Michael Lind has an interesting piece he posted yesteday in Salon that supplements the piece I posted the other day about the corporate state.
Lind does a typology that comprises five American political worldviews: Neoliberal Globalism, Social Democratic Liberalism, Populist Nationalism, Libertarian Isolationism, and Green Malthusianism. It's similar to what I made an attempt to do here in which my focus was more cultural worldviews, which overlap with but are different from political worldviews. Read Lind's entire article for more background, but what I write here should be clear enough without your doing so.
As with all typologies, only extreme types fit cleanly into one category–humans, as contrasted with 'mindsets', are ambivalent and often conflicted in their ideas. Mindsets are consistent and relatively easy to understand and their typologies are important aids in understanding how groups work because they play a significant role in shaping their ethos.
Neoliberal Globalism, for instance, is the dominant mindset of the corporate and political establishment, and it has been since the 80s; it supplanted Social Democratic Liberalism, which was the dominant establishment worldview from FDR to Carter. Very few people are pure examples of either mindset, but the Neoliberal Globalist mindset, its values and its acceptable attitudes and behaviors, dominates in the corridors of power. Neoliberal Globalism is the ideology of corporate empire.
The Social Democratic Liberals lost their influence in the 70s because of their association with the cultural and economic crises of that decade. The "Silent Generation" and Boomer corporate elites, more cosmopolitan and better educated than their old-school predecessors, were infatuated with the sophomoric intellectualism of Randian, neo-Social Darwinism. And this new generation of leaders fashioned itself in the mold of uebermenschen, not to be restrained by the same rules as the lower, less intelligent, less productive, less aggressive losers they walked over to obtain their current positions of influence. It's this group and its mentality that dominates in both governmental and corporate corridors of power. And it's the mentality that serves the spirit of Empire.
These power elites don't care which party is in power. They see Washington politics as a game in which they pit one group against the other to get what they want. They play Republicans and Democrats off one another the way the NBA and its owners play one city against another when it comes to getting the public to pay for a new arena. These elites, never happy with the restriction that came with the social democrats New Deal compromise, saw their opportunity during the Carter administration to change the paradigm, and they were amazingly successful. They were able to exploit the antipathy and resentment felt by Populist Nationalists–i.e., the cultural right–for the diffuse cultural cosmopolitanism associated with identity-politics obsessed Dems and the tradition-bashing mainstream popular culture as represented on TV, the movies, and pop music.
As Lind points out, Dems run for office as if they were Social Democratic Liberals and Republicans run as if they are Populist Nationalists, but both rule as Neoliberal Globalists:
Neoliberal Democrats like Clinton and Obama run for office by posing as social democratic liberals; once in power, they carry out the neoliberal globalist agenda favored by America’s financial and corporate elites. Republicans do the same, pretending to be national populists or libertarians on the hustings, and then governing as the right wing of neoliberalism, sharing assumptions with Clinton-Obama Democrats about free trade, deregulated capitalism and the need for some sort of minimal safety net — preferably a means-tested, voucherized, privatized one that requires Americans to pay brokers and insurance companies.
This explains why Obama is always seeking a bi-partisan solution–he realizes that there's much more agreement among elites of both parties than the political posturing and theater suggests. But let's be clear–bi-partisanship means both parties serve the interests of the corporate power elite. That's the only real common ground that can be found within the Beltway. Their interests are sacrosanct. Only issues they don't care about one way or the other–gay rights, abortion, women's rights–are negotiable in the political sphere.
The fourth typology Lind describes is the Libertarian Isolationists who believe that
the U.S. changed from a decentralized republic into a militarized, authoritarian empire in the late 19th century, when the Spanish-American War made the U.S. a colonial power and trusts and cartels took over the economy. Every president since McKinley, they believe, has been a tool of a self-aggrandizing crony capitalist oligarchy, . . . If the libertarian isolationists had their way, the U.S. would abandon foreign alliances, dismantle most of its military, and return to a 19th-century pattern of decentralized government and an economy based on small businesses and small farms.
This is the teaparty mentality–and overlaps to a certain extent with some of the Nationalist Populists with a neo-confederate bent–they date the end of the Republic before the Spanish American war, that is, to the Union victory in the Civil War. But it also overlaps, at least in its critique, with the Chomskyite left, which isn't really represented in Lind's typology, mainly, I suppose, becuase it is so irrelevant in the current political discourse.
It, like the last group, the Green Malthusian has little or no influence on public policy. But as Lind points out:
Half a decade or a decade of economic stagnation and global economic turmoil might eventually discredit the neoliberal globalist consensus, in the way that the crises of the 1970s undermined the earlier social democratic liberal consensus. So far the Great Recession and its aftermath have not been sufficient to force either neoliberal Democrats or center-right Republicans to reconsider their faith in the neoliberal creed. But alternate worldviews continue to find adherents, the century is young, and history is seldom kind for long to establishments and orthodoxies.
But that's putting the most optimistic spin on it. The reality is that Neoliberal Globalism serves the class interests of the country's elites, and it will continue to do so no matter how bad things get until some group more powerful pushes them out. And there is simply no faction within the political arena right now that even begins to have the strength to do that.
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