Last episode, we talked about the brewing conflict between what currently passes for mainstream conservatism and the schizophrenic reactionary Groyper politics of Nick Fuentes.
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We wrapped things up with the idea that conservatism has never really bothered to conserve anything.
Aside from a few exceptions, most of the time they keep themselves busy fighting culture wars about immigration, civil rights, women’s rights, Christianity, and demonizing organized labor.
What they keep trying to “conserve” is whatever the status quo power dynamic was when their grandad was a kid.
After the Civil War, they wanted slavery back. Women’s suffrage, desegregation—they wanted to get rid of all those things.
This isn’t the first fight inside conservatism. As part of its periodic reinvention of itself, conservatives have gone back to the political well and dredged up the same slogans more than once.
We tied this malleable idea of conservatism in with the evolution of the field of unashamed ideological political economists into what we now think of as the pseudoscience of Economics.
At least the political economists were up front about whatever ideological bent they had. If you were a socialist, you’d start with your convictions about socialism being the absolute best way of running society on offer, and they work to come up with an economic theory or plan that made it seem possible. It was honest.
By the time the 1800s were wrapping up, that wasn’t good enough. Economists wanted to be taken more seriously, so they started dressing the whole thing up like they were doing physics or pure math. They could talk about whatever economic system as if they were describing the laws of nature. That didn’t get rid of the ideology, though. It just buried it under metric tons of academic jargon and complicated formulas.
After all, what’s the difference between modeling a tsunami and a stock market crash? The answer is that the tsunami wasn’t caused by Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan.
That all brings us around to FDR’s New Deal and the era of John Maynard Keynes and what Matt Christman has called his "Keynesian machine for dispensing treats". As many contradictions as Keynes gathered into his economic model, it remains the only proven way to maintain capitalism.
To set the tone, David Talbot has a quote in his book The Devil’s Chessboard about Bertie Pell, a friend of FDR’s who Talbot described as a “full-on traitor to his class”.
“I am almost the last capitalist who is willing to be saved by you,” Pell wrote Roosevelt in 1936 in a letter beseeching the president to draft him for the New Deal cause. The following year, Pell wrote again, praising FDR’s accomplishments: “Your administration has made possible the continuance of American institutions for at least fifty years. You have done for the government what St. Francis did for the Catholic Church. You have brought it back to the people.”
It turns out Pell was eerily correct. Those institutions managed to last just a little longer than 50 years. They are about gone now, though.
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Fly your crypto-leftist flag with our personal love letter to Juan José Arévalo, philosopher and socialist president of Guatemala, and the airline he nationalized.
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Music:Airglow - Spliff and Wesson (CC-BY)
