The Conscience of a Conservative

“Of course, you’re very conservative”

Both sides of my family were lifelong Republicans, and approached their lives conservatively. By that I mean that they valued the contributions of the past to their current happiness, they took care to preserve their tools and other possessions (rather than throwing them out and buying new ones), they paid close attention to their money, abhorred waste, and saved as much as they could in anticipation of future needs. My father, for example, never bought a car or a house with anything but cash. He was not a rich man – just one who found the idea of debt appalling. I don’t remember that my father, or anyone else in the family, tried to teach me these principles, but I absorbed them pretty thoroughly.

Serving in the Army in Germany, I spent many nights at the EM club. As you entered, the first thing you encountered was a small slot machine that took 50 cent pieces. The slot was a pretty loose one, so it seemed worth feeding. I’d generally drop a half buck in the slot, take whatever I might win on into the club, and drink it up. If I didn’t win anything, I went on into the club and drank up whatever I had left.

A few years later, I was tending bar in Denver. Denver, at that time, was not a town of big tippers, and I was living pretty close to the bone. One day I saw an ad in the paper, offering $5 and “all you win” to participants in a psychological experiment. Well, 5 bucks was 5 bucks, and maybe I’d “win” more than that, somehow, so I called to sign up as a guinea pig.

I reported to a house trailer sitting in a corner of the Denver University campus, where a Japanese grad student greeted me and explained the drill. He had fabricated a small, metal machine with a coin slot, and he gave me 5 nickels to play it with. I could keep playing as long as I wanted. I figured he was somehow testing the results of positive and negative reinforcement. After he finished his rap, I took his nickels, put one in the slot, and the machine coughed up three nickels. Following my EM Club practice, I scooped them up and put them in the pocket with the 5 dollar bill he’d given me. “Thanks,” I told him.

He looked severely disappointed. I’d probably screwed up his data, or his expectations. After a long silence, he peered up over his glasses and said, “You . . . are . . .  ve’y . . . consuhvative!”

Many years after that, when I was making enough money to require help with my taxes, I consulted with the City Auditor, an old friend who did some tax preparation on the side. I don’t recall what occasioned his observation, but as we were looking over my returns one year he remarked, “Of course, you’re very conservative.”

If that doesn’t cement my conservative credentials, I’ll add that I still carry my father’s Boy Scout pocket knife, because the steel in its blades is better than any I could afford, if I could find any as good today. I still write poetry in fixed metric, stanza and rhyme schemes, just like Lawn Tennyson, gentleman poet. I still spend a fair portion of my time reminding people of the great writers and musicians of the past.

I agree with Joyce Cary’s character Tom Wilcher: “But of course small-minded people . . . hate the past, not because it is old, but because it might give them something new, something unexpected, and disturb their complacent littleness.”¹ I keep on living with the masters of the past because I still keep finding in their works “something new, something unexpected.” Or something I’ve not until now been ready to understand and appreciate.

So when I hear or see the word “conservative” applied to most of the politicians and commentators and policies it’s lately being applied to, I must object. They have nothing to do with conservatism, or with conserving.

The word used to be widely understood to mean, approximately, “a cultural, social, and political philosophy that seeks to promote and to preserve traditional institutions, customs, and values.”² Can anyone argue that today’s “conservatives,” whether in the presidency, congress, or the media, are promoting or conserving the values that have largely governed the United States through most of its history? Does publicly deriding the judicial system, rendering the legislative bodies virtually incapable of passing any legislation, publicly praising murderous foreign dictators demonstrate any support for traditional American values?

In a strictly economic sense, “Fiscal conservatism or economic conservatism is a political and economic philosophy regarding fiscal policy and fiscal responsibility with an ideological basis in capitalism, individualism, limited government, and laissez-faire economics.”³

I choose to select 1963 as the beginning of our contemporary era of economic and political extravagances. Examining fiscal responsibility since that year, we find a 1,600 % increase in the national debt. During a bit more than a third of those years, Democrats have been in control of both the White House and Congress. Republicans have held total control during 44% of that same time period. Whichever party has held sway, the national debt has risen each year.

The two parties have accomplished during these years a shift of the burden of paying for that national debt from corporate to individual shoulders. In 1961, individual income taxes contributed 44% of the Federal Budget, and corporate taxes 22%. By 2023, the corporate share had increased to 29%. But the individual contribution to Federal Revenue was now 66%.

Not only The Gummint has been running up debt over the past years. In 2023, Consumer Debt – including home mortgage, home equity lines of credit, auto loans student loans, credit card debt – had risen to nearly $18 trillion.

When more exciting issues are lacking during election years, one candidate or another drags out the National Debt as a giant problem that must be addressed forthwith, but neither party can claim to be truly concerned with the debt, because both parties are well aware that most voters are not truly concerned with it, though a good many believe they are and believe they are supporting “conservative values,” generally by voting for Republican candidates who give those values lip service, though the support mostly stops at the lips. (For example, Ronald Reagan, the emblematic “fiscal conservative,” entered the Presidency in 1981 when the federal deficit was approximately $79 billion. At the end of his second term, the federal deficit stood at more than $175 billion. Succeeding “fiscally conservative” presidents have amassed more dramatic increases in the deficit. Nearly all of these increases have been amassed by various advocates of “Free Market Capitalism”⁴.

“Free-Market Capitalism” has been so often and insistently equated with “Conservatism” that the two are now taken to mean the same thing. Marilynne Robinson wrote of this confusion in The Death of Adam:

 “We know that Communism was a theology, a church militant, with sacred texts and with saints and martyrs and prophets, with doctrines about the nature of the world and of humankind, with immutable laws and millennial visions and life-pervading judgments about the nature of good and evil. No doubt it failed finally for the same reason it lasted as long as it did, because it was a theology, gigantic and rigid and intricate, taking authority from its disciplines and its hierarchies even while they rendered it fantastically ill suited to the practical business of understanding and managing an economy. It seems to me that, obedient to the great law which sooner or later makes one the image of one’s enemy, we have theologized our own economic system, transforming it into something likewise rigid and tendentious and therefore always less useful to us. It is an American-style, stripped-down, low-church theology, its clergy largely self-ordained, golf-shirted, the sort one would be not at all surprised and only a little alarmed to find on one’s doorstep. Its teachings are very, very simple: There really are free and natural markets where the optimum value of things is assigned to them; everyone must compete with everyone; the worthy will prosper and the unworthy fail; those who succeed while others fail will be made deeply and justly happy by this experience, having had no other object in life; each of us is poorer for every cent that is used toward the wealth of all of us; governments are instituted among men chiefly to interfere with the working out of these splendid principles.

“This is such a radical obliteration of culture and tradition, let us say of Jesus and Jefferson, as to awe any Bolshevik, of course. But then contemporary discourse is innocent as a babe unborn of any awareness of culture and tradition, so the achievement is never remarked. It is nearly sublime, a sort of cerebral whiteout. But my point here is that unsatisfactory economic ideas and practices which have an impressive history of failure, which caused to founder that great nation California, which lie at the root of much of the shame and dread and division and hostility and cynicism with which our society is presently afflicted, are treated as immutable truths, not to be questioned, not to be interfered with, lest they unleash their terrible retribution, recoiling against whomever would lay a hand on the Ark of Market Economics, if that is the name under which this mighty power is currently invoked.”⁵

This false equation has never been so widely or uncritically accepted as it is now. I found a clue to how this has come about in Frederick Townsend Martin’s remarkably subversive The Passing of the Idle Rich, first published in 1911:

“Among my own people I seldom hear purely political discussions….It matters not one iota what political party is in power, or what President holds the reins of office. We are not politicians or public thinkers; we are the rich; we own America; we got it, God knows how; but we intend to keep it if we can by throwing all the tremendous weight of our support, our influence, our money, our political connection, our purchased senators, our hungry congressmen, our public-speaking demagogues (italics mine) into the scale against any legislation, any political platform, any Presidential campaign, that threatens the integrity of our estate.”⁶

Here’s a representative example from one of those public-speaking demagogs, Thomas Carl Rustici, written for The Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty, one of the many think tanks created by the Koch, Bradley, Scaife and other oligarch-funded foundations:

“The Moral Nature of Free Enterprise”

“The ethical trinity of free enterprise consists of political freedom, individual rights, and private property:

“Voluntary cooperation, mutual reciprocity and human respect are its [capitalism’s] guiding principles.

“Force and fraud . . . are inconsistent with free enterprise. Contracts are based upon respect for the property rights of others. Bargaining replaces violence and domination in moral and legal disputes. Honesty and integrity uphold the spirit of contract as well as reinforce human character. Prosperity and social harmony naturally flow from the ethical virtues of free enterprise.

“[Capitalism] directs unbridled human greed into socially beneficial outcomes. The market, then, becomes a win-win process, not a ‘zero sum game’ where the victors plunder the losers in their acquisition of wealth. Both parties to the transaction must gain, or voluntary social cooperation ends.

“Capitalism demolishes all economic barriers unleashing our maximum human potential.

“[Capitalism] also produces international peace. . . . People preoccupied with earning money have little time to engage in warfare.”⁷

About all the author failed to claim for Capitalism was that it contained lanolin and got rid of unwanted facial hair. The equation of capitalism with democracy (in an “ethical trinity”) has become an article of unquestioned faith. In his diary for 1947, Dwight Eisenhower

“summarized his thinking on world affairs . . . ‘The main issue,’ he wrote, ‘is dictatorship versus a form of government only by the consent of the governed, observance of a bill of rights versus arbitrary power of a ruler or ruling group. That the issue is with us needs no argument – the existing great exponent of dictatorship has announced its fundamental antagonism to all sorts of capitalism (essential to democracy) and that it will strive to destroy it in the world.'”⁸

“all sorts of capitalism (essential to democracy)” – the meaning of those parentheses is perfectly clear. They mean, “It goes without saying.” No need to argue the point, or to ponder how several socialist countries had managed to retain democratic governments.

In Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties, the great novelist Robert Stone, who briefly worked for the old New York Daily News, summed up the messages  with which a growing section of the press and media have incessantly bombarded the public, in the interests of promoting the belief that “conservatism” equaled “capitalism” equalled “the American way of life” equalled “democracy”:

“The politics and social perspective of the Daily News were what America calls ‘conservative.’  This meant promoting American capitalism, the most radical transforming power in the history of the world. Familiar social arrangements and structures crumble. The mass of people find themselves dislocated, alienated and disenfranchised in its wake.

“It was the role of papers like the News to nurse and manipulate popular prejudice in its own language and discover sources for the referred pains ‘progress’ caused, sources safely distant from any suggestion of economic injustice. Yet class resentment was too valuable a weapon of the dominant corporate interests to dispense with; they wanted it exploited and intensified, yet separated from the notion that corporate America and its workers could have any conflict of interest.

“Not that the ‘conservative’ popular press was meant to calm suspicion and discontent. On the contrary. Threats were to be detected everywhere – in reefer madness, in immigrants, above all in ameliorative schemes that threatened economic elites. These had to be seen as foreign-inspired swindles and worse. And the opponents of the the status quo had to be identified as ‘phonies,’ do-gooders trying to be smarter than everybody else, professors who’d never made a payroll.”⁹

While increasingly pervasive and sophisticated propaganda has played a part in contemporary Americans’ acceptance of the Free Market religion, and its equation with Conservatism, this confusion started long before the 20th Century. From our national infancy, some observers have noticed that Americans’ single-minded devotion to what they believed to be “The Free Market” might foster the decline of democracy and the rise of a new, oligarchic aristocracy. Looking back, we can see how this came about.

Oligarchs Ascendant

The power of the wealthy is scarcely a recent development. Socrates, living in a world abstemious and stern beyond our imaginations, ascribed the worship of the wealthy, and the development of oligarchical rule, to the people’s fear of “the prospect of misfortune and poverty.”

Not until the 18th Century had humans attained sufficient sway over the natural world to admire wealth for more positive and abstract reasons. In Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith observed, “We frequently see the respectful attentions of the world more strongly directed towards the rich and the great, than towards the wise and the virtuous. . . . The man of rank and distinction . . . is observed by all the world. . . . Every body is eager to look at him, and to conceive, at least by sympathy, that joy and exultation with which his circumstances naturally inspire him.” This admiring recognition, Smith asserted, was “‘the very state which, in all our waking dreams and idle reveries, we had sketched out to ourselves as the final object of all our desires.”¹⁰

John Adams believed that people had motives for “respectful attentions” to the rich beyond a wish for “that joy and exultation” assumed to accompany riches. Luke Mayville, in John Adams and the Fear of American Oligarchy, put those motives thus:

“To put Adams’ view in more contemporary terms, it is not utilitarian pleasure-seeking or a Nietzschean will to dominate that most often motivates us . . . .  Adams believed that the vast majority viewed wealth and other goods of fortune as the surest signs of distinction . . . . most people sought distinction  ‘neither by vices nor virtues; but by the means which common sense and every day’s experience show, are most sure to obtain it; by riches, by family records, by play, and other frivolous personal accomplishments.'”

Thomas Jefferson, true believer in the power of Reason, “believed that education promised to undercut oligarchy and to shift power to the people and their meritocratic representatives. Jefferson had long believed that education could facilitate the selection of virtue and talent by teaching the electorate to weed out tyrannical ambition.” Education, he believed, would do this by giving “them knowledge of those facts, which history exhibiteth, that possessed thereby of the experience of other ages and countries, they may be enabled to know ambition under all its shapes, and prompt to exert their natural powers to defeat its purposes.”

Our more representative founding father Alexander Hamilton (who came by his fortune the old-fashioned way, through currying favor with the powerful and marrying money),

“vigorously assaulted the notion that an aristocracy existed in America. . . . dismissed his opponents’ fears of aristocracy as mere paranoia. It was true that some men were distinguished by qualities such as wealth and wisdom and that others were not, but such distinctions alone did not set men apart from one another politically. Not only did the Constitution proscribe titles of nobility, it also drew no political distinction between social or economic classes. In this context it was delusional to describe the American elite as an ominous ruling class.”

But Adams, not so optimistic about the powers of either Law or Reason over the behavior of the run of humans, wrote in his Defense of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America that people tend to be “too inattentive to public affairs, and too patient under oppression” to resist the patient efforts of the rich to take political control. This inattention to public affairs, in a “modern commercial republic, where democratic leveling had unintentionally made wealth the preeminent marker of distinction and the most exalted object of emulation” suggested to Adams that oligarchy presented a threat to democratic government.¹¹

In Volume II of Democracy in America, French historian and political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville added to Adams’ view of the sources of American attitudes toward wealth with his customary simplicity and clarity:

“Men who live in democratic times have many passions, but most of their passions either culminate or originate in the love of wealth. This is not because their souls are pettier but because money in such circumstances really is more important.

“When citizens are all independent and indifferent, the only way to obtain their cooperation is by paying for it. Hence the uses of wealth are multiplied ad infinitum, and its value is increased.

“Now that the prestige that once attached to ancient things has vanished, men are no longer distinguished by birth, estate, or occupation, or barely are. Money is virtually the only thing that still creates very visible differences among them and sets some apart from their peers. The distinction that is born of wealth is enhanced by the disappearance and diminution of all the others. “¹²

The drive to “succeed” in the material sense soon became paramount in American society. In his Autobiography, P.T. Barnum wrote of what he learned as a young clerk in a country store during the 19th Century’s early days:

“‘It was ‘dog eat dog’ – ‘tit for tat.’ Our cottons were sold for wool, our wool and cotton for silk and linen; in fact nearly everything was different from what it was represented. The customers cheated us in their fabrics; we cheated the customers with our goods. Each party expected to be cheated, if it was possible. Our eyes, and not our ears, had to be our masters. We must believe little that we saw, and less that we heard….Such a school would ‘cut eye-teeth,’ but if it did not cut conscience, morals, and integrity all up by the roots, it would be because the scholars quit before their education was completed.”¹³

The minor dogs began to be collected into packs, then devoured by the great early capitalists, whose ethics offered no improvement over those Barnum had observed in the country store. In The Robber Barons, Matthew Josephson describes the process concisely:

“The most successful of the early industrial pools was formed toward 1880 by the slaughterhouses of Chicago. Here at the natural transshipment center where numerous great railroad trunk lines converged, the grain, produce, cattle and swine of the West seemed to flow toward the world markets as through a bottle-neck held in the hands of packing-houses, elevators and millers. . . .

“Armour, Morris and the other packers . . . at length arrived at a complete ‘gentlemen’s agreement’ which ended all competition between them. Thus unified, the Big Four of meat, as distributors, faced the consumers with their compact organization and fixed price system. On the other hand, as refiners (or ‘processors’) of raw material, they confronted the disorganized producers, that is, the farmers, with the same concealed unanimity. At the stockyards, ever since 1880, according to Charles Edward Russel’s ‘The Greatest Trust in the World,’ only four buyers would come to bid on the cattle offered each morning: ‘The first offers a low price, the second is not interested, the third is not interested, nor is the fourth in a hurry to make a purchase. The next day the buyer for another of the Big Four sets a price, and the other three refuse to buy.'”

The packers were at least providing an actual service to the country. But greater fortunes were to be made without the need to soil one’s hands on anything real. Josephson writes of Jay Gould’s career as a stock manipulator,

“To understand the scope of the man’s tactics one must note that his domination was carried on by strategic “working controls” rather than by ponderous outright investments. . . . He would pursue a deliberate policy of mismanagement ‘as a matter of principle,’ deriving his gains from the discrepancies between the real value of the affair and its supposed or transient value in the security markets. In good times he would give an appearance of gauntness and misery to his enterprise; in bad times he would pretend affluence. . . . At all times, from his position of vantage, he would be as one who deals out marked cards in the game of buying and selling capital, since he would be fully able to foresee the ‘nature, magnitude and incidence’ of all the risks he created. His system could no more fail than loaded dice.”

John Adams’ grandson Henry, viewing the machinations of Gould and others of his ilk, wrote,

“For the first time since the creation of these enormous corporate bodies, one of them has shown its power for mischief, and has proved itself able to override and trample on law, custom, decency, and every restraint known to society, without scruple, and as yet without check. The belief is common in America that the day is at hand when corporations far greater than the Erie [railroad] – swaying power such as has never in the world’s history been trusted in the hands of mere private citizens, controlled by single men like Vanderbilt, or by combinations of men like Fisk, Gould, and Lane [Frederick Lane, counsel to Fisk and Gould on the Erie Railroad], after having created a system of quiet but irresistible corruption – will ultimately succeed in directing government itself. Under the American form of society, there is now no authority capable of effective resistance.”¹⁴

The producing classes attempted to organize to resist such domination. In 1892, the preamble to the People’s Party’s platform began,

“We meet in the midst of a nation brought to the verge of moral, political, and material ruin. Corruption dominates the ballot-box, the Legislatures, the Congress, and touches even the ermine of the bench . . . . The fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few, unprecedented in the history of mankind; and the possessors or these, in turn, despise the republic and endanger liberty. From the same prolific womb of governmental injustice we breed the two great classes – tramps and millionaires.”

While unsuccessful electorally, the populist wave engendered sufficient support to provoke Theodore Roosevelt to make gestures in their direction. But gestures they largely were. Josephson notes,

“The sound and the fury were soon over, long ago. In 1904, the largest contributors to the election campaign chest – from which Roosevelt pruriently turned his eyes away – would be Frick, Harriman, Morgan, Stillman, George J. Gould, H. H. Rogers, Archbold, and H.B. Hyde, the notorious head of the Equitable Life Assurance Society. They had all learned . . . that after furiously advocating reform measures designed to stem radicalism, Roosevelt bestirred himself to conciliate the great industrialists.”¹⁵

Wars also contributed mightily to create or reinforce the riches of the rich. Gould, Jay Cooke, and many others had gotten their starts with profits generated by the Civil War, but it was World War I that swelled the corporate profits to remarkable degrees. Retired General Smedley Butler noted some examples in War Is a Racket:

“Take our friends the du Ponts, the powder people – didn’t one of them testify before a Senate committee recently that their powder won the war? Or something? How did they do in the wart? They were a patriotic corporation. Well, the average earnings of the du Ponts for the period 1910 to 1914 was $6,000,000 a year. It wasn’t much, but the du Ponts managed to get along on it. Now let’s look at their average yearly profit during the war years, 1914 to 1918. Fifty-eight million dollars a year profit, we find! Nearly ten times that of normal times, and the profits of normal times were pretty good. An increase in profits of more than 950 per cent.

“Take one of our little steel companies that so patriotically shunted aside the making of rails and girders and bridges to manufacture was materials. Well, their 1910-1914 yearly earnings averaged $6,000,000. Then came the war. And , like loyal citizens, Bethlehem Steel promptly turned to munitions making. Did their profits jump – or did they let Uncle Sam in for a bargain? Well, their 1914-1918 average was $49,000,000 a year!

“Or, let’s take United States Steel. The normal earnings during the five-year period prior to the war were $105,000,000 a year. Not bad. Then along came the was and up went the profits. The average yearly profit for the period 1914-1918 was $240,000,000. Not bad.”¹⁶

H.W. Brands went further: he suggested pretty strongly that America’s entry into World War I was determined by the financial interests of the great banks:

“In August 1914 Europe went to war. The capitalists soon began floating loans to the belligerents, while the democrats – or most of them, initially – tried to keep the war from sucking America in. The democrats’ avoidance strategy failed, not least because the capitalists’ lending strategy succeeded so well. By early 1917 the bankers had sent some $2.3 billion to Europe, with the overwhelming majority of the money going to Britain and France, which had stronger ties to Wall Street than Germany had (and a more successful naval blockade of enemy ports). A defeat of the British and French, whatever it might do to the balance of military and moral power in Europe, would break the American banks and likely ravage the American economy. Woodrow Wilson was no cat’s paw for the capitalists, but he couldn’t ignore reality, and his policies tilted increasingly toward Britain and France, culminating in American intervention on their side in April 1917.”¹⁷

Many citizens were encouraged by the flood of war-engendered money and the booming post-war stock market to believe they could hitch their wagons to the gravy train, and many did, and a new consumer economy was born. Of course, it had some help.

The first Genius of American advertising, Edward Bernays, showed the way to his many successors. His biographer, Larry Tye, explains the basic principle:

“Most of what Bernays did at the beginning . . . was aimed at helping American industry accommodate to the economic and social changes wrought by World War I. The pattern had been for firms to alter their product line or pitch to fit changing consumer tastes; Bernays believed that, approached the right way, consumers themselves could be made to do the adjusting.”¹⁸

People long used to looking for quality and making their necessary purchases last could be trained to a new set of expectations rather rapidly, as Bernays discovered, and his discovery was not lost on the new captains of industry, such as Alfred P. Sloan of General Motors:

“Before long the engineering motivation [improving performance] for annual model changes gave way to the marketing considerations. Really significant engineering innovations – four-wheel brakes, for example, introduced on Chevrolets is 1928 – were harder to come by than strictly cosmetic style changes. In 1926 GM had established styling as a separate concept, in the Cadillac division; within a short time the notion was applied to the other divisions as well.

“Not deliberately, but naturally, the emphasis on annual style changes downgraded durability as an element in the thinking of GM designers. Henry Ford had wanted his cars to run forever; Alfred Sloan had no such desire. GM cars should run long enough to get their owners to their first trade-in, preferably not more than a few years after purchase. Indeed, the prospect of mounting repair bills would encourage owners to buy a new car.”¹⁹

Even when the capitalist system performed its most spectacular self-immolation, T.R.’s cousin Franklin was able to patch it back together, with the necessary help of WWII. For long years during the 1930s, many feared that some American variety of communism or fascism might permanently overthrow the oligarchy, but a plurality of Americans kept the faith, despite the agonies they were enduring during the Great Depression. Thinking back on those times, John Steinbeck observed,

“most of the so-called Communists I met were middle-class, middle-aged people playing a game of dreams. I remember a woman in easy circumstances saying to another even more affluent: ‘After the revolution even we will have more, won’t we, dear?’ . . . . we didn’t have any self-admitted proletarians. Everyone was a temporarily embarrassed capitalist.”²⁰

Indeed, “Free-Market Capitalism” had become America’s most unshakeable faith, seemingly immune to challenge. Despite his early experiences as a working man and a soldier, my father, for one, accepted the virtues of capitalism and the wisdom of its owners and operators, and the myths of “free enterprise” and The Invisible Hand. “Accepted” is perhaps too mild – he believed in them with a kind of religious certainty and fervor. On his deathbed, he was still cursing Franklin Roosevelt, author of America’s downfall.

Many other Americans shared his beliefs, and so we have plunged on, consuming heroically on cue, leaping after every mechanical market rabbit presented to us until it runs away with our money. Some of the new oligarchs have simply seized upon and applied the lessons of the original Robber Barons to new fields. In Masters of Enterprise, H.W. Brands describes one of the most egregious of these:

“So aggressive was Microsoft’s marketing – or simply so successful – that the company’s competitors cried foul. One practice that particularly galled rivals was an arrangement whereby computer makers paid Microsoft per computer shipped rather than per software package installed. Microsoft defended this practice as an accounting convenience: It was easier to verify the number of machines that went out the door than the contents of disk drives. But to historically aware observers, the effect recalled the ‘draw-back’ John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil got from the railroads on its competitors’ shipments. A computer maker might install a program by a Microsoft competitor, but Gats’s company had to be paid – as of course did the competitor. Not surprisingly this double duty discouraged the installation of those competing programs. Like John D.’s practice, Gates’s eventually provoked such controversy as to force its discontinuance.

“By the 1990s Microsoft’s hold on computer software matched Standard Oil’s grip on petroleum products a hundred years before. ‘By any normal test, Microsoft is a monopoly,’ declared the Economist magazine. ‘This software colossus’s domination of the personal computer’s operating-system market is complete.”

On Wall Street, technology’s ever-metastasizing devotion to increasing speed led to a similar growth of new robber barons, as Michael Lewis noted in Flash Boys: [Regulation NMS, passed by the SEC in 2005]

“had also stimulated a huge amount of stock market trading. Much of the new volume was generated not by old-fashioned investors but by the extremely fast computers controlled by the high-frequency trading firms. Essentially, the more places there were to trade stocks, the greater the opportunity there was for high-frequency traders to interpose themselves between buyers on one exchange and sellers on another. This was perverse. The initial promise of computer technology was to remove the intermediary from the financial market, or at least reduce the amount he could scalp from that market. The reality turned out to be a windfall for financial intermediaries – of somewhere between $10 billion and $22 billion a year, depending on whose estimates you wanted to believe.”

Because the world couldn’t spread its legs fast or wide enough to embrace the computer, and allow it to be inserted into every transaction of whatever nature, it proved to be the ideal device for the Robber Baron approach. The industry itself promptly saw the possibilities for a sort of infinite bait-and-switch strategy, producing New, Improved versions of itself, soft and hard, at an ever-increasing pace, making the planned obsolescence pioneered by GM look slothful. As an increasingly universal and inescapable medium of communication and commerce, it could enrich itself infinitely by taking tiny slices out of each transaction. It was a marketer’s dream.

Hard to say if the explosion of the digital world caused the New, Improved economic model, or merely accompanied it, but in any case they surely complemented each other and led to the same view of Success, as described by Michael Lewis:

“For almost ten years, however, the lucky winners of the Reagan years sent a quite different message to the less fortunate: success was money, and money was made with debt, tax games, paper shuffling, and arrogance. The people listened. And an insidious side effect of the chrome-plated Reagan boom may yet to be fully realized; the average American has been left with a whole new notion of how to succeed.”²¹

The lesson was not limited to the United States. Swedish novelist Arne Dahl described its effects in his country:

“What was happening to Sweden, that little country in the sticks up by the Arctic Circle, whose populist movements had once conceived of the first democracy that truly extended down into the ranks of the people, but that had never brought it to fruition? The country had finagled its way out of the horrors of World War II, kept all its skeletons in the closet, and ended up with a fabulous competitive advantage compared with all other European countries. For that reason, it could play the self-righteous world conscience until other countries, or at least those unhampered by intrinsic sluggishness, caught up; and then Sweden would see the end of not only the world’s highest standard of living but also of its status as the world’s conscience. Swedes’ strange, naive, deterministic conviction that everything would work out for the better meant that during the 1980s they, more than any other people surrendered themselves to international capital, and they let it run more freely there than anywhere else.

“The inevitable downfall brought a decisive collapse of all political control over the fickle whims of computerized capital. Everyone had to pay to clean up the mess – except business. As the country neared bankruptcy, its large-scale companies were maximizing their profits. The burden of payment was placed on households, on the health care system, on education, on culture – on anything that was fairly long term. The slightest suggestion that business ought also to pay for a tiny, tiny bit of the mess it had made was met by unanimous threats of leaving the country.

“All at once the whole population was forced to think of money. The soul of the Swedish people was filled to bursting, from all directions, with financial thoughts, until only the small holes were left unfilled – and there, of course, nothing long-term could find room. There was room only for lotteries, betting, and shitty entertainment on television; love was replaced by idealized soap operas and cable TV porn; the desire for some sort of spirituality was satisfied by prepackaged New Age solutions; all music that reached the public was tailor made for sales; the media stole the language and made themselves the norm; advertisements stole emotions and shifted them away from their proper objects; drug abuse increased considerably.

“The 1990s were the decade when capitalism test-drove a future in which the hordes of lifelong unemployed had to be kept in check so they didn’t revolt. Numbing entertainment, drugs that didn’t require a lot of follow-up care, ethnic conflicts to give rage an outlet, gene manipulation to minimize the future need for health care, and a constant focus on the monthly act of balancing one’s own private finances – would it take anything more to ruin the human soul that had developed over the millennia? Was there still dangerous ground somewhere, where a free, creative, and critical thought could be suppressed and redirected before it had time to flower?”²²

In Boomerang, Michael Lewis observed the effects of unchecked capitalism’s nano-speed paper shuffles in other countries as well:

“When Iceland became a tourist in global high finance . . . . in 2003, [and] sat down at the same table with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, they had only the roughest idea of what an investment banker did and how he behaved – most of it gleaned from young Icelanders’ experiences at various American business schools. And so what they did with money probably says as much about the American soul, circa 2003, as it does about Icelanders. They understood instantly, for instance, that finance had less to do with productive enterprise than trading bits of paper among themselves. And when they lent money they didn’t simply facilitate enterprise but bankrolled friends and family, so that they might buy and own things, like real investment bankers: Beverly Hills condos, British soccer teams and department stores, Danish airlines and media companies, Norwegian banks, Indian power plants.”

In Greece,

“Prime Minister Papandreou presented this bill [raising retirement age, reducing pensions, etc.], as he has presented everything since he discovered the hole in the books, not as his own idea but as a nonnegotiable demand of the IMF’s. The general idea seems to be that while the Greek people will never listen to any internal call for sacrifice they might listen to calls from outside. The is, they no longer really even want to govern themselves.

“Thousands upon thousands of government employees take to the streets to protest the bill. Here is Greece’s version of the Tea Party: tax collectors on the take, public-school teachers who don’t really teach, well-paid employees of bankrupt state railroads whose trains never run on time, state hospital workers bribed to buy overpriced supplies. Here they are, and here we are: a nation of people looking for anyone to blame but themselves.”

In Ireland,

“the vast majority of the construction was being funded by Irish banks. If the real estate market collapsed, those banks would be on the hook for the losses. . . . The banks continued to make worse loans, but the people borrowing the money to buy houses were growing wary . . . . By 2007, Irish banks were lending 40 percent more to property developers alone that they had to the entire Irish population seven years earlier.

“[In 2010] It had been two years since a handful of Irish Politicians and bankers had decided to guarantee all the debts of the biggest Irish banks . . . . A single bank, Anglo Irish . . . confessed to losses of 34 billion euros. To get a sense of how “34 billion euros” sounds to Irish ears, an American thinking in dollars needs to multiply it by roughly one hundred: $3.4 trillion. And that was for a single bank.”

Not even Germany, that paragon of fiscal conservatism and caution, proved immune:

“Extremely smart traders inside Wall Street investment banks devise deeply unfair, diabolically complicated bets, and then send their sales forces out to scour the world for some idiot who will take the other side of those bets.” [When someone in the firm asked who on earth would buy such absurd offerings as Wall Street had descended to making, another traders answer: “The idiots in Dusseldorf”].²³

The disaster that surfaced in 2007 was indeed worldwide, one that affected many countries in many of the same ways and from many of the same causes, and most countries’ responses to it were essentially the same: the bailout of banks “too big to fail” by the taxpayers of each country. The impotence of national governments in the face of organized international capital was made clearly manifest, and the fiction of “the market” – that is, of masses of individual consumers exercising their choices as a determinant of the behavior of capital – was as clearly revealed as a fiction.

That it had been a fiction since at least the 19th Century was remarked on by Garry Wills in Nixon Agonistes:

“influential businessmen did not want the market to work (they could get much greater rewards from monopoly, protectionism, and government contracts than from the ministrations of the Invisible Hand). The growth of American business has little to do with the free market. The reality behind that growth was governmental favoring of manufacture over agriculture  (e.g., in the great preferential tariff fights that led up to the Civil War), governmental expansion at the proddings of commerce (e.g., in the political deals for rail rights and land grants that determined the westward expansion), governmental protection of capital risks abroad by ‘gunboat diplomacy,’ governmental shelter for big combines in turn-of-the-century Supreme Court Decisions . . . .”²⁴

The notions about economic realities that many people continue to cling to with religious fervor are called “conservative.” Those notions were largely based on the fantasies of 18th-Century rationalists and optimists. Whatever tenuous connections they once had with the realities of the behavior of unchecked, de-regulated capital have long ago disappeared, but true believers refuse all evidence of the disappearance. People understandably prefer to believe what they’re told – that their economic system consists of a free market that somehow polices itself, that the masters of that system have risen by their own unaided efforts and because of their superior character and diligence, and that they still live in a democracy.

Faith defies the presentation of any amount of contrary evidence. Nevertheless, calling oligarchy by other names – “Free Market Capitalism,” “Democracy,” “The American Way of Life” – does not change the fact that we pretty much all live in a giant oligarchy, independent of national governments or citizen “inputs,” or of any humanly constructed curbs. It looks likely to me that we have gotten to this condition largely through our own inordinate successes as a species.

“I see an innumerable host of men”

Alexis deTocqueville thought and studied a great deal in the years that followed publication of the first volume of Democracy in America, considering both his direct observations in the United States and events in his native Europe. He was led to foresee some potential dangers for democratic societies and to write of them in the second volume of his remarkable book:

“Give democratic peoples enlightenment and liberty and leave them alone. They will easily manage to extract from this world all the goods it has to offer. They will perfect each of the useful arts and daily make life more convenient, comfortable, and mild. Their social state naturally pushes them in this direction. . . .

“Though man delights in this proper and legitimate search for well-being, there is reason to fear that he may in the end lose the use of his most sublime faculties, and that, while bent on improving everything around him, he may ultimately degrade himself. . . .

“Democracy encourages the taste for material gratifications. If this taste becomes excessive, it soon leads men to believe that everything is mere matter, and materialism in turn adds to the forces that propel pursuit of those same gratifications with wild ardor. Such is the fatal circle into which democratic nations are driven. . . .”

In short, the natural human tendency to make survival less difficult and stressful can easily grow beyond filling real human needs into a passion for ease and excess, and replace all spiritual and social values with that one passion, leading to the decline and fall of the very democratic liberties that allowed that tendency to flourish. Tocqueville continued:

“I am trying to imagine what new features despotism might have in today’s world: I see an innumerable host of men, all alike and equal, endlessly hastening after petty and vulgar pleasures with which they fill their souls. Each of them, withdrawn into himself, is virtually a stranger to the fate of all the others . . . .

“Over these men stands an immense tutelary power, which assumes sole responsibility for securing their pleasure and watching over their fate. It is absolute, meticulous, regular, provident, and mild. It would resemble paternal authority if only its purpose were the same, namely, to prepare men for manhood. But on the contrary, it seeks only to keep them in childhood irrevocably. It likes citizens to rejoice, provided they think only of rejoicing. It works willingly for their happiness but wants to be the sole agent and only arbiter of that happiness. It provides for their security, regulates their successions, and divides their inheritances. Why not relieve them entirely of the trouble of thinking and the difficulty of living?

“Every day it thus makes man’s use of his free will rarer and more futile. It circumscribes the action of the will more narrowly, and little by little robs each citizen of the use of his own faculties. Equity paved the way for all these things by preparing men to put up with them and even to look upon them as a boon.”

While Tocqueville foresaw a sort of benign despotism as one possible outcome of democracy, he can be excused for failing to see some of the other routes to that despotism that liberty and the development of technology would bring about, such as a dramatic reduction in the human death rate and the corresponding explosion of human population. (In 1900, the average newborn could expect to live 32 years. The  child born in 2021 could expect to live for 71 years. Many more people each year surviving into reproductive ages – and so, many more reproducing, and more of their children surviving to do the same.)  In 1958, Aldous Huxley was considering the implications of this explosion:

“On the first Christmas Day the population of our planet was about two hundred and fifty millions – less than half the population of modern China. Sixteen centuries later, when the Pilgrim Fathers landed at Plymouth Rock, human numbers had climbed to a little more than five hundred millions. By the time of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, world population had passed the seven hundred million mark. In 1931, when I was writing Brave New World, it stood at just under two billions. Today, only twenty-seven years later, there are two billion eight hundred thousand of us. . . .

“At the rate of increase prevailing between the birth of Christ and the death of Queen Elizabeth I, it took sixteen centuries for the population of the earth to double. At the present rate it will double in less than half a century. And this fantastically rapid doubling of our numbers will be taking place on a planet whose most desirable and productive areas are already densely populated, whose soils are being eroded by the frantic efforts of bad farmers to raise more food, and whose easily available mineral capital is being squandered with the reckless extravagance of a drunken sailor getting rid of his accumulated pay.

“As the machinery of mass production is made more efficient it tends to become more complex and more expensive – and so less available to the enterpriser of limited means. Moreover, mass production cannot work without mass distribution; but mass distribution raises problems which only the largest producers can satisfactorily solve. In a world of mass production and mass distribution the Little Man, with his inadequate stock of working capital, is at a grave disadvantage. . . . Under a dictatorship the Big Business, made possible by advancing technology and the consequent ruin of Little Business, is controlled by the State – that is to say, by a small group of party leaders and the soldiers, policemen and civil servants who carry out their orders. In a capitalist democracy, such as the United States, it is controlled by what Professor C. Wright Mills has called the Power Elite. This Power Elite directly employs several millions of the country’s working force in its factories, offices and stores, controls many millions more by lending them the money to buy its products, and through its ownership of the media of mass communication, influences the thoughts, the feelings and the actions of virtually everybody. To parody the words of Winston Churchill, never have so many been manipulated so much by so few. We are far indeed from Jefferson’s ideal of a genuinely free society composed of a hierarchy of self-governing units – ‘the elementary republics of the wards, the county republics, the State republics and the Republic of the Union, forming a gradation of authorities.’

“Self-government is in inverse ratio to numbers. The larger the constituency, the less the value of any particular vote. When he is merely one of millions, the individual elector feels himself to be impotent, a negligible quantity. The candidates he has voted into office are far away, at the top of the pyramid of power. Theoretically they are the servants of the people; but in fact it is the servants who give orders and the people, far off at the base of the great pyramid, who must obey. Increasing population and advancing technology have resulted in an increase in the number and complexity of organizations, an increase in the amount of power concentrated in the hands of officials and a corresponding decrease in the amount of control exercised by electors, coupled with a decrease in the public’s regard for democratic procedures. Already weakened by the vast impersonal forces at work in the modern world, democratic institutions are now being undermined from within by the politicians and their propagandists.”²⁵

Were most humans Huxleys, we might have taken note of the dangerous implications of our triumphs over various threats to our health and survival. Most humans are not so rational as Huxley, and perhaps no degree of rationality is capable of countering the pressures of biology toward reproducing ourselves. (In his Republic, Plato recalls, “I remember someone asking Sophocles, the poet, whether he was still capable of enjoying a woman. ‘Don’t talk that way,’ he answered; ‘I am only too glad to be free of all that; it is like escaping from bondage to a raging madman.'”)²⁶

Beyond bondage to our biological imperatives, most of our history as a species has impelled us toward growth. In a profound essay, “Simplicity,” Scott Russell Sanders wrote,

“It seems that our evolutionary history has shaped us to equate well-being with increase, to yearn not merely for more offspring but more of everything, more shoes and meat and horsepower and loot. In a hunting and gathering society, the fruits of an individual’s search for more food, better tools, and richer land were shared with the tribe. The more relentless the search, the more likely the tribe would flourish. As a result of that history, observes anthropologist Lionel Tiger, ‘We are calculating organisms exquisitely equipped to desire more and truculent and grim about enduring less.’

“How much any group can accumulate or use is limited, of course, by its level of technology. Hunters on foot armed with stone-tipped weapons can wipe out wooly mammoths and giant beavers; they can open up grasslands by burning; they can alter the mix of plants in their home territory; but they can’t turn a mountain inside out in search of glittering metal or erase a forest or poison the sea. The harnessing of mechanical power dramatically increased our ability to make the world over to suit ourselves; the rise of towns enabled us to pile up wealth, since we no longer had to haul it from campsite to campsite. I suspect that we’re no more greedy than our ancestors, no more eager for comfort, only far more potent in pursuing our desires.

“The constant hankering for more, which served hunting and gathering peoples well, has become a menace in this age of clever machines and burgeoning populations. Our devotion to growth endangers the planet, by exhausting resources and accelerating pollution and driving other species to extinction; it upsets community, by swelling the scale of institutions and settlements beyond reach of our understanding; and it harms the individual, by encouraging a scramble for possessions and a nagging discontent even in the midst of plenty.”²⁷

It seems that the drive of biological life to reproduce itself, coupled with our long history of (mostly) precarious, bare survival, our discoveries of the inner workings of our world and ourselves, our courageous efforts to create systems of democratic self-government, have combined to bring forth ever larger and more complex systems in most branches of human endeavor. In 1968’s The New Industrial State, John Kenneth Galbraith summed up this development and one of its results:

“Seventy years ago the corporation was still confined to those industries – railroading, steam navigation, steel-making, petroleum recovery and refining, some mining – where, it seemed, production had to be on a large scale. Now it also sells groceries, mills grain, publishes newspapers and provides public entertainment, all activities that were once the province of the individual proprietor or the insignificant firm. The largest firms deploy billions of dollars’ worth of equipment and hundreds and thousands of men in scores of locations to produce hundreds of products. In 1968, the five hundred largest industrial corporations had two-thirds (64 percent) of all industrial sales in the United States.

“Large-scale organization also requires autonomy. The intrusion of an external and uninformed will is damaging. In the non-Soviet systems this means excluding the nonparticipating capitalist from effective power. But the same imperative operates in the socialist economy. There the business firm seeks to minimize or exclude control by the official bureaucracy. To gain autonomy for the enterprise is what, in substantial measure, the modern Communist theoretician calls reform. Nothing in our time is more interesting than that the erstwhile capitalist corporation and the erstwhile Communist firm should, under the imperatives of organization, come together as oligarchies of their own members. Ideology is not the relevant force. Large and complex organizations can use diverse knowledge and talent and thus function effectively only if under their own authority. This, it must be stressed once more, is not autonomy that subordinates a firm to the market. It is autonomy that allows the firm authority over its planning.”²⁸

Much earlier, deTocqueville foresaw that the general sort of large-scale organization beginning to take shape in his day would lead to oligarchy (which he called “aristocracy . . . based on trade”):

“While the worker increasingly concentrates his intellect on the study of single details, the master daily surveys a much vaster range of things, and his mind expands as the worker’s contracts. Before long, the worker has no need of anything but physical strength without intelligence; the master needs science, and almost genius, in order to succeed. One comes more and more to resemble the administrator of a vast empire, and the other to resemble a brute.

“In this respect, therefore, master and worker are not alike at all, and with each passing day they become increasingly different. They are joined only in the sense of being the two extreme links of a long chain. Each one occupies a place that is made for him, which he does not leave. One is in a state of constant, strict, and necessary dependence on the other and seems born to obey, as the other seems born to command.

“What is this, if not aristocracy?

“The aristocracy that is based on trade almost never settles amidst the industrial population that it directs. Its goal is not to govern that population but to use it.”²⁹

That separation has only increased, as the new aristocracy of capitalism has grown increasingly concerned, not with productive enterprise, but with the twin worlds of speculative finance and digital manipulation. These days, the actual bosses, the billionaires in control of multinational corporations, occupy places they’ve made for themselves, farther and farther beyond any possible curbs that management and labor might impose, or controls national governments might seek to exercise.

Much of the developed, democratic world has begun reacting to this state of affairs in similar ways, embracing reactionary demagogues who promise to somehow reverse the present and reinstitute one or another romanticized version of the past. Mussolini and Hitler pioneered this Big Con in the last century, and another ghastly version occurred toward the end of that century in Cambodia, here summarized by Canadian writer Brian Fawcett:

“The Khmer Rouge regime of 1975-1979 consciously attempted to return Cambodia to the mysteries of Lokeshvara, and to the glories of Angkor Wat. In order to accomplish this, they tried to change both word and world. Prior to the Khmer Rouge coming to power, the Cambodian word for revolution had a conventional meaning: Bambahbambor – ‘Uprising,’ ‘reconstruction.’ Under Pol Pot’s regime, the word for revolution became pattivattana – ‘return to the past.’

“The logic of the Khmer Rouge atrocities is so simple I have to repeat it to avoid any mistakes about what it was. They were rooting out and exterminating all that was not purely and indigenously ignorant of modern urban civilization. If a person could perform any task that was not done in the twelfth century reign of Suryavram II, that person was a traitor. A Khmer Rouge slogan says it all:

            Preserve them – no profit

            Exterminate them – no loss

            We will burn the old grass and the new will grow.”³⁰

The legacy of Mussolini’s and Hitler’s regimes needn’t be rehearsed. The Khmer Rouge managed to murder about a quarter of the country’s population. The glories of imagined pasts not only prove inaccessible, the demagogs who put them on offer seem instead to reliably provide nightmares in the present.

No demonstrations of nightmarish outcome seem adequate to dissuade large numbers of people from embracing the next demagog to try the Golden Age pitch. Ben Bradlee, Jr. spent a good deal of time listening to supporters of Donald Trump after the 2016 election, and wrote about their reasons for that support:

“Tiffany Cloud, fifty, is a politically active housewife and one-time advertising executive married to a former Army Special Operations officer who did two tours of duty in Iraq and one in Afghanistan . . . she thinks the following conclusions can be drawn as to why she and others supported [Trump]: “There was a nostalgia to bring America back to a more familiar time of yesteryear, as personified by Trump’s ‘Make America Great Again’ slogan . . . “

Her husband Erik Olsen concurred:

“‘When I heard that slogan, it harkened back to the past, and you remembered a different time – when you knew your neighbor, bringing us back to international prominence, not apologizing for mistakes we made in the Middle East, and being proud to be Americans, as opposed to not being proud.'”

“Brian Langan, fifty-seven, recently retired after working as a detective with the Pennsylvania State Police for more than twenty-five years. . . . Trump seemed a good cultural fit for Brian too. He liked the candidate’s ‘Make America Great Again’ slogan for the nostalgia it evoked for better, simpler times. ‘When I went to school, I believed America was founded for good, always wanted to do good; we helped others and went to war for other countries.'”³¹

People have imagined and yearned for a Golden Age at least since the days of Hesiod and the book of Genesis, so Cloud and the Langans can perhaps be excused. But the desire for “better, simpler times, “as reflected in simplified fantasies about our history, recalls the great college president George Norlin’s remark that “Who knows only his own generation remains always a child.”

To call this sort of fantasizing about an idyllic past or the possibility of somehow returning to it “Conservative” is a dangerous distortion of the word.

“to ensure that future harvests are not jeopardized”

In the second volume of Democracy in America, Tocqueville wrote,

“I showed earlier that democratic peoples have a taste and often a passion for general ideas. . . . This love of general ideas manifests itself in democratic languages through the constant use of generic terms and abstract words and by the way in which these are used. . . .”

I quoted a fine example of “the constant use of generic terms and abstract words” in Rustici’s “The Moral Nature of Free Enterprise”: 

“Force and fraud . . . are inconsistent with free enterprise. Contracts are based upon respect for the property rights of others. Bargaining replaces violence and domination in moral and legal disputes. Honesty and integrity uphold the spirit of contract as well as reinforce human character. Prosperity and social harmony naturally flow from the ethical virtues of free enterprise.”

Tocqueville continued,

“Such abstract words, which are so common in democratic languages and which are used constantly without being linked to any particular fact, both magnify thought and cast a veil over it. They make the expression more rapid and the idea less clear. When it comes to language, however, democratic peoples prefer obscurity to effort . . . . An abstract word is like a box with a false bottom: you can put in any ideas you please and take them out again without anyone being the wiser.”

So with Rustici’s oration.

“Force and fraud . . . are inconsistent with free enterprise. Contracts are based upon respect for the property rights of others . . . Honesty and integrity uphold the spirit of contract as well as reinforce human character. Prosperity and social harmony naturally flow from the ethical virtues of free enterprise.”

Taken one by one, these propositions sound grand and convincing – until we notice that none of the admirable virtues listed – respect for property rights of others, honesty, integrity – has been shown to be connected in any way with “unbridled free enterprise.” The writer just assumes they are, and expects his conviction to convince us without the need for any sort of specific examples or arguments. “Prosperity and social harmony naturally flow from the ethical virtues of free enterprise.” As, for instance, during the Pullman Strike, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, the Great Depression?

So with the word “conservative.” Grover Norquist, always referred to by the media as a “Conservative,” is probably best known for his sentiment, “My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.” Clearly, he wishes to take the country to a state of anarchy, which is about as far from the intentions of the framers of the Constitution as it’s possible to go. His contempt for any sort of organized authority is echoed by another activist widely described as “Conservative,” Rush Limbaugh: “Government is not capable of caring. Government gets things done through coercion. They fine, they penalize, they tax, they confiscate, they jail, they bully to get what they want.” In other words, Government (otherwise known as “they”) is of no use to people, it exists only to exert its (or their) will by coercion and threat, and never provides any services of any use to its citizens.

How such sweeping rejections of the entire idea that government can have any legitimacy or use can be called “conservative” is beyond me, but these sorts of sweeping generalization are the first choice of the sorts of “conservatives” who have come to embody the word.

Their second most treasured technique is that of unsupported vilification and name-calling. Limbaugh provides a typical example: “When I talk to people who believe in this global warming crap… it’s fake science. They may have educations and degrees that say they are scientists, but they’re not. They’re political hacks and leftists.”

No effort is made to support the characterization of global warming as “crap,” except to call it “fake science.” This has become a nearly automatic technique of denigration in recent years – just put “fake” in front of whatever you wish to disparage, and, Presto! It’s disparaged! If those disparaged attempt to point out that they’ve spent years studying the problem under discussion and that their studies have been declared sound by experts in the field, they are answered with more name-calling: “political hacks and leftists.” No attempt is made to support these slanders. Centuries of development of logic and standards of legitimate argument are ignored by those calling themselves “conservative.”

Not that the taste for generalization and sweeping abstraction is limited to “conservatives.” In his inaugural address, John Kennedy famously bellowed, “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” The “friends” we would support in the service of liberty’s success in those days included the Shah of Iran, the Somoza family dictatorship of Nicaragua, and the Diem family dictatorship of Vietnam.

Tocqueville remarked that “Americans, who generally conduct business in clear, incisive language . . . are likely to go in for bombast when they attempt a poetic style.” More than a century later, Dave Barry noticed and more precisely named the tendency, this time in a speaker normally called an Extreme Liberal:

“The Reverend Jesse Jackson . . . could really rouse a crowd. . . . You’d go to hear him speak, and you’d think, ‘Wow!’ And then later you’d review your notes, and you’d realize that his most mesmerizing lines appeared to have been produced by the Random Rhyming Big Word Generator (‘The revolution of the institution depends on the evolution of the Constitution!’).”³²

Tocqueville attributed this taste for bombast to the tendency in Democratic societies for

“each citizen [to be] usually preoccupied with something quite insignificant: himself. If he lifts up his eyes, he sees only one immense image, that of society, or the even larger figure of the human race. He has either very particular and very clear ideas or very general and very vague notions; there is nothing in between. Once drawn out of himself, therefore, he invariably expects that someone is going to set before him some prodigious thing to behold.”

Those who seek to curry the favor of such citizens, then, whether they call themselves or are called Liberal or Conservative, find it wise to make use of massive abstractions which, if you examine them, can mean anything, and so essentially mean nothing. That last is equally true of the abstractions “Liberal” and “Conservative.” If they have any meaning left, it is usually to identify which gang one belongs to. Are you a Shark, or a Jet?

Here is one example of what some actual conservatives sound like, as reported in The Quoddy Tides, one of the handful of surviving local newspapers:

“Maine’s Lobster Zone A Council met on February 7 at Washington Academy, together with representatives from the Maine Department of Marine Resources, to consider the current proposal . . .  to ensure that future harvests are not jeopardized by current practices. . . . The concern is that smaller lobsters are not permitted sufficient time to reproduce . . . before they reach legal size to be sold to consumers . . . . The minimum size is now set to increase [in] . . . 2025 by 1/16th of an inch. . . .  Similarly, the trap’s escape vent is set to increase. . . . in 2028. . . . Those participating in the discussion also questioned whether the escape vent increase would make a difference, with one commenting that he had installed multiple escape vents but still pulled up traps ‘full of undersized,’ observing that in that case there was ‘no room left for the legal catch’. . . . Similar discussions with other Maine lobster zone councils are being held. . . . “³³

“to ensure that future harvests are not jeopardized by current practices” – could there be a better example of conservatism than that? And rather than conducting their discussion with grandiose declarations about “Ecology,” “Free Enterprise,” or “The Environment,” they conduct it by talking about differences of sixteenths of an inch in legal catch and escape vent sizes, and the very specific effects of those differences. Their talk is based not on ideological principle, but on directly observed and experienced facts, considered from the perspective of generations of learning how to support themselves and their families within the realities of the natural world. No one during the discussion suggested strangling the regulatory body (the Maine Department of Marine Resources) in its bathtub, or questioned its right to regulate the lobster fishery. In other words, these self-employed, small business persons had recognized at some point, and continued to recognize without need for debate, the necessity of creating a body to regulate their economic behavior so that they and their descendants might be able to continue to engage in it.

When I was very young, during and shortly after the Second World War, my dad used to take me with him to work in our neighborhood’s victory garden, which occupied about three quarters of a city block just up the alley from our house. Dad and many of our neighbors had turned this vacant lot into a small, very productive farm that provided vegetables and fruits for many families. I’m pretty sure they kept it going for a while, but not for very many years after the war and its food shortages ended, and people set out to make their individual piles.

I’ve been happy to see that more and more of my neighbors these days are turning parts of their yards into vegetable gardens, many of them offering their crops free to anyone who can use them. I’ve been grateful to discover, many a snowy morning, that some anonymous neighbor has shoveled not only his own walk, but mine, and sometimes the whole side of the street. These are neighborly things people used to do pretty much automatically, and I’m especially happy to see them happening again with no apparent organized or publicized impetus. My neighbors are just deciding that acting for the good of neighbors is worth doing.

Now that I’m too decrepit to do much maintenance on my home, I’ve had to hire various sorts of work people to keep the place afloat, and I’ve found, to my happy surprise, a whole set of younger workers (well, hell, that would include about everyone – say, rather, “workers in their twenties and thirties”) who quite obviously care about what they’re doing enough to have become better than competent, and who work hard but mindfully, and stand behind their work, and carefully clean up after themselves. Most of these people are clearly more than intelligent enough to have gone to college and become whizzes at whatever the latest in technology has to offer. Instead, they’ve been intelligent enough to learn a skill that, whatever wonders and whatever further distractions from reality AI may provide, people are still going to need.

Just before the pandemic shut down many of the country’s retail businesses, two local restauranteurs bought our local corner coffee shop. When retail business suddenly plummeted, they did not join the anti-vaccine, anti-mask, pandemic-denial crowd. Instead, they put their menu on line and created a small retail grocery business from scratch, from which people could order staples, including fresh vegetables and fruits and bathroom and cleaning supplies, on line or by telephone, and pick them up with the absolute minimum of human contact. This provided a welcome service to people in (and eventually outside) the neighborhood and allowed the new restaurant to stay in business and keep a number of people employed.

In other words, those owners desired their investment to survive and support itself through an unpredictable period, and they succeeded in bringing that about by seeing the real needs created in their customer base by the shutdown, meeting those needs, and creating a “socially beneficial outcome . . . a win-win process,” in Rustici’s words. As one of them told an interviewer, “”We’re not going to get rich during these days but we’re making it and we’re going to be sustainable and we look forward to what’s on the other side.” They had not begun the enterprise from “unbridled greed,” but with a desire to create an establishment that would serve as a community meeting place as well as a restaurant, such as they had previously created in the center of downtown, one which encouraged customers to linger in conversation, rather than driving them through their meals and out the door to free up tables for the next set of customers.

My city has been widely recognized as the happy home of all sorts of bigotry and prejudice, yet it has elected one of those restauranteurs, Yemi Mobolade, who also happens to be a Nigerian immigrant married to a white woman, to the office of Mayor. That election brought forth a very brief startle response in the news media, but it strikes me as evidence that a lot of my fellow citizens can still recognize truly conservative acts when they see them.

Tocqueville believed voluntary associations, not only for business purposes, but in the interest of all sorts of civic needs, had been brought to a high level in the America of his day. To illustrate the kind of voluntary association among private citizens that he found of paramount value to a democratic society, Tocqueville cited (to his own bemused surprise) the temperance movement:

“The first time I heard it said that in the United States a hundred thousand men and women had taken a public pledge not to consume strong liquor, the idea struck me as more amusing than serious, and at first I failed to see clearly why such temperate citizens were not content to drink water at home.

“Ultimately I understood that these hundred thousand Americans, frightened by the inroads that drunkenness was making around them, wished to give their patronage to sobriety. They behaved precisely as a great noble would do in dressing very simply in order to inspire contempt for luxury in ordinary citizens.”

Providing good examples of desirable behavior gave way to coercive violence and legislation by Carrie Nation’s day, but that development was not inevitable, and it doesn’t refute Tocqueville’s valuation of voluntary associations.

Writing of the especial need democracies have to retain “spiritualist” beliefs as a counter to the materialism he feared might come to dominate democratic societies, Tocqueville wrote,

“What I am about to say will do me no good in the eyes of politicians. I believe that the only effective way for governments to honor the dogma of the immortality of the soul is to act every day as though they believed in it themselves. And I believe that it is only by conforming scrupulously to religious morality in great affairs that they can boast of teaching citizens to know it, love it, and respect it in small ones.”

I would counter that only by living their daily lives with mutual care and respect can the people of this country ever hope to create leaders who will govern with those same qualities.

I’ve been going on about the Big Picture, but I’m not really a big picture guy, and I have no big antidotes to our occupation by oligarchy, or to the predominance of Doublethink and Newspeak, to offer. Like most people, I live on a pretty small scale. Friends, family, neighborhood – that’s about as big as my picture gets, about as far as my influence is likely to spread.

That doesn’t mean that I give up, or that I see no hope. The hope I see lies in the true conservatism exemplified by those lobster fishers, those restauranteurs, those neighbors and craftspeople, those temperance pledgers. I’m sure you can add your own examples of people in your town or county or state acting to conserve what’s worth conserving, to do business not only for profit but for the good of the community, to perform public examples of what they think is desirable behavior.

The oligarchs will do what they do, doubtless bringing the world economy crashing down around us (once again), and the talking heads will spout their grandiloquent generalizations, increasingly unmoored from demonstrable facts. But I hope that there will remain sufficient kernels of sanity and decency within what Graham Greene dubbed “the torturable class” – meaning “most of us” – to sprout again after the crash. I take that hope from the examples I see with my own eyes, and from what Will Durant concluded in his History of Civilization:

“Perhaps the cause of our contemporary pessimism is our tendency to view history as a turbulent stream of conflicts – between individuals in economic life, between groups in politics, between creeds in religion, between states in war. This is the more dramatic side of history; it captures the eye of the historian and the interest of the reader. But if we turn from that Mississippi of strife, hot with hate and dark with blood, to look upon the banks of the stream, we find quieter but more inspiring scenes: women rearing children, men building homes, peasants drawing food from the soil, artisans making the conveniences of life, statesmen sometimes organizing peace instead of war, teachers forming savages into citizens, musicians taming our hearts with harmony and rhythm, scientists patiently accumulating knowledge, philosophers groping for truth, saints suggesting the wisdom of love. History has been too often a picture of the bloody stream. The history of civilization is a record of what happened on the banks.”

As I approach the end of this, an eclipse of the sun has reached its completion. The sun will re-emerge presently. It always has. So far.

***

End Notes

1 Joyce Cary, To Be a Pilgrim, (London, Michael Joseph, 1942)

2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservatism

3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiscal_conservatism

4 https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2019/jul/29/tweets/republican-presidents-democrats-contribute-deficit/.

5 Marilynne Robinson,The Death of Adam, (Houghton Mifflin, 1998)

6 Frederick Townsend Martin, The Passing of the Idle Rich, (Londo Hodder&Stoughton, 1911)

7 Thomas Carl Rustici, “The Moral Nature of Free Enterprise,” quoted in Larry Beinhart, Fog Facts, (NY,Nation Books, 2005)

8 H.W. Brands, The Devil We Knew, (Oxford & NY, Oxford U.P., 1993)

9 Robert Stone, Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties, (NY, Harper Collins, 2007)

10 Adam Smith,The Theory of Moral Sentiments, (Cambridge, Cambridge U. P., 2002)

11 Luke Mayville, John Adams and the Fear of American Oligarchy, (Princeton, Princeton U.P., 2018)

12 de Tocqueville, Alexis, Democracy in America, Volume Two, (Ypsilanti MI, Library of the Americas, 2012)                  
13 Werner, M.R., Barnum, (NY, Harcourt, Brace, 1924)

14 Josephson, Matthew, The Robber Barons, (NY, Harcourt, Brace, 1934)

15 Brands, H. W., American Colossus, (NY, Doubleday, 2010)

16 Butler, Smedley, War Is a Racket, (Port Townsend WA.Feral House, 2003)

17 Brands, H. W., The Money Men, (NY, Norton, 2006)

18 Tye, Larry, The Father of Spin, (NY, Crown, 1998)

19 Brands, H.W., Master of Enterprise, (NY, Free Press, 1999)

20 Steinbeck, John, “A Primer on the 30s,” Esquire, June 1, 1960

21 Lewis, Michael, The Money Culture, (NY, Norton, 1991)

22 Dahl, Arne, Misterioso, (NY, Pantheon, 2011)

23 Lewis, Michael, Boomerang, (London, Allen Lane, 2011)

24 Wills, Garry, Nixon Agonistes, (NY, Houghton Mifflin, 1970)

25 Huxley, Aldous, Brave New World Revisited, (NY, Harper, 1958)

26 Cornfeld, Francis MacDonald, tr, The Republic of Plato, (Oxford&NY, Oxford UP, 1945)

27 Sanders, Scott Russell, “Simplicity,” reprinted in Anca Rosu/Wendolyn Tetlow,New Affinities, (Boston, Pearson Custom Publishing, 2001)

28 Galbraith, John Kenneth, The New Industrial State, 2nd Edition, Revised, (NY, Houghton-Mifflin, 1971)

29 de Tocqueville, Alexis, op cit

30 Fawcett, Brian, Cambodia: A Book for People Who Find Television Too Slow, (NY, Grove Press, 1986)

31 Bradlee, Jr., Ben, The Forgotten, (Boston, Little Brown, 2018)

32 Barry, Dave, Dave Barry Hits Below the Beltway, (NY, Random House, 2001)

33 Rule, J.D.,  “Fishermen consider regulations as juvenile lobster numbers drop,”The Quoddy Tides,  Vol. 56, No. 7, 23 February, 2024, (Eastport, ME)