False Economy - Alan Beattie [14]
Like Peronism, such campaigns attracted men who viewed themselves as embodiments of uncompromising action, not weasel words, and who frequently harbored unpleasant prejudices. The America First Committee's best-known advocate was the national hero Charles Lindbergh, the first pilot to fly solo across the Atlantic, who partly blamed the Jews for trying to get the United States into the war. There were isolationist demagogues like Father Charles Coughlin, a Catholic 1930s version of a talk-radio shock jock. Father Coughlin's weekly broadcasts attracted millions of listeners to his denunciations of both freewheeling finance capitalism and communism in favor of a socially cohesive economy run by big companies and big labor unions. He, too, showed rising admiration for Hitler and Mussolini, and his broadcasts became increasingly anti-Semitic.
But though it and its like managed to keep the United States out of the Second World War for two years, until the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the America First Committee never became a serious political force. Its modern-day defender is Patrick Buchanan, a populist blow-hard whose frequent excoriations of foreign entanglements rarely gain enough support to make a discernible impact.
America is a militaristic society, as democracies go, but its soldier-statesmen (Dwight Eisenhower, Colin Powell, to name just two) have gone into politics within the framework of the democratic system, not threatening to alter it from without. The only senior soldier to ever directly challenge a president was General Douglas MacArthur, the commander of UN troops in the Korean War, who spoke out against Harry Truman's decision to negotiate an end to the hostilities. MacArthur might well have had the authoritarian part of Peronism down pat (he had earned some notoriety for having suppressed with tear gas a demonstration of army veterans in Washington in 1930 protesting cuts in pension payments) but after Truman relieved him of his command in Korea, he soon saw his immense personal popularity dissipate under the glare of public attention.
"There is a great deal of ruin in a nation," as Adam Smith, one of the modern creators of economics, had it. Even during the two lost decades between the wars, Argentina was one of the ten richest economies in the world. It would not remain so for long.
Argentina after the Second World War knew only one big thing: that relying on the outside world for money and markets had been a mistake. The instinctively defensive reaction to the troubles of the 1930s solidified into an ideological carapace. Having won independence from European colonialists once before, they felt it only natural to declare it again.
Peronism meant corporatism, not a free market or a socialist economy. Peronist ideology argued that Argentina had been devastated by the anarchy of free markets in goods, people, and money, which had brought the misery of the Depression. Now a strong and confident country would build its economy through the patriotic cooperation of labor, the government, and the owners of industry.
The self-sufficiency of the new order, an idea that gained adherents across the world, was given a name: import substitution. Argentina believed that its travails had been caused by remaining an economic colony even after it had ceased to be a political one—exporting low-value commodities and importing higher-value manufactured goods. There was some truth in this, but the solution, to industrialize at the cost of cutting off the economy from the rest of the world, was not the right answer.
Argentina sealed off its manufacturing companies behind a high wall of tariff protection. It could argue that it was only following the pattern set by many other countries, including America, that had climbed clear of their agrarian origins. But not only had the United States had a much bigger domestic market to generate economies of scale,