Sunday Night Journal — July 3, 2011
(I was going to write about something else today, but this is
something I’ve been thinking about, and it’s appropriate
for Independence Day, so I think I’ll go ahead and get it out
of the way.)
The term “culture war” in this country generally
refers to the conflict over matters involving sex, marriage, and the
family. In the 1970s organized reaction to the social earthquake of
the 1960s began to take shape, and one of the most visible of these
reactions was Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, the organization
that for a while more or less defined the term “Christian
Right” or “Religious Right.” It, and Rev. Falwell
himself, quickly became among the most hated entities in the country
in the eyes of sophisticated people. Falwell was widely viewed as a
hick, a bigot, and a fanatic. (When he died a few years ago, I was
both shocked and amused by the number of people who appeared to have
no particular religious belief but nevertheless were certain that
Falwell was in hell.)
I came to feel a bit sorry for Falwell, because I think he
fundamentally misconstrued the situation. He thought that a small
number of radicals—hippies, feminists, etc.—had seized control
of some of our most visible institutions (the press, especially), and
were forcing the agenda of the sexual revolution on a mostly
unwilling, mostly conservative Christian population. And that the
task before him was to awaken those people to the fact that their
society was under attack, and get them to use their political
strength to reverse the sexual revolution, at least to the extent
that it was becoming institutionalized, most obviously with the
legalization of abortion.
But he was wrong. The sexual revolution may have flowered in the
‘60s, and hippies and feminists may have been its most visible
advocates (along with Hugh Hefner), but its roots were much deeper.
And in any case much of the mainstream soon embraced it quite
readily. By the time Falwell attempted to rally socially conservative
Christians, they were not the majority (if they ever had been). And
although the Christian right became a serious political force, it has
at best only slowed the social revolution it was meant to reverse.
I think something similar is going on now with economic ideas. The
Tea Party and various free-market politicians are in a position
similar to that of the Christian Right. They believe that most
Americans still believe in the old concept of individual freedom
combined with responsibility, and that they interpret the American
ideal of liberty to mean, second only to self-government, economic
liberty; that they want the freedom to succeed economically according
to their natural talent and willingness to work hard. That they
recognize that things are not always going to work out well for
everyone in this system, and that such is the price of freedom. And
that they are willing to admit a role for a government safety net for
those who aren’t able to survive on their own in this system,
but envision the safety net as being of limited scope, and certainly
not something that encompasses everyone all the time.
I think there are strong reasons to doubt that most people feel
this way anymore. Part of the intensity of the social culture war
arises from the fact that neither side can quite believe that the
other really wants what it says it wants. In the sexual realm, for
instance, the religious conservative can’t believe that anyone
can truly fail to see that there’s something unhealthy in
homosexuality; the secular liberal can’t believe that anyone
can think there is. Likewise, in the economic realm, the Tea Partier
can’t believe that anyone of sound mind can fail to see the
essential rightness of the traditional American ideals of
independence, and the liberal (for want of a better word) can’t
believe that anyone of sound mind can fail to see the essential
rightness of the welfare state. Each believes that he has only to
sound the alarm, and the majority of Americans will rally to his
cause.
I have a feeling that the Tea Party and others of similar mind are
mistaken about the antagonism among the general population to the
welfare state. I don’t have time now to pursue my various
conjectures about why this is true, but I suspect that support for
measures that would actually shrink the scope of what the federal
government provides is actually pretty small. If you put the question
abstractly, yes, they’ll say they want to cut this or that, but
at the same time they reject cuts to anything that might benefit them
personally. And there’s the rub: almost all of us are now
caught up in the web of “benefits,” money handed to us by
the government directly or indirectly—and are faced with
financial pressures that make dependence, either on the government or
on a large-scale employer, the normal case.
This train of thought was started by a comment on the Caelum et
Terra blog (see sidebar) a week or two ago. I can’t remember now what post it
was on, so I can’t link to it, but it was by someone whose
husband is self-employed, and she was lamenting all the ways in which
her family is penalized financially for it. This sort of independence
should be something close to the American ideal, but almost
everything in our system now assumes as the norm that one works for a
large organization of some kind, and that the organization subsidizes
you financially beyond the cost of your actual salary. The two main
pieces of this are the Social Security tax, half of which is paid by
one’s employer, and health insurance, which is at least heavily
subsidized by the employer—or at least is widely considered the
employer’s responsibility, so that an employer who doesn’t
provide it is considered to be callous and unethical.
The independent contractor or small business owner not only has to
find a way to pay all this himself, but will usually pay much more
for health insurance, because he isn’t getting group rates—or
else take his chances on being able to pay for his own health care,
which is difficult and risky.
Almost everything in our system now is designed to discourage true
economic independence. Neither the government nor the big
corporations nor the labor unions have any interest in encouraging
it. I can think offhand of several people I know personally who are
in various undesirable or unwanted job situations purely because they
can’t afford not to have access to financial support that is
available only through some collective.
It is very difficult to get out of this web even if you want to,
because your participation in so much of it is forced, and the
sacrifice of foregoing the rewards is great. I’m a case in
point. In a few years I’ll be eligible for social security
(actually I already am, but at a reduced rate). I want to retire, but
should I really have a right to expect that? If I am still capable of
working at sixty-six, what right do I have to expect that younger
people should support me? How is this different from going on
welfare? This bothers me, but when the time comes, I’ll
probably take the money, telling myself that, after all, I have been
paying to support other retirees for most of the past forty years.
And the Tea Party itself seems to contain an awful lot of people who
are very exercised about preserving Medicare.
And that doesn’t take into account the large number of poor
or nearly poor people for whom dependence on the government is simply
the unquestioned normal way of life. (I’m not considering here
whether they could do otherwise; no doubt some could and some could
not, but that’s another question.) Or the corporations that
rely on complex tax breaks and subsidies and general cronyism. Or the
people who work directly for the government. Or those whose employers
are heavily dependent on government contracts or subsidies: again,
I’m a case in point, because the independent college I work for
would not be able to survive without government-subsidized financial
aid programs.
The independence that came with the territory of being a small
farmer or shopkeeper or artisan is now available only to those who
are unusually adventurous (or of course wealthy, but that’s
always true). Few of us even own the homes we live in; “home ownership” is
a euphemism for most of us most of the time, because the house was bought
with borrowed money that we’re still trying to pay off (or, often,
not even trying, but expecting to hop from one loan to another for the rest of our lives). The presumption that most people should be somewhat
independent, with a small minority needing assistance, has been
inverted.
All in all, I suspect that as the Tea Party leads the charge for
small government economic freedom, they’re not going to see, when they look behind them, nearly as many people following as they expected. As
with the moral components of the other culture war, the assumption
that most people want a society based on the sort of freedom the Tea
Party advocates may not be warranted. One can’t judge only by
the cultural climate as exemplified in the predominant cultural
expressions—the press, the entertainment industry, the
academy—but on the basis of those one would be justified in
supposing that sexual freedom is now the most important and essential
American freedom, and that other freedoms can and should be
sacrificed to it.
It’s always possible, some say probable, that the whole
structure will come tumbling down because the government doesn’t
actually have the money it dispenses to us. If so, that won’t
be a pretty sight, and it won’t be seen as liberating.
Light On Dark Water 
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