Friday, April 26, 2013

Cut & Paste Leadership, the Modern Political Condition


In his thoroughly insightful book, American Fascists, Chris Hedges details how fundamentalists pervert Christianity by willfully excluding anything that doesn't suit their various ideologies.  That is why, according to Hedges, there are hundreds of versions of Jesus in the United States, each tailored to some particular sect or church's liking.   The fundamentalists even have a project to rewrite the Bible, excising anything (and there is a great deal) that seems even vaguely socialistic or too tolerant or forgiving.

Among America's rightwing political classes even extremists like Michelle Bachmann go all gushy over great presidents past, like Abraham Lincoln, but would positively recoil at so much of what Lincoln stood for, so much of what he said and wrote.   They want a Lincoln sanitized of views that don't conform to their own.  They want you to believe that they believe what Lincoln believed.  They want the public to believe that they stand for what Lincoln stood for when, in reality, it's anything but.

Rightwing politics also rely on economic philosophies that have been so cherry-picked, laundered and tuned up as to bear less than a passing resemblance to their economic gurus, Adam Smith being a useful example.   They hold up Smith as the father of free enterprise capitalism, elevating him to the status of a prophet.  And to make Smith's theories suit their own purposes they truly shred what he actually believed and espoused.   They don't want to hear Adam Smith.  They wish only to hear themselves as they would want Adam Smith to be.

Adam Smith had very unwelcome views on the mantra of growth.  He plainly foresaw the inevitability of society reaching a point at which further growth lost its utility.  In The Wealth of Nations, Smith correctly foresaw roughly 200 years as the longest period for sustained growth followed by the emergence of what we would today call steady state economics, the very era we are now entering.

Likewise Adam Smith was very wary of corporatism and its place in the public arena, something well understood by people like Lincoln, but rejected by today's rightwing corporatism.  Here's what Smith actually believed:

"The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from [the business community] ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention.  It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it."

Yet we have also entered an era in which corporate and political spheres are merging, perhaps in reaction to the restraint of growth.  Smith's injunction to be suspicious of corporate wiles has given way to organizations such as ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, a vehicle for the private sector to propose and sometimes even draft laws that are handed to elected representatives to enact into law.  ALEC is nothing else but an instrument to effect the further capture of economic and political power, a wedge to sever the elected from their electors.  Adam Smith?  Out the bloody window.


And so we emerge with a grand political perversion, leadership by paragraph, cut and paste, driven by ideologies that are first formed and only then justified by what is selected and what is excluded from great minds of the past.


And look at our own Grand Dissembler with his unquestioning embrace of the Tar Sands industry and pipeline operators.  While he would proudly proclaim himself a disciple of Adam Smith, he and his minions toil tirelessly to protect Enbridge and the fossil fuelers from the most scrupulous, ...the most suspicious attention to their dodgy pipeline schemesIn reality, Harper's purpose is also that described by Adam Smith - to deceive and oppress.

7 comments:

Sam Gunsch said...

Could you post the page number for that A. Smith quote?

It's the best!

Just so you know, I've used your quote of Adam Smith to post over here:

http://albertadiary.ca/2013/04/mysterious-2011-review-of-alberta-labour-code-explained-corporate-influence-of-course.html#comment-71771
Sam Gunsch



April 27, 2013 at 12:15 am
re: ” Mr. Mason said. “It’s very clear they weren’t asking for changes to the Labour Code – they were expecting them.””

“they” = ” a well-connected coalition of construction companies and anti-union contractors ”

… and on this point of vested interests negotiating public policy in joint venture with elected governments, is the corporate sector/markets cult’s hero Adam Smith, being just as strong in critique or stonger than Mason and Climenhaga:

… what [Adam] Smith actually believed:
http://the-mound-of-sound.blogspot.ca/2013/04/leadership-by-paragraphs-modern.html

“The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from [the business community] ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it.”

But in Alberta since Klein, the adoption of a corporatist ideology for governance has made vested business interests indistinguishable from the public interest. See Chapter 9, The Corporate Province, in Mark Lisac’s, The Klein Revolution (1995) for the foundational explanation and documentation. Don’t take my word for it.

The Mound of Sound said...

Sam, The Wealth of Nations is so venerable and so often reprinted that, it seems, no one bothers with pagination citations any longer. However here are some other quotes from it you might find interesting.

“No society can surely be flourishing and happy of which by far the greater part of the numbers are poor and miserable. ”

"Our merchants and masters complain much of the bad effects of high wages in raising the price and lessening the sale of goods. They say nothing concerning the bad effects of high profits. They are silent with regard to the pernicious effects of their own gains. They complain only of those of other people.”

“Wherever there is great property, there is great inequality.”

“The subjects of every state ought to contribute towards the support of the government, as nearly as possible, in proportion to their respective abilities.”

CuJoYYC said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
CuJoYYC said...

I just can't help think of Dear Leader™ and his acolytes when reading this little tidbit from Adam Smith.

"The man who barely abstains from violating either the person, or the estate, or the reputation of his neighbours, has surely very little positive merit."

The Mound of Sound said...

Indeed, CuJo. I have just about had it up to the tits with this drift into authoritarianism that's been underway, particularly over the past decade.

In the past two years I have developed an exercise to recalibrate my political compass. I read the writings of Edmund Burke, Smith, Lincoln, T. Roosevelt and others to discern the true meaning of conservatism.

What becomes discouragingly obvious from this exercise is how far past anything remotely conservative we, as a society, and our political classes have shifted.

We have become complacent to abuses of our democracy evident in the decline of our mass media and its transformation into a corporate media cartel. We no longer understand inequality as a mortal threat to democracy. We have an overall indifference to political capture and the subsequent ascendancy of oligarchy.

What leader - Conservative, Liberal or New Democrat - campaigns for the breakup of the corporate media cartel? What leader campaigns to reverse inequality? What leader means to arrest the tide of corporatism?

Okay, there is just one. Elizabeth May. Progressivism underlies Green policy because it is indispensable to their objectives.

Dana said...

Yeah, Mound, I think I have to agree with you.

I'm going to expose myself a bit here - I like Justin Trudeau a great deal - I just don't like some of the things he's saying and I don't see enough change at the top of the party for me to be comfortable.

Also I am fed up with federal Liberal shills like Jeff Jedras equating the BC Liberal Party with the federal version and actively campaigning for them online. The man is either stupid or disingenuous and in either eventuality it's none of his fracking business anyway what happens in BC irrespective of his roots.

The NDP I have pronounced on too frequently to need to repeat myself. To think I used to supply the entertainment at CCF rallies in Regina by singing old labour songs during breaks. Tommy and Woodrow would start a new party of principle if confronted withe today's abomination. Waste of commitment.

So it's Green for me too here in North Vancouver.

The Mound of Sound said...

I hear that, Dana.