America the Beautiful
Renewing the Promise
In his 1965 inaugural address, President Lyndon B. Johnson accentuated the idea of America as a spiritual quest for freedom from both tyranny and misery. In his clarion call for reform, LBJ argued that America’s soul is the promise that those who make the journey to our land can labor to share in its fruits and be liberated from poverty, discrimination, and ignorance. We are dignified by what we have accomplished and distraught by our sometimes terrible failures, but most importantly, we are proud of what we strive to achieve. Our faith in the future is the foundation of our strength.
Recently, the question of who is permitted to share in America’s journey and bounty was answered in an un-American fashion. This past Friday, the Arizona state legislature took immigration reform into its own crude hands by passing Senate Bill 1070, legislation intended to further criminalize undocumented workers in the state. Among other things, the bill requires that police officers determine the immigration status of anyone they apprehend and deem “reasonably suspicious.” It outlaws the employment of day laborers and prohibits anyone—citizen or otherwise—from wittingly transporting undocumented immigrants. Perhaps worst of all, the legislation permits Arizonans to sue police officers who they imagine to be insufficiently vigilant. SB1070 is not rooted in a desire for order so much as a sentiment of fear. As acknowledged in a Crimson staff editorial on Monday, the bill does little to curb undocumented immigration, but almost certainly incites racial profiling, fosters the presumption that some folks are guilty until proven innocent, cripples law enforcement, and exposes government agencies to frivolous lawsuits.
The Oldest Trick in the Book
Once again, conservatives are banking on faux-populism. Over the past few weeks, Republican senators and their brain trust have attempted to shift public opinion on consumer financial protection proposals by deriding them as elitist. This week on bigthink.com—a popular education website—Peter J. Wallison, a Financial Policy Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, argued that the Democrats’ proposal for a Consumer Financial Protection Agency is condescending because it implies that Americans are incapable of understanding complex financial products on their own. Wallison used this same rhetoric in a Washington Post editorial last summer, and unfortunately the idea has found its way onto the GOP congressional website, as well as political consultant Frank Luntz’s notorious February memo to Republicans on how to fight financial reform in general.
It’s the oldest trick in the book. When progressives argue that conservatives defend a dangerous status quo, conservatives counter that progressives condescend to Americans who are perfectly capable of watching out for themselves. Because they have difficulty attacking the content of reform, they portray the tone of the legislation as demeaning and thus culturally repulsive. They eschew meaningful debate by realigning themselves with a shallow conception of the American Dream.
Soul Power
Fifty years ago this month, former Arizona senator and presidential candidate Barry Goldwater published his famous book, “The Conscience of a Conservative.” Goldwater accused liberals of ignoring human needs beyond material satisfaction in the opening chapter of his tome: “The root difference between the Conservatives and the Liberals of today is that Conservatives take account of the whole man, while the Liberals tend to look only at the material side of man’s nature.”
I’ve never considered this criticism to be valid, but I must acknowledge Americans have often been given sufficient reason to think of left-of-center figures as cold technocrats. Today’s Democratic politicians claim spirituality but refuse to articulate how their spiritual ideals enlighten a vision of reform. As the former Clinton Administration advisor Rabbi Michael Lerner wrote in his 2006 bestseller, “The Left Hand of God,” over a thirty-year period Democrats granted the Republicans a stranglehold on the politics of spirituality.
Living in a Material World
Over the past two months, much ado has been made over a New York Times/CBS poll claiming Americans are doing more and buying less. The poll echoes conventional wisdom: The recession is rapidly resetting American values. In the past two years we’ve become thriftier, more social, and less materialistic. We are, to quote one particularly overeager writer at Time magazine, “seeing the rise of the citizen consumer—and the beginnings of a responsibility revolution.”
This is a feel-good story, a silver lining in our economic cloud. I’d love to believe it. But in all likelihood, the heart-warming fable is just that and nothing more. Thrift is the new black; frugality is merely en vogue.
The Wonder and Wisdom of Smallness
In the beginning of Frank Capra’s 1946 classic masterpiece, “It’s a Wonderful Life,” protagonist George Bailey, played by James Stewart, asks his aging father why the family still runs a penny-ante Building and Loan. His father replies quietly, “George, I feel that in a small way we are doing something important: Satisfying a fundamental urge. It’s deep in the race for a man to want his own roof and walls and fireplace, and we’re helping him get those things in our shabby little office.” Later in the film, Bailey remembers his father’s words as he tussles with the evil Mr. Potter and his scheme to force poor-quality housing on the working poor of Bedford Falls.
Over the past few weeks, blogger Arianna Huffington and economist Robert Johnson have launched a viral social media campaign to convince Americans to transfer their funds to local community banks like George Bailey’s. The video for the “Move Your Money” campaign mashes scenes from “It’s a Wonderful Life” with cuts from the Congressional bailout hearings. The campaign equates the Big Four banks (Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, and Wells Fargo) with Mr. Potter and his cronies. It also encourages Americans to send a message “that we have had enough of the high-flying, no-limits-casino banking culture that continues to dominate Wall Street and Capitol Hill.”