As floods tore apart roads and loosened the foundations of houses in Vermont last week—as people saw their personal property and businesses wash away in muddy waves—Republicans’ determination to hold hurricane victims hostage to their insistence on budget cuts irritated people beyond New England.
It was more than just an irritant. The right wing’s determination to get a financial eye for an eye was a symptom of a philosophical crisis in America that’s been brewing for years.
Encapsulating the whole thing was the inconsistency that brought down a firestorm on House Majority Leader Eric Cantor when he became the mouthpiece for the right’s screed about spending. Angry people from tornado-ravaged Missouri to Maine pointed out that in 2004, Cantor asked for hurricane relief funds for his state, Virginia, and voted against a Republican bill requiring cuts to offset the aid. Some pointed out that it was Republicans who failed to stop the off-budget financing of the Bush-era wars that has contributed to the deficit the right now holds over the country like a whip.
Remember when Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, asked by Congress in 2003 how much an invasion of Iraq would cost, said only that it would cost more not to do it? What Republican pulled him up short with concerns about deficits?
That inconsistency points up still unresolved conflicts on the part of the Republican right wing and some factions of the public. The rift between those who stand on the common defense clause of the Constitution and those who insist on a balance between the common defense and the general welfare—with a broad interpretation of the general welfare— underlies a myriad of fights over what our taxes should and shouldn’t pay for.
That may seem to go without saying, but it’s a conflict that intensifies in hard times, and it has roots that go back to 1989, when the Soviet bloc disintegrated and the U.S. named itself sole heir to the grandiose designation “superpower.” Former U.S. senator Rick Santorum exposed a deep fault line in American opinion when he said in May, “You can’t be a superpower if you’re focused on the government taking care of everybody.”
All empires have had to face the question: how hard do you make life for your people in order to hang on to your superpower status?
How many Americans should go without housing, food, health care, education, so the U.S. can go on maintaining troops, bases and weapons systems around the globe? Santorum assumes that we all want the U.S. to be a superpower. In fact, there’s good evidence that most Americans don’t care about superpower status as much as they care about the soundness of their society, down to the continued functioning of beleaguered school systems and the now-threatened post office, and the wellbeing of other Americans.
