Maybe this week I can lighten it up and talk a bit more about some conservative, right wing rhetoric relating to government, with an eye on fake anarchism / crypto-fascism and bad economics in the conservative style. I’ve done most of it before, but always fun.
Let’s talk first about “minimizing government.” You’ve heard that one, right? “I’m a conservative because I want to minimize government?” The minimum level of government is no government, that is to say, bloody, violent anarchism. So conservatives are anarchists? Sometimes they are, but rarely. Usually, they just mean they want to “minimize” government to doing only what they want it to do, which is basically the same thing everyone else wants, although everyone may not agree on what it should actually do, hence democracy. Why not just take up the actual point of disagreement, what different people suppose government should do and why? Why stop to argue first with all the straw men proposing we not minimize government? Why indeed. It’s called rhetoric, manipulation.
How about “small government?” How small, you ask? As small as possible? No government at all? Anarchy? No, not that small. As small as it can be and still do the things one supposes it ought to do. Basically “big government,” at least relative to what real anarchists prefer.
How about more violent rhetoric as when conservatives say they want to “starve the beast (government)” or “drown it (government) in a bathtub?” If government is dead, we again have bloody, violent anarchism. So they support that then? No, not typically. One supposes most conservatives make a distinction between some bit or form of government they support and some bit or form they’d prefer to dispatch by starving or drowning. One gets an indication of what that might be in conservative rhetoric relating to “activist” government.
Talk of “activist” government takes us a bit farther from fake anarchism, although it’s not uncommon to still pick up some implication “inactive” government doesn’t really count as government, per se, so an inactive government enforcing conservative views is like anarchism. More generally, given the whole point of democratic government is it can do things voters want it to do in response to changing events, voter preferences, ethical views, and so on, it can be active, we’re clearly flirting now more with some sort of authoritarian crypto-fascism. But it’s artfully ambiguous, right? Is one saying one supports democracy and is simply suggesting voters refrain from suggesting government do anything? Or is one saying one rejects democracy because it allows voters to say government should do something? It’s not entirely clear. It’s notable in that rhetorical context conservatives don’t seem to care much what form an “activist” government takes, whether it be democratic, fascist, theocratic, communist, etc. That indifference to form of government harkens back to anarchist rhetoric about “the state.”
To understand the origin and allure of this line of rhetoric, one must go back to pre-modern economics, back to Adam Smith, then forward again to the modern bad economics in the conservative style that tries to make neoclassical welfare economics appear it’s still that. Mr. Smith’s concerns were primarily religious. He wanted to show problematic self interest, greed, might paradoxically be considered part of God’s benevolent plan for mankind if mankind could just construct the proper context or system in which it could be properly utilized. That intellectual program evolved, in early classical economics, into a sort of simplistic free market utopianism, but when social conditions raised criticisms, orthodox economists famously artfully redefined “utility” to dodge them, create modern neoclassical welfare economics. Modern bad economics in the conservative style basically picks up where early classical economics left off, artfully misrepresenting the implications of the redefined “utility” to supposedly derive much the same results, leading to the confusion and conflict I routinely address.
I argue, often, that some of the normative arguments one sees in early classical economics, such as one should not “interfere” with any particular real market, “greed is good,” and so on, are not really consistent with modern neoclassical welfare economics. They’re anachronisms. I suspect it’s that ghost of early classical economics, still lurking in bad economics in the conservative style, that supports this notion there is some independent normative significance to government setting up some ostensibly perfect economic system then becoming inactive. That vision of a minimal, inactive government expressing in eternal laws carved in marble ethics relating to the definition, distribution, use of economic power, then doing nothing, ostensibly creating utopia, fulfilling the divine plan, haunts the imaginations of conservatives. Isn’t it about time economists, philosophers, historians got off their high horses, emerged from their various towers and villas, got to work addressing hoary, unhelpful, quasi-religious rhetoric and themes of folk economics, folk politics, that inform how people actually vote?
