The near-bankrupting of the US economy has created an identity crisis for the nation's ideological brands, with conservatives acting like liberals and liberals behaving like conservatives. Just two weeks ago we witnessed the unnatural coupling of George W Bush, the US president and an arch-conservative Republican, teaming up with liberal Democrats in Congress to get his US$700 billion (Dh2.57 trillion) economic rescue measure approved in the face of dissident outrage on both sides. For conservative traditionalists, the "bailout" fund was a heretical intrusion on market forces. For hard-line liberals, it was a reward for wealthy corporatists that should have been distributed among the needy.
In the end, the conciliators prevailed. But placing a value on the terms "liberal" and "conservative" in the US is getting to be as difficult as pricing all that toxic debt that still threatens to swamp the economy. This is no minor matter. Tension is vital to American democracy, so much so that with the collapse of the Soviet Union the country's ruling elites scrambled to find an existential threat to replace it. (Until a real one comes along, they're sticking with radical Islam.) When policy differences blur, as they did when the centre finally held over the rescue package, the only way to advance one's political interests is to "heighten the contradictions" as Richard Nixon, a former US president, put it - tarring your opponent as a tax-and-spend liberal or a conservative greed-head.
Truth be told, the two dozen or so legislators who successfully resisted the rescue plan in its first submission did so in response to opposition from voters back home. By holding out, they were able to go on record blaming "big government" for imposing itself on America's free-market ideals before they were forced by the establishment - and a deepening economic crisis - to go along. Conservative radio commentators warned of a creeping socialism infecting Washington. Mr Bush, it seems, is going out as a stealth Bolshevik.
In fact, the notion of Republican Party restraint is a canard. As he signed his rescue plan into law, Mr Bush solemnised that government meddling in the marketplace should be tolerated only during severe emergencies. This is the same president who has approved eight budgets that contained $25bn in farm subsidies, together with a host of other market-distorting handouts. The next generation of Republican leaders appears to be no less conflicted. In her debate nearly two weeks ago, the Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin uttered that the US government must punish predatory lenders for peddling extravagant mortgages - a liberal reflex - while preaching the conservative palliative of self-reliance and restraint among borrowers. Ms Palin, it should be noted, is the Alaskan governor who has ladled out more subsidies for her constituents than pretty much any politician in America.
In The Conservative Mind, the 1953 manifesto for a revolution against liberal excess, political scholar Russell Kirk argues that "a statesman's chief virtue... is prudence." Try squaring that with the latest intellectual contortion from Newt Gingrich, the somewhat flaky conscience of contemporary conservatism, about how accounting regulations that require bankers to mark their assets to their market values was a root cause of the economic crisis. Prudent observers may note, as New York Times columnist Floyd Norris did, that "it would be more productive to examine the rules that permitted the crisis to grow without being noticed, not at the rule that finally brought the truth to public attention."
Then there are the so-called liberals. Bill Clinton marginalised organised labour, signed into law an aggressive welfare-reform bill, devolved budgeting power to the states, held federal spending growth to a miserly four per cent over the course of his eight-year term and did as much to deregulate Wall Street as did any of his Republican predecessors, including Ronald Reagan. More than any US president, Mr Clinton enabled the economic globalisation that so many traditional liberals despise. The current Democratic Party leader, Barak Obama, was against free trade before he was for it and hangs out with Robert Rubin, Clinton's neoliberal Treasury secretary, and inflation hawk and former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volker.
So what's wrong with all this temporising? Nothing, particularly when real-world challenges are at stake. John Maynard Keynes's famous utterance that "when the facts change, I change my mind," is not a bad rubric for a fast-changing world. The problem is the peculiarly American instinct for brand politicking, which equates compromise and reconsideration with some kind of psychic betrayal. Spinning "liberal" and "conservative" economic philosophies into epithets suggests a lazy mind that cannot appreciate the nuanced traditions that distinguishes one from the other. And it converts demagogues into hypocrites when they must submit to an often hostile reality that has no patience with absolutes.
sglain@thenational.ae
