America the Beautiful

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 passage of SB1070 reveals an important but oft-ignored truth: If progressives don’t unite and push for comprehensive immigration reform at a national level, local reactionaries will enact policies that contradict the American Dream of a more classless and a casteless society. SB1070 is likely to be struck down by the courts, as was California’s Proposition 187 in 1998, but if progressives don’t craft new policy, there will be many more SB1070s to come.

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.

In reality, Wallison and company’s arguments are nothing but smokescreens for fleecing consumers. A consumer financial protection entity, such as Senator Chris Dodd’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau—or the even more robust CFPA proposed by Representative Barney Frank—would do much to defend American families and small businesses from financial ruin. The proposal is anything but elitist—and it’s supported by an overwhelming majority of the American public: A Monday poll by the Consumer Federation of America found that 62 percent of Americans support the creation of a "new federal agency to protect consumers who purchase banking and other financial services."

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.

For many Democrats, the mention of spiritual political leaders conjures up the image of a fire-and-brimstone evangelical preacher encouraging the flock to support the war in Iraq or combat abortion in the street. Understandably, many Democrats would prefer the party take a neutral stance on issues of faith, or even avoid discussion of spirituality completely.

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.

Old habits die slowly, and American consumerism is more than just a habit. Although we’re certainly purchasing fewer luxury items, this is mostly likely not due to a sudden moral transformation. Consumerism is deeply etched in our national identity. Despite the severity of the recession, it will take much more pressure before Americans abandon the kid-in-the-candy store culture that has defined public life over the past three decades.

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.”

We don’t live in the black-and-white world of George Bailey. But there are still lessons to be learned from “It’s a Wonderful Life.” The tone of the Move Your Money campaign is a little too vengeful. Although the banks certainly have much more to answer for, the campaign masks the fact that irresponsible borrowers also played a hand in the fall of our house of cards. And yet, the chief message of the movement, that customer should make finance more local for the common good, is critical to America’s economic and social recovery.

Public opinion plays like a broken record. As the New Jersey bill to legalize same-sex marriage floats and flounders in the state legislature, I can’t help feeling that I’ve heard the same sound-bite arguments from supporters and detractors a million times. Groups with names like Garden State Equality and Progressive Change Committee Campaign decry empty promises of the pursuit of happiness and the withholding of individual rights. They yell and scream across the aisle at the Council on the American Family and the Coalition to Preserve and Protect Marriage, products of the 90s culture wars, which judging by the media clips, continue unabated.

Somewhere in all this mess, it’s become painfully apparent that the camps are talking past each other. In my perspective, advocates for same-sex marriage could go about advancing the message with a bit more tact. Although the proponents of marriage equality have made tremendous strides—achievements should be rightfully recognized and applauded—we must now engage socially-conservative opponents on their own turf. In addition to emphasizing the case for same-sex marriage in terms of individual freedom and rights, we must add community-oriented dimensions to the message. Progressives need to stress that same-sex marriage won’t erode institutions conservatives hold dear—in fact, it might very well strengthen them.

It’s difficult for young progressives to contemplate that the case for same-sex marriage might be cast more persuasively outside the cheap vocabulary of political liberalism. There’s a reason for this. Bread-and-butter arguments for a mere “live and let live” policy are easy to understand and easy to preach. But they’re also the least persuasive.

Luke Skywalker had Darth Vader, Michael Jordan had the entire NBA, and, in the darkest of days, Martin Luther King Jr. had the waning stars of Dixie.

Within recent memory, young American heroes have been defined by combat: They’ve engendered respect and admiration—especially from my generation—by bashing the bad guys.

It is thus all the more remarkable that President Obama, millennial idol, generally refrains from demonizing his opponents. Paradoxically elected as both a progressive champion and a national unifier, he has thus far managed to foster populism with minimal malice. Although Obama has certainly not been lenient with greedy bankers or seedy polluters, he has refused to completely vilify any particular group as the cause of our problems.

At the height of the Gilded Age, the American sociologist Thorstein Veblen criticized the country for “conspicuous consumption”: the lavish and arbitrary spending on goods and service merely for the display of wealth.

Today, even in the midst of recession and what some would dub a second Gilded Age, we have our own arbitrary displays of wealth. But, more uniquely, our time in history is defined by “conspicuous compensation.” The amount that some people are paid—especially those who are paid with the country’s common cents—seems to lack all common sense.

Last Friday, the U.S. Treasury “pay czar” officially mandated pay cuts for the top 25 executives at seven firms that received bailout money—including Citigroup, AIG, and Bank of America. On top of that, the Federal Reserve has now put forth a proposal to have veto power over every bonus of every financial firm—even those who have not received Troubled Asset Relief Program money.