Cultural Roots of the Economic Crisis

Insight about the cultural roots of the economic crisis is finally making the rounds of some big-city papers. Gail Collins gets at the heart of the cultural problem with the bailouts, though here she's talking about the governor of Texas:

Perry, who is the sort of person who calls other guys “dude,” used to be a cotton farmer, a group that seems to have a special talent for combining rugged individualism with intransigent demands for government assistance.

I call this psychological structure submissive individualism. It's an old US tradition (I first identified it via readings of Ralph Waldo Emerson work from the 1830s). It's tied up with fear and American Christianity - salvation finally coming only from God and not from You. But the core is that individual agency needs strong social systems to be effective economically, US social systems have always been weak, individual agency is therefore a weak and fragile thing for most Americans, and yet the obligation to have big agency is absolute. The endless attacks of the US Right on government only makes the psychological contradictions worse. The result is hypocrisy and double-standards.

Collins continues.

The big mystery here is why the tax-protest crowds were behaving as if the world was coming to an end when all Obama’s infant presidency has done is lower taxes for a vast majority of the public. And why people like Perry seem to feel compelled to egg them on.

The answer is that what’s left of the Republican Party is intent on cutting off the knees of the administration before it actually manages to fulfill any campaign promises on reducing the huge economic gap between the top 5 percent of the country and the rest of the populace. In pursuit of that mission, fortune favors the hysterical and rewards politicians who behave like gerbils that just bit into an electric wire.

Yes. And what is the link between submissive individualism and the obsessive pursuit of inequality? Because the only psychologically plausible solution to submission is superiority - especially superior wealth, either achieved or imagined for one's future. Imagined superiority drives out individuality. That combination of inequality and repression is the whole history of the modern Republican party.

So we get simultaneously the culture wars and the budget wars. The latter take the form of endless ongoing cuts at the state and city level even as the banks are flooded with public money. And they are driven by the sheer unilateralism of financial rules in the US - the banks decide, we take it, even now after they have ruined everything.

The Nation's Mental Decline

Dean Baker nails yesterday's theme:

One of the key lessons of this economic crisis should be that there is a remarkable lack of capacity for independent thinking in our most important institutions: government (both the executive and legislative branches), business, the media, and academia. It is possible that an important authority figure could force a re-examination of deeply held views of the world, but we all must recognize that there is a huge amount of dogma to overcome.

Pavlovian Applause

That is Fr. Frank's phrase for the fairly mindless praise being heaped on the Obama economic team, people of great credentials and many practical failures.

The piece is called "The Brightest are not Always the Best." One great thing about Frank Rich is that he's incapable of saying what everyone else is saying. But another great thing is his ability to find a cultural framework that puts politics in perspective. Here he invokes David Halberstam's book about the boy wonders in the JFK administration who brought us the quagmire of Vietnam.

Were Fr. Frank not invoking Halberstam, he could have used a more accurate title, "The Brightest are Often Dumb."

The piece is about Summers and Rubin and Geithner and you won't be surprised by the flaws he finds in their actual record. The more interesting bits are the frighteningly familiar comments from Halberstam about the blindness of the Kennedy geniuses. Since I think Kennedy is Obama's real model rather than Bill Klinton, it was alarming to hear Halberstam talk about the free pass the DC press gave JFK because of his similarties to them as to prep schools, Ivies, credentials, and white-collar world-view - a certain kind of entitled, liberal elitism that you could hear in Obama's comment as he introduced his foreign policy team: "They share my pragmatism about the use of power, and my sense of purpose about America's role as leader in the world."

Rich quotes Halberstam at one point on how the boy geniuses were not so smart:

“the difference between intelligence and wisdom, between the abstract quickness and verbal facility which the team exuded, and true wisdom, which is the product of hard-won, often bitter experience.” That difference was clearly delineated in Vietnam, where American soldiers, officials and reporters could see that the war was going badly even as McNamara brusquely wielded charts and crunched numbers to enforce his conviction that victory was assured.

This is true. The "quickness" comes from systematic dissociation from the actual consequences of and people affected by the model that appears in the boy wonder's brain.

There are two things that have made the problem much worse since Kennedy:

• the hegemony of economics over domestic policy. Economists in the US are abstract modelers, and the modelers are in charge of Obama's economic policy.
• the "knowledge economy" was just an idea during the Kennedy Administration, first publicized by UC President Clark Kerr as the Kennedy period was coming to an end. The prestige of "symbolic analysts" and their detachment from the great masses of real people are more acute now by a factor of 10.

It's going to take cultural imagination to get us out of this. The question is how do we get that through the airlocks of the Obama Admin?