Some thoughts on “Commanding Heights”

Looking back, the “End of History” as identified by the thinker Francis Fukuyama lasted about a decade. It was in this decade that the original book for Commanding Heights was written. The documentary came at the very beginning of a new age of the backlash to globalism that arose with 9/11.

The documentary is very much a product of its time. The source was written when the new economy was ascendant, the Clinton boom meant that the USA was paying back the debt and economists were worried about how to do monetary policy in an era of government surpluses. 

The new millennium made a lot of those issues moot. It wasn’t just 9/11, but the recession that came with the popping of the tech bubble exposing bad accounting from not just Enron but WorldCom and Tyco and Adelphia. All these names made the cover of the news magazines but receded to the collective unconscious. The last third tries to deal with this, but is too close in time to be truly reflective.

What commanding heights is at its core is a celebration of the economy that was in force in 1998. It is a celebration of free markets and the rise of the Austrian school. It is a celebration of Margaret Thatcher waving around a copy of Hayek and claiming, “This is what we believe”. It is a celebration of Reagan, or at least a version of Reagan that ignores pulling back from the tax cuts to a more modest tax reform, a Reagan that ended the cold war standing at the Brandenburg gate telling Gorbachev to “Take down this wall” – and not the Reagan that illegally sold arms to Iran to fund right-wing death squads against an elected government in Central America. And I get it. This time was good for a lot of people up until it wasn’t. It was so good that once it crashed the first time, we doubled down in America by pushing through tax cuts and borrowing more and inflating the deficit so that people could buy houses and we remade the good times.

And then this time it wasn’t good. We’re still coming to terms with the fact that perhaps the return to technology isn’t as high as we want it; that demographic pressures are working against the economy especially if we have less immigration. The tea party and Occupy and Bernie and Trump are two sides of the same coin – the coin being the realization that things are not as we have been told. It is a backlash of the world that is described in Commanding Heights, one that even a decade along after the crash we haven’t come to terms with. If Thatcherism was the English coming to terms with the fact that they were no longer an empire, perhaps that is just the reckoning that Trumpism is, with the red baseball hats and the weird idea that we need to look to the past to remake America in an image of the ideal and not look forward.

One thing that really strikes me is that the Commanding heights set’s up this great clash between Keynes and Hayek. As if Keynesianism didn’t work so this Hayekian version is what we should go with. And looking back now we see that both models of how to let capitalism have their limits. Perhaps the problem lies not with the interpretation of the system, but the system itself.

Two side notes: first one of the things that bugs me is setting up a dichotomy between Keynes and Hayek. They’re not on the same level. There’s a reason that any time a fan of Hayek starts talking about his biography they must rope in the time he was in London and Keynes was at Cambridge. There’s no parallel to people talking about Keynes. Hayek is but a footnote. On the flip side, Hayek does have that “Nobel” prize at least.