Guest Post by Morbo
Great political leaders are not afraid to call on the American people to sacrifice.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt could have told people over the radio, “You know, this Depression thing — don’t sweat it. We’ll get over it soon; don’t let it cramp your style.”
President John F. Kennedy could have told the American people, “Don’t bother asking what you can do for your country; your country doesn’t expect anything from you.”
They took another course. Roosevelt, during the Depression and later during World War II, and Kennedy at the start of the New Frontier laid out the challenges and told the people what to expect. Neither made it sound easy. Yet Americans responded and rose to the occasion.
I have to wonder if Americans today — even if they had a visionary leader worth following — could be successfully called to sacrifice again.
The question is kind of academic right now. The narrow and crabbed MBA worldview of President George W. Bush does not permit him to conceive of such a thing as “sacrifice.” A leader with vision, a leader capable of inspiring the people, could call for shared sacrifice and perhaps do great things — maybe even save Social Security. That’s not Bush.
Bush has spent five years encouraging Americans to be selfish and fantasy-prone. Why should anyone sacrifice for the greater good when the reigning ideology in Washington are the twin messages of “Just look out for yourself” and “Buy, buy, buy”? (What were we told to do after Sept. 11? Go buy something.)
Consider terminology. The very term “Social Security” conjures up the image of the greater society around you. It’s two simple words, but they convey a powerful message: We’re all in this together.
Contrast that to the Bush alternative: private accounts. What message does that send? It says, “You are on your own. Make the right choices, and you’ll live well in retirement. And the guy down the block who made bad choices? Not your concern.”
I got to thinking about this question of sacrifice after I read a forum in the June Harper’s titled “The Iceberg Cometh: Can a nation of spenders be saved?” that looks at the economic state of America.
One of the participants, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, repeats the points he has made often lately: Social Security’s problems are not massive and could be fixed with minor adjustments. Krugman points out that Medicare faces much more serious problems, but even these, he contends, can be overcome if we have the political will.
Krugman’s solution is politically unpopular but probably necessary: a combination of tax increases, benefit cuts and an overhaul of America’s health care system. Naturally, being Krugman, he would hit the rich with a stiffer tax increase than the middle class.
But after laying out his solution, Krugman concedes that the discussion is purely theoretical. “I agree that it’s not going to happen,” he says. “None of this is going to happen.”
Why not? Probably because the very idea of a tax increase paralyzes our political leaders with fear. Democrats know they would be tarred with the “tax and spend” label, and they are aware that Americans apparently fear that concept more than the Republican alternative: Spend like a drunken sailor and don’t tax.
Some would argue that my analysis is oversimplified. After all, President Bill Clinton raised taxes and survived. My answer to that is simple: 1994. That disastrous election, the fallout of which we are still feeling today, was brought about in part because the GOP was able to demagogue over taxes — even though the vast majority of Americans had not seen an increase.
I recall reading an article in The Times prior to that election where the “man on the street” vented his frustration over the Clinton tax hike. Most of these people, if not all of them, did not make enough to be affected by Clinton’s modest increase on the very wealthy. Yet they had heard over and over again from Newt Gingrich and his minions that “Clinton and the Democrats” had raised taxes. They were convinced it had happened.
When people are this out of it — to the extent that they are incapable of even looking at their pay stubs from week and week and seeing that there has been no change — we are in a near hopeless situation.
Can such a nation be called successfully to sacrifice? Can such a people be rallied for the public good? I fear that the cancer of extreme individualism, planted by President Ronald Reagan and nurtured by Bush I and now Bush II, has grown so much that it can no longer be excised from the body politic.
One of my other posts today deals with why so many people shop at Wal-Mart. I talked there about the real squeeze many middle-class Americans feel these days. Even given that squeeze, I’d like to think a courageous politician could talk about the need to give a little now for benefit later — mainly a secure retirement system.
But I’m not surprised no one has the guts to try. Why risk the cascade of anti-tax demagoguery issuing forth from the GOP and its imps in the right-wing media?
These days I wonder if even our most gifted progressive politicians, our most persuasive speakers, our most visionary leaders, could rouse a people who have spent the past 25 years being told they can have it all without paying for any of it.
If this is true, if we really have lost our national ability to sacrifice for the common good, we’ve lost more than Social Security and Medicaid. We’ve lost something vital to the American spirit. We’ve lost something that, in the past, made us a great and enviable nation.