"מנא ,מנא, תקל, ופרסין" ("Mene, Mene, Tekel u-Pharsin") The original Writing on the Wall. Book of Daniel, Chapter 5. So what's a genial agnostic like me doing quoting fire-and-brimstone Biblical snippets on a Sunday?
Well, funny thing about that writing. "MENE", "TEKEL" and "PERES" all happen to be names of currency contemporary to the prophet Daniel. It's Mammon, folks. "μαμμωνάς" to the Attic Greeks; "mámóna" to the Persians; "mamon" in the tongue of Christ, Aramaic; and "trickle down economics" to his ostensible devotees in the Republican Party.
Trickle down economics in itself is dangerous and destructive, but combine it with relentless expansion of the public sector and it's a catastrophic force. That's the whirlwind we're reaping just now. Reagan's peeps put their boots on the necks of the poor, of course, and paid cynical lip service to the middle class, but astonishingly, even after Gingrich's "peasants with pitchforks" (more like "interests who pitch pork"), their real destructiveness was in expanding government, the very vice they like to attribute to Democrats. Reagan's offensive against the already dying forces of communism world-wide expanded the franchise of state action in foreign affairs, raising the cost and the stakes in a vicious cycle that led to the expansion of the military-industrial complex (against which a great Republican president, Eisenhower, warned) and the institutionalization of global terrorism. At the same time, he shied away from tackling the all-too-real (and certainly not dying) specter of "entitlement programs", rightly opposed by the spiritual mentor, William F. Buckley, of Reagan Republicanism. Oh yes, that Buckley--father of the Christopher Buckley who just endorsed Obama (and it's no easy argument that William F would not have done the same thing).
After 12 years of Reagan/Bush, it was Bill Clinton who actually did something about entitlements, with his welfare reform package. To be fair, just as "only Nixon could go to China", perhaps only a Democrat could tackle this problem (which is another reason I support Obama, and hope he'll continue Clinton's reforms).
And then, oh woe unto us--
vae te mores rerum publicarum--George W Bush came along. He was already looking to combine his trickle-down excesses (the infamous Bush tax cuts) with expansion of government (particularly in education where more resources are required, but not more bureacracy). He made half-hearted noises about reforming Social Security, but never had the political will to follow through. But worst of all, in response to 9/11, he threw away all the common sense of his forbears such as Buckley and Eisenhower and ballooned the size of government in the course of a seven-year-long panic. The Department of Homeland Security is an expansion of government the size of which would make even Roosevelt blush. And don't even start me on the expansion of the military/industrial complex through pursuit of two wars and the vast privatization of the mechanism for these wars. Even Republicans can now see their house of cards falling about their heads.
"I don't know that there's a lot of realism in the Republican Party. We have an economic message that is largely irrelevant to most people. Cutting personal tax rates is not the answer to everything. The Bush years were largely prosperous but while national income was up the numbers for most individuals were not. Republicans find that a hard fact to process."
That was David Frum, a former Bush speechwriter,
speaking to The Sunday Telegraph in an excellent article. BTW, Reagan's famous spechwriter Peggy Noonan is to busy in her Wall Street Journal column bemoaning the lack of hoity toity in political
discourse to contribute anything substantive to the conversation, or I expect she'd be forced to agree. But that's the rub about the Bush years that gives the lie to the entire premise Reaganomics. If you offer Mammon complete freedom of the nation, he will quickly find his own high priests (on Wall Street, for the most part), and he will waste no time scourging the poor and allowing a grudging drip drip drip from the middle class to that rank of high priesthood. The highest of high priests (such as Allen Greenspan, toting the putrid Book of Ayn Rand) will be elevated to demigods in the eyes of the uncritical.
And the ten ton irony is that none of this is fiscally liberal (a.k.a. "conservative"). Mammon is just my Sunday name for what economists call "moral hazard" (aptly named, eh?) Every marketplace needs a cop and a judge. Take those away and "enlightened self-interest" really means "hooray for thieves, cartels and confidence scams". Markets are a great force for good, when they run well, in other words, when the cop and the judge are never too far away. Some of the good of good markets is in progressive trend (and it's only political muddy thinking that would make this an unusual idea)--the opportunity for each individual to be successful, for the poor to rise to the middle class, and for the middle class to grow in wealth. I think the American public finally understands this, which is partly why their fury is so focused on Republicans. Sure bad times disfavor incumbents, but the Democratic congress is as much the incumbent as the Republican executive ("unitary" indeed--if that means "friendless").
I think voters finally see the falsehood of an entire Republican generation of promises, and are looking for as fresh a start as they can, and if it means painting Washington Blue and putting their futures in the hands of the supposed illiberal (yes, dammit, I said "illiberal") troika of Obama/Pelosi/Reid, so be it (let's be honest--we should all be nervous of a Blue tide, but the Reds have left us no choice). Republicans themselves, are finally beginning to sense this rebellion, and there is every sign that the American version of the French aristocracy is staring to truly run scared.
The Elephant has a lot to learn from the Book of Daniel in 2008. "But when his heart was lifted up, and his mind hardened in pride, he was deposed from his kingly throne, and they took his glory from him."
Yea, I'm really no sort of Bible thumper (shaaa! as if!), but when William Blake has a moral to illustrate, I'm fit to take notice. Let's hope that an ideological deluge cleans the Augean stables of Republican ideology, because the last thing we need at such critical times is for half of our (unfortunately) two-party system to be condemned to a long spell in the wilderness. Oh where oh where are the Republican Alpheios and Peneios?
