Fear of Change and Public Policy

Speaking of the Tea Party extremists who succeeded in shutting down the government and threatening the world economy recently, Fareed Zakaria today (on his CNN program) made a striking statement:  One cannot love the idea of America while also hating America.

Yet that is what those on the far right have long done: they love the idea of America as it was while hating the America of the past fifty years, the country of diversity in which minorities have become more and more powerful. Zakaria is a clear-eyed realist, not an ideologue.

The latest ideologue to cause havoc in the cause of self-promotion is Ted Cruz of Texas, who warns of disaster and the coming of American "oblivion" unless the federal government becomes less "socialistic."

This is the argument to fear that Ronald Reagan used in 1961 to warn of the coming horror of Medicare, something that most Republicans today who honor Reagan's memory greatly value, even though he warned that it would take away our freedom. Whose freedom is lost by the Medicare program?

The same argument is made today about Obamacare, with ominous warning glances at European nations that have chosen social welfare programs, which to the right-wing extremists, mean the coming of "socialism," a term GOP ideologues seldom define or understand.

The rhetoric based on people's fear of change is clear, from Reagan to Cruz, with each decade seeing more extreme and shrill scare tactics being used in the public policy debate.  These pessimists give true conservatism a bad name by seeing the inevitable changes in demographics and world economy as a loss of freedom, with America becoming second rate. They rarely take in the prosperity, creativity, and innovation that still make the U.S. the envy of the world, much of it due to immigrants like Fareed Zakaria.

Like many astute outsiders, he can see the bigger picture than what the daily news presents to us. He can appreciate the positive side of America as it is today, not as it was in the 1950s; he has also become a leading critic of our fear-based policies and the dangerous polarization that will again threaten the federal government.

The very thing the Tea Party types like Cruz say they want to prevent is what they are achieving by their extremist tactics: the decline of America.

The ideology of self-absorption

I was glad to see that Frank Bruni, writing last month in the New York Times, agrees with me (just kidding). His article, "Individualism in Overdrive," complements nicely some of the remarks about the new narcissism I have written about here as the pervasive evil underlying our culture and political life.

I refer to the Tea Party belief that taxes are not needed because each of us is meant to help ourselves rather than ours. This, after all, is the basis of the extreme indidivualism that has moved the country so dangerously to the right, even in the name of Christianity, which is about loving thy neighbor.

Bruni describes the new Johnny Appleseed of Hypernarcissism, the personal improvement guru Tim Ferris, who suggests putting an unloaded starter pistol in your luggage to make sure that the TSA people at the airport won't lose it. You get peace of mind that way; no matter that government time and money is wasted, which is our (collective) money.

I hope Ferris, a best-selling author, is only joking. Bruni is not when he zeroes in those who try to "game the system" to advance their own cause at the expense of the common good. "Selfishness run amok is a national disease," he writes; too many people act as if they live in a civic vacuum, with no responsibilities to others.

Consider the huge increase in Social Security disability applications, many by people who don't need such assistance, based on the view that the federal treasury is too big to be affected. But isn't that treasury the sum of us? And cheating it is to cheat your neighbor. Looking out for No. 1 may sell books and get you on TV, but it is immoral and destructive of the social fabric.

How many fundamentalist Christians, voting for Republicans, subscribe to the anti-government, me-first principle without seeing that it contradics the Gospel? There is no reason to be surprised by this since there is nothing new under the sun. Selfishness, sometimes called pride, has been, for about 2,000 years, the chief of the deadly sins, and anyone who has read Dante or other earlier authors knows that the avarice of earlier times is little different from that of today. It is always rooted in the self at the expense of the other.

This brings me back to selfishness as the essence of evil--and to its opposite, love, which brings compassion and whatever justice we deserve on this earth.