The war socialism of the American right Conservatives do not object to Keynesianism -- as long as it involves the military by Michael Lind

the red-state Republican economy is the military-industrial complex -- or, to be more specific, the agro-energy-military-industrial complex. As the political heirs of the right-wing Southern Democrats of the 1940s and 1950s, today’s red-state Republicans have inherited the old Southern Democratic trick of combining denunciations of big government with support for federal government spending that benefits their constituents. Those constituents include not only well-paid military contractors, who for all practical purposes are government bureaucrats in a socialist economy, but also ordinary men and women in the ranks, where conservative white Southerners are over-represented.

If you are a right-wing white Southern Republican, you can spend your entire life as a ward of the state. You can serve in the socialist economy of the military and then, as a retired officer, you can go to work for a semi-socialist major defense contractor. Both in your active-duty career, your career in the pseudo-private defense contractor sector and your retirement, you will be one of the privileged Americans who enjoy a system of socialized, single-payer healthcare -- the Veterans Administration. And throughout your career as a state functionary in the socialist military sector, you can grumble about big government and denounce liberals who don’t understand private enterprise. If this is Orwellian Doublethink, it is no different from that of progressives who vote for candidates who promise a new New Deal and then attack middle-class entitlements, govern on behalf of Wall Street and support multinationals that seek to offshore even more industrial jobs.

Indeed, while progressives talk endlessly about protecting American industry, conservatives actually do it -- as long as the industry is military. As Floyd Norris pointed out in a story for the New York Times (chart here), between 2000-2009 military manufacturing increased by nearly 125 percent, while civilian manufacturing contracted by roughly 25 percent. The military, which was responsible for only 3 percent of durable goods orders in 2000, grew to account for 8 percent in 2008, before the crash.

Military Keynesianism includes infrastructure spending. To be sure, the infrastructure is in countries that the U.S. has bombed into chaos like Iraq and Afghanistan, but building foreign infrastructure generates contracts for American firms like Halliburton. Conspiracy theorists to the contrary, the Iraq and Afghan wars were motivated by misguided conservative strategy, not by rewards to contractors, but those rewards are real nonetheless.

Few conservative Republicans confess to their policy of military Keynesianism. As long as they are out of power, Republicans theatrically pose as fiscally conservative enemies of big government. If the GOP recaptured Congress or the presidency, however, Ron Paul would be locked in the attic again and Paul Ryan’s plans for downsizing the federal government would be shelved in a locked cabinet in one of those secret government warehouses depicted in "The X-Files" while even more money was shoveled at the Pentagon.