Counterrevolutionary Meditations

Via Daniel Larison, the indefatigable Dark Lord of paleoconservatism, a masterful puncturing of the emerging myth of Obama the Deliverer, the Reconciler, written by David Sirota:

Yes, it is the Great Education Myth - the idea that if we only just made everyone in America smarter, we would solve outsourcing, wage depression and health care/pension benefit cuts that are the result of forcing Americans to compete in an international race to the bottom. As I wrote recently in the San Francisco Chronicle, this is one of the most dishonest myths out there, as the government's own data shows that, in fact, all of the major economic indicators are plummeting for college grads. You can make everyone in America a PhD, and all you would have is more unemployed PhD's - it would do almost nothing to address the fact that the very structure of our economy - our tax system, our trade system and our corporate welfare system - is designed to help Big Money interests ship jobs offshore and lower wages/benefits here at home.

That gets us to exactly why the Great Education Myth is so often repeated by politicians: because it is the one myth that simultaneously looks like an economic panacea to the public and avoids offending the Big Money interests that bankroll political campaigns. Talk of reforming our trade policy to equalize capital protections (copyrights/patents) and human protections (labor/wage/enviro) threatens Corporate America's efforts to use foreign economic desperation to increase the bottom line. Talk of ending massive taxpayer subsidization of job outsourcing threatens the profit margins of the major political donors like General Electric that are benefiting from such gifts. Talk of cutting corporate welfare threatens the corporate welfare queens that write big checks to politicians. Talk of sending more taxpayer dollars to schools even if that prescription will do very little to address the country's structural economic challenges - well, that threatens nobody.

Not only is Obama the Deliverer complicit in this grand drama of misdirection and dispossession; not only are immovable majorities of the political and economic elites invested in the perpetuation of this betrayal; but, in a sense, the entire legitimacy of the political systems of the Anglo-American world is predicated upon legal mechanisms which have as their necessary consequence precisely this incremental disinheritance of the people. John Locke taught that in the state of nature each man had liberty to accumulate as much property as could be created by the admixture of his labour and the resources of the natural world. After a time, however, the inconvenience of this state of affairs having become manifest to all in the difficulties attendant upon the preservation of property so acquired, and in the limitations this primitive cycle of production and exchange imposed upon the quantity of property that could be amassed, mankind would witness the nascence of a finance economy in the creation of currency as an abstract store of those formerly wholly-tangible values. Therewith, mankind in the state of nature would also begin to chafe under the constraints imposed upon their liberties of action and acquisition by the peculiar conditions of the state of nature, the absence of authoritative institutions and the putative right of each man to act as the enforcer of his own claims of 'right'. The stimulus to political innovation, therefore, would be the perceived insecurity and instability of property, and the limitations imposed by such uncertainty upon the accumulation of abstract property in the form of currency. And so mankind, in order better to secure these 'rights', would conceive the idea of the social contract, in accordance with which each man would cede his powers of enforcement to a government, to the end that by the regularization of the laws protecting and securing property, and providing for the routinization of investment, acquisition, and transfer, each would be liberated from the existential burden of facing the unpredictable loss of his property, or the erection of impediments to the exercise of his rights in that property. The impetus of, and justification for, the social contract by which government originates is, on this conception, the maximization of legal security for the unhindered exercise of the 'rights' of property, which is to say, the acquisitive instinct.

Locke's political philosophy was not philosophy properly so-called, but an elaborate exercise in mythmaking, in the invocation of the animating spirit of the emergent politico-economic order of his age; and, if nothing else, Locke's conjurations are symbolic - which is to say that they participate in, and condense, as it were, the foundational logic of the operative political and economic orders of modernity - of the actual processes by which laws governing economic practices (what is forbidden, what is encouraged, what is subsidized, what is financially privileged) are originated. Any society possesses a sort of logic, a trajectory or tendency emergent from its ideals and aspirations, its public philosophies and individual and communal appropriations and modifications of such philosophies, its institutions, laws, inherited customs, and mores. The logic of a rights-claim, on the modern conception of human nature as lacking a telos and as essentially passional, with reason merely instrumental to the fulfillment of desire is of something essentially illimitable, having no inherent, logical barriers to infinitization. The right of acquisition, especially as elaborated in the political philosophies dominiant in the Anglo-American world, has no objectively specifiable limitations, because the right is grounded in the desires of the individual. Desire, considered in itself, is an infinite abyss of longing. Any limitations that an individual might conceive for himself possess no public standing; and any limitations conceived by any group of individuals would, by virtue of their origins in the unrepeatable desire-complexes of the individuals, be incommensurable. This, ultimately, is the reason the elite classes perceive the social necessity of the Great Education Myth:

...because it is the one myth that simultaneously looks like an economic panacea to the public and avoids offending the Big Money interests that bankroll political campaigns. Talk of reforming our trade policy to equalize capital protections (copyrights/patents) and human protections (labor/wage/enviro) threatens Corporate America's efforts to use foreign economic desperation to increase the bottom line....(snip)

All this Tom Friedman-inspired Great Education Myth does is raise public expectations to unrealistic levels while and creating a justification for continuing to sell off our country's core economic policy to K Street lobbyists.

After all, information is knowledge, knowledge power, and power wealth; and therefore, those who possess wealth must, by necessity, possess greater knowledge of the intricacies of the economic processes of the world, by which our condition has been ameliorated. And those economic processes, and the rights of acquisition which they at once represent and instantiate, are the reason for the existence of government, the legitimating factors of government. Hence, the implicit civil religion of the liberation of acquisition from restraint, the divine right of wealth to encounter no impediment to the highest possible rate of increase - even if this should entail the economic disinheritance of the vast middle and working classes of the nation.