The right-wing project… August 16, 2012
Posted by WorldbyStorm in Economy, US Politics.trackback
Beverley Gage on the Slate Political Gabfest last week made the following point, which I think is extremely important to remember – and not just in relation to the US Presidential election. Speaking about Paul Ryan and the praise he has received for his budgetary plan – and noting that the plan is politically and economically impossible to implement, she continued by pointing out that the Ryan’s of the world aren’t dedicated to running the contemporary economy more efficiently but of changing it entirely. And in this respect the plans for government are not about ‘reform’ but effectively about excision.
She points out that far from Ryan being unique the idea of ‘dealing with’ social security has a long pedigree on the Republican right.
Goldwater, Reagan… It’s all about wanting to do something about social security.
The really interesting question is why social security? What is so meaningful about the government giving relatively small cheques to old people. That is at the core of this ideological divide. And what’s interesting to me and one of the things that Paul Ryan carries on the awareness that a lot of people’s ideas about government are not created by some sort of big ideological debate, but are created out of people’s actual experience of government and if you have government in your life doing something like sending you a cheque that really matters to you then you are going to have a more positive view and then in part your world view is shaped out of those experiences. And I think in recent years the kind of ‘starve the beast’ language of parts of the Republican party anyway has been very much about awareness about that and not only about changing policy for policies sake but wanting to change the ways that people experience government in ways that will therefore change their voting patterns.
I think that’s a key point. Whether successful or not politicians like Ryan are about dismantling the relationships with the state. It’s an interesting question as to whether that’s an achievable goal – I’d put good money on the prospect that a society that was as minarchist as his ilk appear to desire as the ultimate expression of their politics is functionally impossible to implement, the private sector simply cannot address broad societal requirements. But that won’t, of course, stop people from pushing hard in that direction and clearly with little regard for the collateral damage inflicted in the process.
Though it should be noted that in his own constituency Ryan has no problem with the parish pump. So while he may want to starve the beast writ large he most certainly doesn’t want to wage that war on his own constituents, just yet.
i was reading an article on the NYT website (can’t find link) in which the writer – an American in Italy – praised the free medical treatment his son got in a broke, old – Europe country, something that couldn’t happen in the US.
He went on to discuss the general point of why the US has never developed a welfare state. After mentioning the usual theories – Protestant self-reliance etc – he decides that race is at the bottom of it. His argument is that ethnically homogenous European states could develop a welfare system, and persuade people to finance it through taxation, because they felt they were helping their own. For the entire twentieth century (he maintains) Americans could see the beneficiaries of welfare programs were ethnically different, hence were viscerally opposed. This is seldom referred to openly – though occasional references to ‘welfare queens’ constitute a dog-whistle acknowledgement and help to explain the conundrum that puzzles many of us: why do working class white Americans vote Republican?
Liberal journalists from the US are liable to see race at the root of everything.
In fact, the large-scale expansion of Western European welfare states happened near-concurrently with massive in-migration and growth in ethnic diversity.
Even in the US itself, most beneficiaries of the welfare state are and always have been ethnically white, so his theory doesnt even apply there.
You may be correct about ‘liberal’ journalists. I can’t think of a racially diverse European country that has introduced a welfare system, though: the diversity may be ‘near-concurrent’ but that doesn’t contradict the point. And members of minorities may not be the main beneficiaries of US welfare in absolute terms, but they are in relative terms.
And, in my experience in the US, even the most ‘liberal’ think ‘black’ when they hear ‘welfare’.
I can’t think of a racially diverse European country that has introduced a welfare system
The UK, France?
And members of minorities may not be the main beneficiaries of US welfare in absolute terms, but they are in relative terms.
That depends on whether you count social security retirement cheques and medicare as welfare, the beneficiaries of which are over-whelmingly white (and female) due to simple demographics among seniors.