Vennochi is not just wrong on ideology, she’s also oddly blind to the arc of political and economic history. When she asks “How did the Democrats become the party of free stuff?”, she starts with a premise that isn’t true and ends with a racially coded Republican talking point.
To her, the story of bigger government is the story of the Peace Corps and the War on Poverty, the “mixed results” of which, she claims, fuel our current partisan divide, something for which she provides no evidence. Put aside, for a moment, the other “free stuff” our government was doing at the time, like building the interstate highways, educating a generation of (white, male) Americans through the GI Bill, and subsidizing their mortgages so they could move to the burgeoning suburbs. The most expansive proposals for “free stuff” were those of our last liberal president, Richard Nixon, who proposed a negative income tax, free money to replace the patchwork of welfare programs, and health care regardless of the ability to pay.
To Vennochi, we’ve moved to a society where it’s “the taxpayer’s duty to underwrite bigger government.” But has government actually gotten bigger?
Federal government expenditures, as a percent of the total economy, are not anywhere near their 1950s peak, and local and state government expenditures are declining, as well.
These data should not be a surprise to anyone. Since the 1980s, the government has been, according to Republicans, the enemy, something, as Grover Norquist famously said, to make so small that one could drown it an bathtub. With the rise of the Tea Party and the ascendancy of the radical right in Congress, we’ve been quietly adopting a policy of austerity, the same policies that have devastated the economies of Europe.
When Vennochi complains of a country that “forever needs to pour more taxpayer resources into rescuing people from economic crisis,” she’s not even wrong. The premise — more taxpayer resources, forever—is simply false. But more tellingly, she truncates her sentence before delving into the causes of economic crisis: the current state of capitalism and economic governance in this country. We’re an oligarchy where the preferences of the wealthy overrule the will of the majority.
College debt is not some natural force. It is, instead, deliberate government policy, one that created a new industry of money lending rentiers and for-profit educational fraudsters while transforming education from a public good to a privately purchased commodity. The need to increase social security comes not from some sense of overwhelming generosity. It’s a result of deliberate policy decisions that moved the country from pensions to IRAs and 401Ks, transferring retirement risk from corporations that could reasonably assume that risk, to individuals who are demonstrably bad at retirement savings, and enriched Wall Street at the same time.
When Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders offer policies that roll back these policies, they are offering neither radical new entitlements nor new “free stuff.” They are, instead, seeking to reset an economic and power balance that has swung radically in favor of the wealthy.
Because Vennochi accepts the existence of “free stuff” as a given, she doesn’t even recognize where this rhetoric comes from. It is a partisan Republican talking point and a racist dog whistle. It’s coded talk, spoken to white audiences to mean the giveaways they imagine black and Hispanic people get from the government. The question Vennochi is left to answer is this: How did you end up being enlisted in the Republican race and class war?
