Conservative Assault On America’s Families
Shulman delivered these remarks at the Failure of Conservatism Conference on May 3 in Washington, sponored by the Campaign for America’s Future and The American Prospect:
Conservatism historically has seen government as a problem to overcome, an albatross. President Reagan stated it succinctly when he said, “we need to get government off our backs.” Conservatives usually justify this negative view of government in the name of freedom. They conflate freedom with unregulated markets, anti-unionism, low taxes and a rabid individualism. Without so-called government interference, people would be free to make their own choices. But what has this restricted view of government and the notion of freedom it embraces meant for America’s families today? In one word—disaster.The “you are on your own” notion of government and freedom has meant that American families must live with stagnant wages at a time of high profits and productivity without a way to get ahead no matter how hard they try. It has meant health insecurity for workers and their families as fewer and fewer jobs provide health care coverage. It has meant that workers face their older years without the means they counted on to retire, as corporations have slashed traditional pension plans. And it has meant that half of Americans don’t have the fundamental right to take a day off from work when they are sick without losing a job or a paycheck.
It has meant parents having to forgo a child’s high school or college graduation or a PTA meeting because twenty percent of America’s workers do not have any vacation or personal days. It has meant parents tag teaming their shifts to provide their children supervision leading to increased divorce rates because they can’t afford child care. It has meant families who are more stressed out as jobs become more and more insecure. And it has meant more families just struggling to get by with one out of every three workers making less than what it takes to have basic self-sufficiency. All this has been dumped on the already sagging shoulders of working families while government has stood on the sidelines.
And as parents look to provide a better future for their children, it has meant coming up short. Today, it is only the wealthy who have the resources to provide their children the tools required to move up in our society—quality early education, good public schools and a college education. The rest of America’s children just have to do without.
This is a false freedom that forces us to make false choices. Americans aren’t free when they have to choose between paying the rent and providing child care for their children. Parents aren’t free when they must choose between being responsible workers and responsible family members. The elderly aren’t free when they must choose to continue working in their later years because they don’t have pensions. Families aren’t free when they have to declare bankruptcy when they can’t pay their hospital bills. Mothers and fathers aren’t free when they don’t have time to be with their children because they are working two or three jobs just to make ends meet. And children aren’t free when they can’t get the basic tools to succeed and fulfill their potential as human beings.
We can make different choices that would ensure that Americans who work hard can support themselves and their families. We are free to choose ways that will give families time to share with each other and acquire the means that they and their children need to succeed in our new global economy. But this involves a very different definition of freedom, one that presents a very different agenda that will move us closer to ensuring that America’s families can thrive.
This definition of freedom eliminates the false choices we are saddled with today. This freedom involves more than being left alone. Instead, it offers the opportunity to build healthy families and healthy communities. It involves an investment in people. It is a freedom that recognizes that no one can be free without the basic necessities of life, that we can’t be free unless we are all treated with the dignity and respect we deserve.
It is a freedom that recognizes the interconnectedness of us all as human beings and the critical role that our government plays as a protector of public values. It recognizes that government is a place where Americans come together to solve our most pressing problems and to determine how to best use our national resources for the common good.
In the past, government has successfully played a role in providing the public structures for all of us to succeed. As a nation, we determined that our elderly should not be impoverished or go without health care, so we created and continue to provide Social Security and Medicare. We determined that all children deserve the tools to be productive citizens, so we have public schools. And as a nation, we determined that it is in the interest of all of us to have a literate population, so we fund libraries. We passed the GI bill that gave millions of Americans the opportunity to go to college and buy their first homes. It is now time for our government to provide the same kind of opportunity supports that families need today.
Government can and must play the kind of role that it so successfully performed after World War II, in creating the largest middle class in America’s history. Only government can set minimum standards for wages, health coverage, health and safety, paid sick days, retirement security, and the right to organize a union that ensure that hard working Americans have the basics of a decent life. Only government can ensure that families can be both responsible workers and caring family members by updating the outdated workplace practices and supports.
Only government can play the pivotal role in leveraging our resources to provide what workers need to succeed in our new global economy, and create the supports for workers and their families as they move across jobs and/or in and out of the labor force as their life and jobs circumstances change over time. And it is government which has an irreplaceable role in ensuring that all children have the tools they need to fulfill their potential and that opportunity is not limited to the wealthiest among us.
The role of government is to ensure that the prosperity of our economy is broadly shared amongst all hard working Americans and their families and that we create a society in which all families can thrive. The conservatives have it wrong. It’s not about getting government off our backs. It’s about getting it back on our sides, the sides of working families.
Beth Shulman is a lawyer and consultant focusing on work-related issues. She is the author of The Betrayal of Work: How Low-Wage Jobs Fail 30 Million Americans.
© 2007 Beth Schuman
Nice that someone else is seeing what I have been saying was going on for the last 27 years. The thing that really pisses me off is that I don’t consider myself to be that much smarter than anyone else, but apparently I have a better lie guage than others do. I saw over 25 years ago what Reaganomics would lead to, and I got called all sorts of names by almost everyone. And now, a generation later, I have been proven right.
Neoconism, which is what we are REALLY talking about here, has been proven to be the collosal failure of “leadership” that I always said it would be. You can’t go leaving everything up to the morals and ethics of republicans, since they truly don’t have any of either. They have never learned the basic rule of life, whcih is that we are stronger together than we are individually. And the thing is that they KNOW that. Why do you think their whole game has been divide and conquer? And why are we falling for it? It’s been as obvious as the nose on a human face!
If we don’t stop money from making every decision in this country, then we are doomed to a miserable, Orwell inspired life. Remember this: Republicans read 1984 too, but they saw the government as the HERO in that tale, not as the overarching evil that the rest of us recognized it to be.
Reaganomics needs to go the way of the DODO and FAST, or we have no chance at EVER having a future again, let alone being able to live up to it.
Ms. Shulman and WJM are both absolutely on the money with this one! The problem we have is one of psychology and attitude. Yes, Reagan was the monster some of us have always known him to be. The most monstrous of his actions was to give the Christian, fundamentalist, morons permission to feel good about their short-sighted, selfish, racist attitudes! Bush is the current ringleader of the neocon circus, but he is far from alone as the cause of this tragedy. He shares the spotlight with Limbaugh, Hannity, Coulter, O’Reilly, and a churchload of other selfish millionaires. What we don’t need is more of the same. If the so-called progressive voters on the left don’t take their attention away from Hillary, and soon, more of the same is eactly what we are going to get!
http://e-tabitha.com/Horizon.htm
http://sucktheboob.blogspot.com/2007_04_01_archive.html
And this from the “Family Values” party.
“The Value Party”, yes, they take all the value away from everyone else, so they get it all! They see no problem in you making as little as possible, hell, if they could they would have you work for free!
I have always considered economic freedom to be the least important of the various categories of freedom. Most important, in my opinion, is the freedom to do and say whatever you like insofar as by so doing you do not impinge upon the freedom of others to do so. Conservatives, for the most part, reverse these priorities. Libertarians like both kinds of freedom, yet when pressed they seem to prefer economic freedom, and hence are of little use in a society designed around the fair and equitable treatment and protection of its citizens. People like me, though, are a vanishingly small minority in a nation made up chiefly of greedy puritans. America could be great; I have few illusions that it will ever really become so.
Guns or butter. Empire or democracy. That’s the choice, at the heart of it all. We must close those 737+ bases we have around the world, scale way back on military spending, and maybe we’ll have half a chance. Otherwise, we are doomong our children to spend their lives in a declining empire, more and more heavily burdened by debt and taxes.
WJM,
Not to worry. America’s last excursion into government by Money Power ended in the great depression. This one is destined to come to a similar end. At best.
At the far end of the great depression were found the New Deal and a World War. Let’s hope that the next depression gives rise to the next New Deal, but that the US does not play the role of Germany in a next World War.
I too saw this coming with the election of Reagan. I remember the day someone tried to shoot and kill him. The entire bar exploded is applause.
To me, it seems as if we are headed to a new Fuedal Age, only with cell phones and TV’s. There will be, and are, the vast land holders and contries taking what they can from the peasants - taxing them.
There has to be a point when enough people are fed up with the situation and take to the streets.
Take to the streets… and to the Internet.
There you have it. Proof that the Right disenfranchises damn near everyone. Reagan put my folks through the wringer too. Factionalism will help the elites stay in power.
Can anyone on this site recall another single instance of a nation at “war” cutting taxes? Only for the rich of course. Yes closing almost all of the 700 odd overseas facilities seems justifiable. Wouldn’t 5 or 6 naval bases be sufficient. But of course-we are only working hard to promote democracy all over the world-except for places like Saudi Arabia that have financial ties to our royal wannabees. But once royalty did actually take chances on the battlefield-where has noblesse oblige gone?
“We can make different choices that would ensure that Americans who work hard can support themselves and their families.”
“But this involves a very different definition of freedom”
“It recognizes that government is a place where Americans come together to solve our most pressing problems and to determine how to best use our national resources for the common good.”
“This freedom involves more than being left alone”
Scary stuff.
And we’re gonna do this by… oh! I know, I know! Giving the government more money and more power!?
That’ll work!
S.
Helix: you’re right, it will end with a massive depression, but remember, not everyone loses in a depression. There are always winners: the wealthy. However, when this depression starts it would be an excellent time to support locally owned business. As their prices go higher, more money will remain in the community.
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Hey Smurfy: no, it’s not about money and power. It’s about responsiveness. For about the last 30 years government has done an outstanding job of of building business, government and social infrastructure for They the Corporation. To do these very things to support We The People would - gasp! - easily be called Socialism. Never mind that we have a government that is total Corporate Socialism. Huge tax breaks, huge agriculture subsidies. If you’re big with a lot of money, you can make an appt with ANY legislator in America, especially outside your district and state. But if you’re a poor, disabled constituent, they look at you like WTF?
Klever NO country or nation has ever in the history of mankind ever cut tax’s during a war, ours is the first and only at this point in time. You can ckeck this out with Norm Orstein a right’y to boot! He is at The Center for American Progress I think or the American Institute one, they have so many. But Norm wrote a long article early in the Iraq war about this subject. This war is making the rich, richer, and the poor, poorer. The rest is gone shopping!
i’ve been arguing these same points for years now. it was startling to see all of it put together so succinctly, all in one page.
my conservative friends believe we’re at the precipice of losing our individual freedoms to government.
so they do the obvious- they vote for a government that erodes our individual freedoms by making the government a servant to economic interests, instead of being a servant to the citizens.
they have been confused about the purpose of government, and have equated living free with the freedom from interference in seeking profits without regard to the greater good of humankind.
the other harmful conception the neocons seem to hold, is that restricting entities, such as corporations, from harming society is the same as a government limiting an individuals freedom.
what they ignore is that while a huge corporation is made up of individuals, is run by individuals, and fills the portfolios of individuals, the influence and damage, not to mention the loss of our influence as we the people, these gargantuan machines of industry, commerce, and banking wield is not an individual with the same types of freedoms spelled out in our constitution. these fiscal frankensteins have a life of their own, unstoppable without a government.
without certain restrictions, certain laws, or guidelines, mandated by a legal body, approved by the masses, there is none of the freedom our founding fathers hoped for us. all their best thoughts, arguments, work, means nothing if profits for a privileged few outweigh the needs and rights of the many real individuals that our America does not exist without.
we have lost our freedoms to pursue our individual lives. we are slaves to bills, overpriced energy, insurances that cost more and cover less, ridiculously inflated home “values”,
jobs with no cost-of-living adjustments, unconscionable health care costs, skyrocketing education costs, and on and on…
this does not even account for all the second rate products we buy that will be replaced countless times, depleting the planet of resources, and generating all the superfluous manufacturing that is polluting us to death and destruction.
manufacturing that is done to make all those ever increasing quarterly profits, continue to bulge, as we trade our hard-earned money for stuff that will soon break, be outdated by the “new improved” version, which usually means more bells and whistles on the same piece of crap.
all but the wealthiest are starting to feel the pinch.
and we lose our freedom to live a life based on our families and personal values, our hopes and dreams, all to feed the portfolios of the power brokers, the “free-market economy” fans, a market that costs ‘we the people’ far more than our children’s children will be able to bear.
Seeker63: and there is an insidious relationship (on the subject of abrogated freedoms) where the food now hardly BEING food, more a fascimile or that which is legally termed “substantially equivalent” to the intended genuine item itself presents a long-term health liability, but the public is now an enormous guinea pig population to the genetic alteration of food stuffs. BY the time the data is in, the statute of limitations is up, it’s the food equivalent of the automaker’s choice to put the faulty vehicle on the market and let the legal chips fall where they may later. Also, on a spiritual level, a nation being what it invests in, the leaders choosing to empower and enrich the prison-industrial/military-industrial and big pharma complexees means that what is done in our name as citizens, can become a tremendous karmic wave of blowback. With the US burning Baghdad and now fires from sea to shining sea, I hope other readers GET the metaphor. Life is a shared creation an incredibly, incomprehensibly amazing/marvelous fabric wherein every living being functions as a strand. When too many ecosystems get cut, the entire web implodes, as in global warming. Like many on this site I use as little as I can in food, electric, gas, etc but any American largely uses more than natives of more indigenous lands. We need better energy polices and teaching conservation… the waste I see in restaurants, in vehicles left running in parking lots, in paper towels, catalogues, newspapers not read makes me ache for the trees, the vile and unconscionable polluting of this fragile planet’s protective atmospheres, etc. Freedom, great soundbyte, but then there is THE REAL THING…
Most of the nonsense that passes for Conservatism in all reality isn’t that at all! Barry Goldwater was the last of the true conservative’s! He believed that Government should be small and should stay out of most people’s business. It’s been a long time since the Republican party has embraced true conservatism the way Goldwater did. The bunch currently in Washington are Neo-Fascist’s! They are simply masquarading as conservative’s because it gives them some crediability with the voting public! It masks their true intent. Reagan started the move down the Neo-Fascist road with a lot of his policies! He brought the religious nuts into the party and turned it into a fascist movement determined to control every aspect of American life. That was when the Republican Party started moving away from Conservatism into the world of fascism. It’s been a disaster for everyone involved. Especially the Republican Party! I look for them to implode one day from the sheer weight of their own ignorance!
In Europe, the more religious the country, the lower the divorce rate.
The U.S. is more religious than ANY European country, yet has a divorce rate HIGHER than any of them. Why? Couples are working about 10 extra hours a week versus 30 years ago, which comes DIRECTLY out of family time. No wonder the nuclear family is stressed out. So glad the corporate family is doing great.