The Age of
Austerity: How
Scarcity Will Remake American
Politics
By Thomas Byrne
Edsall
(Doubleday, 256 pages,
$24.95)
Thomas Edsall’s new book on the coming “age of austerity”
is an example of why it will not be a moment too soon for the
Boomers and their MSM mandarins to leave the scene.
The book purports to explain what is happening in American
politics in a time of narrowed expectations and reduced resources.
The economic dislocations of the past four years have impacted both
the abilities of government and the expectations of the governed.
This has caused our political life to begin fracturing along
class-based lines rarely seen in American politics.
Edsall, who was long at the Washington Post and
who now has a column at the New York Times online,
believes he has discovered the key to the political dimension of
this global economic and financial meltdown. According to Edsall,
these stresses have caused polarization in the electorate we are
told, and the rupturing of the “broad, tacit compromise” that
“required a growing economy to fund an array of social programs
while keeping taxes relatively low in order to moderate hostilities
in a politically charged resource war.”
The future in this new age will be “brutish,” but when
Edsall gets down to details, it seems the Republicans have all the
brutishness and the liberals, not so much. The financial crisis is
an opportunity for both parties to use “fear,” for Edsall, but the
left is at a disadvantage because its “natural spirit of
generosity” — presumably, with other people’s money — is
hampered, while the Republicans’ bottomless greed can proceed
unabated. Even the Democrats’ moderation is turned against them,
for their “willingness to compromise” has made the Republican even
more grasping in their demands.
But we have heard all this before. Substitute Reagan for
current Republican leadership, say, or evangelicals for the Tea
Party, and we could be back in the 1980s. The story, for people of
Edsall’s age and background, must always be the same. In a time of
scarcity and economic stress, the Democrats try to preserve the
safety net, and even (prudently, of course) to expand it, while
various right-wingers want to hold onto their money a little longer
(as well as, presumably, their guns and religion, an emendation to
the old formula by the current President). What Edsall does not
address is whether the Republicans have a point. If the economy is
shrinking and social services must be cut, why is it extremism to
say so and tolerance to ignore it? Insofar as there was a social
compact in the nation that supported the welfare state at the
national level - and there are good argument why there should be —
for many Americans, the policies of the last three decades have
eroded the trust needed to sustain such a compact.
Edsall recognizes the threat but then mostly fails to
address its causes, preferring to condemn its symptoms, such as
large-scale distrust by middle-class Americans who want the
government to look out for them as citizens rather than seeing them
as alternatively taxpayers or consumers. There is even a chapter on
busing in a North Carolina school district, which Edsall
uses as a commentary on the alleged racism of the Tea Party, the
high costs and problems of the program notwithstanding. (The false
accusations of racist epithets made by the Tea Party here go
unmentioned.) Nor does Edsall acknowledge the rift between what
different minority groups want, and how this might affect the
notion of a social consensus or the requirements of a welfare
state.
Edsall’s story arc, for most Americans, does not work
anymore. At most, his book is a sign of how far politics has
changed such that even long-term observers miss the clear signs of
change; at worst, Edsall offers little more than an in-tribe call
to arms for his fellow members of the elite media. Nelson
Rockefeller (!) gets a mention in book’s index but Angelo Mozilo,
the head of Countrywide mortgage whose lackadaisical lending
policies brought down the company, does not. Nor do Fannie Mae or
Freddie Mac, the “GSEs” whose insatiable demand for mortgages
played a major role in the crisis. And although the Tea Party comes
in for a drubbing, the candidacy of and movement around Ron Paul
gets no mention.
Edsall states flatly that the economic problems are not
caused by public policy or “market failure,” but by global
competition. This is, largely, nonsense. The financial industry is
highly regulated in every modern nation, and those regulations
reflect policy choices with real world effects. And Edsall
completely ignores the public policies of easy credit and freely
available mortgages, which went hand in hand with lavish government
spending at all levels that can no longer be sustained.
The country is indeed passing through a time of
transition, which will include greater austerity measures. Edsall
does corral some useful statistics and notes that austerity is
being taken by both parties as a club to punish the other side and
as a call for their own solutions, and he does provide another
example of the dysfunction in Washington. What is needed is new
thinking about politics and our national political future, but on
this score, The Age of Austerity is just more of the
same.
