Temptation, Temptation. I Can't Resist

I haven't posted since last November, since Election Day, in fact, and I thought that all you reader out there might be wondering why. It's straightforward enough: I didn't see the point. Bloggers occasionally win one or two battles — at least some of the widely-read bloggers do — but I didn't really see much point in continuing to write or argue in the face of an win, an actual election win, by the worst president, perhaps the worst major-party candidate, in American history. Argument and nuance seemed futile in the face of a massive propaganda machine, a collection of mainstream media too lazy and/or co-opted to tell the truth, and an American public too deluded or ignorant to recognize the danger that this adminstration poses.

But such are the counsels of despair, and we're told that despair is a worse sin than any of the others that might have led to it. Not to mention that the passage of time has restored the need to get some of my thoughts written down and (self-) published. So I will start blogging again. I'm sure that's a great relief to all my avid reader — by the way, keep those card and letter coming!

I was particularly inspired to start again by the current campaign to revamp Social Security. I'm not going to present evidence or arguments about why this is a bad idea; they've already been presented in abundance by people better qualified than I to do so. What primarily interests me is the fact that there are still a few Congressional Democrats who are waffling about whether or not to oppose Bush's plan.

Consider the political, rather than economic, realities of the situation. Social Security is at the core of the New Deal. It was a model for many subsequent Democratic social programs, and it is in some ways paradigmatic of Democratic ideals: a progressively funded program that distributes risk across (more or less) the entire society. What's more, it's one of the most successful New Deal programs. It has helped create massive changes in the way Americans think about retirement, about caring for aged parents, and about domestic social programs generally. And it's not just a success: it's an efficient success. 99% of the money taken in by the Social Security Administration gets disbursed to recipients. Only 1% goes to administering the program.

Social Security is something that Democrats can look upon with great pride. It is one of their great accomplishments — not a bipartisan accomplishment, mind you, a Democratic accomplishment. The Republicans of Roosevelt's day hated it, and have passed on that hatred to succeeding generations of Republicans.

And now one of those new generations of Republicans is trying to dismantle it. It's not hard to see why. By getting rid of Social Security, they'd take away one of the key Democratic accmplishments, and give them one less major government success story to point to. The Republicans would like to replace it with a system that increases risk for working people and greatly enriches the investment industry. And if there were ever a time to try to do this, it's now, while they control Congress and the White House, and with the right-wing propaganda machine oiled up and ready to try to sell the idea.

I hope the effort fails. I think it will fail (though I probably shouldn't make predictions, given my recent track record). But as I said, what primarily interests me is what possible motivation any Democrat might have to cooperate with the dismantling of Social Security. If any proposal ever promised to undermine Democratic ideals, as well as the prestige and credibility of the Democratic party, this one does. If any proposal needed to be opposed by a united front, so as to deny the Republicans any conceivable political cover, this one does. The leadership of the party realizes this, and so do the vast majority of the rank and file. What, then, is motivating the few remaining holdouts?

Frankly, having raised the question, I must admit that I am not sure how to answer it. I'm sure that some of the Democratic wafflers (the "Fainthearted Faction") are from conservative districts and don't want to be seen opposing Bush on a proposal he's put front and center in his new term. But is that enough of a reason? Is it really worth selling out their own party's core program, their own party's core ideals, in order to cover their asses in the short term?

If that is their motivation, I think that it is delusional. As I have argued in an earlier post, cooperating with the Republicans is a losing proposition. They have shown repeatedly in the last couple of decades that they are not mollified by goodwill gestures from the Democrats, but will continue to use every conceivable underhanded, vicious, sleazy tactic to discredit Democrats — and these tactics work especially well against moderates from mixed districts, which is why there are so few moderates left. Traditional bipartisanship is dead.

It took the Democratic party the better part of a decade to realize in their guts that they were no longer the natural majority party and would not be able to waltz back into control of Congress as they'd done under Eisenhower and Reagan. It is taking more time, an agonizingly long time, for them to come up with ways to start fighting back against the Republican onslaught. It's not always easy to know how to do this, but it should be clear that in most cases the effective strategy is not to compromise, play nice, and hope that the Republicans will play nice in their turn. They won't. They didn't get control of all three branches of the Federal government by playing nice. Nor will the Democrats regain power by playing nice, whatever temptations the Republicans may dangle in front of individual members of Congress.

On that note, I'll finish up with a couple of thoughts on temptation. One is an aphorism I've seen attributed to Adolf Hitler, though I'm currently unable to confirm its source. Whoever said it, it's a good insight:

Every man has his price — and you'd be surprised in most cases how low that price is.

I don't know what's tempting the Democratic wafflers, but the leadership need to do their best to make sure that the wafflers understand the real price of caving in, namely crippling the Democratic party for generations to come. And the payment for this is unlikely to be as pleasing as it seems now. We can rely on the words of another master tempter here:

All the healthy and outgoing activities which we want him to avoid can be inhibited and nothing given in return, so that at last he may say... "I now see that I spent most of my life doing neither what I ought nor what I liked."

The Fainthearted Faction

The Screwtape Letters