Economic Divisions Can Erode Society

When the Republicans took over Congress in the November election, I didn’t take it hard. I voted for candidates from both parties, so I told my Democratic friends not to go into mourning. After all, shifting control of Congress once every few decades was not exactly destroying democracy.

But I began to get nervous when I heard Rep. Newton Gingrich boast that he was a revolutionary, the only one around.

Myself, I think the first American Revolution was carried out well enough to be the last. Any major-party leader who prattles about being a revolutionary strikes me as stunningly insensitive to the havoc that revolutions cause, especially when they are rooted not in oppression but in the brain of a politician afloat in self-esteem.

I still give him the benefit of the doubt; put the revolutionary talk down to a boyish pose. But sometimes a pose creates a result a young fellow might not foresee.

The fact is that the ambitions of the Newtonians, their lust for the quick, dramatic change and their deep fascination with themselves do have in them the makings of one important ingredient of revolution. That is class struggle.

Done carefully, with each federal program to be sliced examined with the caring attention that we usually save for our own self-interest, much of the “Contract With America” could be of benefit.

But absent that tenderness, the program is turning into more than Americans who voted for it might want. They expected to save some government money spent on other Americans, give bureaucrats the scare of their lives, and have a good housecleaning.

But I doubt they expected the slash-and-burn campaign the Republicans have mounted against so much of the economic and social safety net created by Republican as well as Democratic administrations since World War II.

What’s more, all this is going on when a particular kind of economic expansion is also taking place. Felix G. Rohatyn, senior partner of Lazard Freres, described it in a speech at Wake Forest University last week:

“The big beneficiaries of our economic expansion have been the owners of financial assets and a new class of highly compensated technicians working for companies where profit-sharing and stock ownership was widely spread.

“What is occurring is a huge transfer of wealth from lower-skilled middle-class American workers to the owners of capital assets and to the new technological aristocracy.

“As a result, the institutional relationship created by the mutual loyalty of employees and employers in most American businesses has been badly frayed. … These relationships have been replaced by a combination of fear for the future and a cynicism for the present as a broad proportion of working people see themselves as simply temporary assets to be hired or fired to protect the bottom line and create ‘shareholder value.”’

All right, put this attitude toward workers as disposable together with “slash that net.” Target people on welfare wholesale, take important aid programs from immigrants, legal or not, put Medicare on the cutting board and hint that Social Security will be next. Reduce money for narcotics therapy, summertime jobs for youngsters, health care and other parts of the net created over the last five decades. Cut very deep, very fast.

Inevitably Americans who find themselves poorer or more frightened, with nothing between them and the ground, will look to business, a big beneficiary and supporter of the cuts, to erect a new net.

Too bad for them. Rohatyn warns that it won’t work, that being the social safety net of last resort is government’s business, which makes two of us.

So: If they destroy too much of the government safety net, Republicans will be loading business down with a job it cannot do, with working-class expectations it does not want to meet and cannot.

As a bleeding-heart conservative, I believe that will be not only the prescription for class struggle but the beginning of its reality.

Class struggle does not automatically bring revolution - real, not sound-bite. But in 1932, President Roosevelt understood the danger of economic class struggle, and moved to overcome it and save capitalism. Left unrecognized or ignored, class struggle creates divisions that can undermine society - any society.