a blog by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl

American political debate is currently in the vise grip of a sound-bite.  The sound-bite,   “limited government,” has been offered, and not by a neutral party, as THE topic of debate. Now everyone –citizens and their elected representatives—is supposed to say whether they are for it or against it. Yea or nay.  Our debate seems to have something like the structure of a parliamentary debate or a debating society event, but actually it is missing all the crucial debate ingredients. The phrase “limited government’ is vague and polemical; “limited” to what?  “limited” in what way?  It bears no resemblance to a proposition; nothing like “resolved: the state should be limited to X activities.”  Our situation is like the one that engulfed us in the 1970s, when “family values” was the focus of pseudo-debate.  What did “family values” mean?  What was the implied opposite of “family values”?  What were you saying yea to, and what nay?  People were being asked to debate about a totalistic conservative world-view represented by a sound-bite.

“Limited government” seems like it should have something opposite.  But what? “Unlimited  government”?   Such a phrase could only refer to a government that was authoritarian at the least and totalitarian at worst. Do the Republicans seriously think that the Democrats are Stalinists? So maybe the opposite is “’tax and spend government”?  Actually, if you listen to the pseudo-debate, you eventually hear that the opposite is “socialism.” As usual, the national habit of ridiculous pseudo-debate has come about because  “socialism” is unspoken and unspeakable; it is a form of socio-economic organization that cannot speak its name.  When alluded to in the pseudo-debate, it is called something else, like “the welfare state,” which everyone is supposed to agree is destructive of family values as well as bankruptingly expensive. (And, for some extremists, there is no other socialism than Stalinism, total economic planning by a government, as opposed  to by a network of corporations.)  Socialism’s  adjective –“social” — must never be attached to the form of government everyone in America is supposed to worship:  democracy. In American political debate, social democracy is a contradiction in terms; it makes no sense; it is a perversion meant to corrupt and confuse the young. No one can be a democrat and a socialist.

It does not matter that we actually have a social democrat in the United States Senate, Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who bravely stood up this past week to propose legislation that would close corporate tax loopholes,  raising some $400 billion over the next decade. On a second front, he introduced legislation that would yield some $50 billion per year by imposing a 5.4% surtax on millionaires and billionaires. Sanders’ legislation is valuable in and of itself, but it is also crucial for showing people that you do not have to cut government programs –thereby “limiting government”—in order to have a government with a balanced budget and a semblance of support and protection for its citizens, particularly its young, its elderly, and its poor. The legislation is a demonstration that “limited government” is simply an idol, like a religious idol, designed to lull people into thinking that the proponents of “limited government” –that is, those few who will benefit from it materially—are in charge and ought to be in charge and ought to be the keepers of the country’s economic and political life. The conservatives are the chosen people, so the people should chose them.

Occasionally, our young people are actually taught lessons in their schools about what happens when people live inside an ideological or fundamentalist bubble where the terms of debate preclude debate. The lessons are not in their syllabus, but in their daily lives.  For example, on Monday, April 4, my News York Times told an exemplary tale. The members of the atheist club at Rutherford High School in Panama City, Florida were considering what to do about the up-coming Faith Week. During the Week, the school’s two Christian clubs would be sponsoring before-school prayer meetings at the foot of the school’s political totem: the flagpole. It is perfectly normal to say “Christian democracy” at Rutherford, as everywhere else in the country, but where does that leave the atheists? (or any non-Christian).

A 1984 federal law sponsored by Christian democrats in Congress and lobbied for ferociously by conservative church groups made it possible for Christian groups to use public school property for their meetings. This was one of the opening attacks by Reagan-era Republicans on the separation of church and state that once characterized our democracy. The idea was to limit state so that church could prevail in the political realm and in the culture, including the culture of schools.  But the law, which had a little curtsy toward democracy in it –guaranteed equal access to school property for other clubs as well. Clubs of atheists were not anticipated, any more than were clubs of gays and lesbians (and their straight friends). So, now the Christians have a problem: the atheists are going to be there at Rutherford High’s Faith Week, sitting at tables, passing out information, making speeches.  This tactic was suggested to the young atheists by their faculty sponsor, Mr. Creamer, a very popular English teacher who is an advocate of peaceful debate and friendly, cordial getting along with your neighbors.  (He is such a cordial person that he actually persuaded the Rutherford school board to allow him to put the Gilgamesh on his syllabus, despite the presence in that 2500 year old Babylonian epic of some rather racey scenes and allusions, not all of them about men and women. Perhaps the school board members did not read the text.)

Within the Christian clubs, the faculty sponsors are in a quandary. Explained the math teacher, Ms. Harrell (the Times calls her Mrs., having given up the policy of using Ms. that feminists of my generation cordially persuaded the editors to adopt): “Some of our students didn’t understand that there are people who don’t believe in God.”  Apparently Ms. Harrell enlightened these students, but she baulked at letting them follow Mr. Creamer’s suggestion that the Christians and the atheists might sit down together to discuss their beliefs, in a kind of Peaceable Kingdom of the Young People. “Ms. Harwell declined, fearing it would turn into a debate…”

But, really, Ms. Harwell, fear not!  The story has a sub-plot that shows why a debate will not break out even if a meeting does. There are two dear friends at Rutherford High, both seniors, Joshua and Jim, who enjoy going out to Taco Bell together, where they argue with each other about their respective beliefs and philosophies. They “give each other a hard time,” Joshua admits. But their friendly wrestling match does not become a real debate because Joshua, president of one of the Christian clubs, holds a card that Jim, president of the atheists, could never match.  Joshua says of his friend and all the other atheists: “If they don’t accept Jesus Christ as a saviour, they will definitely go to hell.”  Now there is a debate stopper!

This is the way it is with the idols  “limited government” and “family values,” too. In the minds of their true believers, those who do not have faith in these redemptive ideas are going to go to hell. They do not belong in America, they are political atheists.

We have a frightful history in America of making religion out of politics and politics out of religion. And recently we have entered into a stage of making economic theory into a religion and religion into an economic theory as well. “Limited government” is the sound-bite of neo-conservative economic theory, which insists that if you make the rich richer their prosperity will make the poor less poor. You cannot reason or debate about such a claim; it’s a religious claim about an anticipated miracle, a kind of modern day loaves and fishes miracle in which the rich are handing out the food, in the savior Jesus’role.

But, then, maybe we are coming to the point of irony in the triumph these ideas have been enjoying for nearly two decades.  Maybe we are seeing an unexpected flowering of economic atheist clubs occupying public property and demanding what Bernie Sanders’ legislation offers: some basic democratic fair play.  The demonstrations that have been going on in state capitols around the country in recent weeks, for which Madison, Wisconsin is the Tunis, the Cairo, are being led by people who recognize that “limited government” politicians want to control the government with an iron grip. Their mentality is Stalinist, dictatorial.  They want to close off any debate about  what good governance might look like; governance that was about preventing wastefulness and sponsoring long-range programs supportive of people and cognizant of the threat of environmental damage and climate change that we all face in common.

If the conservatives can silence any talk of good governance, they will be able to accomplish two things: cut programs they deem socialistic and provide tax breaks for the wealthy along with freedom from taxation for corporations. The tax scheme is called sponsoring economic growth; the program cutting is called fiscal responsibility, deficit reduction. But it does seem that quite a number of  “the people,” even those who have been bamboozled by the “limited government” pseudo-debate, have figured out this ruse. The pseudo-debate has hit them right in their pocketbooks and right in their basic democratic impulses: their desires to be supported and empowered citizens. When working people see that collective bargaining is under attack by “limited government” governors who are saying that it is public union employees whose salaries and benefits are driving cities and states into bankruptcy, they smell authoritarianism.

The people are discovering that “limited government” means deregulation, which means more of the kind of financial recklessness that drove the country deep into recession and caused tax revenues to drop, which caused towns and cities and the federal government to plunge into debt, which opened the door for limited government supporters to demand cuts in the government as a matter of financial salvation. But it is now obvious that such salvation will cause further erosion of employment, of consumer spending, and of tax revenues, which will increase the deficits of towns and cities and the federal government.  And so forth. The people are discovering that the dreadful cycle that is being demanded by “limited government” believers is leaving the accrued wealth of the wealthy as untouched as the salaries of CEOs.  Limited government means thou shalt not raise taxes on the wealthy no matter what.  The pseudo-debaee is about taxes defined only as an assault upon people, particularly people with money; it is not about taxes as the common wealth that governments collect in order to assure that the tax-payers are supported and made free to be citizens; that taxes are the means by which needs are supplied that individuals cannot supply as individuals or families so that the people can be free to be political beings.

The people can figure out that only a representative government can prevent –if so inclined–massive inequalities between the rich and the poor and massive attacks upon the middle class and upon social programs like Medicare that are needed by the middle class and the poor. Perhaps the next step will be realization that what Republican budgeteers want is more and more privatization, of Medicare and eventually of Social Security. (G.W Bush made no secret of this aspiration, although he was blocked from accomplishing it.)  Further privatization is where the conversion of entitlement programs into block grant and voucher programs proposed on Wednesday, April 6^th by Republican Representative Paul Ryan is headed.  The people’s healthcare, their children’s education, their pensions, everything that should be publicly supported will become for-profit.

Maybe those critics of the only-for-profit “limited government” scheme who are Old and New Testament readers will realize that this kind of capitalism is a Golden Calf, and its exponents are blasphemous. Maybe pastors should preach against them during Faith Week! Tell them about that rich man who will not enter into the Kingdom of Heaven anymore than a camel will go through eye of a needle!  But, seriously, in plain old secular political terms, perhaps the realization is growing across the land that no one can want this kind of “limited government” unlimited capitalism and be a democrat at the same time.