Chilton Williamson, July 2008
he Democrats want Americans to “have trust in government,” as Al Gore liked to plead when he was running for president. The Republicans want them to have trust in the corporate financial system. But American government is only a lot of power-mad politicians, American finance just so many profit-hungry sharks. The alarming national news reports that have been posted over the past six months are proof positive that neither the politicians nor the financiers that constitute the nation’s elite class have the slightest idea how to run either a government or an economy, in the long run or even short-term. The proposition that the American public should have faith in these men, in their knowledge and competency, is both an absurdity and an insult on its face. Had both the political and the economic elites of the country--the “best and the brightest”--set out deliberately to destroy the United States, their gross mismanagement of its affairs could not have been more complete. “They’re ruining what has been one of the greatest economies of the world,” Jim Rogers of Rogers Holdings, who considers the U.S. to be in what is possibly the greatest recession since World War II, said in July. By shoring up the federally under-written mortgage companies Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, Ben Bernancke and Henry Paulson “are bailing out their friends on Wall Street but there are 300 million Americans that are going to have to pay for this.”
At the summit of national politics, the primary season of 2008 has produced the most shameful spectacle, and with it the most disgraceful results, of any primary contest in American history. From beginning to end, and since, the process has been dominated by the most egregiously shabby, unsuitable, ignorant, unqualified, incompetent, shallow, and egotistical candidates ever to put themselves forward as candidates for the presidency. Writing in the 1920s, Mencken described democracy as “that system of government under which the [American] people, having 35, 717, 342 native-born adult whites to choose from, including thousands who are handsome and many who are wise, pick out a Coolidge to be head of state.” It was, Mencken marveled, as if a hungry man, set before a banquet including the most numerous and choice delicacies, should satisfy his appetite by catching and eating flies. The situation has worsened until, eight decades later, only flies are eager to run for president. The notion that either a black community organizer from Chicago, or an emotionally explosive Arizona senator who cannot make up his mind on most issues, including which of the two national parties he ought to belong to, might be a fit leader for the United States is ludicrous. Precisely at that moment when it appears the country can be saved only by a miracle, the American political class has contrived to arrange the nomination of two presidential candidates who would be incapable of taking advantage of a miraculous intervention in order to rescue it. Small wonder that John McCain has failed to activate the Republican grassroots, and Barack Obama full half of the Democratic Party.
As the government economists and the Wall Street financiers together have reduced the national economy to shambles, they may well do likewise with the international one, aided and abetted by their equally reckless and unknowing facilitators the politicians. As of this writing in mid-July, the stock market plunged again last week in response to another surge in the price of oil, coincident with a precipitous decline in the share values of Freddie Mae and Freddie Mac, often described as “the two most important companies in the world” in which foreign companies and governments are significantly invested. The Bush administration is considering a conservatorship for the two should the current bailout fail, an arrangement that could leave their huge mortgage losses to be shouldered by the American taxpayers. An alternative proposal, for the government to guarantee the $5 trillion in debt owed or guaranteed by the companies, would amount to a doubling of the already gargantuan public debt. According to the latest reports, home ownership in the United States has fallen by around six percent—almost exactly the amount by which it had risen in recent years after President Bush determined that every American deserves to own his own home. The connection between these figures and the intervening housing bust is plain to see. The government, in pursuit of its egalitarian quest, encouraged or permitted the writing of mortages to people (including especially members of racial minority groups) who could not afford them, with the result that those mortgages have now been foreclosed upon and the housing market has crashed. How could this have been allowed to happen? The fact is that Wall Street, as several of its more eminent players have recently admitted, simply has no idea what is going on in the current financial markets—a polite way of saying that it has no idea of what it is doing, or should be doing. Meanwhile, the dollar continues to sink against the rest of the world’s currencies, the mania for free trade remains undiminished (Senator McCain is still an enthusiast), more American businesses and assets are being snapped up by foreigners, American jobs go on being “outsourced” abroad, and the balance of trade worsens.
Lastly, on the international front, the status and reputation of the United States deteriorate further, as its badly-laid and worse-pursued military and diplomatic schemes unravel. Though violence in Iraq has declined sharply following the reinforcement of the American military presence there, the country is unlikely to survive the withdrawal of American troops which the Iraq government is currently pressing on Washington. Far worse, the original, the real war against terrorism—the war in Afghanistan--is rapidly becoming a losing one as the Taliban regroup and reinforce themselves. This, unlike the conflict in Iraq, is a war that might truly have been won--had not a rogue cohort within the Bush administration seduced the president into opening a second, distractive, irrelevant, and recklessly expensive front against Baghdad, thus sacrificing the interests of national security on behalf of neoconservatism. Meanwhile, both as a cause and a result of the reconstruction of the Taliban, anti-American terrorists have consolidated their control over Pakistan’s tribal area across the Afghan border, to which jihadists are migrating in escalating numbers, and India has become embroiled in the regional war through the bombing of her embassy in Kabul. As for Pakistan, George Bush, with characteristic stubbornness and obtuseness, has unrelentingly backed the obviously wrong horse by supporting his crony Musharraf against the opposition parties. In doing so, he has antagonized the Pakistani people and made it impossible for Washington to neutralize the borderlands and halt the training and export of fresh Taliban soldiers and the Al Queda terrorists who were America’s targets in the first place.
The centralization of political power at the federal level and in Washington, and the consolidation of financial power on Wall Street and among a relative handful of firms and corporations, have been defended on the grounds of their supposed efficiency, and from the assumption that the political and the financial systems alike are controlled by an enlightened meritocracy that knows exactly what it is doing. But the state of the union brutally unmasks this pretence of omniscience, omnipotence, and virtue. The United States is no meritocracy but rather a kakistocracy (government by the worst), which understands the practice of government and economy as little as it does everything else in the world, including history and human nature. ###
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Chilton Williamson, Jr.