Conservatives were greatly assisted by the coming of stagflation in the late 1970s. Keynesian economists had no tools to deal with it and they did not see it coming. It seemed that economic science no longer had answers for dealing with the macro economy. Thereafter, economists shifted their interest to microeconomics. There was far less interests in quantitative economics; although, quantitative method continued to advance in the realm of finance.
The void for dealing with larger economic questions was filled by economic notions that had no scientific base. George H.W. Bush ridiculed the ideas Ronald Reagan borrowed from Austrian theorists as “Voodoeconomics.” Then Reagan and his vice-president Bush, moved on to even more questionable theories called “supply side economics,” which even some of the Austria and ridiculed.
Ronald Reagan promised the American people that his big tax cuts for the rich would restart the economy, encourage private savings, and generate much more revenue than was lost as a result of the cuts. None of these promises came true, but decades later rightist politicians say they did. As one would expect, the domestic savings rate began a sharp decline because ordinary people had less income.
The turning point in public attitudes about helping the poor and unfortunates occurred them. In 1986, the Catholic bishops addressed the matter in Economic Justice for All ( 1986), a document that said that an economic policy should be judged by its impact on the poor and vulnerable. The Methodist bishops pitched in with a similar document. The episode demonstrated how powerful the Republican information machine was. Powerful foundations hired lay Catholic scholars, including Micael Novak, to prove that the bishops had no business commenting on how economic policies impacted the poor. There were many well-funded scholarly answers to these advocates of compassion that said that churches should not meddle in economics. These good clergymen's effort to proclaim Gospel values went unheeded. In time, mainline Protestant denominations, facing declining membership and contributions, baked away from the Social Gospel.
The Catholic bishops, who soon faced mass defections from their flock for other reasons, eventually stopped emphasizing economic justice and peace and focused narrowly on abortion. By 2008, many of them became allies of the Republican Party. Now and then they issued gentle complaints against policies that hurt the poor, but any half-way careful observer knew where their basic sympathies really resided.
Slowly, conservative spokesmen laid the groundwork for what would become a shift to the right and the emergence of a conventional wisdom rooted in market fundamentalism. Some write that contemporary culture is hostile to conventional wisdom, but the fact is that people have a need for a connection with the universal, and conventional wisdom was a “common culture/sense” that creates a useful framework for interpreting things around us in such a way as to lock in unnegotiated values.” Especially in our day of information overload, people seem to need simple answers that require no analysis. That puts progressive narratives at a great disadvantage.
Market fundamentalism invaded the academy. In economics, students were taught to concentrate on the choices of individual actors. There was less need for analysis of broad forces that were measured by statistics. In other disciplines, students were encouraged to focus on individual agency rather than look for patterns, forces, and class. Instead, the key words were individual, choice, agency, performance, desire and expectations.
Slowly, conservative scholars chipped away at the achievements of the civil rights movement. Decisions and legislation on voting rights were used to corral as many blacks as possible into districts to reduce their electoral power. More and more the standard for justice was not equality but the ability to make choices. Conservatives also busied themselves trying to prove that race and the concept of race did not really exist except as a social construct. They missed the fact that identity itself has been destabilized and people now have contradictory, shifting, malleable multiple identities.
Universities were encouraged to adopt market principles in their operations, and soon General education and the liberal arts were hollowed out. Still later, even major universities took to hiring more part-time, nontenured teachers than tenured teachers. Who knows how career considerations might effect what the former taught. The application of the principles of capitalism resulted in de-skilling the major potential social institutions, the universities, public schools, the church, and the Democratic Party. In the case of the Democratic Party, even its left wing was co-opted by corporate capitalism in what Chris Hedges calls “the death of liberalism.”
They were badly fragmented along identity and ideological lines. Some New Deal liberals remained, but they were more than counterbalanced by the New Democratic Coalition people who thought that somehow market forces will magically restore income growth for the middle class and rescue the people who lost good paying job.
Conservatives complained about new academic tendencies that are grouped under the elusive heading of “postmodernism,” but they also benefited mightily from them. There was, here and in the western world, growing distrust of received values, institutions and authority. Younger academicians were questioning the value of the traditional educational cannon, built on the classics and Enlightenment principles. Instead, they bought into postmodernism, a direct challenge to rationalism and the Enlightenment project, and deconstructionism, which focused on the narrow and particular. Whereas the scholars of the 1950s and 1960s had a way of thinking big, as did C. Wright Mills, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and David Rieseman, the scholars of the eighties thought small and did not have big visions. Economists were far less focused on ways to stabilizer a national or world economy and were , instead, looking at ways optimizing the results of individual and corporate behavior. One economist, Ronald Coase, went so far as to suggest that judges should look less at batters of abstract justice and more about how their decision can create economic benefits.
The diminished emphasis upon logic, rationality, and reasoned discourse would spill over into the political world, paving the way for the likes of Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachmann, and Rick Perry. The misstatements and gross exaggerations of this these prophets of rage and political fundamentalism keep conservative pundits busy explaining away their foolishness and irresponsibility. Advances in linguistics, cognitive psychology, and linguistics made it possible to frame their foolish arguments in a manner that proved convincing to those not given to close thought.
The recent debate over raising the debt ceiling demonstrated how effective people like this could be with their irrational appeals, lack of information, and dishonesty. Pailin and Bachmann both demanded that the debt ceiling not be raised. The Alaskan said the nation did not face a “Titanic moment.” Both said the federal government took in well over a trillion dollars, far more than enough to pay its priority expenses. Both quickly said that these expenses began with paying interest on the past debt. Backmann said she “loved” the people on Social Security and would not defunct it. Both would pay all military bills. Neither told what non-priority expenses would not be paid. Pundits did not question their assumption that paying on the existing debt would guarantee that the nation's credit rating would not decline. When Standard and Poor made clear that taking the debt hostage had discouraged the debt rating agency enough to lower the US rating, the pundit generally spread the blame to Democrats. David Gergen, now dean of the scribblers, said the Democrats where half to blame. How could that be unless he thought Obama should have run up the white flag months ago??
Mitt Romney has spent months saying Obama's recovery package created no new jobs and made thing worse. Not once has be been seriously challenged by the mainstream media to prove the the charges. Then he said he opposed the last minute compromise to raise the debt limit. It was hinted that this
late move did not show political courage, but no one asked him how he would pay the bills were he president and the compromise were not passed.
In politics, conservative scholars had issued a pile of books on rational choice models. That is to say that they thought that voters were rational and swayed by careful calculations of self interest. Now it appears that only the liberals believed any of this because it was irrational forces and urges that were to transform today's politics. It was the age when the emotions and irrational were exploited. Some called the period was dominated by “identity politics,” the focus was on smaller groups. The great power of the Christian Right comes to mind, but there was plenty of identity politics on the left. The point is that its practitioners seemed to have lost sight of the needs of overall society. Democratic presidents still sounded off on communitarian themes, but they tried to collect votes by warning about the dangers of big government and they rarely used the power of government to promote equality for America’s poor and disadvantages.
What was well underway in the 1980s and came to fruition today was a near-paradigm shift in which the communitarian emphasis and values of the New Deal era were being rejected by a majority of Americans. The collapse of the old culture, built around the New Deal consensus, made possible the emergence of a new political order that feared big government—except when it was making war, rewarding the rich, or promoting unfettered capitalism. Somehow, that Social Darwinism meshed nicely with racism, and it was no accident that Ronald Reagan began his 1980 campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, a clear sign he had little sympathy with the civil rights workers who were harassed and killed there. In 1980, few wrote about what his decision to open his campaign in Mississippi meant. Today, all too few admit that Birtherism is about racism, not confusion over Alaska's record-keeping practices.
Peter McLaren wrote 16 years ago describing the predatory culture of post-industrial capitalism and noting that powerful conservative forces sought to manufacture a common wisdom that locked in market values, hostility to the welfare state, and the belief that the rich should e honored as job creators. Above all, what was desired was a sense of citizenship that insures power and privilege residing in the top few percentiles of American citizenry.
Now we are dwelling in a time when this strategy, aided and abetted by lingering racism, has produced
produced an environment in which it is difficult to challenge conventional wisdom, part of which is the very odd notion that cutting sp[ending and laying off public workers will generate new spending and new jobs. So, we have a public that wants the cuts and also jobs and growth. Except in a time of severe stagflation, the cuts and jobs simply do not go together.
So powerful is the Republican information machine and the Right's conventional wisdom, that very few commentators do much fact-checking. They will not state the obvious: the cuts will cost hundreds of thousands of jobs. If you want growth and jobs, you must spend to generate them. Even President Obama seems to fear telling these obvious truths and, for the moment, is tiptoeing around the big question: “ Are people really willing to see another recession and much more unemployment just so spending can be dampened?”