The Great Recession: Some Niebuhrian Reflections

The paroxysms of economic pain through which the world has been suffering for the past four years offer any number of possible vectors for analysis—from economic theory, to public policy, to sociology, to international affairs. An examination of the economic crisis through any of these lenses would reveal a great deal both about how we’ve come to be here, and how we might (or might not) find our way out of it. The “Great Recession” is almost unique in modern political economics: a large-scale, catastrophic global economic meltdown, which may well persist for some time to come.¹

There have, of course, been other economic crises, recessions of greater or lesser duration, as well as global crises, such as the so-called “Asian Flu” of the mid-1990s, but the Great Recession has come to be so named because its impact has been unlike anything the world has experienced since the 1930s (see Krugman 2008; Reich 2010; Stiglitz 2010). And given the increasingly interconnected and codependent nature of the global economic system, the negative effects of this downturn are affecting a much greater proportion of the world’s population than the Great Depression. The reverberations continue, as we see in the ongoing European financial crisis; but the epicenter of the earthquake, in September of 2008, was the result of a conscious set of decisions and policies that led inexorably to a wide-scale economic meltdown. And the singular characteristic of that set of decisions and policies was the belief that economics had surpassed the realm of the merely human, to become a transcendent mode of thought, capable of near-omniscience regarding human actions and their consequences—Issac Asimov’s “psychohistory” come to life, and given breath at Princeton and the University of Chicago.²

This moment of economic crisis has intersected with another moment, one of renewed interest in the thought of Reinhold Niebuhr. Niebuhr’s wide-ranging intellectual curiosity touched frequently on questions of ethics and economics, particularly during the period of his own economic crisis in the wake of the 1929 stock market crash. Niebuhr’s insights during that period, which formed the core of what came to be known as his “Christian realist” approach to issues of Christianity and public morality, have something to say to us as we grapple with the questions of justice, economics, and social reform in the wake of the 2008 collapse.

A Tale of Two Protests

In the aftermath of the economic crisis, and in response to its ongoing depredations, two mass movements (each boasting greater or lesser degrees of authenticity) have emerged on the American stage. The first, dubbed the “Tea Party” movement, emerged as a reaction to policies pursued by both the Bush and Obama administrations to solve the financial crisis—in particular, by offering relief to the banking and mortgage industries. Strongly libertarian in its ideological motivation, and often rooted in a particular vision of small government, states’ rights, and nationalism, this movement directed its hostility primarily toward the Obama administration, seeing in many of its policies the roots of an incipient totalitarianism.³

At root, the Tea Party’s ideology is a reaction to what it sees as an overreaching federal government, which is believed to have caused the financial crisis of 2008 by coddling irresponsible and unreliable home buyers on the one hand and subsidizing a venal and corrupt culture of Wall Street traders on the other (see Berlet 2011). There is a vital streak of middle-class resentment that runs through the Tea Party movement, which sees itself as representing “ordinary” Americans who work hard, pay their debts, and don’t ask for government handouts.⁴ Demographically, it is predominantly white, male, and older (Ashbee 2011, 159–60). From the perspective of its adherents, the financial crisis was the result of government redistribution of wealth to the underserving, either in the form of social services and subsidies for the poor or in the form of bailouts to the financial industry (158). Additionally, there is a strong theme of personal antipathy toward Barack Obama and doubt about the...