WRITING commentary in the United States used to be a lucrative business. The essayist and former editor of Harpers, Lewis Lapham, says he was once offered $200,000 a year for life if he would edit a right-wing political journal. That was over 30 years ago. Conservative businessmen and corporations were spending large sums of money – $3 billion according to Lapham – trying to combat what they believed to be the threat to the American way of life posed by liberal ideas.
It seemed to work. Conservative organisations like the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute, journals like the American Spectator and National Review and countless well-funded academic programmes played a key role in entrenching the neo-liberal right in the consciousness of the United States establishment. I wouldn’t argue that this was the whole story, but the battle of ideas was certainly a part of it. From Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush, American politics was driven by essentially free-market ideals.
The Democrat Bill Clinton, who was President from 1993 -2001, was no real exception, despite his rhetoric opposing “trickle-down economics”. It was Clinton who repealed the Glass-Steagall Act that prevented Wall Street investment banks from using ordinary bank depositor’s money to speculate on dodgy derivatives. The Democrat President was also responsible for limiting welfare entitlement to two years, and for the “three strikes and you’re out” criminal justice policy which led to the US having 25 per cent of the world’s prison population.
But Lapham’s target isn’t Clinton but the American intellectual right and the politicians they served. To this end he traces the degeneration of US democracy in a series of essays which have already been published in Harpers and in his own Lapham’s Quarterly. I’m sure these pieces worked well in their time, and are demonstrably well written. But they don’t quite hold together as a book since any piece published over twenty years ago shows its age.
There is a lot to enjoy, however, as Lapham excoriates the Bush dynasty. His later essays, especially those on the financial crash, are brilliantly indignant and well informed. His criticism of new age billionaire philanthropists is incendiary: “The displays of noble expenditure...derive from the larger stores of private wealth created over the last 40 years as a consequence of the systematic rigging of the nation’s economic outcomes to favour the rich.”
An octogenarian essayist in the orotund tradition of Gore Vidal, Lapham wears his learning heavily. He’s obviously very well read, but the epigrammatic style can become somewhat wearing. “Oligarchies bear an unhappy resemblance to cheese. Sooner or later they turn rancid in the sun”. The author has what you might call a good conceit of himself and this is very much reflected in an approach to history that seems mainly to revolve around Lapham’s world.
However, I rather appreciated the copious literary quotations and the classical references. Lapham argues that American politics confirms Aristotle’s theory that forms of government follow one another in a sequence as predictable as the changing of the seasons: monarchy, followed by democracy, degenerating into plutocracy and then reverting to monarchy. It has a rough and ready relevance even to a republic like the United States. Donald Trump might not possess the blood royal but he certainly has the ambition to be a dictator and has a fondness for crowns – at least on the heads of beauty queens.
The problem with Lapham’s Aristotelian determinism is that the sequence doesn’t quite work. Donald Trump has been the contingent product, not of the neoliberal presidencies but the two periods in office of Barack Obama. America’s first black President gets off pretty lightly here in a few dismissive pages. Indeed, while this book purports to explain the collapse of American democracy and the rise of Trump nihilism it has very little to say either about the 2016 Republican candidate or his rival Hillary Clinton, except to say that they resemble “Washington’s housewife celebrity bride and reality game show host atop the wedding cake of a stupefied plutocracy”.
Like much of The Age of Folly, this assessment says rather less than the author would like us to think it does.
The Age of Folly – America Abandons Its Democracy by Lewis H. Lapham is published by Verso, priced £20
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