I remember when Nancy Reagan announced the "War on Drugs" - which rapidly evolved into an expensive Federal Bureaucracy over all the states. The most interesting component was the part about
Saving our nation's children. The Reagan administration, from a very centralized place, erected a one-size-fits-all solution, and then they proceeded with a media-forward strategy of carpet bombing all television markets with "You can't fly when you're high". This new
Federal concern for the body politic expanded into a moral war against sin. This is when Reagan partnered with Pat Robertson and the moral majority to Protect American Families from the liberal permissiveness and alternative lifestyles unleashed in the sixties. This lead to another bloated Federal Bureaucracy that sought to control the content of Hollywood, making sure no curse-words or naked images reached the pure and innocent souls of our children. (I'm sure you're all familiar with the famous ban on "7 Dirty Words" which has survived in no small part because of the tremendous pressure exerted by Conservative coalitions loosely claiming to be doing "Family Support". For a good treatment of the Centralized Moral Control that Conservatives exert from Washington read the
Decency Wars )
This Federal concern for Drugs and Sin was actually quite brilliant because it altered the regulatory role of the government from Boardroom to Bedroom. Reagan got us to worry more about what drugs and non-reproductive sex were doing to our families than what Arthur Anderson was doing with Enron's taxes. They defanged the SEC and EPA, making it possible for GE to poison families by dumping PCBs in the Hudson while they redoubled efforts to save the souls of those same families by protecting them from the word "Shit". Those families may have died of cancer, but at least Washington saved their souls. (Brilliant)
By the time we got to Bush 43, the regulatory apparatus of Drugs, Sin and Evil-Doers was fully institutionalized - and supported by talk radio, which trained the stupid to worry more about Janet Jackson's breast than Wall Street criminality. Of course, the war on terrorism fit perfectly into the rhetoric of evil. Taken as a whole, this growing apparatus was brilliantly Stalinist - preaching never-ending fear of vague shadowy domestic and foreign "evil doers" who sought to destroy the American Way of Life: indeed, whether it be drug dealers from the ghetto, illegals from Mexico, liberal elite atheist baby killers from Hollywood, or Muslims from abroad, the American Family was under siege - and, but [wait for it] guess who is at the door offering help? Washington! It was Rightwing Big Government at its most evolved. They got American Families to worry about gay gym teachers and Islamo-fascists while, in the back of the house, their Big Money Donors were making trillions from an unregulated derivatives market.
Reagan got us to think about drugs and a crumbing Soviet Empire when the real nuclear bomb was the Energy Crisis (which involved breaking the energy monopoly of his big oil donors). The upshot of this strategic distraction is that today our economy is being destroyed by the $4 gallon. Bush got us to worry about "evil doers" when the real nuclear bomb was the housing bubble. He was begged to pressure Greenspan to raise interest rates in order to slow the money flowing into the bubble, but he was too busy distracting middle class home owners with visions of evil. (The upshot is that American home owners, by borrowing against their inflated home values, kept the Bush economy afloat on a sea of bad credit. This was predictable. When we started to ship jobs overseas (to give American corporations the benefits of ultra-cheap labor), we replaced wage-based consumption with American Express, Visa and Master Card. This cycle of debt-based consumption got so bad that American families, struggling to keep pace in the face of disappearing jobs, wages, benefits and entitlements, leveraged the last thing left that had any value, their homes)
Make no mistake though, the Conservative Movement LOVES centralized control when it involves
their issues. The Department of Homeland security is the most expensive and powerful bureaucracy ever created. It gives Washington total centralized control over state law enforcement. Can you imagine the Tea Party ever protesting it?
Do you think they know anything about its size, budget, waste, and anti-constitutional powers of surveillance? Of course not.
They love centralized control, and they love distracting the nation with tales of evil while their corporate donors loot the nation.
