No Exit

The Bush administration has brought the notion of the "marketization" of American life to heights unequalled in history. With former (and probably future) business executives and lobbyists in so many key positions, whole cabinet-level departments, the Department of Defense included, are now run more like large corporations than agencies of government.

Unsurprisingly, a new, business-style mind-set has gripped Washington, for corporate leaders like to pride themselves on being resolute, on knowing how to move rapidly, boldly, and with a certain Promethean energy as they go about the process of merging and acquiring. In the sclerotic corridors of the federal bureaucracy it may, indeed, take a bold and driven leader to change the old terms of the game and get things done in inventive and previously unimagined ways.

In a sense, this is the appeal of men like Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Vice President Richard Cheney and Treasury Secretary John Snow. They do not allow ambiguities, temporary reversals, or naysayers to throw them off course. Like those dynamic entrepreneurs of the 1990s who blazed corporate trails, creating new global business structures in the process, these men do not view themselves as simple keepers of the status quo. They exude a faith-based fervor in their market-driven conviction that they have been almost divinely anointed to usher us into a new world, one guided by new styles of management and sanctified by the accumulation of wealth. They believe in the divine providence of the market, take the gospel of the "long boom" as their religious text, and have an unalloyed confidence that, under their tutelage, the commonweal can only move onward and upward. Their seminaries are the great business schools of the country to which the best and the brightest of a generation flocked to become acolytes of this new commercial cloth, the chosen people of a marketized world.

Such men feel no compunction about operating in the public sphere just as they did in the private one. Indeed, like the Calvinist businessmen analyzed in Max Weber's treatise, "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism," they view success and wealth as God's way of sanctioning their industrious ministries. They also believe that they have every right to use up whatever resources are at hand to further their goals.

However, the fates of so many of their corporate comrades in the private sector hint at where their new course at home and abroad -- whether in the resource-rich American West or resource-rich Iraq -- may end up. So many of their cohorts of the 1990s, motivated by a similar near-millenarian mind-set, crashed and burned as the dot.com bubble imploded, leaving behind a Ground Zero of collapsed companies, criminal activity, depressed stock values, mega-debt, bankruptcies, legions of unemployed workers, and phalanxes of defrocked CEOs. This speaks not just to the over-weaning arrogance and self-deception with which they went about their neo-liberal revolution, but to the direction similar attitudes may be leading the Bush administration.

If there were any stars by which these titans of nouvelle corporate dynamism were supposed to unswervingly steer as they blazed deal-making trails in the governmental heavens, they were: