Cut & Paste Leadership, the Modern Political Condition

In his thoroughly insightful book, American Fascists, Chris Hedges details how fundamentalists pervert Christianity by willfully excluding anything that doesn't suit their various ideologies.  That is why, according to Hedges, there are hundreds of versions of Jesus in the United States, each tailored to some particular sect or church's liking.   The fundamentalists even have a project to rewrite the Bible, excising anything (and there is a great deal) that seems even vaguely socialistic or too tolerant or forgiving.

Among America's rightwing political classes even extremists like Michelle Bachmann go all gushy over great presidents past, like Abraham Lincoln, but would positively recoil at so much of what Lincoln stood for, so much of what he said and wrote.   They want a Lincoln sanitized of views that don't conform to their own.  They want you to believe that they believe what Lincoln believed.  They want the public to believe that they stand for what Lincoln stood for when, in reality, it's anything but.

Rightwing politics also rely on economic philosophies that have been so cherry-picked, laundered and tuned up as to bear less than a passing resemblance to their economic gurus, Adam Smith being a useful example.   They hold up Smith as the father of free enterprise capitalism, elevating him to the status of a prophet.  And to make Smith's theories suit their own purposes they truly shred what he actually believed and espoused.   They don't want to hear Adam Smith.  They wish only to hear themselves as they would want Adam Smith to be.

Adam Smith had very unwelcome views on the mantra of growth.  He plainly foresaw the inevitability of society reaching a point at which further growth lost its utility.  In The Wealth of Nations, Smith correctly foresaw roughly 200 years as the longest period for sustained growth followed by the emergence of what we would today call steady state economics, the very era we are now entering.

Likewise Adam Smith was very wary of corporatism and its place in the public arena, something well understood by people like Lincoln, but rejected by today's rightwing corporatism.  Here's what Smith actually believed:

"The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from [the business community] ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention.  It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it."

Yet we have also entered an era in which corporate and political spheres are merging, perhaps in reaction to the restraint of growth.  Smith's injunction to be suspicious of corporate wiles has given way to organizations such as ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, a vehicle for the private sector to propose and sometimes even draft laws that are handed to elected representatives to enact into law.  ALEC is nothing else but an instrument to effect the further capture of economic and political power, a wedge to sever the elected from their electors.  Adam Smith?  Out the bloody window.


And so we emerge with a grand political perversion, leadership by paragraph, cut and paste, driven by ideologies that are first formed and only then justified by what is selected and what is excluded from great minds of the past.

And look at our own Grand Dissembler with his unquestioning embrace of the Tar Sands industry and pipeline operators.  While he would proudly proclaim himself a disciple of Adam Smith, he and his minions toil tirelessly to protect Enbridge and the fossil fuelers from the most scrupulous, ...the most suspicious attention to their dodgy pipeline schemes.  In reality, Harper's purpose is also that described by Adam Smith - to deceive and oppress.