Charles Murray, the conservative polemicist, describes the mood of working class voters who left the party of Roosevelt to become Reagan Democrats as legitimately angry. The joined a party that promised them a better life and “It hasn’t done a damn thing to help them” for almost two generations.
Murray laments the erosion of the American Creed that he boils down to egalitarianism, liberty and individualism. Many will not share his diagnosis of the causes or his prescription for a cure, but he’s got the symptoms right. We were brought up to believe in equal treatment for all, liberty to go about our business and the right to an individual destiny.
An increasingly populous, complicated, technological, global, diverse, divisive and unequal environment impinges on all of the above. But people can adapt to changing times with ideals intact. The real betrayal is often more quotidian than ideological. Day by day, practical promises that we relied on are broken and our lives are disrupted by government, multi-national employers, and other institutions beyond the power of average citizens to control.
For example, a Wall Street Journal article anticipating tax season warns that the Obama administration’s budget seeks to change the rules governing IRAs. We were told that if we put after-tax dollars in a Roth IRA there would be no mandatory scheduled withdrawals. Now it is proposed to impose such a schedule, forcing retirees to withdraw money on a timetable not of their choosing. Beneficiaries of any money remaining at the death of the deceased owners of 401ks and IRAs can now withdraw the money over their lifetimes. Now it is proposed to require them to empty those accounts in five years.
Both these changes would bring more revenue to the government, but foul up retirement and estate plans based on faith that the old rules would be honored. This is but a small instance of a pervasive kind of bad behavior that has taught Americans to trust no one. Across the aisle, Republicans have been itching to eliminate Medicare since it was created fifty years ago. They aspire to turn Social Security over to Wall Street and Medicare to private insurers and medical conglomerates. Again, the aim is to abrogate the social contract. What happened to a deal’s a deal?
The only reason Americans have to worry about a retirement based on IRAs and 401ks is because so many employers threw the traditional pension overboard while sending jobs offshore. That too was a betrayal of a compact between individuals and institutions. My father’s generation toiled faithfully and was promised a pension as part of the deal. Often by the time retirement arrived it had been replaced by a less generous lump sum or a relatively paltry annuity, making their retirement insecure. When you base your plans on twenty or thirty years of promises only to be told one day the game has been changed, you are understandably bitter.
Sometimes we collaborate in our own destruction by trusting predatory wolves in lenders clothing. The home equity loan and the 30-year mortgage which replaced the 15 or 20 year model ought to be labelled with skulls and crossbones like other household poisons. Thanks to a live-for-today attitude abetted by lenders, many people arrive at retirement still carrying a huge load of mortgage debt instead of owning a financial asset and a secure place to live.
Many other promises should come equipped with a caveat emptor label. Young people join the military with the promise of education in skills that will be useful when they reenter civilian life. Often what they learn is not transferrable to the workplace. Veterans are also promised benefits in exchange for service. But as we all know, the medical care they need is often inconvenient to access and scandalously inadequate to their needs, a betrayal so vile as to border on treason. College students, who were told from the cradle that a degree would guarantee a good job, find themselves underemployed and saddled with a lifetime of debt.
Cities, counties, states and the national government make an implied contract with their citizens. In exchange for paying their taxes and obeying the laws, the services they are provided will be safe, adequate and reliable. Yet the water of Flint poisons its children. Schools across the country provide an education inferior to that available to our international competitors and one that varies wildly by district. Inadequate food and drug, workplace and environmental inspections and regulations allow us to be sickened. Decaying roads and bridges kill us. Make your own list
Even worse than all these broken promises and betrayals is the open secret that the system works just fine for some well-fixed or well-connected citizens. Indeed, the rules of the game are often rigged to feather their nests and to disadvantage those who get to pay for the privilege of being maltreated.
Is it any wonder that candidates who aren’t perceived to be in on the fix are drawing crowds while those with billionaire donors, dark money PACs, and familiar names like Bush and Clinton fail to generate wild enthusiasm? Voters are rightly fed up with the status quo. They have learned talk’s cheap, promises are made and not kept, and they nurse a forlorn hope that this year they won’t be fooled again. Many, however, also suspect that when the dust settles it will be one more case of “meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”