The End is Near (for the Nixon Era)

At a time of political excess, when a crisis is coming fast, government tends to do things that are so jaw-droppingly dumb it's almost impossible for historians to believe them in retrospect.

The ultimate expression of this stupidity, of course, was the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff. Similar events include the 1857 Dred Scott Decision, the 1895 Gold Bond and the Johnson Administration's War on Poverty.

All these events have something in common. They are attempts by the dieing Thesis to make permanent the extremes of the thesis' belief system.

We are now going through a period like that regarding the Nixon-Reagan-Bush Thesis. Stomping on common middle-class tax donation dodges and privatizing the IRS while at the same time cutting in half the number of agents looking at wealthy individuals are all of a piece.

It's willful, political tone deafness.

So, too, is the current willful ignorance over the President's NSA wiretaps. This is the chief mark of excess, the way “conventional wisdom” enables it, and the way those around the government refuse to consider any other path but acceptance. The court has spoken. The bond has been sold. The tariff has been passed. The War must continue. (The picture, by the way, is of Judge Anna Johnston Diggs Taylor, whose first husband, Rep. Charlie Diggs, was first head of the Congressional Black Caucus, and who struck down the NSA program last week.) 

Supporters of the President's economic policies have been able to excuse the economic reality until now with talk of nonsense like the Laffer Curve   (the laughter curve would be more like it) but now the bark is off, so to speak. They are still unwilling to accept that the NSA wiretaps are obviously illegal, and obvious felonies.

In the process the whole point of the current excess is stripped bare. In this case it aims to create a new oligarchic authoritarianism, where those whose parents were rich – George W. Bush, Paris Hilton, etc. etc. -- are permanently masters over everyone else, and where social mobility is destroyed on behalf of the laziest, most noisome among us.

You could say the same thing about Dred Scott – it was an attempt to force slavery on the north. Or the Gold Bond, an attempt to give private financiers control of the government. Or the Smoot-Hawley tariff, an attempt to isolate America from the world and its problems. Or the War on Poverty, with its great aims and colossal failure.

The point is that all these past actions failed in their aims. Slavery was ended. The government was reformed. The U.S. rejected isolationism. The War on Poverty ended, and poverty won.

Right or wrong isn't the point here. The point is excess. The point is crisis. The point is that, for the Nixon Thesis of Conflict, the end is undoubtedly near.