Poll: Majority of Americans Willing to Throw Down in the Class War
Greg Sargent breaks down the new Pew Poll,
which apparently shows that a majority of Americans are more than
willing to throw down in the class war. It's quite inspiring when you
think about it. Seems that no matter how hard the 1% tried it can't
quite convince the people that they should put their own needs behind
those of the millionaire "jaaahb creators."
But
as Greg point out, this is not guarantee that the new populist rhetoric
from the president or the congressional Democrats will trump the bad
economy. After all, as Rick Perlstein noted in this article from a while back, modern liberalism, properly understood, is "freedom, plus groceries":
This beast we call “liberalism”—in its genus Americanus, at least—is a notoriously complicated animal. Its philosophy is rooted in the notion of human beings as autonomous agents. With the realization that formal autonomy meant little without the means to sustain a decent life, its practical definition in this century came to encompass the various kinds of government arrangements democratically devised to share the social burden. What we now mean by the word was summarized with unmatched elegance by Maury Maverick, the Texas congressman who led a caucus in the 1930s that tried to push the New Deal to the left. He called liberalism “freedom plus groceries.” As a definition, it cannot be improved upon—although scholars may prefer John Rawls’s formulation, that for justice to thrive the minimum worth of liberty must be maximized.
The groceries part, the different ways in which liberals devised to vouchsafe enough material resources for everyone (whatever the divergent conceptions of “enough”), makes for a complex history. I won’t get into the technicalities except to note the existence of the commitment as one of liberalism’s constants and to observe that such a commitment almost invariably requires a political imagination geared toward the long term.
Needless
to say, the freedom part is literally compromised by decisions to
legalize indefinite detention without trial, but for the purposes of
this discussion, it's the groceries that are causing the problem --- or
rather lack thereof. The Democrats are simply not responding to the
immediate concerns of a majority of Americans. Even health care, which
is a great anxiety producing issue, is still fraught with confusion
(although its early benefits are beginning to register a bit.) The more
immediate issues of a foreclosure fraud crisis and all the problems
associated with it, unemployment and job insecurity and massive numbers
falling into poverty while the wealthy pig out (and whine about it) is
what has people up in arms. They need government to deliver some
groceries and the government is instead putting them on a diet.
Conservatives
don't believe in delivering groceries, of course. When they aren't
stealing the milk money and handing it out to their rich friends to pay
back their donations, they're indifferent at best. It's liberals who are
supposed to deliver at times like this and instead of doing that they
are cutting deals to shrink the existing, tattered safety net in the
future in order to keep the economy from sinking further in the present.
(It's not all their fault, but being ineffectual doesn't rally the
troops.)
The populist rhetoric
is welcome, of course. At least it's beginning to reframe the argument
away from the destructive notion that government deficits caused the
economic crisis.(Unfortunately, there's still a lot of work to do on that.) But it's going to be very tough if Democrats keep compromising on the groceries.
We
still don't know what deal, if any, is going to emerge on the budget.
The Democrats have evidently given up entirely on the millionaire
surtax, which I indicated earlier isn't all that surprising. The question now is whether the Republicans will
be able to coerce them into accepting their odious cuts to pay for the
payroll tax cut and unemployment extensions. That's not delivering
groceries, it's eating your seed corn.
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