Good evening, dear readers!
Greymantle is back at it again after a five-week absence. Once again, let me offer my apologies for the lengthy gap between posts. It has been a very busy spring, both work-wise and family-wise.
Until the kids go off to college, I will periodically be trapped in a rut of driving all over the eastern seaboard to attend athletic events and make college visits. That’s life. ‘First World Problems’, as they say.
With this post, I am going to pick up where we left off in March with my thoughts on the phenomenon of failure, and why it happens.
As I outlined in my last post, failures in business, war, and finance (and in life, more generally) are frequently caused by failures to imagine alternative scenarios that clash with our own hopes and with our pre-conceived notions of how the world works.
Last time around, I offered three examples of imaginative failure: First, Vladimir Putin’s failure to imagine that Ukrainians would dig in and resist Russia’s invasion. Second, SVB banks’ failure to imagine that the U.S. could experience a sudden shift in its inflation and interest rate environment. Third, Sam Bankman-Fried’s failure to imagine that the crypto bubble he helped create would be of a much shorter duration than other recent financial bubbles (i.e. the 2000’s structured finance bubble).
With today’s post, I am going to focus on the imaginative failures of U.S. political conservatism as embodied by the leadership of the Republican Party and its network of think tanks and associated political action committees (PACs) that fund political campaigns.
A GREAT KINGDOM IS ABOUT TO FALL
As the economist Paul Krugman hinted in a Twitter post about the U.S. economy this past week, once it becomes plainly obvious to a majority of Americans that the U.S. economy is not entering a recession in 2023 and inflation is moderating as expected, ‘a great kingdom will fall’.
By ‘great kingdom’, Paul Krugman means the Republican Party, or ‘GOP’, and their major think tank ideologues, who have been pushing a low-tax version of ‘free market fundamentalism‘ since the mid-1970s. That is the economic side of their philosophy, at any rate.
Krugman apparently believes, as does Greymantle, that the stakes are really very high for the GOP heading into the 2024 election cycle. If a widening majority of U.S. voters turn against the GOP in 2024 – and a narrow majority of voters has been more or less against them since 2006 – then the chances of their being clobbered at the ballot box are dizzyingly high.
Swiftly moderating inflation and strong, direct evidence that unemployment remains low and wages are rising despite the GOP’s endless harangue that ‘the U.S. economy is terrible’, might be just enough to tune another 5 million American voters out of the GOP message of low taxes and less regulation.
Propaganda can warp peoples’ minds, but one thing it can’t do is deprive them of the ability to see the blatantly obvious.
If the official unemployment rate is 3.5%, then whatever the ‘real’ or ‘unofficial’ rate could be is also bound to be pretty low – no matter how you slice it. You can say Labor Dept. stats are a bunch of ‘globalist lies’ if it makes you feel good, but it will be obvious to folks in Portland, Maine and Portland, Oregon that their friends and neighbors aren’t looking for work.
An inflation rate of 5% is an inflation rate of 5%. We are not quite there yet, but Greymantle expects we’ll be there by the autumn. And higher deposit rates on savings accounts look really good to depositors.
Mix and match some more good economic news with the degree to which centrist and left-leaning voters have been annoyed by the Supreme Court’s recent overturning of Roe v. Wade and you have the makings of an electoral disaster for the Republicans in 2024.
That defeat will be not only an epochal ballot loss for the GOP, but a nail in the coffin of both MAGA Trumpism and fusionism, the preceding ideology of the GOP. If my prediction is correct, then the GOP will be both turned out of power and looking for a new ideology to hang its hat on.
HOW DID THIS HAPPEN?
The looming collapse of American conservatism has been on its way since the 2006 elections, when the GOP was turned out of power in a midterm rout that served both as a repudiation of the Bush Administration’s foreign policy and its military failures in Iraq.
Other notable defeats have followed in the years since. Notable among these were Barack Obama’s election as U.S. president in 2008, Obama’s 2012 re-election, and the manifold poll defeats of the Trump years, beginning with the 2018 midterm losses.
The strange thing is that conservatives have never believed that the end of their movement is imminent.
Perhaps that is understandable, to some degree. After all, their movement has been plotting the complete takeover of all three branches of the U.S. federal government since the mid-1970s, and for most of the time since have been able to point to a series of noteworthy successes.
For certain brief moments, for instance, including the 2003-06 ‘rally round the flag’ period and Donald Trump’s first two years in power, they seemed to be entering the stretch of uncontested control of government for which they had so long dreamed.
The men and women who forged post-1950s American conservatism, and here I am speaking of William F. Buckley, Phyliss Shafly, Ronald Reagan, Barry Goldwater, and the wealthy sponsors and intellection lights of the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute, were nothing if not detailed planners of their slow ascent to power.
Between the mid-1960s and the late 1990s, this movement advanced to power within the Republican Party, founded or captured various media organs, and expanded their influence in major industries, pushing out moderate ‘Rockefeller Republicans‘ and forging alliances with evangelical Christendom and conservative factions within Catholicism and Judaism.
With the assistance of ruthless businessmen such as the Australian newspaper magnate, Rupert Murdoch, and chemical industry leaders Charles and David Koch, a new conservative – or at least right-wing – media complex was established in the late 1970s that grew to include hundreds of talk radio stations and programs, the Wall Street Journal, and the Murdoch-owned Fox News television channel.
For committed members of this political movement, the steady advance of their agents and elected representatives seemed to offer ample proof of the inexorable nature of their progress to the apex of power.
The problem with the rise of conservatism – and it was something that most conservative leaders and their operatives tended to lose sight of as time went on – was that conservatism’s rise was, to some extent, an artificial phenomenon. It was a function of deep pockets and clever talkers. One thing it wasn’t was a natural outgrowth of an underlying shift in values in conservatism’s direction.
Even as the number of purportedly ‘conservative’ media outlets proliferated, there was growing evidence that the median American voter, as a political animal, was becoming decidedly less conservative in his or her outlook.
IT TURNS OUT THAT VOTERS LIKE PUBLIC SERVICES
American conservatism’s core beliefs rest on four basic pillars.
First, that low taxes translate into economic growth and general prosperity. Second, that Americans are naturally disposed to desire limited intrusion and services provided by state and federal government.
Third, that Americans strongly favor punitive punishments for criminals and an expansive global military presence. Fourth and finally, that Americans are socially conservative creatures that hold a strong identification with the traditional family and the Christian religion.
All other beliefs and policy positions characterized as ‘conservative’ in the U.S. flow from these four basic tenets.
Perhaps all these tenets were once held by a majority of Americans, or at least a majority of Americans living west of the Delaware River and south of the Mason-Dixon Line. However, Greymantle doubts this mythical view of American social history. In the 1930s, 40s and 50s, a majority of Americans were clearly comfortable with the power of labor unions and were happy with the results of the New Deal.
Unquestionably, a moderately large sub-set of American voters did subscribe to all, or most, of these tenets in the late 1960s. To the chagrin and dismay of conservative leaders, however, it appears that an even larger sub-set of voters gradually abandoned these positions between the mid-1970s – when conservatism began its forward march – and the current era of the 2020s.
The first indication that this was the case became obvious to Greymantle in the year 2005, when then-President George W. Bush attempted to privatize the federal Social Security program. Bush’s proposal was met with a mixture of resistance and derision, most notably from core Republican voters.
Republican opposition to Bush’s plan to privatize Social Security should have been a sign that the grass roots were losing faith in conservatism as a system of ideas. Instead, right-wing media pundits scratched their heads and blamed Republican opposition to the plan on the costs of the Iraq War.
There was probably more than a grain of truth to this theory. “If Bush is spending $1 trillion on wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, then he has no business endangering Social Security by handing it over to a bunch of Wall Street bankers’. This was the moment that 21st century populism was born in America – at least from my perspective.
The second sign that the conservative edifice was cracking was vocal grass roots discontent with the waging of war in Iraq in 2005-06, particularly as the insurgency against U.S. forces escalated. Even as Fox News hosts kept justifying Bush Administration policy, callers in to talk radio programs ranted about the incompetence and expense of the entire enterprise.
And then came the biggest shock of all: the election of Barack Obama as U.S. President in November 2008.
The inability of the conservative movement to adequately ‘process’ this event was the real turning point, Greymantle believes, heralding the coming collapse of conservatism as an ideology and the slow slide of the GOP base into the fantasies and conspiracist thinking that presently capture it.
WHEN CLEAR EXPLANATIONS ARE NECESSARY
Greymantle’s clearest memory of the 2008 presidential election is the atmosphere in the room in which John McCain, the Republican candidate who lost the election, made his concession speech on the night of Nov. 4, 2008 at about 11:30pm Eastern Time. It was the evening of election day. The returns had just shown that Barack Obama was the certain winner.
McCain’s concession speech was generous and big-hearted in the way of classic concession speeches in American political life. He thanked Obama for running a strong campaign and pledged to help the president-elect steer the ship of state in any way he could. Keep in mind the condition of the country at the time: the 2008 Financial Crisis was an ongoing reality.
McCain’s delivery was unfailingly gracious and, in substance, patriotic. His attitude bolstered my faith in the American system.
Towards the middle of the speech, I began to look around the room to see how other people were reacting. I noticed Sarah Palin, McCain’s running mate, standing quietly a few feet to McCain’s right, crying noiselessly. Palin appeared genuinely distraught. The observation struck me like a gut-punch.
What was the matter with Palin? Until a month before the Republican convention that summer, Palin had been a relatively obscure figure in U.S. politics. Popular in her native Alaska, Palin had not been a household name anywhere else until two months prior to the election.
Palin’s selection as McCain’s running mate had dramatically raised her political profile. On top of that, Palin was a relatively young 44 years of age. If she played her cards right, she could have a successful 40-year career ahead of her in national Republican politics.
So, why was Palin crying as if her mother had died? That thought kept ratcheting around my head as my eyes took in the demeanor of others in McCain’s election headquarters. What I noticed most of all was the silence in the room. You could have heard a pin drop.
Uh-oh, Greymantle thought. This isn’t good. Something is definitely off here. Even when a political candidate loses, the room is usually full of gracious cheering for the defeated and celebrations of a campaign well-fought. The loser had ‘fought the good fight’. Nothing to be ashamed of.
That’s when my skin began to crawl and I thought: ‘They don’t understand how McCain could possibly have lost. They have no explanation for the defeat. It isn’t in any way obvious to them why McCain didn’t win. In fact, these are people in a state of utter disbelief and shock’.
McCain or Frank Luntz or SOMEBODY on the Republican side is going to have to explain to this room of grass roots Republican volunteers and professional operatives why McCain lost the race, or something in the GOP mind is going to go badly askew. That was Greymantle’s thought.
Sometimes, when something unexpected happens, a clear and detailed explanation isn’t really necessary. Folks gobsmacked by the sudden turn of events can figure out for themselves what went wrong, why the gamble or gambit did not work out as expected. With a bit of common sense and intuition, and two or three questions, folks can ascertain what went down.
But there are times when a clear explanation is absolutely necessary. Those tend to be the times when interested parties literally cannot imagine – at all – why events did not turn in their favor, because all the laws of social gravity and every fact that they thought they knew appeared to predict, with great certainty, that matters would turn out as always.
Such was the case with Obama’s first election in 2008. The reason so many Republicans could not accept the outcome was that they could never have imagined such an outcome materializing. Even on the eve of the election. For them, the choice of Obama as the Democratic nominee was a kind of cosmic joke played on the Democrats. He surely could never win.
THE COMPLACENT IMAGINATION
We all pack a fair number of fixed categories into our minds. It’s a way of helping us to stay sane.
‘Up’ can’t suddenly become ‘down’ tomorrow. The Navy SEALS are unlikely to take up tap dancing. The Greens will remain opposed to nuclear power, cowboys will prefer the novels of Louis L’Amour to the poetry of Nikki Giovanni and the Pope will remain a Catholic (except for Pope Francis, arguably). Stable categories will not suddenly be inverted.
This is called ‘bias’. We all are guilty of it, whether we care to admit it or not.
Imagination is a quality human beings share that allows our minds to break out of the stale categories to which it becomes accustomed. Imagination’s function, like fear, is to help us avoid danger and error. The difference is the imagination tends to bring a feeling of pleasure in its wake, whereas fear is simply, well, fear. Who likes being afraid?
Our imaginations help us to peer a little distance into the future. They are like decision trees wherein we can picture how different scenarios of cause and effect will play out over the short or long term. The best imaginations are active and dynamic rather than staid and stable.
A genius is frequently distinguished from other clever people by the degree of dynamism in their imagination. Take Albert Einstein or George Lucas or Doris Lessing: these are people with active imaginations.
There is another type of imagination that I like to call ‘the complacent imagination’. This is an imaginative style distinguished by its reliance on time-worn and fixed categories and decision trees with few branches. This imaginative style does not like to imagine the unexpected. It likes to imagine a happy ending for itself and disaster for those opposed.
Why put effort into figuring out a way to break up the Democratic coalition when the ‘silent majority’ are turning out to vote for you in the next election?
The Republicans of 2008 had complacent imaginations. Many of them still do, albeit a complacency redirected into a kind of repetitive frenzy.
A FAILURE TO IMAGINE
In 2008, GOP voters could not imagine that a majority of the country would vote for Barack Obama because most of them did not know anyone in their immediate social circles who felt comfortable voting for the young senator from Illinois and was prepared to say so.
Most of them also did not know anyone like Barack Obama personally, either in the social or professional sense. Mixed race constitutional law professors who lectured at University of Chicago were just not who they hung out with. And that was the problem, because we all unconsciously tend to see our own social circle as the yardstick for making sense of reality.
If Barack Obama seemed like an alien from outer space to large numbers of Republican voters, it was because his composure and manners were alien to their received social life, and they could not imagine that someone like Obama would be an acceptable alternative to someone like John McCain.
So, when Obama was elected, these bedrock GOP voters were like, “Who voted for this guy? Do people in New York and California really feel comfortable with a guy who grew up in Hawaii and whose mother is white and father is an African Marxist college professor in Kenya? And…if the majority of voters do feel comfortable voting for Obama, then what can I deduce about the other attitudes and beliefs of ‘Blue State’ voters?”
In other words, Obama’s election triggered a panicked rethinking of human social reality for a lot of Republicans (and some Democrats, too). The problem seems to have been that…the aforementioned panicked rethinking did not proceed very far. It did not result in an epiphany of some kind that might have been along the lines of, ‘Well, I guess the country has changed a bit more than I thought. Going to have to adapt now.”
Rather, the anxiety and disbelief generated by Obama’s election tended to move in the direction of repeated fixations on various fear tropes in the conservative imagination: socialism, Marxism, Black Power, permission structures to enable higher degrees of law-breaking, etc.
Not that some of those items haven’t percolated up from the liberal sphere of the country since Obama was elected, particularly during 2020. But very little of that was actually rearing its head in 2008.
SLOUCHING TOWARD DEFEAT
The discussion above leads us directly, gentle readers, into the present state and state-of-mind of the U.S. conservative movement.
As I have stated above, in my view the GOP and the conservative political movement that purportedly controls are heading towards electoral disaster in 2024, which I fully expect to be followed, in time, by a more complete defeat of most of their core ideas in a variety of other areas.
The conservatives clearly understand that they’re in trouble, but don’t quite know what to do about it outside of fear-mongering and pursuing a variety of techniques designed to ‘turn out the base’ of core GOP voters.
Again, this appears to stem from a sort of naive belief that their voters still represent ‘the Silent Majority‘ of the U.S.. If they aren’t winning (because, after all, they are the majority) then it’s because the other side is cheating. And if the other side is winning by cheating, then election strategies and messages don’t have to be re-worked at all.
There are almost certainly approaches that could be made towards tackling this challenge.
One would be to thrown in the towel on climate change denialism and present a realistic platform for dealing with global warming that is robust enough to appeal to voters with college degrees but still different enough from the Democratic approach to be called center-right in some way.
Another would be to thrown in the towel on lower taxes and actively embrace higher taxes on the super-rich as a way of balancing the federal budget and stabilizing the national debt. Such an approach could label itself as ‘fiscally conservative’ and appeal to a certain kind of center-left voter who may be disenchanted with the Dems because of ‘Wokism’ and other hobby horses of the American Left.
A third and final approach would be to take some elements of the first two approaches and then distance the GOP from the pro-life (anti-abortion) movement in hopes of winning over the broad middle of America.
That broad middle might best be described as ‘socially and sexually libertarian’ on a variety of issues related to sex and reproduction, but who aren’t necessarily comfortable with the idea that gender is something ‘assigned at birth’ that can be randomly changed by individuals.
All probable approaches to recapturing the center, but none apparently in the works as a campaign strategy for 2024.
The trouble with each of these approaches is that they all contain some element of ‘throwing in one towel or another’ to embrace what have become popular mainstream positions over the past 50 years, but are still anathema to the core group of conservative GOP voters who are in a state of denial that the Overton Window has changed as much as it has.
Convincing those voters that some changes have to be made and some sacred cows slaughtered in order to prevent even worse defeats is something that neither Republican elites or populists can bring themselves to do.
The problem is that they just can’t imagine doing it.
We’ll have more for you next month on America’s changing society and the likely place within it of what Greymantle calls ‘Conservative Dissenters’ in the swiftly approaching era when the Democratic Party and social libertarians will be the majority and hold the balance of power.
Until then, I remain —
Greymantle
