“Now back in 1927 an American socialist, Norman Thomas, six times candidate for president on the Socialist Party ticket, said the American people would never vote for socialism. But he said under the name of liberalism the American people will adopt every fragment of the socialist program.This speech has been used by folks on the right in the current healthcare debate to reject the current efforts at reform. The idea that "They're trying to do it to us again! Reagan warned us!" makes red staters cry with self-righteous rage. "They're trying to make us socialists! Fight them at every turn!"
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One of the traditional methods of imposing statism or socialism on a people has been by way of medicine. It’s very easy to disguise a medical program as a humanitarian project. Most people are a little reluctant to oppose anything that suggests medical care for people who possibly can't afford it.
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James Madison in 1788, speaking to the Virginia Convention said: “Since the general civilization of mankind, I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachment of those in power, than by violent and sudden usurpations.”
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In this country of ours, took place the greatest revolution that has ever taken place in world’s history. The only true revolution. Every other revolution simply exchanged one set of rulers for another. But here for the first time in all the thousands of years of man’s relation to man, a little group of the men, the founding fathers for the first time – established the idea that you and I had within ourselves the God given right and ability to determine our own destiny."
Here's my gloss on the subject, from Cambridge, Massachusetts, deep in Blue State Country: Reagan was absolutely right. And it's far too late.
The conundrum here is that a substantial number of Americans are frightened to death of the idea of their own 'freedom.' To them, if freedom means risk - to their standard of living, to their idea of justice, to the stability of their daily lives - they'd rather choose something else. Reagan's arguments resonate with those who aren't afraid, who are willing and eager to take on the responsibility and risk that comes along with the freedom he talks about. They sound scary as hell to everyone else.
Of course there's no shortage of demagogues who make a living out of encouraging that fear, and those folks get paid to find ways to reduce risk for their constituents. They've been telling people all their lives that "the risks of freedom are too high. We'll make them go away." And now almost everyone has come to benefit from those effects: their benefit checks, their tenure-based 3% standard of living increase, their government contracts, their prescription drug benefits, their mortgage deductions and their low interest rates so they can buy shiny things with borrowed money.
And here's the part that the red-staters don't want to talk about: the Republican party is just as guilty as the Democrats. Over the years, Republicans have been tempted by the same instinct that most Americans have for desiring a lower level of risk. Corporations have used them to protect profits and shield them from competition, seniors have convinced them to pass prescription drug benefits, and value voters have encouraged them to use laws to prohibit social practices like abortion. The mortgage deduction and unemployment insurance and the byzantine tax code, rigged to encourage certain practices over others, is all about using the government to reduce risk and guarantee comfort. Republicans, as well as Democrats, are told by their constituents to find ways to make business cycles go away, so the Federal Reserve is designed to 'smooth them out'. When the financial system melted down, the general consensus across the political spectrum was that the government should "do something" to reduce the dislocation that would result. All this encourages stability over freedom.
Human nature is such, folks. We're selfish creatures by default - both materially and emotionally. We like to be worry-free. Wanting material comfort is in our genes, and using what power we have to get ahead is a natural extension of that. Here in Massachusetts, I heard voters time and again say that they voted for the lionized Ted Kennedy for forty years because he brought back government largesse to the state. "He was good for Massachusetts," was the refrain. Around here, joining a union that fights to protect jobs at all costs, regardless of the consequences of the institution at stake, is a no-brainer. If you can pick up a low-intensity government job, or a police detail, or a disability pension, you're seen as lucky. You've "outsmahted the system."
Once we have something, we'll fight even harder to keep it. Preserving our own at the expense of the greater good is usually an easy decision. When the senate debate on the health care bill came to the floor this week, the first amendment the Republicans offered was one to protect the health care coverage of seniors. The social security system is unreformable because of the political fallout that would result from simply the *discussion* of a benefit reduction. In the health care debate, politicians soothingly promise that you won't lose anything you already have that you like - even if that thing could be replaced by something better. It's hard for most people to imagine things changing for the better, but everyone can easily imagine things changing for the worse.
Since World War II, America's unprecedented level of prosperity has made all this largesse possible. We could afford the handouts and the giveaways and the tax breaks and the bailouts because we had a powerful economic engine. People (both here and in the rest of the world) simply believed that we could grow our way out of our debts, and kept lending us the money we wanted.
The ugly truth that keeps this next part from being a cautionary fable is that we can probably keep doing that for a while. Maybe a long while. Past predictions about the free-rider carrying capacity of the American economy, and its eventual overload, have so far been overstated. For the rest of the world, America is still a far more transparent and stable and prosperous investment option than pretty much anywhere else on the planet. The risk-reduction sentiment is not confined to our country, of course. Every other country has significant constituencies lobbying for less risk and higher comfort every day, and large numbers of them have made their peace with this dynamic a long time ago: stability trumps freedom. Period.
Historically, too, the great scientific and political and economic upheavals of the 19th century made people yearn for a reduction of risk and a guarantee of material comfort. Communism, socialism, the union movement, "a chicken in every pot," national socialism, the Great Society, global warming - all are part of that trend. We've been doing this for centuries - pushing our governments to reduce risk and guarantee comfort as far as our systems will allow. When things get pushed too far things collapse, but we keep trying.
There is a great quote floating around that is relevant in this context:
"A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. [Emphasis added] From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse over loose fiscal policy..."
I originally thought this was written by a Greek philosopher, but turns out that it's a 1950s-era paraphrase of an 18th century Scottish philosopher's comment about Greek democracy. Great. But while this compromises its historical pedigree, it doesn't make it less true.
Americans have historically settled for a different balance of the freedom-stability dynamic - one that tolerates some negative outcomes as a tradeoff for greater aggregate prosperity. And this fact explains our continued ability to both vote ourselves funds from the treasury and remain economically afloat. The people who are not afraid of risk, who don't dream of ways of living a prosperous life on the government's largesse - those people are the ones who continue to drive our aggregate prosperity forward, and upon whom the rest of the system depends. Very Ayn Rand of me, I know, but there it is. There has been a strain of American culture that celebrates those who take risks and succeed - from J.D. Rockefeller to Bill Gates to the guy who started a successful car dealership on credit card debt. Most Americans don't begrudge the rich their gains - in fact want to emulate them - as long as those gains were honestly earned. This cultural dimension inspires new generations of risk-takers to keep coming, and as long as they do we'll keep trying to push our system to take care of everyone else.
The bottom line is that human nature and generations of leadership have created a society of people incapable of living in a free society. If one were imposed today by fiat, many would starve while they waited for someone to help them. Think Hurricane Katrina.
So when Reagan asks frightened Americans to reject incremental socialism, it's like suddenly asking a child who has been told there's a bogeyman under the bed his whole life to "grow up and act like an adult". He doesn't even know what that means. And the uncomfortable, Rand-ian truth is that our society is doing well enough that it can afford to carry a certain number of these folks without breaking down. How many? No one really knows.
It's too late, folks. Socialism is here - deeply embedded in the minds of the majority. It's comforting and it's safe and it has nothing to do with freedom.
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