Remember the line about how the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled is convincing people that he doesn’t exist? It’s a versatile quotation, able to be deployed by people from all ideological backgrounds.
For many on the Right, the hidden Devil is liberal cultural hegemony—the supposed influence that the Left is able to exert on an unsuspecting populace through its domination of Hollywood, universities, nonprofits, and government institutions.
Conservatives might possess political power in their control of the Presidency, Senate, House, Supreme Court, and 34 State Governorships, but the Left has what matters: the ability to impose an alien and misguided ideology through its nearly invisible manipulation of America’s cultural apparatus.
But the analogy ought to be reversed. The Devil that we’ve been persuaded doesn’t exist is plain for the eye to see—a determined campaign of conservatives to wreck institutions of arts and education and social dissent, disguised behind a high-minded commitment to small government and fiscal prudence. The American Right has long hated universities just as much as it hates Hollywood liberals and George Soros’s insidious Open Society initiatives. (Open society? No thanks!)
The 2016 Democratic Primaries might have resurfaced the perennial debate on the Left over prioritizing class or culture, but if there ever were a moment to illuminate the reality that the culture and class wars were one in the same, this is it.
Why “Tax Reform” Symbolizes It All
The grotesque GOP tax bill that is nearing passage in Congress is the latest and most audacious volley in this enduring war. Any center of power that can actually be independent and critical of the country’s rapacious plutocracy has got to go.
The bait-and-switch is painfully obvious. The media constantly refer to Paul Ryan—who has never seen a poor child he didn’t think would be better off in a coal mine, living off of bacon grease and corn meal—as a wonk. He’s a policy guy. He’s got big ideas, like giving gigantic tax cuts to the rich while privatizing or doing away with Medicare and Social Security altogether.
This pablum is passed off as self-evident by all but exasperated progressives, in much the same way that many nominally intelligent people convinced themselves that Thomas Friedman is a gifted wordsmith.
This frame distorts our understanding of American politics on a huge scale. Libertarianism is understood as just a philosophical difference—a sincere belief in smaller government and the efficiencies of the market.
The GOP tax bill is not about a philosophical approach to taming big government or goosing job creation. It is a massive transfer of wealth to the ultra rich donor class that bankrolls the GOP, done on the backs of working people. It blows a hole in the budget to do so, and includes a bevy of goodies and carve-outs to satisfy narrow special interests.
But our contention is that it’s far more than this.
Indeed, it’s not just about plutocratic greed. It’s hardly surprising for rich people to donate to candidates and then demand that they advance their own economic interests once in office. It just makes sense. (Well-heeled Democrats do it too, of course, but they sort of feel bad about it.)
Up with Us, Down with Them
Rather, the tax bill is an extension of the culture war. Yes, it gives the rich the tax cuts they crave. But it is part of a much bigger effort to smash institutions that the Right has wanted to destroy for a long time anyway.
It threatens to destroy the financial model of graduate education, as historian David Walsh and others have made clear with their #GradStudentTax hash tag. No more pesky Marxist professors training the next generation of elitist social critics. The impact will likely be felt most heavily in the humanities and social sciences, but it will disrupt all advanced education in US universities. Quite intentionally.
The bill will remove the deduction for citizens to write off some of their state and local taxes, a provision long in place. This is a direct attack on people in blue states that have higher taxes; of course, states like California and New Jersey tax at a higher rate to provide a higher level of social services than places like Georgia or Alabama.
What’s in the blue states? Hollywood, the liberal media, Berkeley, minorities, sanctuary cities.
Attack states that didn’t vote for your party? Check. Transfer money from the voters there to the people in your red states (which already take in more federal benefits than New York or California)? Check. Make blue states more like Alabama by putting pressure on their budgets and social expenditures? Check.
Stick it to people you don’t like. It’s an economic motivation, yes, but it’s also rooted in deep cultural animus at least as much.
As Sahil Kapur recently reported, “Some of the biggest losers under the Republican tax overhaul include upper-middle class families in high-tax areas like New York City, graduate students, government workers and public school teachers.”
Actual GOPers have been even more frank about their motivations. Conservative economist Stephen Moore (a former Trump campaign adviser) explained it this way:
It’s death to Democrats… They go after state and local taxes, which weakens public employee unions. They go after university endowments, and universities have become play pens of the left. And getting rid of the mandate is to eventually dismantle Obamacare.
In colorfully villainous fashion, Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley explained that the bill was meant to reward the investor class, who do all the real work in America, and not the sadsack losers who blow all their money on “booze or women or movies.” The poors are garbage, and they deserve to be rolling around in the dirt, scabbing their hands trying to crawl out of a deep ditch. It’s vindictive and purposeful.
The Long War against Arts, Education, Workers, Basically Everything
We are, of course, not making any of this up. The culture wars of Ronald Reagan in 1966 or Pat Buchanan in 1992 or Karl Rove in 2004, when social conservatives went to war on God, gays, and guns, have supposedly subsided in recent years. Yet they never went away.
The antipathy toward universities goes back at least to conservative icon William F. Buckley, who assailed liberal elites in his 1951 book God and Man at Yale. But it didn’t necessarily start there; historian Richard Hofstadter’s oft-cited 1963 book on the long history of suspicion toward intellectuals in American history comes to mind.
The 1950s and 1960s brought many assaults on eggheads, elites, “pointy-headed bureaucrats who couldn’t park a bicycle straight.” The Ford Foundation came under attack for funding social reform efforts and undesired research in the 1960s, and was brought to heel. Richard Nixon was known for resenting intellectuals and other cultural elites, who he felt saw him as a parvenu rube and interloper. He did his best to undercut institutions like the National Endowment for the Arts, as historian Bruce Schulman illustrates in his great book The Seventies.
There’s sex education in the 1970s. (See Natalia Petrzela’s Classroom Wars.) God forbid anyone should know the difference between their private parts and a goddamned mailbox. Robert Mapplethorpe in the 1980s—taxpayer dollars going to fund outrageous perversion. More recently, there has been left-turned-right warrior David Horowitz’s wildly disingenuous effort to harass, shame, and hopefully fire liberal professors, Students for Academic Freedom. The list of “professors who hate America” in the run-up to the Iraq War. (Eric Foner was not the only one proud to be on it.)
Then, of course, there was Donald Trump’s puzzling assertion during the presidential campaign that he was being hounded by the IRS because he was a good Christian. Their sense of animus goes to weird and deep places.
These are not disconnected dots. Conservatives have long wanted to undermine institutions that promote independent thinking and criticism of social inequities; they also want to hurt and take from people they don’t like: the blue staters, the professors, the union “bosses,” the annoying actors (Sean Penn is, of course, legitimately annoying), the poor and people of color and Planned Parenthood and ACORN (rest in power).
Political scientist Corey Robin has argued that this antipathy is in the DNA of conservatism, going back to the French Revolution. Conservatives have long been invested in restoring seemingly lost power for men over women, parents over children, the rich over the poor, white people over minorities, and so forth. The Left has at the same time pursued a project to expand the scope of freedom and equality for workers, women, racial and sexual minorities, and others who historically had less power.
Hence, institutions committed to those goals must be undercut and destroyed. As Marx said in 1842, “No one fights against freedom; one fights at most against the freedom of another.” None of this is new.
Looking Beyond the Plutocratic Pig Trough
Politics is a game of us versus them; my power over yours; my interests at the expense of people I don’t like. Conservatives have long gotten this basic fact and have pursued their interests with raw force. Liberals and Democrats think that politics is a fucking West Wing episode where if we all got down to work and did an origami workshop we could find a way to make Medicare fiscally solvent in the long-term.
The other side is using your own hand to smack you in the face and say “Why do you keep hitting yourself? Why do you keep hitting yourself?” We are not arguing over the best and fairest way to divide up the pizza; they want the whole pizza. And more.
The GOP tax bill is, in a sense, admirable—an expression of giving the party’s own constituents what they want. But what they want is not exactly a sincere commitment to the virtues of trickle-down and the Laffer Curve. They want to win and they want you to lose, and this goes far beyond debates about tax policy.
Libertarian hero Ludwig von Mises once summed it up well in a letter to Ayn Rand:
You have the courage to tell the masses what no politician told them: you are inferior and all the improvements in your conditions which you simply take for granted you owe to the effort of men who are better than you.
There’s the Devil that convinced us it didn’t exist.