The word “freedom” looms large in modern conservative rhetoric. Lobbying groups are given names like FreedomWorks; health reform is denounced not just for its cost but as an assault on, yes, freedom. Oh, and remember when we were supposed to refer to pommes frites as “freedom fries”? The right’s definition of freedom, however, isn’t one that, say, F.D.R. would recognize. In particular, the third of his famous Four Freedoms — freedom from want — seems to have been turned on its head. Conservatives seem, in particular, to believe that freedom’s just another word for not enough to eat. Hence the war on food stamps, which House Republicans have just voted to cut sharply even while voting to increase farm subsidies.
A Facebook friend asked me a question the other day in response to something I’d written that day about how some on the Right would rather see America burn than suffer another day with The Black Guy in the White House ©:
“Jack, WTF’s happening over there??”
What’s happened? Well, one of our political parties has lost its effin’ collective mind, that’s what’s happened. The GOP is ruled by a cabal of Teapublican zealots who wouldn’t piss on the poor or middle class if they were on fire. They’d happily burn America to the ground if 100% of their demands aren’t met. And they could care less about the damage they do or the people they hurt along the way. If people starve…well, it’s their own damned fault for being too lazy and stupid to take care of themselves. (The “I got mine, you can damned well get your own” theory of effective governance.)
This is how we arrived at the war on food stamps. We live in a world in which subsidizing farmers and Big Agriculture is considered perfectly appropriate, but public assistance for the poor, the sick, and the elderly is the worst sort of socialism imaginable.
Time was when the social contract had meaning, when compassion wasn’t Latin for weakness and coddling those unwilling to take responsibility for their own lives. Government was a tool for providing a hand up to those in need. Sure, it wasn’t perfect, and some took advantage of the system…but we didn’t throw the baby out with the bath water. We accepted that the perfect shouldn’t be the enemy of the good. We accepted that we have a collective responsibility to look out for one another, that if we don’t hang together, we will most assuredly hang alone (apologies to Benjamin Franklin).
Now the calculus has changed, and one imperfection is viewed as proof that the system is broken. Never mind that welfare for corporations has been a bad and very broken idea for lo, these many years. Corporations create jobs and are therefore eminently worthy of taxpayer support. The poor, the sick, and the elderly? Why should we be throwing money at a bunch of people too lazy and shiftless to do for themselves? Doesn’t that just encourage dependency? Why should I be paying for someone unwilling to get off their butts and take care of themselves?
Of course, the current Right-wing lunacy is by no means a new phenomenon. There has always been a strain of compassion-free unreasonableness extant among the American Right. Every now and again it rears its ugly head, and we’re left to deal with those who would happily create an America where only the strong survive. The only problem is that “I got mine, you can damned well get your own” makes for poor public policy. Rugged individualism is what people claim when they’ve achieved financial success and forgotten that they didn’t get where they are all by themselves.
Instead of helping those in need, there are those among us demanding that we should by rights wage war on them, which I suspect is easy to do when you see the needy and the sick as something less than fully human.
Remember, compassion is for losers and Liberals.
