What Fiscal Conservatives Really Want

The 1964 loss of the presidential election by GOP candidate Barry Goldwater spelled the death knell for a political party based primarily on fiscal conservatism. The ten percenters then realized that they needed to embrace enough voters to capture fifty-one percent of the vote. Fiscal conservatism wasn’t juicy enough to snag another forty-one percent of the electorate. They soon discovered that they could crush the Democratic political (patronage) machine that governed much of the south and the southwest by appealing to an even bigger machine: social conservatism represented powerfully by Evangelical Christians. Evangelical, rural white traditionalists bit into that effort… hook, line and sinker.

Indeed, the bulk of those white, Evangelical-leaning voters were hardly rich, although there were a lot of them within the middle class. But the ten percenters discovered that if they could just add a few “social conservative” elements to the GOP platform – starting out with school prayer, “pro-life” anti-abortionist policies and anti-evolution practices (adding anti-gay, anti-feminist and anti-immigration policies as time moved on) – their new constituents would vote in lockstep even if they made their own economic life more difficult. This new constituency was even willing to sacrifice quality public education, infrastructure and public services that were simply cost-burdens richer folks weren’t fond of paying for.

The wealthy embraced this “easy button” to getting low taxes, with lots of loopholes designed specifically for the wealthy to grow their net worth accordingly, and to reduce those pesky financial and environmental regulations that cost the rich more than they were willing to pay. Yes, social conservatives were willing to vote for legislation that would make their water less potable, their air less breathable, and would tilt the financial world to rob from the poor and give to the rich… if only their legislators would toe the Evangelically-approved line.

A moribund Republican Party exploded with control of the majority of governorships and state legislatures. They used their newfound power to Gerrymander themselves into seemingly inviolate control in election after election, having relegated their local Democrats to carefully isolated pockets where their votes simply would not matter. As the Supreme Court further empowered the mega-wealthy, allowing the wholesale purchase of media space and time to allow influence peddling on a scale never before witnessed in the free world via decisions like Citizens United, GOP power seemed unstoppable. The changed landscape even allowed the most brazen candidates – like Donald Trump and neophyte Ben Carson – to make the most amazing and ultimate unprovable claims while increasing their voter popularity.

But it does come down to what the ten percenters… really the one percenters today… really want as their price for having fomented all of this social conservatism. What exactly is their price? Let’s look at one example. Illinois’ mega-billionaires – with lots of support from outsider billionaires – decided to make this bastion of liberalism cave to the power of their wealth. “The richest man in Illinois does not often give speeches. But on a warm spring day two years ago, Kenneth C. Griffin, the billionaire founder of one of the world’s largest hedge funds, rose before a black-tie dinner of the Economic Club of Chicago to deliver an urgent plea to the city’s elite.

“They had stood silently, Mr. Griffin told them, as politicians spent too much and drove businesses and jobs from the state. They had refused to help those who would take on the reigning powers in the Illinois Capitol. “It is time for us to do something,” he implored.

“Their response came quickly. In the months since, Mr. Griffin and a small group of rich supporters — not just from Chicago, but also from New York City and Los Angeles, southern Florida and Texas — have poured tens of millions of dollars into the state, a concentration of political money without precedent in Illinois history.

“Their wealth has forcefully shifted the state’s balance of power. Last year, the families helped elect as governor Bruce Rauner, a Griffin friend and former private equity executive from the Chicago suburbs, who estimates his own fortune at more than $500 million. Now they are rallying behind Mr. Rauner’s agenda: to cut spending and overhaul the state’s pension system, impose term limits and weaken public employee unions.

“‘It was clear that they wanted to change the power structure, change the way business was conducted and change the status quo,’ said Andy Shaw, an acquaintance of Mr. Rauner’s and the president of the Better Government Association, a nonpartisan state watchdog group that received donations from Mr. Rauner before he ran.

“The rich families remaking Illinois are among a small group around the country who have channeled their extraordinary wealth into political power, taking advantage of regulatory, legal and cultural shifts that have carved new paths for infusing money into campaigns. Economic winners in an age of rising inequality, operating largely out of public view, they are reshaping government with fortunes so large as to defy the ordinary financial scale of politics. In the 2016 presidential race, a New York Times analysis found [Ocotber], just 158 families had provided nearly half of the early campaign money…

“[To] a remarkable degree, their philosophies are becoming part of a widely adopted blueprint for public officials around the country: Critical of the power of unions, many are also determined to reduce spending and taxation, and are skeptical of government-led efforts to mitigate the growing gap between the rich and everyone else.

“‘There was never so much money behind these efforts,’ said Iris J. Lav, formerly a senior adviser at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a left-leaning economic think tank in Washington… ‘It has gotten much stronger in the last five or six years,’ Ms. Lav continued. ‘There’s the sense of an opening, of a discontent with the old model. It’s about social insurance, the social compact — who’s responsible for whom?’” New York Times, November 29^th. Amazingly, the notions of fiscal conservatism – never a part of anything religious (in fact, quite the opposite, as lifting the less privileged used to be an Evangelical, biblically-mandated basic) – soon became an essential new Evangelical value. The story of what fiscal conservatives want, and what they are willing to concede to the white traditionalist conservatives, has become the story of the new United States. Down on government spending, our public primary and secondary schools have fallen in global rankings from first to somewhere between seventeenth and twenty-third (and falling), our infrastructure is collapsing around us and China is zipping by us in government-supported (job creating) research.

Not reliant on a vibrant America, with assets neatly placed around the globe and deeply supportive of an outsource-driven global economy, the mega-wealthy have continuously decreased their stake in America. They like living here still (moving’s a bitch!), but they really do not care how much their surrounding Americans are struggling or that 70% of Americans have made less in real money, year after year, for decades. Since they send their kids to private schools and live in protected enclaves with expensive European-made cars and clothes, they do not care if local schools are awful or that local clothing manufacturers have just done out of business.

In fact, our plunging educational system – with priorities that focus more on teaching creationism than math and science – allows a growing undereducated number of voters to continue to perpetuate a system that is totally designed to allow the mega-wealthy to profit at the expense of the masses. But history also teaches us that a society predicated on specialized privilege, while the quality of life dwindles for the majority, will stretch only so long before it snaps. And when it snaps, all those “Constitutionally protected” guns will decide the new alignments in the new political system that arises. I wonder if that is the future the one percenters expect… or want.

I’m Peter Dekom, and until we wake up and truly understand what we are doing to ourselves, we will not end our death spiral to a regime change I doubt any of us really wants.