Whether or not people
should be more consistent . . . we are inconsistent all the time!
Per the previous source, Reagan in 1980 supported bailouts for both Chrysler and New York City. Plus, he wanted to end the grain embargo against the Soviet Union, while Carter wanted to maintain it.
* I tend to think we as human beings actually do better going ahead and letting ourselves be inconsistent
Chrysler and New York City are entirely different cases from non-capital owning consumers. Michael Harrington observed quite bitterly back at the end of the 50's in The Other America, a book on persistent poverty in the USA in the midst of "affluence," that in the USA the prevailing conventional wisdom has long been, "socialism for the rich and free enterprise for the poor." The dire need to preserve the moral fiber of the nation without which we would surely slip into indolence, improvidence, and irretrievable depths of moral turpitude applies only to the common masses, the people for whom a bailout makes the difference between getting along somewhat respectably at whatever social level they have clawed their way up to and a spiral of downward ruin, whereas the moneyed elect can be presumed by the fact of their material success to be gifted with the right combination of genes and culture to guarantee that they are true actors in civilization and must therefore be saved from any bad consequences of their misjudgments, or at any rate it is a pragmatic and not a moral question whether to bail them out or not.
This ideology is rarely expressed so baldly and boldly, but you can see it in consistent operation throughout the history of the Republic. The masses are potentially dangerous to civilization itself; the classes (those above the base level that is) are civilization. We have many brave and bold words coming from the great leaders of our history, from Jefferson and Adamses and Andrew Jackson and Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, not to mention also-rans for power such as William Jennings Bryan; these words on behalf of the common man, words affirming labor is prior to capital and its interests should take precedence from Lincoln, warning of "malefactors of great wealth" (T. Roosevelt) or the monolithic yet insidious power of "the military-industrial complex," are remembered and treasured. But look instead to the policies enacted, often by the Great Republicans themselves, and we find careful fostering of an elite that already on the basis of its concentration of private wealth alone ought to be allowed to shift for itself, and grave suspicion of actually doing anything substantial for the masses. This is inconsistency indeed, but it is a
consistent inconsistency. To dream up an ideology can simultaneously justify the bailout of moneyed interests "too big to fail" (when, if it is not clear to everyone here, that there is an alternative to suffering their failure--take their failure to deliver on purely private capitalist terms as evidence of incompetence, and socialize the function the failed institution failed to deliver on private terms into publicly accountable institutions instead--an option consistently overlooked and with ready ideological "proofs" it is a chimera) while leaving masses to dangle on the edge of starvation because without the freedom to fail there is no meaningful freedom at all, and the rich would hardly do the poor a favor by "robbing them of their poverty" as George Gilder, a pundit of the New Right, wrote at this juncture of the late '70s and early '80s, is quite a trick of intellectual gymnastics, but we've had great minds of the Republic squaring the circle of a democratic ideology that must guarantee the power and privileges of private wealth hard at work on the task since Thomas Jefferson took the early first stabs at it.
Indeed, when one reads up on the triumphant political ascendency of Andrew Jackson and the inauguration of the modern form of American republican democracy in the transformations his party wrought early in the 19th century, the social contract whereby the obvious contradictions of interest between a small class of extremely wealthy families and a vast nation living hand to mouth despite having per capita the greatest concentration of overall wealth in the world becomes clear in its foundations. With the Age of Jackson the rules of the game were finally worked out and laid down, and many of Jackson's ringing slogans become, with standard interpretations, the rules by which the conservative movement of the 1970s and after could be judged the fair winners.
The key relevant concept here is that government alone is the major danger to both democracy and a fair economy. All pernicious events fall either into the category of the mysterious but necessary workings of the free market, which in the long run is assumed to punish the inefficient and reward the industrious and zealous seekers after efficiency, or else the perverse effect of political interference. "Equal rights to all; special privileges to none" was Jackson's crusading slogan, in context leveled against both political concepts seeking to limit democracy and the economic power of the Northeastern plutocracy--but the latter were deemed to have power, not by virtue of simply being wealthy, but by their vicious and unnatural grip on the financial system via the formal charter of the Bank of the United States and other centralizing machinations. Great fortunes as such were absolved of any blame, as long as they didn't arise via political manipulations; a system enabling the latter was what the Jacksonians meant by "special privilege." A covenant of sorts was established, laying the basis of the "Jacksonian mentality" that dominates American political thinking; all people (of a suitably privileged level that ideally goes without saying; in Jackson's time, "free, white and over 21," a catchphrase I have heard quite shockingly in modern times--the "male" part went without saying!) may presume among themselves social and political equality; at a stroke the basis of class struggle is rendered nonexistent on paper and ruled out when approached in practice. The middle classes and indeed the poorest worker, as long as they are male, "free, white and over 21" can regard themselves as the equals of the Astors, Vanderbilts and Rockefellers, and of their plant manager, and the bankers in the city who hold the mortgages on their farms, and so on; they can vicariously claim the triumphs of organized capital as the collective achievements of people no different than themselves. Vice versa a threat to the vested interests of these classes is automatically seen as a threat to their own way of life, wealth transfers via government policy are illegitimate regardless of the direction it flows, a matter of theft among equals rather than one of attempting social balance. Another crucial concept is that borderline between people who are "in" the class of democratic equals and people who are outside it, always presumed to be inferior and as Chief Justice Taney said of people of African descent, having "no rights a white man is bound to respect." Who gets to be included as a Jacksonian American and who remains excluded has been a major battleground of the past 70 years or so.
But the relevant bit here relates to the theoretical equality of a billionaire and an unskilled non-college goer with petty drug felonies and prison time served on their records. Even on Jacksonian terms, they are not treated equally; far from being seen as parasites on and threats to the great democratic public, the owners of concentrated wealth are revered as the very avatars of the virtues of the American democracy, and as the generous creators and distributors of wealth all others should ideally aspire to emulate, and if they cannot do that, accept the fact of their de facto subordination to their bounty with good grace and humility. With the added ideological plank that great wealth by default is assumed to be honestly earned, and only when one can prove some special, non-typical violation of the rules can the law or administration take punitive action, we at last approximate the functional form of modern conventional ideology.
So--if you meant to prove that Reagan could just as well take up the consumerist banner and stand by the Love Canal victims along with legions of other cases of bystanders, employees and consumers being abused in the name of corporate profits--he could do that but in doing so he would have to surrender his ties to the alliance that was propelling him to the top on their shoulders. Reagan's ultimate success in the 1980 election was due to a coalition that he could cement together using consistent ideological messages. The Christian Right, the military-industrial sector, hard core racists and culture war conservatives across the board, and even fiscal conservatives could all put their collective shoulders to his wheel and push together, because the neo-Jacksonian message he dispensed resonated with all of them and alienated none of them. It might seem strange that fiscal conservatives for instance could endorse the deficit-happy Reagan administrations--but, hidden behind sweeping and high flown phrases about balanced budgets and living within one's means, pay as you go, etc, are very important class distinctions not acknowledged as such but crucial nonetheless--it matters who one borrows money for. Borrowing for weapons and putting men in military uniform is always OK, because the right classes benefit from that--the lion's share of the money goes to sectors of heavy industry; maintaining more soldiers and veterans costs relatively little because the system is adept at shortchanging them--witness a program I see on display at my city job center, a private charity begging for money to feed starving veterans! Or the infamous and eternal mismanagement and corruption of the Veteran's Administration, a fact going back to its post-Civil War roots. OTOH fiscal irresponsibility that enables transfers of wealth down the social ladder to the working classes are always dubious, indeed it is the true definition of fiscal mismanagement in functional terms, to these ideologues, to give anything to working people without their earning it, and letting wages rise too high is another case of mismanagement. When we realize that fiscal conservatives only worry about deficits when elements of them go to benefit the poor, and that even in times of surplus condemn such payments as robbery of the rich in defiance of a plain obligation to cut their taxes instead, we can more usefully correlate their words with their actions.
In short where you seem to see random inconsistency that permits any politician to back any measure, leaving no consistent content to any political label or faction whatsoever, I see a very consistent pattern that of course contradicts the apparent meaning of rhetoric--but when the rhetoric is properly decoded, so that pretty words can carry intelligence of not so pretty policies, then we find a much deeper consistency at work.
Many a politician could indeed take some opportunistic impulse from the consumer revolt mood of the late 1970s, and many did. But to trim their sails to catch that wind consistently, they would have to move themselves into a space that by prevailing ideology was a bad place to be; to stay there and continue to tap into the consistent discontents of the age stemming from corporate malfunctioning (from the point of view of mass satisfaction, not, I need to stress with you, a failure to fulfill their ideologically defined duties which they were doing) they would have to challenge the comfortable historically hallowed Jacksonian terms, make people less comfortable in their illusions and thus more committed to build an alternate system, and chart a path from their current perilous state to one where they stand on solid ground. For Ronald Reagan to do that, he would need to abandon the alliance he had been building for decades, toss all of their special interests--of ongoing corporate privilege; of white supremacists seeking to regain legitimacy; of conservative culture warriors striving to put women back into their places in kitchens, gay people back into the closet, immigrants back into the shadows on pain of arbitrary deportation, people of color humbly taking what crumbs of white privilege their natural racial superiors deemed prudent and staying quiet about deficiencies; the poor generally limping along humbly on charity where their sensibly low wages might not suffice--and just at the time when their ideological message sheltering under and buoyed suspended from the sublime words ancient generations of renowned American ideologues had hallowed was beginning to get real traction too! Nothing could have been more foolish than Ronald Reagan tacking off in the direction of Ralph Nader. Compare their political fates and explain to us again, why should Reagan have traded in one for the other?
Your whole premise here---well as usual it is quite slippery and amorphous. Again and again you very correctly and significantly point out really massive divergences and dissonances between the image of what our dominant ideology claims is the way things should be, and the grassroots experience of masses of Americans who have quite different observations and experiences and even, in ad hoc and limited ways, remedies in mind for serious pains that did ail them and do ail us today, the matters having never been resolved in a really satisfactory way. All this potential for an America and probably thus world with a very very different set of policies and outcomes and (if we grant the notion that some sort of consistency binds particular actors to particular policies, which however you often seek to have ruled irrelevant apparently on the grounds that consistency is an illusion and any politician can adopt any image they desire, which I think is quite clearly disproven for many of them) thus entirely different people running things, is very real and from a point of view like mine, mainly useful as an indictment of the system we have, undermining its claims to be founded on good sense and democratic consensus.
But then all that said, you never seem able to recognize that there were forces at work preventing the formation of new coalitions and new consciousness of priorities and goals, rendering the large numbers of people out of step and policies seen as failures effectively irrelevant, while other world views that have plainly demonstrated gaps between perception and reality could remain coherent and powerful, forcing those not entirely at peace with them to either figure out how to compromise with the unsatisfactory yet real, or float impotently or sink out of sight separately, unable to cohere.
The interesting question is not "what if they could cohere by sheer fiat," but "what would it take to enable them to cohere plausibly?" Pretending for a moment they could have traction by fiat is somewhat worthwhile--we can quickly identify whose OTL toes would have a steamroller run over them in an ATL where the consumer anti-corporate crusades you identify were to cohere without our bothering to figure out how and why their world is different than ours to enable it. The beginning of such a crusade might be people who think that particular companies happen to be sheltering extreme criminals, but very quickly it will become plain that the corporations getting caught are just the unlucky losers in a game of musical chairs, and the sort of behavior that gets one company branded as poisoners and murderers prevails in their competitors too. Getting legal settlements out of them, assuming those court battles would be won hands down and not evaded where they could not be simply defeated by larger amounts of money, will soon become plainly an arbitrary and partial recompense of a general injustice and pretty soon every corporation is coming under comprehensive scrutiny and all found wanting by the same standards. Assuming minimal variation from OTL the predictable outcome is essential shutdown of US industry, massive and rapid withdrawal of capital invested in the USA and reinvestment in competing industries overseas--in Europe, in Japan, and increasingly in Third World nations. If we have minimal changes in consciousness then the American non-corporate leadership is unable to cope and we get a big national depression. To prevent such an outcome, it would be necessary to either have the entire capitalist world undergoing the same moral reform at the same time with the same resolve, so that capital is not immune no matter where it flees, whether to Malaysia or Uruguay; the common people everywhere stand ready to demand a costly covenant with communities and the consumers in general. The next recourse is that industries shut down anyway, capital withdrawn from production but not reinvested anywhere, sitting idle, and sacredly untouchable, until the people submit and take their dangerous jobs paying for their polluted homes back on the old terms or worse. To prevent that, the people must be prepared to take at least the material assets left idle, seize control of them and get enough of them working again despite their owners vetoing this. In Jacksonian terms that is theft pure and simple; how do you think Ronald Reagan would justify it? I think he would not. For this to work, the populist movement has to have a sufficiently realistic and detailed model of how modern industrial society can work to enable the wheels to turn without replicating a new edition of the same moneyed elite that brought us to this pretty pass today. They might be able to cobble something together ad hoc without any prior concepts, and dance fast enough not to undermine their movement, but after they have succeeded in doing so, the new system would have a new pattern which sooner or later someone is going to recognize and codify, and having done that the new system will stand on much stronger ground--so I think it unlikely to be merely stumbled upon piecemeal in time, working well enough, to sustain the movement.
"When vision fails, the people perish." The advantage the Right has in this country in modern times is that they have a vision of how things should be, one that is unworkable in many aspects, quite predictably horrible in others, but one tested for ideological consistency with older layers of American ideology that are widely accepted, especially among tens of millions who are hurt by them but accept them anyway.
