A Tale of Two Moralities
By Paul Krugman
NY Times Op-Ed: January 14, 2011
On Wednesday, President Obama called on Americans to "expand our moral
imaginations, to listen to each other more carefully, to sharpen our
instincts for empathy, and remind ourselves of all the ways our hopes and
dreams are bound together." Those were beautiful words; they spoke to our
desire for reconciliation.
But the truth is that we are a deeply divided nation and are likely to
remain one for a long time. By all means, let's listen to each other more
carefully; but what we'll discover, I fear, is how far apart we are. For the
great divide in our politics isn't really about pragmatic issues, about
which policies work best; it's about differences in those very moral
imaginations Mr. Obama urges us to expand, about divergent beliefs over what
constitutes justice.
And the real challenge we face is not how to resolve our differences -
something that won't happen any time soon - but how to keep the expression
of those differences within bounds.
What are the differences I'm talking about?
One side of American politics considers the modern welfare state - a
private-enterprise economy, but one in which society's winners are taxed to
pay for a social safety net - morally superior to the capitalism red in
tooth and claw we had before the New Deal. It's only right, this side
believes, for the affluent to help the less fortunate.
The other side believes that people have a right to keep what they earn, and
that taxing them to support others, no matter how needy, amounts to theft.
That's what lies behind the modern right's fondness for violent rhetoric:
many activists on the right really do see taxes and regulation as tyrannical
impositions on their liberty.
There's no middle ground between these views. One side saw health reform,
with its subsidized extension of coverage to the uninsured, as fulfilling a
moral imperative: wealthy nations, it believed, have an obligation to
provide all their citizens with essential care. The other side saw the same
reform as a moral outrage, an assault on the right of Americans to spend
their money as they choose.
This deep divide in American political morality - for that's what it amounts
to - is a relatively recent development. Commentators who pine for the days
of civility and bipartisanship are, whether they realize it or not, pining
for the days when the Republican Party accepted the legitimacy of the
welfare state, and was even willing to contemplate expanding it. As many
analysts have noted, the Obama health reform - whose passage was met with
vandalism and death threats against members of Congress - was modeled on
Republican plans from the 1990s.
But that was then. Today's G.O.P. sees much of what the modern federal
government does as illegitimate; today's Democratic Party does not. When
people talk about partisan differences, they often seem to be implying that
these differences are petty, matters that could be resolved with a bit of
good will. But what we're talking about here is a fundamental disagreement
about the proper role of government.
Regular readers know which side of that divide I'm on. In future columns I
will no doubt spend a lot of time pointing out the hypocrisy and logical
fallacies of the "I earned it and I have the right to keep it" crowd. And
I'll
also have a lot to say about how far we really are from being a society of
equal opportunity, in which success depends solely on one's own efforts.
But the question for now is what we can agree on given this deep national
divide.
In a way, politics as a whole now resembles the longstanding politics of
abortion - a subject that puts fundamental values at odds, in which each
side believes that the other side is morally in the wrong. Almost 38 years
have passed since Roe v. Wade, and this dispute is no closer to resolution.
Yet we have, for the most part, managed to agree on certain ground rules in
the abortion controversy: it's acceptable to express your opinion and to
criticize the other side, but it's not acceptable either to engage in
violence or to encourage others to do so.
What we need now is an extension of those ground rules to the wider national
debate.
Right now, each side in that debate passionately believes that the other
side is wrong. And it's all right for them to say that. What's not
acceptable is the kind of violence and eliminationist rhetoric encouraging
violence that has become all too common these past two years.
It's not enough to appeal to the better angels of our nature. We need to
have leaders of both parties - or Mr. Obama alone if necessary - declare
that both violence and any language hinting at the acceptability of violence
are out of bounds. We all want reconciliation, but the road to that goal
begins with an agreement that our differences will be settled by the rule of
law.
***
Whistleblower hands Assange offshore bank secrets
By Robin Millard (AFP) - 12 hours ago
LONDON - WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange vowed to publish secret details of
offshore accounts after a Swiss banking whistleblower handed over data
Monday on 2,000 purportedly tax-dodging individuals and firms.
Former Swiss banker Rudolf Elmer, who worked for eight years in the Cayman
Islands, a renowned offshore tax haven in the Caribbean, personally gave
Assange two CDs of data at a London press conference.
Elmer said he wanted the world to know the truth about money concealed in
offshore accounts and the systems in place to keep it secret.
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