When I first studied Catholic social teaching, I wondered why the preferential option for the poor was elevated to the level of a core principle. My naive reaction was that this concept was well captured by more general principles like solidarity. The older I get, the more I appreciate this principle, because everything in our culture says the opposite – ignore the poor, ignore those who have no voice, pretend they don’t exist. America thinks of itself as a modern dynamic country, where everybody can achieve anything they want. The Calvinist streak emphasizes personal responsibility. The poor simply get in the way of this inflated and distorted self-image. And it’s only getting worse.
The poor are real. America is one of the most unequal of the advanced economies, and levels of inequality match those of the gilded era. Real incomes of the bottom 90 percent have been essentially flat since 1973, while the income of the top 1 percent tripled. Then, CEOs were paid 26 times the median wage; now, it is over three hundred times. Poverty is shockingly high for a wealthy country, now encompassing 15 percent of households – and this doesn’t even include the marginalized millions struggling to balance multiple jobs, keep their houses, and avoid sickness for fear of ruinous healthcare costs. The chances of the poor escaping their lot is lower than in Europe. As Edward Luce from the Financial Times puts it, “in today’s America if you are born in rags, you are likelier to stay in rags than in almost any corner of old Europe”.
And as this happens, politics moves in the other direction. The poor are not welcome in the public square. They are invisible. Their concerns dismissed and scorned, while the interests of the rich dominate. We are told that granting tax relief to top earners, the very people who did so well over the past three decades, is moral and essential, as is removing the tax on large estates. These are the priorities. This is the policy debate.
The New York Times can run articles on how hard it is to live on $250,000 these days, while pretending that the millions who live below the poverty line simply don’t exist. This is the policy debate.
Welfare recipients are painted as idle cheats, and those with incomes so low that they do not even reach the tax threshold are deemed “lucky duckies”. Of all government spending, “welfare” is the top target for cuts. This is the policy debate.
Extending unemployment benefits to help people make ends meet in the worst downturn since the Great Depression is seen as too costly. The cost is $30 billion. And yet the same people insist on tax cuts for the top 1 percent, where the cost is $678 billion. Go figure. This is the policy debate.
The poor were voiceless during the health care debate. With all the talk of bending the cost curve and phony abortion mandates, hardly anybody talked about the scandal of uninsurance or underinsurance. Instead, we heard a lot from the right about how an individual mandate to bring care to the poor was a gross violation of freedom. This is the policy debate.
Merely drawing attention to these great inequities, to this manifest unfairness, is dubbed “class warfare”. Pro-rich public policy is not.
As the country buts angrier and more bitter, the poor are even being blamed for the financial crisis. This goes against every shred of evidence, which shows that the real villains were the major Wall Street investment banks and the unregulated mortgage lenders. And yet today, their interests dominate in the political arena, while the poor are scorned. The reason is simple – money. The financial industry has a lot of clout, because it can buy a lot of clout. The same goes for the big energy companies and the chamber of commerce. And their positions always seem to end up making rich people richer.
Just take the financial sector. The financial meltdown was due to two decades of regulatory neglect and negligence. Ideology pushed for open markets and deregulation, and contributions greased the wheels. But few have learned the lesson, and the American right is obstinately refusing to even acknowledge that there is a lesson to be learned. Think of an interesting experiment. Wall Street vigorously supported the bailout and vigorously opposed financial sector reform. The most ardent servants of Wall Street are those who voted for the first and against the second. Who might these people be? As Zach Carter notes: ” Of the 69 House members who voted with Wall Street on both the bailout and financial reform, 60 are Republicans, while nine are Democrats. All 21 Senators who voted with Wall Street on both issues are Republicans, and Republicans raked in over 90 percent of the total campaign contributions.” No further comment needed.
But money would not be able to dominate politics if the culture did not enable it. The rich would not be able to so brazenly support their own financial interests if the culture did not support it. Something very wrong has happened to the culture. Part of it is an old story by now – social norms have changed since the 1970s, and fairness is no longer regarded as an important value or principle. Solidarity has been cast aside, and replaced with a resurgence of old-fashioned liberalism. Self-interest is a virtue. Greed is good. And the poor are responsible for their own state in life. While private charity is to be lauded, there is absolutely no public requirement to protect their interests or to promote fairness. It’s all about freedom.
In these strange days, it’s getting much worse. This Reaganesque ideology, on the rise for a few decades now, has recently metamorphosed into something extremely ugly. It’s no longer enough to ignore the poor, but all attempts to help them must be demonized as well. Jeff Sachs says it best when he calls it America’s deepening moral crisis:
“Much of America is in a nasty mood and the language of compassion has more or less been abandoned…America today presents the paradox of a rich country falling apart because of the collapse of its core values…the country is in the throes of an ugly moral crisis…Income inequality is at historic highs, but the rich claim they have no responsibility to the rest of society. They refuse to come to the aid of the destitute, and defend tax cuts at every opportunity. Almost everybody complains, almost everybody aggressively defends their own narrow, short-term interests, and almost everybody abandons any pretense of looking ahead or addressing the needs of others.”
I remember the shocking stories during the healthcare protests. We saw townhall meetings, with sick uninsured people literally begging for help. But the loud and ugly proto tea-partiers mocked them, telling them to take care of themselves. I remember one particularly ugly video of a guy laughing at a handicapped person, and throwing a dollar bill at him. Sachs is right. This is a crisis in culture. This is a moral crisis. We are losing the values that once animated the public square – the virtue of prudence, a notion of fairness, a sense of solidarity. These values are essential to our Christian and Catholic heritage, and they are being trampled upon. This is a culture worth fighting for. An authentic conservative would understand this, unlike the fake conservatives who cheer on the mob rule of the tea parties. Somebody has to take a stand against this madness, to preserve what is good in society, to restore what has been lost. There preferential option for the poor is not just a mantra. It has real and concrete meaning. This should be a rallying cry for all Catholics.
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