Security and Liberal Reform

Katherine Henry, Liberalism and the Culture of Security: The Nineteenth-Century Rhetoric of Reform (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2011).

from the publisher:

Figures of protection and security are everywhere in American public discourse, from the protection of privacy or civil liberties to the protection of marriage or the unborn, and from social security to homeland security. Liberalism and the Culture of Security traces a crucial paradox in historical and contemporary notions of citizenship: in a liberal democratic culture that imagines its citizens as self-reliant, autonomous, and inviolable, the truth is that claims for citizenship—particularly for marginalized groups such as women and slaves—have just as often been made in the name of vulnerability and helplessness.

Katherine Henry traces this turn back to the eighteenth-century opposition of liberty and tyranny, which imagined our liberties as being in danger of violation by the forces of tyranny and thus in need of protection. She examines four particular instances of this rhetorical pattern. The first chapters show how women’s rights and antislavery activists in the antebellum era exploited the contradictions that arose from the liberal promise of a protected citizenry: first by focusing primarily on arguments over slavery in the 1850s that invoke the Declaration of Independence, including Harriet Beecher Stowe’s fiction and Frederick Douglass’s “Fourth of July” speech; and next by examining Angelina Grimké’s brief but intense antislavery speaking career in the 1830s.

New conditions after the Civil War and Emancipation changed the way arguments about civic inclusion and exclusion could be advanced. Henry considers the issue of African American citizenship in the 1880s and 1890s, focusing on the mainstream white Southern debate over segregation and the specter of a tyrannical federal government, and then turning to Frances E. W. Harper’s fictional account of African American citizenship in Iola Leroy. Finally, Henry examines Henry James’s 1886 novel The Bostonians, in which arguments over the appropriate role of women and the proper place of the South in post–Civil War America are played out as a contest between Olive Chancellor and Basil ransom for control over the voice of the eloquent girl Verena Tarrant.

Debating the Economy

Paul Krugman on the economic debate:

Yet a destructive passivity has overtaken our discourse. . . . The truth is that creating jobs in a depressed economy is something government could and should be doing. Yes, there are huge political obstacles to action — notably, the fact that the House is controlled by a party that benefits from the economy’s weakness. But political gridlock should not be conflated with economic reality.

Paul Krugman, "No, We Can't? Or Won't?" New York Times, 11 July 2011.

Level the Playing Field?

Robert Reich in the New York Times today -- "How to End the Great Recession":

THE Great Depression and its aftermath demonstrate that there is only one way back to full recovery: through more widely shared prosperity. In the 1930s, the American economy was completely restructured. New Deal measures — Social Security, a 40-hour work week with time-and-a-half overtime, unemployment insurance, the right to form unions and bargain collectively, the minimum wage — leveled the playing field.

Reich argues that we cannot recover from the long structural recession until the middle class is able to buy the goods in produces.

Climate, Reform, Recovery

Paul Krugman argues in support of President Obama's case that relief, reform, and recovery can work together. In the case of climate change reform, Krugman argues, proper investment and reform now might actually help the economy to recover. Such investment would not simply be throwing money at a good cause, but would stimulate the economy and create conditions for growth. Krugman writes that "it’s important to understand that just as denials that climate change is happening are junk science, predictions of economic disaster if we try to do anything about climate change are junk economics."

Krugman does not deny that there would be costs, but claims that "the best available estimates suggest that the costs of an emissions-limitation program would be modest, as long as it’s implemented gradually. And committing ourselves now might actually help the economy recover from its current slump. . . . This short-run economic boost isn’t the main reason to move on climate-change policy. The important thing is that the planet is in danger, and the longer we wait the worse it gets. But it is an extra reason to move quickly."

FDR on Social Security

The Social Security Administration has put together a small online collection of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's speeches and messages relating to Social Security, illustrating his comprehensive vision--and his expert instruction--on the theme that the great goal is to restore security, and that this is to be accomplished by interlinked programs of relief, reform, and recovery. For a variety of practical, political reasons, FDR left comprehensive, universal, single-payer national health insurance out of his Social Security package, though he was very clear that all of the arguments supporting Social Security and unemployment insurance applied in the area of health insurance as well, and that eventually we would have to get around to it. He was never able to do that, and it has not happened -- yet. Maybe this time.

We live in different times, and yet it is remarkable how close the themes of FDR and his opponents are to the debates going on today, in policy and politics.

Here are some excerpts from his message to Congress of June 8, 1934, when he had been in office for fifteen months, introducing the idea of social security insurance:

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, "Message to Congress Reviewing the Broad Objectives and Accomplishments of the Administration," June 8, 1934.

You and I, as the responsible directors of these policies and actions, may, with good reason, look to the future with confidence, just as we may look to the past fifteen months with reasonable satisfaction.

On the side of relief we have extended material aid to millions of our fellow citizens.

On the side of recovery we have helped to lift agriculture and industry from a condition of utter Prostration.

But, in addition to these immediate tasks of relief and of recovery we have properly, necessarily and with overwhelming approval determined to safeguard these tasks by rebuilding many of the structures of our economic life and reorganizing it in order to prevent a recurrence of collapse.

It is childish to speak of recovery first and reconstruction afterward. In the very nature of the processes of recovery we must avoid the destructive influences of the past. We have shown the world that democracy has within it the elements necessary to its own salvation. . . .

Among our objectives I place the security of the men, women and children of the Nation first.

This security for the individual and for the family concerns itself primarily with three factors. People want decent homes to live in; they want to locate them where they can engage in productive work; and they want some safeguard against misfortunes which cannot be wholly eliminated in this man-made world of ours. . . .

These three great objectives the security of the home, the security of livelihood, and the security of social insurance--are, it seems to me, a minimum of the promise that we can offer to the American people. They constitute a right which belongs to every individual and every family willing to work. They are the essential fulfillment of measures already taken toward relief, recovery and reconstruction.

FDR's Statements on Social Security at www.socialsecurity.gov

More documents on FDR speeches and papers at the American Presidency Project and the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum

Relief, Reform, Recovery

Economists and policy makers have been telling us that the present situation is the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Some progressives have been calling for a new New Deal.

The public debate over this week's "stimulus" bill has struck me, for that reason, as somewhat impoverished.

In the Great Depression, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt made the case that simply re-starting the business cycle, kicking in a new boom that would lead to a new bust, was impractical and unwise. Instead, he offered an approach that is referred to, with some variations, as the three R's --

RELIEF -- Economic action to offer immediate relief to those most affected by the crisis.

REFORM -- Fixing the economic and financial systems so that the abuses that had led to the crash would not come again -- reforming the banks, the mortgage system, and Wall Street.

RECOVERY -- The return of prosperity in the private sector, which in the U.S. system is the engine of economic growth and offers the hope, under reasonable rules, of widespread prosperity.

I'm no economist, and so it is not really for me to say whether the stimulus bill passed by Congress this week will bring about recovery. But as a matter of rhetorical history, it has struck me as strange that President Obama and the sponsors of the bill have allowed the Republican opposition to define the debate as merely about stimulus -- as if recovery could be achieved with relief (in the short run) and reform (to prevent a return to this mess after another artificial bubble). If "stimulus" is the only theme in the debate, the Republican opposition can make a seemingly plausible argument about tax cuts. But their re-distributionist tax cuts in the past eight years and their neglect of regulation helped to bring about the crisis.

FDR taught that Recovery could not reasonably be expected by merely letting the business cycle do its work. Many people need relief now -- for example through extended unemployment benefits, some extension of various welfare benefits, health care, mortgage protection. And though most direct relief would not be expected for the long run, some of its elements might be needed by those worst off. Reform we desperately seem to need to restore sensible regulation to the market.

Or so it seems to a non-economist. In any case, one would hope for a rhetorical approach that makes the case for the role of RELIEF and REFORM in the planning for RECOVERY.

see:

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Fireside Chat, 28 June 1934.

"The New Deal: Measures for Relief, Recovery, and Reform" Crossroads high school curriculum.

New Deal - Wikipedia

Health Rhetoric

In The Economist this week, an interesting analysis of the rhetorical and policy wisdom of appointing Tom Daschle Secretary of Health and Human Services and putting him in charge of persuading Congress to pass comprehensive and universal health care for the United States. Such a program was originally to have been part of the package that gave us Social Security in 1935, but health was dropped because of Congressional resistance. Congress has been resisting ever since, with the notable exception of Medicare, passed under Lyndon Johnson. The Economist appears to argue that the problem is partly a matter of policy, partly a matter of politics, and very much a matter of rhetoric. The choice of Daschle is itself read in partly rhetorical terms.

This looks like a pretty shrewd pick, and the fact that it is the first cabinet job to be sort-of-announced is an indication that Barack Obama is in deadly earnest about one of his main campaign promises: comprehensive health-care reform. . . .

By appointing a big cheese to the health job, Mr Obama seems to be defying the gloomy view that the state of the economy rules out such an expensive initiative. His proposed plan has been costed at anything from $50 billion to $100 billion a year, which many people argue can not be afforded in the current environment. He could, of course, make the opposite case. The deepening recession is likely to have dreadful consequences in health-care terms, as people lose their jobs and the health insurance that goes with them, and as companies scale back or even abandon the packages they offer their workers. So reform is more urgently needed than ever.

In addition, there is such widespread agreement on the need for fiscal stimulus at the levels of hundreds of billions that it might, paradoxically, become politically easier to slip another large programme into the mix, especially one that benefits ordinary people rather than bankers. Last, stressed American companies are actively backing radical reform, because the burden of health insurance costs is crippling their ability to compete abroad. In the early 1990s, they opposed it, and helped to kill it off.

This last observation is perhaps crucial -- American business is crippled by its health care obligations. A comprehensive and universal federal program could make American business more competitive and might even reduce the incentive to send jobs abroad. If businessmen pressure Congress for reform, that may at last make it happen. The time is right, and the rhetorical forces that have stalled reform may now be aligned to create change.

The photograph that accompanies the article in The Economist abstracts Tom Daschle in the act of speaking, with an operation apparently in progress behind him. The positioning places him in the apparent role of speaking for doctors, nurses, and patients--a switch on the traditional opposition of the American medical and insurance establishment to universal health insurance.

See "A Shrewd Choice: Can Tom Daschle and Barack Obama Fix American Health Care?" The Economist, 21 November 2008.

photo credit: AP, from The Economist