Unions and the Politics of Budget Cutting

So, I guess my post on Ronald Reagan didn't exactly whip the conservative masses into a polemical frenzy.  Here an issue that's a little more timely.

I've been following with interest the goings on in Wisconsin and other states as well as the political posturing over the federal budget.  I have to admit that public service employee unions were never particularly near and dear to my heart.   The one time I attended a local school committee meeting the teacher's union, trying to move along difficult contract negotiations, was out in force.  I felt very sorry for the school committee members as they had to listen to endless harangues and put up with what struck me as an appalling lack of basic civility. I could also never understand the concept of teacher tenure.  I always assumed that tenure existed to protect scholars from political interference in their academic research, not to guarantee school teachers lifetime employment.  And I've been dismayed at times by the behavior of police and fireman's unions whose concept of solidarity seems to mean defending their members who abuse their power regardless of the circumstances.

So I certainly can see how public service unions could be improved, and I don't dispute that the budget crises facing states are very real.  But looking at what the Republicans have undertaken, I can help but conclude that reforming the public service sector and balancing the budget are secondary concerns at best, and that the real motive is to enact a political agenda.  It's hard to take Republican new found religion on budget deficits seriously, first of all, when they have done so much to create the deficits with their mania for tax cuts and military spending.  Rather, they are using the pretext of budget cutting to launch an all-out assault on the state run social safety net in general and on unions in particular.   It is very revealing that that the governor of Wisconsin has refused to conduct any negotiations at all with the public employee unions despite their willing to agree to all the financial concessions he has proposed.  If his primary goal was balancing the budget, this should have been enough, but it's clear that he has other goals in mind, goals shared by his right wing sponsors who funded his electoral campaign and helped put him in power.

I know my friend Lev has very different views on these matters, and I'm interested to hear his response. 

On the Mythologization of Ronald Reagan

We're back after a hiatus of sorts, but here's a topic that liable to get the polemical juices flowing--the legacy of Ronald Reagan.

It’s Reagan’s 100^th birthday and all his admirers are out in force.  I don’t recall exactly how or when it happened, but over the last decade or so Reagan has become something like a latter day founding father—a wise, skillful politician whose judgments were invariably spot-on.  It’s as if he set the gold standard, and Republicans ever since have been trying to find someone who could measure up  I wouldn't be surprised if they're clearing away space for him on Mt. Rushmore at this very moment.

Funny thing is, this is not at all how I remember Reagan.  Of course, I can’t speak to his image in what we now know of as the Red States (imagine how that would have sounded when Reagan came into office!), although I do recall that there were times, particularly in his first term when his popularity dropped quite low—well below anything Obama has encountered.  But his image in circles that I frequented was overwhelmingly negative.  If you had asked my take on him back then, probably the best I could had said was that he was well trained actor.  He put on a good show, but nothing was as it seemed.  He preached family values, but he divorced his first wife and was estranged from his children.  He courted the Christian right, but was indifferent to religion in his own life.  He was touted as the “Great Communicator,” but only when he was reading Peggy Noonan’s speeches off a teleprompter.  Off the cuff, he could barely string together a complete sentence.  He claimed to be standing up for the common man, but no one was a better friend of the corporate world.  In short, whatever it was about him that was charming the American public, I didn’t get it. 

The other thing I would have said about Reagan, particularly during his first term, was that he was dangerous.  He was a fanatic anti-communist dead set on bringing the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation.  All of the progress that had been made in moderating Cold War confrontation was lost under Reagan.  Of course no one could possible have imagined what would happen to the Soviet Union under Gorbachev, and so Reagan’s path of confrontation seemed to border on insanity. 

Well, that was then.  Now with 30 years of hindsight, and a whole different worldview, how does Reagan measure up?   Does he deserve all the brouhaha? 

I would have to admit that in retrospective, I do have more positive feelings toward Reagan, as least on a personal level.  If you asked me now, I would say that not only was Reagan a good actor, he was also a good politician.  Two things in particular come to mind.  First, is his human touch, his ability to connect with people, even his ideological opponents, on a personal level.  As a result, he was never afraid to engage in give and take and work toward practical solutions. This leads to my second positive characteristic- his flexibility.  Of course no one could argue that Reagan was not a person of strong beliefs.  But he could also be pragmatic—whether it was in negotiations with the Democratic Congress or in arms control talks with Gorbachev.   And it was precisely this ability to allow his positions to evolve as circumstances changed that led to his greatest achievement—helping to create the conditions under which the Cold War could come to an end. 

When Reagan came into office, he was as rabid a cold warrior as they came. His key advisers on Soviet affairs were Richard Pipes and Richard Perle whose take on the communist world was basically—nuke ‘em!  Rollback replaced containment and detente as the governing doctrine.  But around the middle of his presidency Reagan’s views began to shift.  The story I’ve heard is that Nancy Reagan prevailed upon him to start meeting with a writer on Russian culture, Susan Massie, who in the course of a series of meetings, helped bring him toward a more nuanced view.   This shift in his viewpoint helped to make him more receptive toward Gorbachev and allowed him to give Gorbachev the reassurances he needed to launch his attempts at reform.  I certainly don’t buy the triumphalist myth that Reagan ‘won’ the Cold War, through his arms build-up.  But I do think that by signaling his willingness to enter into serious dialogue on arms control, he helped to create the atmosphere that made Gorbachev’s perestroika possible.   

So I do give Reagan some credit for positive achievements.   But what gets lost in the rush to canonize him are the deep and lasting costs of his many misguided ventures.   We can see this both domestically and internationally.  In foreign policy, Reagan subordinated every possible consideration of human rights, social justice and democracy to his fanatical anti-communism.  Sure, he talked a good talk about liberal values when it was a matter of condemning communist abuses, but he was perfectly happy to funnel massive amounts to aid to the military in El Salvador to support the likes of Roberto D’Aubuisson (AKA Blowtorch Bob), described by a former ambassador as a “pathological killer,” who organized horrific death squads and ordered the murder of untold thousands including Archbishop Oscar Romero and four American nuns.  And I won’t even go into the story of the Nicaraguan contras, whose violence and brutality were legendary.

One could argue that Reagan’s Latin American misadventures were essentially episodic.  They were regrettable, of course, but once Reagan left office and the Cold War ended the countries involved could resolve their inner conflicts and more or less go back to normal life.  Personally, I simply don’t know enough about the recent history of these countries to make a judgment either way.  But this could certainly not be said about Afghanistan, where the legacy of the policies of the 1980s still haunts us to this day.   There’s even a word for it—blowback.  We built up a force to further our Cold War interests and now it has turned against us.   Who would have thought that these valiant Muslim “freedom fighters,” to whom we were funneling billions of dollars, would form the nucleus of Al Queda and the Taliban?  With all that Cold War noise buzzing in Reagan’s ears, who could have expected him to actually listen his beloved mujahedeen long enough to understand just how antithetical their ideas and aspirations were to the values of the Western democracy?  It didn’t matter.  Our enemy’s enemy is our friend.  But as they say, with friends like that who needs enemies.

But perhaps the most profound negative aspect of Reagan’s legacy is precisely what he is most lauded for by his conservative admirers.  It was Reagan, I believe, who did more than anyone else to infect mainstream conservative discourse with the anti-government virus that it suffers from to this day.   Reagan got a lot of mileage, particularly while on the campaign trail, assailing the power of the state – “government is the problem not the solution,” “most frightening phrase in the English language: I’m from the government and I’m here to help,” etc. etc.   Once he was President, of course, Reagan’s anti-government bluster quickly dissipated.  He raised taxes on numerous occasions, did little or nothing to cut back on the size of government and if fact actually added new government agencies while in power.   I always found it appropriate that the Ronald Reagan building on Pennsylvania Ave that opened in the mid 1990s was the most expensive Federal office building every constructed. 

But if Reagan’s anti-government rhetoric turned out to be largely smoke and mirrors, the same cannot be said of his latter-day admirers, who are threatening to inflict immense damage to the American way of life in their zeal to “starve the beast.”   We got a hint of this during the Bush II administration when the ineffectiveness of government agencies became a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy: cut back funding, fire the best people, replace them with incompetent cronies, remove any kind of meaningful oversight, and then when the agencies mess up proclaim—“see we told you government couldn’t do anything right.”  Now, thank goodness, the grownups are back in control of the agencies, but the Tea Party wingnuts have their hands on the fiscal spigot and are threatening to cut off funding willy-nilly.  The recent budget proposals in the House are a monument to shortsightedness and irresponsibility.  Of course they will never pass, but even a “compromise” could do enormous damage.  And it’s all in Reagan’s name.

So given what Reagan’s presidency actually represented, why has this cult of Reagan emerged.   The easy answer is that it is useful.  Larger than life heroes are the lifeblood of ideological movements, and when you’re building a cult of personality, the last thing you want to do is sully it with the messy details of real life.  Of course it takes time (at least in an open society) to pull this off.   As late as 1992, more Americans had an unfavorable than a favorable view of Reagan and a substantial plurality felt that they were worse off as a result of his presidency.   But by the end of the 1990s memories had begun to fade, a process eased along by the general prosperity of the Clinton years and the three ring circus put on by Ken Starr and co.   My first recollection of a changing image came around the 2000 election when Bush Jr. was deliberately marketed as a kind of latter-day Reagan—a warm-hearted no nonsense kind of guy who shot from the hip, thought from the gut and would bring back those happy days.   Reagan’s death in 2004 brought a new wave of fond remembrances, soon to be encapsulated in pithy YouTube clips replaying the best of Reagan’s made for TV moments—“Mr Gorbachev—tear down this wall!”  And once the ideological right rediscovered its mojo after Obama’s election, the image of Reagan was there waiting for them, indelibly etched, clear and bright and safely removed from the messy reality of his presidency.