The few elderly Americans who remember the world before the New Deal won’t tell you about not being divided into Common Men and Economic Royalists. They won’t tell you how good it felt to start from nothing and become successful by dint of one’s own hard work. They will tell you about bread lines, soup lines, Hoovervilles, and being sent out on the road by parents who could no longer afford to feed them. They’ll tell you about “railroad bulls” who beat them senseless and police who prevented them from crossing a state line because the people on the other side of that line couldn’t take care of their own. They’ll tell you about the disappearance of money. In 1988, an elderly black lady who remembered it all, defined the situation very simply: “Back then, you could buy a whole barrel of flour for twenty-five cents. But where were you going to find that quarter?!” There are few good memories from the survivors of the days before the New Deal.
Rush Limbaugh derides them as “low information voters”, but these people are merely average Americans. They dislike politics and avoid it because they consider it a dirty business, which it is. They pay their taxes, go to work, go to church, raise their children and expect something in return from the government for those taxes they pay. They elect Democrats to preserve and expand their entitlements, and when the Democrats bite off more than they can chew, they elect Republicans to fix the mess.
When they send people to Congress, they don’t care about ideology. They want the people they elect to be problem solvers, and if that means reaching across the aisle and compromising their principles, so be it. They don’t necessarily want smaller government, they want more effective government. Most importantly, they don’t want anything to get in the way of their entitlements, particularly when the economy is in a state of depression.
In late 1995, Bill Clinton positioned Newt Gingrich to stand between the American people and their government checks in a highly publicized government shutdown. The result was the end of Gingrich’s revolution after barely one year, followed by Clinton’s cracking the whip over the “militia” Republicans elected in 1994, turning them into good, reliable purveyors of pork.
The average American voter elected Tea Party candidates to Congress to fix the problem, not shut down the government or default on the nation’s debt, which was the alternative when Obama positioned the Tea Party to stand between the people and their entitlements. The potential default incident in the summer of 2011 and the government shutdown of late 2013 turned the people against the Tea Party. The charge against the Tea Party is that they want to “burn down the house”, when the people merely want the house patched.
The key to this is the New Deal paradigm. As long as it survives, the current state of affairs will not change. An intransigent ideologue of a president will stand firm and double down when challenged, forcing Congress to bend to his will to keep the game going.
The key to the New Deal paradigm is the fact that US dollar is the world’s reserve currency, and the dollar is the only pool of capital deep enough to handle the trillions of dollars of international transactions that trade daily. Until that ends, this nation can abuse that currency at will and force its malfeasance on the rest of the world. As Nixon’s Treasury Secretary, John Connally, said in 1971 when Nixon closed the gold window to foreign payments, “They’re our deficits, but they’re your problem.” This is what permits Americans to live beyond their means and enjoy that exhilarating sense of instant gratification, a vice whose tentacles extend far beyond the world of money into the world of simple everyday morality.
As long as the New Deal paradigm reigns, the Democrats and Republicans will fight over who controls the federal faucet and how that faucet distributes largesse to their favored constituents. It is not in the interest of either party to shut down the federal faucet. Because of this, it is only when the faucet dries up – because there is a sovereign debt default – that there will be nothing more to fight over. When that day comes and the rest of the world converts to some kind of international currency standard, it’s game over and lights out for the American fiat dollar and the New Deal.
On that fateful day, there will only be two paradigms left for America’s future: the Tea Party movement, based on the American Revolution; or the Occupy Wall Street movement, based on the French Revolution. The Democratic and Republican parties, the great enablers and profiteers of the New Deal, will be consigned to the ash heap of history.
Excellent explanation. Sad it will take the violence and hardship that will come with the dissolution of today’s two parties.
“...They want the people they elect to be problem solvers, and if that means reaching across the aisle and compromising their principles, so be it...”
If compromising your principles solves problems, then you need to take a serious look at your principles.