Morality, Not Just Money

Throughout this section of the book, I will be arguing that political policies have everything to do with moral visions – for both liberals and conservatives. The conservative political agenda, for example, is not merely to cut the cost of government. The conservative agenda, as we shall see, is a moral agenda, just as the liberal agenda is.

Consider, for example, the issue of the deficit. How did it get so large?

Liberals like to think of Ronald Reagan as stupid. Whether he was or not, those around him certainly were not. While constantly attacking liberals as big spenders, the Reagan and Bush administrations added three trillion dollars to the national debt by drastically increasing military spending while cutting taxes for the rich. They could count; they saw the deficit increasing. They blamed the increases on liberal spending, but Reagan did not veto every spending bill. Moreover, Reagan's own actions accounted for much of the deficit increase. Had financial responsibility and the lessening of spending been Reagan's top priorities, he would not have allowed such an increase in the deficit, simply by not cutting taxes and not pushing for a military buildup far beyond the Pentagon's requests.

While the deficit was increasing, there was a vast shift of wealth away from the lower and middle classes toward the rich. Liberals, cynically, saw this shift as Reagan and Bush making their friends and their political supporters rich. Certainly that was the effect. It is hardly new for the friends and supporters of politicians in power to get rich. This is usually seen as immorality and corruption, and with good reason. Many liberals saw Reagan that way.

But Ronald Reagan did not consider himself as immoral. Certainly he and his staff could tell that their policies were producing vast increases in the deficit, when they had come into office promising a balanced budget. Reagan was not forced to pursue deficit-increasing policies. Why did he do so?

I would like to suggest that he pursued deficit-increasing policies in the service of what he saw as overriding moral goals: (1) Building up the military to protect America from the evil empire of Soviet communism. (2) Lowering taxes for the rich, so that enterprise was rewarded not punished. Interestingly, for President Reagan as for any good conservative, these policies, however different on the surface, were instances of the same underlying principle: the Morality of Reward and Punishment.

What was evil in Soviet communism, for Reagan as for other conservatives, was not just totalitarianism. Certainly Soviet totalitarianism was evil, but the U.S. had supported capitalist totalitarian dictatorships willingly while overthrowing a democratically elected communist government in Chile. The main evil of communism for Reagan, as for most conservatives, was that it stifled free enterprise. Since communism did not allow for free markets (open to Western companies) or for financially rewarding entrepreneurship, it violated the basis of the Strict Father moral system: the Morality of Punishment and Reward.

Adding three trillion dollars to the deficit actually served a moral purpose for Ronald Reagan. It meant that, sooner or later, the deficit would force an elimination of social programs. He knew perfectly well that the military budget would never be seriously cut, and that a major increase in tax revenues to eliminate the deficit would never be agreed upon. In the long run, the staggering deficit would actually serve Strict Father morality – conservative morality – by forcing Congress to cut social programs. From the perspective of Strict

Father morality, Ronald Reagan looks moral and smart, not immoral and dumb as many liberals believe.

The ultimate conservative agenda, as I will be arguing in the following pages, is moral, not financial. It is a thorough political revamping of America in the service of a moral revolution, a revolution that conservatives believe will make Americans better people and improve American life. So far as I can tell, the main issue in every conservative political policy is morality – good versus evil. There is nothing surprising in this. Conservatives consider themselves moral people and they talk about morality and the family constantly. But to liberals, who have their own very different moral system, conservative policies are so immoral that any conservative discussion of morality is taken as demagoguery.

Of course, liberals also see their policies as moral and their overall politics as serving moral goals. Conservatives, however, talk as if liberals were degenerates opposed to morality; as if they were corrupted by special interests; as if they loved expensive and inefficient bureaucracy; as if they wanted to take away the rights of citizens. Each side sees the other as immoral, corrupt, and longheaded. Neither side wants to see the other as moral in any way. Neither side wants to recognize that there are two opposed, highly-structured, well-grounded, widely accepted, and utterly contradictory moral systems at the center of American politics.

The failure to see that politics is fundamentally about morality demeans American politics. It makes all politicians look immoral. And it hides the deep logic behind political positions.

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