Liberalism and its notable accomplishments

Political campaign season is ugly. It reminds me of those cable TV stations I flip through, the ones playing to a certain audience that enjoys predators killing prey. Who enjoys that? The attack ads go after the neck of a candidate. A Pennsylvania congressional race recently featured what we’ve seen many times before: “Candidate X is a (ominous music) Liberal (spoken with distaste).”

Joseph Goebbels pioneered the practice of the repeated lie: say it often enough and people come to believe it. Have an authoritative person say it with stentorian tones, and more will believe sooner. Ads before elections are repeated as often as the attacker can afford to. So once again we have been treated to the ritual demonizing of the term Liberal.

Politicians of all persuasions are guilty of dirty politics, but why do we not hear corresponding attacks on (scary background) Conservative? That slant after all brought us tax cuts for the super-rich on the ever-failed pretense that wealth will trickle down to us peons. It brought us a war known at the start as one against the wrong enemy (because of which the country went from a $236 billion surplus to a $1.2 trillion deficit). And, for its own selfish reasons, it brought us unified, obstructionist sabotage of things like universal health insurance, the kind that most other industrialized nations of the world have had for decades.

Here is what liberalism has accomplished in the last century. Liberals introduced child labor laws, the eight-hour day, minimum wage, progressive income taxation, direct election of senators, women’s suffrage, the Securities and Exchange Commission until conservatives emasculated it on behalf of Wall Street derivative buccaneers, insured savings at banks, rural electrification, unionism, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Head Start, Peace Corps, Vista, food stamps, federal aid to educations, legal services for the poor, the National Endowment for the Arts, public TV and so much more.

Most if not all of the above was — and still is, though quietly — branded as socialism (really scary music) by extremists. It’s Marx back from the dead. Commies are in our government introducing all manner of mayhem even while right-wing resisters with straight faces collect their Social Security and work a 40-hour week, happy that their children are prevented by law from sweatshop factories and are in schools aided by pinko Washington.

If you still disbelieve that extremists, encouraged by Limbaugh, Beck, Krauthammer and company press to overthrow the above, ask why they want to privatize Social Security, making it a federal casino based on the volatile stock market. During this seemingly endless recession, how would you have liked to gamble your pension on the market?

At this point you will ask me why conservatism is so popular even if it cannot assemble a comparable list of accomplishments. Well-meaning people can disagree about the successes and failures of political policies, and elections are about more than economics and social policy. And among both conservatives and liberals there are honorable men and women (and scoundrels).

But I think an important reason is the repeated rationale that you can get rich if you vote like the rich. It seems to have hypnotic power on people disgruntled at the poor performance of the economy. Throw the bums out, even if they were the ones who started us toward recovery. Too bad it’s taking them so long, even while obstructionists are greeted as saviors.

Here in our United States of Amnesia our memory span is disastrously short. We know the present: recession. But we quickly forget the very recent past: who got us there and how they did it. Add to that the indisputable phenomenon of the electorate taking us left and then right and left again, with all the waste it takes to change directions with little thought to the consequences. You can’t turn a super-tanker on a dime. Even in investing they tell you to choose one philosophy and then stick to it. Do not change course every few months because results have not appeared quickly enough.

But underneath it all I blame greed. Rather than share and work together, our ruthlessly rugged individualism makes us resist a delay to amass a common pension fund for use later, when we retire.

Like children we want it now, and we won’t share with anyone else. We will call Social Security socialism and we’ll do the same with other government programs based on public solidarity, people working together for the common prosperity of all who want to work. Our greed will cause us to choke the way a child does who gobbles whole his jelly donut rather than share it with a friend who has a cream donut.