Social Security: The Social Contract’s Comeback Year?

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/12/30-4



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The Struggle

Social Security, like the social contract ideal which spawned it, enjoyed a long period of growth and evolution. The number of people it covered kept increasing – Republicans boasted about that in their 1956 party platform! – and its benefits were designed to keep pace with the cost of living for its recipients. Nobody in mainstream political thought would have dared to challenge it.

True, the social contract always had its opponents. But for decades they were marginalized by norms of political and social decency. Right-wing radicals like billionaire H. L. Hunt might rave about tearing up social programs, and democracy along with them, but they had no standing – not in politics, and not in legitimate debate.

Then something happened – or, rather, some things happened. Future Supreme Court Judge Lewis Powell wrote a paper for some wealthy corporate interests in 1970 which outlined a long-term strategy for bringing these radical ideologies of greed back into the mainstream. Ronald Reagan put a smiling face – perhaps even a smiley face – on these mean-spirited ideologies.

A new breed of Democrat began to offer, not a defense of the social contract, but a “kinder, gentler” plan for dismantlement. That approach was first epitomized by the DLC (Democratic Leadership Council) faction which helped elect Bill Clinton, and then by the Wall Street-funded (and self-described “progressive”) ideas of groups like Third Way.