The Bigger Lie
It’s the economy, sort of
While supply lines haven’t transmitted sufficient amounts to Capitol Hill, this moment has not been short on sources of wisdom. To hear what wisdom sounds like today — from Ruth Ben-Ghiat, or Adam Serwer, or Timothy Snyder, or many others — is to understand that we are living through a crisis. It isn’t a crisis of biblical proportions (yet), but its outcome is unknown.
And it’s based on a lie. We’ll come back to that part.
When I was a graduate student — a simpler time — much of my research focused on connecting ideology to its era. In a 2012 paper, I wrote about the “fundamental difference between a timeless view of the role of government… and a widespread national attitude that seeps into every cultural pore for twenty to forty years before swinging back with the predictability of a pendulum.”
This concept of philosophical eras has been explored in several forms, like Anand Giridharadas’s “stadium” analogy, or Stephen Skowronek’s “political time.” In the paper, I called a given era’s dominant political philosophy the “epochal ideology” (not half as good a term as “political time”).
Whatever you want to call it, it’s important to remember that ideology and political party are not the same thing. After all, few candidates for elected office can be said to have paid greater homage to Ronald Reagan in the interest of courting voters than Barack Obama.
For most of the 40-plus years of political time that have passed since Reagan’s election, Democrats and Republicans have each undertaken efforts to reduce the size and role of the state. The epochal ideology of the last four decades was neoliberalism (think libertarianism), and it drew both parties rightward in their governance, just as New Deal America once drew both parties to the left.
Yet it was only Republicans who, for a time, successfully branded themselves as fiscal hawks. If we grant Reagan-era Republicans this characterization (there are certainly reasons not to), how do we square them with Bush II-era Republicans? A Bush II-era Republican might claim to be a fiscal hawk, but this was empirically not so. The economy swung from a $3.5 trillion surplus to a $5.5 trillion deficit under the 43rd president’s watch.
In fact, numerous indicators support the contention that Democrats have generally been better for the economy than Republicans. According to the New York Times, Republicans in this neoliberal political time have created larger deficits than their Democratic counterparts. Going back even further, of the last 14 presidents, the lowest-performing commanders-in-chief in terms of GDP and nonfarm job growth were the two most recent Republican officeholders, with Donald Trump bringing up the rear.
Trump is the first president since Herbert Hoover — as in Great Depression-era Herbert Hoover — to oversee a net decline in employment. Even allowing for challenges incurred by the pandemic, and out of step with nations that took proactive, scientifically-backed measures, the federal government’s response was nowhere near sufficient to stave off the worst of the health and economic outcomes that have come to pass.
Reagan raised taxes 11 times during his presidency to maintain a moderately healthy budget. Trickle-down economics was and remains a mythology that in practice concentrates wealth at the top, but if proving its efficacy meant doing the opposite of what trickle-down economics espoused, like raising taxes, the 1980s GOP would see it done.
By January 2017, and (critically) with a Democrat no longer in the White House, Republicans rarely made loud, sustained economic arguments anymore. Exceptions included mentioning the stock market — which is not the economy — cutting taxes, and wielding a cudgel against COVID-19 restrictions. Trump’s Republican Party, known the world over for performance art, rarely feigned interest in fiscal responsibility.
(This applies less often to Republicans who serve in executive roles and with more proximity to their constituents, e.g. mayors.)
Republicans are known to tout that theirs is the party of Lincoln. Is it even the party of Reagan?
This argument is not a lukewarm take distilling down the Capitol riot, its prelude, and the aftermath to come to White economic hardship. It is merely an acknowledgement that the neoliberal epoch pushed our economic circumstances to the point of undermining democracy, and it did so by way of an enormous, enthralling lie.
If you have been following the news over the last few weeks and months, you may have come across “the Big Lie,” a term for propaganda that supports an authoritarian agenda. It has been used frequently to refer to Donald Trump’s claim that the election was stolen — undoubtedly a Big Lie.
There is, however, a Bigger Lie. The Bigger Lie is not the only reason that the Big Lie came to be, but the Big Lie would not have happened without the Bigger Lie. The Bigger Lie is one for the neoliberal hall of fame: Government is the problem.
Government is certainly not the solution to every problem, but in convincing multiple generations to accept the Bigger Lie, we have arrived at a moment when our democracy is showing signs of critical failure.
It may not have started out as a lie, but neoliberalism became a lie when proponents failed to deliver the results promised by trickle-down economic theory — and kept doing it anyway. It was always a lie for those who saw it for what it was: a means to enrich the wealthy and disempower the have-nots, calling them “soon-to-haves” even when the numbers didn’t add up.
Neoliberal sirens made us doubt what should have been straightforward propositions. Why would you want to unionize? Why would you want to break up monopolies? Why would you want a public health insurance option? Why would you want to regulate how your pension is managed?
If government is the problem, then it shouldn’t be trusted with your tax dollars. Instead, leave financial security to the historically trustworthy “job creators.”
When a lie cannot fill your belly, you have three choices: You can accept the lie, you can recognize the lie for what it is, or you can decide that something is preventing the lie from working its magic. In service to the Bigger Lie, Republican leaders opened up an all-you-can-eat buffet of lies to explain why the soon-to-haves still weren’t close to having. Nixon’s Southern Strategy predated Reaganomics, offering up Black people as the ready-made enemy of shared prosperity. Black people were joined by women, Hispanics, Asians, gays, Jews, Muslims, young people, Hollywood, urbanites, Democrats, and more — communities exploited to draw attention away from failed economics.
The lies grew so numerous that verifiable truth was replaced by dogmatic faith. That faith did not stand up well to scrutiny, but faith, technically, doesn’t require scrutiny. And after decades, the parts of the Republican platform that once existed outside of the Bigger Lie — like, for example, a coherent foreign policy — had been replaced wholesale.
The lies that supported the Bigger Lie went from being means to an end to the end itself. Government is only the problem now when other people are in charge. Republicans employ the full range of the levers of big government when it suits them, taking action, even overreaching, when it may further their lies.
This is the Great Irony of the Bigger Lie: The Republican Party hasn’t served as an institutional expression of neoliberalism in years. One cost of the hollow promises of low taxation, privatization, and deregulation is that the dog is a lot faster than the car. After the wealth gap expands exponentially and the money for essential services dries up, then what?
The Washington Post analyzed public records and found that almost “60 percent of the people facing charges related to the Capitol riot showed signs of prior money troubles, including bankruptcies, notices of eviction or foreclosure, bad debts, or unpaid taxes over the past two decades.”
It would be irresponsible to claim or imply that financial issues caused the riot. Instead, what came to the Capitol on January 6 was the Bigger Lie. Some of what fomented the Capitol mob were generations of prosperity not shared with the soon-to-haves. Some of those who stormed the Capitol were wealthy people who weren’t interested in advancing civil rights or policy proposals that would expand the social safety net and, quite possibly, raise their taxes.
Together, both rich and poor, the majority of the modern-day GOP are post-Reagan, and they equate the Bigger Lie with a timeless entitlement to enter the promised land. For the poor, this means rising to a station greater than those who unfairly passed them by. For the rich, this means securing their wealth and ensuring the door stays closed behind them. In both cases, it means taking what is rightfully yours, even if, objectively, it isn’t. The Bigger Lie, disconnected from economics and whitewashed by the passage of time, became an American Truth.
Remember, ideology and political party are not one and the same. Despite its hollowness, neoliberal economics has had 40 years to infiltrate every institutional nook and cranny of American life. The GOP, once neoliberalism’s greatest advocate, was forced to adapt when its ideology didn’t put food on enough tables. Today, Trumpism has evolved from Republicanism in much the same way (though not nearly as catastrophically) that Maoism and Stalinism evolved from communism: unfaithful to its founding principles and amenable to terrorism.
Humans step forward into history without control over where and how they enter. In the words of one little-known philosopher, they “have to work upon circumstances as they find them, have to fashion the material handed down by the past.” In the course of reshaping the future, “they are eager to press the spirits of the past into their service, borrowing the names of the dead, reviving old war-cries, dressing up in traditional costumes, that they may make a braver pageant in the newly staged scene of universal history.”
Karl Marx found this historical pattern to be lacking in imagination. But perhaps it explains the level of cognitive dissonance required to wave American flags while using an American flagpole to attack an American flag-wearing officer. Perhaps it explains how the Republican Party, the party of small government, law and order, and fiscal responsibility, became synonymous with authoritarianism, lawlessness, and economic catastrophe.
Words and symbols are pacifiers, purveyors of legitimacy. Republicans once were the party of Lincoln, but “Republican” is only a word, just as the flag is only a symbol. These can mean whatever the summoner wishes them to mean.
When Republicans embraced the Bigger Lie and the lies that followed, they sent the party into an epistemological spiral that was sold as patriotism. A democratic future demands that we come to grips with what “Republican” means today.
Liberal democracy is precious. Ask the pro-Navalny protesters of Siberia for their thoughts.
They and millions of others around the world know the truth: A democracy built on lies is a Ponzi scheme. The bottom always falls out.
