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HOW HISTORIC LIBERALISM BECAME TODAY’S RADICAL CONSERVATISM [1]

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Date: 2023-01-31  

What today’s free-market radicals and anti-others social reactionaries have in common is their willingness to impose their values on unwilling others – and a resulting rejection of both democracy and honest discussion in favor of authoritarian, top-down control backed up by street-level militance if not vigilante violence. And, as long as their immediate agenda prioritizes lower taxes on the wealthy and fewer constraints on business activity, much of the country’s corporate leadership, a group not known for its egalitarian tendencies, is willing to tolerate excesses in other areas – a strategic choice made easier by the emergence of far-right politicians who are less personally crazy and professionally incompetent than Donald Trump.

This alliance might seem strange because an initial theme of the far-right (fascist) insurgency was its anti-federal government and anti-corporate establishment fury. This is because they, correctly, saw Washington’s growing power as a tool used by liberals and big business to impose national norms on local hierarchies – which interfered with the power of traditional regional and local elites, such as southern and western major landowners whose historic wealth came from racist labor and natural resource exploitation. This underlies the far-right’s pro-business but anti-elite politics, which also draws upon the very long history of US populist opposition to central banks and currency speculators going back to Andrew Jackson’s crusade against Hamilton’s fiscal system.

The national norms they opposed were the twentieth century version of historic liberalism. Originally, Liberalism fought for the breaking apart of royalty-authorized commercial monopolies and aristocratic privilege in government and social status. The solution was “democracy” – limiting the royalist constraints on business and policy-making by opening trade, government, and influential social interactions to a broader swath of the population. While the exact boundaries of that broader swath was narrow – white, wealthy, male – the language used to promote the policy was universal, open-ended if only because the new “middle class” elites saw themselves as the embodiment of all those “beneath” them: their wives, children, servants, workers, slaves. They were the embodiment of “the people” so using such unrestricted terminology was considered to be inclusive rather than a contradiction or a form of exclusion.

LIVE FREE AND MAKE MONEY

This, with all the limits of the era and the distortions of slavery, was the ideology of the American revolution. Today’s far-right – meaning today’s reactionary conservatives – still support that traditional version of liberty: freedom from central government’s constraints, the direct connection of private property and the pursuit of profit to personal power, the belief that democratic values are legitimately and best exercised within narrow demographic boundaries. Drawing on a long American history of “democratic” struggles for radical versions of universal white male suffrage, they see themselves as freedom-fighting patriots upholding the “originalist” meaning of the Constitution against radical perversion.

Twentieth century liberalism, coming to grips with the industrial era and pushed by working class movements, modified historic liberalism. Government was now seen as a necessary and legitimate regulator of capitalism’s inherent and destructive boom-and-bust cycles, as a provider of safety-net services for desperate people pushed to the side of business growth. Modern liberalism still believed that prosperity came from business initiative and profit-seeking, that individualism was the core value of social systems, and that the general welfare improved by overall economic growth rather than redistribution beyond the limited lifting of the bottom through welfare and other programs. But, pushed by movements for inclusion by previously marginalized groups – internationally by liberated colonies; domestically by organized workers, descendants of slaves, women, and others – it moved beyond historic liberalism to champion the removal of group discrimination as a barrier for individual advancement. For a variety of reasons, modernized liberalism found a home in the Democratic Party.

(After Teddy Roosevelt pulled the progressive wing out of the GOP in 1912, when the Republican-associated Great Depression wiped out the economy, Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal became the hinge for an epochal switch of the northern industrial states from the Republican allegiances formed during the Civil War to the reinvigorated national Democratic Party. The national party’s northern base became increasingly important in presidential elections during the post-WWII era, pulling it towards the needs and policy preferences of those areas, particularly the growing numbers of African-Americans escaping Southern Jim Crow and college-educated professionals escaping ethnic urban neighborhoods by moving to the suburbs.)

SWITCHING PLACES: GOP MOVES SOUTH, DEMS MOVE NORTH

Combined with the escalating replacement of local/regional family businesses by national corporations, it was this attack on local hierarchies, whose upper layers (mostly correctly) saw as undermining their traditional sources of wealth and prestige, that energized the epoch-making swing of the “solid South” from Democratic to Republican. This was a nearly total switch among whites, most dramatically visible in the entire “deep South” rejection of the Civil Rights Law signing Lyndon Johnson in favor of Barry Goldwater, whose overwhelming success coat-tails brought Republican victories in numerous “down ballot” races.

The Clinton/Obama-era Democratic leadership’s adoption of “neo-liberalism” and the escalating standard-of-living stagnation of increasing percentages of the party’s blue-collar base opened up additional space for the GOP. And that party was ready to move: its “southern strategy” of welcoming social reactionaries was more than matched by the escalating radicalism of the conservative movement’s far-right fringe. From the KKK to Christian nationalists, from libertarians to militias, they were all welcome. This all came together in Donald Trump’s campaign. He had used his reality-TV celebrity and tabloid sex-scabades to position himself as a playboy renegade, someone who flouted polite upper-class society’s rules and got away with it, and – through his prominence in the “birther” attacks on Obama – as open to racist attacks on the establishment.

And here we are….even if Trump doesn’t get the 2024 nomination the old Republican Party is dead. Even the remaining “moderates” know that placating the far-right is necessary to get through the primary. The national Democratic Party, thinking it can win in the middle, still fights its own progressive wing, thereby losing that vital source of new energy, ideas, and support and risking a slow drift further to the corporate center-right.

It’s time to accept that we’re in a new era requiring new understandings and strategies….while the globe warms and the seas rise.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/1/31/2150412/-HOW-HISTORIC-LIBERALISM-BECAME-TODAY-S-RADICAL-CONSERVATISM

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