Freedom plus groceries
by digby
I was watching the Spitzer show on DVR this morning and guests were all talking about what fakers the Republicans are on deficit reduction. And it’s true. They care about destroying programs that benefit average people and cutting taxes. But if it were a choice between tax hikes and maintaining our global military empire and burgeoning police state, there is no doubt that they are very happy to deficit spend. It’s not debt they hate, it’s redistribution of wealth.
But these “they don’t care about the deficit” conversations are starting to worry me. It’s not that it isn’t true that the Republican Party doesn’t care about deficits. But when Democrats make the charge the implication is that they do. “We are the real deficit cutters, the responsible ones, the grown ups in the room who will ask for sacrifice,that everyone has skin in the game. If you agree that debt is the greatest problem we face, vote for us!” (Who needs conservatism?)
The Democrats did some heavy lifting at the beginning of the 90s and first helped George Bush Sr pass a deficit reduction bill which ushered in the era of Gingrich and then put their own careers on the line to raise taxes under Clinton. Then a tech boom hit, the economy soared and they ended up leaving a surplus for the Republicans to squander on tax cuts and wars the minute they got back into office. This is what happens when Democrats decide that the people will reward them for their mature, responsible commitment to shrink the debt above all other concerns. They do the heavy lifting and the conservatives sweep in and reap the rewards.
I’m reminded of Rick Perlstein’s piece of a few years back called “How can the Democrats win?”:
This beast we call “liberalism”—in its genus Americanus, at least—is a notoriously complicated animal. Its philosophy is rooted in the notion of human beings as autonomous agents. With the realization that formal autonomy meant little without the means to sustain a decent life, its practical definition in this century came to encompass the various kinds of government arrangements democratically devised to share the social burden. What we now mean by the word was summarized with unmatched elegance by Maury Maverick, the Texas congressman who led a caucus in the 1930s that tried to push the New Deal to the left. He called liberalism “freedom plus groceries.” As a definition, it cannot be improved upon—although scholars may prefer John Rawls’s formulation, that for justice to thrive the minimum worth of liberty must be maximized.
The groceries part, the different ways in which liberals devised to vouchsafe enough material resources for everyone (whatever the divergent conceptions of “enough”), makes for a complex history. I won’t get into the technicalities except to note the existence of the commitment as one of liberalism’s constants and to observe that such a commitment almost invariably requires a political imagination geared toward the long term.
Liberalism isn’t against balancing the budget, per se. But neither is that what it is supposed to care about over all other things. Indeed, it’s supposed to care about “freedom plus groceries” above all others. And even if it were assumed that in order to advance its true vision it must retire the debt first, recent history shows that the minute it does, the other side immediately raises it again. This is because railing against the debt is intrinsic to the promotion of the conservative agenda, which is to eliminate redistribution of wealth. Unless Republicans change their radical trajectory, the deficit Democrats are nothing but their cleaning ladies.
Debt can be crippling. But right now we are suffering from an epic economic slump and focusing on debt will make it worse. Money is cheap, growth is possible, reform is necessary. Playing into the Republicans’ hands by vying for the title of who can be the biggest deficit hawk at a time like this is not only bad policy it’s politically idiotic. Nothing works better for the long term victory of conservatism.
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