Coolidge was a Roaring Twenties Tea Partier.
Harding-Coolidge-Hoover: another era of Republican dominance with a disastrous conclusion.
The Business of the Government
by Laurence Lewis for Daily Kos:
To those that remember him at all, President Calvin Coolidge probably is best known for having uttered two memorable lines, the first being:
The business of America is business.
Of course, political perceptions and political realities often diverging and rarely to meet, Coolidge never actually said that. It does, however, capture the essence of his political ideology. The actual quote was this:
"After all, the chief business of the American people is business. They are profoundly concerned with producing, buying, selling, investing and prospering in the world. I am strongly of opinion that the great majority of people will always find these are moving impulses of our life."
Coolidge became president upon the sudden death of his predecessor, President Warren Harding, who had presided over what until then had been one of the most corrupt administrations in U.S. history. Coolidge was neoliberal before neoliberal was cool. He eviscerated regulation of industry by appointing regulators who did not regulate. He cut taxes and federal spending. He believed government should have no role in addressing social problems. He believed the federal government should not be responsible for flood control, and after the devastating 1927 Mississippi River flood refused even to visit the region. If it all sounds familiar, it should.
As Jed Lewison noted on Monday, Jeff Zeleny of the New York Times just wrote a puff piece on Republican Hairpiece Mitt Romney, whose entire government experience was a single term in the Massachusetts statehouse:
"I like President Obama,” Mr. Romney said, “but he doesn’t have a clue how jobs are created."
And never mind that the main failure of the Obama stimulus package was that it was too small, rather than too large, and that it was mainly the Republicans who prevented it from being more effective. And never mind that despite that fact the Obama stimulus package is credited with having saved millions of jobs and averted a depression, while Romney's own experience gives him both a clue and a track record at destroying jobs. For even as the Times titled Zeleny's piece "To Quiet Critics, Romney Puts 2012 Focus on Jobs," Jed pointed out the reality that Romney the businessman made his personal fortune by firing thousands of employees while bankrupting five businesses. But this is about much more than the Lesser Romney, and there was something else about Zeleny's article that typified modern political dialogue, and typified what is so wrong with it:
"The message is well suited to Mr. Romney’s background as a successful executive and former governor, as well as the man who rescued the 2002 Winter Games from financial trouble. But it may also be his best opportunity to try to steer around criticism over the health care plan he created in Massachusetts, which to many Republicans looks distressingly similar to the federal law signed last year by Mr. Obama."
Zeleny doesn't mention that Romney's entire experience in government was that single term as governor. Realizing he probably wouldn't be elected to a second, and that the defeat likely would destroy his presidential ambitions, Romney retired rather than fight for his job. Which, by the standards of modern Republican presidential aspirants, makes him intrepid and tenacious. But Romney always has been singularly about ambition rather than principle.
Zeleny also doesn't mention that Romney's success as an executive came at the expense of thousands of employees. But Zeleny's focus on Romney the executive, and his focus on Romney's reputation as financial savior of the Olympics, gets to the real heart of the problem: There is a pervasive and wildly mistaken presumption among many in the traditional media and the professional political class that being successful at business qualifies one to be a political leader.
"After all, the chief business of the American people is business. They are profoundly concerned with producing, buying, selling, investing and prospering in the world. I am strongly of opinion that the great majority of people will always find these are moving impulses of our life."
The problem with Coolidge's framing is that most Americans would disagree. According to a November Gallup poll, Americans rate the honesty and ethical standards of business executives below those of nurses, military officers, druggists and pharmacists, grade school teachers, medical doctors, police officers, clergy, day care providers, judges, auto mechanics, nursing home operators, and even bankers, TV reporters, newspaper reporters, local officeholders, and the much-maligned practitioners of law. Perusing that list, what is most apparent is that those deemed most honest and ethical are mostly underpaid, and mostly concerned with caring for and nurturing and protecting one another, including most often strangers. But even more to the point, it's a fair guess that most Americans are most profoundly concerned with, and find their most moving impulses devoted to, the people they love. It's a fair guess that most Americans identify themselves most by their human relationships and their most passionate hobbies rather than the ways they make money.
As are most people around the world, most Americans are, first and foremost, caring and compassionate. That our government is so far adrift from representing such humane values speaks to why so many Americans feel so alienated from it. That so many in government and the media, and at least one of our two political parties, are so wholly invested in using government as but a means of manipulating and consolidating wealth speaks to why so many are so cynical about it. Being good at business does not qualify one to serve in government. Wanting to make the world a better place for as many people as possible does. Many on the political right talk about values, but mostly as a means of dividing people along demographic lines. But these are the real values that count: caring about the public good; caring about strangers; caring about the world.
Businesses are in business to make money. They are not in business to be nice. There are many responsible business leaders, but many of the world's largest and most successful industries depend on exploiting workers, despoiling the environment, manipulating and otherwise taking advantage of consumers, and squeezing out every possible penny of profit. The public good is to be damned. Most businesses, and particularly most of the largest and most successful businesses, consciously and deliberately damn the public good utterly without conscience. That is why the public good needs defending from them. That is why capitalism itself best thrives when protected from its own exigent excesses. Government is the vehicle.
Modern democratic and republican forms of government were invented to protect people from despotism, to defend human rights, and to give the public good access to political power. Those that would put businesses in charge of government have it exactly backward. Those that deem business executives by that experience qualified to lead government have it exactly backward. George W. Bush was this nation's first MBA president, and the result was the worst-ever terrorist attack on U.S. soil, two disastrously failed wars, a series of human rights violations that likely qualify as war crimes, a great American city drowned due to incompetence and indifference, the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression, and ignoring completely the impending environmental catastrophe that is climate change. But Bush's buddies in the fossil fuels and defense contracting industries did make lots and lots and lots of money.
The other famous quote from Calvin Coolidge came while he was vacationing in South Dakota. Always terse, he unexpectedly announced that he wouldn't seek a second full term in office:
I do not choose to run for President...
His Republican Party chose in his stead his Commerce Secretary, whom Coolidge neither liked nor trusted, but who had helped implement Coolidge's economic ideology. Stepping aside at that point proved a smart decision by Coolidge. His presidency had enjoyed a false economic boom, but his policies contributed to that boom's implosion, which began less than a year after he left office. Had he sought and been elected to another term as president, he would not be mostly forgotten, and most remembered for but a few quick quotes. Instead, his name rather than his successor's would be synonymous with devastating poverty. We now likely would remember Coolidgevilles rather than Hoovervilles.
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