ONE FLESH:

FDR's Deal, In Bush's Terms (Steven Mufson, February 20, 2005, Washington Post)

When President Bush went on the road this month to make his sales pitch for his plan to alter Social Security, he sounded at times more like a personal investment adviser than the nation's policymaker-in-chief. He preached the virtues of putting away money when you're young, the magic of compound interest and the ability of individuals to beat Social Security's rate of return (as though the Social Security trust fund were simply a lumbering, below-par mutual fund).

"Now, I've got some ideas myself," the president said during a stop at Montgomery County Community College in Blue Bell, Pa. "And one of the ideas is to allow younger workers to take some of their own money and set up a personal retirement account. The idea is to allow a younger worker to be able to earn a better rate of return on his or her money than that which is being earned as a result of the Social Security money going through the federal government."

How we talk about policy says a lot about how we think about it. Is Social Security a planning vehicle that an individual uses for his or her own retirement, or is it a pooling of resources so that all of society can meet the needs of its older members? Is it about each person saving for himself, or is it a matter of young helping old and rich helping poor?

In couching the Social Security debate largely as a matter of personal rather than collective interest, Bush is redefining the program's very essence. The president's drive to divert a portion of payroll taxes from traditional Social Security benefits to personal accounts for every worker is a departure from the origins of the program and the way people talked about it then. [...]

[B]ush has replaced his much-vaunted compassionate conservatism with conservative paternalism. He would transfer a huge chunk of tax revenues from the control of government to individual accounts, but government would still force people to save, control the investment choices they make and regulate the rate of withdrawals. "I think every citizen -- every citizen -- has got the capacity to manage his or her own money," Bush said earlier this month. "And if they don't, we'll help them understand how to, and the rules will be such that they can." On the one hand, he would empower individuals to make choices about their investments, while on the other hand he promises that the protective hand of government will still be there. Individualism may be an essential part of the American spirit, but individuals cannot always be trusted.

This is very nearly insightful. Liberalism, the politics of the Democrats, is feminine and maternal. It provides a blanket guarantee that you'll be taken care of and an end to moralism to create a poluace tied to ther State's apron strings.

Conservatism, in its older more libertarian variant, is masculine and paternal. It demands that individuals accept total responsibility for themselves, even if that means we turn a blind eye to suffering, which builds character anyway.

Conservatism was possible so long as women didn't have the vote and other franchise restrictions were maintained. Liberalism rose with the political power of wpomen anbd received a mighty boost from the infantilizing trauma of the Great Depression.

President Bush's compassionate conservatism, or the Right's version of the Third Way, seeks to retain the maternalistic social welfare net but apply paternal standards to it, making folks responsible, at least in the first instance, for weaving their own. The dominance of George Bush, Tony Blair and John Howard likely traces directly to the genius of this marriage.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 4, 2005 8:35 AM