Neutering Social Security

By Jim Hightower, Hightower Lowdown. Posted April 5, 2005.

When George W. says he's going to "fix" our Social Security system, I feel like a dog that's just been told, "We're taking you to the vet to get you fixed."

Whether it's to dogs or to We the People, George's message is the same: This radical surgery is needed for your own good. If, however, you suspect that something besides your welfare is really motivating him ... you're exactly right.

Extremist, right-wing ideology and the insatiable corporate grab for money are the two forces behind Bush's push not merely to neuter this enormously popular and effective retirement program ... but ultimately to kill it. As reported in last month's Lowdown, step one is to portray Social Security as fatally flawed. The promised benefits are a "hoax," the taxes paid into the trust fund are "wasted" rather than invested for maximum return, and "the so-called reserve fund ... is no reserve at all."

Interestingly, these are quotes not from today's alarmist Bushites but from the lips of Alf Landon and the pages of his party's platform when he was the Republican candidate for president way back in 1936! Note that the first Social Security check was not mailed until 1937, so the ideologues and big money interests were predicting doom and gloom and trying to undermine the program even before it started.

Indeed, dismantling Social Security has been a central tenet of the right wing for nearly 70 years, and it's been an increasingly serious goal of GOP presidential politics since the hardcore right made its grab for the reins of the party's national leadership with Barry Goldwater's 1964 run. Nothing that Bush is saying today is new. Just as George is now doing, Goldwater painted a picture of a collapsing system 40 years ago, declaring that "it is not actuarially sound" and contending that he merely wanted "to make Social Security solvent, to improve it." Likewise, Ronnie Reagan called for the same sort of privatization approach now touted by Bush. "Can't we introduce voluntary features that would permit a citizen to do better on his own?" the Gipper asked.

While politicians from Goldwater to George have portrayed their assault on the program in terms of "saving" it with a curative dose of privatization, it's really the very existence of Social Security that sticks in their craw. (In '64, in a moment of candor about his real intentions, Goldwater said, "Perhaps Social Security should be abolished.") Behind this campaign is the right wing's anti-government dogma, which has trumped the obvious need to guarantee people a basic level of retirement security.

These are laissez-faire extremists who loathe the notion of anything "public," who cringe at the ethic of the "Common Good," and who despise any government program that supports anything other than military and corporate interests. For them, America is not about a people uniting to share society's burdens and to stretch the possibilities of individual achievement, but about people watching out for themselves and being solely responsible for their own gains, unfettered by any concern for the larger society. A leading proselytizer for this self-centered ethic of "everyone on your own" is Grover Norquist, a longtime Washington lobbyist, bagman, and strategist for the far right. He says bluntly that he seeks to shrink government "to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub."

Because Social Security actually works and is far more efficient than private pension annuities, it is especially galling to Norquist and his allies. Living in an ideological fantasyland, they see the New Deal as the Great Evil that transformed Americans from mythic rugged individualists to weakling drones dependent on the federal government. Starting with Social Security, these sprites of the right intend to make us Americans better people by freeing us from any traces of such dependency.

"Social Security," exclaims a top executive of the privatization-boosting think tank the Cato Institute, "is the lynchpin of the welfare state." Government, such dogmatists contend, has no business worrying about things like people's retirement -- let the marketplace sort that out. If they can drive a spear through Social Security, they say, they can kill the whole beast (which is how they describe our government). In short, their goal is to cancel the basic social contract struck between ordinary workaday folks and rapacious corporate power in FDR's day and to return us to that earlier, glorious age of the Robber Barons, when citizens didn't have a bunch of sissy laws, meddlesome programs, and a safety net to empower and strengthen them.

Enter George W.

All of this frothing at the mouth by the right-ring fringe would merely be silly -- except that the fringe has now moved into Bush's White House and Tom DeLay's Congress and is turning silly into policy.

George himself has long been a part of this journey from the wilderness. He's currently squawking like a rooster choking on a peach pit about the urgency of dealing with a looming "crisis" in Social Security, as though this issue suddenly has appeared on his radar. But he's been nurturing privatization as a policy goal from his days as a prep school brat. In 1963, while a senior at Andover, he got a copy of Goldwater's campaign manifesto, "Conscience of a Conservative." Apparently, this is a book he actually read, taking to heart Goldwater's pointed example of Social Security as a government program that would better be put in private hands, making individuals responsible for their own retirement.

Jim Hightower is the best-selling author of Let's Stop Beating Around the Bush from Viking Press. For more information, visit jimhightower.com.

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