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Staving
Off Trickle-down Barbarism
May 2,
2001
by Paul Ryan
The marketing professionals in the Bush administration have
been less than forthright in selling their tax cut. The benefits
would accrue to the wealthiest smidgen of the population and
would do much less to stimulate the economy than the household
rebate proposed by Democrats. It will radically reduce our
fiscal wiggle-room and probably lead to a 1980s-style transfer
of wealth from taxpayers to bond-holders; in other words,
shift valuable resources from the American majority to a distinctly
Republican constituency. Like much of what we have seen from
this new administration, the tax cut appears to be based more
upon paying-off benefactors than on sound public policy.
Republicans argue that progressive tax rates are unfair.
But what about taxes that are actually regressive?
Sales taxes, payroll taxes, utility surcharges, user fees,
even fines like traffic tickets, take a larger--often much
larger--relative bite out of the earnings of working- and
middle-class families. The progressive income tax is not a
way of sticking rich folks with the bill; it is a way of flattening
the overall costs of the public sector. The idea, advanced
by the Bushies, that affluent families are disproportionately
taxed is untrue. In fact, it is another symptom of our country's
moral decline.
This is America, for crying out loud. No one begrudges wealthy
households their honestly-earned dollars. Compared to other
advanced nations, rich people get a pretty good deal here.
And, when push comes to shove, America will send her sons,
poor and rich alike, as she has done in the past, to defend
their lives, property, and sacred fortunes. But a country
cannot simply be an economy. The United States is not--or
ought not be--an enterprise zone in the Western Hemisphere.
It is a national community, with a shared heritage and common
values. The Federal government is the incarnation of that
community, the living embodiment of the American people--in
Lincoln's formulation, “government of the people, by the people,
and for the people.” To pretend that "the people"
are one thing and "the government" is another shamelessly
disregards the very premise of the American experiment. Limited
government, to be sure. Liberty, or at least the ordered freedom
that confers dignity to our lives, certainly. But this nation
is governed with the consent of the governed. When
rabble-rousers seek to gain political advantage by turning
the people against their government, by arguing that the people’s
government is some kind of monstrous beast, we must observe
that they are abusing sacred principles, and indeed, acting
like juveniles. Adult citizens treat duly constituted public
institutions as an extension of their citizenship. Less mature
citizens view these institutions as a child would a parent,
whether for good or for ill.
Nor does it violate the precepts of limited government to
deploy the public sector in softening the jagged edges of
the marketplace. Markets are efficient, but they are also
heartless. It is not “dependency” but the recognition that
our country--like all countries--draws its posterity, its
very decency, from its civic nature. Our shared duty
is to make sure that the tender blossom of civilization is
protected and nourished. If that means, among other things,
"high taxes", then, as Oliver Holmes noted, that
is a price to pay for living as civilized people. There is
no reason to expect that civilization may be obtained on the
cheap. Nothing in human history confirms that.
Our Republican countrymen are certainly patriots--one cannot
doubt that. And they are religious as well. When President
Bush was candidate Bush, he even went so far as to claim that
Jesus Christ was his favorite "political philosopher."
Many snickered over that, but in fact, Jesus did have a political
philosophy. He was much more communitarian than libertarian--he
probably would not have much use for American-style triumphalism
or prosperity theology--and in any event, his approach to
the body politic was oriented around a distinction between
God's Kingdom and Mammon. He maintained that one could not
serve both, that one must choose. In his words, "no
servant can be slave to two masters: he will either hate the
first and love the second or treat the first with respect
and the second with scorn." The fatal flaw in contemporary
Republican doctrine is their willingness to turn over our
country to mere business interests. All the traditionalism
and conservative principles and best moral intentions in the
world will get swamped--overrun--when consumerism drives the
culture. In their adoration of the markets--which prudently
constrained, do have a place in modern society--Republicans
unwittingly choose Mammon, the exact opposite of the civic
vision enunciated by Jesus.
These advocates of a flatter income tax should remember Lester
Thurow's distinction between an establishment and an oligarchy.
Every country has an elite--not just a "cultural elite,"
as the right-wingers claim, but the practical movers-and-shakers
of the nation. In itself, that is not a bad thing. Human beings,
contrary to leftish doctrine, are not equal. As John Adams
said, there is greater variation between man and man than
there is between man and beast. Elites are probably in the
natural order of things. And in any case, their children go
to the finest schools, know the most powerful people, have
the best opportunities. Whether an elite is an establishment,
which our country had as recently the mid-20th century, or
just an oligarchy, which the American elite arguably is now,
they are better connected than you or me. It is not a grand
conspiracy. National elites does not move in concert--at least,
not consciously. They are simply the demographic within the
general population that supplies the country with its economic
leadership.
Elites set the tone, but they are not the same. An establishment
family recognizes that privilege carries responsibilities.
I forget if it was GW's favorite political philosopher, or
one of his apostles, who said that much is expected of him
who is given much. Oligarchs, on the other hand, seek further
aggrandizement of family privileges. One links the nation's
success to their own success. The other cares only--when reduced
to brass knuckles--for their own enrichment. If our country
seems more savage than it was two or three generations ago,
it is at least partly due to the fact that our elite families
are acting less and less as though they have a stake in our
common destiny. Not to overstate the case, the Bush family
itself is an interesting microcosm of this transition from
establishment to oligarchy. The President is certainly genial
and well-mannered, but one suspects that--notwithstanding
all the posturing to the contrary--he is not an especially
honorable person. Among an establishment, and for that matter,
among the Bushes of prior generations, honor was holy currency.
Now it is a rhetorical device, a bludgeon used to curry
cheap political leverage with the people.
Our elite has grown increasingly barbaric. The Bush tax plan
only reinforces this barbaric behavior. Unfortunately for
the broader society, and no less than tax cuts themselves,
barbarism has a trickle-down effect. TS Eliot wrote: "A
church for all, a job for each; every man to his work."
We have different stations in life, but we all share in
this precious flower called civilization. Our liberal compatriots
sometimes imagine that civilized society is the given--it
is not. The benefits conferred by civilization take many generations
to acquire and only a few to destroy. It is the delicate fabric
that makes our humanity valuable, indeed, that makes life
worth living, and it can be easily lost. Bush's selfish
and oligarchic tax cut leads to the forlorn observation that
where one finds barbarians in the country clubs, one should
not be surprised to find savages in the streets.
At the same time, the current situation is filled with opportunities
for the Democratic party. The silent majority is at last on
our side. The rancorous minority is over on the right, almost
the mirror opposite of the situation when President Nixon
coined the term a generation ago. In those days, the loud
minority was to the left and the great American majority was
center-right. The election in 2000 proved that the electorate,
much less the larger public, in now center-left. Gore and
Nader received a majority between them, running issue-driven
campaigns. A fair percentage of Bush supporters, in contrast,
voted for him, not because of his conservative views, but
because they bought the "character" argument and
decided that being "dumb" was less of a character
flaw than being a "liar." One cannot fault them
for that decision. It was based upon correct moral prioritization.
The fact that this kind of distinction between Bush and
Gore was a part of the political conversation--which, however
untrue, benefited the Republicans far more than the Democrats--is
a failure of Democratic party operatives, not the American
people. Bush is not stupid. Gore is not a liar. But lying
is evil and being dumb is not. Here is a fact you can take
to the bank: it is better to be the stupid party than the
evil party.
We Americans are less libertarian than commonly believed.
Yes, there is a libertarian streak to our approach, but
it is more a secondary characteristic than an overarching
one. We subscribe to the principle of maximum liberty coextensive
with the liberty of others, not the principle of maximum liberty
as such. And even then we have reservations. We are pluralist,
not multiculturalist. We have a tolerant, live-and-let-live
view of life, and yet we take ourselves seriously, sometimes
to the point of narcissism. We are good-humored and informal.
We are family-oriented. We are spiritual people. We yearn
for love and belonging. Bill Bradley was precisely right when
he pointed out that there is an aching loneliness spread out
across our land. This beautiful country, this land of plenty,
is the world's living exhibit of the time-worn truths that
happiness cannot be bought, that value and meaning are shared
experiences, that communities are comprised of families, not
individuals, and that human individuality is relative, not
absolute. Our country's civic life is ripe for re-socialization,
and the mechanism for that re-socialization is the Democratic
party.
Where is the center of the American electorate? In many
respects the great American middle is to the left of Left
and the right of Right on the political spectrum. Taken as
a whole, Americans are fiscally liberal and socially conservative.
If one remembers properly, Clinton was elected in 1992 upon
that platform (although it was not identified as such). It
is ironic, and noteworthy, that the "centrist" politicians
of our era are the exact reverse: culturally liberal and economically
conservative. How like us Boomers, this morally-earnest generation
of Americans, to get it bass ackwards!
Still, the moment for gaining a permanent advantage on the
GOP is at hand. We are on the threshold of an unbridled Democratic
majority, not unlike the Republican majority that "emerged"
in the late 1960s. But it will only be achieved if Democrats
can bring themselves to honor the hard-won wisdom of the ages,
to hold dear the institutions and civic-virtues that flow
from our heritage; in short, by embracing a form of cultural
conservatism. It ought not be hard to do. Like the better
angels of our nature, it is right and good to cherish the
civilizing nature of our moral traditions. Not the overly
stringent ones, nor the overly lax ones. Both stringent morality
and lax morality is the stuff of barbarians. We are not barbarous.
Civilized people find in their moral traditions the middle
way, a "golden mean" between laxity and stringency
that shapes the trunk of the tree of civilization. Our branch
of that tree, the American branch, will only be preserved
if we, the humane and the just, take ownership of our classical
heritage. And that won't happen as long as the GOP
claims "market-share" over the hearts of social
conservatives.
The Bush tax cut, and the less-than-honest means by which
it is being foisted on the people, illustrates the stakes
involved. The Republicans are basically about turning the
country over to fundamentally rapacious and amoral commercial
forces. While there are fine people in that party, our good
and decent friends, the private profit approach to public
policy makes them, however unintentionally, the party of Mammon,
of money, of consumerism. That opens the door for Democrats
to be the party of citizenship, the party of the higher values.
Let them be the party of business--we should be the party
of the American household. They shall always have more cash,
but as long as we are faithful to the nation, our truths will
find the majority. After all, as a great Republican once said,
"you can only fool some of the people all the
time.."
It is in the area of values, of moral principle, that we
must meet the Republicans head-on. Here is where they have
slaughtered us and here is where we can push them to the periphery.
The Clinton years revealed a distasteful Republican propensity
for being affronted at the moral transgressions of non-Republicans.
It was largely an opportunistic moral outrage, an outrage
that strained at the gnats of one's enemies while swallowing
the camels of one's friends. It was too often, and quite simply,
the morality of intrusive blowhards. While character assassination
is an effective short-term strategy, demoralizing Democrats
while animating their own ranks, it is human nature to get
sick of those who rarely trespass, but are relentlessly trespassed
upon. Americans are basically waiting for the Democrats to
smoke the Republicans out on this issue. Alas for Democrats,
it requires a willingness to accept the moral terms of political
discourse. (I might add that had Democrats been a little less
Machiavellian and a little more morally engaged, we might
be in the White House now. Moral principle, which respects
the power of the Presidency enough to hold a solemn regard
for the consent of the governed, seeks to recount the votes
in all states within the margin of error: New Mexico,
Iowa, Wisconsin, New Hampshire, Oregon, in addition to Florida.
Amoral jockeying seeks to change the "dynamic" by
recounting the undervotes in four chiefly Democratic counties.)
Moral terms of discussion should not frighten Democrats.
Morality grows out of our interpersonal lives, our nature
as high social creatures. Many cultural conservatives claim
that the moral erosion our country has experienced over the
past several decades is a function of “moral relativism.”
Those old moral “absolutes,” they say, have been supplanted
by the “feel-good” values of today. That may be true as far
as it goes, but it is rather a distinction without a difference.
If moral absolutes are unsubstantiated assertions, or conversely,
legalistic nonsense, and relative morality contains sharp,
clear lines--albeit at 99% rather than 100%--who cares how
it is branded? Rather, moral decline in our country stems
from the fraying of our common moral perspective.
More on that shortly. For now, we may reiterate that moral
regulation is derived from our collective being. We live among
other people, often many other people. Robinson Caruso
is not compelled to behave in a moral way. We are.
What is more, moral imperatives tend to be more relevant the
more crowded the population. City dwellers often have a better
feel for moral interchange than rural folk, if only through
their greater contact with the panorama of characters comprising
the moral drama; that is, through their more numerous encounters
with the human condition, or even simply the American condition.
Rural people may have more integrity than their urban counterparts,
having been less exposed to the temptations and vices of the
big city, but they are perhaps less morally insightful. Our
system, as the last election painfully demonstrated, is structured
to give rural Americans a disproportionate voice in the body
politic. That is unjust, because an election is an act of
judgment, and even if we concede the superior virtue of our
rural countrymen, there is scant evidence of their superior
ability to judge virtue. On the contrary, the natural
Democratic constituency is better positioned to employ moral
considerations in its voting decisions. It is the Democrats
who benefit when political dialog becomes moralized. Indeed,
Democrats have the responsibility to outline for Americans
the moral thrust of political issues.
Republicans like to guffaw that a conservative is a liberal
who has been mugged. Tom Wolfe answered, in "Bonfire
of the Vanities," that a liberal is a conservative who
has been arrested. Reality itself is the delimiter of right-wing
morality. As long as people have a friend who is gay, a cousin
who could not shake his addiction to street drugs, a child
who made a bad choice or two, much less an ability to honestly
evaluate their own behavior, the either/or nature of Republican
moral reasoning will smell false. Our conservative countrymen
certainly gain clarity with their dualistic moralizing and,
to an extent, clarity helps sell their agenda. Republicans
like Rush Limbaugh and Dr. Laura and the host of other right-wing
pundits are attractive precisely because they distill complex
moral realities down to simple dichotomies. It is with reason,
I suppose, that we fell from Eden when we ate from the tree
of good and evil knowledge. Unfortunately for these commentators,
folks with a little experience under their belt understand
that the conflict between good and evil is ambiguous, often
confusing, and very often ironic. When people who reduce moral
shades of gray to clear-cut whites and blacks discover good
things labeled "evil" and evil things labeled "good,"
it is not “immorality,” nor even the complexity and nuance
of moral life, that creates these juxtapositions. Rather,
it is their own laziness, their own slovenly moral habits.
In a word, they prefer clarity to truth. It is only too bad
that the rest of us must endure the social--or more correctly,
the anti-social--consequences of that slothful thinking.
Talk radio is a pretty reasonable indicator of the state
of conservatism in this country. It creates the illusion of
a marketplace of ideas, when in fact, it is merely a marketplace.
The truth is that conservative talk radio is all about the
host : letting voices speak, turning them down, cutting
them off, interjecting a summarizing opinion, breaking endlessly
to sell more crap. What appears to be the free exchange of
ideas is in fact rank authoritarianism. On a certain level,
most individuals realize that their souls are not being edified
by the stark nonsense emanating from the Republican right.
On another, they hear the moral language that all souls crave.
It almost does not matter that the content is slovenly and
egotistical. The very fact that it is the language
of the ages makes it resonate in the souls of men.
It is an untruth of liberalism, classically understood, that
the law and the market are all that is needed to maintain
the secular order. The order in any community, secular or
otherwise, also requires a shared sense of equity. The events
of Florida in the last election illustrate how much we have
depleted our communitarian stock—these common moral resources.
Counting votes to determine who really won an election is
a simple enough task, not much more complicated than setting
up rules for a sandlot football game (do kids play schoolyard
games any more? or have those been trumped by Organized Youth
Sports?). The fact that the media and a significant fraction
of the public bought the idea that hand-counts are inherently
flawed says as much about the erosion of our interpersonal
capacities as the venality of those advancing that argument.
In any event, it is clear that, other than the courts, which
are themselves contemptibly hegemonic, Americans do not have
a basis for resolving moral quandaries. In fact, when it comes
to morality, we barely speak the same language. Alasdair MacIntyre
warns us that when morality becomes a matter of emotional
assertion and counter-assertion, when passion, and not critical
rationality, endow moral principles with legitimacy, when
there is nothing like the church, or some other communitarian
framework, built up over the generations, and essentially
pre-legal and pre-economic in nature, to adjudicate moral
disputes, to resolve the questions of what is right and what
is wrong, the descent into barbarism is complete. Our accepted
moral wisdom--the stock of moral truths we collectively trust
because they are derived from our moral struggles through
the centuries--only illustrate where our country is relative
to other civilized nations. The absence of this common faith
removes us from the civilized portion of humanity altogether
and rather unceremoniously dumps us among the savages.
I am not unaware that my language may strike some Democrats
as offensive. I frankly do not care--or rather, I do care,
but only because I, like any good communitarian, yearn for
the approval of other people. I do not care that some
Democrats, like some Republicans, are readily victimized by
the moral shortcomings of others. That is exactly the attitude
which must be overcome if any type of American reconciliation
is to take place. Just as there are pro-choice Republicans,
there are--or at least, should be--pro-life Democrats. If
there were still such animals as liberal Republicans, I might
be one. Unfortunately, they are a vanished breed, and our
country is worse for it, but we Catholics may still cling
to the age-old trinity of American Catholicism: family, church,
and the Democratic party. That party--our party--is America's
last, best hope. Pockets of civilization will survive regardless
of what happens to America, but if our nation is to
remain civilized, it will only come through a morally re-invigorated
Democratic party.
The stakes over the next few years are very high. The task
of preserving our civilization, let alone building it, is
a daunting one. The GOP has no contemporary track record when
it comes to humane treatment of the orphan and the widow,
the poor and the imprisoned. Since they are running the show
now, we may anticipate protracted efforts to appeal to the
baser instincts of the population, while channeling scarce
public resources towards the enrichment of business owners
and creditors. That is bad news. The Bush tax cuts are an
example of the socially destructive forces that we Democrats
must stave off, and continue staving off, for the sake of
our country.
In terms of our moral capacities as a people, as Americans,
Florida seemed to indicate that we have lost the ability to
simultaneously compete and cooperate, at least in the manner
required by the daily interaction of civilized human beings.
It is an egregious loss, and in historical terms, a recent
one. It is egregious because an order of civilization requires
nothing other than striving for human excellence while
retaining a measure of equity. Without that golden balance,
without a celebration of achievement within the shared sense
of fairness, civilized society is simply impossible. And it
is recent because other generations of Americans would have
laughed--simply scoffed--at the notion that something like
a hand count of votes was beyond our capacity to organize
in incorrupt manner.
It is our turn, as Democrats, to create a "big tent"--not
in the sense of "diversity" and all those other
tiresome phrases that lack moral authority, or even much resonance,
but in the sense of articulating a cultural and fiscal agenda
that is rooted in the better part of our moral heritage. The
bigness of our tent must rise from the magnificence
of our souls, e pluribus magnificence, to be sure, but which
affirms, above all, unum. Creating this big tent is our duty
during this season in the wilderness. If we do it properly,
the public backlash against the loudly self-insistent and
frequently nutty voices on the right will be so immense that
they shall be effectively silenced for a generation. In terms
of our posterity, in terms of American civilization itself,
that can only be to the Good.
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