It is time for the United States to admit that it is no longer facing a battle over public services, or beginning to see the signs of an anti-welfare culture, but that it is in fact actively entrenched in a basic human rights and civil rights war over whether people in the United States should have access to the most necessary, and fundamental, of services. The war isn’t starting: it began many years ago, it’s been mounting in intensity ever since, and in 2014, it is going to reach a fever pitch, and possibly a tipping point.
As US conservatives attack the right to access education, health care, housing, and food, all while actively denying basic benefits, the left has, yet again, an opportunity to fight back. Can the left muster the ammunition and the organisation to do so? Or will it be left in its usual disorganised haze, unable to act in any meaningful way to address social inequalities?
Across multiple states, conservative think-tanks are orchestrating attacks on government benefits to ‘free people from government dependency,’ as the right views access to basic human needs as ‘dependency.’ Documents uncovered by The Guardian display an impressive, terrifying, and coordinated strategy, drawing upon lessons learned from organisations like ALEC, which already have a profound effect on US politics, society, and culture thanks to their brilliant lobbying and template-based legislative contributions, allowing state after state to adopt conservative laws without even having to invest energy in writing them.
Many of these groups are hiding under the shelter of being tax-exempt nonprofits, allowing them to collect large amounts of funding with special tax treatment for both themselves and their contributors. They’re turning around to use these funds, in turn, to undermine the very government that’s providing them with this special treatment…all while claiming that they want to eliminate special treatment for given classes of people.
Of course, they’re mainly concerned with ‘special treatment’ of low-income people in the United States, and their evident solution is to slash Medicaid funding, destroy schools, attack public pensions and benefits, and worry away at every possible social benefits programme in the United States, including those once considered sacred, like Medicare.
Conservatives in the US do not believe in fundamental human rights, but rather in an economics-based model of society, firmly believing that a free market can solve all ills. Their version of a ‘free market’ is a curious blend of a completely unregulated market and one subject to bizarre government interventions—for example, conservatives disastrously pushed to deregulate utilities in the United States, but believe interfering with the practice of medicine by barring certain procedures or medications is perfectly reasonable. Even as they lobby to, for example, lift the restrictions on the oil and gas industry in the United States, they’re fighting to ban abortion across a multitude of US states, and have succeeded in restricting reproductive rights considerably.
Under the conservative model, the welfare of individual people doesn’t matter, unless those individuals are white, wealthy, and in power; most of their protectionism is focused on those of high class and social positions. The rest of the country can burn, even though it’s the labour of the lower classes that supports the upper classes, and even though lower and middle class people (what remains of the middle class, at any rate) are those who sustain the country; they contribute more in terms of taxes, charitable contributions, and community-based involvement than their wealthy counterparts, in a country where billionaire Warren Buffet once infamously noted that he pays fewer taxes than his secretary, thanks to the protections put in place to safeguard wealth.
Strangely, though, appeals to economics don’t actually matter to conservatives. As Congress closed its session for the holidays, Democrats were unsuccessful in an attempt to push through an extension of long-term unemployment benefits, stymied by Republicans who refused to consider extending the cuts without a corresponding cut to the budget to make up the difference. Republicans knew full well that the extended wrangling over the budget would make Democrats hesitant, at best, when it came to further discussions, and thus, benefits ran out for 1.3 million people mere days after Christmas, with around a million more to follow in the coming weeks.
But here’s an interesting equation: when the government pays out a dollar in benefits, the economy gets approximately $1.60 back. How? Because when people have access to money, they spend it; people living at or below the poverty line start buying food and supplies, stimulating local businesses, contributing to job creation, and engaging with their local economies. Thus, there’s a clear and obvious economic benefit to offering extended benefits to people who are having trouble finding work in a difficult economy, even if you don’t believe there’s an ethical obligation to ensure all people in the United States have access to a basic standard of living that includes not being homeless, not starving, having access to education, and being able to obtain health care.
Yet, Republicans refused the extension, demonstrating that their ideology isn’t about simple economics, but about something much deeper: the firmly entrenched belief that everyone must bootstrap their way through difficult times, including those who are not logistically able to do so (if the bootstrapping myth is even anything other than a myth). Conservatives think that people must be forced to take action to better their lives, even when all evidence demonstrates that there is no meaningful action someone can take, because she’s trapped in an economic system that doesn’t favour people like her.
The war on benefits isn’t just an attack on social services, and it’s not even just a war on the poor (though both these things are true). It’s also a war about ideology, and about what kind of country the United States wants to be. Will this country become a place where the gap between rich and poor grows ever-wider and is actively ignored, where political policies and beliefs maintain the myth that everyone is capable of (and obligated to) achieve economic independence even in the face of structural inequalities? Right now, conservatives are winning the war, and dictating the future of the United States in the process, for as these benefits are eroded, they will be difficult if not impossible to win back thanks to divisive politics, entrenchment, and abusive tactics from conservative lobbyists, politicians, think tanks, and others.
Reformers face considerable obstacles, given the pressure, strength, and power of the right. Conservatives can easily, and deftly, dictate the nature of the conversation in a world where they rely heavily on coordinated single-issue campaigning, unfair campaign finance laws, and other tricks that keep power in the hands of the wealthy and high-statused. Yet, as Mayor Bill de Blasio took office in New York on 1 January, his speech provided a glimmer of hope: perhaps it’s possible to defeat the system.
Photo by 401(K)2013, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license