We Americans suffer from a self-imposed immaturity. It goes back to the Reagan years and the dream of unregulated commerce--of great riches to which all eventually will surely rise; of a gambling society in which every citizen always wins his bet against an unbreakable bank. Joe had swallowed that dream. Obama, by contrast, with his suggestion of a small adjustment toward a graduated tax, was explaining the realism of the progressive tax that began with Theodore Roosevelt.
And yet, when Obama evokes a society in which you begin by working for someone else, pass on to work as your own boss, and end by employing others, he is going back further than Theodore Roosevelt. This was a favorite topic with Abraham Lincoln, a politician whose ideas of labor and progress were memorably captured in his Address to the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society (September 30, 1859). "The prudent, penniless beginner in the world," said Lincoln, "labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land for himself; then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him." That the prosperous employer should assist the beginner was a natural corollary, for Lincoln, of his understanding of non-slave labor. Selfishness or, as he called it, "self-interest" was a symptom of a slavish mind, and incompatible with the high morale of democracy.
Is the American dream a selfish dream? Obama's questioner in Ohio seemed to believe that it was, and that it was always meant to be. It is clear the McCain-Palin campaign is doing everything it can to encourage that belief. In the latest ads, they are cultivating the fear of "socialism" much as Barry Goldwater in 1964 cultivated the fear that Medicare was a harbinger of "socialized medicine." This is a subject on which Americans some day soon will have to choose between Goldwater and Reagan, on the one hand, and Lincoln and Roosevelt on the other; and it is a consequential choice: between a selective dependency on government which cuts out the uses of government for persons less well off than oneself, and acceptance of the value of limited government that does "for a community of people" (as Lincoln said elsewhere) "whatever they need to have done, but can not do, at all, or cannot so well do, for themselves--in their separate, and individual capacities."
The American dream has sometimes meant the selfish gamble that everyone takes and that all expect to win. But of the American dream when it comes in this questionable shape, we ought to begin to be wary. Not because all dreams, like all hopes that assist people in living their lives, are not to be sympathized with, but because it is possible for a platitude to acquire such an air of sacredness that the mere mention of it aborts all understanding and all thought.
It appears that the Repugs, fine americans and christians to a (white) man, have turned the common decency of giving folks a helping hand into 'socialism', thus to be reviled. They need to be sent to wander in the desert for forty years or so and think about it.
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