The Problem with K Street Conservatism
EDITORIAL The Problem with K Street Conservatism It must be miserable to be on the Democratic left. For decades you've been inveighing against the evils of corporate power. For decades you've been...
...The dot-com collapse has exposed the foolishness of the investor class...
...They organize American drive and creativity to produce the wealth and the living standards we all enjoy...
...This is the perfect storm...
...This is incredible...
...corporations deserve representation...
...It didn't take a series of scandals to teach them there are greedy and rotten people in corporations...
...The polls indicate that the general public does not see these as political scandals...
...It's odd...
...So in the end, there was no impetus toward any ambitious energy bill or any major compromise...
...That's fine...
...The culture of the corporate community is bound to dominate the culture of conservatism, not the other way around...
...The steel tariffs measure the president signed this year is perhaps the worst piece of trade legislation in half a century...
...There will be fewer big ideas...
...Furthermore, though there has been a loss of confidence in corporate elites, that does not mean Americans want to see government taking a dramatically more aggressive role in economic life...
...David Brooks, for the Editors...
...In place of ideology, too often we have cynicism...
...Republicans are now watering down measures to regulate the accounting industry, and Democrats concede that there will be no popular backlash...
...But the fact remains that conservatism, even with a conservative president, has lost some of its insurgent energy and has become corpo-ratist...
...Now, typically, business groups provide the bucks and conservatives provide the troops for many of the ginned-up lobbying campaigns...
...And what happens...
...During the Clinton administration, conservatives fought Hillary Clinton's health care plan, while many businesses initially sought to manipulate it for comparative advantage...
...Many conservatives who came to town as activists now double as paid lobbyists...
...But over recent years, Tom DeLay, Grover Norquist, and others have set up a K Street patronage operation that effectively obliterates the distinction between conservatives and corporatists...
...Meanwhile, big opportunities are missed because the business community is properly focused on the here and now, and not on grand possibilities for the future...
...they confirm everything liberals think they know about the rotten core of corporate America...
...For example, this past year presented a golden opportunity to put together a large plan that would one day rid us of our dependence on Saudi oil...
...You cut the deals you need to cut...
...Just because the class-warfare liberals are wrong, with their 1930s-style indictment of corporate power, doesn't mean that the increasing identification between the business community and American conservatism is not a problem...
...Indeed, it contained practically no ideas of any sort...
...Almost everyone acknowledges that income inequality is on the rise...
...Then come a series of business scandals that exemplify a level of corporate greed that surpasses even your most pinko fantasies—Enron, Arthur Andersen, Tyco, Allfirst, Merrill Lynch, ImClone...
...Unlike Washington activists or academic polemicists, most Americans live in the world of corporate America...
...Furthermore, the scandals don't negate the evidence they see every day—that there are many more decent and honorable people in corporations, and these businesses do far more to build wealth and improve lives than they do to mar them...
...It provides better management, more money, and pseudo-accountability, while rejecting the core conservative insight that schools will only get better as a result of choice, competition, and parental pressure...
...That's why it must be miserable to be on the Democratic left...
...The president's approval numbers suffer not a bit...
...And remember, when they brag about the growing merger between conservatives and the business community, they are talking about something akin to a merger between Sam's Video Shack and Blockbuster...
...The rich are getting richer...
...If politics is overtaken by the corporate mentality, then government just becomes a grubby enterprise of redistributing federal dollars from their people to our people...
...Conservatives correctly argued that the United States had to work toward a more market-oriented agriculture system...
...During the early days of the Reagan administration, conservatives advocated supply-side tax cuts, while the business community by and large preached green-eyeshade fiscal austerity...
...Republican education policy now reflects corporate priorities, not conservative priorities...
...But it still remains true that leading America is a higher calling than leading IBM, GE, or Alcoa...
...It happens to be good for agribusiness...
...A fizzle...
...It was just a collection of corporate pork, self-serving subsidies, and narrowly focused favors...
...The liberals express joyful satisfaction at the scandals...
...When conservatism was at its healthiest, it often allied with parts of the business community, but there were clear distinctions, and very often the two communities clashed...
...And then suddenly, the moment comes...
...The Republican party loses no support and the Democratic party fails to gain...
...Corporate elites are not blackhearted materialists who exploit the working man, as the economic populists imagined...
...Such issues are not playing a big role in the midterm elections...
...There will be less principle, less of an insurgent spirit, and more corporate pork...
...That means there will be more resources and entrée for Washington activists, but there will be less intellectual creativity in the Republican party...
...During the Cold War, conservatives wanted to topple communism, the business community wanted to trade with communism...
...Yet in the post-Gingrich Congress, almost nobody is willing to stand up and defend conservative convictions...
...For decades you've been waiting for a popular backlash against concentrated wealth, one that would finally provide momentum for the liberal economic policies you've been championing all along—for redistribution, for tighter regulations on business, for bigger and more active government...
...The fact is the public is disgusted by Enron and the other scandals, but most Americans have not generalized their disgust into a widespread loss of faith in the current political-economic system...
...Never before in your lifetime has there been such a confluence of events all pointing in the direction of a popular revolt against overweening corporate power...
...In some ways the Republican party seems more conservative than it ever has been, but somehow in the realm of domestic policy conservative ideas don't seem to matter very much...
...Nothing...
...And the biggest of these scandals, the Enron scandal, revolves around a man, Ken Lay, who is one of the biggest supporters of the president of the United States...
...Instead of a fundamental debate about ideas, conservative politics becomes transac-tionalism...
...You've got the most corporate presidential administration in history, topped by two former oil executives and a former aluminum CEO...
...The corporate scandals roil and roil, but their effect on American politics is practically nil...
...Outside of the liberal hard core, there is very little of what you would call class consciousness...
...As the economy appeared to be slipping into recession, Republicans came up with a stimulus package that contained almost no conservative ideas...
...And if the economic liberals can't ride a wave to power now, when they have so much going in their favor, then they never will be able to ride a wave to power, certainly not when the economy finally recovers and when this amazing wave of scandals fades away...
...Everybody gripes about the bosses, but that doesn't mean most Americans see the world as being divided between the People and the Powerful, as Bob Shrum and Al Gore preached in the 2000 election...
...But even Democratic leaders know that there will be no massive popular call for any of the things on the class-warfare liberals' wish list...
...Surely now, the moment of economic liberalism is at hand...
...In the culture of corporatism, free trade ideology takes a back seat...
...The country deserves better...
...Maybe the sorry stagnation in domestic policy is simply the result of the amazing parity in American politics or the unusual urgency of foreign policy...
...But now free marketeers and business organizations are more likely to work hand in glove...
...The farm bill that Republicans supported and the president signed shreds market-based reforms...
...But that doesn't mean that all is hunky-dory for the right...
...It requires grander visions, higher aspirations, and broader perspectives...
...Long gone are the days when Republicans championed dramatic plans for fundamental tax reform, such as the flat tax, a consumption tax, or a radical simplification of the tax code...
...But no business lobby is interested in what might be achieved in the year 2015, and oil companies don't exactly mind continued dependence on the Saudi royal family, no matter how much it dilutes our efforts to fight Islamic extremism...
Vol. 7 • June 2002 • No. 40
