Chris Dillow: Conservatives & austerity

Chris Dillow ponders the strange relationship between Conservatives & austerity.

There’s a second way. Once we acknowledge that people’s incomes depend upon fiscal policy it follows that poverty is a failure of government rather than of individuals. Conservatives can then no longer regard it as a moral failing.

Fiscal austerity, therefore, is needed in order to maintain the “natural” hierarchy in which the rich are entitled to power because they are virtuous heroes whilst the poor must be stigmatized as lazy and feckless.

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Secondly, American rightists have no problem with the prospect of rising government debt if it means tax cuts for the rich. They value inequality and hierarchy over fiscal prudence.

Yes, support for austerity is an intellectual error. But it might be one founded in a peculiarity of the Conservative psyche. Keynesians, I fear, under-rate this point.

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George Orwell expressed the same sentiments in his book, 1984.

It was possible, no doubt, to imagine a society in which wealth, in the sense of personal possessions and luxuries, should be evenly distributed, while power remained in the hands of a small privileged caste. But in practice such a society could not long remain stable. For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realise that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance.

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And I cannot resist including Adam Suttler's rant about why the people need the rulers:

People need hierarchy to protect them from all of those threats that the hierarchy created.

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James Kunstler: We're Good People, Really We Are!

James Kunstler writes that We're Good People, Really We Are!.

Now, the question of motive. Why does the thinking class in America embrace ideas that are not necessarily, and surely not self-evidently, truthful, and even self-destructive? Because this class is dangerously insecure and perversely needs to insist on being right about its guiding dogmas and shibboleths at all costs. That is why so much of the behavior emanating from the thinking class amounts to virtue signaling — we are the good people on the side of what’s right, really we are! Of course, virtue signaling is just the new term for self-righteousness. There is also the issue of careerism. So many individuals are making a living at trafficking in, supporting, or executing policy based on these dogmas and shibboleths that they don’t dare depart from the Overton Bubble of permissible, received thought lest they sacrifice their status and incomes.

The thinking classes are also the leaders and foot-soldiers in American institutions. When they are unable or unwilling to think clearly, then you get a breakdown of authority, which leads to a breakdown of legitimacy. That’s exactly where we’re at today in our national politics — our ability to manage the polity.

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Kunstler seems to be faintly aware of the Marxist idea of an ideological superstructure which reproduces the dominant ideology of the underlying class relationships. Indeed, this superstructure has its careerists and the construction of an Overton Window. The superstructure defends and promulugates the class relations in the minds of the oppressed classes. It cannot do otherwise as it is an instrument of control.

Thinkers, like Kunstler, believe the superstructure is undermining the political, economic, and social system. What is happening is that the class relations are changing, and the superstucture is struggling to maintain the old system. The ideology is diverging from reality.

To admit a new reality would undermine the legitimacy of the current ruling class. This is one of the pre-conditions for a social revolution: the ruling ideology cannot grasp the new economic reality that it has created. With the rise of automation, the old caste of unskilled, and therefore, disposable workers is rapidly disappearing. Skilled workers are coming to the fore. With that, the old caste of line managers and supervisors are disappearing as well. Workers are supposed to become self-directed thereby eliminating the need and expense of direct control.

What we have left is:

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