How much has Peterson spent trying to tear up the social contract? He's not saying. But we know that in one five-year period alone he spent nearly half a billion dollars, and he's been pursuing this goal since the 1980s.
"Money doesn't talk," as the young Bob Dylan so aptly put it, "it swears."
The Fruits of Their Labors
But activists and experts had been working diligently behind the scenes. At first the efforts were defensive, and focused on preventing those cuts. But these individuals and groups eventually shifted the terms of the debate from cuts to expansion. Policy experts like Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson began proposing benefit increases, both to offset increasing wealth inequality and to shore up the nation's rapidly decaying retirement system. Economist and blogger Duncan Black took up the cause in op-eds. And a number of groups went to work privately educating political leaders on the need to strengthen, not weaken, Social Security.
The effort paid off. The idea of increasing Social Security benefits had been marginalized as "extreme" in the media and in DC power circles, despite being supported by most voters (including most Republicans). No longer. As proof of that, Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa introduced a bill this year which would increase benefits. A number of other Democrats have signed on to the bill, including Sherrod Brown of Ohio, Hawaii's two Senators, and Mark Begich from conservative-leaning Alaska.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren's recent endorsement of the idea added considerable momentum to the effort, and sparked that ill-advised tirade from the leaders of Third Way.
The momentum and the power remains with the anti-Social Security crowd. But it's a sign of change to see the idea of increasing Social Security move into the mainstream debate. That's striking progress, in the course of only a single year. But it reflects an ancient struggle over the existence and nature of the social contract.
Proxy War
Today the anti-"entitlement" crowd is on the defensive. Its arguments are increasingly embedded in wider ad hominem arguments against "leftism" or "economic populism." The Third Way attack on Elizabeth Warren was a case in point. So was a recent column by former New York Times editor Bill Keller, which praised his fellow "centrists" -- a faction whose views are actually far to the right of the general public's -- for, among other things, wishing to "slow the growth of entitlements."
Keller, like most self-described "centrists," argue that it is reasonable and even "liberal" to argue that public investments can only be funded at the cost of the nation's seniors and disabled. At the same time, they argue that historically reasonable levels of taxation on the wealthy and on corporations are politically "impractical."
Theirs is a "kinder, gentler" assault on the social contract, one which argues that it can only be maintained at a reduced level -- and that it can only be financed by further damaging the economic security of the vast majority. Call it a "lateral Robin Hood" approach -- take from the unfortunate, and give to the even less-fortunate, but leave the wealthy alone. That's not liberalism, in any sense of the term.
Dean Baker dispatched Keller's arguments rather neatly here. We, among others, responded to Third Way's. But on a broader time scale, the debate isn't just a short-term argument about Social Security or economic policy. The assault on Social Security is a proxy war on the social contract itself. Combatants like Keller probably don't realize that's what they're doing. They're just repeating what they've heard. But they're waging a proxy war just the same.
Honoring the Contract
The social contract is an ancient concept, which arguably began with Plato. Worrying about its well-being can seem absurd, like worrying about the fate of entropy or the planetary crust. It seems unassailable, indestructible. But either we're a society or we're not. An attack on any aspect of the social contract, especially programs like Social Security, are an attack on the entire fabric of an indivisible whole.
It's been more than 300 years since John Locke published his Two Treatises on Government. The social contract has continued to evolve since then. It was essential to the formation of this country, and to our best modern moments of prosperity. But today it's threatened by the forces of globalized wealth.
That's why the good news of the past year is more than just a glimmer of hope. It's been asymmetrical warfare between the highly-financed advocates for the 1 Percent and the outgunned, underfunded fighters for the majority. The shifting debate about Social Security is one sign that the balance of power may be shifting. There were others this year, including the Moral Mondays protests in North Carolina and the growing minimum-wage movement.
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