A New Infantile Paralysis

My generation grew through childhood during those perilous years before Jonas Salk developed an effective vaccine against the poliomyelitis virus. One strain of the virus induced paralysis in about 1% of infected persons, children being especially susceptible, hence the name, infantile paralysis. The Good News is that the last reported case of wild polio virus transmission in North America occurred in 1979. The World Health Organization hopes to be able to declare world-wide eradication of the disease early in the 21st century.

The Bad News is that a new virulent plague of infantile behavior among elected officials is currently sweeping the country. This behavior has already paralyzed government in Wisconsin and is rapidly closing in on Washington, D.C., where it may cripple the federal government within the next two weeks.  What are the origins of this plague and the prognosis for a cure?

We know the plague is highly contagious and probably air-borne because the first regional outbreak occurred in Wisconsin's western neighbor, Minnesota, and prevailing winds in the region range from SW to NW. It has an incubation period of about 4 years, during which the infrastructure of essential public services deteriorates at the rate of 4-5% per year due to deaths, retirements and emigration of a demoralized civil service, while wishful thinking abounds as to how quickly the tax benefits accruing to the upper tax brackets will trickle down to small business entrepreneurs, thus resulting in massive job growth which will rapidly restore fiscal health to the state. Having seen no response to this therapy in the first four years, the "No New Taxes" prescription was re-filled for another four while the rapidly ageing Boy Governor, sensing an unhappy denouement, escaped under the pretense of ascendance to the 2012 throne, leaving a deficit of $6.2 billion.

Meanwhile, downwind of Minnesota's border, another juvenile governor, mistaking the gullibility of his constituency for a wanton lack of respect for contractual law, felt the need to address Wisconsin's projected budget deficit on the backs of his public employees. Dire measures, indeed, for rectifying a figure so poorly known that some economic scenarios actually suggest a budget surplus! One can only wonder just what the Republicans really believe in.

George Lakoff at the Huffington Post has sought answers to this question too, taking the issue to its philosophical roots. Lakoff correctly identifies the issue as the very "moral basis of American democracy".  Let us examine the contrasting views.

In the 2008 campaign, candidate Obama accurately described the basis of American democracy: Empathy -- citizens caring for each other, both social and personal responsibility -- acting on that care, and an ethic of excellence. From these, our freedoms and our way of life follow, as does the role of government: to protect and empower everyone equally.   Protection includes safety, health, the environment, pensions and empowerment starts with education and infrastructure. No one can be free without these, and without a commitment to care and act on that care by one's fellow citizens.

One needn't be a student of biology or sociology to recognize the validity of this view. Humans are undeniably social animals, transcending their physical limitations (slowness, weakness of limb, poor olfaction and hearing, essentially hairless, and burdened by a long gestation and protracted infantile period) solely by the social/cultural context within which they live. The paragraph above doesn't really go far enough, not only can we not be free without our social context, we cannot survive in regions beyond a few degrees of latitude on either side of the equator. Note that personal responsibility and an ethic of excellence (any ethic, for that matter) can only be defined in a social/cultural context. What then, is the alternate view? Lakoff continues:

Conservatives believe in individual responsibility alone, not social responsibility. They don't think government should help its citizens. That is, they don't think citizens should help each other. The part of government they want to cut is not the military ..., not government subsidies to corporations, not the aspect of government that fits their worldview. They want to cut the part that helps people. Why? Because that violates individual responsibility.

This is illustrated in Lakoff's article by analogy to the ideal conservative family in which a "strict father rules". All decisions are his prerogative, he enforces the standards and determines the rights of reproduction. What follows, in the family and society as a whole, is resistance to spousal rights, opposition to abortion, resistance to taxes and  government regulation of "public" assets such as health, environment, food and pharmaceutical safety, education, broadcasting, and public lands. Lakoff concludes:

Above all, the authority of conservatism itself must be maintained. The country should be ruled by conservative values, and progressive values are seen as evil. Science should not have authority over the market, and so the science of global warming and evolution must be denied. Facts that are inconsistent with the authority of conservatism must be ignored or denied or explained away. To protect and extend conservative values themselves, the devil's own means can be used again[st] conservatism's immoral enemies, whether lies, intimidation, torture, or even death, say, for women's doctors.

These are the values at the foundation of conservative belief. They derive from a profound misunderstanding of the degree to which each individual and generation stand upon the shoulders of their predecessors. The tiny strand of DNA that links one generation to the next carries only the barest minimum of information enabling us to grow physically and to think. All the rest of who we are and what we do, individually and collectively, depends upon cultural transmission of accumulated knowledge. If anything needs to be securely protected in transit between generations, it is the product of culture, the previous generation's incremental gain in knowledge, not the individuality of a particular strand of DNA.

If you need more proof, and an estimate of how rapidly an ancestral trail can be erased by inbreeding, examine the past few hundred years of monarchical collapse in Europe, and the remaining royal stubs wracked by congenital infirmities. Outbreeding to introduce commoner genes is clearly required to perpetuate the family line.

What does all this mean to Wisconsin governance? Simply put, Gov. Walker's ploy to blame collective bargaining for Wisconsin's fiscal woes, is both exaggerated and targeted at union-busting, rather than recognizing the truth that responsible governance incurs legitimate costs that need to be managed and supported by taxation. The paralysis in Wisconsin governance experienced over the past few days is real and will continue until the Wisconsin Senate achieves the three-fifths quorum required to pass fiscal legislation. Now that the teacher's union has agreed to the Governor's fiscal demands, the infantile reasons for this paralysis will become evident if the conservative camp goes around the three-fifths quorum rule by severing the union-busting language from the fiscal component of the budget bill. This will give pause to the city fathers of Ripon, Wisconsin, who may well change their community greeting to read: "Birthplace of the Republican Party Fantasies".

It is high time that the patchwork of science fiction underlying conservative delusions of self-reliance is revealed to the American electorate. Perhaps the release of "Who is John Galt?"  in April will provide new opportunities to  re-examine these fairy tales. Continuation on the present path is a Grimm prospect, indeed.

Cross-posted to The Renaissance Post