At Washington Post, Arthur C. Brooks wants to declare another Kulturkampf…for Chicago-Randian economics:
This is not the culture war of the 1990s. It is not a fight over guns, gays or abortion. Those old battles have been eclipsed by a new struggle between two competing visions of the country’s future. In one, America will continue to be an exceptional nation organized around the principles of free enterprise — limited government, a reliance on entrepreneurship and rewards determined by market forces. In the other, America will move toward European-style statism grounded in expanding bureaucracies, a managed economy and large-scale income redistribution.
If Brooks means “limited government” as health care costs so out-of-control they threaten every American with bankruptcy, then yes. If he means “limited government” as regulators rubber-stamping British Petroleum memos and counting them as safety paperwork, then yes. If he means a financial system that rewards NINA loans, builds toxic investments disguised as premium investments, and then bets against them, then yes — this style of economics is under threat.
It needs to be. It must compete with a different kind of economic system: one in which energy companies are forced to spend a few of their millions on safety instead of billions on cleanup. I just don’t see that as “statist.” Nor is a managed economy around the corner; the president has not declared Teh Global Socializms™ in effect yet because he never will.
As for large-scale income redistributions: we just finished having one. It was a gigantic upward-transfer of wealth on the backs of America’s poor and middle. If doing away with that is socialism, then Brooks’ Kulturkampf would seem to be off to a bad start; and in fact, he’s already lost. But that is not the point of Kulturkampf. As Orwell put it:
The war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous. Hierarchical society is only possible on the basis of poverty and ignorance. This new version is the past and no different past can ever have existed. In principle the war effort is always planned to keep society on the brink of starvation. The war is waged by the ruling group against its own subjects and its object is not the victory over either Eurasia or East Asia, but to keep the very structure of society intact.
The real tension in Brooks’ world is between the very rich and the rest of us. He wants this social, economic, and political structure to remain intact. His side has held out the promise of wealth — a prosperity gospel — to convince Americans to vote against their own interests. The utter bankruptcy of that promise is the reason why his side has lost; the call to Kulturkampf is a way of trying to outlast events.
