Between the Lines, Online: The Bush Deal

Nowadays this sounds like a hopelessly old-fashioned Clifford Odets play. But Social Security was so popular from the moment it was enacted in 1935 that it cowed Republicans into me-tooism. The next five Republican nominees for president--Alf Landon, Wendell Willkie, Thomas Dewey, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Richard Nixon--were all moderates who accepted the premise of the New Deal, though they pushed for a more business-friendly government.

But even as GOP platforms endorsed Social Security, the ascendant conservative wing of the party--from Robert Taft to Barry Goldwater to Ronald Reagan--considered it a threat to the free enterprise system. The attacks on what William Randolph Hearst called the "Raw Deal" became all the more venomous as Republicans grew frustrated by the staying power of FDR's legacy. This curdled into the bitterness of the McCarthy era. Anti-communism worked for the GOP in part because it dovetailed with their critique of the New Deal as being socialist or even communist at its core.

But after his death, FDR was too popular to attack frontally. A conservative urban legend was born that lives even now--most recently peddled by Fox News' Brit Hume--that Roosevelt actually wanted to convert Social Security to private accounts after 30 years. (It's completely untrue, though he did favor supplemental voluntary retirement insurance above and beyond standard Social Security). While constituents loved Social Security, conservative politicians did not. Within their own ranks, they seethed. Lou Cannon, Reagan's biographer, wrote that Reagan "shared the view that Social Security was a Ponzi scheme."

After Goldwater was crushed in 1964 and Reagan lost the 1976 primaries to Gerald Ford in part because both wanted to make Social Security voluntary, the issue became the "third rail of American politics." Touch it and you die. As president, Reagan was slam-dunked when he tried to cut benefits and he later gave in and strengthened the program. Only now do we have a president who is willing to go at the underpinnings of the New Deal consensus.

Bush cannot do so directly. FDR's handiwork is still so revered that the president must cast his proposal in the guise of saving Social Security. But Bush's idea is almost 180 degrees from Roosevelt's. The New Deal was about insuring against risk, so that disadvantaged people felt more secure in the knowledge that the government would help them stand against the vicissitudes of fate. The Bush Deal is about expanding risk, so that disadvantaged people feel more acutely than at any time since the 1920s that they are at sea amid unpredictable market forces, fending for themselves.

© 2005