The rot runs deep
by Tom Sullivan
Looking inside the hollow of the President’s Oak//Photo by Bryce Richter, UW-Madison
RNC chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, speaking this week at the Conservative Political Action Conference, framed next year’s general election as a choice between individual freedom, liberty, entrepreneurship, innovation, and the American dream (Team Republican) versus a socialist path where Democrats take over your healthcare, make you eat dog food (Trump is trying to make it harder for three-quarters of a million to get food), and promote a Green New Deal that will cost $93 trillion. She’s crunched the numbers!
McDaniel spoke in support of a president (apparently a career criminal) who believes you are either a predator or a loser — not exactly the poster man-child for market capitalism.
*They want to take your hamburgers and make you eat dog food to survive* — Here's a supercut of all the insane things CPAC speakers have been saying Democrats and cows pic.twitter.com/HfmBnlRGyo— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 1, 2019
The American Enterprise Institute’s James Pethokoukis does not think so either. The portrayal of the choices presented at CPAC are “clownish” and likely to undermine support “for capitalism among those already capitalism-skeptical younger Americans,” he writes at The Week:
Of even greater concern is that Trump’s portrayal of himself as a capitalist hero and his policies as true capitalism will further increase that skepticism. Tariff Man rejects the notion that the free exchange of goods and services between nations can be mutually beneficial. As Adam Smith writes in The Wealth of Nations, “In every country it always is and must be the interest of the great body of the people to buy whatever they want of those who sell it cheapest.”
To protectionist Trump, a basic tenet of market capitalism is elitist drivel, the wisdom of suckers. This helps explain his confused trade war with China. Most American businesses and policymakers want less interference by Beijing in the Chinese economy. They want it to re-embrace markets rather than slip further back into central planning. But Trump is actually pushing for greater “state capitalism” in China by demanding Beijing direct the purchase of more American products to reduce the trade gap between the two economies. Under Trump, America forsakes its role in promoting democratic capitalism across the globe.
Not to mention Trump’s dalliances with white nationalism and foreign autocrats.
The Pethokoukis defense of free-market capitalism is another version of “Conservatism never fails. It is only failed.” Trump is a bad capitalist, you see, as George W. Bush was a bad conservative. At CPAC, Bush has already disappeared down the memory hole. Give them a few years and Trump will vanish too.
There is a reason engines have governors: to keep them from revving beyond the redline and flying apart. After free-market zealots began removing the controls from the economy under Ronald Reagan, twice things have flown apart: during the savings and loan crisis and during the financial collapse of 2008. The predators have prospered and the rest of the country has lost ground. Capitalism ungoverned is not the well-oiled machine its fans advertise.
Alex Kingsbury of the New York Times Editorial Board warns that after Trump, getting America back to normal, as Rep. Elijah Cummings recommended this week, is not an option. “Normal” is how we got here. Michael Cohen’s testimony this week is a “devastating indictment” of normal where, just as there are two economies, one for the rich and another for the rest, there are two systems of justice in this country:
… decades of declining prosecutions of white-collar crimes may have allowed Paul Manafort, a man guilty of tax evasion and bank fraud, to lead a presidential campaign. If the number of white-collar crimes prosecuted by the Justice Department had not fallen more than 40 percent in the past 20 years, perhaps Mr. Cohen, who committed tax fraud and bank fraud, might not have ascended to become deputy finance chairman of the Republican National Committee, a post he held until June 2018.
Then there’s the president himself, Exhibit A of what happens when a country spends decades treating crimes by the poor as felonies and crimes by the powerful as misdemeanors.
Now is not the time, Kingsbury concludes, to return to normal but for Normal America to learn from mistakes of the past. The CPAC crowd simply buries the past and moves on unenlightened by it. Looking in the mirror is not their style.