The End of History, GOP Style

Until this Republican convention, I’d never much cared for the concept of “the end of history,” as promulgated by Francis Fukuyama. His proposition was that with the defeat of communism, history will stop unfolding in successive Hegelian chapters. It’s dead; it ended and we are now frozen forever in the amber of capitalist liberal democracy.

In San Diego, Fukuyama looked pretty good. Here was post-history, whose politics require neither logic nor coherence. History implies consequence, post-history denies it. There is no unfolding of a narrative, merely discrete and inchoate episodes, whose “truth” is purely self-referential.

Take what is supposed to be the intellectual epicenter of the Dole challenge, his tax plan. He pledges to cut individual rates by 15%, whack the capital gains tax to 14% and abolish the IRS as we know it.

Of course, Bill Clinton pledged to abolish welfare as we know it. So, reckoning that even more people hate taxes than they do welfare recipients, Dole offers this bold scheme, which is most definitely post-historical, and which absolutely no one believes, particularly since Dole promises he’ll balance the budget at the same time.

It’s not that there’s anything wrong with the idea of abolishing the IRS. The government doesn’t need tax revenues to carry on its operations. It can sell bonds or get the Fed to print more money. Inflation is dead. Taxes are merely an intrusion on our right to spend our money the way we want. The Dole plan is intellectually credible but politically grotesque, because the minute Fed chairman Alan Greenspan saw growth moving at the clip required by the plan, interest rates would get jacked up until the economy fell flat on its face.

I thought for a moment that maybe Dole chose his running mate because he remembered the Kemp plank in the Republican platform of 1984, which was savage about the role of the Fed. But then I met columnist Robert Novak here in San Diego. Novak has touted Kemp for years as the supply-siders’ last, best hope. I cried excitedly that perhaps the opportunity for us Fed haters had come round at last.

Novak wagged his head mournfully and indicated that Kemp is now a respectable vice presidential candidate and dirty talk about Greenspan or the Fed will never pass his lips. A candidate for only five days and already Kemp has sold out. As he so post-historically put it, he’s changed his ideas but not his ideals.

Because we’re now in post-history, the Cold War’s over and scarce a threat to America left on the planet, the Republicans no longer feel it necessary to be bellicose. They cry a lot now. Mike Deaver’s only slip on that perfectly scripted and tear-sodden first evening here was to have a clip of Henry Kissinger croaking out a tearless testimonial. Suddenly we were back in history. No speech from Kissinger ends without a command to bomb someone. Fortunately, Deaver gave Henry the hook before the usual peremptory command.

Most post-historical of all was Colin Powell’s speech. It could have been uttered in good faith by Jesse Jackson, who then would have been duly torn apart by the pundits for extremism. When Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich said something critical about corporate welfare, he immediately got shot down by Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin. Yet Powell denounced corporate welfare and got nothing worse than a few boos from some of the gathering’s innumerable millionaires. The pundits all loved it.

Roars of applause greeted Powell for his longings that the party be inclusive and generous. Maybe, contrary to the spirit of the GOP platform, the children of illegal immigrants will be able to join an apprentice program for citizenship. As Powell uttered his uplifting sentiments, the mostly white, rich audience was transmuted by camera selection into a gathering of people of color, of seemingly modest means. By such camera techniques the ethnic, sexual and class composition of the delegates changed at least four times that evening, which is definitely post-historical.

This was the first convention in many decades truly free from the rhetorical shadow of war, cold or hot. In 1992, the Soviet Union was not that long gone and the dust scarcely settled on the conquest of Iraq. In the old days, the core business of such conventions was the same as it is now, the extraction of vast sums of money from corporate sponsors. But the discipline of the Cold War, what Norman Mailer recently called “the essential paranoid fiction,” imposed restraints. Now the lid is off. Striving for a definition of the essential meaning of freedom, Newt Gingrich offered us . . . the rise to Olympic status of beach volleyball. Welcome to post-history.