Supercrash by Darryl Cunningham
Published in 2014 în UK under the title Supercrash, then in 2015 in the United States of America as The Age of Selfishness, Darryl Cunningham’s graphic novel synthesized numerous treatments of the ideology that brought into being the 2008 Financial Crash. But more than going through the ideas of Ayn Rand, Alan Greenspan, Joseph Stiglitz, Steven Pinker and the common tropes of 2010s media, the volume illustrates the limits of progressive liberalism.
The book consists of three relatively independent parts, thematically linked and stitched by a thin thread represented by Ayn Rand.
The first part, initially published on the defunct webcomics portal ACT-I-VATE, acts as a biography of the Russian-born American author and a survey of her work. Even though harsh in his characterization, Cunningham avoids painting a grotesque picture of Rand, portraying her instead as an intelligent woman, extraordinarily determined, but with difficulties in empathizing with others and animated by a malign world-view.
As the cartoonist goes through Rand’s work and links it to objectivism, the so-called philosophy of selfishness, Cunnyngham often falls into biographism and psychologization. Thus, the opposition between the superior individual and the mediocre masses, which would mark Ayn Rand’s career, finds its kernel in the Bolshevik Revolution.
As far as criticizing randian ideas, Supercrash doesn’t innovate. There’s little need for it. Her immense and highly polemic novels, as well as her philosophy lacking in philosophical content, were an easy target both for liberal and socialist critics even during Rand’s life. And her death didn’t really stop them. For example, Corey Robin, reviewing another biography of Rand writes an ample critique of objectivism, which makes its way in The Reactionary Mind.
On the other hand, when Cunningham looks at the relationship between Ayn Rand and Nathaniel Branden inside the cheekily named The Collective, a social club organized by the two, the volume germinates something quite interesting.
There are plenty of dangerous ideas, many of them published in books that sold really well. Few of them manage to influence fiscal policies. Rand distinguished herself by cultivating a group of New York elites who in turn developed a personality cult for the writer and started to disseminate her ideas in an organized fashion through the talks organized by the Nathaniel Branden Institute and The Objectivist newspaper. Brandon synthesized Rand’s philosophy and created the context to apply it to practical concerns starting from psychology and drama studies to politics and the economy. Future professors and politicians developed inside this organization. They formed bonds held together by their common view of the state’s role in the economy, or rather, lack of it. And as they advanced in their careers, they acted on this worldview, built not only on the ideas provided by Rand, but also by the resources and platforms she and her organizations awarded. Sadly, the volume quickly abandons this avenue of investigation, at most pointing that the Nathaniel Branden Institute anticipates the Cato Institute, preferring instead to keep an inventory of the various infidelities happening inside the Collective in the hope of pointing out the hypocrisy of Rand and her acolytes.
Of course, despite the influence Rand casts over politics and culture (besides the former chief of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, the graphic novel also mentions then Representative and now former Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan), the far right in the United States of America didn’t spur because of her books and social activity. The volume even mentions Murray Rothbard, but only to point out how authoritarian Rand was in her personal conduct, instead of placing the writer inside a broader picture of American socio-economic thinking. Which, in the end, makes it seem that her gravest act remains more of a lapse in morality: that selfishness presented as a virtue in a provocative manner.
Even the best chapter of the book, the one about the US banking industry and the Financial Crisis of 2008, maintains its moralizing streak. If dozens of nicely animated and convincingly narrated clips from Vox, Big Think or AJ+ can provide exact, but very partial explanations of the phenomena and a commercial film like The Big Short manages to dramatize the disaster, Cunningham produces one of the most accessible and comprehensive presentations of the sequence of events that gave way to the crisis, as well as the financial mechanisms that facilitated it. These are much needed explanations, as the Crisis and The Great Recession that followed are poorly understood by most people and this confusion is a fertile soil for austerity measures and even fascism.
While The Big Short buries its technical explanations under spectacle that turns them incoherent, Supercrash has enough patience to go through the different derivatives, presenting their purpose, the history of how they were unshackled from regulations for profit and how this process created systemic risk at the level of the whole global economy. Also, as opposed to The Big Short which is fine with shrugging at the weakness of the governmental agencies tasked with overseeing the financial sector, presented almost as a given, Cunningham mentions the role played by the ideology of those leading the agencies (a fox in the henhouse situation), the role of lobbying and corruption as well as the revolving door between the public and the private sector.
Even so, the book still identifies the primary cause of the crisis in the bankers’ selfishness. This is the conclusion it holds even after it presents the case of Countrywide, a company which refused for a while to trade in subprime loans, but ends up by the end of the 1980s to throw its lot in that marketplace competing with Wells Fargo, lest it would’ve been put out of business. Even if the anecdote clearly illustrates how the financial system itself induces a particular behavior in the agents operating inside it (who either adopts the market’s rationality or are replaced by others who will), Cunningham doesn’t stop to relate it to his broader argument. He simple uses it to present the minuscule punishments suffered by the scant few investors, bankers and executives who were condemned for their part in the financial crisis.
The third chapter is by far the most confused and confusing. First of all, it’s rather made up of two distinct chapters. The second part is a retrospective of the political effects in the wake of the Great Recession. It takes note of the austerity measures, the government and media campaigns targeting poor people and especially those on welfare. It also looks at the ascent of the Tea Party movement and UKIP. Re-reading it now can be a useful corrective since the roots of the current wave of global fascism have been mystified to no end, displaced from the territory of the economy and politics onto that of culture and a perverse techno-utopianism. Yet it still uses a moralizing frame of reference. Greed is still the main culprit for all of these and the generative kernel is Ayn Rand’s objectivist philosophy.
Strangest of all is the first part of the chapter which uncritically recaps Chris Mooney’s The Republican Brain, stating that liberalism and conservatism are neurologically determined. These two political ideologies are closely identified with support for either the Democratic Party or the Republican Party, which should be a red flag for any reader outside the US and is surprising that it wasn’t for the British cartoonist. This chapter also presents a deeply conservative retelling of the countercultural movement of the 60s which, by abandoning “traditional values”, generated a crime wave in the 70s and 80s. More than the controversial theories, what’s befuddling is the complete shift in how the left and the right are characterized. If in the rest of the comic, even in the second part of the chapter, the right is associated with individualism (this being the key thesis of the volume), in this sequence individualism becomes a feature of the left.
Through the crack represented by this strange portion of the volume we can peer at a deeper flaw within it. The ease with which core features of Conservatism and Liberalism are switched around shows what most political scientists agree on: both ideologies are actually variations of political liberalism, the political ideology of the capitalist economic system. The Democrats and The Republicans share different cultural expressions of liberalism and support, to some extent, different social policies more out of demographic reasons, then ideological ones.
The attempt to blow up a single pole into a whole political spectrum not only produces contradictions and confusions, but it also leads to rash conclusions and creates blind spots. The little-by-little repeal of Glass-Steagall, is of course, what led to the financial crisis of 2008. But never is the comic asking why was the act necessary in the first place, especially if Ayn Rand didn’t even publish her first novel by 1933. Asking this question would maybe show that it’s not personal greed that’s at the heart of the financial crisis, but the very way the economy is organized. And this organization of the economy is what induces in people behaviors that can be read as selfish, that needs ideological justifications and in the end tends to slowly erode the various barriers put in its way if it’s not constantly contested.
In the end there is plenty of useful information bound together and sharply broken down in Supercrash. But I’m not sure the comic realizes their significance because of the perspective in which it casts them. Liberalism, be it progressive, prioritizing individual choice, misses the systems and institutions which validated those choices. So, when looking at the available data, the graphic novel turns the natural conclusion on its head, blaming personal greed and selfishness instead of a system which allows only those who act in their own interest, regardless of their own morality, to prosper. Although the research work was significant, and the presentation accessible without being paternalistic or vulgarizing, the comic is dulled precisely by what it aims to critique: by ideology.
