The Silence of the Technocrats

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http://inthesetimes.com/article/12574/the_silence_of_the_technocrats

In 2008, the country’s financial system suffered an epic breakdown, largely the result – as nearly every credible observer agrees – of the decades-long effort to roll back bank supervision and encourage financial experimentation. The banks’ stumble quickly plunged the nation and the world into the worst recession since the 1930s. This was no ordinary business-cycle downturn. Millions of Americans, and a large number of their banks, became insolvent in a matter of weeks.

Sixteen trillion dollars in household wealth was incinerated on the pyre Wall Street had kindled. And yet, to date – the Occupy movement notwithstanding – the most effective political response to these events has been a campaign to roll back regulation, to strip government employees of the right to collectively bargain and to clamp down on federal spending.

This return of the Right is even more remarkable when we remember the prevailing opinion climate of 2008. After the disasters of the George W. Bush presidency culminated in the catastrophe on Wall Street, the leading lights of the Beltway consensus deemed that the nation was traveling in a new direction. They had seen this movie before, and they knew how it was supposed to go. The plates were shifting. Conservatism’s decades-long reign was at an end. An era of liberal ascendancy was at hand. This was the unambiguous mandate of history, as unmistakable as the gigantic crowds that gathered to hear Barack Obama speak as he traveled the campaign trail.

But while the Washington wise men sat back and waited for the mystic tides of history to sort things out, conservatives acted.