Jon Stewart, the host of The Daily Show on Comedy Central, has a phrase to characterize how Foxnews looks at the world: It is the view from Bullshit Mountain. It is most appropriate, especially when trying to distinguish what people on that television station have to say from ordinary lying. Lying is intentionally not telling the truth; bullshit is intentionally muddling the truth for purposes of making it seem like you know what you are talking about, when in fact you are just making a mess of it, so other people will be confused and will succumb to your point of view (especially if you are sufficiently aggressive in your bullshitting). This may explain why Stewart spends so much time on his show confusing clips of people on Fox with animals defecating (just in case you do not get the point)!
Mitt Romney has been accused of many things as a presidential candidate: serial liar, flip-flopper, man who will believe anything to get elected, man without core values, etc. Yet, he really is best described as a bullshitter (which is exactly what President Barack Obama recently called him). He does not quite lie as much as continually parse words so that his positions can migrate to where they need to be to get the votes he seeks, whether in a primary where he is appealing to the severely conservative base of the current Republican Party or in a general election where he must moderate those positions to appeal to people other than the extremists who populate his party today.
It should be no surprise that Romney himself is a bullshitter since he has spent so long this election cycle trying to regurgitate the talking points the talking heads on Fox have been instructed to repeat in mantra fashion so as to indoctrinate their audience. Once you start talking like the bullshitters on Bullshit Mountain, everything starts to look just as you would see it if you too were sitting atop of Bullshit Mountain.
In fact, the Republican Party today is knee deep in bullshit and Romney is the just lead bullshitter. Romney is the lead bullshitter because his core is in fact obfuscation. He keeps twisting his positions and muddling what he stands for to the point that after a while he ends up with no core. This makes him a true believer of a particular ironic sort—someone who probably genuinely believes that his deflections and diversions in and of themselves reflect a solid position. His positions are nuanced. Yet, many others in the Party are more traditional true believers, extreme social and economic conservatives who end up bullshitters as they twist their un-varnished positions to make them more palatable to voters beyond the Party’s rabid base. We do not have to look too far from Romney to find examples. Paul Ryan (Romney’s Vice Presidential candidate) is a true believer-bullshitter of the first order whether he is talking about abortion or tax cuts, Medicare or defense spending. Ryan and others like him also do not really lie so much as they just make shit up in ways that confuse issues to the point they can convince people they are actually telling the truth (according to the facts, science. etc.). That way they can make it seem that their strongly-held but questionable positions have a basis in truth and facts that they actually don’t.
These days, at the end of the 2012 general election campaign, the bullshit is being slung far and wide, most especially about issues of sex and race. Listen to the bullshit on sex. Women who endure a “legitimate rape” secrete hormones that prevent them from getting pregnant so that any woman who gets pregnant and wants an abortion because she claims she was raped must be lying (not bullshitting). Welfare recipients who want additional benefits for having another child should be prevented from accessing those benefits unless they can prove they were raped (which evidently cannot happen due to those hormones). And Mitt Romney actually supports abortion rights (even if it turns out only in cases to save the life of the mother, incest or rape which, it goes without saying, supposedly should never occur because of those powerful hormones again).
Then there is the bullshit on race. Voter ID laws and other related restrictions are necessary because voter fraud is real, if invisible and undocumented, and we are asked to please keep in mind that these laws are not designed to prevent African Americans and Latinos from voting, even though they are much less likely to end up voting because of these additional restrictions. The push to put restrictions on voting is, we are told, not about cutting into nonwhite support for Obama (even if Republican elected officials have publicly indicated that is exactly what these bullshit-based laws are all about).
The idea additional welfare benefits should be denied unless rape is proven is supposedly based on the claim that women on welfare have children just to get more benefits. This is…how should we say it…bullshit. There is no factual basis for this claim. Just like there is no factual basis for the claim that there are people who are trying to vote illegally (especially undocumented and illegal immigrants who would be risking deportation if they got caught). It is all bullshit regardless of whether the bullshitters believe in the sanctity of their positions or not. They desperately bend facts and logic to make their unreasonable stands seem reasonable. And being a true believer may actually serve to operate as some kind of self-legitimation in practicing the bullshitting for a supposedly good cause. Religious conservatives want to curtail access to welfare to prevent the additional pregnancies (that welfare does not cause) and other Republicans concerned about the sanctity of the ballot want to “True the Vote” even if all it does is end up disenfranchising mostly nonwhite Obama supporters.
Whether offered piously or cynically, bullshit ends up playing fast and loose with facts and logic. Sure, some women on welfare are not planning enough to improve their desperate situation, but reducing benefits when they have another child is not going to provide them with a path for a life beyond destitution. Sure, sometimes, some people’s registration forms are improperly completed. Some people might vote twice but that is even rarer. If our elections are at risk of fraud, it is from the people tallying the votes, not the people casting them. But even that is only occurring in isolated instances up until this election (and we can hope it stays that way).
Bullshit also unnecessarily complicates things. Allowing additional benefits in cases of rape would actually be an improvement in some states where aid for all additional children is denied to families on welfare regardless of whether rape was involved or not. Voter IDs are not quite as bad as the old poll tax that was intentionally set so high that basically almost all blacks in the south could not qualify to vote. So these laws are less bad, and more focused, as if they were attending to specific problems that actually exist. Not as bad and not quite lies, these horrible laws are based in bullshit and end up just hurting people whether they are welfare recipients or voters. The result then is bullshit laws made by bullshit politicians, bullshitting about sex and race, making up stories about women on welfare and nonwhites trying to vote, just to legitimate their repugnant beliefs.
Yet it does not stop there. There is the bullshit called climate change denial, various creationism contortions, and the idea that the rich who are not investing in business growth are the real job-creators waiting to be incentivized. The head bullshitter Romney continues to twist facts to make himself seem to be everything to everyone. My favorite is the bankruptcy that is not a bankruptcy. Romney claims he was not for letting the auto industry in Detroit go bankrupt but was instead for a structured bankruptcy where private equity firms like his Bain Capital could swoop in and buy up GM and Chrysler. But at the time, the economy was in the tank and there was no private equity firm prepared to do that in any way that people would say was fair or would lead to recovery of the auto industry. So his structured bankruptcy would have been just another bad bankruptcy and his insistence on the difference is bullshit. The same could be said about his plans for Medicare or Medicaid, tax cuts, education reform, etc.
Let’s face facts: all politicians are prone to bullshitting—it comes with the pandering for votes. Yet things on Bullshit Mountain are very different and go well beyond the usual bullshit. On Bullshit Mountain, things stink to high heaven.
At the end of the 18th century in England, a debate raged over what to do about the poor. Thomas Malthus, a clergyman recognized as an economic thinker of the first order, prevailed in this debate. As Peggy Somers and Fred Block note, Malthus argued, essentially, that it is against the natural order of things to aid the poor, who would only propagate further and thereby bring down the whole society with them. Malthus’s arguments contributed to reform of the Poor Laws designed to restrict aid in the name of encouraging work. Malthus based his thinking on a melding of economic theory and Christian theology, arguing that policy needed to be consistent with the will of God and the natural laws that flowed from God’s vision for the world. Human attempts to deviate from our divinely-inspired natural state of being would only fail. As a result, public policy must not subvert processes by which people’s natural inclinations were made manifest. Malthus’s invisible hand was not unlike Adam Smith’s and laid the basis for a Darwinist view of how society evolved.
This amalgamation of religious belief and economic reasoning eventually lost its prominence. By the mid-20th century, for example, conservatives in the United States such as Irving Kristol could only offer “two cheers” for a capitalism that had lost is sacred commitments to doing what was not just economically efficient but also morally viable. Conservatives at times could even rail against the tendency of capitalism’s hedonistic consumer culture to rend the moral fabric of the social order.
Yet, more recently, as William Connolly and others have demonstrated, Christian religion and capitalist economics have again been fused tightly in the extreme conservative movement that has captured the Republican Party. This, I believe, is the main reason that so much of their economic reasoning appears irrational and in direct violation of mainstream economics. It disregards almost all available evidence regarding the efficacy of their specific, or more appropriately, often unspecific, economic policy proposals. The insistence that their economic ideas be simultaneously consistent with religious belief makes for a faith-based economic policy that is impervious to reconsideration in light of rational analysis or factual evidence. Going beyond the old aphorism, not only will they will not allow a few good facts to ruin a bad theory; they will also not allow anything that smacks of secular-scientific rational thought to undermine their firmly held religious beliefs.
Witness Mitt Romney’s factually incorrect statement that all Obama supporters pay no federal income taxes and they feel they are entitled as victims to government benefits. For some conservative commentators Romney’s factual errors were to be excused because they were in service of an important moral judgment that Obama’s supporters fail to practice personal responsibility.
This privileging of moral belief over evidence can be seen in other policy issues discussed by the right. The 2012 campaign has publicized the extreme conservative belief that rape victims cannot get pregnant, thereby making it less controversial to deny them access to abortion services (which the Republican Party platform has advocated for years). The same holds true for global warming, which the extreme conservatives continue to insist is a hoax, perpetrated somehow by conniving scientists. And, more generally, the Romney campaign has responded to complaints that many of its criticisms of the Obama Administration are outright lies by declaring that it refuses to be governed by fact checkers, as if the facts were an unfair constraint on true believers.
Still, it is in economic theory that one finds the strongest version of creedal insistence. From tax cuts to stimulate job growth to balanced budgets to create more confidence in economic policy to opposition to any new business regulations in order to establish certainty about the economic playing field, there remains scant evidence that these policy positions have any factual basis or are consistent with established economic thinking. The problem with the proposals is that they are proffered like universal beliefs true for all times under all circumstances, much like Malthus’s assertions that policy must always be consistent with an unchanging, underlying natural order. The insistence that these policy positions are always the only thing the government should do to stabilize the economy and encourage growth sounds a lot like a set of dogmatic religious principles that when violated merit nothing less than damnation. But economic reasoning has moved beyond Malthus’s unchanging natural order of things. Historically sensitive analysis steeped in facts supports a more nuanced approach. Tax cuts can, at times, stimulate the economy, but it depends on which cuts under what conditions. Balancing budgets can produce greater confidence and heighten willingness to invest without fear of inflation, but confidence-building maneuvers are likely to work only if investors think the economy is likely to grow as a result. And the idea that much-needed regulation should be forestalled is not likely to increase certainty about a predictable economic playing field where no new government intervention will occur if it only leads to corrupt practices that allow those who cut corners to lower prices compared to competitors who are reluctant to undermine the public’s health and safety and the nation’s well-being.
Malthus-like religiously-inspired economics has returned to public discourse with a vengeance. Its unwavering insistence on its policy prescriptions regardless of circumstances is perhaps one reason it appeals to deeply religious constituencies, who steadfastly believe in timeless moral certainties regardless of the facts. It may also be why these constituencies support these policies at the cost of their own economic interests. In the end, however, it is our ability to act collectively as a nation to take rational, factually-supported steps to resolve the current economic crisis that is the major casualty of this return to economic mysticism.
Both of the major political parties in the U.S. have now completed their 2012 presidential nomination conventions. Yet, it seems most ironic: the country is at a major turning point politically, yet neither party seems prepared to seize the opportunity to provide a credible vision for going forward to addresses the economic crisis that continues to wreak havoc on families all across the political spectrum and up and down the class structure. As a result, the ongoing political paralysis induced by hyperpolarization is likely to continue through the rest of the election campaign and after. Why did the rhetoric from both conventions sound so old and hollow, especially in face of the challenges the country urgently needs to address?
The Republican convention formally endorsed Mitt Romney as its presidential candidate to end a primary season where Romney spent most of his time trying to placate an increasingly implacable base of über-conservatives, including especially members of the Tea Party. A series of opponents took turns defeating him in primaries as the base persistently withheld its approval. By the time Romney arrived at the Republican convention in Tampa, he had done everything he could to remake himself as a “severe” conservative, including choosing Rep. Paul Ryan as his Vice Presidential candidate. Thus Romney was anointed acceptable if not a true believer. His convention speech was locked into re-citing a litany of extreme conservative positions on taxes, spending, regulation, welfare, health care, reproductive rights, immigration, race relations, trade, foreign policy, you name it. He mirrored his campaign stump speech, lacking specifics because he has no real serious plans for making these tired policy prescriptions work. Romney was still hoping he could run simply by saying he was not the current President who had failed to pull the country out of the worst economic meltdown since the Great Depression.
The Democratic convention was an improvement. Yet, Obama did not really close the deal: his rhetoric was inspiring but will it be enough given that the economic crisis continues to leave so many people unemployed and growing numbers of families impoverished? There seemed to be something missing at the core of the Democratic convention, as if the party’s leaders dared not discuss some Pink Elephant in the middle of the Charlotte convention hall.
Why the silence? The conventions provide an answer: neither party is prepared to confront the structural changes in the economy that have been developing for over thirty years in the face of globalization. Both parties are mortgaged to philosophical ideas, political interests and portfolio investments that are either abetting this structural change (the Republicans) or incapable of offering an alternative to it (the Democrats).
Neoliberalism is the name for this structural change and the neoliberalization of the U.S. political economy has been a long time in coming, with economic downturns successively presenting opportunities to offload workers, outsource jobs, and restructure firms so that they can more efficiently and profitably, if also more heartlessly, participate in the global economy. For instance, in four of the five U.S. recessions since the recession of 1970, as the economy recovered, it came back with fewer jobs than before, a result most likely due to major corporations seizing the opportunity to restructure and move further into the global economy where first-world workers are an uncompetitive burden. This would not necessarily be fatal for sustaining an occupational structure enabling most workers to earn a decent living for themselves and their families. Yet, that would require systematic planning to move laid off workers into new jobs that paid decent wages. Instead, in the U.S. especially, but now increasingly elsewhere, the state’s role in responding to restructuring is insufficient to keep pace. Wages have been stagnant for most classes of workers for over thirty years, with manual skill workers seeing major diminutions in the real value of their pay. Precarity is pervasive—save for the elite at the very top of the class system.
The current presidential election, then, is at best implicitly about whether the state still has an obligation to the mass of working people who are being systematically marginalized by the intensification of restructuring. The U.S. may drift by default to what could be called a tiered society. At the top, there is a limited stratum of upper and upper middle class people ensconced in positions of corporate oversight and needed professional occupations. At the bottom is everyone else who is increasingly deemed undeserving of the state’s attention, in part because they failed to position themselves as successful participants for the globalizing economy and are as a result seen as a burden that a globally competitive corporate sector cannot and will not carry. At the extreme, those in poverty are cast aside as disposable populations to be monitored, surveilled, disciplined, and punished more than they are to be helped.
Neoliberalism is not simply an ideology that prizes market fundamentalism and a return to laissez-faire economics. That would be Plan A. Yet, Plan A has run afoul of Keynesian Economics and its insistence that only the state is big enough to counteract market failure. As a result, there remains a belief in the welfare state to counter the capriciousness of the market and the adversity it creates for those who get marginalized. The proponents of neoliberalism cannot just sweep the welfare state away and return to a system of laissez-faire economics (think the 19th Century and the age of the robber barons). Instead, the right must resort to Plan B: If you cannot eradicate the welfare state, marketize it. Remake welfare state programs to operate consonant with market principles in service of more efficiently buttressing the market itself. From education vouchers to medical insurance vouchers to private investments accounts in lieu of social security, from welfare-to-work programs grounded in incentivizing taking low-wage work to the penalties and rewards in reentry programs for ex-felons and same in drug treatment programs, the programs of the welfare state are increasingly run according to strict market logic to get clients to be more market-compliant actors themselves. The state increasingly contracts with for-profit providers who are incentivized to discipline their clients so that those clients themselves become more disciplined and docile, internalizing market logic so they will more willing accept the verdict of the globalizing market and take any low-wage jobs, if available, as their main source of economic salvation.
Neoliberalization is undoubtedly a failed project where vouchers do not cover the cost of market participation, for schools or health care, where incentives for work still lead to poverty-inuring low-wage and insecure employment, where social and economic policies allow market principles to undermine any sense of collective responsibility until we need to consider remediation before mounting social and economic problems created by those failed policies threaten the very fabric of our society.
Yet, the two nominating conventions ignored the Pink Elephant. One party hopes we won’t notice it is committed to realizing this dystopia for the 99 percent so as to create a utopia for its select class of financial backers, the 1 percent. The other party, not as indebted to the corporate class, does not dare express any but the mildest platitudes of opposition—for fear of falling even further behind in the competition for corporate donors.
Mobilizing against the neoliberal shift must of necessity come from outside the political parties. Yet the fact of the matter is that most people would rather not be political, not risk losing what they have, and not take their chances engaging in direct action. So when they do, we know something has happened to change the normal course of affairs. Once people come to see that there is less to lose by acting, they are ready to be mobilized. The historical record is clear that the only proven way to get real change is at those times when the people on the bottom rise up and say they are mad as hell and are not going to take it anymore. The global economic meltdown since the onset of the Great Recession in 2008 has created a crucible which makes mass mobilization possible, as witnessed by the Occupy Wall Street campaign in 2011, where those marginalized and left to the wayside by the intensification of the neoliberal economic restructuring in the wake of the Great Recession finally started to fight back. With sufficient mobilization, the neoliberalization of the welfare state will not stand.
Yet, it will take nothing less than a broad-based social movement, more sustained and robust than Occupy, to vanquish the Republicans supporters for supporting this structural shift, while beginning the process of holding the Democrats accountable for their timidity in opposing it.
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