In her latest Wall Street Journal column Peggy Noonan pleads with Republicans to “save capitalism”:
The American establishment had to come to look very, very bad. Two long unwon wars destroyed the GOP’s reputation for sobriety in foreign affairs, and the 2008 crash cratered its reputation for economic probity. Both disasters gave those inclined to turn from the status quo inspiration and arguments. Culturally, 2008 was especially resonant: The government bailed out its buddies and threw no one in jail, and the capitalists failed to defend the system that made them rich. They dummied up, hunkered down and waited for it to pass.
Americans have long sort of accepted a kind of deal regarding leadership by various elites and establishments. The agreement was that if the elites more or less play by the rules, protect the integrity of the system, and care about the people, they can have their mansions. But when you begin to perceive that the great and mighty are not necessarily on your side, when they show no particular sense of responsibility to their fellow citizens, all bets are off. The compact is broken: They no longer get to have their mansions. They no longer get to be “the rich.â€
For most of the 20th century the poor in America didn’t hate the rich for their mansions; they wanted a mansion and thought they could get one if things turned their way. When you think the system’s rigged, your attitude changes.
On the right the same wars, the same crash, and a different aspect. In the great issue of the 2016 campaign it became unmistakably clear that the GOP elite did not care in the least how the working class experienced immigration. The party already worried too much about border security—that’s the lesson the elites took from Mitt Romney’s loss in 2012, according to their famous autopsy. They appeared to look after their own needs, their own reputations: We’re not racist like people who worry about the border! They were, as I’ve written, the protected, who looked down on those with rougher lives. The unprotected noticed, and began to sunder their relationship with establishments and elites.
Donald Trump came of that sundering. He was the perfect insult thrown in the establishment’s face. You’re such losers we’re hiring a reality-TV star to take your place. He’ll be better than you.
Conservatives regularly attend symposia to discuss the future of conservatism. Republicans in Washington stumble around trying to figure what to stand for beyond capitalizing on whatever zany thing some socialist said today.
But isn’t their historical purpose clear? Their job—now and in the coming decade—is, in a supple, clever and concerted way, to save the free-market system from those who would dismantle it. It is to preserve and defend the capitalism that made America a great thing in the world and that, for all its flaws and inequities, created and spread stupendous wealth. The natural job of conservatives is to conserve, in this case that great system.
a plea I feel confident in predicting will fall on deaf ears for a simple reason: there is precious little capitalism to save. As documentation I submit the enormous degree of business consolidation. That consolidation hasn’t occurred naturally. It’s been abetted by government action or, at least in the United States, inaction.
Lately we’ve been hearing many bitter complaints contrasting capitalism and socialism but that’s largely misdirection. What we presently have are competing groups of rent-seekers and I see no prospects for anything different. Contrasting millennials with Baby Boomers is misdirection, too. The Congressional leadership like the political leadership in Illinois is preponderantly composed of members of the Silent Generation who accumulated power and fortune through systematic corruption. If they throw the baby out with the bath water you can rest assured that it won’t be their baby.
