Mid-Michigan readers can hear Rick Cole every Wednesday at approximately 6:35 a.m. on Lansing radio station WILS 1320’s “am Lansing” program hosted by Walt Sorg.

by Richard Cole
June 16, 2009

I am a liberal and I admit it. I like to live like a conservative, and I’ll admit that, too. But that’s my choice. And I do know the difference.

A few of my best friends are liberals, and a few of my best friends are conservatives. Most of my friends are neither. They are either Democrats or Republicans. Most Democrats don’t know what a liberal is, and most Republicans are equally clueless about what it means to be conservative.

Jerry Coomes has been a teacher of mine for nearly 40 years. In today’s lesson, he gave me a copy of an article from the current issue (June 11, 2009) of The New York Review. In it, a bunch of smart people discuss “The Crisis and How to Deal with it.”

Robin Wells (co-author of Economics) said this: “I think the story (of the current economic crisis) starts in the Eighties. During the Reagan years, we experienced chronic fiscal deficits, and we began to abdicate our responsibility to raise tax revenue that could sustainably finance government. In order to do that, we had to borrow, and who did we borrow from? We borrowed from countries that were running persistent trade surpluses. And as we continued to run these deficits with these countries, there grew to be a symbiotic relationship…

“The import of capital allowed us to consistently live beyond our means, first by running fiscal deficits, not raising enough tax revenue to finance the government, and then also through the leverage that we used in housing, and in commercial real estate, and in leveraged buyouts. And this continued: it grew because there was no point anywhere along the line at which anyone would say ‘halt.’”

Hardly seems conservative.

We lived on easy street, a credit-card pipe dream. Buy it or build it, eat it — supersized — and charge it to your grandchildren. This mentality permeated significant policy decisions no conservative would have tolerated. But the conservatives were absent from the party. 

The story doesn’t end with the Republican free-lunch bunch. Bill Bradley (U.S. Senator from New Jersey from 1979 to 1997) offers this rather chilling commentary on his own Democratic Party: “The second mistake was in 1999, the explicit decision by the Clinton administration and Congress not to regulate derivatives, in particular credit default swaps. In 2002 they were worth $1 trillion and today they’re worth (on the books) $33 trillion, and that decision not to regulate derivatives created the following sequence: you have mortgages; then a thousand mortgages are packaged and sold as a mortgage-backed security; a thousand mortgage-backed securities are packaged and sold as a collateral debt obligation(CDO); then a thousand collateral debt obligations are packaged and sold as a CDO squared; and insuring each one of those bundles are credit default swaps, which are a part of that $33 trillion (on the books). And our government deliberately decided not to regulate this chain of investments.”

That hardly sounds liberal.

So we had Democrats — afraid to be called liberals — who were conspiring with banking interests intoxicated with the new tools they created, and we supported them living in the style to which they were rapidly becoming accustomed, a lifestyle this easy money financed. If there was an honest liberal amongst them — someone who would have recognized this feeding frenzy as a fool’s attempt to die with the most toys — he never stepped up.

And as Bradley says: “Finally, we might want to remember that the chairman of the Federal Reserve is supposed to remove the punch bowl from the party when the party gets out of control. And that did not happen in the Greenspan years. The opposite happened.”

So, I return to my central premise that for the Democrats to suggest that conservative Republicans are responsible for profligate debt-financed spending, government-imposed morality, or unfunded warfare is to miss the point that this is not conservative behavior at all. They may be partisan Republicans, but they are not conservative.

An equally significant point is missed on the other side. For Republicans to call Democrats liberals — Democrats who are afraid to regulate business, strengthen essential government services and infrastructure, speak up for the poor or raise taxes — is no less off target. These may be Democrats — Democrat partisans, for sure — but they are no more liberal than the Republican partisans are conservative.

Our founders understood what we deny — that with ideological disagreements accompanied by civil discourse, we would strengthen the democracy in this great republic. To do that requires understanding, tolerating, even welcoming conservatives in liberal homes and vice versa for the purpose of understanding the necessary and appropriate tension honest ideology can produce.

In contrast, we seem to have been running together, hand-in-hand — Remocrats and Depublicans alike — full speed ahead toward the high cliff above a common grave befitting the hypocrites, plutocrats, poseurs, and free loading partisans we have become.

Richard Cole is professor and chairperson of the Department of Advertising, Public Relations and Retailing at Michigan State University. The opinions expressed reflect his individual viewpoint and not that of the university.