2
Disaster Republicanism
In The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Naomi Klein describes how corporate interests exploited the crisis created by the Hurricane Katrina disaster in order to make radical changes that people in normal circumstances would never make. She cites other instances in Chile under Augusto Pinochet and in Russia under Boris Yeltsin as further examples of crises either precipitated or used as opportunities to take radical actions.1
Referring to the rush of charter schools into New Orleans to undermine the public schools after Katrina, Klein observed: “I call these orchestrated raids on the public sphere in the wake of catastrophic events, combined with the treatment of disasters as exciting market opportunities, ‘disaster capitalism.’”2
Similarly, as explained earlier, the budget “crisis” in Ohio in 2011 was a manufactured one—generated by years of sharp tax reductions that rewarded the wealthiest Ohioans—that presented a similar “market opportunity” to conservative ideologues. Once that crisis was created, Republican stalwarts like John Kasich and Shannon Jones would bluntly state, “There is no money left,” wrongly implying that “extraordinary demands” by unionized public employees had drained the treasury. McClatchy Newspapers, alone among the major media groups, were quick to pick up on this. “The tax cuts were supposed to stimulate Ohio’s economy and create jobs,” McClatchy reporters observed, “But that didn’t happen once the economy tanked. Instead, the changes ended up costing Ohio more than $2 billion a year in lost tax revenue, money that would have gone a long way toward closing the state’s $8 billion budget gap for fiscal year 2012.”3
But the particular brand of conservatism that played out in Ohio in 2011 has deeper ideological origins beyond the facts of the political, social, and economic situation in the state. It has its roots in a battle that today is largely forgotten but nonetheless remains at the center of conflict between those who see their government as a tool for balancing interests and regulating the worst abuses of the free-enterprise system and those who see government as an obstacle to the unrestricted environment in which they believe these forces should operate. While it is possible to draw this conflict back to Woodrow Wilson and issues raised in his second inaugural address in 1916, in modern America, this conflict first burst into the open when Franklin D. Roosevelt took office in 1933. There have been small and ineffective attempts by some conservative commentators to introduce novel theories about the economic collapse of the 1920s and to suggest that the Great Depression was not caused by unregulated capitalism and that the New Deal did not “work.” Chief among the works advocating these theories is the deeply flawed The Forgotten Man, written by right-wing pundit Amity Shlaes. Published in 2009, the book provides a mix of anecdotal stories and a largely ideologically driven and