As a British citizen I can’t really imagine our two main political parties going at each other on fundamental moral issues such as abortion, the use of torture, gay marriage or the death penalty. In recent decades, the Conservatives have become more ‘liberal’ and cosmopolitan on such matters, in public at least. Heck they even listen to ‘rebellious’ pop music chums. Not so in America. Conservatives and Liberals over on the other side of the pond often have egregious, emotive debates about just such topics and the polarisation seems extreme at first glance. But we all know appearances can be deceptive. Dig a little deeper and it’s quite easy to see that those on both sides are dancing to the same tune.
I’m not talking about the fact that pernicious patriotism and war-mongering have proved just as high up Obama’s list of priorities as Bush’s. I’m not even talking about Obama’s frankly embarrassing u-turn on Guantanamo Bay. The crucial similarity between Conservatives and Liberals is that they both concur with the somewhat aptly named, ‘Washington Consensus’. This is basically an economic outlook which favours neoliberal policies both at home and abroad. It encompasses free-trade, open markets, heavy privatisation, de-regulation and generally low taxes for the super-wealthy behind the facade of job creation. In the American context, the domestic and international components of these policies are often contradictory.
As the beacon of free-market capitalism, successive US governments of either orientation have been keen to roll out this model to the ‘developing’ world (hereafter let’s call it the two-thirds world as two thirds of the world’s population lives here and it has no history of colonialism or racial inferiority attached to it). With the help of institutions such as the IMF, WTO and the World Bank, the US is willing to offer economic aid to struggling nations, particularly in South America and Africa. All they have to do in return is open up their markets to foreign investment, adopt a model of free trade and ensure that their labour movements don’t kick up too much of a stink. This invariably leads to the exploitation of the natural resources of the two-thirds world country involved with a hand-full of indigenous middle-men getting rich in process; a fact lauded as proof of progress. Or worse, as was the case in Bolivia, where the water system was privatised by US company, Bechtel, in the name of ‘efficiency’. They increased the cost prohibitively leaving thousands without running water and with little improvement in the service.
At home on the other hand, both Republican and Democratic governments are happy to renege on the ‘free-trade’ policies they so forcibly promote abroad, often engaging in protectionism to help domestic industries, the most notable being agriculture which gets considerable subsidies. Regulation and taxes on corporations are kept to a bare minimum with the bogey-man of capital flight, that is, big business moving their operations abroad and taking their jobs with them, used to justify such policies. The reason that capital flight is even possible is thanks to the very same ‘Washington Consensus’ policies being adopted over the last 30 years in the first place.
It would be easy to claim that Conservatives and Liberals in the US are fairly indistinct because ultimately they are both mercy to the market and other economic forces and are therefore severely restricted in what they can do. This is a traditional, economically determinist, Marxist analysis that asserts that the economic determines the political. In fact it is much more complicated than that simple one-way causality. A more sophisticated analysis would be to say that economic, political and cultural forces in society are involved in a symbiotic relationship, each complementing and affecting the other in myriad ways. This relationship is unbalanced though, quite heavily towards the interests of capital so that the politics in the US never call into question the underlying economic system and the hegemonic culture similarly reifies the status quo.
This analysis allows for degrees of variation in the political and cultural spheres but due to the imbalance this always tips in favour of capitalist interests. Essentially, the preferences of corporate elites (economic), members of government and the state (political) and the mass media (cultural) all interlock and share a common interest in maintaining the status quo that keeps them all in positions of privilege and power. Not only that, they also run in the same social and professional circles; business and government ‘experts’ speak on the news, ex-government officials get on the boards of large companies and corporate elites are handed positions in the government apparatus by their friends in congress. Ultimately the media, big business and both Conservatives and Liberals share the same broad class interests. One only has to look at the last Presidential campaign to see that both sides represent the interests of capital, with a combined expenditure of roughly $2.4 Billion, with the more ‘Liberal’ side actually spending more than their more ‘Conservative’ counterparts.
The pretence of democracy in America, and much of the ‘One-third World’ is a major facet of the dominant capitalist ideology and culture; it placates the masses by giving them the illusion of choice. This is combined with the constant cultural reification of the status quo in the media, another illusion of choice defended by the logic of supply and demand. These illusions keep the general populace compliant, ‘Manufacturing Consent’, so successfully that many will virulently defend the system that oppresses them. The purely cosmetic differences between Conservatives and Liberals in America help give credibility to the illusion of choice but make no mistake, those on both sides want things to stay the way they are on the issues that really matter. They want the rich to keep dominating the poor and the poor to keep thanking them for being such benevolent leaders. The real Washington Consensus then, is between corporate elites, politicians and the media at the expense of everyone else and the sooner we realise this the sooner we can wage a proper fight back...
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