Taking Apart the New Deal

By: Ron Grossman

Mesmerized by photos and footage from Iraq, we could easily forget that George W. Bush has been pressing his fight on a second front as well.

A quieter war, it has largely dropped off our television screens. Network anchormen aren't embedded with White House staffers. They don't race around in olive-drab Humvees as presidential advisers mop up isolated pockets of congressional resistance to the administration's home-front campaign.

Still, if Bush wins this battle, he will have set back the clock of American politics to 1933. Already perplexed by his go-it-alone foreign policy, our residual friends and allies in Europe will be further confused by that U-turn.

Seventy years ago in his inaugural address, Franklin D. Roosevelt envisioned "a New Deal for the American people".

New it certainly was. Until then, the federal government delivered mail, collected import duties, chased an occasional moonshiner, and pretty much let it go at that. Washington was a sleepy town. But in the emergency of the Depression, FDR's administration churned out an alphabet-soup of new agencies: the NRA, the WPA, the PWA, the CCC. Some of those programs worked, others didn't, but collectively they changed the American philosophy of government.

Henceforth, the New Deal promised, big government would be on the side of the little guy - especially when he found himself on the mat, beaten down by events beyond his control.

That very idea stuck in Bush's craw long before he took office. Even now, with a shooting war to worry about, he seemingly can't get it out of mind.

Domestic agendas usually are put on a back burner during wartime. After Pearl Harbor, FDR announced that his was on hold for the duration.

"Old Dr. New Deal", he famously said, had become "Dr. Win the War".

Bush's 2^nd Front

Undaunted, Bush has continued to press for major tax cuts that make even some conservatives nervous, including Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan. In February, as U.S. forces were arriving in Kuwait, the President was on the stump in Middle America plugging his pet fiscal project.

"We have a responsibility to lift up issues beyond the mud pit of politics", Bush said. In dollars and cents, that lifting means big-bucks breaks for the richest taxpayers, small potatoes for the little guy.

Green-eyeshade types, among them staffers at the Congressional Budget Office, think that doesn't make sense. They note that if the taxes are slashed even as the cost of the Iraq war pushes the federal budget further out of whack, the result will be huge deficits.

But the accountants fail to realize that, looked at from the right perspective, ledger books filled with red ink can have a silver lining. Deficits provide justification for deep cuts in long-established social-welfare programs.

Henceforth, according to Bush's blueprint, government is to be little and on the side of the big guy. The circle has come full around.

With its closing, the U.S. distances itself from a long-running definition of the obligations of a modern state inscribed in civics textbooks, first in Europe. It wasn't written by a left-wing hand, some Old World equivalent of FDR. Long before Roosevelt created Social Security, Germany had a similar system of old-age pensions and industrial-accident insurance.

Bismarck Led the Way

Its author was the imperial minister Otto von Bismarck, a crusty old fellow known in the 1880's as the "Iron Chancellor". By comparison, he would make Karl Rove or Vice President Dick Cheney look like a bleeding-heart liberal.

But Bismarck recognized that modern life made it tough for average people to fend for themselves, according to the then-reigning political philosophy. The scale of industrial enterprise had transformed the older, independent artisan and small shopkeeper into a factory worker. Myriad peasants had become big-city tenement dwellers - without the cottage-side vegetable patches to see them through their senior-citizen years.

Bismarck also knew that if he didn't provide a safety net for the masses, his political opponents, the socialists, would. From Germany those insights - part altruistic, part down-and-dirty political calculation - spread to Germany's neighbors. England instituted unemployment insurance in 1910.

Dubbed the welfare state, the idea of the government extending a helping hand became the norm. It no longer is argued about in Europe. It is considered a right, not a privilege. Privatizing pensions, American conservatives' dream project, would seem slightly daft by European standards.

In the U.S., we keep postponing a realistic attack on the issue of medical care, even as ever more Americans, and their employers, can't afford to buy insurance on the private market. In Europe, even conservative politicians wouldn't dare tamper with their national health-insurance programs - another 19^th Century invention of Bismarck's. If anything, when the left is in power, it faces criticism from the right for not properly funding those schemes.

In fact, the parties have come to a kind of tacit understanding there: Parties of the left may call themselves socialists, but they don't aim for a collectivized economy. Parties of the right speak elegantly about restoring the individual's gumption, but they don't aim at dismantling the welfare state.

It long was the same here. Republicans railed against the New Deal from the day it was born. Conservatives solemnly predicted that Roosevelt's Social Security scheme was the first step toward an encompassing regimentation that would require citizens to wear dog tags. Running for office, GOP presidential candidates would rail against post-FDR Washington as if it were Sodom or Gomorra.

When they got there, though, they more or less made their peace with the welfare state. Even President Ronald Reagan's bark proved louder than his bite. But George W. Bush has drawn a bead on the heritage of the New Deal, in a way that his own father never did.

His is a vision of pioneer America, where sturdy frontiersmen didn't wait for the government. They went out and tamed the wilderness with their own two hands. It is a simplified reading of American history, to be sure.

Novelist Hamlin Garland wrote a memoir of growing up in a 19^th Century homesteading family, A Son of the Middle Border. Scores of readers wrote to him, grateful that he had reported that for every success story there were dozens of failures in the Old West, as they knew from sad experience.

Still, myths are real to those to hear them and pass them on. The cowboy remains the compelling archetype of our national hero. All those golden-sunset Hollywood movies that perpetuated it help Bush sell his vision of a return to a pre-welfare state America - even to those who would wind up with the short end of the stick.

And now he has, as well, two successive military victories under his belt. The traditional peace movement overlaps with the welfare state's most vocal remaining supporters. So if things continue to go the President's way, his natural strategy will be to characterize opponents of his domestic agenda as lacking the same gumption as those who opposed his Middle East policies.

For anyone hoping to preserve anything of the New Deal, that is going to be a very high hurdle to get over. Democrats and liberals shouldn't underestimate Bush's determination, or his immunity from criticism that other countries don't do things the way he wants to.

Saddam Hussein did, and look where that got him. As Bush told a reporter just after taking office, he regards the period between FDR's election and his own as an aberration.

"I think we agree", the President said, "the past is over".