Cross-posted at Daily Kos

Republicans are betting heavily this election year on candidates from the business world – e.g., for Senate, Carly Fiorina in CA, Linda McMahon in CT, and Bill Binnie in NH; for governor, Meg Whitman in CA, Rick Snyder in MI, and Charlie Baker in MA; and this Tuesday, Tim Burns for John Murtha’s House seat in PA.

Putting aside whether the recent shenanigans of corporations from Goldman Sachs to BP may tarnish this strategy, I’d like to ask an even more important question: what is the track record of businessmen who become political leaders?  Certainly there are businessmen who make admirable contributions to government, like Virginia’s own Mark Warner.

But there’s a very important lesson of history that most people don’t know – namely, that SOME OF THE MOST DISASTROUS LEADERS OF THIS CENTURY HAVE BEEN FORMER BUSINESSMEN.  I’m not even going to get into our first MBA president, George W. Bush, both because his Reign of Error is so fresh in our minds and because, frankly, he was a lousy businessman too.  No, in this diary I’m going to focus on three successful businessmen-turned-leaders who left incredible trails of destruction behind them – Herbert Hoover, Neville Chamberlain and Robert McNamara.  And there is critical evidence that their business experience was a major contributing factor in their spectacular failures.

Herbert Hoover, our 31st president, is a particularly important example because we always hear the line that cleaning up our economic mess is a job for a seasoned businessman.  It didn’t quite turn out that way for the president who let the Great Depression happen and worsen on his watch.

Hoover’s background was as a mining engineer and executive.  He attained fame, and showed the best of his business and logistical skills, as the “Great Humanitarian” who organized very successful relief operations for the devastated countries of Europe after World War I.  He then served as the exceptionally pro-business Secretary of Commerce for ultraconservative presidents Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge.

And yet the same skills that elevated him to the presidency did not seem to work too well in that position.  As Jonathan Alter wrote in The Defining Moment,

As a mining executive and large-scale relief organizer, he could bark orders without worrying about the give-and-take of politics.  But the presidency required supple skills that were beyond him.

Hoover could not launch what was needed – a New Deal – because that would’ve gone against his anti-government, laissez-faire religion.  Rather, he kept insisting that the government balance its budget – at a time when massive stimulus was needed.  (Sound familiar?)  He also believed, according to Alter, in “people of goodwill voluntarily collaborating to solve a problem” – what another Republican businessman-turned-politician five decades later would refer to as “a thousand points of light.”

Hoover’s points of light did not succeed in overcoming the darkness of the Great Depression.  And he seemed way too much like the CEO in his gold-plated office, out of touch with the suffering common man.  When his aides tried to set up a photo-op to show that he was just a regular guy, the result was a photo of Hoover fishing in the Shenandoah river – in suit and tie!  Even years after his presidency, he claimed that the prevalence of apple-sellers on the street during the Depression was a business scheme under which “many persons left their jobs for the more profitable one of selling apples.”  That apparently was what economic disaster looked like through the lace curtains of the corporate ivory tower in which Hoover was at his most comfortable.

British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain (who served from 1937-1940) is perhaps an even more interesting example because so much of the folk knowledge about him is wrong.  The image of Chamberlain as a sniveling little liberal appeaser misses the facts that he was the head of the Conservative party, the Tories, and that he based his approach to politics very much on his experience as managing director for 17 years of Hoskins & Company, a manufacturer of ship components.  Like the hapless George W. Bush, he had the advantage of a father who had done well enough in the job of chief executive for the country, former Prime Minister Joseph Chamberlain.  But while passing on the reins of leadership to your kid may be common in corporations and monarchies, it doesn’t seem to work quite as well for democracies.

As William Manchester writes in “The Last Lion: William Spencer Churchill; Alone: 1932-1940”:

Sir John Simon, an admirer, wrote that when colleagues came to Neville he would “listen in a business-like fashion to what one had to say, and then state his conclusions with the finality of a General Manager conducting his company’s affairs.”  Chamberlain once told Ivan Maisky, the Soviet ambassador, he felt that “if only we could sit down at a table with the Germans and run through all their complaints and claims with a pencil, this would greatly relieve all tnesions.” […] He was passionately antiwar, in large part because it meant government interference in private enterprise, and the manufacture of armaments would be useless when peace returns.

This puts his unspeakably disastrous policy of appeasing Hitler in a whole different perspective than we are used to hearing from our conservative friends.  Indeed, like Hoover, Chamberlain was obsessive about balancing budgets, and one of the most disastrous aspects of his policy was keeping spending on defense low at a time when Hitler was expanding the German military to eye-popping levels.  As Manchester says: “If Clausewitz saw war as a science, the chancellor viewed it as a business, or at any rate as an enterprise to be managed in the style of a successful businessman.”  This meant sacrificing the safety of Britain, and the rest of Europe to “our economic stability.”  

Chamberlain thought he could get away with this because of his confidence that he could make deals with Hitler as if the Fuhrer were just some business rival holding out for the right price.  Nor did he recognize the hazard posed to the world by the Nazis until it was almost too late.  Indeed, as Chamberlain’s foreign secretary (until he resigned), Anthony Eden, noted: “Chamberlain had a certain sympathy for dictators, ‘whose efficiency appealed to him.'”

All of this led to Chamberlain’s appeasement policy, which allowed the Nazis to violate all the treaties that had held Germany in check after WWI, occupy the Rhineland, overrun Czechoslovakia and then Poland before the British and French finally responded with force, leading to the horrors of WWII.  Which is why it would be hard to imagine a more uninentionally disastrous reign in modern times than that of the business-minded Neville Chamberlain.

In more recent times, we have the example of a successful businessman who rose, not to elected office, but to a position as one of America’s most consequential cabinet secretaries.  Robert S. McNamara, Defense Secretary from 1961 to 1968, was architect and manager of the Vietnam War for John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson during which time he escalated that conflict to excruciating levels.

But before that, he was known as a “Whiz Kid” at Ford Motor Company.  McNamara came from an MBA at Harvard and a stint during World War II at the Army Air Force’s Office of Statistical Control, to take Ford by storm.  He and his fellow Whiz Kids brought modern management techniques to the then stodgy and inefficient Ford, according to an article at American Heritage’s Invention and Technology magazine:

“They drew up organizational charts, created job descriptions, split the company into divisions, put together the first coordinated production schedule, and delivered the first cash-flow forecast.”

McNamara had some real success and showed some real vision.  He cancelled the cursed Edsel and anticipated the Japanese by a few decades with a strong focus on smaller, more fuel-efficient cars.  Still, McNamara’s obsession with numbers, ruthless rationality and efficiency revealed major flaws as well, as the American Heritage article points out:

In the 1960s Ford men often repeated the story of how McNamara had “designed” a car while sitting in church one Sunday. He showed up for work the next morning with a piece of paper on which he had laid down the contours of a new model. Only he hadn’t done it with a drawing, as a car guy would have. His doodling had been in numbers. He had written down a desired length, weight, cost, investment level, and price, with no word about how the car should look or feel.

His focus on numbers over people would prove devastating in Vietnam.  As Stanley Karnow wrote in “Vietnam: A History”:

It had been ‘McNamara’s war’ for a long time, a cause he had promoted tirelessly since the star of President Kennedy’s tenure in office.  He had viewed the struggle during the 1960s as almost exclusively in quantitative terms, calculating that the United States could win simply by committing its superior resources effectively.

His belief that winning the war was a matter of body counts rather than winning the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese resulted in the loss of countless lives, dollars and acres.  Indeed, McNamara had his doubts towards the end of his tenure whether this approach ultimately would really work.  But he held his tongue in order to follow orders, only publicly admitting his doubts years later – when it was too late to make a difference for the millions of people impacted by this war.

Unlike poor Neville, McNamara’s energy, brilliance, and management skills were undeniable.  But as with Hoover and Chamberlain, he was blinded by his own arrogance.  As Steven Walt wrote in Foreign Policy after McNamara’s death last year, “McNamara may have been a gifted analyst and corporate executive, blessed with a lot of raw smarts, but he was also one of those people who could not imagine being wrong or resist the desire to tell the world what to do.”  

And like the other two, McNamara’s worst mistakes involved focusing more on logistics and efficiency than on the real life consequences of his decisions on people. These men brought destruction on the world not through bad intent but because they refused to listen to others and ignored clear warning signs that they were heading in devastating directions.  These characteristics seemed to serve them well in their business careers, where they could deliver results with less destructive consequences and didn’t have to worry about answering to anyone other than the shareholders.  But that brings me back to my original question, of whether even the greatest business executives must make great political leaders.

I do not write all of this in order to say that a business man or woman cannot make a great leader.  But for those who aim for high office, I do think it’s important that they grapple with the terrible leadership examples outlined above and explain to the voters why they will be different.  And it’s important for the voters to read and appreciate history, which on this issue raises major warning flags.  For sure, we do not want to elect the next Herbert Hoover, Neville Chamberlain, or Robert S. McNamara to run our country – regardless of how well they ran eBay or HP or whatever.

The Tea Party movement, working within the Republican Party, has momentum after rubbing out Senator Bennett’s career in Utah and forcing Charlie Crist in Florida to call himself an Independent. Whether the Tea Party participants realize it or not, their mission has mutated from an amorphous anger against the modern world of diversity and what they refer to as “big government and too many taxes,” into a flat-out commitment to the catechism of corporate feudalism, which masquerades right now as a movement to restore the capitalist free market of a (mythical) 18th century political past, as they believe it was created by our Founding Fathers in an infallible document venerated as The Constitution.  

The entire scenario admits of no questions and no deviation—- it is like a secular religion, despite being a confusing mishmash of various wish lists from groups on the extreme right. The one over-riding message buried in that mishmash is the intent to dismantle the government, while pretending to save it—– rather like the military commander who lamented, “In order to save the village, it was necessary to destroy it.”

The Tea Party’s primary aims are actually a distillation of long-cherished Republican fetishes, like distaste for government, that date back even to pre-Reagan days, including a bed-rock conviction regarding all taxes as an immoral taking from the prudent and hard-working by the lazy and improvident through the power of what they see as a fundamentally illegal government (which can do nothing right anyway: “I’m from the government and I’m here to help you. Hahaha”). The Tea Party, therefore, is Republicanism on steroids. They are political luddites, one and all.

This hatred of government has been craftily rationalized by a political philosophy that combines a version of libertarianism with corporate control of the political system.  It equates Freedom with the establishment of completely unregulated free Market Capitalism. When examined closely, the idea seems to be that government exists primarily to give assistance to corporate business interests by providing stability and enforcement of contracts (the “rule of law”)—- the mystical “hidden hand” of The Market will provide everything else.  

The philosophy goes on to say that if “government” develops delusions or mission creep, and tries to serve any other interests (like those of workers, environmentalists, or pensioners for example) it is illegally meddling beyond its constitutional job description—- God and our Founding Fathers clearly meant there to be very limited government, and for individuals to be responsible for themselves; if they cannot manage to accrue enough wealth to take care of themselves, and provide safety, shelter, sustenance, and education for their families, then no one else, least of all government, has any reason to help them.

The ideal, the Nirvana promised to those who apply this theory is a curiously anarchistic society reminiscent actually of the promised outcome of communism, in which The State, once seized by workers, would “wither away” into a minor administrative function. The difference here is that the promised land has been updated so that Labor (i.e., workers), far from being honored, will eventually be less than serfs, and the corporations, having attained personhood, will be the dominant elite.  Not to worry, though, says the theory: unregulated free market capitalism will provide endless growth and prosperity, while any glitches will be summarily worked out by The Market by itself, without human interference—- and that, folks, is true Freedom.

Greed is sanctified; corporations are designed solely to make a profit for their shareholders (and, coincidentally, for the entrepreneurs and upper echelon of their leadership). Believers are convinced that single-minded concentration on this principle will create the best of all possible worlds, a Nirvana on earth.

Getting to this Nirvana involves dismantling what they call “the liberal state” by any means possible. That includes seeking elective office in order to control the power of the state, whence true believers will privatize every function they can, install incompetent cronies in positions of leadership which they will mal-administer, cut taxes while borrowing funds to pay for their schemes, divert enormous amounts of taxpayer money to chosen cronies in sweetheart no-bid contracts, or to their own pockets, appoint to regulatory bodies members of the industry supposedly being regulated, indulge in military action or wars at the behest of corporate buddies without paying for them out of current revenues, defund or otherwise destroy  any and every so-called liberal program or group(like ACORN) they can, but provide public money for various private pet projects of their own—– in short, destroy government as we know it, even including public education (they say public education “teaches statism and liberal ideas”)

Why? The new Republicans regard this destruction as necessary to reach their Nirvana. The truth, I fear, is, that the destruction of powerful central government suits the corporations. It has taken the business oligarchy a few generations to figure out that:

1) they no longer need the help of a nation state to grow big and powerful,

2) it is far better if they and their minions run the political side in order to enhance their profits and power, and prevent presumptuous taxes and regulations against them—– plus, they can dip into the public treasury for their own uses (like bailouts and subsidies) if they run things, and

3) with globalization, petty, small-sized political entities are easier to control than big central states.

Just as business interests after the American Revolution were ill-served by the chaotic lack of stability and standardized laws under the Articles of Confederation, and were one of the main groups pushing for a stronger central government under the Constitution, so now global corporations today feel themselves ill-served by the federal government, the only organization powerful enough to have the slightest possibility of reining them in. Big Business and Big Finance had a taste of being pretty much in charge during the Bush years, and they have no intention of accepting anything less.

One result of the Republican party’s subservience to this political theory is that there is no longer a middle ground. There is no longer a center of moderate political views, where reasonable people can meet to craft policies or legislation based on shared principles of government. It is “my way or the highway” with today’s Republicans, desperate to serve their business and financial masters.  

Thus, Democrats (and with them, know it or not, small business, workers, indeed the entire so-called middle class) are in a fight not just for their political lives, but for the entire concept of democracy and self-government by the people. Democrats should not expect to do more than peel away an individual here or there from the other side, and should stop playing for “bi-partisanship,” which is now just a joke.  

All the Republican bleating about freedom, personal liberty, personal responsibility, small government, and lower taxes is smoke and mirrors to cover the onward march of the business oligarchy toward a new world of corporate feudalism.  The existing patchwork of political entities will no doubt continue to exist, probably in attenuated form, but real power will reside with the corporate and financial oligarchies of the world.  

The change is not yet complete, of course, and I am not saying the scenario is necessarily a full-blown conspiracy, or even inevitable.  It is more like one very possible outcome of current events. It behooves progressives to get their contrary philosophy out there in the public square, and fight for it. No quarter allowed.