Testing the National Covenant: Fears and Appetites in American Politics

Chapter 2: THE OVERREACH OF FREE MARKET IDEOLOGY: Business and Government

27 2 THE OVERREACH OF FREE MARKET IDEOLOGY Business and Government The presidential election of 2004 troubled the nation more than most elections in living memory. The reaction went deeper than battles between Democrats and Republicans on particular issues. Policy differences reflected a far deeper struggle over identity—just who we are as a nation. Politically the right attempted to redefine America. President George W. Bush’s re-election, even though it was by a small majority of voters, tended to endorse this redefinition in the eyes of the world and to make it less reversible than his apparently accidental election by a five-to-four vote of the Supreme Court in 2000. In foreign affairs this alteration in identity cast the nation in a role resembling that of imperial Rome.Whereas the founders of the country modeled America after Athens and republican Rome, the template under Bush bore an imperial stamp.A unilateralist foreign policy signaled a country that no longer perceived itself to be a republic but saw itself as the ruling power in a monopolar world. Similarly, the country seemed engaged domestically in producing a two-class society that resembled the imperial city. As its first order of business, no matter what the circumstances, the Bush administration supported tax cuts for the wealthy and for corporate America: tax cuts before 9/11 and after 9/11; tax cuts before and after the invasion of Iraq; tax cuts during budget surpluses but also during budget deficits; tax cuts during America’s huge shift from a manufacturing economy to a service economy and also during mounting trade deficits; and sadly enough, tax cuts for the wealthy, unaccompanied by other remedies, following the crash of 2008. Budget and trade deficits across the decade bankrolled consumer spending rather than investing in more competitive products and technologies. They also blocked those investments in infrastructure on which a robust future for a society depends. Cumulatively, government policies helped create a permanent underclass—not the temporary underclass of newly arrived immigrants , but a permanent class of those who serve the highly placed but who do not adequately participate in the fundamental goods that a civilization offers. The deterioration of neighborhoods in the inner cities, the decline of elemental safety—never mind education—in the public schools, the burgeoning of jail populations to the point that the country had the highest percentage of incarcerated citizens of any nation in the industrialized world, the great strains on the family, the general slackening of discipline that a consumer- and mediadriven society relentlessly encourages, and the huge transfer of wealth in almost twenty-five years between 1977 and 1999 (during which the upper 1 percent of Americans more than doubled their share of all income and the lowest 20 percent suffered an actual decline)—all these changes signaled a civilization at risk.1 About 20 percent of American children lived in officially calculated (and therefore underestimated) poverty.2 More than forty- five million Americans had no health care insurance; far more than twenty million were underinsured. About 80 percent of Americans without health care coverage were the working poor, whose children attended schools that were vastly overcrowded and underfunded , giving them little access to those skills that might help them negotiate life in an information age. Social critics have worried about the eventual turmoil in store for a country that has created a permanent underclass or “internal proletariat.” In his Study of History Arnold Toynbee defined an internal proletariat as a large body of people who are in a society but not of it, because they do not participate adequately in the society’s benefits.3 Measured by that standard, the wealthiest nation the 28 Chapter 2 world has ever seen has been industriously preparing the way for the fulfillment of Toynbee’s prophecy that most “high civilizations” die not by the weapons of outsiders but eventually by their own hands. They die by suicide, not by murder. That may well be. But the threat from the underclass does not yet pose the chief internal danger to good public order in the United States. In the late 1990s Barbara Ehrenreich spent some time in different locales in the East and Midwest working as a waitress , hotel maid, housecleaner, nursing home aid, and Walmart salesperson. She settled in the cheapest digs possible and tried to live on the...