For a while now I have been reflecting on the question of freedom of speech and political accountability, and there are some things I would like to get off my chest.
The outrages have been piling up: The role that the NRA and ALEC played in the "Stand your ground legislation"; The Zimmerman verdict; A movement that is afoot that restricts the access women have to reproductive care; The assault on workers' rights by Republican governors; Voter suppression; Austerity and the upward redistribution of wealth; The Farm Bill passed by the House that includes deep cuts to food stamps for the poor, but maintains subsidies for agribusinesses and wealthy farmers; The Republican attempts to sabotage the implementation of the Affordable Care Act; The attempts by Republicans and sections of the Media to implicate the Obama Admininstration in the fake IRS and Benghazi scandals.
Time and again the Republicans have been demonstrating that they have little interest in good governance in the public interest. For them politics seems to have become the naked pursuit of power. Obstructionism, the manufacturing of crises and fake scandals on the part of Republicans and the right wing campaigns to delegitimise liberals have been undermining political accountability and representative democracy.
Did Ronald Reagan ever explain to us exactly why "government is not a solution to our problem, government is the problem"? One of the explanations I have come across is the urban legend about the welfare queen driving around in a Cadillac.
Bill Scher says: "Liberals are not libertarians or anarchists. Liberals believe in a proper use of government to maximize the common good, including public safety."
Can it be that the anger that the Tea Party direct at government is testament to the qualified success that representative democracy, engaged citizens, popular movements for change, and government intervention have played in protecting the rights of workers, including marginalized communities in mainstream society and pursuing equal rights for women.
It is also my contention that in the modern world we are all, including members of the Tea Party and the mythical John Galt, dependent on government investment in infrastructure, education and training, and research and development, as well as governments' capacity to deliver when it comes to sanitation, access to clean water, food safety, public health, access to affordable health care, transportation systems, traffic control, environmental protection, disaster management, public safety, etc.
And in a very important article Robert Reich says:
"One of the most deceptive ideas continuously sounded by the Right (and its fathomless think tanks and media outlets) is that the “free market” is natural and inevitable, existing outside and beyond government. So whatever inequality or insecurity it generates is beyond our control. And whatever ways we might seek to reduce inequality or insecurity — to make the economy work for us — are unwarranted constraints on the market’s freedom, and will inevitably go wrong.
By this view, if some people aren’t paid enough to live on, the market has determined they aren’t worth enough. If others rake in billions, they must be worth it. If millions of Americans remain unemployed or their paychecks are shrinking or they work two or three part-time jobs with no idea what they’ll earn next month or next week, that’s too bad; it’s just the outcome of the market.
According to this logic, government shouldn’t intrude through minimum wages, high taxes on top earners, public spending to get people back to work, regulations on business, or anything else, because the “free market” knows best.
In reality, the “free market” is a bunch of rules about (1) what can be owned and traded (the genome? slaves? nuclear materials? babies? votes?); (2) on what terms (equal access to the internet? the right to organize unions? corporate monopolies? the length of patent protections? ); (3) under what conditions (poisonous drugs? unsafe foods? deceptive Ponzi schemes? uninsured derivatives? dangerous workplaces?) (4) what’s private and what’s public (police? roads? clean air and clean water? healthcare? good schools? parks and playgrounds?); (5) how to pay for what (taxes, user fees, individual pricing?). And so on.
These rules don’t exist in nature; they are human creations. Governments don’t “intrude” on free markets; governments organize and maintain them. Markets aren’t “free” of rules; the rules define them."
But on the other hand governments can and do overreach and abuse their powers. And there are instances where government programs can be inefficient or wasteful. And therefore political accountability is a vital and indispensable component of representative democracy. The Bill of Rights (freedom of speech, freedom of association) creates the democratic space where citizens can hold the decision makers and those in power to account. But we also need to ask the question: When people criticise government, are they criticising it in order to improve the way government works to secure the common good, or are they criticising government because they are anti-government libertarians who believe in the primacy of the individual and a minimal state? And when people criticise public education, are they criticising it in order to improve the way public schools work, or are they criticising public education because they are neoliberals who want to put education in the hands of the private sector?
So let us talk about what life would be like if we absolutise individual liberty at the expense community, social responsibility and the common good. And let us talk about what the world would look if society is primarily geared to protecting the interests of for-profit corporations and the rich and the powerful.
In a speech on the Senate floor Elizabeth Warren said that government is not an imaginary bogeyman under the bed to be feared and resisted:
"In our democracy, government is not some make-believe thing that has an independent will of its own. In our democracy, government is just how we descibe all the things that "we the people"have already decided to do together."
I suppose that ideally democracy involves finding some kind of balance between pursuing the common good and protecting individual liberty.
I think that the 47% videotape was such a dramatic occurrence in the 2012 election because it revealed some of the assumptions and value judgments that underlie Mitt Romney's political ideas. Mitt Romney divides society into makers and takers. The question is: Who gets to decide who the makers are and who the takers are?
In an article about Rand Paul Jonathan Chait says the following about Ayn Rand:
"Rand’s philosophy is a kind of inverted Marxism, imagining politics as a struggle between a virtuous producer class that creates all wealth and the parasites who exploit them. (Marx believed the workers produced all wealth and the capitalists robbed it from them; Rand believed roughly the opposite.) Also like Marx, Rand considered conventional democratic government as a cover for this kind of exploitation. If the majority could tax the rich to benefit itself, this was tyranny."
The question is, for the past thirty years or so, have we been seeing an on-going assault on the social contract been business and labour?
In "Revolt of the Rich" Mike Lofgren says : "Our financial elites are the new secessionists ... the rich disconnect themselves from the civic life of the nation and from any concern about its well-being except as a place to extract loot."
An important theme of the presidency of Barack Obama has been: We are in this together.