Austerity programs are all the rage these days. While Wall Street budgets prosper with tax breaks, Main Street budgets tighten with fewer services. Republican Congressman Paul Ryan rightly understands that budgets are moral documents. He rightly states that the debate occurring throughout the nation is really about "different ideas about government." What are those differences?
On the one hand we have a tradition that the good of the many outweighs the good of the one. Government exists to serve the needs of its citizens. We rely on citizens caring for one another. We embody an empathic vision of America as a mutual aid society. We are a "city on a hill" and a "light to the nations" showing by example how to bring various ethnicities together under the banner of a multicolored rainbow. And that rainbow does indeed have a pot of gold at the end of it, a promise that all will both survive, and thrive. The American dream is a communal dream of connection. Out of many, one.
This tradition gave birth to the Declaration of Independence, and the Bill of Rights. It gave birth to the reoccurring resistance to centralized economic power whether it forms itself as a Federal Reserve Bank or the establishment of property rights having preference over community rights. This tradition is called democracy and it continually flowers in civil rights movements, in unions, in the deep desire to put a ceiling over wealth and a floorboard under poverty.
Today however, we are being overwhelmed by another tradition that has also grown up in American history. It is a tradition that asserts that the good of the one outweighs the good of the many. This tradition focuses on centralized power in the military, on a unitary executive (a king), and in the reign of an economic market without any checks and balances other than money. This tradition, this impulse towards fascism, influences both corporate political parties and much of Christianity. It is the longing for the strong man to bind us together, ruling over us, driving out the impure and protecting us from pluralistic temptations.
The unleashing of this conservative tradition, now in its 31st year, is reaping the harvest it has sown. After decades of corporate tax cuts, of military build-ups, of regulatory evisceration, of continual propaganda, and a repetitious liturgy casting certain fellow Americans as the enemy, the beloved country we once lived in is rotting from within. We are turning our backs on our neighbors, clenching our fists tightly and refusing to share while sleeping inside political nightmares of each one against everyone else.
In this context the events of Wisconsin, now spreading throughout the nation, are a welcome wake-up call to come back to our roots as a democracy. The issue before us is not about a scarcity of wealth but the distribution of it. And that's a moral issue.