It seems many in this country have been seduced by the term “lame duck”—which, I have to confess, always brings to my mind an image of Kathy Bates looming with a sledgehammer over a drugged and pinioned Daffy Duck.  But I think this perception (lame-duck status, not my cartoon horror fantasies) stems from an essential misperception about how our federal government has come to function—or, more to the point, not to function.

 
George W. Bush will continue to be an immensely powerful man for the next nine months.  The performance of the wacky comedy duo of Petraeus and Crocker in Congress this week makes clear that our representatives—no matter how ambitious and/or well-meaning—are essentially powerless in reversing his wartime policies.  In this sense alone, neither the President’s inability to pass legislation, nor the country’s growing sense of disgust with his administration, its policies, and his bumbling public persona have lessened his ability to shape events in the world, not just now, but for years to come.

But for all of Bush’s very obvious, proactive failures, I think the most disastrous facet of his presidency has been its legacy of inaction, and the degree to which he has either normalized such behavior or tied it to a perception of simple incompetence.  The latter impression is particularly useful for Republicans because it allows the party and its candidates to dissociate themselves from a single polarizing figure, as though he and his wreckage-strewn term of office were not perfect exemplars of everything neoconservatism most dearly wishes to achieve.

Neocons love anecdotal accounts of meddling federal regulations; they would very much like us to believe that any such intervention is, by nature, both unnecessary and abusive.  This line of argument reminds me very much of the tactics employed by the Southern Caucus to defeat civil rights legislation during much of the first half of the twentieth century.  It’s not that we’re racist, that we hate blacks or want to push them down, these reasonable-sounding men would protest.  It’s just that we feel that voters’ rights legislation and anti-lynching laws are unconstitutional, unwarranted intrusions into the affairs of the states.  Paradoxically, Southern senators’ objections to the expansion of civil liberties was said to stem from their love of liberty!  And as for lynching, they said, well, that barbaric practice had been greatly exaggerated by an overly credulous and sensationalist news media, and besides, to the extent that such violence did take place, it was on the decline already.

Now, few would dare to criticize the passage of the Civil Rights Act of  1964 in a public forum today (though many are perfectly comfortable doing so by way of proxy issues such as affirmative action).  But what I find fascinating and more than a little discouraging is that the rhetorical tactic itself continues to be a centerpiece of conservative strategy—and it is as mendacious, purposely misdirected, and, sadly, effective as ever.  The movement’s ideologues attack regulation, public institutions, environmentalism, and proposals such as universal health care on the grounds that they give too much power to the federal government—which is, they claim, inherently ineffectual when it comes to providing services of any kind.  Not only that—these sorts of programs, they say, introduce an element of federal intrusion into our daily lives that could in time upend all our democratic ideals.  Indeed, even a program desired by the majority of the citizenry, such as universal health care, is alternately called a slippery slope to communism, European socialism, or fascism (the pundits, then and now, can never seem to decide).  The great thinkers of the movement would furthermore ask us to believe that industry is constantly policing itself; that, for instance, the abusive and unfair labor practices of the Gilded Age would have reformed themselves if those meddling Progressives and New Dealers had only allowed the market to do its work.  That there is absolutely no evidence or historical basis for this notion does not give them a moment’s pause.  On top of that, they insist that the worst abuses of industry are not so bad; in one of my favorite recent examples, Michael Goldfarb of the Weekly Standard triumphantly claimed that a new super-duper coal-fired energy plant in India would produce about one-tenth the atmospheric carbon as all the forest fires in the United States every year.  This is a tactic I’ve seen before, and it continues to puzzle me; apologists for corporate abuses admit that we are capable of influencing the planet on a scale similar to a natural disaster, but they frame it in such a way that it seems somehow harmless, even harmonious.  After all, a wildfire or a volcano is a natural disaster.  So, when we dump pollutants into the atmosphere, we’re just engaging in the magical circle of life.  Isn’t that reassuring?

Of course, this is all a smokescreen.  Neoconservatives aren’t troubled by consolidation of power; they just want it to be in the right hands.  Guys like Goldfarb and Kristol are not dummies; they know very well that nature—and politics—loathe a vacuum.  Thinking conservatives (don’t kid yourself; they might be wrong, but some of them are mighty smart) cannot possibly believe that power stripped from the federal government will magically redistribute itself to all the citizens in the land.  In fact, that is precisely what they don’t want.  One could argue that the entire basis of American conservatism is contempt for the masses (more on this later).  The point of putting as much money into as few hands as possible is not merely to enrich oneself; it is to reinforce the notion that this is the natural order of things.  To this end, neoconservatives work persistently to undercut the very basis of governmental authority wherever said authority might actually distribute power more equitably.  They do this, of course, by equivocating power with freedom.

Progressives need to recognize this strategy and attack it at the roots.  The point of regulation isn’t that the government is somehow wiser and more just than industry; it’s an extension of the principle of checks and balances.  Federal oversight promotes a sort of competition between the public and private sectors that dissipates over-consolidation of power in the hands of corporations.  Likewise, the point of a progressively-oriented security net—public education, health care, pensions, unemployment insurance and training for displaced workers— is not the establishment of some sort of cradle-to-grave nanny state; quite apart from the obvious humanitarian benefits, these programs enable individuals to negotiate more strenuously with immensely powerful business interests, thereby distributing more power and influence from the few to the many.

This, incidentally, is the very definition of democracy.

But, very early on, pro-business factions learned that concerns about a more vaguely defined ideal of freedom could easily trump our desire for meaningful representation and individual influence on the system that, to a very great degree, determines the shape and character of our day-to-day lives.  Thus, New Dealers were accused of being communists; civil rights activists were criminals and subversives; environmentalists are whackos; civil libertarians are terrorist sympathizers and traitors.  This was most effective in the 60s, when riots and peaceful-but-countercultural demonstrations provided an easily-appropriated image of where such rabble-rousing would lead.  Many in America have therefore come to associate any form of liberal activism with civil unrest.  This attitude has provided the right with a sort of rhetorical Death Star which neoconservatives have wielded with impunity to obliterate even the most modest liberal reforms for the last forty years.  To hell with the hippies and the tree-huggers and the do-gooders, an increasingly conservative electorate has proclaimed with its votes and its silent complicity—they’re against freedom!

Still, Bush’s approach to “governing”—unapologetic cronyism and indifference toward enforcement of inconvenient laws and regulations—has, in a way, proven far more effective than any of these rhetorical devices.  Since he has been unable to push through a legislative program dismantling Social Security or to otherwise publicly gut prized New Deal programs, Bush and his underlings have pursued a policy of simply refusing to enforce or fund any law or agency which doesn’t fit into the neoconservative agenda.  The recent revelation that the administration failed to seek prosecution in over fifty criminal cases of criminal wrongdoing by corporations in the last seven and a half years is just one of the more blatant examples of this stratagem.  Look into every corner of the executive branch’s regulatory apparatus— the EPA, the FDA, even the FAA— and you will find the same pervasive attitude.  This is not conservatism; it is pro-corporate, laissez-faire radicalism.

I suggest that every American gaze long and hard at the photographs of travelers stranded in airports, and contemplate where neoconservative philosophy has taken us, and where it is leading.  This latest scandal—American Airlines' cancellation of hundreds of flights due to potentially catastrophic safety violations—should serve as the wakeup call we’ve desperately needed, if only the news media will run with the story.  Libertarians take note: this is what happens when the market is allowed to police itself.  While it’s right to point out that competition and commercial enterprise can drive many forms of innovation faster than centralized control, to ignore public safety in the interest of expediting corporate profits is reckless, irresponsible, fantastically naïve, and frankly criminal.

What’s most sobering about the current state of affairs is that the American Airlines fiasco typifies the least of our real concerns; we’re facing climate change, a growing energy crisis, declining supplies of natural resources, global food shortages, the slow collapse of our infrastructure, and—perhaps most important, and most under-the-radar—a looming shortage in fresh water, and virtually nothing has been done by the single entity with the most power and opportunity to marshal our resources in defense of our basic way of life: the executive branch of the federal government.