How does it feel to be on your own? Sifting through the rubble, bringing up the dead, reassembling history from below.
Possibly another data point related to the gamer-tech New Model Bro Army mob broligarchy "vibe shift" takeover thing:
"And if legalizing online sports books and wallpapering the lives of Americans with enticing advertisements for them strike you as a bad idea — or at least not especially thought-through — well, what does that imply about the country’s apparent shift toward risk-forward libertarianism rather than risk-shy paternalism in recent years?" - David Wallace-Wells, NY Times
Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, Niles Rodgers, and the Allman Brothers Band's favorite POTUS. And my first vote for a president, although I cannot say I paid too close attention to President Carter's term in office and the year I voted for him in 1980 he actually lost. In retrospect based mostly on the account in Walter Karp's Liberty Under Siege (1989), I've always understood Carter's presidency as this decent guy who wasn't up to the big money hardball politics going on in Washington. I believed the 1980 October Surprise theory from the first time I heard it. It was like a coup de grace to Carter's term in office, Reagan and Beltway insiders stealing his lunch money. The way Carter's humanitarian strengths and integrity blossomed and flourished after his presidency has only seemed to corroborate Karp's take. Carter's humility and honesty and generosity were his superpowers, and traits not tolerated much in the special interest meat grinder of the halls of government. Carter lived a century but the timing of his passing might be a mercy in that he won't have to see what comes next for the country and maybe the loss of a politician and leader like him might raise the alarm a little about the peril the country is facing as the result of the recent election. Wonder how the Carter Center would have assessed the integrity of the US election as official observers, as they have done other elections all around the world? What might they have had to say about the Russian bomb scares and Musk's billions flooding the zone with disinformation down the stretch? I've never really thought much about Carter as the rock & roll POTUS, or until the documentary of the same name came out in 2020 anyway. But I do remember Hunter S. Thompson loved him. And I remember he was the first president to walk in an inaugural parade and he put solar panels on the roof of the Whitehouse. And I can't remember ever seeing any other president in a fan t-shirt for a rock & roll band like he appears in the doc in one for The Allman Bros. Also in the doc Carter says the first artists he thought of inviting to play at his inauguration were Paul Simon and Aretha Franklin; not exactly Elvis and Tina Turner but rock & roll-ish enough. By comparison, I think Reagan was still into the Rat Pack. The Bushies were into country music, reportedly. Clinton was into Fleetwood Mac and played the saxophone. Obama was always doing playlists like he was a rock critic. Biden tried to follow suit but his heart wasn't in it so his lists came off even cringier than Obama's. And before Carter, according to the internet, Gerald Ford was a jazz fan and Nixon only listened to Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries with the volume set to 11, just kidding. And Grump appears to like all rock and pop music only once it's been played to death, bloated, and bad. So it is Jimmy Carter: The Rock & Roll President. RIP.
Addendum: Several of my favorite journalists are pointing out in the wake of Carter's passing that features of the neoliberal order, conventionally attributed to Reagan winning in 1980, actually got going under Carter. I've been aware of this case for awhile but always bristled at the argument.
Deregulating the trucking industry isn't the same as making opposition to all regulations and taxes on wealth official admin policy or making regulations and taxes anti-growth curse words. Neolib boilerplate: Government interventions in the economy-- i.e., taxes and regulations-- are bad, always bad, and should always be scorned and condemned. The only thing equally bad is government spending that might require more taxes and regulations.
Although, in historical fact, various gov regulations and taxes protecting labor, public health, and the environment have been around for over a hundred years and are essential to the general prosperity and peace of society. They are essential to keeping the food we eat and the air we breathe from poisoning and killing us. It's that basic. Sure, Carter was into Christian austerity but also into lots of Christian charity. Keep it simple: Milton Friedman, Mr. Neoliberal Austerity Economics, advised Reagan and dissed Carter.
Anyway, drives me crazy how people in politics can get so self-servingly binary about this stuff. Deregulating anything equals Neoliberalism. No it doesn't. Cutting any waste in government is austerity. No, cutting essential social safety net spending in the caring economy or cutting spending on public infrastructure is austerity. And, actually, regressive taxes on the bottom 50% of income earners ought to be cut and progressive taxes on exorbitant wealth hoarding ought to be increased. So I can get a little defensive about this argument that Carter was a Neolib. Still, have to concede some points on the matter to this passage from Tim Barker substack post @ Origins of Our Time:
By 1984, Stuart Eizenstat, Carter’s top domestic policy adviser, could already describe the former president’s most important legacy as “taking the Democrats into the post-New Deal era.” This meant “supporting fiscal moderation and less government intrusion in the economy — a philosophy of government that some now describe as ‘neo-liberal.’”
Who knows Eizenstat's intentions four years into the Reagan Revolution but point taken. As a heart breaking example of Carter's "fiscal moderation" and austerity turns out he recommended cutting social security. I know, a different time, stagflation, the gov had to do something. But by punishing the elderly poor? This doesn't taint his Habitat for Humanity home building work but it does put it possibly in a new light? Building homes for the poor as penance?
Anyway, Carter's takes on the infamous 2010 Citizen's United Supreme Court ruling allowing billionaires and Big Business to spend literally as much as they want promoting austerity and sabotaging our democracy adds perspective. Compiled by Public Citizen:
Citizens United is an “erroneous ruling” and “the most stupid decision the Supreme Court ever made.”
Citizens United has turned America into an “oligarchy with unlimited political bribery.”
Citizens United “violates the essence” of our democracy and represents “the biggest change in America” since I was elected in 1976.
Citizens United has left everyday Americans “cheated out of” the chance to make their lives better.
Citizens United has led to “a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors.”
To corporate rule neoliberalism means maximizing capital wealth accumulation for the oligarchy and austerity budgets for everyone else. Jimmy Carter was NOT a Neoliberal. His Christian austerity was an equal opportunity austerity.
Some republican legislator excited about Grump's support for deregulating the economy:
“There may be more bang for the buck in terms of growing our economy…making regulatory changes, get the impediments out of the way, let those job creators and entrepreneurs really be able to go to work.”
Letters from an American Historian
I liked Gary Gerstle's book The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order (2022), especially the history stuff about the fall of the New Deal (1932-1979) period and the rise of Neoliberal period (1980 to when remains a question), but the "fall" of the neoliberal order in his book title still seemed a tad presumptuous even after finishing his argument.
The recent election, for instance, was driven by revenge of the neoliberal order as much as it was culture war stupidity. Deregulatory hype like the above quote is Neolib reaction, pure and simple. They're back and never went away really.
And how many times have we heard this one: if only we'd get taxes and regulations off the backs of our enterprising captains of industry they'd create all the jobs and wealth and prosperity America could ever possibly need. Free market or halcyon deregulated business conditions are hyped as this romantic Shangri-La fantasy forever frustrated by government meddling. But, we already know what big businesses, corporations, will in fact do when unfettered by government regulations. We have nearly two centuries of evidence of what they do, actually.
We know what the free marketeers do when unregulated: 1) Big business interests will peddle products that are dangerous, poisonous, and addictive if not regulated. 2) Big employers will squeeze labor to the last drop, enslave workers if possible, and work children and adults for less than living wages, and then have the gall to construct an ideology out of these practices that contends that their business success and productive "efficiencies" depend on disciplining labor like this, most of whom would fall into lazy waste without the order their jobs provide. And 3) As much as they can get away with, large corporations have always "externalized" the expenses of doing business, their costs of production, pushing carbon emissions and other pollutants onto the community or public commons openly or if need be they will take extraordinary measures to dump their wastes into the environment to avoid the expense of disposing of them safely. Again, unless regulated this is what many so-called free market businesses will do and have been doing for 150 years routinely.
The free market dogma has gotten so bad of late that the billionaires and oligarchy are opposing green energy innovations and obstructing economic reforms with that old saw about how saving the planet is bad for the economy. One imagines making the planet uninhabitable won't be very good for the economy either.
Anyway, we do know what big corporations and private equity firms do when deregulated: they lowball and chisel labor, breaking unions, off-shoring labor, whatever they have to do, understaff and overstretch their frontline workers, externalize all the costs they can, and then skim off as much as they can in profits for as long as they can, and then sell off their remaining assets for parts. And just like they've never seen a tax or regulation they like, the profit margins from this process, their take, is never enough, of course. This go-go yuppie sales hustle hype is always in pursuit of the next bull market bubble and will most likely fizzle with a bunch of stock buybacks or another crypto bubble meltdown.
It's in the government's interest to increase commercial activity but not to leave the foxes guarding the henhouse. From a macro economic standpoint it's evident at this point that the neoliberal order isn't so much pro economic growth as it is class war redistribution and pro-billionaire wealth hoarding. If the richies had a pound of sense they'd be leaning hard into economic development in a green energy transition and pay living wages. But they don't.
And if nothing else, maybe this assassination of a healthcare CEO, I read today they found a backpack, presumably owned by the gunman, full of Monopoly money (not kidding), might give some sobering pause to the austerity Hawks lining up to turn the screws on health care and other essential services crucial to big super-majorities of the population.
Stay tuned.