors, pledge “allegiance to the flag . . . with liberty and justice for all.” Only one company, Federated Department Stores, thought it was unequivocally a good idea. Others said they would take it under consideration or rejected the proposal or did not respond. When I released all the responses from the companies (over sixty of them) to the media, only one columnist, out of dozens of liberal, progressive, libertarian, and conservative syndicated columnists, made any mention of this minimal test of corporate patriotism. It was Buchanan, who devoted his column to the packet of responses from the company officials, ending with the question: “If they cannot pledge loyalty to America, why should Americans be loyal to them?”13
A convergence that would speak out against corporate managed global trade, as written in the autocratic rules of NAFTA and the WTO, is not a predictable left-of-center position. Raised on Economics 101 and the nineteenth-century theory of comparative advantage, most economists, reporters, liberal editors, writers, authors, and politicians have become knee-jerk ditto-heads when they hear the term “free trade.” From the New York Times corporate globalization cheerleader Thomas Friedman to trade-can-do-no-harm economists like Larry Summers and Jagdish Bhagwati, the mantra is trade über alles. It does not impress them that modern globalization is facilitating “absolute advantage”—that is, the location in one or more countries of all factors of production—labor, capital, technology, and managerial skills. The real-world problems with this comparative advantage theory led free trader, MIT professor, and Nobel Laureate Paul Samuelson to write, near the end of his career, a liberal argument for reconsidering this Ricardian trade dogma.14
A combination of populist conservatives, industrial unionists, and smart progressives could form the convergence alliance to start the long march toward prudent economic self-reliance and away from extreme dependency fostered by globally linked financial speculators like Goldman Sachs. A drive to replace the strip-mining of our domestic economy by international agreements framed and used by global corporations to exploit workers, consumers, and the environment is long overdue, given how our country is chronically slipping.
The second subversion Buchanan ascribed to the neoconservatives is that they, in the name of Republican conservatism, have plunged this nation headlong into a global empire of control, military bases, invasions, and imperial dashing of national sovereignties. Gone is the traditional, prudent conservative concern over deficits and military adventurism. The new doctrine, he avers, was contained in George W. Bush’s June 2, 2002, speech at West Point establishing the new principle of the United States’ right to preemptive attack and preventive war anywhere in the world. Buchanan accurately says that “the Constitution does not empower the president to launch preventive wars.” He goes on, “in dealing with nations, containment and deterrence had never failed us. We contained Stalin and Mao, though both had large arsenals of nuclear weapons.”15
President Obama has extended the Bush doctrine by declaring his unilateral right, as secret prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner, to destroy anybody, anywhere in the world, including American citizens, suspected to be engaged in alleged terrorist activities, all this vaguely and loosely defined as anti-US security. This allows for unbridled, secret discretion contrary to the exclusive congressional authority to declare and finance wars!
The third rupture of conservative principles, according to Buchanan, is the takeover or hijacking of the Republican Party of Taft, Goldwater, and Reagan by both the neocons and the corporatists, who, for similar and dissimilar reasons, have combined to destroy our sovereignty, our constitutional restraints, and our reasonable economic self-determination. Their national security strategy has ushered in, he states, “an era of what historian Harry Elmer Barnes called ‘Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace.’” A continual state of belligerence confirms President Eisenhower’s final warning to his country about the insatiable, profitable “military-industrial complex.”16
The Possibility of Convergence Keeps Raising Its Head
The possibility for convergence of populist conservatives like Buchanan with liberals and progressives is strongly based on writings, such as those to which I have just referred, and on the polls that continually show, in spite of the domination of belligerent official propaganda, at least half and sometimes up to 70 percent of the American people are not buying these endless wars and hostilities for no clearly perceived objectives. Pursue attackers and bring them to justice? Yes, they say. But year after year of widening quagmires and their blowback make Americans think more about what Ron Paul called “minding our own business,” and our tending to neglected domestic conditions and needs.
Retired general Anthony Zinni, a Pentagon Middle East expert and former Centcom commander, worked with neoconservatives in the Department of Defense and found that they, with the decisive collaborators at the Bush-Cheney White House, prompted the web of deception that poured half a million US soldiers into a devastated Iraq for years. He writes: “The more I saw the more I thought this was the product of the neocons,
who didn’t understand the region and were going to create havoc there. These were dilettantes from Washington think tanks who never had an idea that worked on the ground.”17
His strictures do not apply to the Cato Institute libertarian think tank, however, which consistently opposed the war on Iraq in detailed policy papers before and during the invasion and occupation.
But to Move to Convergence, It Is Necessary to Separate Corporatists from the Principled
In sum, it is clear that when it comes to the world of these professional conservatives, little is clear. It is all jumbled up with factions, dissenters, and claimants to the true mantle of conservatism, each providing energetic rationales for their positions and proclaiming their fealty to their intellectual forebears. The unspoken divergence of some of these factions often hinges on how lucrative their commercially connected activities are, ones that include such considerations as consulting and lecture fees, future career moves, and links to overlapping boards of directors. If it is remarkable—and it is—how hard-line and inflexible are today’s Republican leaders and their flock in Congress, compared with the more independent-minded Smiths, Hayeks, von Mises, Tafts, Kirks, even Jack Kemps and Goldwaters, it is due in part to the fragility of the conservatism they tout, which cannot withstand temptations offered by corporate contributions and the rewards awaiting after retirements or electoral defeats. Infamous corporate lobbyist Jack Abramoff said, “When a public servant has a debt to someone seeking a favor from the government, the foundation of our government is at risk.”18
Today, the traditional cloak of conservatism has been transformed into a fig leaf for the likes of Boehner, Cantor, and McConnell. Boehner is so corporate-indentured that we crafted a poster of him with his suit emblazoned with many corporate logos of those sponsoring him, from Sallie Mae to ExxonMobil. They covered every available space on his garment (see http://suitsforsale.org). He delivered for them to the utmost of his power. After all, corporatism requires that both conservatives and liberals compromise their dedicated principles in return for that proverbial “mess of pottage.”
