Kevin Baker – on the coming crisis.

New York City
November 9, 2000

Steve, et al:

My reactions to the impending election are akin to what Elizabeth Kubler-Ross used to describe as the stages of dealing with impending death. You know – all that “denial,” “anger,” “bargaining,” “acceptance”…I move hourly back and forth between them.

I really don’t think a decisive Nader vote will materialize at the polls. Instead, even worse, I think Bush is going to win with a majority.

The thing that impresses me most about Bush voters – or at least, the vital number of converts, outside the true believers, that will push him over the top – is their assumption that there will be no real, negative consequences to their vote. I found myself wondering if they – and Nader – could actually be right, and what I thought would really happen if Bush is elected.

In this vein, I saw Alan Ehrenhalt’s piece on the Times op-ed on Sunday, about how no matter what happens in the election, the old era of right-wing politics is over. I think he could not be more wrong. Sure, Reagan-era conservatism – which was basically warmed-over military Keynesianism, combined with various cultural gestures that left the core of the old New Deal/Great Society consensus intact – is over. What is coming now, with the advent of Bush the Lesser, is a whole new era of right-wing politics, the likes of which the U.S., and the world, has not seen before.

I keep thinking about Maggie Thatcher’s infamous statement that “society does not exist.” That is, I think, the vital clue to the years ahead. It is the essential nexus of both the Republican right and – to a lesser degree – the Clinton/Gore wing of the Democratic Party.

Society does not exist – that is, all human relations will be boiled down to the most fundamental, short-term, economic transactions. See Gingrich in the Times magazine a few weeks ago, advocating that children be paid $1,000 to take calculus. This is the essence of his – and Clinton’s – “opportunity society.”

Marx liked to dream that under socialism the state would “fade away,” but in fact it is late-period capitalism that will now proceed to dismantle the nation state. As usual, the U.S. is in the vanguard. The Clinton/Gore decision to yank away the safety net was the beginning; now Bush will start to “privatize” the Social Security system.

Dramatic as these changes may seem, they will soon appear as nothing, and the new, post-nation era will roll on with an inexorable, destructive momentum all its own. After Social Security, school vouchers will gradually end public education. Police forces around the nation, encouraged to rely on the booty from drug busts for their budgets, will become evermore independent forces, beholden only to the richest and most powerful elements in society. A large, powerful, volunteer military – given no foreign role to play – will become a new political player.

Many Americans will soon recognize this as the deadly tailspin it is for our society, but to quote Boss Tweed, “What are you going to do about it?” Parents, finding the public schools gutted, will naturally flee to private ones. All citizens, watching the funds drain out of Social Security, will insist on putting more and more of their money into their own, safer investments. Neighborhoods no longer protected by an effective, public police force will hire private security and moonlighting cops instead. The less the public sector works, the more reluctant people will be to put their money into it, and the less money it has, the less well it will function. Even the means of dissent and reform will largely evaporate. With the media all but completely consolidated into a few mega-monopolies (a process greatly aided by Bill Clinton’s surreptitious decision to give away the new spectrum of TV channels and the general refusal to enforce anti-trust laws), voices of protest will become fainter and fainter. Term-limit laws, and the institutionalization of what Tom Delay calls the “right” to contribute whatever one wishes to elected officials, will ensure that the political class of the very near future will consist solely of kleptocrats and glorified lobbyists.

Indeed, before too long, even the more progressive elements in America will be forced to support our fissure into separate, self-interested enclaves. Local control will be seen as the only way to preserve minority rights and the few, dwindling social and environmental programs that remain. What we will get is a version of Peru or Paraguay, or one of half-a-dozen other Latin American states, in which those who have the means huddle inside their walled mansions or neighborhoods, hoping the local dictatorship and their own guards will save them from kidnapping and murder.

Of course, this won’t really “work,” or at least not as its main advocates, the ravenous greedheads who envision a new, global order of trade and sweatshops, would like. As leaders as diverse as Disraeli, Lincoln, Bismarck, Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt, and Richard Nixon understood, capitalism is best fostered by a progressive, social welfare state, one that keeps order, makes rules, and increases wealth – in short, does all the messy, untidy, un-businesslike things that must be done to keep a society running.

This is the ultimate irony: the super-capitalists of today have actually swallowed their own rhetoric. It used to be that all their blather about how they, the Masters of the Universe, were the sole creators of wealth, was just useful propaganda in their unending fight to win this tax break or the end of that anti-pollution statute. Now, like some junta of Latin American generals who have spent far too long swapping tales of their machismo and the glorious deeds of their ancestors around the mess table, they actually have come to think that they can supercede the most powerful historical force of the past five hundred years – the nation-state – and run not just some banana republic but the whole world.

And of course they can’t. Their cherished new world trading order will soon collapse without strong governmental structures to negotiate and enforce rules. The end of the welfare state will vastly diminish buying power around the globe. The lack of an effective public education system will cut into the sort of talent they need to keep productivity rising. And the end of effective governments will leave us largely defenseless in the face of the innumerable environmental and health crises that globalization is already provoking. (Can’t wait to see how paying kids a thousand bucks not to get the Ebola virus works out.)

By the end of this century, at the very latest, the new global corporations will be crying out for government – but by that time it will be much too late, if it is not too late already. Many people, infuriated by the decay of their nations, their standards of living, and their physical environment, will react with rage but, befuddled by decades of junk entertainment and active, right-wing propaganda, their protests will be incoherent at best. A race riot here, an Aryan nation enclave there – perhaps an outbreak of some wholly new, bizarre preoccupation, along the lines of one of my favorites from American history, “anti-Masonry.” None of it will suffice to change a thing. I guess you would call this the “anger” stage.

Kevin