That’s the title of a recently published book by Dana Milbank about the Republican agenda over the last quarter century. Duh! I’ve been referring to destruction as an ideological agenda for eighteen years on this blog. So, Mr. Milbank would seem to be a bit slow. Indeed, I’d argue that the destructive national agenda came into its own with the First Gulf War and the “liberation” of household assets for “the market.” If women were not going to be returned to the household to provide unpaid labor and work for wages like the men who initiated the industrial era, then households might as well be converted into status symbols. Now we have a housing and homeless crisis because few are left to manage households.

So, Milbank dates it ti 1994. The ideologues of creative destruction showed up earlier, I think.

*************
What is the problem with creative destruction as referenced by Marx and Schunpeter? Neither realized that what they identified as capitalism was really nothing but an etherial version of the predatory mode. The predator destroys to survive. Reciptocators are mutually beneficial; their exchange benefits both sides for the simple reason that preferences differ. Diversity is the key to reciprocity.

In practice that means the conformists are doomed.