I was born in 1936, the year Robert K. Merton’s paper, “The Unanticipated Consequences of Purposive Social Action,” popularized the concept of the law of unintended consequences.
Merton tried to apply a systematic analysis to the problem of unintended consequences of deliberate acts intended to cause social change. More recently, the law of unintended consequences has come to mean an idiomatic warning that an intervention in a complex system tends to create unanticipated and often undesirable outcomes. Like Murphy’s law, it is commonly used as a wry warning against the hubristic belief that humans can fully control the world around them.
One can see the enormous downside of what unintended consequences can bring in our politics and presidential campaigns.
It is the broad public belief that the federal government is dysfunctional and working against the public good that we can thank the conservative movement for. The unintended consequences of conservative political strategy have resulted in a largely stalled government and the political zoo that is now the Republican presidential reality show. Is it any wonder that President Barack Obama has had to employ executive order to achieve anything?
Although conservatism has much older roots in American history, the modern movement began to come together in the mid-1930s when intellectuals and politicians collaborated with businessmen to oppose the liberalism of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, the newly energized labor unions, and big city Democratic machines. After World War II that coalition gained strength from new think tanks and writers who developed an intellectual rationale for conservatism in the pursuit of social change.
When Newt Gingrich began his all-out assault on the Democrats in the Congress in the 1980s, he invented a new vocabulary to make his pro-government opponents look corrupt and weak. Nearly every Republican in Congress has committed to never increase taxes by signing Grover Norquist’s anti-tax pledge that, in turn, has greatly limited the government’s ability to do its work.
Meanwhile, The Federalist Society, a group of conservatives and libertarians, developed a network of lawyers and judges who side against government, and a conservative media serve as an echo chamber for those ideas. All these tactics spread the idea that government is a powerful conspiracy against the interests of the American people.
That said, when George W. Bush was in power, most Republicans had no choice but to collaborate in the funding, operation (and expansion) of the federal government. Of course, that changed when President Obama, a liberal Democrat, took office in 2009. Congressional Republicans determined to do everything they could to make his administration fail. That was the same year the Tea Party opened its own campaign against government, Democrats and moderate Republicans. The Republican struggle is financed by several networks of donors — including the Koch brothers, who have financed the most extreme candidates.
With respect to the Koch brothers, in a recent interview in Rolling Stone, New Yorker staff writer Jane Mayer and the author of “Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right,” said the Kochs “… were so far to the right that conservatives like (William) Buckley viewed them as the fringe. They are so anti-government,” Mayer said, “that they bordered on anarchy.”
Some of Charles Koch’s ideas “that seemed so crazy and fringe back in 1980, such as abolishing the IRS and the EPA,” said Mayer, “you’re hearing those same ideas now echoing among the Republican presidential candidates.”
Starving and immobilizing the government makes it look ineffective, which then validates Republican propaganda. FDR created the modern Democratic Party by convincing every section of the country, from the agricultural south and the resource-rich west to the urban areas of the Northeast and Midwest, that the government could help them. Now that belief has nearly disappeared in most of the “Red States,” the states that have given the Republicans control of the Senate.
The “genius” of the Republican strategy is that it validates itself. People seem to have no understanding of how government can, and has in the past, worked for the public good. Dismay, distrust and despair of government fueled by the cancer of income inequality has the common citizen seeking more than a “fix;” that citizen wants to turn the establishment tables upside down.
The Republican strategy’s unintended consequences include “radical” presidential candidates Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. One candidate pays no heed to the Republican “establishment,” not to mention Fox News, the pope or to anyone who opposes him and the other candidate listens to the people and has been calling it straight for 40 years.
John Bos lives in Shelburne Falls. He invites comments and dialogue at john01370@gmail.com.