A Big Chicken Comes Home to Roost

FDR, the man the right loved to hate, the man whose commemorative coin (the dime) often got painted red by his demonizers, the man anti-Semites called Rosenfeld, is seen by many historians as having in fact "saved capitalism." The neo-con revision of his legacy, however, is that the steps he took were unnecessary, that everything would have eventually corrected itself in our then crippled system if market forces had been allowed to play out. What the arguments being made before the Supreme Court right now richly illustrate is that the compromises Roosevelt was forced to make in order to keep the masses of the 1930s from getting out their pitchforks and still keep the country from the dread fate of turning into a European social democracy, (read socialist state), contained the seeds of the eventual destruction of even so sacrosanct an innovation as social security.

It is more than likely that the Supreme Court will strike down the so-called individual mandate in President Obama's health bill. There is even a strong possibility that the court will overturn the entire bill. But the consequences may be more far-reaching than that. If the court finds that governments cannot force citizens to make investments in their own future, it will not just be the health bill and social security that will fall, but the very concept of government having a role in health, education, housing, and a host of other aspects of our lives that we have taken for granted since the 1930s..

When FDR implemented his New Deal, the ruling classes saw in the existence of the Soviet Union a real and present danger to their very existence. When, in 1991, the U.S.S.R. collapsed, right wing ideologues sensed a historical opportunity to forward their agenda without opposition. Carpe diem became the call of the day. There would never be another such window of opportunity in which to roll back the advances made by the working classes. There was no longer an alternative system to turn to.

What the current debate proves is that half-way measures are always dangerous. The right is striking at the weak underbelly of liberal programs, programs that have always tried to moderate between complete laissez-faire capitalism, with its constant threat of pushing the working classes too far and into the streets, and socialism, the philosophy which has as its core tenet that governments have the responsibility of representing all of the people in a society. If the right gets its way, ironically, it may be planting the seeds of its own destruction.