Most economists are saying that now is a terrible time to be slashing spending. With unemployment at close to 10% (and that's using the very conservative official numbers), with the housing market still reeling, austerity measures such as conservatives are advocating are little better than 21st century Hoovernomics. But I can imagine the conservative response--so when is a good time to cut this unsustainable spending binge? If not now, when? And they are right, these imaginary conservative interlocutors of mine. The answer will always be "later."
Progressives have erred in accepting so many conservative frames, and this is one of the biggies. It has become conventional wisdom that the federal government needs to slash spending--the only question is who will be affected. Liberals advocate soaking the rich. (Well, not really, but since I'm trying to imagine the conservative mind, let's just play along.) Conservatives know that their base does not like--if fact hates--this notion. Rich people, of course, don't like it, but neither do conservatives in general, and most of them are not rich. These conservatives do not vote their economic self-interest, as many--including Thomas Frank--have pointed out. For them, it is a moral issue. Taking money from those that have earned it, and giving it to those who are shiftless and lazy, is the major complaint--perhaps the only complaint--that conservatives really have against government. Progressives will never win any economic argument as long as this ideological framework is in place.
A huge majority of the country loved FDR and his big spending ways, because they saw directly how government spending affected their lives. Government spending defeated the Nazis and saved the world. Government spending provided electricity to the nation. Government spending helped young couples buy their first home, and helped send them all to college. In short, government spending created the post-war era that conservatives nostalgically pine for as the Golden Age of America. Minorities, however, were largely shut out of the golden age of governmental spending. Sure, they loved FDR too, for they were better off than before, but while white America was booming, their progress was slow and incremental. The civil rights movement and LBJ's Great Society aimed to fix this inequity, to open up the power of government spending to all Americans. And not so coincidentally, this is when more and more conservatives began to sour on government spending, when the idea began to take hold in the conservative mind that government spending doesn't help us any more. All it does is take money from our pockets and give it to Them. And that's not right.
Much is made of the Republican party being taken over by fundamentalist Christians, a phenomenon that began in the conservative backlash to post-war cultural changes and became manifest with Reagan's victory in 1980. But I believe that this bit of common sense has it backwards. Christians didn't take over the Republican Party--conservative ideology transformed Christianity. Al Franken's Supply-Side Jesus is funny because it's no joke. Conservative economic dogma is now central to Christian fundamentalist beliefs. The idea that the government is taking from the wealthy to help the undeserving poor mapped almost perfectly onto the central anxiety of the post-war era--the eternal struggle between Christian America and godless Communism. All of the ridiculous accusations of socialism, fascism, communism, and Marxism hurled against progressives (to the deep consternation of pedants like me who object not to the ideological frame being employed but to the muddling of language by using the terms interchangeably) stem from this post-war anxiety that our government is robbing from the rich and giving to the poor, which is communist, which is unchristian, and so must be opposed by good Christians.
I was born in the South in 1973, and grew up in a fundamentalist Christian household. I went to a private Christian school, as the public school I was zoned for was largely black. This school, of course, had not been so up until the late 60s, when desegregation finally began being enforced throughout the South. My parents never took me to a public park--I played on the swingset in my backyard, in friends' backyards, at my private school's playground, or at my all-white church's playground. I was never taken to a public pool--my grandparents had a pool, as did many friends. In short, I grew up in a world where public = black. I almost never encountered black people; not until high school did I have a black friend. For me, the South might as well have still been under Jim Crow. And this is what progressives are getting at when they accuse conservatives (often implicitly, sometimes directly) of being racist. These accusations are, of course, a terrible strategy. Individual conservatives are not racist (well, some of them are, but so are some progressives). But the current conservative economic dogma, the one that is doing so much damage to our politics right now, the one that has utterly transformed American Christianity, is built upon an ideology that took root before the vast majority of conservatives were even born. It is an ideology that renders invisible all of the governmental services that benefit the white and the wealthy, and obsesses over those services that benefit minorities and the poor. It is an ideology that has built a shadow world, a private world, and become more and more epistemically closed as time has passed.
This frame of government as Communist Robin Hood must be rejected if progressives ever hope to make substantial economic changes in this country. We must return to the understanding that created FDR's popularity, the understanding that government services are a piece of the puzzle (NOT the whole puzzle--hard work and good luck will always be important, and progressives neglect this at their own peril) that is American prosperity. The government is at its best when it curbs the excesses of capitalism (and we will always be arguing over how free the market should be--it is a good argument and should continue). The government is at its best when it provides services, such as health care, that would be immoral to turn over to the heartlessness of pure capitalism. But most importantly, we must return to the idea the government spending affects us all. Providing health care to the jobless helps them, but it helps me too, by driving down the insane costs of the current health care system. We must reject the notion that all government spending is bad, is immoral, because all government spending is redistributive. It is most certainly not. The federal government is certainly no utopia. It will always be filled with self-centered individuals, always be teetering on the brink of corruption. But unlike the private shadow system that conservatives have created, governmental corruption can be discovered, can be brought to the light and punished, and the corruptors voted out of office. This is why governmental services are superior to private services, and why government spending should increase--it's not that the government is more pure, or more moral, than private industries, but rather that the government is more directly accountable to the American people that they serve.
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