There are several signs of how not knowing history will hurt the U.S. through the collective ignorance of past mistakes and lessons. We see this in the way the economy is detoriating due to the political debate over the public debt and the poor or non-ezistant dialog between political factions. It used to be that you couldn't see the differences between the political factions in this nation. The economic woes have brough these differences into high relief.
The Republican Party has seemed to be taken over by Libertarians. They used to be regarded as a kooky fringe, but now their thinking has taken center stage. The insistance on no defecit sepnding and on a balanced budget amendment in the Constitution would greatly weaken if not destroy the Federal Government, which would have great unintended consequences, and it is clear that George W. Bush, who is responsible for fully more than one third of the $ 14.2 trillion in the public debt, may have intentionally tried to bust the Federal Government and the current uncompromising set of fiscal conservatives may be trying to complete the process.
A weak and ineffectual Federal Government would preceed outright Civil War or a break up of the Union, not entirely a bad thing, as Jesusland, could go its marry way, and fight with Mexican drug lords, while the east and west coasts have most of the population, and the brains. But gridlock in Congress and a broke central government could signal the end of the Union.
Quite possibly the very thing some of the fiscal conservatives wanted could undo them and avert a crisis. In signing the agreement to extend the debt ceiling, they voted for a super committee to come up with $ 1.2 Trillion in cuts by Novemeber, with the same political makeup as the whole Congress which couldn't agree in August. I think the super committee will fail in its goal, and at that time cuts are automatic in entitlement programs, mostly in Defense and Medicare. The people who will get hurt the most are contractors who would probably support the GOP, either traditionally supportive of defense or those that resisted the Health Care Law of 2010. Several of these businesses will go bankrupt in a short time and they may blame the GOP.
Several Tea Party politicians were up for recall votes in Wisconsin. They were not recalled. This sets up an analysis of Middle Class conservativism as being antithetical to purely economic analysis and raises a hypothesis about the role of Germany's Middle Class and the rise of Hitler, who was elected democratically in 1932. The theory is that people, like those in the Arab Spring, with rising expectations and nothing to lose look to the future and get liberal ideals, but that those falling out of the Middle Class, such as many American workers, have every thing to lose and look to the past and embrace conservative ideals. This is what most have happened in Germany, and it is happening here, now. This is a bleak view of political psychology.
Several people have said to me that they don't understand how people cannot realize how these conservatives have disadvantaged the American Middle Class. This can happen when people do not know the history of how the benefits of living in the American Middle Class came to be, and how often it was to the disadvantage of the Caitalists and investors who made the American economy. Not only, because of Cold War propaganda, and the political pressure of Capitalists to keep the story of economics sanitized and secret, many Americans cannot reason about political economy and ask themselves about whether economic institutions, corporations, lobbyests, and the media, are fair, and need some supervision beyond the markets. For these reasons many people just do not know or understand how decisions made out of the control of their political officials, or beyond the scope of law, or even just a commonly heald sense of fairness, can shape what job they can find to do or what the other priorities in the economy are. They might be well versed in ideas of checks and balances in the government that prevent abuse of power while being totally naive about how markets work or how little scrutany of decisions made in business and in markets can lead to abuse of power. Part of the reason is the mumbo-jumble on the evening news about economics matters which the powerful in world economics and politics want, and secondly is the myth that there is some kind of great accountant in the sky keeping the books on it all.
Behind much of the conservative political economy is just this myth, that there is some kind of accountant in the sky. It was implicit in the rebuttal speech the House Speaker gave to the President on the agreement on the debt limit. Mr. Baynour said that the federal finances should be managed like household finances, as if there really was some world banker who accounted for every cent, every bill, every mortgage payment. That might be the dream of Monitorists or their modern incarnation, Libertarians, who want the value of money fixed on precious metal. Fixing the money supply favors those who hoard gold and limits the ability to governments to print money, even if the supply of money backed in specie actually limits economic activity like it has on several ocassions in the past.
What fills my head with myrth and terror is the unintended consequences of this all and the historical precident for a reaction. If the hoarders and greedy are fixated on wealth and sit on assets during the down turn of a business cycle they helped to unleash, the "working out" of this crunch is not either pretty or predictable, as history is my guide. The last time this happened, the world was overrun by dictators who started world war that "worked out" to the tune of 25 million killed. Conservatives love to claim that it wasn't the New Deal that ended the Great Depression, but WW II, even as they gutted many of the provisions of the former and even when Roosevelt tried to balance the budget in 1937, he unleashed a second recession that he had to end with "stimulus", or deficet spending. This go around we have much less resources, the wealthy are undertaxed, and the last President spent the government into such as deep hole that it cannot respond well to the current crisis. I hope the conservatives understand the consequences, but then again, maybe I don't, since it could involve them being flushed from the political scene.