Thomas Friedman’s The West

In a saner world, it would be a simple matter to dismiss the social-political-economic “meta-story” Thomas Friedman produces in his Op-Ed entitled Root Canal Politics.  Unfortunately, Friedman represents a broad international elite consensus on the painful (for some) remedies that must be employed by a new wave of “smarter” and more “honest” politicians.  His predictable elite centrist positions explain his near unlimited access to the media and long list of prizes and accolades in spite of his utterly ridiculous fantasies about the exercise of power in the world. 

In Friedman’s classless utopian tale – let’s call it The West – global trends are shaped by monolithic “generations” which possess distinct personalities, obvious enough to any clear-headed observer willing to tackle the subject: Kurt Andersen, Tom Brokaw, David Willetts, and of course Thomas Friedman.  The “Greatest Generation … made enormous sacrifices and investments to build us a world of abundance,” while the “Baby Boomers” have “eaten through all that abundance like hungry locusts.”  This post World War 2 sea change is allegedly rooted in the upbringing of the Boomers who “were raised to believe there really was a Tooth Fairy, whose magic would allow conservatives to cut taxes without cutting services and liberals to expand services without raising taxes.”  If this mass ideology continues unchecked, “we’re headed for intergenerational conflict throughout the West,” dwarfing other more trivial issues like nuclear confrontation, environmental destruction, shredding of international law, decline of functioning democracy, etc.

The present world cannot possibly arise from concentrated power and wealth acting in its interests over time because in The West there are no such concentrations, or any relevant history for that matter.  There are merely liberals and conservatives who have been programmed through their upbringing to act in the manner described.  And if elected officials stray from their supposed orthodoxy, they will be besieged by uncivilized “rioting anti-austerity protestors reportedly chanting, ‘Burn it down! That brothel Parliament!’“ 

Unsurprisingly, Friedman endorses the advice of the London Financial Times to “cut public sector pay, freeze benefits, slash jobs, abolish a range of welfare entitlements and take the ax to programs such as school building and road maintenance” in Britain and elsewhere.  If the “Regeneration” can implement these sensible changes, then a glorious new era is upon that “raises incomes anew, but in a way that is financially and ecologically sustainable,” as in Augusto Pinochet’s Chile for example, where these recommendations were implemented with enormous brutality leading to huge inequality, misery, and eventual near-total economic collapse.  Curiously, these neoliberal measures happened to benefit foreign investors, multinational corporations, and the local military dictatorship that carried them out, a pattern that is duplicated virtually everywhere, defying explanation.  Perhaps Friedman would argue that Pinochet’s generation and their “kids” were able to join together to make the “big adjustment,” realizing that it’s time “to be, mostly, about taking things away.”

Returning to historical fact, Friedman’s “world of abundance” in 1945 consisted of a public U.S. debt of about twice the current debt as a percentage of GDP.  The subsequent 30 years witnessed consistent, quite egalitarian growth with high rates of public expenditure that slowly reduced the debt.  In Friedman’s The West, this is when the Grasshopper Generation was eating through the abundance like hungry locusts.  When financial capital was liberalized in the early 1970s ushering in the Neoliberal era, global investors gained the ability to demand the austerity measures that Friedman now calls for, and they have been quite successful by employing capital flight and attacks on currency, both in the West and the colonial world. 

So it appears that “Root Canal Politics” have been underway for nearly 40 years, yielding globally exactly what was experienced in the short period described in Chile.  Wealth has been increasingly concentrated, financial crises have become more frequent and more severe, indices of social health have deteriorated as public services and investment were hollowed out, working hours have increased, wages have stagnated or declined for most people, labor rights have been dismantled, and so on.  Of course, it is never enough: Friedman has discovered that Greeks employed in hazardous jobs are able to retire slightly earlier, and in Britain buses are still publicly funded and the elderly get their heating bills subsidized.  No doubt scandals such as these will be the next target of the investor class and their media mouthpieces. 

Strikingly absent from The West is the colossal portion of public expenditure generally referred to as “defense” which sets yearly records, is uncorrelated to external threats, and crucially is never used for actual defense.   In addition to escaping Friedman’s crosshairs, by some odd coincidence this happens also to be the main device by which the public subsidizes the rich.  Also escaping calls for cutbacks are the gigantic and growing prison system, substantial funding for nonsensical space exploration programs, huge public subsidies to the pharmaceutical industry, bailouts and other gifts to the financial industry, and numerous other wealth redistribution projects.  For these beneficiaries of public largesse, the tooth fairy most certainly not “be dead.” 

 “The Regeneration…will have to figure out how to raise some taxes to increase revenues, while cutting other taxes to stimulate growth; they’ll have to cut some services to save money, while investing in new infrastructure to grow economic capacity. We have got to use every dollar wisely now.”  The only disagreement with this meaningless conclusion is on everything that matters.  What are “some taxes” and “other taxes”?  What are “some services” and “new infrastructure”?  What does it mean to use dollars “wisely”?  Without a coherent and authoritative rejection of all that is stated and all that is left out of the tale of The West what will be left around us is easy to describe: Degeneration.

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