| Conservative Trickle-Down Morality
Frank writes:
Critics have cried "hypocrisy" at conservatives' willingness to throw a government lifeline to Wall Street while refusing to do the same for ordinary Americans. But calling free-market, pro-bailout conservatives "hypocrites" lets them off easy. In reality, there is a consistent worldview behind their position -- it's just not one most are willing to talk about: the reason government should aid the rich but not the poor is that the rich are presumed to use money more wisely -- after all, that's why they became rich in the first place.
This belief is the cornerstone of trickle-down economics: the theory is that tax breaks to those with money -- individuals and companies--are more important than tax breaks to those without, because the investment savvy of the rich will trickle down to benefit the rest of us....
The problem is this: a tax cut that provides a million dollars to a single individual or a single dollar to a million individuals still pumps a million dollars into the economy. So what justifies giving so much of it to one rich guy instead of spreading it across a million regular people?
Only the conservative belief that the rich acquired their money by exercising greater virtue than the rest of us. While trickle-down economics theory can be used to mask a raw power grab, it is also a philosophy of moral superiority which many conservatives have come to truly believe. It credits the wealthy not only with financial savoir-faire, but with character excellence: the rich are not just financially wise, but morally good, because they use their resources in ways that promote, instead of harming, the general welfare.
As I noted above, there is no mention of Lakoff here, but this all flows directly from Lakoff's analysis as I broadly described it. Moral strength, self-discipline, adherance to the rules, and the strict dichotomization of right and wrong are all crucial concomitance of the rightwing justification of wealth. For exemplars such as these, taxes surely are a burden, and an unfair one at that. We should be giving them money. And, indeed, for several decades now, that's exactly what we've been doing. Now we're being asked to do it some more.
But there is a problem here, Frank notes. The fairy tale hasn't come true:
It [the trickle-down philosophy of moral superiority] credits the wealthy not only with financial savoir-faire, but with character excellence: the rich are not just financially wise, but morally good, because they use their resources in ways that promote, instead of harming, the general welfare.
With the meltdown of the Wall Street giants, it's time to admit that's just not so. Raw self-interest, high-risk behavior, old-fashioned greed, irresponsible choices -- these were the impulses of the fat cats who, taking advantage of unsound public policy, pushed our economy to the brink of disaster, imperiling the wellbeing of us all. The free market, while often an efficient allocator of goods and services, quite simply leaves too many people and too many social goods to their own devices.
This is almost self-evidently true, but it has to be stated. And not just once, but over and over and over again. It has to be pounded into people's heads. This was the rationale behind three decades of untrammelled greed, and this is the calamaty it has all produced.
Racism
However, this isn't the whole of the story. Conservative ideology is, after all, more a justification of hierarchical power than anything else. Lakoff's explanation of its logic deals with the internal structuring of what are sometimes known as "legitimating myths." In Social Dominance Theory (SDT) developed by Sidanius and Pratto (Social Dominance: An Intergroup Theory of Social Hierarchy and Oppression), their place in preserving the hierarchical social system is central, translating attitudes into support for institutions and individual practices that keep hierarchical relations in place:
From the perspective of SDT, ideology is a rationalization of attitudes toward group dominance ("social dominance orientation," SDO)--either embracing it or not. SDO is a more fundamental attitude than either racism or sexism, but is correlated with both--including racist and sexist attitudes that are rationalized and/or denied. It shows correlations with a wide range of rationalizing ideas or systems of belief, as indicated by this chart showing a variety of ways in which it contributes to opposition against government programs helping minorities:
All of this serves as background to the recent rightwing attempts to blame minorities for the financial meltdown, as I noted in quick hit earlier this week:
| Racism Makes You Stupid, Episode #956,234: Right Blames Blacks For Financial Crisis.
Never ones to quit playing the blame game, movement conservatives are trying to blame the current crisis on blacks (and, to a lesser extent, Latinos) and the liberals who love them. Media Matters took Fox's Neil Cavuto to task for getting the ball rolling on this. NRO jumped on the bandwagon, "big time" as America's #2 war criminal would say, in an editorial yesterday blaming the Community Reinvestment Act, which provides a mechanism (obviously rather inadequate) for promoting investment in traditionally redlined communities. The editorial, which began by defending Phil Gramm, went on to state:
Much more problematic than Gramm-Leach-Bliley is the Community Reinvestment Act, a bit of legislative arm-twisting much beloved by Sen. Obama and his fellow Democrats. One of the reasons so many bad mortgage loans were made in the first place is that Barack Obama's celebrated community organizers make their careers out of forcing banks to do so. ACORN, for which Obama worked, is one of many left-wing organizations that spent decades pressuring banks and bank regulators to do more to make mortgages available to people without much in the way of income, assets, or credit. These campaigns often were couched in racially inflammatory terms.
There are just two itsy-bitsy problems with this "explanation," as Matt Yglesias explains:
#1, the CRA has been around since 1977. The current financial crisis has not.
#2, the financial crisis problem is not with the loans themselves, but with how the financial system deceptively repackaged them. (Indeed, without this deceptive repackaging the sub-prime mortgage situation would never have mushroomed the way it did.)
Actually, of course, it's much worse than this, since, as per usual, many blacks who qualified for market-rate loans were steered into sub-prime loans instead.
What's the name for this? (A) Blaming the victim.
(B) Racism.
(C) Conservatism.
(D) All of the above. |
Populism, Left vs. Right
Finally, we come to the issue of populism. McCain, who has deep, longstanding ties to those who caused the financial crisis--as well as ideological support for them--attempted to turn on a dime from denying their was a crisis to positioning himself as a fierce opponent of special interests, who would protect ordinary American taxpayers. How is this possible? The answers are incredibly complex, but a big chunk of what makes it possible is simple associational logig. Conservatism appeals to people on the basis of identity. "We conservatives" are the upstanding moral people--who are exemplified in the wealthy (as discussed above) as well as our legitimate political leaders. The division between "us" and "them" is crucial to conservative identity politics. I have referred to this various times before. In
Lloyd Free and Hadley Cantril's 1967 landmark book, The Political Beliefs of Americans: A Study of Public Opinion, based on Gallup-conducted surveys in 1964 found that operational conservatism (defined in terms of opposition to social spending programs, which their data showed to be the hard core of cosnervative identity) was powerfully correlated with opposition to sharing power with others:
This indicates that the "us/them" mindset is deeply ingrained in conservative thinking, which means that a key ingrediant of populist anger at "them" is readily available on the right. This is much less the case on the left, not least because those on the left tend to have a more complicated view of the world, and tend not to see things so consistently in terms of black and white morality. Moral complexity and ambiguity are much more recognized by liberals, which is often quite appropriate. But not always. And this is where liberals far too often seem to fall down.
The challenge for leftwing populism is always how to engage with passionate commitment, and yet leave room for complexity, as well as leaving room for "them" to become part of "us."
This is a vast topic, far too vast to handle here. But an indication of how to deal with it can readily be seen in the example of Martin Luther King. King was entirely unapologetic for the unyeilding stand he took in fighting against racism. Yet, he repeatedly articulated the view that those who oppossed him were not, in the end his enemies. They were, in their own ways, trapped in the same ignorance, fear and hatred that was the real enemy of black and white alike. By seeing the enemy not as individuals or groups of invididuals, but as attitudes and ideologies based on those attitudes, King showed us a powerful way forward--one that all of us can learn from today, and every day.
Applying this lesson may not be easy. And it is far from the only lesson we need to learn. But it is an essential lesson, if we are to claim the populist mantle, and not let blind rightwing anger rip it from our hands. |
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