The Left-Liberal Narrative

[Valin]

The American Interest:

Liberals see most of our ills resulting from our straying from the righteous path set forth for us by leaders like FDR and LBJ. Their impassioned narrative has deep roots in American society.

Walter Russell Mead

4/22/14

 

The debate over inequality keeps heating up. Just as Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty First Century drew enraptured hosannas from liberal inequality hawks like Paul Krugman, conservatives fired back by pointing to a rash of studies that many scholars believe demonstrates a causal relationship between the spread of single parent families and economic inequality, with children of two-parent households enjoying higher income as kids and then going on to do better as adults.

 

It’s easy to focus on the differences between the liberal and conservative inequality narratives, but the similarities between them are in some ways more revealing. If there is one overarching trend in American life today, it is that Americans are less optimistic than we have usually been. Most people seem to agree today that American society is in trouble. Wave after wave of rapid change—economic, social, cultural, demographic—sweeps across the country, and everywhere we look, Americans can see even the most basic and important elements of our national life under threat.

 

But if we are (mostly) united in pessimism, we are divided, even polarized in the way we identify our troubles and prescribe cures, and the national debate over inequality is shaped by a deeper struggle over why, exactly, this country is headed downhill and about what we should do about it. Both on the left and the right, attitudes toward the inequality debate often reflect peoples’ views over the political consequences of the debate as much as their intellectual convictions over the causes and cures of economic inequality. For Democrats, growing economic inequality is an issue that unites the disparate elements of the blue coalition behind a common narrative and summons the faithful to a defense of the blue social model. For Republicans, the issue is more of a hot potato, and the GOP would probably rather see the whole issue drop off the national agenda.

 

For most liberals, inequality is both a leading symptom of our national decline and an important talking point for the defense of what’s left of the blue social model. For blue model liberals, the last generation is best understood as a Grim Slide. In the days of FDR and LBJ, Americans knew the right way to live and to govern themselves. A strong federal government used Keynesian economics and enlightened, progressive views on social policy to reshape American life. The inevitable and eternal greed of corporations and the rich was curbed; Americans learned the right lessons of the wicked 1920s in which inequality ran riot and plutocrats flourished, only to see the false prosperity of those years vanish in the Depression. As long as those important lessons were remembered, a progressive tax code, pro-union legislation, income redistribution and tight regulation of financial corporations made America a good and decent country. The middle class flourished, prosperity was shared, recessions were mild, and life was good.

 

(Snip)

 

 

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