First, the Gingrich problem. Early in the
January 7th debate in New Hampshire, George Stephanopoulos asked Gingrich whether he stood by his surrogates' claims that Romney's tenure at Bain is "a story of greed [in which] Bain made spectacular profits by stripping American businesses of assets, selling everything to the highest bidder, and often killing jobs for big financial rewards." Gingrich's response slithered around the matter of his own responsibility for these attacks, initially claiming that he had not "seen the film," and then hiding behind a
New York Times article which examined Bain's handling of "one particular company."
As for Newt's
New York Times charade, it was perfectly calibrated to toss Romney his only homerun ball of the primary season, and Romney took advantage of it, replying, "I'm not surprised to hear the
New York Times try to put free enterprise on trial... [but] it's a little surprising from my colleagues on this stage." Newt could not have set Romney up any more perfectly to look like the genuine conservative in the race if he had planned it. The Republican Establishment has been using Gingrich for months to peel so-called Tea Party voters away from the real conservative alternatives. At the New Hampshire debate, Gingrich finally transcended the status of useful pseudo-conservative tool; he now seems to be driving Romney's campaign bus.
More importantly, however, consider Gingrich's suggestion, on the Bain issue, that people should "look at the film and decide. If it's factually accurate, then it raises questions." Why does it raise questions, and what kind of questions? Here we arrive at the heart of a problem that is far greater than one terrible Republican candidate.
Dan Greenfield has argued valiantly at Canada Free Press that this criticism has nothing to do with putting capitalism on trial, because accepting capitalism on principle does not require us to approve of every instantiation of business activity. His point, though well-taken and correct, is not enough to save Gingrich et al. on this one. (And, for anyone who is reading my work for the first time, let me state emphatically that no one harbors a more sincere disapproval of Romney as the Republican nominee than I do. His support of free enterprise has not followed him into his political life.)
Gingrich explained his criticism of Bain's practices this way:
"I'm very much for free enterprise... create a business, grow jobs, provide leadership. I'm not nearly as enamored of a Wall Street model, where you can flip companies, you can go in and have leverage buyouts, you can basically take out all the money, leaving behind the workers. I think it's a legitimate part of the debate to say, okay, on balance were people better off, or were people worse off, for this particular style of investment?"
To parse this point, then, Gingrich and, presumably, his surrogates and supporters, are in favor of free enterprise – as long as it is aimed at job-creation, and does not leave the workers behind. If that sounds reasonable to you, consider whether Barack Obama would say anything different in principle. Yes, Gingrich and Obama would disagree on the specific means to their economic ends. The ends, however, are essentially the same. The difference is that whereas Obama wishes to supplant much of the apparatus of free enterprise with a regulatory state that he believes could create the desired outcomes, Gingrich and his ilk hope that free enterprise itself can achieve those outcomes – as long as it is the right "model" of free enterprise, namely the kind that is about job-creation and preserving workers' jobs.
When Rush Limbaugh
said that Gingrich's Bain Capital attack was making the Left's argument, he was absolutely correct. The point is not merely that Gingrich is paving Obama's road against Romney for him. The problem goes much deeper than electoral politics. It is a question of whether conservatives are willing to defend capitalism on constitutionalist terms, rather than accepting the presuppositions of the Left, as Republicans have done for the last several decades – a moral submission that has resulted in the inexorable leftward ratchet effect of modern democratic politics.
Is it the purpose of so-called capitalists to create jobs? That they do this, and that they might take pride in having done this, is not relevant to this question. The question is whether capitalists need to be justified in their activities on grounds of public service, public utility, or public-spiritedness. In other words, is capitalism morally acceptable only if it is practiced with the intention of helping others, by creating jobs or protecting workers, such that a capitalist "model" that does not seem to be oriented this way is immoral?
Crypto-fascism – which is the idea that government and (selected) business interests should "work together" to promote a "greater good."
This view of capitalism accepts the moral view of leftists. In the New World – the land that more than any other has proven the boundless capacity of free enterprise to elevate almost everyone within a society – this moral view is the direct product of a hundred years of an educational establishment increasingly under the control of a well-integrated mixture of collectivist moral theory and socialist propaganda (these days referred to as political correctness). The view is so widely accepted – or, rather, so effectively stamped into the modern soul – that many people cannot conceive of any argument for capitalism that does not finally revert to the premise that an economic system is justifiable if and only if it takes care of people, gives them stability, protects them from hardship or sudden change, and so on. Since capitalism's dynamism is inherently incapable of answering to such standards, those who would defend it find themselves repeatedly conceding the need for "controls," "reasonable limits," or the creation of "a level playing field" – the need to "abandon free market principles to save the free market system," as George W. Bush said – all of which are euphemisms for government regulations of one degree of severity or another. The same is true of those who argue that some businesses are "too big to fail." That is, they are too beneficial to other people to be allowed to fail. This supposedly noble premise leads very directly to crony-capitalism – i.e. crypto-fascism – which is the idea that government and (selected) business interests should "work together" to promote a "greater good."
Consider once again Gingrich's argument for raising this critique of Bain Capital: "I think it's a legitimate part of the debate to say okay, on balance were people better off, or were people worse off, for this particular style of investment?"
Why is it a legitimate part of the debate? Because it is part of Romney's record? But it is a part of Romney's generally successful past as a business executive, so that alone cannot explain why Gingrich wishes to draw attention to it. No, his reason for saying it is a legitimate part of the debate is that, in his view, the answer to his question – "on balance were people better off... for this particular style of investment?" – must be "No." If he had merely wanted to suggest that Romney was not a good leader because his business venture failed, then he might have said so; but this is not what he meant. It is "this particular style of investment" that he is seeking to put on trial. And on what grounds? On the grounds that, in his view, "people" were, "on balance," "worse off" for it.
Which "people"? Not people in general, obviously, since it is precisely the nature of free enterprise to risk bringing about some provisional failures in the name of broader, ultimate success – and Romney's business career cannot be said to have led people in general to be "worse off." No, by the "people" who are "worse off," Gingrich means specifically "the workers" at one particular company who lost jobs through the investment decisions of Bain Capital.
"The workers." This phrase, used in this manner, has proletarian revolutionary ethics written all over it. That some people may have lost their jobs due to business decisions made by Bain is unquestionable. That this equates to those people being "worse off" in the final analysis is, in most cases, impossible to say.
Provisionally, at the moment of losing one's job, one clearly feels "worse off" than one felt the day before. The same is true the day your girlfriend reads you the riot act; the day you fail a job aptitude test; the day your mother dies; and so on for a million possible hardships and failures that life can throw at us all. Whether that provisional drainage from one's pot of good fortune spells ultimate defeat is a different matter entirely. In most cases, there is no reason why it should. Whether life brings us more failures than successes on the whole is a philosophical question that need not be broached here. In either case, it cannot be denied that everyone who lives through an adult life on this planet will face his share of pain, failure, crisis, and loss. But life is not to be judged on a provisional basis.
Aristotle argues that it is impossible to call any man happy until after he dies; one must weigh the totality of his life, and how all its vicissitudes affected him, right up to his moment of dying, to say with any measure of reason whether the man was truly happy or unhappy.
Looked at properly, then, the whole matter of "the workers" being "worse off" is rooted in the narrow and short-range perspective of modern leftist morality, with its oppressed proletariat and its oppressive capitalist bourgeoisie. As anyone with two brain cells to rub together can glean from a quick glance at any given year of the United States economy, the socialist interpretation of capitalism – the model of "the workers" locked in a permanent state of downtroddenness – was itself the ultimate provisional perspective, an entire economic theory built out of the observation of one tiny moment of history, with no consideration of the dynamism in the industrial market economy that might completely change "workers'" conditions a few years later. America is the living proof of how thoroughly wrong that theory was.
And yet, for reasons having more to do with power-lust than with any real concern for the plight of so-called "workers," the morality of socialism – the view that men with control over the "means of production" are to be judged by how much benefit they provide to their "workers" – has never ceased to spread its poison throughout modern life.
Consider the way the remaining candidates in the Republican primaries as of New Hampshire reacted to the birth of Occupy Wall Street. They all hedged their bets. While only Ron Paul actively courted this confused rabble, all the other candidates #-footed around the subject, avoiding direct and general criticism until they determined that such criticism would play well with the conservative base, which was fed-up with Gingrich-style comparisons between OWS and the Tea Party. At last, long after Herman Cain had stuck his neck out and spoken the truth, the others – led, not surprisingly, by Newt the Shape-changer – began to use strong and unequivocal language about this anti-American pseudo-movement.
The reason these men were unable to get it right from the outset is the same reason Gingrich feels warranted in attacking Romney's "style of investment" now. It is the same reason America is on the verge of being consigned to a societal palliative care facility. The reason: they too think that capitalism needs to justify itself.
But "capitalism" is just Marx's word to name America's most fundamental tenet: individual liberty. As an economic theory, its most basic and profound notion is Adam Smith's famous "invisible hand." Accepting that a human's primary consideration is, and must be, his own preservation – which is also at the heart of the Declaration's "right to life" – Smith refuses to begin with the goal of promoting the well-being of others. Individuals act to preserve themselves, and to project themselves successfully into the future. If they are allowed to do so freely, while living within a system of laws designed primarily to protect their ability to remain free in this sense, their activity will of necessity produce wealth, in the form of goods and services for trade. This natural wealth production has, as its indirect effect, the improvement of living conditions in general throughout the community. In practical terms, it means better jobs, higher wages, and so on. The trick is not to let this basic understanding of the free economy melt away when turning to the relation between morality and public policy.
Liberty, not the ability to take care of others, is the moral notion at America's core
Liberty, not the ability to take care of others, is the moral notion at America's core. Individualism is the moral code that produces the kind of citizens America requires if it is to survive as the constitutional republic it was intended to be. From individualism comes self-reliance, pride in accomplishment, and – most relevant to the issue of the vicissitudes of "the workers" – the will and fortitude to start again, to prepare oneself for failures, and to trust oneself to overcome the unavoidable difficulties of life. And most important of all, at the present stage of moral devolution, individualism gives rise to a refusal to blame others for one's difficulties. No one owes you a job. You are not working primarily to help your employer make money, so why should he be working primarily to make sure you have stable employment.
The entitlement mentality that is widely derided these days is more than just a learned expectation that one will be provided for. It is also, on the other side of the coin, a learned inability to accept responsibility for oneself. And accepting responsibility for oneself includes accepting the need to deal with the obstacles presented by those decisions of other people which might affect one adversely. If there were reason to believe that Romney made business decisions with the sinister intent of causing suffering and hardship for the "workers" (i.e. employees), then there would be cause for moral recrimination. If he was just trying to make his own businesses more successful, and failed in one instance in spite of his best intentions, then while his decisions might be criticized from a business point of view, implications of moral wrong-doing are worse than wrong-headed. They break faith with the American spirit of self-reliant resiliency in the face of challenges and hardships – the spirit that gave birth to the nation, and made it the envy of the world, even when the world failed to understand it.
Life's contingencies sometimes do not work out in our favor. The Left's inclination is to cradle us all against those contingencies – thereby securing almost everyone's fate at the low ebb of practical existence. The American, the moral individualist, the constitutionalist – call him what you will – is the survivor who refuses to see another man's freedom as the cause of his own troubles. The American joins Fred and Ginger, who, more than six years into the Great Depression, declared, "Let's face the music and dance."
Freedom does not require a moral justification. It is a moral justification. Unfreedom, likewise, is a moral refutation. Since the Republican Party Establishment does not understand this, the most urgent question facing America and the world is: Over the next few years, will the United States be justified or refuted?
Newt Gingrich's attacks on Mitt Romney's record at Bain Capital reveal further evidence of at least two things that should be obvious by now, but which remain unclear to many Republicans. The first is that Gingrich's instincts are completely anti-conservative at their core. The second, which is more ominous, is that so many who wish to see themselves as conservatives – or even libertarians – have in fact accepted a basic moral premise of leftism, leaving them unable to present a consistent moral position against the Left, and thus leaving the Western world in an inexorable leftward drift, regardless of which party wins any given election.
