Romney – No body likes him
It’s no surprise that those on the left don’t like Willard Romney but the folks over at The American Conservative don’t dislike him any less. I have been passing on Daniel Larison’s rants on Romney’s foreign policy for months but he’s not alone. Social conservative Rod Dreher is not too excited with his foreign policy either, Dubya 2012.
Scott Galupo:
The Loathsome Romney Candidacy: How Did We Get Here?
This is a milestone moment in American politics. “Fabulously wealthy” presidential candidates are more of a norm than an aberration — witness the Roosevelts, the Kennedys, the Bushes, Nelson Rockefeller, George Romney, Ross Perot. But to a man, each of them ran at least in part on the principle of noblesse oblige — the idea that the wealthy must make sacrifices for the common good (yes, even George W. Bush, who promised not to “balance the budget on the backs of the poor).
In contrast, Romney and his ilk are having none of this. They are trying to persuade voters — and for all we know may have persuaded themselves — that, in effect, “As Goes Bain Capital, So Goes America.”
I’ve thought a lot about this question over the last six months. How did this happen? How did we come to this pass, where a man like Mitt Romney — whose candidacy represents a breathtakingly cynical, borderline nihilistic pursuit of power on behalf of a tiny sliver of the population — sits within striking distance of the highest office in the land?
An accident – the last man standing. Perhaps not!
Still, the “accident” narrative only gets you so far. The reality is, Romney slipped through — and there are troubling factors that buoy his campaign. The complete rejection of mainstream macroeconomic theory is one such factor. Cultural animus toward Obama is another. Liberals overstate its extent, but it’s undeniably real.
Most decisive is what I’ve been calling the theological fusion of social and economic conservatism. Too many evangelical Christians seem incapable of even questioning Mammon. Now they enthusiastically welcome the money changers into the temple. Like the Calvinists of old, they glorify market outcomes as a sign of divine favor. And the cliche “class warfare” has served as a handy tool to shut down any deviation from this new orthodoxy.
The prospect of a second Obama term doesn’t excite me. Nevertheless, my overriding hope is to see Mitt Romney spat out of the body politic, once and for all. (Bold mine)
Noah Millman responds and Larison responds to Millman.
Noah Millman makes a good observation, but he seems to be missing Scott Galupo’s objection to Romney:
So expelling Mitt Romney will do nothing to change the fact that a critique of the financialization of American capitalism has barely begun anywhere in American politics.
That’s correct, but what I believe Scott was saying was that he wants Romney to lose so that we will be rid of Mitt Romney as a political figure. Put another way, a political system that rewards someone like Romney with the Presidency is in extremely poor health, and Scott doesn’t want our system to be as far gone as a Romney victory would prove it to be.
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Regardless, the point is that Scott is mostly objecting to what he calls Romney’s “breathtakingly cynical, borderline nihilistic pursuit of power.” It’s the sheer cynicism involved that offends even more than the interests served by that cynicism.
I haven’t seen such an effective critiuqe of Romney on any of the progressive blogs or media.
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Liberals not only don’t seem to realize the degree to which the so-called conservative revolution of the past thirty years has been a cover for the ‘financialization’ of the economy, the takeover of the economy by the financial industry, they don’t even seem to care when it is pointed out to them. It is as if the propaganda victory of the rich over the right has been as successful over the left as well.
There is no natural free market economy that would exist outside of government, the article of faith of the libertarians. The market is defined by society through government; how the market operates, who the market rewards and who it disadvantages. If the market produces outcomes that we don’t like there is no reason that we can’t try to change the market or to use the government to compensate for the undesirable outcomes. It is not even true that the government in the past was incompetent at these compensation efforts. The rebellion started by the wealthy was because the compensation efforts were easy to implement and quite successful.
Over the last thirty years we have paid a terribly high price as the wealthy have increasingly gotten their way and increased their control over the government and over the economy. In 1970 the percentage of the nation’s profits earned by the financial sector was 2%. In 2007 it was 40%. We have gone from a nation that produces things to a nation of rent seekers, a few people at the top squeezing the economy to gain what they can from it at the cost of everyone else. There is no better representative of this than Mitt Romney and his Bain Capital.
No part of the economy has been left untouched. The problem with health care is that it is too expensive and it started to get too expensive starting in 1970 as it has been turned increasingly into a for profit business. Hospitals that had been owned and run by charities and government became owned and run as for profit businesses. Insurance that had been issued by community rate based non-profit coops was issued by for profit insurance companies. It is not as the propaganda machine tells us that the government has over regulated the industry; the industry has required more regulation as the aim of it has gone from providing health care to making a profit.
The rich intensely dislike the federal government not because it is incompetent but because much of it is paid for by the progressive income tax that hits them the hardest. As a result the rich want to see government functions striped away from the federal government and passed on to the States and local government where the taxation is more regressive, the rich pay a smaller percentage. Even though most of the time it means that the total costs of the functions to the nation goes up because of the duplication involved having 50 states or 25,000 cities do something rather than one federal government.
Liberals seem to be not aware of what has actually gone on and why. I don’t know if it is because they don’t understand or if they don’t want to understand. Certainly it bodes poorly for the chances of change if the natural opponents don’t even understand the problem.
Merkin, the ‘natural’ opponents to badly-distributed wealth would be those in the lowest brackets. Given the demographics, please explain to me the Deep South and Massachusetts.
Merkin, people forget. The lessons of the Great Depression have been washed away by the economic successes of the 30 years after it. We will relearn them as we re-create the conditions that brought us the depression, hopefully before we are forced to endure another one. But you are right, it is astonishing that people don’t see whats happening. Even after the last decade, where taxes were lowered, regulation became a joke, and the entire nation suffered, there is still a HUGE number of people in the middle class that think the policies that made this mess are the way out of this mess. When I see middle class American cheering the arrests made by OWS protestors I just don’t know what to say, other than, “They are on your side you morons!”.