| It seems like it was only yesterday that the mighty Soviet Socialist Empire came crashing down and the conquering American behemoth stood astride the world. The verbal sleight of hand aside, capitalism was equally triumphant, for in truth, liberal democracy and capitalism historically have been closely intertwined.
The Soviet decline marked “The End of History,” the Japanese American political economist Francis Fukuyama gloated in a widely celebrated 1989 essay. “What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”
Socialism is dead. Long live capitalism!
Who would have imagined that in less than a generation the capitalist juggernaut, which by now had swept virtually every major country into its orbit, would burn out so meteorically.
Make no mistake; the global capitalist system is on its knees, as irretrievably down as the Soviet Empire was two decades earlier. The major U.S. banks have been nationalized in all but name. The government, which has already invested hundreds of billions of dollars to prop up the financial system, is effectively already calling the shots. Citigroup is proposing the State take a 40 percent stake in the company, making it, by far, its largest single shareholder. As the economy craters, other banks will quickly fall in line.
Over the next several months, we will see increasing governmental intervention in wide sectors of the American economy as more business icons fold. As the resulting pain of growing unemployment spreads wider and deeper, governmental welfare programs, from unemployment compensation to food stamps, will expand the government’s reach into every aspect of American life.
The celebration of greed fired the engines of individual creativity and ingenuity, which propelled capitalism for generations. Individual selfishness was the fatally glossed over contradiction in Socialist ideology. But it has proven an equally gnawing internal cancer in the body of capitalism. In retrospect, what should shock us are not the excesses of risky derivatives, Ponzi schemes and vulgar and ostentatious displays of wealth, but that the financial system was able to survive as long and that the abusers were so few. At this juncture, both laissez faire capitalism and centralized socialism stand thoroughly discredited. We have to chart a new course. Recognizing the historical aversion to socialism in this country, we have to develop some other politically palatable terminology for the inescapable state intervention in the social and economic fabric of American life. Meanwhile, welcome to the United Soci |
