While searching for a wedding gift recently, my wife, Patty, heard a well-coiffed customer complaining loudly to the salesperson about President Reagan’s proposed cuts in student loans.
“Can you believe what he’s doing?” the woman exploded as she signed a sales slip for $350. “How will my daughter keep her condominium and continue at medical school?” Bustling off to her BMW, she could still be heard huffing over those “unfair cuts.”
Whether or not Reagan succeeds in cutting subsidized college loans won’t determine the fate of the republic; but this woman’s selfish reaction is symptomatic of a widespread public attitude that does indeed threaten American democracy: for self-government demands self-restraint.
The evidence is mounting, however, that no one is willing to restrain mushrooming government programs, which now provide direct grants to 66 million Americans. And if we have lost self-restraint, one must question if we still have the moral capacity essential for democracy to function.
The answer may come soon, in how we handle the two great economic issues of 1985—the deficit and tax reform. At this writing the outlook is anything but optimistic.
Consider the budget debate. For seven months, the President and both houses of Congress were stalemated. One senator told me the closed committee sessions were the most rancorous free-for-alls he had ever attended. Constant political jockeying made budget cutting nearly impossible.
For example, the Senate wisely voted to kill the long-discredited Economic Development Administration—then promptly appropriated $30 million to finance three EDA projects in states of Senate Appropriations Committee members!
And just before the August recess, Senate Republicans presented a valiant last-ditch deficit reduction plan, which the President summarily rejected. While House Democrats chortled, astonished conferees patched together a budget with a $170 million deficit and, exhausted, staggered home.
But the tax reform issue has provided, if possible, an even more depressing spectacle of “what’s-in-it-for-me” American politics.
Last spring the President unveiled his tax proposal with unrestrained hyperbole, proclaiming it the “second American Revolution.” But within days the “revolution” resembled more a stampeding band of looters than the heroic colonists who laid down their lives for liberty.
While a Gallup poll indicated a two-to-one margin of approval of the President’s proposal for tax reductions, the same poll revealed overwhelming public disapproval for the elimination of deductions that would finance those reductions.
Against such pressures, it is little wonder that even strong-willed politicians wilt. Finance Committee Chairman Bob Packwood was an advocate of the plan—until it came to repealing a timber exemption. Timber is the biggest revenue producer of Oregon—Packwood’s home state.
In the same vein, Jesse Helms, a man of courage and principle, could one day propose cutting senators’ salaries, then immediately engineer a billion-dollar tobacco subsidy. Senator Helms is from the leading tobacco-producing state in the Union.
Such special interest coddling, in the face of the staggering national deficit, creates the worst kind of public cynicism. People see the entire “system” as unworkable, unfair, even a farce.
This was embarrassingly evident during a speech in Williamsburg in which President Reagan argued for tax reform on the grounds that an unfair system often invites cheating. He meant for his listeners to join him in deploring such behavior. “It is not considered bad …,” the President said. “After all, goes this thinking, what’s immoral about cheating a system that is itself a cheat? That isn’t a sin, it’s a duty.”
But to his horror, the crowd burst into applause, taking Reagan’s comments to be an endorsement for breaking the law.
The continuing impasse over the deficit and taxes reveals the sad truth: The total of everyone’s special interests has become far greater than the national interest. But if we are to survive, we must practice disciplined self-denial, that which looks past immediate gratification to values more lasting and secure.
Democratic capitalism is not merely a free enterprise system, as Michael Novak has argued. It is three systems in one: an economy based on markets and incentives; a democratic polity; and a moral-cultural value system conditioned by “… discipline … sacrifice for the future … compassion … and concern for the common good.”
Without this base, as the Founding Fathers well understood, political liberty becomes license, and economic freedom becomes unchecked greed. John Adams wrote, “Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other.”
If America’s moral foundations are crumbling, who is to blame? Christians cannot simply point fingers at irresponsible politicians and an indifferent public.
For Christianity, as eminent Catholic historian Christopher Dawson has written, is “the soul of Western civilization.” Thus it is Christians—you and I—who must address the crisis that now threatens. But that means asking ourselves hard questions. Are we salt and light, models of the self-denial Christ teaches? Or are we like those polled by George Gallup, concerned only about ourselves?
And have we the courage to let a prophetic word ring forth to this self-centered generation, to speak plainly from our pulpits to the need for civic virtue and public responsibility? Dare we confront the hypocrisy of American politics?
There are no more urgent questions. The battles over the deficit and tax reform are inconsequential compared to what these two struggles tell us about the kind of a nation we have become—and indeed, whether we have the moral fortitude to make democracy function.
It has been said the quintessential American question is “What’s in it for me?” If that is true, then the answer in this case is simply “Everything.” Our freedoms, our opportunities—our nation itself.
