by Tom Corbett
Of course, it is possible just to be honest. You could tell voters that we consciously created a massive, multi-trillion-dollar deficit through unneeded and ill-advised tax giveaways. You can tell voters that most of this policy largess went to the politician’s uberwealthy friends…the very people who have seen their share of the economic pie expand from about 10 percent of the total to almost one-quarter in recent decades. Of course, you could try arguing that the need for this giveaway is obvious. Wealthy political patrons expect a return on their political donations to self-serving Political Action Committees (PACs), which now can run into the hundreds of millions by some of the larger donors. They are not making such donations out of any interest in good public policy. Besides, there is a moral justification. Think how the lives of the wealthy are improved by being able to purchase that fifth Renoir for their guest bathroom without thinking about the cost.
On the surface, our public postures appear cruelly selfish and indifferent to any minimal sense of real morality, how could this have happened? How did we go from a period in the 1960s where new policies were judged by “what they did for the poor” to the new mantra of “what does a policy do for the rich?” Perhaps it is only by chance that our politics are so toxic, that our policies now seem so skewed toward those who need public help the least. No, that did not happen by accident. It is the result of a planned, well-funded, and superbly executed strategic initiative that goes back for half a century or more. Remember this. In 1962, about 80 percent of Americans believed that government could be counted on to do the right thing most of the time. Today, only 20 percent agree with that sentiment in some polls. That kind of tectonic shift in public attitudes does not happen absent some guiding agent.
A well-funded and broad based informational campaign, really a misinformation campaign, has been carried out through a host of interest groups, think tanks, and specialized media outlets. Social media further abets the balkanization and tribalization of American beliefs and politics. Institutions such as the courts (i.e., the Federalist Society) and higher education (i.e., the Leadership Institute) are under attack by those zealous to find liberal tendencies that undermine the natural order everywhere. The death knells for sanity probably came with ending of the Fairness Doctrine during the Reagan era and the Citizens United ruling earlier in this century. These decisions guaranteed that unlimited money could be poured into the political process and that no checks would prevent torrents of unceasing propaganda from swaying a majority from sensibly voting for their self-interests or for causes that extend beyond their own selfish purposes.
Now, some of the poorest counties in America vote overwhelmingly for leaders who want nothing more than to eviscerate what remains of the safety net on which they depend so much. The generation of unreasoned fear and the creation of easy scapegoats works as well today as it did for Goebbels during the 1930s. Substitute illegals or brown-skinned terrorists for Jews or Gypsies or Slavs and you have an instant recipe for controlling 30 to 40 percent of the electorate. With a little voter suppression and gerrymandering, staying in power is within reach no matter how repulsive the proposed agenda.
Some in the mainstream academy continue to struggle to preserve rationality and evidence despite the prevailing political headwinds. As mentioned earlier, Karen Bogenschneider has been working with state legislators for many years in her efforts to bring research to these political figures through the Family Impact Seminar (FIS) model. More recently, she has been interviewing current legislators and longer-term political observers to get inside the mindset of key policymakers. Her assessment is that most politicians are well meaning and hardworking folk. All things being equal, they would prefer to base their decisions upon good evidence, at least for those decisions outside the ideological hot button items. For knowledge producers, the key is to bring rigorous evidence to this key audience in an effective, non-agenda driven ways. In effect, academics need to get outside of their normal culture and become familiar with the world of policymakers. Few do, unfortunately, and honest brokers are difficult to find for most legislators.
That is not the only difficulty at present. Ideological and normative controls are more effective in the current environment. Members of each political party are expected to toe the line for a set agenda, often articulated by outside organizations such as ALEC or the NRA or the Club for Growth or the Leadership Institute or the Federalist Society or one of the many other special interest with enormous clout and chests full of money. Independence and evidence-driven decisions are left to the few areas where special interests simply do not care. The result is that the traditional policy arts, at least those taught in policy schools seem less relevant today. We see less debate among experts touting studies to firm up an evidence-based point and more use of research to defend priors or exercise pure power.
Effort and strategy alone, however, probably cannot sustain a substantive transformation in the underlying political premises or foundational belief sets. You need a saleable theory that strikes a chord at some sub-rational level. In the mid-1990s, Keynesian principles dominated with Republican Richard Nixon famously proclaiming that we are “all Keynesians now.” That theory made total sense for the times. The Great Depression and the World War II had left a residue of faith in the potential for government to do good. Conservatives lambasted Roosevelt as a “traitor to his class,” but realized the popularity of his programs. The ‘right’ had lost the battle over core belief systems.
On the defensive, they had to turn that new foundational faith in a proactive government around. For the wealthy, too many average voters now embraced the heresy that government had an essential role in diminishing the abrasive consequences of free markets. People accepted the principal that the public sector should afford all people at least a shot at a decent life. For many traditionalists, that seemed utterly contrary to the notion of a people free from government intrusion and a philosophy that markets alone ensure a fair distribution of resources and opportunities. A natural law was being violated. In the eyes of the elite, a new moral philosophy was needed.
Fortunately, for those opposed to large and intrusive government, there is a long history of economic and philosophic thought to buttress their views of good government meaning less to almost no government. Early thinkers such as Adam Smith and Frederick Bastiot laid out the principles of free trade and open markets. These principles shaped the thinking of this country’s founding fathers. The iconic phrase in one of our famous foundational documents was first written as “…pursuing life, liberty, and property,” not happiness. One revolutionary father, John Adams, is quoted as saying, “Property is surely a right of mankind as real as liberty.”
In the first half of the 1800s, Carl Menger developed the Austrian School that pushed conservative economic and political principles and gave the free market and minimalist government hawks a semblance of academic legitimacy. Later in that century, Herbert Spencer translated Darwin’s biological evolutionary theory into a social framework. It was here that survival of the fittest notion came into common usage. Integrated with Calvinist principles, the new perspective offered a powerful rationale to justify extreme selfishness. Those who were the most capable rose to the top of the social pyramid. They had the skills and motivation to succeed. Those who did not deserved little sympathy or support. Their plight was God and nature’s way of assigning them to their just position in life. To help them would contravene the laws of nature and do more harm than good.
A whole number of thinkers and would-be philosophers struggled to keep the conservative vision alive even as broader circumstances brought the virtues of free markets into question. Frederick Hayek, Ludwig Von Mises, Murray Rothman, and Milton Friedman pounded away at the advantages of economic and personal freedom amidst so many seeking collective security during the economic collapses that occurred with predictable regularity. The great, worldwide depression of the 1930s presented a societal calamity that the old conservative bromides could not easily sweep away.
Many were ready for a new explanation of the world and Keynesian theory was offered as an alternative to economic orthodoxy.
Naturally, many of the economic elite had desperately opposed the New Deal and the subsequent expansion of the federal government through Johnson’s Great Society. Roosevelt was despised among many of the wealthy, a traitor to his class. That was not surprising. What was surprising is how many poor whites also embraced conservative concepts or were amenable to the coming ideological counter revolution. The great African-American thinker, W.E.B. Dubois, wrote in the 1930s that many southern whites preferred a psychological wage to any increased monetary compensation. They would support anyone who permitted them to feel superior to those below them on the racial hierarchy scale, at least as seen in their eyes. That latent racial animus would burst open as a political and voting reality as economic conditions gradually improved. Some argue today that the Trump phenomenon has not been driven by economic anxiety, which is real enough, but by racial anxiety, which is undeniable. The basic anxiety associated with a blind fear of losing ones’ preeminent social position in society as demographics evolve toward a racially diverse nation remains the 900-pound gorilla in the room. Anglo-Saxon dominance is under siege.
Arguably, the philosophical pushback by the right might be traced back to the 1950s, a period when conservative thought clearly was on the defensive and a liberal explosion was just on the horizon. James Buchanan, stung by the recent Brown versus the Board of Education Supreme Court ruling desegregating public schools, founded the Virginia School of Political Economy; a bit like the Chicago school of economic thought but more extreme. Gathering like-minded scholars, they began bringing forward economic principles that had fallen into disrepute.
The founding principles of this school or movement, were traditional. Government should keep its hands off the economy. Only the market should reward effort and distribute goods. Whatever distribution of income and wealth occurs is efficient and fair. Any efforts to remedy inequality will be artificial, inefficient, and morally bankrupt. Any services beyond those deemed essential (e.g., defense, policing, a sound currency, and contract dispute resolution) and the taxes necessary to support them are unnecessary and an inexcusable penalty on the winners in society. Progressive tax schemes are the height of confiscatory evil since they penalize those responsible for creating economic prosperity in the first instance. Their bedrock premise was that there is a natural order to things and proactive government upsets that order leading to the morally bankrupt misappropriating resources from the true guardians of society’s well-being.
Of course, when they started the school, the safety net was only partially developed but was expanding inexorably. The top marginal tax rates, however, were in the 90 percent range, a holdover from the war years where the national debt exceeded the aggregate worth of the economy. Certainly, such extreme progressivity provided an opportunity to make easy points about heavy-handed taxation. It was not unreasonable to argue that these high tax rates might dampen America’s competitiveness. This was probable likely to happen once the rest of the world got back on its feet after the war and America no longer was producing half of the world’s economic output as it did when other economies were in tatters. Think of Korea in the early 1950s, during that horrific conflict. It was a backward, autocratic, and desperately poor country. Today, it is a democracy and an economic powerhouse that competes with us in many economic sectors.
The explosion of domestic spending in the 1960s and early 1970s further stirred the waters leading to a political backlash. Despite the Barry Goldwater debacle in 1964, the core conservative believers never lost heart. Then, the civil rights legislation of the mid-1960s broke the historical partisan anomaly where liberals and conservatives could be found in each party. The Republicans eventually purged their liberal wing while the Democrats lost the deep South. Within a generation, the parties had realigned along ideological fault lines. Almost two decades after the Virginia School began to resurrect conservative political ideas, Lewis Powell, future Supreme Court justice, wrote a memo to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in 1973 that decried the loss of competitiveness in the economy that could only be restored by a return to bedrock conservative economic principles. More to the point, he laid out a basic strategy which, with generous support from the economic elite, paved the way to a sustained, comprehensive playbook to turn the country in a different direction.
Forty-plus years later, the ideological revolution seems complete, though Washington has yet to be turned into the ghost town for which many on the right pine. Starting with Ronald Reagan, the new mantra of lower taxes and limited government (except for defense) gained steam. Though there were bumps along the way, this new mantra became the default position of American politics, its dominant position assured by the marriage of economic theory with the social agenda of evangelical conservatism in the late 1970s. From that point on, liberalism was on the defensive, some might say life support.
For a policy wonk like myself, the current situation is more than bleak. It is hard to imagine a more depressing world. Programs are being savaged without any concern as to consequences for vulnerable populations. Policy is driven almost entirely by ideology and a frantic search for dollars to finance the never-ending desire to cut taxes on the wealthy further. To the Virginia School and the earlier moral philosophers, tax progressivity is a mortal sin. Ideally, fairness meant taking the same amount from each person to fund essential public needs and no more. There, moral sense is simple. Taxing the wealthy excessively, or at all, penalizes success, upsets the moral order, and introduces impediments to the free flow of capital and entrepreneurial energies. In some instances, they have argued with apparent success that some rich ought to pay proportionally less than the average citizen. Thus, the lower tax rate on deferred dividends, a primary source of income for super wealthy hedge fund managers. Warren Buffet has criticized the fact that his secretary pays proportionally more in taxes than he does. While such principles might have appeared extreme a few decades ago, they take on an aura of essential spiritual precepts in our current era.
Consider the following for just a moment. The tools that poverty scholars are immersed in as students and rewarded for as members of the academy now appear less relevant, at least in the political arena. Ideology dominates evidence. Republicans now turn to ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Council) for their legislation, not to experts. The council was founded in 1973 by Paul Weyrich and other conservative leaders to counter the increasing control on daily life imposed by various regulatory agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). At the beginning of the twentieth century, the academic warriors carrying forth the spirit of the Wisconsin Idea wrested control of law-making from corporate interests, at least in part. In the later part of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first, legislative control slipped back to corporate interests with ALEC leading the way. That was not by accident nor through inattention by the way.
Given this horrendous reality, what would I say to prospective policy students today, at least those who would bring science, evidence, and an abiding interest in the public good into the application of their trade? What would I say to those wanting to follow my path into the policy arena? Could I tell them that doing policy is a worthwhile way to spend your life with a straight face? Could I talk about the challenges and joys of struggling with society’s most compelling problems with any enthusiasm knowing that entrenched norms and political rigidities appear to dominate reason and compassion? Where will these young policy aspirants apply their academic skills or express their normative instincts? Ah yes, we are back to the concerns that motivated the writing of this book in the first instance.
In my humble opinion, not enough members of the academy are pushing the boundaries of programmatic and institutional change. Not enough are trying to better understand the psychology and sociology of beliefs and actions. Yes, I can think of several scholars from research universities who focused on the i
nstitutional and normative dimensions related to poverty and welfare policies. However, the majority ply their academic trade in the usual ways…examining narrowly constrained technical issues from afar by using secondary data sets manipulated by advanced econometric techniques. There work never extends beyond the reaches of their frontal lobes, their rational part of the brain. Relatively few immerse themselves in the raw complexities of the real world or look at how public decisions are really made. Those that do are not always very effective.
The reasons for this are not difficult to infer. For one thing, focusing on any deeper understanding of institutional, political, and ideological realities can be quite labor intensive. Professionally speaking, this can be counterproductive for committed members of the academy where cranking out a continuous and endless series of articles is the one and only key to success. For another, it involves too much interaction with real people as they go about doing the public’s business. That means getting outside their own comfortable cultural cocoon…yuck! For still another, it is reasonably certain that you will wind up in some obscure backwater of the academic world. And finally, we really don’t have an academic sub-discipline that trains scholars to understand institutions from the inside nor how pure policy is prostituted by the human dimension, at least not in the same way some scholars are trained to study families or communities in an intimate way.