The Race to the Bottom Has Accelerated
Just when we thought it couldn’t get any worse, it did. Trump gave Putin the green light to attack NATO with impunity should he win in November. The Democrats tried to outflank the Republicans on immigration in a misguided attempt to seize the low ground. And President Biden found a way to make his election even more problematic with his overreaction to being let off the hook for mishandling classified documents. If this were soccer we’d call these “own goals.” It’s unfortunately more fitting in the U.S. to term them self-inflicted gunshot wounds.
But the worse news for us at Revelatur was the emergence of a chilling hypothesis. Based on our modeling and analyses, we now conclude that American plutocrats and oligarchs are focusing on a new objective with horrific and far-reaching implications.
They envision the future United States as a pure economic entity connected only by monetary interests and governed in a manner to optimize the economic interests of the elite. The government they seek will not validate or recognize societal interests as a basis for decision making, nor will it accept claims to human rights as a basis for justice. Our analysis further concludes that they not only want this, but they also intend it, they have a strategy to achieve their aims, they are deploying the strategy largely without us perceiving it, and it’s working!
The cover term they use for this objective is “limited government,” by which we thought — because they want us to — included primarily reduced regulation and oversight of business, and less intrusion into individual lives. All the dust the left kicks up about things like the Republicans’ abortion position being thus hypocritical obscures the major move the right is making, which is to totally invalidate America as a society and dismantle all aspects of government which support “the people” and our society. They will not rest until there are no more social support programs, and the Executive Branch is reduced to a mammoth “Department of Defense and Security Services.”
Trump’s NATO stance, the right’s immigration focus, and the continuous effort to scale back or eliminate Social Security, Medicare, the Affordable Care Act, etc., are thus not primarily meanness at the level of the money people. They’re not that concerned with people to feel that emotion. Rather, they’re the results of a soulless, self-justifying financial or market “rationality” that makes perfect sense to the elite because they live in a different world than you and I do.
Now, with people like Trump, it is a hate and narcissism that just happens to align with what plutocrats need in their politicians. And MAGA are just the useful idiot shock troops motivated by fear, hatred, and jealousy whose large numbers support the right’s intended illusion that a large percentage of Americans support their intentions for American society and government. The fact is that the majority of MAGA has no idea what their masters intend, nor do they understand the implications for themselves and their descendants.
These symbiotic elements on the right were always meant for each other but couldn’t hook up until Fox News and social media provided them a free organizing mechanism and made them feel justified. And boy what a beautiful day that was for them.
How did we get here? We’ve got to go back a bit to the emergence of Neoliberalism in the mid 20thCentury. Neoliberalism started out innocuously enough. It was initially an ‘outside the mainstream’ critique of socialism and mid 20th century capitalism from two mediocre economists – Fredrick Hayek and Milton Friedman – who fancied themselves renaissance men. But the money people saw promise in their theories, tossed them over the wall to their emergent think tank network, and laundered them as policy.
And the left watched the creeping stain and did, well, bupkis. Well, it’s worse than that. The left keeps tacking its policies closer to whatever neoliberals advocate, which has pulled the center left to the right of where the Republican Party Center was until the 1980s.
The result? The worst inequality at least since the 19th century robber barons, the world’s highest rates of substance abuse, declining life expectancy, horrific incarceration rates for African Americans, normalized gun violence. And a country one election away from becoming a banana republic.
During this 60+-year process, neoliberalism evolved from a primarily economic concept into a complete societal organizing principle. At its broadest, it is a socio-political theory of everything that includes a nested political system (autocratic democracy), an economic system (crony capitalism), and a cultural ethos (survival of the fittest) with relatively defined roles for the elite, middle class, and masses.
Neoliberalism was initially sold as an incremental update of classical liberalism designed primarily to correct for government overshoot in social and oversight programs. However, the difference between them in value foundation is profound. Whereas liberalism is a politically idealistic approach and framework, neoliberalism takes the political realism approach. They are complete opposites – not cousins. For instance, Machiavelli is the “Ur” neoliberal, and Fascism is the form of government most suited to its aims.
And if you want to go way back to find the source of the values disconnect, the replacement of Catholic and mainline Protestantism’s central precept of atonement by Luther’s “Justification by Faith” was the beginning of the theological slide whose absurdity has brought us to the current neoliberal and fundamental Christian justification: “In the beginning was the Market, and the Market was with God, and the Market was God.” Sound blasphemous? It is! That’s the point we’re making. But the blasphemy is not in the act of pointing it out – it’s in holding the belief!
Over time, partly by the contingencies of history, partly as a direct result of hardening mores of the plutocrats, partly based on the enthusiastic reception from MAGA, and partly due to lack of pushback from Democrats, liberals and progressives, neoliberalism has morphed into a political theology and social control system so binding that more people can envision the end of the world than the end of capitalism.
Absent either the tempering effects previously provided by religion or political idealism, the worst aspects of pure finance rationale have combined with really bad people to form a powerful movement that will eventually burn itself out, but not before making life on the planet much worse or extinguishing it entirely.
The epitome of neoliberalism is Private Equity (PE), the soulless financial firms whose point in life is to optimize the ROI of every dollar. PE -- and most corporations -- adhere to economist Michael Jensen’s contribution to neoliberalism – the maximizing of shareholder value as the single objective function of the corporation, or what is known as “shareholder capitalism.”
The U.S. is supposed to have the greatest economy in world history. Ever wonder why most Americans don’t believe this to be true? It’s because the U.S. is actually an extraction economy little different than Russia and the Middle Eastern oil producing nations we like to make fun of.
The difference is that the U.S. extraction economy version is based primarily on income taxes – like old feudal systems, rather than natural resources. However, an extraction economy based on taxation will not work much longer – because there will not be enough income to extract sufficient taxes from for the plutocrats to get richer!
And we at Revelatur thought for some time that the shrinking of the income tax base would eventually stop the right’s extraction efforts. But they’re increasingly funding and tapping into digital and pure finance streams such as derivatives. The point being, there doesn’t even have to be a real economy to back any of it up for plutocrats to thrive.
For a time, debt can make up for the lost taxation revenue stream. Debt is a powerful mechanism plutocrats use to keep the non-elites in line – maintaining the long running U.S. confidence game in which you just must believe and work hard and you’ll “make it.” Of course, if you’ve cracked an economics textbook, you know that debt without income has a limit, but the plutocrats don’t care because, well, they don’t care. Remember, they lead different lives than we do. For them, there is never a reckoning, there is never personal accountability, there is never a bill that cannot be paid.
The right will keep running full tilt boogie in the direction they’re heading until they meet a superior force – and that force does not exist at this time. That being the case, they can just keep going until they see serious signs of a revolution, and then they can either dial it back or take the revolution head on because, even if they lose, they’ll still have all their money and the rest of us will have to start all over economically.
This hypothesis also helps make sense of the near-total national political gridlock. It appears to us as more likely than not that the U.S. is not too big to govern as is so often averred, it’s too big of an extraction target to leave alone! Both political parties are extracting exactly what they want from the system, it’s just “the people” -- you remember them from the Constitution – who aren’t getting what they want from their “representatives.”
The political theater before us – the right pretending to govern within the Constitution and aligned to American values when the total opposite is the truth; and the Democrats working so hard to pretend that they really are the party of the people – all this dissonance leaves no forward momentum for getting anything done by politicians except personal enrichment.
Aristotle thought that democracy was a worse system of government than monarchy or aristocracy because it was uniquely susceptible to corruption. I never understood what he meant until recently. He, and most political scientists, are political idealists. But the power holders have not been – they don’t have to be – they are political realists following their hero Machiavelli.
And idealists are at a distinct disadvantage in this fight. First, they must define a good system. Then they must wrest power from realists to constitute it. What was accomplished along this line, culminating in the developed democracies of the west, took two thousand years of engineering, war, hard work, and sacrifice. After that, idealists must defend the system continuously. All the realists have to do is find and support each other, a much simpler proposition.
The military finds it useful – indeed critical -- to delineate all the forces that impact victory and defeat. This list extends beyond the combatants, in which your side is always termed the “blue force,” and the enemy the “red force.” In modern warfare, and particularly in insurgencies (the right is conducting an insurgency against the American people, our way of life, and the government), neutral forces are labeled “green.” Clearly Republicans are red in the current scenario.
However, contrary to popular belief and self-designation, Democrats are not blue force. Rather, we designate them “green” for a neutral force, because while the right has declared war on Democrats, Democrats are not actually responding within any type of military or war paradigm. Same goes with the press. The only real blue force in the U.S. is the percentage of “the people” who remain political idealists. These are mainly progressives, and they are not combined at this point into a single cohesive force.
One reason we validate the green force designation for the Democratic Party is its actions. For instance, President Biden and the party caving to Republican immigration bullshit demoralizes and undermines blue force, and should the proposed policy become law, would actually reduce blue force combat power. This is not the action of a force that realizes its adversary is dead set on exterminating it.
Another is that a force is defined by its objectives. Clearly the major objective Biden and the Democratic Party share is power. And in this they are no different than the right, and therefore cannot make a stronger claim to virtue and righteousness. They would have to adopt and fight for the same objectives as blue force to “be” blue force. We would need to see them doing everything they can to reverse Republican gains such as the recent tax cuts -- and going hard after programs the people desire -- such as abortion rights – to consider re-classifying them as blue forces.
But what makes this all the more tragic is that because green feels righteous and justified, it tries to stamp out the actual blue force! Pelosi fought The Squad harder than she did Republicans, doing their dirty work for them for free.
It is long past time to expect the Democratic Party to fight back – it’s just not in their DNA and they do not perceive doing so to be in their best interests.
Blue Force will find eventual success through a flexible strategy that includes selecting and supporting Democratic Party candidates to minimize the number and power of Republican office holders, working around the Democratic Party in the policy space using Participative Democracy mechanisms, and activism including non-violent civil disobedience when required to maintain a politically idealistic society and prevent injustice.