American Conservatism Is Keynesian to the Core
The American conservative movement is dominated by gravediggers and hustlers. Both groups are Keynesian to the core.
This has been true ever since the movement began in the Hiss-Chambers hearings in 1948. The Old Right of the 1930's was committed to tearing down the New Deal. The Middle Right, 1948-1980, was committed to strengthening the federal government to root out the Communists at home and abroad. The Middle Right refused to fight Truman's creation of the modern surveillance state: CIA, NSC, NSA. They thought there should be more of it. They did not oppose the Truman Doctrine in foreign policy. They thought there should be more of it.
The exception was Senator Robert Taft. His death in July 1953 ended the last traces of the Old Right in Washington until Ron Paul was elected in 1976.
The New Right is the fusion of the neoconservative movement and the New Christian Right. It came together in the election of 1980: Reagan. To the extent that it still operates, it is marked by support for the Pentagon and the Social Security/Medicare subsidies.
They are all united in this confession: Keynesian planning works. The system will hold. "Medicare can be reformed, if Congress acts now." We are assured this every decade. But Congress never acts. The off-budget deficit grows larger. The present value of the unfunded liabilities of the federal government are in the $200 trillion range. "There is still time for Congress to act." No, there isn't. But those inside the Beltway never admit this.
I am waiting for the Tea Party's leaders, whoever they are, to announce: "Abolish Medicare now. It will bankrupt the federal government if we don't. It is beyond the point of no return. No reform can save it. We must cut our losses." Let me know if this changes. Until it does, the Tea Party is also Keynesian. "The system will hold." The system is Keynesian.
Above all, American conservatism is focused on the Washington Beltway, not local politics. Here is where conservatives send their political donations. Here is where it has lost every major battle except Phyllis Schlafly's Stop-ERA, which was conducted at the grass roots level, not inside the Beltway. This money never rolls back the warfare-welfare state. It sustains it. It cries out: "Thus far, and no farther." Then, after the welfare system expands, it says it again. And again.
It does not say: "Roll it back to 1912." Or 1787.
THE GRAVEDIGGERS
My father-in-law, R. J. Rushdoony, spoke of the gravediggers within the conservative movement and also within the evangelical community.
Gravediggers became famous during World War II. The Nazis and the Soviets would condemn dozens of people to death. They would then force these people to dig a mass grave. Then they would line the people up in front of the mass grave, and they would shoot them. The bodies would topple into the mass grave. Then local residents of the community would be required to shovel the dirt over the bodies, filling in the grave.
This was a cost-cutting measure. The executioners got the victims to do the hard work. Then they got the next batch of potential victims to do the rest of the hard work.
Anyone could have refused to dig his own grave. He was going to be shot in a few minutes anyway. He might as well resist. He might as well not make it easy for the executioners. What could they do about it? Shoot him? So what? He would get a little rest and recreation. Well, anyway, he would get a little rest, not having to dig his own grave, and all it would cost them would be the loss of a couple of minutes of life. But the gravediggers refused to attack the executioners with shovels. They refused to lie down on the ground and refuse to dig. They dutifully dug their graves, dutifully lined up in front of their graves, and stood there, making it easy for the executioners.
Rushdoony said that the conservative movement was filled with people who were convinced that the conspiracy is in total control of events. This is the mentality of the gravedigger, he said. That was in the 1960's. Things have changed a little, but not enough.
Rushdoony's point was this: an eschatology of gravedigging leads to the impotence of every group that holds this eschatology.
Rushdoony had in mind that element of the Right wing that is geared to exposing conspiracies. He said that the overwhelming majority of Right-wingers who adopt this outlook are convinced that this or that conspiracy is inevitably going to win. The conspiracy functions as God in their thinking. The conspiracy predestines everything. The predestinating conspiracy is unstoppable. He wrote about this in 1965, in his book, The Nature of the American System. It is online.
Those people within the Right wing who adopt a conspiracy outlook are almost always convinced that efforts to resist are futile until the conspiracy is exposed. The conspiracy always wins. The conspiracy is always run by the equivalent of a chess grand master, who is five moves ahead of the rest of us. The centrally planned conspiracy is overwhelmingly dominant, and the pathetic efforts of conservatives to roll this back are simply an exercise in futility.
They think that exposing the conspiracy will lead to a great house-cleaning. Then the good guys will take over the system, and make it productive. Their slogan is: "A clean sweep." Over time, they lose hope. They lose hope that Americans will ever believe their story. They become gravediggers mentally. Then they die, and their heirs toss out their clippings.
Rushdoony believed in conspiracies: special-interest groups that use the state to suppress the free market. He believed there are ways to fight conspiracies successfully. One way is to de-fund the public schools, a position he articulated in his 1961 book, Intellectual Schizophrenia. I have summarized this strategy here. The fundamental strategy is this: replace, not capture. Cut the funding; do not merely replace today's leaders.
The conservative movement, as well as the fundamentalist movement, has long been hampered by an eschatology of defeat. They find it difficult to mobilize the resources, intellectually and politically, to do battle with the modern Keynesian state, precisely because they do not believe they can defeat the modern Keynesian state. They are convinced that Keynesianism is going to win, which means they are convinced that Keynesian economic analysis is more accurate than free-market economic analysis. They believe that centralized power is more powerful than decentralized knowledge, capitalization, and mobilization. They believe in centralization as the primary means of exercising influence in history.
I have been active in the conservative movement ever since 1956. I have seen firsthand exactly what Rushdoony described. There is an inherent gravedigger mentality within the conservative movement. They think they are going to lose. They think the state is going to win.
THE HUSTLERS
In contrast to the gravediggers are the Washington Beltway's hustlers. They are focused on narrow policy questions. They are focused on the next Congressional election. They come o their supporters with this message: "we can win in November. Send us money.
They never win in November. Something always thwarts them.
The federal bureaucracies multiply. Their employees are protected by Civil Service legislation. They cannot be fired. The existing body of federal regulations cannot be rolled back in one term, one decade, or one generation. It can be rolled back only by one thing: federal bankruptcy.
The electorate is divided. Congress is gridlocked. Legislation abolishing old laws is unheard of. I have waited since 1956. It rarely happens. The only cases of substance took place under Carter: the abolition of the Civil Aeronautics Board and the gutting of the Interstate Commerce Commission.
Still, the hustlers whoop up the troops by a call to the next election.
There is no call to abolish the Federal Cabinets. There is a call to replace a few a senior bureaucrats at the top for at most eight years.
"Send money! Hold the fine!"
The money rolls in. The careers of the hustlers are preserved for another electoral cycle, win or lose.
They are Keynesians. They insist that the present system can be redeemed by tinkering at the edges, if only you will send money.
It is all a holding action. It is all a call to tread water. It is no threat to the existing Keynesian system. It never has been.
HAYEK ON DECENTRALIZED KNOWLEDGE
In contrast, there is F. A. Hayek's great essay on the use of knowledge in society. He wrote it in 1945. He showed that no government agency or committee is capable of harnessing the information that the free market is capable of harnessing, because the free market is based on a decentralized system of rewards and punishments. The price system, the private property social order, and the profit-and-loss accounting system all combine to implement the best knowledge available in society.
In other words, an institutional arrangement based on decentralization, private property, and liberty is overwhelmingly better financed through the capital markets than any government is. There is no way that any government, long-term, can overcome the effects of the free market. Government agencies can do this for a while, but they cannot do it long-term. They run out of wealth to confiscate. They do not have sufficient knowledge. They do not have the best and brightest working for them. They are governed by workers who are tenured, and tenured people tend to be lazy, inefficient, and unable to deal with the real world on a regular basis.
Very few conservatives have ever concluded that Hayek was right. They may say they are Hayekians in their defense of the free market, but they do not understand, nor do they believe, the most important article that Hayek ever wrote.
So, they want to capture the institutions of the federal state. They want to take over the existing empire. If you think this is not true, take a look at conservative foreign policy. It is geared to taking over the State Department, and then running the State Department as if it were the military. There is an enormous faith in the Pentagon, especially the ability of Pentagon personnel to plan for the extension of the American Empire. Conservatives are committed to power, meaning centralized power, meaning military power. This has been true ever since the late 1940's.
The conservative movement has always had faith in the Pentagon, because they have never had faith in the free market. They believe that centralized power, especially military power, is the way to maintain freedom. They believe in the power of the federal bureaucracy.
They do not understand the advent of fourth-generation warfare. The American military is incapable of dealing with non-state actors. The American military, which is a second-generation military operation, cannot deal effectively with fourth-generation, non-state military and paramilitary organizations. The vast majority of conservatives cannot figure this out. Why not? Because they are committed -- heart, mind, and soul -- to the idea that centralized political power is ultimately dominant. They really do believe in the state.
Beginning with the Cold War, American politics has been split between two rival views of federal sovereignty. The American public, educated in the public schools, believes in the efficacy of centralized political power. The division in American politics is mainly over which of the centralizing organizations of the federal government is the one that should be financed, and the one that should be trusted. The conservatives trust the Pentagon's tenured bureaucrats. The liberals trust the tenured bureaucrats at the Department of Labor, the National Labor Relations Board, and the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission. They all trust the Social Security System. The conservatives, in order to get the votes for the Pentagon, go along with supporting the welfare state, including food stamps, Medicare, and Medicaid. The liberals, needing conservative votes on food stamps, Medicare, and Medicaid, vote for any war that a Republican President gets into, and of course any war that a Democrat gets into. Then they join hands in one unilateral affirmation of faith in the power of centralized planning, tenured bureaucracy, and deficit spending.
The hard-core conservatives, who tend to be conspiracy theorists, believe that politics is all rigged, and more to the point, that it is all rigged in terms of the system that will forever overcome the effects of liberty. They really do believe in Keynesianism's declaration of faith in central planning. They really do believe that Keynesian central planning, when commandeered by the conspiracy -- there is no agreement on which conspiracy is the main one -- has won, is winning, and will continue to win. They see themselves surrounded by almost irreversible evil.
They think Janet Yellen knows what she's doing.
MICROCOMPUTERS AND LIBERTY
It is widely believed within the conservative movement that the NSA, the IRS, and all the other federal surveillance bureaucracies now have the power of total central planning, because they have computers. They are convinced that the federal government is the great inheritor of the digital technologies of surveillance, and that there is no way to stop the ever greater expansion of state power in our lives. They do not understand that the decentralization that is inherent in the digital technologies is challenging the state in every area. They do not understand that the ability of the state to enforce all of the regulations, despite all the computerization, is minimal. The state is staffed by bureaucrats. These are tenured bureaucrats. They are not efficient. They have to make decisions in order to implement anything that they have learned from their computer screens. They can track ever more information, but they are no better at making decisions than they were a decade ago or two decades ago. They are being overwhelmed by the data.
To get anything enforced, they have to go through the court system. The court system is jammed up. It is not going to get unjammed anytime soon. Bureaucrats can make trouble for any given individual, and it is a disaster when this happens to an individual. But what happens to individuals is not representative of what the state is experiencing on an aggregate level. Edward Snowden blew the whistle on them, and he did so because all the data could be downloaded into pocket hard drives.
I have written about this here:
//www.garynorth.com/public/11315.cfm
CONCLUSION
I realize that it is very difficult to persuade conservatives otherwise. This is because they are committed to the ideology of Keynesian centralized power. They really do believe that the bad guys, meaning the New World Order, meaning the conspirators, meaning the central planners, have the power to plan, execute their plans, and force the rest of us to conform to their plans. They really do believe in central planning. They do not believe in Mises, Hayek, Rothbard, and the worldview presented by Austrian School economics. They may say they believe in it, but they do not. I wish they did.
So, the rest of us have to plod along, waiting for the central governments of the world to run out of other people's money. We wait for the Great Default, when generations of promises to the voters who supported the welfare state are finally abandoned by the welfare state: "insufficient funds."
We publish. We work for a better day. We work to replace -- not capture -- the institutions of central planning. We do not call for a program to sweep the bad guys out of the seats of power. We plan to eliminate the seats of power.
Tax-funded education is a good place to begin. Technology is on our side. The goal should not be to replace the public existing school curriculum with a better one. The goal should be to shut off the funding 100%. Replace, not capture. No vouchers; tax cuts instead.