In the New York Times, Paul Krugman notes how many leaders in media and politics seem not to have noticed that the Age of Reagan is well and truly over:
The debate over the “public option” in health care has been dismaying in many ways. Perhaps the most depressing aspect for progressives, however, has been the extent to which opponents of greater choice in health care have gained traction — in Congress, if not with the broader public — simply by repeating, over and over again, that the public option would be, horrors, a government program.
Washington, it seems, is still ruled by Reaganism — by an ideology that says government intervention is always bad, and leaving the private sector to its own devices is always good.
Call me naïve, but I actually hoped that the failure of Reaganism in practice would kill it. It turns out, however, to be a zombie doctrine: even though it should be dead, it keeps on coming.
Krugman’s not the only one who can see how out of touch with reality our elites have become — workers have known this for a long time, as anyone who’s followed our ongoing American Dream Survey knows. The American Dream Survey tracks how working peoples’ opinions on a range of economic issues are affecting the way they look at politics and governance.
One thing that’s been clear ever since the first American Dream Survey back in 2007 is that for working people, the age when Reagan’s ideas held sway ended long ago. Here’s a particularly striking example from our November 2008 survey:
Now I’d like to read you a pair of statements about solving America’s problems. Of the two, please tell me which statement is closer to your own views.
- Government is the problem, not the solution.
- We need to reform government to make it work for us. Our government has to be part of the solution.
Option #1 is taken nearly verbatim from Ronald Reagan’s first inaugural address in 1981:
In 2008, though, only 27% of working people agreed with it. A whopping 68% said that option #2 — “government has to be part of the solution” — was closer to their personal views than Reagan’s famous formulation was. And that’s not a generational rejection, either — workers under 30 in our sample split the same way workers overall did. (See for yourself — here’s the topline. The question I’m referencing is on page 10.)
What’s fascinating (and/or depressing) about our political discourse is how disconnected in many ways it has become from reality. In America’s factories and office parks, workers are struggling to deal with the challenges of 2009 — stagnant wages, retirement insecurity, lack of access to health care and declining hope of ever achieving the American Dream. Here in Washington, though, many leaders seem frozen in 1983, like prehistoric ants frozen in amber — conservatives strutting as if they had not been twice dealt historic defeats at the polls, progressives cowering as if unprecendented majorities had not rallied to their banner, journalists framing every debate the way they did in the age of Pac-Man Fever.
Those attitudes may have made sense 25 years ago. But they’re as in tune with the mood of the moment as leg warmers and Rubik’s Cubes.