The question of our generation's character has been much on my mind in the past few weeks, as bad news turns to worse in the markets, and serious questions about our nation's ability to maintain such an extravagantly high standard of living remain. The historical precedent of the Great Depression has been dragged out in editorial after editorial as evidence of Americans' get-'er-done melting pot ingenuity in the face of crisis. While certainly a hopeful thought to hang above the fireplace with care this holiday season, the similarities aren't all they're cracked up to be.
For starters, while we face some of the same problems (unemployment, lack of credit, etc.), we do so against a drastically changed historical backdrop. Unlike their Depression-scarred grandparents, Millennials didn't overcome widespread familial poverty through thrift and hard work; we were brought up with Super Nintendos and summer camps (well, I didn't have a Super Nintendo, but all my friends did...). Consumption has been part of our DNA for so long that cutbacks on luxury items like consumer electronics and designer clothing feel like unspeakable privation. If this recession gets worse, it's the children in grade school now who will truly internalize it into their worldview; it's far too late for us.
We also lack the shared experience of the World War that followed and ended the first Depression, a war that brought millions of Americans into the middle class through manufacturing jobs and G.I. Bill education. If the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have had any profound social effect, it's been in increasing the underclass of wounded and psychologically scarred soldiers with insufficient benefits, and shattering families in predominantly lower-income neighborhoods every time another body comes home.
Nevertheless, the parallels remain between us and those intrepid stormers of Normandy and organization men (and women, in the first truly widespread instance of American women working outside the home). We seem to be, like our grandparents before us, a pragmatic generation, more focused on getting things done than on the deep ideological struggles of the Boomer cohort. Both conservative and liberal Millennials tend to oppose President Bush's policies, (unlike in the 60s, when Young Republicans like Karl Rove counted on widespread support among mainstream youth) and the 2008 presidential election results among our demographic (66% Obama to 32% McCain) should be downright embarrassing to the Republicans.
But those who see Obama's electoral mandate and the Democrats' control of both houses of Congress as an excuse to push through a broadly progressive agenda (which I tend to support) should take note of another precedent set by the Greatest Generation. The buried resentments of the post-war "consensus years," during which coastal elites dictated a technocratic policy slate supposedly "beyond ideology," surfaced in the modern conservative movement, first in Barry Goldwater's failed presidential bid, later in Richard Nixon's political comeback, as decisions about race, government aid, and foreign policy that once seemed self-evident frayed and ultimately exploded in the protests and counter-protests of the 60s.
I, for one, intend to keep a close eye on the young followers of libertarian hero Ron Paul, defined by their fervent support for limited government, reinstating the gold standard, and isolationist foreign policy. Like Goldwater's conservatives, they have been alienated by both major parties. While their numbers have yet to impact national politics, the collapse of the global financial system could prove an unexpected boon to their cause.
We have been blessed, or cursed, to live in interesting times; the way we react to what may be the defining economic shift of our lifetime will prove whether we deserve to be the Greatest, Second Greatest, Worst, or "_____" Generation.
-- Will Payne
The issue of whether evangelicals, or other strong believers, can be accommodated in the progressive "big tent" is contingent on the left's willingness to appreciate and even respect the role religion plays in their life, despite their own divergent philosophies.
Whether or not a political realignment of believers is at hand we have yet to see, but there have been liberal Christians devoted to social justice since Jesus himself associated himself with the weak and poor of his society (if he actually did any of this, or existed at all, is a question I won't even begin to tackle here). More recently, Christian groups like Jim Wallis' Sojourners magazine have taken up the mantle of combining God and progressive thought.
But there remains a serious gap of understanding between the bulk of reason-loving leftists and their faithful neighbors. Many of my friends, especially those who I met in and since college, characterize themselves as atheists, or at least indifferent agnostics. A significant minority of them find religious feeling so strange and negative an influence as to defy explanation. Drawing on the writings of acclaimed atheists like Richard Dawkins, they see religious theory and practice as little more than a "God delusion" obfuscating the rational truth about the world.
While I respect and often agree with the ideas and the rationales of these thinkers and their supporters, my lived experience of religion has kept me from discounting its potential for good. I grew up regularly attending Presbyterian and Congregational churches with my family, even serving as a deacon (board of around 15 congregants who help guide the running of the church) at the Trinitarian Congregational Church in Concord, Mass.
Before I go on, I should say that I wouldn't characterize myself as a "believer" by any measure. Many of the sermons at my church didn't even talk about faith all that much. The focus was on introspection, reexamination of life and relationships, and fellowship. I found in my youth group an open community, devoted to valuing each other as humans inherently worthy of such consideration, not as the disparate sets of talents and flaws we each carried through our high school hallways.
This was not a particularly "religious" group. The point was not, as in many similar evangelical groups (Young Life, in particular, which had a strong presence in our town), to deepen our personal relationship with Jesus. But we did meet every week to play games, talk about important things in our lives, go camping and hiking, and generally build a friend network outside the Balkanized world of the cafeteria. These were not my closest friends (many of them I seldom saw outside the group), but without them my adolescence would have been a far more difficult period.
If there was one coherent spiritual strain that resonated especially strongly with me then, it was a hearty skepticism regarding man's perfectability (one that many skeptics of religion would be well served to carry into their often rhapsodic musings on science and progress). One regular prayer at my church, one that has always stuck with me in the years past my frequent churchgoing, contains the line: "[g]ive me the courage to venture normal love with average people." I found, and still found, something refreshing and bold in the idea of it taking courage to acknowledge the battles you can't win, and the challenge of forging a good life out of imperfect material. The starkness of the task reminded me of Kierkegaard, but with sober judgment taking the role of his fear and trembling faith.
Progressives, and all of us, really, could use a dose of this kind of humility. Grant people their own inconsistencies and irrationalities, their failings and hypocrisies, from evangelicals to economists, and hope that they will accept you for yours. Once you accept this, politics can go back to the delicate dance of compromise and coalition-building, and past the confused resentment of irreconcilable worldviews.
-- Will Payne
"We must patiently explain why taxing or regulating noble things (like work, saving, and entrepreneurial risk-taking) means you’ll get less of what makes America great and why subsidizing other things (like idleness and single parenthood) means you’ll get more of the destructive behaviors that ultimately will drag us down."
— An excerpt from a piece in the National Review by the vice president of government relations for the Heritage Foundation.
First of all, let me say that I'm heartened by the conservatives' urges to "patiently explain" their policies to the opposition. Now that the American public has shown their rejection of the past eight years of cronyism and stifled debate under a conservative Republican administration, and elected a charismatic Democrat known for his ability to listen, the Review and their peers realize that they need to make a broader case for their policies than Georgetown cocktail parties if conservative thought is going to retain any relevance.
This is a good thing. There are many strains to American civic thought, and all deserve an honest hearing. Many fiscal conservatives (not the wing in power of the Republican Party recently, alas) were and are right to point out the dangers of deficit spending, negative saving rates, and increased household debt that are making today's economic scene look so dismal.
The claim that our society "subsidizes" and thus encourages single parenthood and idleness clearly rings as false to anyone laid off (over 500,000 in the past month, with more likely soon), or raising a child on their own. A governmental safety net that helps people, and their dependent children, stay alive and healthy until they can contribute meaningfully to the economy prevents much higher social costs down the road, and enables the next generation to better their situation. Try telling the child whose school lunch program was cut that they deserve to suffer for their parents' lack of economic success (even if it was clearly their "fault").
The broader argument underlying this conservative rhetoric has to do with their inherent opposition to taxing income at all. This is a powerful argument, one that has resonated with voters from coast to coast in the "tax revolts" of the 1980s and 1990s (even in states like California, whose economy was and remains grounded by government largesse in water policy and contracting jobs; see Joan Didion's excellent memoir Where I Was From.)
Nevertheless, in a post-agricultural, post-industrial society, taxing land and property, or even consumption and trade, misses the bulk of individual economic activity. Taxing the "noble thing" of work is the best way our government has found so far to fulfill two goals: to fund government, and to correct rises in economic inequality brought about by differing income potential.
While economic libertarians may take offense to this dual purpose, claiming that (Rand, anyone?), their intellectual champions have by and large accepted some form of redistributive society. In his 1962 book Capitalism and Freedom, conservative icon Milton Friedman proposed a "negative income tax" instead of the graduated income tax, under which all Americans (say 25%) .
Today's Republicans may seem shocked by the redistributive efforts of our taxation policy, but could John McCain really have spent so much time in Congress without realizing that many of the most popular government programs (from Social Security to Medicare and Medicaid) are devoted almost entirely to "spreading the wealth around"?
During his own presidency, none other than Richard Nixon proposed a Family Assistance Plan, a welfare plan with a guaranteed family income, not tied to employment. The plan was defeated in Congress, and the backlash from those more conservative than the President helped fuel later "welfare reform" efforts that have defanged so many anti-poverty campaigns.
Government does need to manage the incentives offered to people to work and create new jobs with the demands of government. But neither an Obama repeal (or simple lack of renewal) of Bush's tax cuts for the extremely wealthy, or his health care program, to pick two prominent examples of the new administration's drive for redistributive reform, seem likely to lead to distorted incentives for the many "Joe the Plumbers" of the world. The National Review is going to have to be more patient, and bring new facts to light, to convince Will the Blogger that Obama's welfare plans will lead to destructive behaviors that drag us down, rather than level the playing field enough to give more Americans a chance at living a comfortable middle-class life.
-- Will Payne
While $5 billion dollars could be spent well on any number of policy priorities in Obama's first term, I think that an investment in science and technology, specifically focusing on energy efficiency and innovation around alternative energy, would provide the most concentrated set of benefits, as well as spill-over effects in a variety of other areas. I agree with Barack Obama that we need a new Space Race, in which the enormous economic and educational power spent by previous generations of American leaders on competing with the Soviets is channeled into solving the twin problems of fossil fuel depletion and global warming. I would like to emphasize, though, the importance of competition and innovation (free market ideas put towards progress in addition to profit) in making sure this money is well spent.
More specifically, an increase in scholarship money for the sciences is needed, especially for lower-income children. An investment in technological entrepreneurship is a way to ensure future job growth; by tying awards to both performance and need, in much that same way that wealthy private universities pay full tuition for qualified lower-income applicants, the brunt of this job creation will be in the neediest sectors. This would leave existing federal financial aid in place, but supplement it to provide opportunity for economically-disadvantaged students to enroll in elite science and technology schools. In 21st-century America, there should never be a "ghetto Einstein," unable to get the support and training he or she needs due to inadequate education funding.
A similarly entrepreneurial approach, on a grander scale, would be creating a series of government-funded "prizes" for various modeled after the Ansari X-Prize for private spacecraft development. This has already been started; House legislation creating the hydrogen fuel cell "H Prizes" has been signed into law, though it has yet to be awarded. Here, instead of subsidizing underperforming technology (a common criticism of many green jobs schemes), the government can step in and raise aspirations beyond what's conceivable today. Such a scheme could not only reward excellence and create jobs, it could lead to whole new industries opening up.
Luckily, while making no specific mention of the prize idea in their agendas on change.gov in energy and technology policy, the Obama administration already seems to be taking these sorts of initiatives seriously, and many other common sense policy proposals in this field (weatherizing houses, subsidizing energy-efficient appliances, etc.). Besides the prize idea, these are all ideas widely held as beneficial in his circle of advisors. Let's just hope that in working to create "Green Jobs," the administration focuses on rewarding excellence and innovation, and less on political sops like corn ethanol and "clean coal," or broad subsidies that use taxpayer money to increase market inefficiencies.
-- Will Payne
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