What Would Jefferson Do? by Thom Hartmann

Author:Thom Hartmann [Hartmann, Thom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9781400082629
Publisher: Harmony Books
Published: 2008-11-20T06:00:00+00:00

Awakening to the antidemocratic

conservative damage

It's now more than 20 years since Ronald Reagan, the first president who was a true believer in the modern cult of conservatism, came to power. A generation later seems an appropriate time to evaluate the damage done to America by Reagan and Bush II's conservative deficits, Gingrich's conservative power politics, Cheney's conservative foreign policy, the rise of conservative corporate monopoly media, and the sustained, two-decades-long conservative assault on the quality of the environment and the rights of organized labor.

In each case, the results are chilling.

Conservative “supply-side” economics (called “Voodoo Economics” by George H. W. Bush) have brought us the largest national debt in the history of the United States—so severe that recently the World Bank warned that we were treading the path already walked by Argentina and other nations who had slipped beyond their ability to repay their own debt.

Jefferson predicted it.

It's a testimony to the power of the American democratic republic our Founders created that it took 227 years before a president succeeded in inflicting such a potentially mortal wound on America. But, although they did everything they could to prevent it, the Founders still worried that the day would come.

In a letter to Samuel Kercheval, Jefferson noted the temptation of governments to spend money they don't have in order to produce a temporary feel-good boom in the economy, just in time for an election. But a true statesman wouldn't resort to such tactics to buy votes, Jefferson wrote: “We must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election [choice] between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude.”

But Reagan, and then his spiritual heir George W. Bush, suggested that perpetual debt and the short-term profusion it would bring were just fine. Many of us have already forgotten it, but in just eight years, Reagan's budgets doubled the entire national debt that the country had accumulated since its founding. This debt used to produce the “Reagan recovery,” on which we are still paying interest, is particularly bizarre, considering that traditional American conservative values call for thrift and being responsible for oneself.

Reagan and both Bushes spent trillions of borrowed money, producing the same sort of stage-prop prosperity you or I could have if we had a credit card with a million-dollar credit limit that we knew somebody else would have to pay. But the debt they ran up was and is real, and it will have to be repaid by the generation today coming of age and their children.

Yet even beyond this real economic harm, the main damage conservative raw power politics has produced is the epidemic of cynicism across America, as people simply take on the attitude of “Why should I bother? I can't make a difference.” Although it's fashionable to say that increasing numbers of Americans don't vote, the reality is that increasing numbers have been abstaining as their only way of saying “none of the above.” Negative ads and scorched-earth politics, like those played by Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay, produce a revulsion that propels people away from the political arena.

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