The Politics of Pessimism

For some strange reason, business leaders seem to turn towards the Republicans for political leadership when the empirical evidence of the past century seems to indicate that Republicans are bad for the economy and Democrats are good for it. Virtually every Republican president since, and including, Hoover (Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Bush and Bush) has managed to make a hash of the national economy. One of the reasons for this economic ineptitude could be that Republicans are basically pessimists who place self-interest above anything else. The American President who really initiated the great tech boom of the last 30 years was John Kennedy. However, as the fruits of the seeds he sowed back in 1960 began to truly burst forth in the latter half of the 1990s, the conservatives, lead by George Bush, began vigorously to attack the idea that this expansion was sustainable. Their efforts have become a self-fulfilling prophecy, and we will not get out from underneath this until we replace our political leaders in Washington.

The Republican record with the economy has not bee a good one. Beginning with Hoover, who presided over the Crash of 1929 and the beginning of the Great Depression of the 1930s, only Eisenhower escaped a strong recession under his leadership. Eisenhower can be seen as an anomaly since he was not a strong Republican: rather, he was primarily a hands-off president who had the economic momentum left over from the industrial expansion of World War II and the continuing needs of the Cold War to prop up the economy. The Nixon/Ford presidency inherited the Vietnam War, but managed to still hash up the economy further. Under their watch we had the first Energy Crisis and the introduction of the term “stag-flation” to the lexicon. Ronald Reagan, in his single-minded pursuit of the destruction of the “Evil Empire” came very close to spending the country into penury. It is not unrelated that, under his watch, the stock market experienced in October of 1987 the worst crash since 1929. It is also indicative that George Bush, after winning an almost bloodless war against Iraq, managed to lose the Presidency because the economy was so bad.

All, with the possible exception of Eisenhower, share one trait in common: they had a very pessimistic view of the national government. The first thing almost every Republican president does upon entering office is announce massive cuts to government spending in all areas except the military. Republican philosophy maintains that individual self-interest must be paramount over public “good”, and that the public interest is best served when wealth in concentrated in a relative few private hands. To this end, they uniformly advocate a regressive tax policy that always benefits the rich to the detriment of the economy as a whole. The Republican penchant for cutting social and basic research spending actually attacks two of the basic pillars of our economy: consumer spending and technological innovation.

The single seminal event in the second half of the 20th Century was President John Kennedy’s call to place a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s. When he issued this challenge to the nation, computers were massive machines that were very limited in power. Yet, to get a man to the moon, we needed to develop small, lightweight and very powerful computers to help guide the Apollo capsules to the distant moon and back again. It was this need which gave impetus to the development of printed circuits and, ultimately, the silicon chip. This was the genesis of the computer industry that has been driving our economy for the past twenty years. The investment in the space program has, therefore, returned to our society dividends beyond anyone’s imagination.

The power of the economic engine created by the needs of the space program in the 1960s has been growing in strength over the intervening years. This economic engine often had to contend with contravening economic currents generated by the political actions of Republican presidents and politicians, but, even against these adverse trends, it burst into full (if brief) flower under the Clinton presidency of the 1990s. However, by 1998 the conservatives were strongly attacking the current prosperity as an “unsustainable bubble.” As the Presidential elections of 2000 neared, the volume and intensity of the attacks on the economy grew increasingly shrill. In the end, Bush and the Republicans sold their vision and the seeds of doubt were placed in the collective mind of America. The idea that the economy was in trouble became, in fact, a self-fulfilling prophecy. As a result, the recession, which was initially presented as potentially a “mild” correction, became increasingly severe.

It needs to be understood that the underlying strengths of the technological economic engine are still there. All of the conditions which brought about its rise are still extant. The current recession can be attributed in large part to the pessimism engendered by the Republican presidential campaign and the overly enthusiastic dampening measures taken by the Federal Reserve Board in the period 1999-2000. The climate of pessimism will not abate until we remove the Republicans from control of national policy. The first step will be to elect a Democrat controlled Congress in 2002. The second step will be to make George Bush, like his father, a one-term president. To this end, the Democrats must find a strong national candidate soon, and begin to promote that person on the national political stage. There is one person, though, who should not be considered: Al Gore. He is politically damaged goods who has had his chance and lost.

The Republicans, when installed in the White House, have presided over numerous instances of economic recession/depression. This record of economic failure can be, in large part, attributed to the pessimism inherent in Republican political philosophy. The seeds of the technology fueled economic surge of the last 30 years were sown by President John Kennedy when he challenged the nation to place a man on the moon by the end of the decade of the 1960s. This nascent economic boom burst into brief flower during the latter half of the 1990s, but the Republicans worked tirelessly to undermine this prosperity. We are seeing the results of this effort in our current economy, and we will not be able to truly begin to repair the damage done until we replace the Republican leadership in both Congress and the White House with optimistic, activist Democrats.