Let’s Not Talk About Inequality
campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com
Conservatism’s strength, its stress on the value of individual responsibility, is also its central weakness.
The right’s claim that liberalism creates a deterrent to personal initiative and generates an ethos of dependency has resonated powerfully among white swing voters crucial to the ascendance of the Republican Party over the last four decades.
As the aftereffects of the financial collapse of 2008 continue to batter the nation with high unemployment and low growth, however, the conservative message has run into headwinds.
How does the laid-off 55-year-old factory employee “who worked hard and played by the rules,” looking for a job in a market where there are 4.2 applicants for every opening, find comfort when he turns on the TV to see Newt Gingrich declare that “you’ve got to become more employable” or Mitt Romney arguing that
the American people, edified by American principles, will rise to the occasion again, securing our safety, our prosperity and our peace.
One of these principles is a merit-based society. In a merit-based society, people achieve success and rewards through hard work, education, risk taking and even a little luck.
The conservative response to crisis offered by Gingrich and Romney fails to address the anxiety and anger of those millions of Americans who suddenly find themselves with no job, no health insurance and no money to pay the mortgage.
This question will set the terms of the debate for the 2012 election.
With just over three weeks to go until the Iowa caucuses on Jan. 3, the narrative of the right is under challenge from a competing narrative originating on the left, a narrative that describes an American economy sharply skewed towards the affluent, with rising inequality, a dwindling middle class and the persistence of long-term unemployment.
Describing the influence of the Occupy Wall Street movement on the electorate, Frank Luntz, a conservative consultant who specializes in framing political messages, told the Republican Governors Association meeting in Orlando on Nov. 30, “I’m so scared of this anti-Wall Street effort” because “they’re having an impact on what the American people think of capitalism.”
Luntz contended that shifting voter attitudes require Republican officials to carefully monitor and change their language. The public is now favorable to raising taxes on the rich, he said, but “if you talk about government taking the money from hardworking Americans, the public says no.”
On the other side of the aisle, Democratic pollster Geoff Garin said in an interview that “2012 is going to be about two fundamentally different theories of the economy.” In a Nov. 21 memo to Senator Charles Schumer, chairman of the Democratic Policy and Communications Center, Garin wrote:
The success of the Republican Party in the 2010 midterm elections was based to a large extent on the ability of the Republicans, aided by the activism of the Tea Party movement, to focus voters’ attention on an anti-government narrative that blamed the country’s economic problems on excessive federal spending, the size of the national debt, and increased government involvement in the private economy. Recent polling, however, indicates that the Republican/Tea Party narrative about the economy has been superseded by a different narrative - one that emphasizes the need to address the growing gap between those at the very top of the economic ladder and the rest of the country.
Garin cited the findings of a Nov. 3-5 Wall Street Journal/NBC poll that asked respondents to rank their support for 1.) a set of policies generally favored by Republicans which would cut spending, eliminate regulations and reject all tax increases, or 2.) a set of policies generally favored by Democrats calling for the elimination of tax breaks for the rich and tougher regulation of major banks and corporations.
The Democratic alternative received far more backing, with 60 percent in strong agreement and 16 percent voicing mild agreement, compared to 33 percent strong support for the Republican strategy, with 20 percent giving moderate support.