ATTACKS ON A VENERABLE AGREEMENT

In this last posting for 2012, I would like to make a quick comment on the fiscal cliff. As I write these words, the President and Congress are trying to hammer out a compromise to avoid the cliff. Of all the “disastrous” outcomes resulting from going over this cliff, I believe the elimination of unemployment benefits for the long term unemployed is the worst. This is unconscionable. Beyond its immorality is the fact that it adds to the narrative many have been speaking and writing about; i. e., that the one percent has created a social system that has abandoned what long had been the tacit agreement between the economic classes. That agreement was that the rich were permitted to do those things necessary to create their wealth in exchange for an economy that provided the jobs and income that allowed a middle class to be established and maintained. The deal also included opportunities that if pursued through education, hard work, and yes, some luck, would provide some entry into the upper income class. While I don't believe this agreement has been totally abandoned, it has come under severe challenges.

Joseph E. Stiglitz¹ argues that in the past recent decades, this deal has eroded away and a new agreement has taken its place. Let me apply the perspective I have been developing in this blog to what Stiglitz highlights. What I see is that after World War II, through the fifties, sixties, and into the seventies, the weakening perspective of federalism finally lost a hold over our ideal visions of what governance and politics should be. In its place, we have had the ascendance of what I have been calling the natural rights construct (or the classical liberal view, as it is known in philosophical circles). There are those among us, like those who are known as libertarians, who even radicalize its tenets. This view, through the years, had become more and more popular. Finally, those most enamored by its message of liberty were rewarded by the election of its most noted standard bearer, the trans-formative president – Ronald Reagan. And with his election, Reagan and his Reagan Republicans have been able to implement their preferences in many areas of public policy. For example, labor unions, that have played such an essential role in creating the middle class among the working class, have been the target of anti-union policies – the latest being experienced in Wisconsin and Michigan.

The work of the natural rights advocates has not been a small project. For one thing, they have to undo the mountain of public policy we generally call the New Deal. This was the plethora of programs and benefits the federal government put in place to meet the challenges of the Great Depression. I always taught my students a way to get a handle on all these specific policy initiatives was to think of three Rs: Relief, Recovery, and Reform. Not original with me, this handle categorizes the three major aims of the New Deal: address the human needs of those who were in dire distress due to the severity of the depression, get the economy turned around and headed towards prosperity, and put into place those programs and regulations that would, at least in theory, prevent a recurrence of another depression.

But all of this – and it was not accomplished without a lot of opposition from the conservatives of the time – could not have been done without an underlying understanding among the citizenry that this nation was one based on a congregational commitment. This commitment placed a mutual responsibility on the shoulders of each citizen for the welfare of every other citizen. The reforms of the New Deal were based on the realization that the older vision of this mutual responsibility was no longer viable. That vision primarily placed responsibilities on private charities and religious organizations. With the rise of the corporation which revolutionized our whole economic structure, the nation could no longer rely on such private agents that mostly operated in the context of a rural society. By the 1930s, our urban based labor class needed government to respond to an emergency such as the Great Depression. And so the New Deal was instituted and, by and large, we still live under its protection.

But today, too many of us have obliterated this conception of mutually responsible citizenry. Slowly but surely, without such a strong sense for the commitment, many of the elements of the New Deal have been scaled back or are under attack. Even the most cherished programs, such as Social Security, have been threatened by formal proposals from those who most ardently voice the principles of the natural rights construct. And I will end this year by stating as simply as I can, that civics education with its adoption of the natural rights perspective as its main guide toward determining its content, has helped enable these attempts to transform our basic and historically honored agreement.

1Stiglitz, J. E. (2012). The price of inequality: How today's divided society endangers our future. New York, NY: W. W. Norton and Company.