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| William Graham Sumner (1840-1910) |
On my errand to Chapel Hill yesterday, I stopped at a coffee shop and was lucky to find a copy of last Thursday’s Carrboro Citizen. I read it over a cup of coffee and a bowl of granola. Admittedly, the weekly Citizen reflects the liberal community of Carrboro and Chapel Hill, and I don’t apologize for that.
The issue’s featured opinion piece was “The Ryan choice,” by Robert Reich (published on August 11 on his own website). Reich was Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration. He’s now a professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley, the city of my birth.
If you would like to learn more about perhaps the central issue facing us all in the upcoming presidential election, I highly recommend “The Ryan choice” to you, if you haven’t already seen it. Some excerpts from the article:
Ryan is not a firebrand. He’s not smarmy. He doesn’t ooze contempt for opponents or ridicule those who disagree with him. In style and tone, he doesn’t even sound like an ideologue—until you listen to what he has to say.
It’s here—in Ryan’s views and policy judgments—we find the true ideologue. More than any other politician today, Paul Ryan exemplifies the social Darwinism at the core of today’s Republican Party: Reward the rich, penalize the poor, let everyone else fend for themselves. Dog eat dog….
Ryan’s views are pure social Darwinism. As William Graham Sumner, the progenitor of social Darwinism in America, put it in the 1880s: “Civilization has a simple choice.” It’s either “liberty, inequality, survival of the fittest” or “not-liberty, equality, survival of the unfittest. The former carries society forward and favors all its best members; the latter carries society downwards and favors all its worst members.”
Is this Mitt Romney’s view as well?
…
Romney hasn’t put out much but the budget he’s proposed would, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, throw ten million low-income people off the benefits rolls for food stamps or cut benefits by thousands of dollars a year, or both.
At the same time, Romney wants to permanently extend the Bush tax cuts to the wealthy, reduce corporate income taxes, and eliminate the estate tax. These tax reductions would increase the incomes of people earning more than $1 million a year by an average of $295,874 annually, according to the non-partisan Tax Policy Center.
…
Social Darwinism offered a moral justification for the wild inequities and social cruelties of the late nineteenth century. It allowed John D. Rockefeller, for example, to claim the fortune he accumulated through his giant Standard Oil Trust was “merely a survival of the fittest… the working out of a law of nature and of God.”
The social Darwinism of that era also undermined all efforts to build a more broadly based prosperity and rescue our democracy from the tight grip of a very few at the top. It was used by the privileged and powerful to convince everyone else that government shouldn’t do much of anything.
…
By choosing Ryan, Romney has raised for the nation the starkest of choices: Do we want to return to that earlier time, or are we willing and able to move forward—toward a democracy and an economy that works for us all?
Ryan’s views are crystallized in the budget he produced for House Republicans last March as chairman of the House Budget committee. That budget would cut $3.3 trillion from low-income programs over the next decade. The biggest cuts would be in Medicaid, which provides healthcare for the nation’s poor—forcing states to drop coverage for an estimated 14 million to 28 million low-income people, according to the non-partisan Center for Budget and Policy Priorities.
Ryan’s budget would also reduce food stamps for poor families by 17 percent ($135 billion) over the decade, leading to a significant increase in hunger—particularly among children. It would also reduce housing assistance, job training, and Pell grants for college tuition….
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* From wordorigins.org:
The phrase dog eat dog is a reference to ruthless competition. It is a translation of the Latin proverb, canis caninam non est, dog will not eat dog. English use of the phrase dates to the late 18th century.
The Ryan choice does indeed raise uneasy questions. Would Romney as president be a Ryan amplifier, a conduit for Ryan's noxious ideas? Or would he be a Ryan moderator, a president with ideas of his own that moderate some of Ryan's cruelty? The latter doesn't seem very likely: when has Romney ever impressed anyone as a man of convictions? One thing is sure. Ryan was chosen to strengthen Romney's conservative base, and that base won't rest easy if they see Ryan relegated to a mere showcase. And Romney knows it.
ReplyDeleteKen, all I can add to your questions about the potential influence of Ryan and Romney on each other is to ask: What difference does it really make?
ReplyDeleteEven though we are in the last year of the Barack Obama's first, and possibly last, term, and George W. Bush long since left Pennsylvania Avenue, questions still linger over how Florida put Bush in the White House in the first place, and how Ohio gave him a second term. While roughly half the people in the U.S.were wringing their hands and spouting rhetoric about his questionable victories and subsequent actions, Bush was presiding over what was either the greatest transfer of wealth in history, or the largest in the U.S. since the Civil War, depending on which media sources you believe. And he was doing it with the outspoken support of the other half of the people in the U.S., even if only the elite one percent of them were actually benefiting from his economic doctrine.
So if Romney wins, questionably or not, and imposes his budget, what does anyone actually do about it?
To your point Moristotle, if Romney wins and imposes Ryan's budget plan, and if a side effect of that is people begin starving to death, what does anyone actually do about that? Seriously, do half the people in the country again sit around wringing their hands and pontificating, often over $5 lattes at their favorite coffee shops or dinner at their preferred high-end restaurants, while the less fortunate starve to death? Do people talk and talk while the fictional movie "The Hunger Games" takes several steps toward becoming a documentary, or do they actually do something?
It is interesting to ponder what the founding fathers would recommend in this situation, considering the steps they took to bring this country to life in the first place.
Motomynd, perhaps the real difference the possibility of a Romney-Ryan victory makes is to motivate you and me and others in North Carolina to get out and do what we can to help ensure that Obama wins North Carolina's electoral votes?
DeleteAs to what to do if Romney & Ryan win (and not only North Carolina but enough other states' electoral votes to gain the White House), it might be time for you and me (and Ken) to march on Washington?
If R&R win, the economic misery that we're enduring now will look like a garden party in retrospect. By 2014, people will begin counting the days till the next election. Romney will be a one-term president, if that's any consolation.
DeleteKen, I don't think that I could regard it as any kind of consolation whatsoever. Marching in January 2013 would appear to me to be the only alternative, even if we were marching on behalf of millions of bafflingly ill-informed American voters.
DeleteKen, "it will only be one term" is exactly what a lot of people said to me about Bush when I was trying to get them to go to DC with me to protest in front of the Supreme Court. Instead we wound up with eight years of Bush, and we all know what came of that.
ReplyDeleteMoristotle, since I've been through it in DC I can give some insight. What jumped out at the Bush-Gore protests was how well organized the Republican protesters were, and how the Democrats seemed a bunch of disorganized babblers who couldn't even come up with clever signs or chants to catch media attention.
The stereotype is that conservatives are less articulate while the liberals are supposedly erudite and high-brow by comparison. On the street, as with most campaigns in recent years, the reality is the right wingers present a crisp, concise message about their plans, while the left wingers sound vague and unconvinced about theirs.
It may be that we have millions of ill-informed voters because they care more about how the message sounds than what it says. Right or wrong, agree with them or not, Republicans almost always seem to have a clear message. Democrats, on the other hand, almost always sound like people who just want to hear themselves talk, and they hope the voters will somehow be able to sort through the rhetoric and figure out the message on their own.
Even when the Democrats do manage a resounding victory, look what they do with it. George Bush won a questionable election by the slimmest of margins, and ruled as if he had a mandate. Barack Obama won in a landslide, and ruled as if he was waiting for a recount.
Let's hope we don't have to march after the election. If we do, let's hope it isn't just the three of us. And for goodness sake, let's come up with some clever signs that look good on camera.
Motomynd, if it turns out that we're duty-bound to march, let's collaborate on the signs. And Ken might be willing to help with their editing.
DeleteAs for that second term of Bush's, I can't remember when it was exactly, but sometime during I guess 2004 I realized that he could very well win again despite his disastrousness.
Invoking Sumner, Social Darwinism and the last "Gilded Age" leads me to recall the real resistance to that ideology: Big Bill Heywood, Rosa Luxemburg, the IWW. Alas we shall not see their like again. As much as I regard #Occupy, they lack the fire down below. So don't mourn- GOTV!
ReplyDeleteTom, is it your theory that Occupy has been ineffective because they have been unwilling to employ the violently confrontational tactics encouraged by those you mention? Do you really think getting out the vote will turn the tide in America today, or is the situation ripe for the rise of another Big Bill and a group like the IWW?
ReplyDeleteLet me unpack my comment back to front to see if I can be clearer. “Don’t mourn, organize.” was Joe Hill’s advice before his judicial murder by the state of Utah in 1915. I used a twist on this to suggest that you and the other commenters were assuming powerlessness in the face of the electoral mess ahead.
ReplyDeleteBeing here during the second major #Occupy manifestation I saw lots of energy and passion, but limits on doing the basic community organizing tasks to sustain the struggle. Also, please get clear in your mind the distinction between the “monopoly of violence of the state”, including police provocateurs (AKA Black Bloc), and what those of us who non-violently resisted authority did.
The same category error is made in your characterization of the wobblies- their primary effort was organizing the working class to get a fair shake, which was met with bullets and billy clubs. But, perhaps because their situation was more dire, those people made the commitment and did the year after year hard slog to improve the lot of the “little guy”. And, of course, in the end, their grandchildren became Reagan Democrats- as Joan Walsh noted in her Salon column earlier this week. [http://www.salon.com/2012/08/23/is_white_pessimism_all_about_race/]
Which brings me finally to Get Out The Vote. Which clearly scares the Repugs- to the point that, after seeking to demolish women’s healthcare, blocking this is the major focus of Red State legislatures this year. That suggests to me that what most social justice focused organizations, including both the Food Bank and Senior Center I work with, are gearing up for- voter registration and education- must be effective in waking people up.
Because “What we did that was wrong was wait so long; what we did that was right was start to fight.” And that’s my point- change is a grassroots community effort, which takes action reflecting the reality you face, not staying in one’s comfort zone.