Friday, September 26, 2008
What’s Old (and Vile) Is New (2:22 pm)
Chris Hayes writes on the resurgence of the (Andrew) Mellon Caucus, noting how some wingers are quoting (with approval!!!) the following statement from the old plutocrat:
Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate … It will purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life.
Utterly charming in 1929, and it’s only grown more so today. But it sent me back to John Holbo’s phenomenal review of David Frum’s book Dead Right, in which he delves deep into the heart of darkness lying within the right’s economic philosophy. Holbo quotes a passage in which Frum explains that “The great, overwhelming fact of a capitalist economy is risk. Everyone is at constant risk of the loss of his job, or of the destruction of his business by a competitor, or of the crash of his investment portfolio. Risk makes people circumspect. It disciplines them and teaches them self-control. Without a safety net, people won’t try to vault across the big top.”
Mmm-hmm. As Holbo notes:
The thing that makes capitalism good, apparently, is not that it generates wealth more efficiently than other known economic engines. No, the thing that makes capitalism good is that, by forcing people to live precarious lives, it causes them to live in fear of losing everything and therefore to adopt – as fearful people will – a cowed and subservient posture: in a word, they behave ‘conservatively’. Of course, crouching to protect themselves and their loved ones from the eternal lash of risk precisely won’t preserve these workers from risk. But the point isn’t to induce a society-wide conformist crouch by way of making the workers safe and happy. The point is to induce a society-wide conformist crouch. Period. A solid foundation is hereby laid for a desirable social order.
Let’s call this position (what would be an evocative name?) ‘dark satanic millian liberalism’: the ethico-political theory that says laissez faire capitalism is good if and only if under capitalism the masses are forced to work in environments that break their will to want to ‘jump across the big top’, i.e. behave in a self-assertive, celebratorily individualist manner.
It’s long as hell, but you should take the time to read the whole thing.
It would be hard to measure the dishonesty of Holbo’s interpretation of what Frum is saying is units smaller than oceans. Frum does NOT say that what is good about capitalism is at it creates cowering conformists; it is actually lefty multiculturalism’s notion that no one should ever be offended that takes this role. The word “great” in the Frum passage does not mean “really wonderful”; it means “large” (as the word following it, “overwhelming,” makes clear). The rest of Holbo’s blog (I read most of it, all that I could stomach) is equally tendentious, attributig words, thoughts, and motivations to Frum and conservatives that no half-honest observer or writer with any desire to be thoughtful would put forth, projecting his own vile perceptions and assumptions onto others. If this is a model of what Brian Cook thinks is a “phenomenal review,” his standards are very low indeed.
posted by Mitch on 9-27-08 at 6:26 PM