Confessions of a Recovering Statist

[Jeffrey C. Dege]

http://past.thenation.com/issue/971117/1117ehre.htm

When Government Gets Mean:
Confessions of a Recovering Statist

By Barbara Ehrenreich
_________________________________________________________________

Call this the confessions of a recovering statist--at least that's how
the right will probably view it. In the past fifteen or so years, I've
ended hundreds of speeches with the words "cut military spending and
expand social spending," or some euphonious version thereof,
implicitly identifying government as the only appropriate focus for
activism. In these predilections I have hardly been alone:
Progressivism is almost defined, in our times, by its advocacy of an
"activist government."

A couple of decades ago, it made sense to pin our hopes on the federal
government as a positive instrument for social change. In the sixties
and seventies--pressured by the civil rights movement, the nascent
feminist movement and a still-muscular labor movement--the federal
government expanded both its economic protections and its guarantees
of civil liberties. We gained, in little more than a decade, Medicare
and Medicaid, workplace safety and environmental regulations,
cost-of-living increases in Social Security and laws against race- and
sex-based discrimination, as well as the right to birth control and
abortion. To many of us who came together in the early eighties to
form the Democratic Socialists of America, for instance, it seemed
possible that we would achieve our goal of an economically socialist
and socially libertarian society by building on the programs and
guarantees already offered by the federal government. At the very
least, that government seemed to embody, in however imperfect a form,
some defense against corporate banditry.

So when a populist right emerged to challenge "big government" and the
legitimacy of government-based reforms in general, we valiantly leapt
to its defense. At the time, this seemed like the only reasonable and
principled response: We knew the right was not so much "against
government" as it was against the meager protections government
provides for the low- and middle-income majority. But ineluctably we,
the erstwhile radicals, became far better defenders of government than
any of its elected functionaries. As the right escalated its attacks,
we escalated our defense, to the point, all too often, of seeming to
abandon our own antistatist tradition and critiques of existing
government programs. I realized how much our image had changed--from
"radical" to "defenders of government"--in discussions with some of
the rural right-wingers I regularly talk to. To my surprise, they were
surprised to discover that I share their outrage over random drug
searches and similar intrusions: It was their impression that
"liberals" thought the government could do no wrong!

I'm not sure whether we should have responded differently to the
right's antigovernment rhetoric from the start. But surely today,
after nearly two decades of conservative national governance, Reagan
through Clinton, we can no longer let progressivism be understood as
the defense of government--this government anyway--against the
antigovernment forces of the right. The federal government of 1997 is
a very different creature from that of, say, 1977--more egregiously
corrupt and sycophantic toward wealth, more glaringly repressive and
even less responsive to the needs of low- and middle-income people. By
setting ourselves up as the defenders of government (or, colloquially
speaking, "big government") against the neo-anarchists of the right,
progressives have boxed themselves into a pragmatically and morally
untenable position.

Pragmatically, the problem is that hardly anyone out there wants to
hear about more government or bigger government. Even the constituency
for better government is tepid: Witness the non-response to our
current campaign finance scandals. It is, unfortunately, the federal
government--long favored by the left because of its relative ability
to rise above the racism and corporate caprices that typically
dominate the statehouses--that has been the most thoroughly
discredited as a potential agency of positive change. Maybe that will
change--as, for example, people notice that it is the federal
government and not the Chamber of Commerce that tends to organize
disaster relief and that has brought us such innovations as the
Internet. But for the time being, we're not going to get anywhere with
a progressive agenda consisting of wonderful new government
initiatives. Believe me, I have tried, and found again and again that
the enthusiasm for, say, national health insurance or stricter
environmental regulation quickly ebbs when I point out that the only
source of such improvements is likely to be the federal government.
Socialism is, of course, completely out of the question as long as it
is conceived as a hypertrophied version of the government we now have,
or, in the paranoid fantasy of the populist right, Hillary running
everything.

Americans did not always hate their government. The proportion who say
they "trust the government in Washington" only "some of the time" or
"none of the time" has shot up only recently, rising from 30 percent
to 70 percent just in the years between 1966 and 1992. We usually
explain this shift in outlook as a brilliant propaganda coup for the
right, which, by the mid-seventies, was raking in enough corporate
money to create a lush intellectual infrastructure of think tanks and
new media outlets. We understand that racism also played its part in
the turn against government, helping foster the peculiar perception
that people of color have been the chief, if not the sole,
beneficiaries of government activism. But we also should understand
that the discrediting of government was not accomplished solely
through propaganda and prejudice: There are legitimate grounds for
distrusting government, and these grounds have been expanding. Through
its power over the government it professes to hate, the right has put
itself in a position to create a government that is ever more
deserving of hatred.

It is, first of all, a government that offers far too little to its
average citizens. Thanks to the efforts of the right over the past
several decades and especially the past decade and a half, we have a
government that does not provide the kinds of services that, in other
nations, have helped create a mass constituency for government
activism--things like universal health insurance, child care, college
tuition, paid parental leave and a reliable safety net. In fact,
middle-class, non-elderly Americans encounter their government chiefly
in the form of petty-minded bureaucracies like the I.R.S. and the
D.M.V. Hence the vicious cycle that has been powering the rightward
march of U.S. politics: The less the government does for us, the
easier it is to believe the right's antigovernment propaganda; and the
more we believe it, the less likely we are to vote for anyone who
might use government to actually improve our lives.

The result has been a near-total ideological roadblock for the left.
We say "Child care! Health care!" and all the rest, and they say,
"Aha, you mean more government!" End of discussion. We have no trouble
imagining the kind of polity and social protections we would like, but
one of the most venerable instruments for achieving
them--government--has been ruled out of order by the ideologues of the
right. Now we could of course doggedly continue our defense of
government activism against the celebrants of the "free market"
economy--pointing out, for example, that government still offers some
useful things like Medicare and Head Start, that taxes are actually
quite low here compared with other nations, that it is still, despite
the ever-tightening rule of wealth, in some vague sense "our"
government.

But there is another reason we can no longer let progressivism be
defined as the defense of government activism, and this is a moral
one. While government does less and less for us, it does more and more
to us. The right points to the appalling firebombing at Waco; we
should be just as noisily indignant about the ongoing police war
against low-income Americans of color, not to mention teenagers,
immigrants and other designated misfits. If there is any handy measure
of a government's repressiveness, it is the proportion of its
citizenry who are incarcerated, and at least by this measure the
United States leads the world. Furthermore, prison conditions in this
country are steadily worsening: Children are incarcerated with adults;
efforts at rehabilitation are being discarded as overly indulgent
amenities; arbitrary brutality and systematic deprivation are common.
We don't, in other words, have a soft, cuddly government of the kind
that could be derided as a "nanny state." We have a huge and heavily
armed cop.

So government has not been shrinking, as promised, on the
Clinton-Gingrich watch. Only the helpful functions of government are
shrinking, while the repressive ones are expanding without foreseeable
limit and increasingly threaten all Americans. Clinton, in particular,
has revealed a boundless appetite for surveillance in the name of the
drug war and antiterrorism--proposing, at various times, drug tests
for young people seeking driver's licenses, government-accessible
"clipper chips" within our PCs and the examination of air travelers'
life histories for "suspicious travel patterns." Anthony Lewis has
concluded that Bill Clinton "has the worst civil liberties record of
any President in at least 60 years." He also has the most flamboyant
record--surpassing even Reagan's--for the destruction of government
services.

We are not yet a police state, of course. You may disagree with me as
to how far we have gone in that direction, but you will surely agree
that there is some point when the ratio of the repressive to the
helpful functions of government will become so top-heavy that it will
be masochistic to regard government as a potential ally and friend.
Maybe for you that will be when Social Security is abolished (or
privatized) and when 10 million, instead of a mere 5 million,
Americans are trapped in the criminal justice system. For me that
point was passed with the repeal of welfare in 1996, after which I
could no longer imagine that my federal taxes served any compassionate
function--or, more generally, that the government plays any
redistributive role other than to promote the ongoing upward
redistribution of wealth.

Our entire outlook has to change. Most fundamentally, given the nature
of our real and existing government, we can no longer allow ourselves
to be seen as mere cheerleaders for government activism. The power to
levy taxes, for example, is increasingly deployed to tithe low- and
middle-income people to subsidize the state functions--such as
corporate welfare and the military--favored by the corporate elite.
Even the few remaining services for the poor are tainted by the
repressive agenda of the right, which has budgeted funds for "chastity
education" for welfare recipients and favors ever more intimate
monitoring of the lifestyles of public housing occupants. When this
government gets "active," it may very well act against us.

Yes, we should continue to defend the idea, meaning really the vision,
of a truly progressive and robustly democratic form of governance. My
point is that we can no longer advance that vision by acting as if the
existing government prefigures it in any serious way. We can, of
course, continue to try to reform the existing government: by electing
progressives to office, for example, and by working to change the
rules that make it almost impossible to do so. But these efforts have
so far been both arduous and disappointing. Procedural tinkering, such
as campaign finance reform and the New Party's unsuccessful effort to
legalize fusion tickets, is usually too abstract and complex to
generate much excitement. And progressive elected officials only
rarely remain so, being quickly absorbed into an insiders' world of
corruption and compromise.

In the meantime, though, the progressive agenda cannot be put on hold
until we have a government that is worthy and capable of carrying it
out. There are plenty of things we can do, right now and even with the
existing rules and cast of miscreants. We have to begin, though, by
acknowledging that the struggle for economic justice can no longer be
conceived simply as a campaign to build support for our wish list of
government services. We need a greater emphasis on strategies and
approaches that do not depend on the existing government, that in fact
bypass it as irrelevant or downright obstructionist.

Some of these approaches are obvious and uncontroversial. First, we
can support efforts to organize the 90 percent of American workers who
are unorganized, including, most urgently, the former recipients of
welfare. Historically, there have been two approaches to economic
justice: (1) demanding services and income support from government,
and (2) directly confronting private capital by organizing unions.
Since the first option has been foreclosed for the time being, there
must be an all-out emphasis on the second. A major obstacle, sadly, is
union leadership itself, which, even in its recently reinvigorated
form, has insisted on funneling millions to Democratic candidates (or,
worse, their own re-election campaigns) while strike funds go lacking.
Fortunately, though, union organizing does not have to wait for the
existing union leadership. The ongoing efforts to organize workfare
recipients, for example, are being led by groups like ACORN and the
recipients themselves; once the hard work of organizing has been
accomplished, the unions will no doubt be happy to incorporate the new
members.

Second, we can launch a citizen initiative against corporate crime. In
the past couple of years, there have been dozens of demonstrations at
the retail outlets of sweatshop-dependent corporations like Nike,
Guess and Disney. In the absence of effective regulation against
abusive corporations, we have no choice but to pressure them
ourselves.

More controversially, I propose that we put greater emphasis on
projects that both give people concrete assistance and serve as
springboards for further political activism. Examples might include
squats, cooperatives of various kinds, community currency projects and
some of the less costly types of "alternative services," like those
offering information, contacts, referrals and a place for people to
gather. Such projects can't provide a substitute for government
services since, numerically speaking, their impact is only a drop in
the bucket, but they can serve as a "cultural core," in Frances Fox
Piven's phrase, of a movement that may eventually be strong enough to
win services that are tax-funded and distributed as a matter of right.
The feminist health centers, for example, that flourished in the
seventies and are still in operation in a number of cities around the
country cannot make up for the lack of national health insurance. But
they have given many thousands of women the subversive idea that
low-cost, high-quality health care is a right--while at the same time
serving as organizing centers for the defense of reproductive rights.

There are several reasons for an emphasis on projects that create
alternatives. First, they may be necessary for organizing low-income
workers, who are often dispersed among many small employment sites
that are almost impossible to organize one by one. Such workers may be
easier to reach through neighborhood-based centers offering, for
example, employment counseling along with information on workers'
rights and unions--as some organizers of workfare recipients are
currently proposing. Second and more generally, bold and visible
alternatives may help break through the hopelessness and passivity
engendered by years of right-wing campaigning against public services.
Successful projects might inspire the kind of can-do spirit that is so
lacking today: If government won't do it, then let government get out
of the way, because we're not waiting around!

But for me, the most powerful argument for projects that create
alternatives is, ultimately, the scary fact that there is less and
less for them to be alternative to. Consider the plight of the people
who are being tossed off welfare. Do we simply wait around until the
government changes its mind? Applaud the efforts of the Ford
Foundation to track the fate of former welfare recipients as they
stumble through low-wage jobs and perhaps into homelessness, all the
while trying to publicize the horror stories as they unfold? Better to
do something that actually helps a few people, or gets them started
helping themselves--while at the same time dramatically underscoring
the need for economic justice for all. And if our activism is bold and
visible enough, it may help prod the existing government in a
progressive direction: banning the products of sweatshops, for
example, or replacing workfare with the option of adequately paid
public-sector jobs.

But economic justice is not the only thing on our agenda. We have to
be ready to defy a government that has become an active repressor, and
this means putting a greater emphasis on civil libertarian issues.
Some progressives have responded to the right's successes with a
narrowing focus on economic justice, arguing that the "social
issues"--like gay rights, abortion, drug-law reform, even police
brutality--are just too divisive. True, most Americans are far more
amenable to economic goals like national health insurance than to
drug-law reform (which would empty out most of the prison cells
overnight). Morally, though, we have no choice but to oppose the
steady erosion of individual liberties and the growth of the
punishment industry. It might even improve, or at least clarify, our
image if we were more forthright and militant about our own brand of
libertarianism.

Tragic realities impel us to move beyond our emotional co-dependency
on government as the only available instrument for social change, but
there are opportunities beckoning us in that direction; one is the
need to develop a meaningful internationalism. Rhetorically, most
progressives agree that it is the transnational corporations, far more
than the nation-states, that rule the world, and that the future
depends on our ability to build transnational forms of resistance. In
practice, though, it's hard to do this when almost all our efforts are
addressed to our own particular nation-state. We might free our
imaginations to conceive of truly international strategies if our
mission were no longer defined so provincially in terms of our
immediate impact on the existing national government.

Finally, there is the opportunity to clarify to the American public
what we stand for. We cannot let ourselves be defined or perceived as
the defenders of a government that has become, under the tutelage of
right-wing Republicans and Democrats alike, outrageously corrupt,
loathsomely repressive and socially callous. Our goal is, as it has
always been, full freedom and economic security for all. At one point
it looked like our government might help us achieve this. But that
government is no longer "ours," nor will it be anything we would want
to claim as ours without a massive downward transfer of power. For
now, it looks like we are on our own, although--if you count the
world's oppressed and underpaid majority--we are hardly alone.

--
If ever the free institutions of America are destroyed, that event may
be attributed to the omnipotence of the majority, which may at some
future time urge the minorities to desperation and oblige them to have
recourse to physical force. Anarchy will then be the result, but it will
have been brought about by despotism.
- Alexis De Toqueville