New York Times,
January 14, 2011
A
Tale of Two Moralities
By PAUL KRUGMAN
On
Wednesday, President Obama called on Americans to “expand
our moral imaginations, to listen to each other more carefully,
to sharpen our instincts for empathy, and remind ourselves of
all the ways our hopes and dreams are bound together.” Those
were beautiful words; they spoke to our desire for reconciliation.
But the truth is that we are a deeply divided nation and are likely
to remain one for a long time. By all means, let’s listen
to each other more carefully; but what we’ll discover, I
fear, is how far apart we are. For the great divide in our politics
isn’t really about pragmatic issues, about which policies
work best; it’s about differences in those very moral imaginations
Mr. Obama urges us to expand, about divergent beliefs over what
constitutes justice.
And the real
challenge we face is not how to resolve our differences —
something that won’t happen any time soon — but how
to keep the expression of those differences within bounds.
What are the
differences I’m talking about?
One side of
American politics considers the modern welfare state — a
private-enterprise economy, but one in which society’s winners
are taxed to pay for a social safety net — morally superior
to the capitalism red in tooth and claw we had before the New
Deal. It’s only right, this side believes, for the affluent
to help the less fortunate.
The other
side believes that people have a right to keep what they earn,
and that taxing them to support others, no matter how needy, amounts
to theft. That’s what lies behind the modern right’s
fondness for violent rhetoric: many activists on the right really
do see taxes and regulation as tyrannical impositions on their
liberty.
There’s
no middle ground between these views. One side saw health reform,
with its subsidized extension of coverage to the uninsured, as
fulfilling a moral imperative: wealthy nations, it believed, have
an obligation to provide all their citizens with essential care.
The other side saw the same reform as a moral outrage, an assault
on the right of Americans to spend their money as they choose.
This deep
divide in American political morality — for that’s what
it amounts to — is a relatively recent development. Commentators
who pine for the days of civility and bipartisanship are, whether
they realize it or not, pining for the days when the Republican
Party accepted the legitimacy of the welfare state, and was even
willing to contemplate expanding it. As many analysts have noted,
the Obama health reform — whose passage was met with vandalism
and death threats against members of Congress — was modeled
on Republican plans from the 1990s.
But that was
then. Today’s G.O.P. sees much of what the modern federal
government does as illegitimate; today’s Democratic Party
does not. When people talk about partisan differences, they often
seem to be implying that these differences are petty, matters
that could be resolved with a bit of good will. But what we’re
talking about here is a fundamental disagreement about the proper
role of government.
Regular readers
know which side of that divide I’m on. In future columns
I will no doubt spend a lot of time pointing out the hypocrisy
and logical fallacies of the “I earned it and I have the
right to keep it” crowd. And I’ll also have a lot to
say about how far we really are from being a society of equal
opportunity, in which success depends solely on one’s own
efforts.
But the question
for now is what we can agree on given this deep national divide.
In a way,
politics as a whole now resembles the longstanding politics of
abortion — a subject that puts fundamental values at odds,
in which each side believes that the other side is morally in
the wrong. Almost 38 years have passed since Roe v. Wade, and
this dispute is no closer to resolution.
Yet we have,
for the most part, managed to agree on certain ground rules in
the abortion controversy: it’s acceptable to express your
opinion and to criticize the other side, but it’s not acceptable
either to engage in violence or to encourage others to do so.
What we need
now is an extension of those ground rules to the wider national
debate.
Right now,
each side in that debate passionately believes that the other
side is wrong. And it’s all right for them to say that. What’s
not acceptable is the kind of violence and eliminationist rhetoric
encouraging violence that has become all too common these past
two years.
It’s
not enough to appeal to the better angels of our nature. We need
to have leaders of both parties — or Mr. Obama alone if necessary
— declare that both violence and any language hinting at
the acceptability of violence are out of bounds. We all want reconciliation,
but the road to that goal begins with an agreement that our differences
will be settled by the rule of law.
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