Looking the Wrong Way
Brits paint it right on the crosswalks, which way to look. When it comes to politics these days, maybe us Yanks could use crosswalks like that. Can’t seem to tell which way is which.
We’re used to looking to the right and knowing exactly what we’ll see, peering in the other direction and being equally sure what to expect. Except now what we see is no longer what we were accustomed to seeing.
For ages and ages, left meant liberal, a word that comes from the same root as liberty. A synonym for freedom, as in liberal democracy. Confusion sets in when one of today’s “liberals” cancels someone failing to conform to politically correct standards. Left also meant progressive, a devotion to progress, a passion for innovation, imagining better ways that bring about better days. It’s disorienting to see those claiming to be progressive today dedicated to protecting what’s been in place, preserving established institutions and longstanding policies or cherished programs, thinking little of what new frontiers America might explore next.
For ages and ages, right meant conservative, signifying caution and stability. I can’t be alone in finding it weird to slap that label on people who are radically impulsive with a zeal for creating chaos. Conservatives were by definition resistant to change, liked keeping things more or less the way they are. Now they’re eager to tear things down, blow stuff up, drag us all back to the 1920s or better yet the 1890s. The word conservative shares the same root as conserve and conservation. Passing for “conservative” these days means chanting drill, baby, drill or at least being on board with full-blast resource extraction and voracious consumption.
Conservatives of old championed limited government, now they favor intrusive and oppressive rule. Conservatives stood for free markets, now they’re for protectionism and isolationism. The current “conservative” federal government administration is openly meddling in the market, picking and choosing winners, then demanding a share of the spoils. This is far from free-market economics, it’s state capitalism. German Nazis called it national socialism. American conservatives used to call it communism.
The ruling regime is communing with Intel, taking a 10% ownership stake in the chipmaker. Taking a cut of the proceeds from Nvidia’s and AMD’s AI chip sales to China. Acquiring a golden share in U.S. Steel, here again the government taking an ownership stake, this time in a 124-year-old American manufacturer.
Then there’s Tesla. After sinking a quarter-billion dollars in the last presidential election, the automaker’s mercurial leader Elon Musk strayed from the boardroom for a gig in the winner’s government, where without congressional authorization and in defiance of many a court order he took a wrecking ball to entire agencies. Musk bragged of spending a weekend “feeding USAID into the wood chipper.” The demolition he celebrated has already cost more than 600,000 people their lives globally, including over 400,000 children.
Musk’s neglect of his business and the damage his political actions did to the company’s image caused sales to plummet and left its stock dangerously overvalued. Standard and Poor’s tracks the stock performance of 500 leading companies listed on U.S. stock exchanges. The lower the ratio of a company’s share price to its earnings, the better. Going back to 1927, the average price-to-earnings ratio of S&P 500 companies has been as low as six in mid-1949 and as high as 122 in mid-2009 on the heels of the financial crisis. As of last month, it was a hair over 30. Tesla’s is close to 300.
Yesterday’s conservatives surely would have seen this as grounds for heads to roll. One head in particular, namely Musk’s. Tesla’s board saw it differently, deciding he deserved a massive raise. Shareholders signed off, handing Musk a trillion-dollar pay package. As The Bulwark’s Jonathan Last put it, “Tesla suffered terribly because Elon Musk hurt the company; so the company will pay him $1 trillion to incentivize him to stop hurting the company.”
That’s not conservative economics, or even state capitalism, it’s like paying protection money to a mobster.
None of this makes a lick of sense, at least not as long as we keep looking from side to side at the crosswalk. But look down, then up, things start coming into focus. The view explains a lot, makes sense of the current state of our economy, makes sense of our present politics.
Who is to the left, who is to the right and who’s in the middle doesn’t matter anymore. Not when those on top are savaging everyone below them.