A Response to 21st Century Hoovernomics

Most economists are saying that now is a terrible time to be slashing spending.  With unemployment at close to 10% (and that's using the very conservative official numbers), with the housing market still reeling, austerity measures such as conservatives are advocating are little better than 21st century Hoovernomics.  But I can imagine the conservative response--so when is a good time to cut this unsustainable spending binge?  If not now, when?  And they are right, these imaginary conservative interlocutors of mine.  The answer will always be "later."

Progressives have erred in accepting so many conservative frames, and this is one of the biggies.  It has become conventional wisdom that the federal government needs to slash spending--the only question is who will be affected.  Liberals advocate soaking the rich. (Well, not really, but since I'm trying to imagine the conservative mind, let's just play along.)  Conservatives know that their base does not like--if fact hates--this notion.  Rich people, of course, don't like it, but neither do conservatives in general, and most of them are not rich.  These conservatives do not vote their economic self-interest, as many--including Thomas Frank--have pointed out.  For them, it is a moral issue.  Taking money from those that have earned it, and giving it to those who are shiftless and lazy, is the major complaint--perhaps the only complaint--that conservatives really have against government.  Progressives will never win any economic argument as long as this ideological framework is in place.

A huge majority of the country loved FDR and his big spending ways, because they saw directly how government spending affected their lives.  Government spending defeated the Nazis and saved the world.  Government spending provided electricity to the nation.  Government spending helped young couples buy their first home, and helped send them all to college.  In short, government spending created the post-war era that conservatives nostalgically pine for as the Golden Age of America.  Minorities, however, were largely shut out of the golden age of governmental spending.  Sure, they loved FDR too, for they were better off than before, but while white America was booming, their progress was slow and incremental.  The civil rights movement and LBJ's Great Society aimed to fix this inequity, to open up the power of government spending to all Americans.  And not so coincidentally, this is when more and more conservatives began to sour on government spending, when the idea began to take hold in the conservative mind that government spending doesn't help us any more.  All it does is take money from our pockets and give it to Them.  And that's not right.

Much is made of the Republican party being taken over by fundamentalist Christians, a phenomenon that began in the conservative backlash to post-war cultural changes and became manifest with Reagan's victory in 1980.  But I believe that this bit of common sense has it backwards.  Christians didn't take over the Republican Party--conservative ideology transformed Christianity.  Al Franken's Supply-Side Jesus is funny because it's no joke.  Conservative economic dogma is now central to Christian fundamentalist beliefs.  The idea that the government is taking from the wealthy to help the undeserving poor mapped almost perfectly onto the central anxiety of the post-war era--the eternal struggle between Christian America and godless Communism.  All of the ridiculous accusations of socialism, fascism, communism, and Marxism hurled against progressives (to the deep consternation of pedants like me who object not to the ideological frame being employed but to the muddling of language by using the terms interchangeably) stem from this post-war anxiety that our government is robbing from the rich and giving to the poor, which is communist, which is unchristian, and so must be opposed by good Christians.

I was born in the South in 1973, and grew up in a fundamentalist Christian household.  I went to a private Christian school, as the public school I was zoned for was largely black.  This school, of course, had not been so up until the late 60s, when desegregation finally began being enforced throughout the South.  My parents never took me to a public park--I played on the swingset in my backyard, in friends' backyards, at my private school's playground, or at my all-white church's playground.  I was never taken to a public pool--my grandparents had a pool, as did many friends.  In short, I grew up in a world where public = black.  I almost never encountered black people; not until high school did I have a black friend. For me, the South might as well have still been under Jim Crow.  And this is what progressives are getting at when they accuse conservatives (often implicitly, sometimes directly) of being racist.   These accusations are, of course, a terrible strategy.  Individual conservatives are not racist (well, some of them are, but so are some progressives).  But the current conservative economic dogma, the one that is doing so much damage to our politics right now, the one that has utterly transformed American Christianity, is built upon an ideology that took root before the vast majority of conservatives were even born.  It is an ideology that renders invisible all of the governmental services that benefit the white and the wealthy, and obsesses over those services that benefit minorities and the poor.  It is an ideology that has built a shadow world, a private world, and become more and more epistemically closed as time has passed.

This frame of government as Communist Robin Hood must be rejected if progressives ever hope to make substantial economic changes in this country.  We must return to the understanding that created FDR's popularity, the understanding that government services are a piece of the puzzle (NOT the whole puzzle--hard work and good luck will always be important, and progressives neglect this at their own peril) that is American prosperity.  The government is at its best when it curbs the excesses of capitalism (and we will always be arguing over how free the market should be--it is a good argument and should continue).  The government is at its best when it provides services, such as health care, that would be immoral to turn over to the heartlessness of pure capitalism.  But most importantly, we must return to the idea the government spending affects us all.  Providing health care to the jobless helps them, but it helps me too, by driving down the insane costs of the current health care system.  We must reject the notion that all government spending is bad, is immoral, because all government spending is redistributive.   It is most certainly not.  The federal government is certainly no utopia.  It will always be filled with self-centered individuals, always be teetering on the brink of corruption.  But unlike the private shadow system that conservatives have created, governmental corruption can be discovered, can be brought to the light and punished, and the corruptors voted out of office.  This is why governmental services are superior to private services, and why government spending should increase--it's not that the government is more pure, or more moral, than private industries, but rather that the government is more directly accountable to the American people that they serve.

A Face in the Crowd

Last night I finally got around to watching Elia Kazan's 1957 film A Face in the Crowd. The poor Netflix DVD had lain around the house all summer, ignored night after night, until it was buried under a stack of children's cartoons and bootleg episodes of Dr. Who. As has become the constant refrain of my life--I should not have waited so long.

Based on a short story by by Budd Schulberg, A Face in the Crowd tells of the rise and fall of a homespun hillbilly, played by Andy Griffith. The story was inspired by the careers of men like Will Rogers and Arthur Godfrey¹, men whose genial humor masked their desire and ability to influence the nation's politics. A Face in the Crowd is one of many texts at the time which examined the growing influence of the media—The Great Man (1956) and The Sweet Smell of Success (1957) being two others. It was not seen at the time as a particularly good film—reviews were decidedly mixed, and box office receipts anemic. But in the mid-70s, amid the nation's reaction to Nixon and Watergate, the film began to be seen in a more positive light. The critical success of Network was seen in part as a continuation of the ideas begun in Kazan's film. Moreover, with the election of actor Ronald Reagan in 1980, the film took hold, at least for liberals, as an eerily prescient warning about the dangers of media manipulation and the public's desire for politicians that portray a faux-rural charm.

And believe you me, Griffith is charming. I had never seen Griffith act, having assiduously avoided his eponymous TV show. I've seen clips, of course, which only reinforced my impression of him as a dumbed down Atticus Finch, a soothingly bland father figure and all around nice guy who plays straight man to the wackiness of small-town life and teaches us valuable lessons. In short, I was completely unprepared for his performance in A Face in the Crowd. Griffith is simultaneously attractive and repulsive. Especially in the first third of the film, I found myself laughing out loud at his antics, fully aware that he is a manipulative, completely self-centered bastard. Schickel calls Griffith's portrayal of Lonesome Rhodes the most “nakedly poised on this fine line” between attraction and repulsion of all of Kazan's protagonists, and I agree with him. Not even Brando as Stanley Kowalski is better, simply because Brando isn't able to repulse us as Griffith can.² I wasn't as enamored with Patricia Neal's character, the woman who discovers, beds, and eventually betrays Rhodes. But next to Griffith's scenery-chewing, her more restrained performance is harder to remember. Some have criticized her long-suffering character for, well, suffering so long. She does put up with quite a bit, but having seen enough Kazan work, I accept that she is just like all his other heroines—an upper-class educated woman irresistibly drawn to the animal magnetism of a sweaty working class man. Neal is superb at reaction shots; which is good, because Kazan uses a lot of them. There are plenty of moments where we see Griffith chewing some scenery while over his shoulder we see Neal's reaction—a perfect mix of attraction and repulsion. Kazan might have cast her for that look alone.

The “social menace of television” theme is well done, but at this point, nothing new. (Though there is a wonderfully surreal montage of advertising for the film's main product, a patent medicine sham that is marketed as a 50s version of Viagra, that skewers the sexism of the day.) In fact, Rhodes's quick fall from grace (fantastically if melodramatically conveyed by the close-up on the elevator buttons lighting up in succession as Rhodes descends after his TV gaffe) strikes me as a bit naïve. These days, right-wing entertainers can say just about anything and not only survive, but thrive. We do love our bad boys. And that is the aspect of the film that I found most provocative—the critique of our love of rebellion. Lonesome Rhodes is first shown to us in prison, and his rise in popularity is directly related to his bad boy behavior—he tells his radio listeners to use his boss's swimming pool, and refuses to read the advertising copy given him, mocking his sponsors instead. This mockery, of course, only increases sales. Rhodes is pure id, thinking only of himself and his pleasures, yet somehow is able to make others feel intense connections to him. Kazan had, of course, worked with both of the poster boys for Teenage Angst, Marlon Brando and James Dean, and with this film he seems to deconstruct the trope. At the beginning of the film Rhodes sings of freedom, a song that he returns to throughout the film, a song that highlights how we translate his acts of petulance and narcissism as expressions of the male American Dream, the dream of having complete control over your own life, of telling the boss to shove it, of sleeping with whomever, whenever you choose. By the end of the film this dream has become a nightmare, with Rhodes revealed as the monster he was all along. (The final time we see Rhodes, he is ranting maniacally to an empty room, as his one remaining lackey plays canned applause, reminding us of the simulacrum that he, and all Bad Boys, have always represented. Yes, he is utterly self-absorbed—as are we, for wanting his selfishness to mean something that it never can.)

If the film has a hero, it is nebbish Walter Matthau, the third spoke of the film's love triangle.³ Poor intellectual, glasses-wearing, pushover Matthau—pining away for the girl who is always attracted to the bad boy instead. Yet it is Matthau who gets to deliver the film's final denunciation of Rhodes, and he also gets the girl—though we are led to believe that she will always be pining after Andy Griffith. More importantly, Matthau's character learns from and profits from his experience—he has written a tell-all book about Rhodes, set to be released just as Rhodes spectacularly implodes. Though the film denounces the media in no uncertain terms, A Face in the Crowd is no Frankfurt School manifesto. It is not capitalism that is to blame; rather, it is us poor rubes, who fail to see through the chicanery. In such a world, the true heroes are those who pull back the curtain and reveal the Truth. And if they can profit while doing so, more power to them.

1This info is drawn from Richard Schickel's 2005 biography of Elia Kazan, which I purchased at Half-price Books for a dollar, and which has sat unread on my shelf ever since. I was aware of Will Rogers, but had never heard of Godfrey. After reading Wikipedia, I see how much of the film is based on Godfrey. I wonder if Jack Kirby modelled Glorious Godfrey on him? Red hair, power of persuasion—it must be.

2 Interestingly, the critics of the time faulted Griffith for exactly this dual quality of his performance, wanting him “to be either a snake or a charmer” in Schickel's words.

3God how I love this type of character. Screenwriters obviously overidentify with the Clark Kent type—as do I.