- Restoration actress Elizabeth Barry
This past weekend I attended a wonderful production of William Wycherley’s The Country Wife at the replica of Shakespeare’s Blackfriars Theater in Staunton, Virginia. I’ve had the onrushing sequester on my mind recently, which may be why Wycherley’s cynical ending seemed a lot like the GOP’s current state of denial over its economic prescriptions. If the indiscriminate budget cuts are allowed to take hold, most economists believe that the economic recovery will be slowed and some fear that we will be plunged back into recession. I’ll describe the play’s conclusion and then show how it applies.
In the Country Wife’s final scene, virtually the entire society refuses to acknowledge an unpleasant truth that is staring them in the face, which is that uber-rake Horner has slept with their wives. If this becomes openly known, then all the wives will be dishonored and all of the men will be mocked as cuckolds. Only by believing an implausible falsehood will everyone’s reputation be saved. Given the stakes, everyone is fully determined to believe it.
Unfortunately for them, Marjorie Pinchwife, the country wife of the title, is threatening, in her innocence, to tell the truth and explode the story. The others must persuade her to tell a lie or they will be ruined.
In the end she succumbs to the pressure, tells the expected lie, and everything ends “happily ever after.”
My father tells me that in the 1960s Monroe Spears, editor of The Sewanee Review, refused to allow Sewanee students to perform Country Wife. I like to think it was because of its dark cynicism, but it’s probably really because the hero pretends that he has been rendered impotent by venereal disease. He does this so that he can circumvent husbands’ defenses and make love to their wives. Mrs. Pinchwife knows from first hand knowledge that Horner is not really impotent.
The GOP’s implausible falsehood is that supply side economics will grow the economy. This philosophy was once described as “voodoo economics” by George Herbert Walker Bush when he was running against Ronald Reagan, but he later recanted (like Marjorie Pinchwife) and now “trickle down” is sacred Republican orthodoxy. The idea that we can bring back economic good times by cutting taxes and reducing government spending is preached incessantly. Democratic compromise proposals of 50% spending cuts/50% revenue increases are dismissed out of hand.
Do the Republicans really believe in their economic philosophy? Or is it a case that, like the society in Country Wife, they only pretend to believe because they have built their entire reputation on the assumption that this economic reality is true. Michael Tomasky of The Daily Beast believes the latter in an article about how a President Romney would have handled the sequester threat:
I’d argue that there is good reason to believe that a President Romney and a GOP House would not have pursued the strategy that Republicans now advocate. Chances are they’d have decided, as Dick Cheney famously did back in the days when the administration he was in was running them up, that “deficits don’t matter.” As my colleague David Frum likes to say, “We’re all Keynesians during Republican administrations.”
In other words: if they had the actual responsibility of power, there is no way on earth Republicans would be pushing for such drastic budget cuts. This in turn suggests, if I’m correct, that they have to know on some level that what they’re proposing right now is harmful to the economy. But they can’t admit it, because admitting it would toss 30 years of arguments about the economy out the window, and because admitting it would by implication bring them around to more rational policies that would help the country—which would also be policies that helped Obama. And that, in Republicanland, is the greatest mortal sin there is.
By the way, David Frum, a former George W. Bush speechwriter who has been all but expelled from Republican ranks for calling his party out for its implausible economic stories, would be like the truth-telling Marjorie Pinchwife. Another Marjorie would be Bruce Bartlett, former Bush treasury advisor who also advocates for government stimulus measures. (See also conservative Ramesh Ponnuru challenging GOP orthodoxy in today’s New York Times.)
I’ve sometimes speculated about what would happen to the characters in Country Wife if Marjorie had been allowed to tell the truth. To be sure, in the short run everyone would have been shamed. But they might also have begun to live their lives with a new sense of openness. In the next century, an “age of sincerity” would emerge after people read Jean Jacques Rousseau, so we can see what is possible.
Allow me to dream a little of frank economic conversations where people put country over ideology and have honest conversations about what can be done. Maybe we could stop posing and start listening to our country wives. It’s amazing how much we could accomplish with the U. S. economy if we only stopped manufacturing artificial crises.
