Arthur Alpert Pic2Richard Berry, the Republican candidate for Mayor of Albuquerque wants to run the city like a business, but hasn’t told us which – AIG, Lehman or GM?

To his credit, though, he knows what’s real and what’s not.

That’s why, as Marjorie Childress reported, Mr. Berry is relying on the Republican Party for canvassing, volunteer labor, telephone lines and a copier. He grasps that Albuquerque’s non-partisan elections are fiction.

(Fiction fostered, I believe, by good government types who think that if we close our eyes and pretend elections aren’t about power, the Good Fairy will make it so.)

Fiction is fundamental to all our politics and what lies beneath.

Democracy is itself a fiction requiring a “willing suspension of disbelief,” based on subordinate white lies like “popular sovereignty.” “the people” and their “representatives.” So writes the distinguished historian Edmund Morgan in “American Heroes.”

If Morgan’s right, then American history has been a struggle between those who would realize the democratic fiction and others happy with their perch on the power ladder.

We all trade in fictions. Take the liberals’ idea of human nature, which leads them to “rational” arguments for the common good that ignore fears and narrow interests—one reason Obama’s White House fumbled health reform.
Fiction also thrives when we misuse words. We talk about “business,” for example, as if it’s unitary. But small businesses (I once owned one) differ radically from the biggies. Example—startups and mom-and-pops compete in relatively free markets; major enterprises, not so much.

Free trade also is a mirage, which didn’t keep banker David Rockefeller from defending it against protectionism (in an op-ed in the New York Times last Sunday), without defining either word!

Economics is mostly fiction dressed in lab coats, which explains how almost all economists and financial experts, including Alan Greenspan (the Ayn Rand alumnus) never saw the Apocalypse looming.

And we Americans meander in their footsteps. Most applauded President George W. Bush’s budget-busting tax cuts for the affluent and entitlement expansions. Not to mention his faith in the geniuses commanding Wall Street and real estate.

The scariest fiction these days is scapegoating – blaming others for the tribe’s travails.

Thanks to “Big Government, “ we dodged a second Great Depression, so we may never get master scapegoaters like Father Coughlin(the father of hate radio) and Gerald L.K. Smith, thousands of Nazi wannabes (brawling) and Marxists (conspiring), as in the 1930s. Compared to them, Glenn Beck is small time.

But today’s demonstrators, backed by big money, are frightening as they flail at The Other —government, socialists, Islam, liberals, atheists, gays, ACORN and our African-American president.

They’re pitiable, too, in their fear, pliability and economic insecurity. And they’re not all wrong.

That’s why the White House must find its populist tongue. It’s time to say we made a mistake called Reaganism, which unleashed the free market to make us all richer but made only the rich richer.

And which – inevitably – set our course toward “Recession.”

Say that government isn’t the enemy, that only government can save us from mammoth institutions so muscular they can – almost did – pull the temple down.

Talk about larger values versus commercial; the nation in contrast to the market; community, as opposed to every-man-for-himself.

Teach history, too – American capitalism, with fetters and buffers, works well for the great majority. Free, it craters.
Franklin Roosevelt proposed a “second bill of rights” in 1944 because, he said, “true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence.” That was even before his affluent opponents had termed him a “traitor to his class.”

By rejecting fiction for reality (like Richard Berry), Barack Obama might some day earn similar praise.