American revolution

I believe we are seeing the early signs of a hugely important re-alignment of the American political landscape. I think the Right Wing of American politics is fracturing.

The Right Wing of American politics has always had two broad wings: the Religious\Social Right and the Corporate Right. One was the Moral Majority concerned with home town and Fundamentalist Christian beliefs, the other was corporate concerned with Washington DC and big business. Their alliance encapsulated the Republican view of American Christian Capitalism. Christian at home, Capitalist at work. Powerful everywhere.

But when Newt Gingerich came along with his ‘Contract with America’ the alliance between Home Town Republican and Corporate Big Money, nearly split.

The Moral Majority’s evangelical fervor found a new enemy in Big Government. The radical movement wanted spending cuts, balanced budgets and a humbled Federal Government. Washington was unprepared and so were their friends in big business. The Corporate Right Wing of America suddenly found themselves caught in the crossfire, in danger of being cast out as hate-figures and villains alongside the Progressive Left. Both were branded, by the new Grass roots radicals, as being responsible for a Federal government that had become a bloated pork barrel of special interests sucking the life from America.

But the ‘revolution’ was short lived. Perceived political intransigence and arrogance on Gingerich’s part made it easy for his enemies both on the Left and the Right, to blame him for ‘shutting down’ the government. More importantly, what did for Newt, was the Greenspan era of cheap credit.

In the era of cheap credit, the libertarian argument for small government no longer seemed so important. But today there is no cheap credit. Now we have soiled ourselves in a pool of our own vomit from that debt and credit binge. And now we have a vast public debt as well. Newt may be gone, but the seeds of his discontent are about to push up a rather different kind of green shoot.

There is a new grass-root anti-government radicalism growing in America. Once again there is a radical and righteous anger at a bloated Federal Government that plainly no longer cares for the ordinary man. Only this time it is not Corporate Big Business who are seen as the corrupter of government, but the Big Banks. It is the Big Banks and the financial world, who are seen as the enablers and paymasters of an arrogant Federal Government. And what is more, Corporate America, some very powerful players in it at least, are on the side of the radicals.

The message that unites them, is that together, the Big Banks and the bloated and self-serving Federal government have colluded to enrich themselves and to rob, both the working man and the companies who would like to employ him.

Washington is now seen as being in the pay of bankers, and together they are raping the American people and their way of life. A revolving door of influence and corruption, from DC to Wall Street and back again. With one aim – To enrich the elite and undermine real democracy.

This message has a spreading power because it has more than a grain of truth in it.

Industrial America is waking up to having lost much of their former political pre-eminence. They have been displaced by the banks, from the ear of government and power. The corporations and the poor together, feel the same bankers have stolen from them both.

Strange times for Industrial America to find itself with the possibility of being seen as the champions of the ordinary man and woman looking for a job. Joined together against the banks who ruined the corporations and stole the jobs.

The banks have made powerful enemies and not woken up to the danger.

The Big Banks have been too busy looking at European leaders who will not bow down to them, or at the usual leftie, progressive voices, and have not seen the real enemy rising to face them – a ressurgent libertarian, anti-Big Government radicalism. Only this time, the radicalism has a very powerful new ally -Industrial America. There are large and powerful parts of corporate, industrial America who now see Big Government, and the Washington DC Federal Machine that Newt railed against, as in-league with the Big Banks.

The Koch Brothers who own nearly all, of the vast Koch Industries conglomerate, detest Obama and his economic policies. A recent New Yorker article chronicled their connections with the new libertarian movement. Radicals can be a nuisance. Radicals with access to very deep pockets can be a danger.

So on one side of the American Right we have out-of-touch Big Government allied with arrogant Big Banks, and on the other grass roots, libertarian, radicalism now allied with the Industrial powers they used to be against.

Together they will, I think, articulate a desire for a return to what they will remember as ‘moral capitalism’. You may not like the idea or think that there ever was such a thing. But that’s not the point. The point is it has a coherence about it which taps into deep parts of America’s mythology. That gives it a power the Banks do not, and cannot have. A cultural, moral power. Mess with THAT power at your extreme peril.