A Long Fight Ahead

The compromise reached between Democrats and Republicans in the recent budget debate was successful in reducing all types of programs that make the United States a more civilized country. The drama is going to intensify. What kind of country will the United States become: one where there is a minimum decency of economic equality or one where citizens have to survive without social institutions? The two parties will soon have to agree on a budget for 2012 and raise the government debt limit. Several Republican legislators are willing to allow the country to go into bankruptcy if their demands aren’t met. They have formed a front with proposals to eliminate the American welfare state, reduce the weight of the government and assure that Washington provides a wide margin of liberty with respect to regulations and taxes.

Perhaps they are forcing the president to rediscover his former social welfare identity. Maybe he believes that the social deficits of the country (in education, health care, infrastructure, science and technology, and environmental protection) require more attention than monetary debt. If so, he has refrained from saying so publicly. He has

preferred to invoke the potential dynamism of the American market economy, despite the evidence that it has lost its ability to provide employment and prosperity. He has remained silent, in a very audible way, on the traditions of his party with respect to planning, cooperation between the public and private sector, and economic and social citizenship. The majority of his public-sector employees — technocrats lacking passion — feel uncomfortable before the large ideas of social renovation.

Nevertheless, both the ideas of renovation and reactions to them have sparked the national debate, even if by conventionally rhetorical and implicit ways. The Republicans are divided between those who believe the state is incapable of administering the market and those who fear it is more than competent to do so. The systemic denial of the positive capabilities of wide public-sector involvement in the economy (and in regulation) is the result of a very persistent ideological campaign. The transformation from Keynesianism to neoclassicism of academic economics is undoubtedly not an example of progress in selfless research. Universities continue to be the place for critical review, even though they breed resistance to political change. The doctrine of market sovereignty is considered by many citizens as a necessary axiom of national faith. Ignorance helps: In the states that regularly vote Republican, a net flow of federal funds sustains their economies, but few are aware of this.

The racial hatred and xenophobia that the president is subjected to (expressed in the belief that he wasn’t born in Hawaii or that he’s a foreigner) extends to the political economy. Many citizens believe that they pay taxes to support immigrants or ethnic and racial groups that they dislike. Franklin D. Roosevelt won the approval of Southern legislators for Social Security (retirement pension that is now within the reach of all citizens) by excluding agricultural and domestic workers.

Back then, mostly Southern African Americans occupied these positions. The prejudice against Asian and Latino immigrants in these vast areas of the United States follows that shameful line of secession. The resistance to social programs is, equally, the product of a hardened spirit of individualism. It reflects a rising sense of vulnerability during a period of economic uncertainty. That anger, including the fanaticism of the tea party, is evidence of the depth of the uneasiness.

Nevertheless, opinion polls show that people are more concerned about unemployment (and about public services like education and health care) than the deficit. Most are still attached to Medicare (health insurance for retired individuals) and Social Security. This is particularly true for those groups (young people, women, Latinos and African Americans, the highly educated and labor union workers) whose abstention in the 2010 elections allowed Republicans to achieve such successful results. Even though there is no solid Republican candidate, the campaign for 2012 has already begun. The president believes that he can win solely by making strides with “independents,” who supposedly are ideologically neutral. The question is whether he can succeed in moving away from the economic and social ideas that would propel them to vote for a convincing Republican candidate. The president’s success in 2008 in mobilizing the electorate was not followed by awarding a stronger voice in policy-making to his most committed supporters. Instead, he listened to his donors in the world of finance and industry.

Perhaps the protests that took place in Wisconsin, which responded to intentions to destroy public-service labor unions — indispensable elements to the policies of the Democratic Party — are the beginning of a national mobilization of the defenders of American progress. That could induce the president to establish fewer compromises with the defenders of an unregulated market.

The heirs of the New Deal, the New Frontier and the Great Society, agreed to defend certain programs (the preservation of Social Security and Medicare), but not new social projects. It is strikingly similar to the situation with the European Socialist and Social Democratic Parties. Some (read: Krugman, Reich, Stiglitz) have developed renovation projects that have not yet arrived to the general public. In the United States the intellectual opposition is not in prison, but it doesn’t appear on national television very often either. The president has clearly decided that he cannot trust in a reformist

coalition that hasn’t yet been completely formed. If he prefers to play the role of a constitutional monarchy, he will have to conform himself to the consolation of a monarch: having influence, but not power.

Regardless of the results of the presidential struggle, very severe conflicts will continue. The Democrats had an uphill struggle to retain their majority in the Senate, and their current chances to retake Congress are particularly uncertain. The United States no longer enjoys the privilege of managing their affairs independent of the rest of the world. The types of questions that constitute the agenda of the G-8 and G-20 cannot be answered in American English.

Governor Palin isn’t a political thinker that stands out for her insight, but when she accused the president of thinking in a “post-American” world, she paid him an unintentional tribute. It is unsettling that a president that contemplates so many new international possibilities has a restricted vision of the capacity for change in his own country.