A March Through The Mind Of America

THE FAILURE of the Republican Congress to reform education and Social Security shows that you cannot enact reform just because you have a majority in Congress. The voters saw that and properly decided that a can’t-do Congress needed to be retired.

We should learn from our current political elite, the progressive liberals. Their battle to secure decency and justice for working people and former slaves was not just a matter of winning elections and majorities in Congress. Their power issued from the moral case that they made to the great American middle class, a decent people with compassion for the less fortunate and the oppressed.

Today, we live in a new age of injustice. Yet today’s average liberal seems unconcerned about a government school system that delivers a mere 15 percent of adults as “proficient” in literacy and numeracy and utterly fails to educate the children of poor people. The average liberal seems unconcerned that the welfare state has wrecked the authentic culture of the working class and the African-American family. The average liberal seems unconcerned that Social Security and Medicare will impose swingeing taxes on the next generation of working people.

These injustices may be obvious to conservatives. But they are not yet the common currency circulating among the American people. That is why Republicans failed to reform education with the No Child Left Behind Act and Social Security with the president’s individual account plan.

Face it: Our modern liberals have compassion only for liberals and liberal political dependents. They lack the common decency of the great American middle class, so open to moral persuasion.

This means that the challenges facing our conservative insurgency will be greater than those facing the progressive insurgency of a century ago. Conservatives must not just make the moral case to win the hearts and minds of the American people; they must fight the liberal princes of privilege.

Ultimately, conservatives have to convince the American people that, far from being the beneficiaries of compassionate liberals who gave them worker rights, Social Security, civil rights, women’s rights, and so on, they are in fact the dupes of the liberal princes of privilege, taught to be grateful for scraps left over from the table of unjust and unaccountable liberal power.

The time to make a start is now, and Phil Kerpen of Americans for Prosperity is doing just that. Why would the White House sign on for a rumored Social Security compromise with Democrats that increases taxes and cuts benefits on the wealthy, he argues, if it doesn’t include a provision for individual accounts? Such measures, he writes,

are entirely about what’s best for government: They are about finding a way to make the books balance on paper so that the feds can keep spending our Social Security dollars on unrelated, wasteful programs.

Then he gets down to the basic injustice of the Social Security program.

Because I’m young, single, and male, Social Security promises me a 1.5 percent real rate of return. And that’s what it promises. What it can afford to pay is more like half a percent, which is more like passbook interest than an investment return.

Think about it. The US government diverts the retirement savings of American working people into vote buying programs and pays back the principal almost without interest. But it fully repays principal and market rates of interest to the foreign governments that invest in its notes and bonds. How do you spell INJUSTICE?

Who would have thought that the Democratic Party, the party of the little people, would one day be perfectly at ease with a government pension plan that stiffed ordinary working people in favor of rich foreign governments? But that is what power does to politicians and political movements. They end up more concerned about balancing the budget of a bloated government than in balancing the budgets of the American people.

We will not reform Social Security until it becomes shameful for a politician to defend the current unjust system. We will know when we get there. TV news anchors will unconsciously refer to “controversial Democratic opposition to the president’s plan to give every American an individual Social Security account” instead of “the president’s controversial plan to privatize Social Security.” They will frown at the “threat of a filibuster to the president’s pro-choice plan that puts teeth into every parent’s right to send their child to the school of their choice” instead of worrying about “the president’s plan to direct federal funds away from the public school system to private and sectarian religious schools.”

It will take an ideological insurgency to change the hearts and minds of the American people and, finally, the stony hearts of the mainstream media.

With Republicans just turned out of power, there will never be a better time to start constructing a new conservative narrative that will liberate the nation from liberal oppression. But it is not going to be easy. It is not going to be quick.

It will not be like the liberal “march through the institutions” of the last generation. It will have to be more than that. What is needed is a “march through the mind of America.”

The time to start is now.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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