ROMNEY'S RULES

Any attempt foresee the policies Mitt Romney might embrace as president by taking his policy statements at face value seems fraught with contradiction and uncertainty. The former governor of the liberal-leaning state of Massachusetts, running for the U.S. presidency as a “strict conservative” in the primaries, then shape-shifting as a moderate during the debates, has remained consistently inconsistent throughout his political career. Name virtually any issue and, over time, you will find Romney opportunistically on either side of it, depending on what he thinks his audience at the time wants to hear. Frequently during the course of the presidential campaign he has said one thing, only to have his campaign managers “clarify” his remarks the next day, saying he really meant exactly the opposite. Moreover, the positions he has articulated, more often than not, lack any semblance of clarifying detail to be relied upon a foundation for predicting the future of his presidency, were he to be elected.

For this inconsistency and vagueness critics accuse Romney of having no core principles. I disagree. His overriding core principle is clear. It centers on gaining and retaining wealth and power by whatever means necessary – first financial power as a principal of Bain Capital, and now political power as President of the United States. Having secured such power, we can reasonably expect him to seek to retain it by serving the interests of his wealthy base, coinciding with his own as a card-carrying member of the 1 Percent. 

These interests cluster around a restatement of the premise popularized in the 1950s “What’s good for General Motors is good for the U.S.A.” In short, Romney sees corporations both as the sole creators of wealth and the ultimate arbiters of how such wealth should be distributed. Corporate profits are the measure of society’s success and anything – government taxes and regulations especially – likely to impair profits detract from such success. Accordingly, by Romney’s lights, any attempt by government to override the dictates of corporations in allocating scarce resources, either in the process of production or distribution of the fruits of production, cannot be tolerated.

Hearkening back to my discussion of rules versus results articulated in a previous post (“A Tale of Two Moralities” Jan 16, 2011), these rules – doubtlessly learned at the knee of his father, a self-made man rising to become a car company chief executive and governor of the state of Michigan – inform Romney’s politics. Any untoward results from such policies can be disregarded, according to Romney. If people suffer, it’s their own damn fault, because the rules are moral and good, so the outcome they produce must, therefore, be moral and good. It’s such people, the “47 Percent,” who are unworthy, unmotivated, uneducated, underachieving. No hint that the “Masters of the Universe” who organize society may be at fault. 

At this point, it’s worth remembering Mussolini’s definition of fascism as “the marriage of  state and corporate power.” However, where Mussolini saw corporate power as the means to achieve the supremacy of the State, Romney sees just the opposite: the State as the means to achieve the supremacy of corporations. 

These rules, therefore, rather than any policy pronouncements by the candidate, provide the lodestar for expectations about Romney’s conduct were he to be elected president. Unfortunately for the middle classes and the poor, these rules in support of the interests of the 1 Percent will guide policy in the same direction as the Bush administration’s reprise of Reaganomics with its emphasis on tax cuts, lax regulation and bloated defense spending. If you liked the inequality of wealth, financial instability and economic entropy of the Bush administration, your going to love the results of a Romney presidency.  

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