As the history of conservative, Republican dominated “red” states shows, Republican policy failure is their ticket to electoral success. Let’s look at some reasons for that having to do with intellectual artifacts, ideas, rhetoric.
It seems conservatives, Republicans are taking advantage of the American electorate’s clear tendency to turn right when under stress, particularly economic stress. Republicans know the more dysfunction, poverty, sickness, ignorance, violence they create, the stronger their hold on power. American voters’ tendency to turn right likely relates to the long Cold War against authoritarian, undemocratic communism, followed by conservative rhetoric suggesting the problem with communism was not that it was authoritarian, undemocratic, but was too “big,” tried to do too much. During the 1980s right wing Reagan Revolution, this rhetoric was applied to democratic government, so the source of all our problems was meant to be big democratic government as our form of “communism,” and conservatives’ objective was to fight for small, weak, inactive democratic government.
This was the era in which the notion of a “welfare state,” a state that accepts as an objective the welfare or well-being of its citizens, became anathema, when the typical ethical thinking behind it became characterized as false, empty “virtue signaling,” a cover for promoting “big” government. This meshed very well with ubiquitous anti-democracy bad economics in the conservative style, which promotes market utopianism, suppresses the role of democracy in transmitting the normative views of voters, and presents democracy only as something that “interferes with” or “distorts” markets. The rhetoric is calculated to take advantage of Americans’ traditional distaste for authoritarian government, as undemocratic communism, and turn it to supporting right wing undemocratic fascism, by equating “communism” with big democratic government. It’s basically an equivocation on terms.
Although some particularly foolish sorts followed the rhetoric of a maximally minimized democratic government to its logical conclusion in bloody, lawless, utopian anarchism. Most understood we would still need laws for property, markets, contracts, thus also law enforcement, government. They took up the notion of government that could establish and enforce the necessary laws while preventing voters using democracy from ever reconsidering or changing those laws, making a government “too big” or “too active” by revising the allocation of goods, using non-market mechanisms, etc. This led them naturally to “small” fascism, the quest to find an authoritarian Leader they trusted enough to establish the right sort of state, strong enough to resist pressure from the governed, voters, democracy. Even as they may have seen the risks involved, they saw it as the only solution. Their idea of politics evolved away from reasoned discussion as understood by those who support the ethos of democracy toward politics as installing the right Leader some old way, promoting political violence not only for that but as their proposed means of later swapping out Leaders as necessary.
That’s where we are today. Some conservatives, Republicans explicitly support “small” fascism, some equate fascism with communism and then suppose they’re fighting it in the form of overly big or active democratic government, some suppose they’re fighting for utopian anarchism, others theocratism. Conservatives, Republicans are working toward dysfunction as a necessary first step to fomenting an American fascist regime they suppose will end the ostensible sources of all our problems, democratic government, the US Constitution, US law, and usher in a conservative utopia.
The important thing to realize is there’s no self-correcting mechanism at work. It’s just not realistic to expect American voters to see conservative, Republican policy failure and respond by voting for something else. They will vote for the same thing, albeit maybe a more extreme form of it. Conservative, Republican voters cheer on corruption and incompetence not only because it corresponds to their priors that democratic government is inherently corrupt but because they suppose it shows democratic government must be small, weak, inactive, hopefully one day nonexistent. There is no end other than fascism because of course everyone, or most people anyway, understand one must have government at some level to have a functioning society, thus it can always be “too big” and responsible for whatever problems remain as long as democracy exists. With “small” fascism that cares nothing for the welfare, well-being of the population but only expresses conservative values on economics, ethics, allocation of resources, conservatives suppose they will finally have a government able to rebuff the foolish whims, normative views of the governed. One suspects conservative, Republican voters may hubristically exaggerate their own influence over any such fascist regime. They suppose their guns mean they can intimidate it into doing whatever they prefer, being whatever “size” they like. But surely the intimidation may go the other way.
The main impetus in the realm of ideas is anti-democracy bad economics in the conservative style and its sequelae, promoted or at least not forcefully refuted by academic economists, who are the main proponents of the fascist cause, albeit typically concerned to deny or anyway not acknowledge it. If one would like to disrupt this trend toward fascism in the USA, the most important thing one can do is take on academic economists, learn what real neoclassical welfare economics says, distinguish it from false, misleading, anti-democracy bad economics in the conservative style.
