Here's my take on Bush's SCOTUS appointment of Texas crony Harriet Miers. It's pretty close to Jack Balkin's from TPM Cafe. So let him have his say first:
George W. Bush has always been an interesting hybrid of the traditional business conservative who came from a powerful Republican family and a religious conservative who found God. That combination has made him appealing to many different parts of the Republican coalition. But when the chips are down in his Administration, Bush has shown his true colors as a business conservative who above all wants a smooth ride for capital. That is what Miers offers.
Business conservatives are less interested in shaking up the world than in stability and in clearing a path for the promotion of their interests. Although their goals may often overlap with the goals of movement conservatives and religious conservatives, they are relatively uninterested in religious proselytization or ideological crusading. Business conservatives are pragmatists at heart, and the promotion of capital makes them more cosmopolitan in spite of themselves.
Religious and social conservatives may be shocked to learn that the Republican Party is the party of big business after all-- it has been since the Civil War-- and that big business is not always interested in the same things they are. That is why the Republican revolution in the courts inevitably will be a revolution on business's terms.
And what, exactly, does business want? Overturning the New Deal? The Constitution in Exile? The return of God to the public schools? The end of affirmative action? Outlawing abortion once and for all? Squashing gays and lesbians underfoot? None of these things. What business wants is stability, comfort, predictability, and an agile, productive, submissive and demobilized population. It wants a powerful executive that can protect America's interests abroad. It wants a Congress freed from federal judicial oversight that is able to dish out the pork, jiggle the tax code and deregulate the economy according to its ever shifting concerns and interests. And it wants a Supreme Court that will give a pro-business President and a pro-business Congress a free hand, a Court that will protect the rights of employers over employees, advertisers over consumer groups, and corporations over environmentalists.
It wants, in short, someone very much like Harriet Miers.
That seems about right to me. But if Balkin's point is that with the Miers' appointment we don't need to worry about the constitution in exile and other movement conservative cranks, well ok. But I've never seen them as a very serious threat. The threat in the long run does not come from the wingnuts, but from the regressive trend since the eighties in which wealth in this country is becoming alarmingly concentrated.
There are structural changes being promoted by the business conservative wing of the GOP that are very significant, and we need to make its agenda more a focus of our concern and vigilance. The cultural values debate in the political sphere is a distraction. That all should be worked out in the cultural sphere. Our primary focus in the political sphere should be about power distribution.
There are a lot of people on the left who see the GOP as trending toward fascism, and I would agree that there are fascistic tendencies on the wingnut right. Those people are vulnerable to demagogic manipulation, and they can be pretty scary, along the lines of what I wrote about yesterday regarding naive idealism. But the power structure in the U.S. is not fascistic. In fascist societies, business serves the state. Our tendency is toward crony capitalism in which the state serves business. Is that so much better?
Well, ok. Corporate capitalism has no interest in gassing gays and Jews. It doesn't really care about how we live our private lives. It does have an interest in there being enough money in the pockets of the general population so that it can buy the stuff it sells. So things could be worse. But let's be frank. Crony capitalism is anti-democratic, and it undermines the republic. Are we living in a democracy if our elected representatives mainly represent the interests of Big Money? Are we living in a vibrant democracy if agenda items that serve the broader commonweal, like getting some kind of a sane health care system in place, don't have a prayer because of industry opposition?
The basic political question that we all need to focus on is this: Where's the Power? Who's in the driver's seat when it comes to making fundamental decisions about where we want to go as a society? Is there any doubt that the corporate agenda is the only one that really matters in the Beltway corridors of power?
The struggle against Big Money has been the most important political issue in this country since the Robber Baron era after the Civil War. This is the main act, and yet it seems to be at the very periphery of most of the political discourse. The debate about the Miers' nomination is getting hijacked by questions about whether she's for or against abortion or whether she has the competence to do the job. All of that is secondary to this bigger issue of the crapitalization of the country, of the making the Texas way of doing things the Beltway of doing things. The struggle that should be at the heart of the debate right now in America is who is in the driver's seat? Whose interests are driving policy--the interests of Big Money, or the interests of the rest of us.
I've explained this before. I'm not against business; I'm against concentrations of power. It would be ok if we were a nation of de-concentrated farmers and small business people. But we are not that. We are a nation in which wealth, and the power that comes with it, is becoming evermore concentrated in fewer and fewer hands with each passing decade.
These crapitalists, of course, are not monolithic; they are not a secret cabal hatching their plots in some bunker hideaway. But there is a confluence of interest that binds them, particularly those whose interests lie in the military industrial complex, and Bush/Cheney/Rove are completely on board with their program. And while dismantling the social programs of the New Deal era are not their central concerns, they don't really care about them. And so their alliance with movement conservatives like Grover Norquist, who do want to dismantle the New Deal, is quite painless.
And these crony capitalists do not care about the cultural values debate, except insofar as it creates a smokescreen behind which they can advance their agenda. They are more than willing to pour a little fuel on the flames from time to time to keep things smoky and everyone distracted. They are quite happy so long as they and their agenda are not the focus of the debate.
So that's what worries me about the Miers appointment, and also to a lesser extent about the Roberts' appointment. I retain some hope that Roberts willl not be a toady. But both are rather comfortable in that world, and I fear they will be consciously or unconsciously predisposed to support the crapitalist agenda.