Last week on the Daily Show, Lewis Lapham caught my ear with by referring to the Bush Administration as “utopian anarchists”. In trying to find a transcript of the interview online, I came across this criticism of Lapham’s comment :

For someone who is ostensibly a member of America’s intellectual elite, I was shocked at his fundamental misunderstanding of the basics of conservative political philosophy. He made the argument that conservatism today was essentially “utopian anarchism”, a charge that had me floored. Lapham’s view of conservatism could not be more incorrect - in fact, what he sees as conservatism is its diametrical opposite.

What followed was a good description of traditional conservatism and an explanation of why labeling conservatives “utopian anarchists” is a misnomer. Although I sgree, I think the writer missed the point of Lapham’s comments entirely.

What Lapham was trying to say is that by being “utopian anarchists”, Bush and his fellow neo-conservatives are not conservatives in the traditional sense. This point was made very well in a Marketplace commentary by Thomas Frank last week :

Time was you could always count on conservatives to scream for a balanced federal budget. Not anymore. What they want these days is tax cuts and the budget be damnned.

You’ve no doubt heard that this year’s tax cuts will mainly be enjoyed by the rich; that three-quarters of them will go to society’s wealthiest fifth. This is true but describing them this way misses an important point : The reason the Administration wants to do away with dividend taxes, estate taxes, and all the rest of it is not just to reward the wealthy but to de-fund government, to pull the rug out from under the New Deal social order once and for all.

“Government is not the solution to our problem,” Ronald Reagan famously said in 1981. “Government is the problem.” And today the phrase reverberates across the years echoed by a mighty chorus : Limbaugh, Coulter, Hannity, North, Gingrich, Barr, DeLay, Heyworth, Graham, Santorum..

Yesterday’s far right is today’s mainstream and the belief that government was merely misguided has given way to the belief that government is unredeemable. That the beuracrats who staff it are elitist, un-American, treasonable.

Now detroying government would be tought to pull off if you had to break down each job that the government does and prove that we’d be better off without it. It’s far easier to just pull the money and let nature take its course. Five years from now we’ll all no doubt be reading bestsellers about the menace that budget deficits pose to our grandkids and our legislators will have no choice but to poack up and turn off the lights.

Massive deficits are great because they force government downsizing down the road and this is why they’ve become the signature gesture of Republican administrations, from Ronald Reagan to George Bush Sr. and now to his son. The true goal is not to “jump start” consumer spending or even to spark entrepreneurship, but to throw a wrench into the works of this despised institution : To jam the locomotive into reverse, throw something heavy on the throttle, and jump for it.

Bush and his economic team can’t be completely retarded. They know that the government can’t run a deficit forever. The fact is, the Bush policy of annual tax cuts are a time bomb designed to force the eventual bankruptcy of the social programs conservative extremists have been decrying for decades. Like Mohammed Atta piloting a 747, George Bush is deliberately steering the budget into a nosedive. Sounds like utopian anarchism to me.