Arch-Tory Charles Moore begins to wonder after the 2008 crash and the recent revelations about Rupert Murdoch's media-political complex in Britain and America:
One of the great arguments of the Left is that what the Right calls “the free market” is actually a set-up. The rich run a global system that allows them to accumulate capital and pay the lowest possible price for labour. The freedom that results applies only to them. The many simply have to work harder, in conditions that grow ever more insecure, to enrich the few. Democratic politics, which purports to enrich the many, is actually in the pocket of those bankers, media barons and other moguls who run and own everything.
In the 1970s and 1980s, it was easy to refute this line of reasoning because it was obvious, particularly in Britain, that it was the trade unions that were holding people back … But as we have surveyed the Murdoch scandal of the past fortnight, few could deny that it has revealed how an international company has bullied and bought its way to control of party leaderships, police forces and regulatory processes … The Left was right that the power of Rupert Murdoch had become an anti-social force. The Right (in which, for these purposes, one must include the New Labour of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown) was too slow to see this, partly because it confused populism and democracy.
That distinction is critical to diagnosing the current right. Moore saw it up close on America's primary propaganda channel:
On Fox News (another Murdoch property, and one which, while I was there, did not breathe a word of his difficulties), Republicans lined up for hours to threaten to wreck the President’s attempt to raise the debt ceiling. They seemed to take for granted the underlying robustness of their country’s economic and political arrangements. This is a mistake. The greatest capitalist country in history is now dependent on other people’s capital to survive. In such circumstances, Western democracy starts to feel like a threatened luxury. We can wave banners about “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”, but they tend to say, in smaller print, “Made in China”.
Capitalism, in my view, needs to be reformed if it is to win back the confidence of many. Wall Street needs to be much more stringently regulated and the tax code is in desperate need of radical simplification, to cite two obvious examples. The idea that merely cutting taxes, throwing seniors off Medicare, and slashing discretionary spending will somehow lead us back to a promised land is a fantasy. And at some point, more conservatives will be as frank as Mr Moore.
The Dish 