5 Myths in American Politics

Hard times can make people pretty crazy.  Instead of steeling themselves and putting their mind to solving their (in our case, myriad) problems, they can do a whole lot of frothing and screaming crazy nonsense.  Here are just five of myths that remain ideological obstacles to solving our many, many current problems.

Myth 1: “The United States is a Democracy”

As established, the people of the United States lost the battle for democracy before the Revolutionary War was over.  The Senate is full of millionaires, serving decades in unchallengeable seats.  The Supreme Court is an office for the appointment of judicial toadies to life seats.  The Presidency is the seat of a pseudo-elective monarchy that has become more powerful than any absolutist European despot, with a vast labyrinthine bureaucracy of policy planners completely divorced from popular demand.  So where is the democracy?  The House of Representatives is the closest thing, but the Representatives are beholden to advancing the power of their own parties and bowing to the wishes of the highest bidder, not obeying the will of their constituents.

Americans content themselves with this arrangement by claiming that the United States is “a republic, not a democracy.”  But this mantra was never very meaningful in the first place.  The Founders never had any good idea what a “republic” was, except that it was not a democracy.  The most coherent definition of republicanism comes from Rousseau, who contrasted a republic with a tyranny.  The magistrates of a republic acted according to the law (which, for Rousseau, was only law if approved by the people directly), whereas the magistrates of a tyranny did not.  Thus, Americans cannot even content themselves with the belief that the United States is a republic of that kind, since its last president committed a variety of major state crimes, and its current president won’t enforce the law because then people might not like him.  Even if executive power had ever been a source of public power, it has by now been completely unmoored from the popular will.

Myth 2: “The Constitution is a Living Document”

We’ve all heard the old trope that “the Constitution is a living document.”  I’ve never heard this applied to any other document, and it doesn’t make much sense when I try to (“this cookbook is a living document”).  This is supposed to mean that the language of the Constitution can be understood according to the needs of the present generation.  Thus, we get the “right to privacy” out of the Fourth Amendment, for example.  I certainly agree that we require a right to privacy against one another, as there are so many so eager to violate the privacy of the individual.  Extracting that concept from the few sentences contained in the Fourth and perhaps Sixth Amendment is an amazing leap though.

The problem with this approach of course is that it can be used against the expansion of desirable rights and for the cause of authoritarianism.  Can you find the passage in the Constitution about the “unitary executive”?  You can’t, but it’s there, because the Constitution is a living document that says the President has any power he wants beyond the reach of law, even when the actual words of the document don’t say any such thing.

This whole nonsense arose from the establishment of the otherwise laudable federal programs of the New Deal and the subsequent liberal dominance following the Second World War.  Congress didn’t have the power to create any of those New Deal programs, unless the meaning of the words in the Constitution meant something other than what they said.  These semantic gymnastics all depend on the existence of friendly courts that will agree that the Constitution does say “free beer,” we just never noticed before.  When the courts are not so friendly, they say the Constitution says “torture is fine” and “no habeas corpus.”»   If you want the Constitution to say what you want it to say, you’re going to have to put the words in there.

Myth 3: Socialism and Communism

You see a lot of talk these days about how certain people are communists, fascists, and socialists, all at once.  Socialism, communism, and fascism are all different things, though.  Socialism and communism are special recipients of confusion, even by those who are being charitable towards them.  Hostile commentators still living the Cold War will talk about state power and control, oppression, and so forth, all very real things in the former Soviet bloc, but all irrelevant to the actual philosophy behind socialism and communism.  Those intellectually generous types might say that socialism and communism are all about advancing the common good, or value equality over liberty, or other nice glosses that try to match the soaring hopes of Marx for humanity with the police state morass on the other side of the Iron Curtain.  The secret was that the two things had nothing to do with each other except in the words used by the party ideologues to justify their injustice.

Socialism involves the transition towards ownership of land and capital “by society,” which may mean different things depending on how one understands the phrase “social ownership.”  For some socialists, it will mean the ownership of land and capital by the democratic state, so that the government would appoint the executive authority of public enterprises.  For most socialists, I think, state ownership is a means towards social ownership, not an end.  Most socialists conceive of social ownership as involving the workers of public enterprises being their own collective managers, electing their own administrators, enacting company policy themselves, and providing goods and services on the basis of human need, without needing to be motivated by maximum profit.  The government role here would vary according to particular socialist ideals, but would involve directing the general trajectory of the economy.  Particularly ‘light’ versions of socialism (“pinko”) may claim the mantle of socialism while not actually altering the property relations of society at all.  Instead, they content themselves with managing a bureaucratic welfare state, but this claim to socialism is rather dubious.  It’s just managed capitalism.  This path-of-least-resistance “socialism” dominated Western Europe for the second half of the twentieth century.

Socialism is of course bound up in the concept of communism.  Communism is generally speaking the common ownership of things, and this can include religious communism where people share absolutely everything.  However, I am certain that when we speak of communism, we are talking about the recent social philosophy originating with Karl Marx.  Marx argued for the possibility» of communism as developing out of capitalism as a result of the conflict of the owning class (capitalists or the bourgeoisie) and the working class (proletariat).  The capitalist possesses power over the proletariat by virtue of the capitalists’ ownership of the means of production, the tools which the worker needs to produce the very means by which he or she survives.  The proletariat would organize against their exploitation and oppression and overthrow the bourgeois state and regime of private property.  The workers would create a new thoroughgoing democratic society, destroying the old means of bourgeois oppression – private property, the police, the military, the nation-state, the bureaucracy – and the state itself would come to an end as this universal democracy took hold generally.  This society of the “free and equal association of workers” would be communism, a world of perfect human freedom.  It was after Marx’s death that “socialism” came to mean the bridge between capitalism and communism.

I should note that in neither socialism nor communism are personal possessions socially owned – personal possessions remain personal» (this may not be true in religious communism and hippie communes).  I simply make this observation because of the widespread misconception that socialism and communism means not having anything of one’s own.

Also note that nothing said above can describe any of the so-called “Communist” nations (that is, nations governed by Communist Parties) of the twentieth century – all were to varying degrees authoritarian bureaucratic oligarchies that ridiculously attempted to plan every aspect of the economy.  Such nations were failures in establishing socialism or communism, and their relation to such political philosophies was mostly rhetorical.

Myth 4: Fascism

Fascism is an eruption of violent and authoritarian nationalism emerging across social classes in periods of general social distress in any particular society.  The problems of the society are claimed to be the cause of some element that is not a part of the nation.  This element may be either external to the nation, in a foreign enemy, or internal to the nation, in the form of groups that do not share our national values and beliefs.  Fascism is the attempt to conquer state power to enforce this vision of what constitutes The Nation from those elements that do not conform to the vision of proper nationality.

This usually comes out as an extensive list of enemies (in Nazism, biologically identifiable): Jews, Gypsies and other migrating or segregated peoples, homosexuals, communists and socialists, liberals and progressives, non-whites or non-Europeans, et cetera.  There may also be religious enemies – Spanish fascists were very Catholic, for example, and the modern European fascist has targeted a racialized conception of Muslims.  The list can get pretty long, and the more extravagant the story of the nation, the longer the list of those parts of society that do not conform to the story.  Fascism is, essentially, the organization of a society by the state into a vast lynch-mob.

The original fascism of Italy and Germany pursued economic “corporatism.”  This does not mean corporate as in corporation, but rather corporate in the more general sense of any association having a common body.  Parliaments supposedly representing citizens as equals were replaced with advisory assemblies of the representatives of associations, usually economic, and usually tiered.  By tiered, I mean that business associations were more important than labor unions, and the needs of business always won out over that of labor.  While the original fascist state intervened in the economy to produce growth, it did so at the direction of, and in service to, big business.  Business in turn provided the arms and other industrial services with which to fight and liquidate enemies of the state.  Corporatism is not necessarily fascist, and many postwar Western European nations formed corporative advisory councils of business associations and labor unions for the self-regulation of the economy.

The difference between fascism and socialism is fairly marked, so that the conflation of the two at the level of theory seems baffling.  The goal of socialism is, as Marx put it, “the reabsorption of the state by society”, or the redistribution of state power into the hands of the public.  The goal of fascism is the obverse, to quote Mussolini: “All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.”  In other words, fascism is the absorption of society by the state, and a completely undemocratic state at that.  The conflation of socialism and fascism seems to emerge from identifying both as “totalitarian.” This is another term from Mussolini denoting the attempt to control every aspect of society by the state according to national values.  This was an illusion of course, but the term has survived to describe taxation and the postal service in the United States (but not the Department of Homeland Security).  The totalitarianism of fascism was a deliberate feature of its strange outlook.  The totalitarianism of the Soviet Union was a development of a bureaucratic oligarchy struggling to contain the adversities of war and famine, overbearing the ad hoc democratic institutions of a still-born revolutionary republic, and raising the rule of a single party to the level of philosophy.

Myth 5: “Our Debts Will Make Our Grandchildren Poorer”

The prosperity of the United States is not necessarily threatened by budget deficits and the national debt produced by covering those deficits.  The debt-burden is determined by the relation of debt to the gross domestic product (GDP, the sum of everything produced in the United States).  The United States may have a sky-high debt, but it also still has a sky-high GDP.  The current ratio is about 65% – federal debt is about 65% of GDP.  By comparison, the debt-to-GDP ratio of Japan is about 220%.  Our debt-burden is higher than usual, but actually not that great, especially considering the general economic decline.

We will be able to tell when the national debt becomes a problem.  If lenders begin to think that the national debt will not be repaid, they will begin to hold out for higher interest rates on the government bonds that hold the debt.  Lenders of money to the government will want the promise of a greater return in the future in exchange for the risk of holding bonds that may not be repaid, or otherwise worth less, in the future.  Thus, we can tell how threatening the debt is becoming by the going interest rates on government bonds.  Currently, the interest rate on such bonds is three percent.  This is low; there is nothing to worry about so far.  Well, about our public finances anyway – it’s not a good sign for the private economy in fact.

Budget deficits are actually required for continued economic growth in a modern economy that has hit a rough patch.  Investment and production follow consumption – if people can’t afford to buy things, then other people can’t afford to make things.  As a result of the popping housing bubble and the financial crash, the United States lost at least a trillion dollars worth of consumption.  If the economy is going to move again, then the government has to make up the loss.  The bank bailouts approach this level, but the banks aren’t going to start lending the money to a bunch of poor people, so that’s just $700 billion into a banker’s pocket (and they aren’t going to spend it into consumption, just more non-productive finance).  After subtracting all the tax breaks and other leakages from the “stimulus package,” we get something like $150 billion per year in public consumption.  This is a lot less than one trillion dollars.

That said, not all budget deficits are equal. The government can produce budget deficits by producing massive amounts of weapons of war and giving money to banks that don’t lend it out, or it can produce quality schools, universal high-quality health care provision, and enduring infrastructure.  During the Second World War, the government was able to produce a lasting prosperity by deficit-spending on the military.  Spending on the military created jobs and put factories into operation creating products that people would be able to afford because they had jobs.  After the War, despite the largest debt ever accumulated probably ever, prosperity continued as military spending continued, because the military could continue to provide new jobs, new orders for new products, funding innovations in universities that would then find their way into consumer products.  This spending gave us interstate highways, computers and the internet, and space exploration.  And, since the United States was enormously richer as a result of this deficit-spending, the national debt became significantly less burdensome.  The growth in the GDP outpaced the growth of the national debt, and the debt-burden became smaller, as a paradoxical result of deficit-spending and borrowing.

But eventually military spending exhausted wealth- and job-creation and technical innovation.  Investments in the military begin to get used in the pointless destruction of nations oversees – Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan – and instead of public investment improving the life of the nation, it flows out of the country to build the outposts of imperialism (750 foreign US bases at last count).  In the middle of the century, budget deficits caused by military spending provided domestic benefits to make the nation richer, but now the projection of imperial power overseas expends the wealth of the nation, creating debt without providing the means by which it can be repaid.  This is of course beside the moral point of the wholesale butcher and conquest of non-combatants that the money is going to pay for.  Whether budget deficits make us richer or poorer in the future depends on what they are used for.  If deficit-spending is used for improving the built environment and human well-being, the wealth that such spending produces will make the debt taken to finance such projects easily repayable.  If the money is spent on imperialism, then debt repayment will indeed be impoverishing.