Bill Jamieson: America goes right out on a limb

The Republicans stand before an open goal – the US presidency – so what is their problem

IS AMERICA mad? For the avoidance of doubt among American readers, I mean mad not as in angry, but mad as in barking. Many this side of the Atlantic have feared as much for some time. But two developments have propelled this dark and troubling thought to the fore.

The first came earlier this week when coverage was given by the US business website Bloomberg to an academic paper arguing that the 2007-8 crisis on Wall Street could be traced to “corporate psychopaths”. Professor Clive Boddy says psychopaths take advantage of the “relative chaotic nature of the modern corporation”, including “rapid change, constant renewal” and a high turnover of “key personnel”. Such circumstances allow them to ascend through a combination of “charm and charisma”.

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“For Wall Street … the trouble started when these charmers made their way to corner offices of important financial institutions.”

Far more obvious and troubling evidence of mental incapacity for many has been the early jousting to select the Republican Party contender for the presidential election in November.

Yes, that’s the president, as in president of the United States, the most powerful figure in the western world.

The following transpired in Iowa this week. Finishing third, but with a respectable 21 per cent of the vote, was Ron Paul. He would repeal the Barack Obama healthcare reforms, “abolish the welfare state” (sic) to discourage illegal immigration and allow states to ban abortion. He supports policy measures to encourage home schooling.

Finishing neck and neck with the winner was Rick Santorum. Mr Santorum would also repeal the 2010 healthcare overhaul, encourage Israel to “take out” Iran’s nuclear facility and push for a constitutional amendment barring same-sex marriage. A 2003 interview in which he said “I have a problem with homosexual acts” and in which he recommended that laws should exist against polygamy, adultery and sodomy, still reverberates. He has also campaigned to put “intelligent design” on school science courses. Mr Santorum, a candidate for whom the description “social conservative” barely begins to convey his views, gained powerful momentum in the closing days of the campaign and finished within just eight votes of winning the Iowa vote.

The victor was Mitt Romney, former governor of Massachusetts. He had been expected to win by a margin somewhat greater than eight votes. But then Mr Romney has “flip-flop issues”. To the extent that he has firm views, he is, or was, and may in future be, or not, pledged to repeal the Obama healthcare reforms and to take a generally conservative position on social issues. Here and there. More or less.

However, Mr Romney has very fixed beliefs in one regard. He is a Mormon – and no casual lay member of this Church. He is a graduate of Brigham Young University and former Mormon missionary. He rose to become a bishop of the Mormon Church and a Stake President (presiding over approximately 12 Mormon wards/churches in Boston). The Church has striking views and has been attacked, inter alia, for being historically racist. In any other context, Mr Romney’s views may have been considered outlandish and at best odd. Yet such has been the range of the most odd and outlandish characters in the Republican field that he has been widely cast as the “moderate” candidate and the party’s best hope.

It is said that he stands to do well in the next primary in New Hampshire next Tuesday and that this may establish him as the leading contender to take on Obama in November.

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But his Mormon beliefs may come under more searching scrutiny in the South Carolina ballot due 11 days later. This is a strongly evangelical state, where the Mormon church is viewed with suspicion.

It is truly hard to fathom, given the gargantuan levels of debt and deficit under which the United States now labours, and a torrent of government spending that has failed to kick-start a credible recovery in the textbook Keynesian manner, that the Republicans have as yet been unable to field a credible candidate capable of scoring at this wide-open goal. Indeed, it as if the party has suffered a collective nervous breakdown. This is evident in its retreat into a ferocious fundamentalism. Seldom before has a political generation resorted to sonorous quotation from the Declaration of Independence as if such selective quotation clinched an argument. And seldom have we seen a complex problem reduced to raucously pedalled slogans about the virtues of minimal government. This is blind to the historical experience of the Depression era, which profoundly affected American politics and economics. The clocks, as far as I know, have not been turned back to erase this historic experience. As for the US overall, it gives every appearance of itself being in the grip of an epic nervous breakdown, evident in its growing ungovernability. In Congress, the war between the parties has seldom been more implacable and unsparing. In the ensuing gridlock, little is done to bear down on levels of deficit and debt that may yet bring the country to its knees.

It is telling that in his compelling book Boomerang, Michael Lewis chooses to conclude his tour d’horizon of global insolvency in California. His thesis is that the sub-prime crisis was not the cause, but a symptom of a deeper malaise. It is a chilling account of what is happening to large swathes of America as the money runs out. At municipal level, services are cut, not just to the bone but deep into it, as the bulk of the local budget is soaked up in pension payments to long-retired employees, with little left over to fund basic provision such as street lighting and paving. Here, surely, is the dead end for a system of government hollowed out in an intensifying war between ferociously organised spending lobbies and a population implacably opposed to forking out higher taxes. A country surrounded by abundance fell victim to the delusion that with cheap debt, everybody could be rich. And it is locked into that greater delusion still, that public services can be provided while simultaneously voting down the very tax revenues that make it possible.

It is hard not to see Lewis’s analysis as other than a study in madness. It is one from which the world needs America to recover fast and to release that capacity for reinvention for which she is rightly famed. Is America mad? For everyone’s sakes, let’s hope not.

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