Category: Neoliberalism

“The New Earth” and the 1970s

I have just finished reading the novel, The New Earth, by Jess Row. In many ways it is a mess of a book. About a dysfunctional family, one that the novel overburdens with not one trauma, but five. I won’t list them to avoid spoiling your reading pleasure. But let’s just say that it’s three traumas too many. And there is a jejune bit of meta-fiction (or postmodernist high jinks) running through the book, in which “the novel” announces its requirements in ways that add nothing to the impact or import of the novel.

That’s because, as is usually the case, the novel’s excellence comes from its portrayal of an array of characters and the ways in which they strive to navigate life in the United States from 1970 to the era of Trump. (There are some masterful meta-fictions in which character and mundane observation play no role. So I am not saying it can’t be done. But it is very hard to pull off, and most excellent novels do what novels have always done, dissect society through the travails of individual characters.)

To be clear: The New Earth is the best novel I have read recently. I highly recommend it, flaws and all.

A loud despair runs through Row’s book; by its end, the three children of the family have declared the US unlivable—and take their father off with them into exile. In one way, that’s why the multiple traumas are too much. We don’t need over the top horrors to understand why people suffer in the contemporary US. Enough to register the cruelties of everyday life—and the helplessness many of us feel about doing anything to remedy them. The most sympathetic of the novel’s characters is the daughter who works as a lawyer trying to help terrified immigrants in Trump’s America. We see how she is overwhelmed, with far too many cases than she could ever effectively handle, and fighting a judicial bureaucracy that even when it is not being deliberately cruel (which happens often enough) is battered into indifference by also being overburdened.

In short, the novel is just about the best account I have read of the pain and fear that comes from living in the contemporary world. The family’s other daughter joins a peace group trying to protect Palestinians from Israeli settlers, so the horrors are not confined to the US.

Not surprisingly, the novel has nothing to offer in the way of solutions—except finding a separate peace. The characters leave the US in search of that peace, hiding out from history as it were, and tending to their own gardens.

Which leads me to the 1970s. The parents of the dysfunctional family spend a fraught few years in the middle 70s in a Vermont commune presided over by a Japanese Zen master. The novel does a marvelous job capturing the spirit of the 70s—which was a decade of separate peace making. The failures of the revolutionary, transformative hopes of the 60s yielded the small-scale, personalized experiments of the 70s. I know that’s a cliché, but Row makes it take on flesh. The search for alternatives was real—and while never a mass movement, it did motivate a fairly large sub-culture.

And Row’s novel ponders why it all fell apart. Why, as if determined to show Margaret Thatcher was right when she declared there are no alternatives, a belief in other ways of living, in an ability to create and sustain those other ways, just dissipated, leaving nary a trace behind. It all just disappeared: the hope, the experiments, the conviction that mainstream society was not just cruel, but fully and truly insane. The determination to have no part in that insane society–and the various ways people actually acted on that determination. Not some fantasy of moving to Canada, but setting out to establish communities where a different life could be lived and sustained. The novel’s ending–with its surviving characters going into exile–both reprises the 70s despairing conclusion that only a separate peace is possible with the added despair of not even believing one can, with friends, create the place of that separate peace. No running away to create a community, just running away, is all we can manage to imagine (and sometimes, although rarely, do) in the 2020s. After all, how many people really do move to Canada?

I graduated from college in 1974 and immediately started grad school in the fall of that year. I didn’t know anyone who was dropping out to pursue some utopian alternative. My fellow students at Georgetown were disappointedly conventional and conservative. No doubt most of them voted for Reagan a few years down the road. The atmosphere at Buffalo was entirely different. I had traded conservative kids from Northeastern Catholic high schools for Jewish grad students, a surprising number of whom were “red diaper” babies. From being just about the most radical kid on campus in DC, I went to being a boring middle-of-the-roader in upstate NY.

Grad school in Buffalo during those years was a mess; apparently its teetering on the edge of anarchistic chaos was the after effect of its actually having been mired in anarchistic chaos in the years from 1968 to 1972. A kind of fragile order had been restored, but there was still a lot of pulling in various contradictory directions, basically filling the whole spectrum from the Trotskyite Sparticus revolutionaries to the careerist academics on the faculty and in the grad student ranks. The careerists were on the defensive and a distinct minority in Buffalo. It wasn’t until I got to Berkeley in 1977 that I encountered true academic careerism in all its tedium and stuffiness. The kind of place where people would not venture an opinion because something “was not in their field” and where obsession with the “profession’s” pecking order, both locally and nationally, was as pronounced as any minor Austen character’s constantly reaching for his Debrett’s.

All of this to say that in Buffalo one could imagine that academics was itself an alternative. Having one’s cake and eating it too. Certainly that was the case for me. After all, I ended up in Buffalo halfway by mistake. I would have gone to Yale or Cornell if they would have had me. I did know that Buffalo was at the forefront of “theory”—in which I was interested. But I would have gone to deadly conservative Minnesota if they had given me a better stipend. So I wandered into the Buffalo anarchy with only the dimmest idea of what I was getting into.

But I had been reading the various radical tracts of the 60s—Marcuse, N. O. Brown, Charles Reich, Philip Slater. So I did have the image of books that could intervene in the here and now, that were promoting alternatives, that were paving the way toward a transformed world. So I was primed already to think I was preparing myself to be a similar kind of prophet, one who mobilized ideas to move the world forward.

I think it is that image of an audience that meant I could never have fled into a commune. Prudence no doubt also played a huge part. I wanted/needed a job, a sinecure if you will. Already in 1974 the American Philosophical Society was warning prospective graduate students that their job prospects were iffy. A professor of mine at Georgetown ran into me the summer of 1974. When he learned I was going to grad school, he advised me to learn a trade—carpentry or electricity—along the way, so I would have something to fall back on. A far different take (and a more refreshing one) than my encounter in 1978 with one of the Berkeley professors I had gotten to know. I told him I was doing adjunct work for $900 a course at the University of San Francisco while I looked for a tenure track job. What kind of tenure track job, he asked. In my dreams, a liberal arts college. Well, he replied, have you contacted Reed?

Back to prudence. I couldn’t step off the pier into the unknown of a commune. But I also couldn’t do it because I wanted to address the world. I wanted to be a writer and I wanted an audience. So I needed to believe (and it proved, eventually, approximately true) that the academy would afford me the freedom and autonomy and financial means to do my own thing, to pursue what interested me and what I thought should interest (and influence) others. There was a long apprenticeship, with freedom only coming after tenure, but the academy did deliver something like an alternative way of living—even if the dreams of influencing others, of contributing to a transformation of America life, did not (could not?) come to fruition.

Thus, my own 1970s hopes were dashed; the robust goals of dramatic change scaled back to the miniature spaces of the classroom and the family. Even my efforts at transforming academic culture came to naught. I spent most of my academic career at UNC trying to break the strangleholds of departments and of individually conducted research in how the university organized itself and how faculty experienced their careers. To no avail. Nothing I did in that regard had even a minimal impact.

True, UNC is a particularly conservative place. True interdisciplinary structures and fantastic collaborative work have been introduced and have flourished in other places. But I couldn’t get UNC to move in those directions. I had plenty of co-conspirators (so my use of “I” here is misleading), but we failed.

In other words, I ended up with my own separate peace. I had a more than satisfactory career, in terms of loving my students and the classes I taught, in terms of writing what I wanted to write to the best of my abilities, in terms of the respect and regard of my students and colleagues. But nothing I did made any difference in terms of providing alternatives to the way life is organized and lived in the US. I could only watch—as so many of my generation did—while the dominant mode (call it “neoliberalism” if you will; I have called it “the return of ruthless capitalism”) only tightened its grip on every corner of the world.

That tightening grip somehow—and this is where Row’s novel is very strong—also obliterated the pockets of alternative communes and their like. Somehow? After all, what threat were a few scattered dissident communities, far from the mainstream, tiny in their numbers and their power? Yet they, too, had to be driven into the maw. Swallowed whole and made extinct.

How? Part of the story is the inflation of the late 1970s. It is hard to convey to people today how cheap life was in the early 70s. My grad stipend was $270 a month; if you were paying $75 a month for rent in Buffalo in 1974, you hadn’t looked hard enough. If you had no income, no steady job, you couldn’t expect raises that at least took inflation into account even if lagging behind. Things that could be done for almost no money in 1972 (like finding a place in the country and scraping by on what you could grow and casual labor) were impossible by 1978. Poverty—real, soul and body destroying poverty—drove people off the communes as the decade unfolded.

There were multiple other causes as well. But I want to return—and end—with this question of audience. The communes were always, to some extent, demonstration projects. They were meant to prove to a skeptical world (which, in reality, might shrink down to skeptical parents and other family members) that an alternative was possible. But you couldn’t go into a commune unless you also had very strong ties to your fellow communards; they were the audience you were most cathected to.

That’s where I didn’t have it. I was cathected to the imaginary audience of readers. Those were the people I wanted to address. I had turned my back on my parents, had succeeded to a large extent in not caring a whit if they approved of what I was doing or not. We didn’t share any values by that point; they were Catholic Goldwater Republicans. My only retained inheritance from them was a strong commitment and emotional attachment to monogamy. I had no interest in or sympathy for 70s sexual experimentation or revolution, although very sympathetic with both feminism and the gay liberation movement.

In any case, I was not attached to a local audience or community. The lack of such ties meant setting off into the woods with a small group of like-minded others was never a possibility for me. But, inevitably, the courage and romance of that attracts my admiration. And the failure of those efforts both disheartens and intrigues me. Why couldn’t they by sustained? And why, today, have we gotten to the point where such utopian efforts don’t even exist any more? A total loss of hope—and of vision—and of deep attachments to a cadre of others.

We are thrown back on the family—or on church communities. There is almost nothing else in the way of lived solidarities out there. Especially if we think of institutional supports for those solidarities. Yes, there are networks of friends, but never organized into ways of life, or (perhaps more radically) ways of sustaining life, of securing the basic necessities. For that, you must go to the market; you can’t provide them for yourself through a small-scale collaboration with friends.

That’s what the demise of the 70s spirit means. Experiments are no longer even tried. Everyone buckles under to the imperatives of the marketplace and to the intolerances of a society that scorns all alternatives and punishes those who, for whatever reason, cannot manage or refuse to bow to the demands of the market. A society that visits the economic sins of the fathers on their offspring, making it well nigh impossible to climb out of the pit of poverty.

So, yes, I miss the 70s with its sense of possibilities. I was mostly a by-stander to, not a participant in, its experiments, which does seem a lamentable prudence. But I was a fellow traveler in the sense of being a sympathizer. I wanted the experimenters to succeed. I hated the inevitable smug “I told you so” that followed the multiple failures. I could mostly overlook the experimenters’ excesses and their often ludicrous rhetoric in order to honor their courage in trying to forge a new path. And I can feel very melancholy when I read a novel like “The New Earth” and experience afresh the hopes that drove so many 70s alternatives and the eventual crushing of those hopes.

Gridlock and Upheaval

Viewed one way, the world seems divided between the countries where everything seems locked into place and the countries undergoing constant upheaval. In the United States, we seem unable to change anything. Corporate power unchallenged; insane policies on gun ownership; a dysfunctional (inefficient, nontransparent, and grossly unequal) health care “system”; underfunded and segregated schools; homelessness; an addiction to automobiles that is subsidized by government funding of roads and the oil industry; environmental devastation of various sorts; increasing economic polarization; persistent racial disparities of every kind; a bloated military engaged in endless wars; and an intelligence “secret state” unaccountable to law. All of these problems have been with us since at least the 1970s and we have made little to no progress in ameliorating them. Hell, we can’t even address them within our political institutions—and they barely even register as topics of debate during our political campaigns. What national politician over the past forty years has ever had anything to say about homelessness? Why does Congress every year rubber stamp absurd military spending—the same Congress that hasn’t passed an actual, planned budget since 1996?

Such gridlock might pass as stability. Certainly, stability is far preferable than conditions in a “failed state” like Somalia. But the reality is that, absent a functioning government, other powers step into the vacuum. By dismembering a regulatory state that actually oversees economic activity, Republicans have enabled the great wealth grab that has characterized US society since 1970. There has been dramatic change—enabled by the very lack of action on the level of the state.

The change has been both material and ideological (to use Marxist terms). The ideological change might be summed up in the victory of Milton Friedman’s dictum that corporations have only one responsibility: to enrich their owners (shareholders). Any level of profit is completely justifiable—as are any measures taken to secure profits. Pollution, tax gamesmanship, off-shoring, driving down wages, various techniques to ratchet up “productivity” are all perfectly acceptable—since capital (investment) is going to flow toward those enterprises that best utilize all these means toward larger profits.

The material changes have been in modes of production. The productivity of the average American worker has risen dramatically. Since 1979, according to the Economic Policy Institute, productivity has risen 69% while wages have only risen 11%. (Link: https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/).

Any American worker can tell you where those productivity gains have come from: a bit from automation, but also from various “speed-up” techniques, including increased surveillance, unpaid overtime (in the US, 85% of men and 65% of women work more than 40 hours a week; link: https://20somethingfinance.com/american-hours-worked-productivity-vacation/), and persistent understaffing in relation to the work that must be accomplished.

American workers notoriously do not take their vacations. Why? For very paradoxical reasons: a combination of knowing all the work that won’t get done (and will be waiting for them) if they take time off (because of understaffing) combined with a fear that the business will be seen to survive while they are gone and, hence, they will be laid off. The absolute loss of job security in the new dispensation of neoliberal economics combined with the knowledge that losing health insurance is the surest pathway to destitution keeps the worker at his or her job. Yet they are also tied to their jobs by a laudable (but self-defeating) sense of responsibility, a desire to see that the work gets done and gets done well. The struggle is to maintain self-respect even while trapped in a workplace that uses them up as ruthlessly as 19^th century factory hands.

In short, even as nothing changes, there have been drastic upheavals in the terms of work for most Americans. The relentless pursuit of productivity by American enterprises has made working conditions substantially worse and job insecurity much more prevalent than they were in 1970 even as wages have remained almost stagnant.

What’s even more dispiriting is that much of this productivity is (on any sane, big picture view) worthless. Not worthless in its ability to churn out profit, but worthless in any sensible account of social well-being. We are in David Graeber “bull shit jobs” territory here. Think of tax codes and a health care system (to take just two examples) so byzantine that tens of thousands of people are employed to work through their bureaucratic mazes. We are overworked to produce things that do not, in John Ruskin’s memorable phrase, “avail life.” American society, apparently so unmovable, has increasingly embraced “illth,” the opposite of that wealth that avails life.

I had coffee the other day with one of my favorite ex-students. He is currently pursuing a PhD in the humanities—and was commenting on the academic version of insane productivity demands. The response since 1970 to the decline of jobs in the humanities has been to up the demands for scholarly production required at each step of the process of trying to secure (and then keep) a position. The inexorable logic of increasing demands appears unstoppable. Even though every one knows it is insane. Writing articles and books no one ever reads—and that have no impact on anything anywhere. The only reasonable response seems to be to up and quit: to refuse to be exploited as a non-tenurable, under-paid part-timer, and to refuse to ruin ten to fifteen years of your life bound to the productivity wheel of fire.

The young academic’s dilemma is no different than that faced by the newly hired at Goldman Sachs who are required to work 100 hours a week. (Link: https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/22/business/goldman-sachs-saturday-rule-workplace-survey/index.html) These hazing rituals can be sustained because the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is open to so few even though so many desire it. There is even the meritocratic pride of those who are tough enough to make it—and their corresponding contempt for the weaklings who drop out along the way. Competition is glorified as the way to discover who is really the best, even as this fetishism of competition overwhelms any consideration of the quality or the larger worth of the work produced under these inhumane conditions. Productivity has become like money—valued for its own sake, not for the things it enables.

What was most dispiriting in my conversation with my student was not his own dismal prospects—and the attempt to figure out a way for him to have a decent life doing the things he loved. No, it was the larger view. He has given up entirely on the United States. We are a society in terminable decline, one that offers no prospects of a good life to his generation, and unable to summon the will, the know-how, or the vision to change course. Crippled by our racial and culture war animosities (stirred up by politicians and a news media that has no interest—in every sense of that word—in addressing our society’s dysfunctions), the US (in this student’s eyes) has no path forward.

Not that a future outside the US looks any better. He was convinced China is the future—and it’s grim. Twenty years ago, China at least made noises about being a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural society, and its burgeoning economy appeared likely to produce a robust civil society. But that proved a fleeting dream. State capitalism is now joined to ethnic absolutism as China’s modus operandi. The non-Han will be crushed along with any dissent (witness the crackdown in Hong Kong). That the processes making life worse are driven by the state in China and by the abdication of the state in the United States makes China look stronger, but offers no consolation for those who lives are disfigured in both places.

It’s not that my student—or most people—can’t see what is happening to them. A clear-eyed vision of what is wrong is widespread. It’s the inability to locate any levers of change that paralyses. Stop the world I want to get off—because it is currently so obviously bad and hurtling toward worse.

Neoliberal Baseball

Taken in one way, the famous book (and then movie) Moneyball is a paean to the benefits of untrammeled competition. Some of the allure of sports is that it seemingly offers pure, uncorrupted competition, unsullied by issues of inherited advantage, racist prejudice, access to information unavailable to other competitors, or an uneven playing field structured by rules/laws that favor some players more than others. Walk onto the baseball field, where the rules are openly known to all, and the umpires are impartial—and the results will go to the team that plays better. (The Astros’ sign-stealing violates the equal information requirement.)

In Moneyball, intelligence and innovation succeed by doing what capitalists are supposed to do: find a more productive, cheaper, and better way to meet a need. In this case, the need was to win more baseball games over a season than the competition. And to do so while spending less money on payroll. The trick was to value things the market didn’t value—and thus get productivity at a lower cost. The stone the other builders rejected would be the Oakland A’s path to success.

Someone in the music business once said that the person who gets rich is the one who does it second. The market needs to be softened up by the innovator—and then the copy-cat gets the biggest rewards. Professional baseball embraced the “analytics” that drove the A’s innovative approach over a ten year span (or so).

But—and here is where neoliberalism comes in—the terms of the embrace ended up reversing the priorities. It no longer became a question of winning, except insofar as winning increased the bottom line. Economics triumphed over the ostensible point of the whole pursuit—which is better called “the whole enterprise” at this juncture.

One key move was the conversion of WAR (Wins above Replacement; the key general numerical summary of a player’s contribution to his team) into money. One WAR is deemed to be worth $8 million (that’s a 2018 figure; perhaps it has crept up a bit.) In game terms, one WAR means a player will over a season of 162 games contribute to the team winning one more game than an “average player” would. Added to the calculation of WAR is the ZIPS forecast system, which uses a player’s own history and a series of historical comparisons to predict the player’s likely future WAR over a given span of time. In short, analytics produced a “scientific” measurement of any player’s “value.” So much for market processes setting the price. Now there was an “objective” measure of price.

One more fact about baseball as a business needs to be added. Players in baseball require a longer period of development than in basketball and football, the two other major money making sports in the United States. Players can come straight from college (or even high school in the case of basketball) into the two other sports; there is usually two or three years (sometimes more, fewer times less) in the “minor” leagues before a baseball player is ready for the big time. To compensate teams for subsiding these development years, those teams get to employ (the term used is “control”) players for the first six years of their major league careers. In other words, players cannot participate in an open market competition for their services until they have worked for six years—often at a very significant discount from what they could earn if all teams could bid for their services. There is no free market for the vast majority of players—since less than 30% of players even last six full years in the majors.

What has been the effect of this collision of analytics with the player control system?

Basically, teams now covet the younger, cheaper players as the way to keep operating costs down, while being willing to pay large contracts to “super-stars” (Mookie Betts, Gerrit Cole, Bryce Harper, Mike Trout). The ones left holding the bag are the players who have been good enough to last six years in the majors, but who are in the one to two WAR a year range. Few teams are now willing to pay (for example) $12 million a season for a player who is one to two games above the younger player who can be had for about $1 million for the season. (Yes, it is possible to have a negative WAR; those are the players who don’t last. As would be expected, a very large group of players clusters around the mean of 0 WAR; after all the whole system is built around identifying what is “average.”)

Let us now count the ways that this all resembles neoliberalism (admittedly an inexact term; but one taken in this instance not to refer to increasing privatization of once public functions, but to the current brand of capitalism that combines loud praise of free markets with various practices that, in fact, stifle competition; places economic return over all other considerations; and has a set of by now familiar strategies and consequences.)

1. The evisceration of the middle class. Baseball teams are trending toward having a top 10% (the superstars) on the big contracts and a set of disposable younger players cycling through during the “control” years. The same growth of economic inequality we have been experiencing in the general economy.

2. Taking advantage of the way the market is structured as the key to making money. It is not through innovation, increased productivity, or a better product (see # 3 below on this point) that making money most depends. Rather, the real key to financial success is working the system in your favor. Competition is anathema to the neoliberal capitalist—as is risk. The goal is to grab market share that is immune to competition and ensures little to no risk. In baseball’s case, market share is secured by the control system and privileged access to the teams’ regional market.

3. Branding is more important than the quality of the product. It turns out that if you can maintain a loyal fan base, placate them with a superstar or two, then it doesn’t matter if you have a faceless supporting cast. (College basketball has taken this to its ultimate logical absurdity, cycling in a new cast of characters every single year.) The loyalty is to the team, not to the players. Surprisingly, even winning and losing don’t matter than much given the bars to actual competition. Yes, winning puts fans’ butts in the seats. But it doesn’t much impact TV revenues so long as teams get to carve out their regional market—and keep other teams out of that market (as league wide rules enable.) In short, a shoddy product is no bar to economic success. Sound familiar?

4. That the downsides of selling something mediocre are so low is because the real profits come from financialization, not from sales of a product. Baseball teams are speculative investments—and like California real estate only seem to go up in value. When the Kansas City Royals are sold for over $1 billion dollars in 2019 by someone who bought them for $96 million in 2000, even losing money on day-to-day operations over that 19 year period is a winning move. In neoliberalism, it is the company’s overall valuation that is the source of wealth, not what it actually does or delivers for consumers.

5. Finally, it is worth noting that neoliberalism is usually associated with aggressive privatization. But (as Christopher Newfield has demonstrated beyond doubt in his analyses of the “corporatization” of American public universities), the actual practice of neoliberalism (pharmaceutical companies are a great example) is to push certain costs of doing business (basic research for the pharmaceuticals, health care for its workers for Walmarts and McDonalds, transportation infrastructure for just about everyone) on to the public ledger in order to maximize its profits. There is no more egregious example than the way professional sports teams get municipalities to build hugely expensive stadiums—ones that have a shorter and shorter life span.

Moneyball may seem a charming story about how the wits of little Jack triumph over the Giant. But we need to see how the Giant, although a little slow on the uptake, becomes the one who recovers to restructure the field once again to his advantage. And how the Giant in the process repeats that classic move of economic activity: substituting the desire to accumulate wealth for the actual activity that was the original pursuit.

Right-Wing Sensibility

“You cannot greet the world in the morning with anything less than ferocity, or be evening you will be destroyed.” Hilary Mantel, The Mirror and the Light, p. 543.

What I want to do here is characterize right-wing sensibility. I will, in a subsequent post, try to characterize left-wing sensibility, which I find much harder to do.

I think Dick Cheney, more than Donald Trump, is a good exemplar here. Recall his one-percent doctrine. “If there’s a 1% chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al-Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response. It’s not about our analysis … It’s about our response.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_One_Percent_Doctrine

For the right-winger, it’s a dangerous world out there, full of enemies. If you let your guard down, you are toast. Pre-emptive violence (another doctrine of the Bush years) is best, but hitting back with ferocity is second best. The “bad guys” are everywhere and eternal vigilance is required to keep them in check. Conservatives are always the “party of order” because the challenges to order are everywhere.

The difference between us—the guardians of order—and them, the sowers of chaos—is, inevitably moralized. They aren’t called the “bad guys” for nothing. The maintenance of order becomes the maintenance of moral order. And that requires punishment. Justice for conservatives is “people getting what they deserve.” It has nothing to do with equality, since some people are better, more worthy, than others. Hayek wrote that the whole notion of equality is a travesty of justice. How could equal treatment be just, he wrote? The whole point of justice is to discriminate between the guilty and the not-guilty. A justice system that treated everyone the same would not be just.

Because it is a dangerous world, the conservative wants a strong military, a strong national security apparatus, and a strong leader. The niceties of democracy, the rule of law, and tolerance are distractions, even hindrances, when it comes to securing the nation against enemies external and internal. The moral division between good and bad translates fairly directly into strong-in-group bias. The members of my group—the nation—are good; the outsiders are, at best, never to be trusted, and, at worst, dangerous foes incessantly plotting against us.

Obviously, this mind-set encourages paranoia, the continual identification of new groups that are a threat to my group. Right-wing movements of the past two hundred years have always traded on identifying an “internal” enemy as well as an external one.

The moral component of conservatism rests on a strong sense of “desert” (less politely called “entitlement.”) My standing in the world, the goods I possess, are deserved—and for that reason it is fully just to deny those goods to the undeserving. The right-wing fury about the “nanny state” is about taking what I have earned and giving it to those too lazy or otherwise too morally deficient to have earned something for themselves. A very basic sense of justice is the source of the indignation against the welfare functions of the modern liberal state. (I believe that the fact that conservatives and liberals mean absolutely distinct things by “justice” goes a long way to defining the political divide between the two camps.)

There is, undoubtedly, a tension between the individualism that celebrates moral responsibility and what one has earned for oneself and the willingness to submerge the self in the larger group of the morally just. (The group of the saved, of the elect.) The aggression of a conservatism that is always on the lookout for enemies is complemented (perhaps even washed clean) by a concomitant willingness to sacrifice the self for the group in the event of violence.

Right-wing thought, because so focused on good guys versus bad guys, tends to the Manichean, toward moral absolutism, and, thus, to the conclusion that there is no compromising with the devil. Negotiation is a sign of weakness—and every weakness with be exploited. Strength is the only source of security in this dangerous world. The evil are just evil; their badness is not to be explained away, and the idea that they can be rehabilitated is sentimental liberal claptrap. For this reason (its inability to detect middle grounds), conservative thought is particularly attracted to slippery slope arguments. Medicare is Socialism and we are on the road to serfdom. Give them an inch and they will take a mile. Hysteria about drastic consequences to even the mildest of reforms goes with the territory.

In certain strains of right-wing sensibility, there can be a strong sense of one’s own potential depravity, an Augustinian sense of all humans as weak, sinful creatures. In that case, the appeal of a strong leader and an authoritarian social order extends to the need for external constraints to rein in one’s own tendency to sin. We are in superego territory here, where the masochistic desire to submit to a strong hand flips quickly and almost seamlessly into the sadistic need to punish depraved others. [This dynamic is very complex in US conservatism; it seems to play no role at all in the many shameless right-wing moralists. But it runs through various sites of evangelical fervor, where drinking, domestic violence, drug abuse, and covert hetero- and homo-sexual behavior co-exists with a deep attachment to “saving grace.”]

I do think attitudes toward the necessity of punishment—and to the severity of the forms it should take—are central here. Conservatives (Kipling is a great instance, but think of most policemen and many soldiers) hate liberals because liberals (in the conservative view) leave the dirty work of punishment and the enforcement of order to “the thin blue line.” The liberals benefit from the police and from prisons, yet not only refrain from doing the dirty work themselves, but also disdain those who do that work.

Here we tap into another feature of the right-wing sensibility: a sense of grievance. Their own rectitude, their doing the essential work society requires, is never appreciated, while the spongers, the eggheads, the chattering classes, not the mention the Jews, the blacks, and the immigrants gather in all the spoils. Society rewards the wrong people—a proof of society’s corruption and of the need for a strong leader to pull it back onto the right path.

In short, something is wrong somewhere—and that wrongness is either the product of evil people or of a fundamental, unchangeable fact, of a dangerous world replete with people out to get you. In either case, aggression is the best response. As my conservative students tell me, the Machiavelli of The Prince basically has it right.

Conservatives are capable of exemplary generosity to those in their in-group. That generosity, you might say, matches their ferocity to those deemed outside the pale.

Given the priority conservatives place on security, it was one of the great intellectual coups of history when the neo-liberals (Hayek and Friedman in particular) captured the word “freedom” to describe what capitalism delivered—and, on that basis, make a defense of unregulated capitalism the hallmark of late-twentieth-century conservatism (Thatcher and Reagan). Traditional conservatives (Burke and Carlyle) saw capitalism as destroying communal solidarity by pitting each individual against the rest in endless competition. They associated capitalism with the destruction of social order.

Hayek and Friedman, in contrast, correctly recognize that capitalism (because of the coercive force of economic necessity for most people) poses no danger to order. Assured that order is not threatened, they can undertake their propaganda campaign for “free” markets by insisting that government is the source of coercion (as well as the source of inefficiency) while the market will set us free. Ignore the fact of economic necessity—or of the disastrous results of profitable enterprises always shifting the costs of “externalities” elsewhere—and their argument makes some sense. And it fits perfectly (Hayek’s work is the perfect model here) with right-wing Manicheanism. The market all good; any efforts to regulate the market (either by states or by unions) all bad.

Hayek and Friedman also have to ignore all the evidence that capitalists hate risk. Security remains the watch-word. Capitalists always try to minimize competition, to shift costs and risks elsewhere, to never face personal bankruptcy. That’s why capitalism tends toward monopoly. Competition (just like economic downturns) does not spur risk-taking; it spurs ever more ingenious ways to mitigate risk. Innovation occurs within secure environments—like research tanks and universities.

Conservatives hate liberals—and the most common charge is that liberals are hypocrites. Somewhere in the conservative psyche (maybe I am giving them too much credit) there are guilt feelings about their aggressive, uncharitable relation to their fellow human beings. I would think there is a similar guilt about the costs of aggressive behavior (both military and economic) on the world and its inhabitants. Such massive destruction (of cities, of the environment, of the people trampled by military and economic adventurism) is hard to justify—and do-gooder liberals keep pointing out that unpleasant fact. For a conservative like my father, that finger-pointing spurred rage. In his milder moments, he would brand war a sad necessity, taking a tragic view of what this world inflicted on us, these constantly fighting human animals. But in less mild moods, the rage generated fantasies of violence against those liberals, the desire to place them in the front lines of battle, to have them subjected to violence.

Because determined to defend their own rectitude (no matter the deep, hidden doubts or guilt feelings that make liberal accusations sting), conservatives respond with similar rage to accusations of racism. They will fall back on “desert”—which is why a certain kind of Darwinian and/or free market fundamentalism is so appealing to the right wing. There has to be a mechanism (shades of Calvinism) to separate out the “elect” (the deserving) from the “damned” (the undeserving). And it is much better if that mechanism can be demonstrated as “natural,” as a process uncontrolled by human hands and, thus, unbiased in any way.

Hayek himself avoided the crude claim that the market’s creation of winners and losers was just. Desert, he was willing to concede, played only a small role in market success. But Hayek was adamant that the processes of the market were beyond human control—and that all efforts to control them would lead to worse results than laissez-faire. The point is that the conservative is going to strive to avoid taking any responsibility for the ills the liberal harps on (poverty, racism, environmental degradation, workplace dangers etc.)

Three final thoughts. One, I don’t know what to do with people like the Koch brothers. Their animus against workers, environmentalists, and any kind of regulation is so over the top, so relentless, and so directly hostile to the well-being of millions of people even as their own wealth is beyond what could be spent in a thousand life-time, that I cannot fathom their motives or sensibility. What is at stake for them? They have been given a sweet, sweet deal by this world—and yet are filled with rage against it and a desire to do hurt. What’s their beef? It’s baffling. As Gary Wills put it many years ago (reporting on either the 1992 or 1996 Republican convention in the New York Review of Books), what explains all these aggrieved millionaires? It is one thing for politicians (eager for power) to exploit the sense of grievance among those the economy has not served well, providing those souls with enemies to focus on. But why would a millionaire fall for that poison? And I end up thinking (simplistically, but with no place else to go) that even as there are souls for whom no amount of power will ever suffice, there are souls for whom no amount of money will ever suffice. Just greed simpliciter.

The second thought is spurred by Walter Benjamin’s insight that the logical end of fascism is war. At the extreme right, the only plausible response to the identified enemies is extermination, and the only way to offer “the masses” participation in power (the opportunity to exercise that strength, that “ferocity,” that insures survival into the evening—to recall my opening quote) is to put a gun in their hands and march them off the battle. Trump’s America has not reached this point; the undercurrent of violence in his politics is unorganized at the moment, only inspiring lone shooters, not para-military or official violence. With the courts increasingly in right-wing hands, most of the contemporary conservative movement (especially its “respectable” political and business wings) is willing to effect its coup through the law. And liberals have been hand-tied by this strategy, with its vote suppression, roll back of regulations, business friendly court decisions etc. The left, I believe, will eventually have to resort to defying court decisions–the way much of the South defied the Brown decision.

Third: I have deliberately not talked of Trump in this post. I don’t think him easily exemplary of the right-wing sensibility. His craving for attention, his obvious insecurities, his participation in the pursuit and circuits of “celebrity” make him a rather different animal. There are overlaps of course, but better not to be confused by thinking there is a perfect match.