The Problem with Liberals is that They Won

The city of Rome has been in a state of constant use for about 3,000 years. Settled as a village that grew into a kingdom and Greek colony, the city was home base as its people overthrew the monarch in about 500 BC in favor of a republic, handed that republic back to a king with Julius and Augustus, deified their emperor a few centuries after that, saw that mess collapse into petty squabbling only to be consolidated by a new Christian emperor, lost its seat as the political center of the empire while remaining its spiritual and economic one, which later turned back into a city state and unofficial seat of the Holy Roman Empire during the Middle Ages, then turned into a commune overseen by an unhappy Vatican until it and its papal godfathers were swept up in the Renaissance, all before settling into its current situation as the capital of a modern nation state, the cultural and political center of an entity that knows and can feel its ended geographically, ethnically, and culturally.

Basically, never a dull moment to be a Roman. There have been a lot of bad times, to be sure, but a lot of good times too. Throughout the march of time, society was always progressing, adding new layers of civilization on top of the old, to the point that the city is basically a seven-layer dip of history and social progress. If archaeologists could make a cut through the city like a geologist with a rock formation, they could read human history the way a dendrologist counts and interprets tree rings.

So, Rome, essentially, has been winning for three millennia. Not all of those “wins” were good for everyone, but, while it occasionally went along for the ride, the city was usually pushing the wave on which the rest of the world was floating.

I find myself thinking lately of the city of Rome and how it reminds me of progressivism and liberal politics.

You see, progressivism has won consistently for 150 years, both in America and around the world. While progressivism hasn’t always batted 1.000, recent history has been a jerky but relatively steadily upward climb. There has been fairly consistent progress from the abolition of slavery, through advent of the income tax, and on to trust busting, national parks, women’s suffrage, worker’s rights and unions, the League of Nations, Social Security, the Works Progress Administration, Tennessee Valley Authority, the United Nations, desegregation, civil rights expansion, voter protection laws, unemployment insurance, Medicare, Medicaid, public housing, disability insurance, women’s rights, fair hiring practices, accessibility requirements, gay rights, and more.

Over decades, this herky-jerky progress has left layer upon layer of laws, regulations, and bureaucracy. All well-meaning acts of progress, but thousands of small acts building a mountain of government that a lot of people, frankly, find terrifying. Not the specifics of the laws and regulation themselves, a vast majority of people in the U.S. would be in favor of each of those is asked individually. But the sheer volume and complexity does scare a lot of people.

Federal departmental spending in 2016.

State Department: $27.7 billion
Treasury Department: $484.0 billion
Department of Justice: $35.0 billion
Department of the Interior: $12.6 billion
Department of Labor: $39.0 billion
Department of Agriculture: $137.7 billion
Department of Commerce: $9.4 billion
Department of Defense: $516.2 billion
Department of Health & Human Services: $994.7 billion
Department of Housing and Urban Development: $25.7 billion
Department of Transportation: $69.7 billion
Department of Energy: $24.6 billion
Department of Education: $70.9 billion
Department of Veterans Affairs: $159.0 billion
Department of Homeland Security: $46.4 billion

That’s $2.7 trillion in spending, not counting outlays from the Social Security Administration (retirement, disability, and other SSI spending) totaling nearly another trillion dollars. Subtract the $516.2 billion for defense spending and 85 percent of the Health & Human Services spending (for Medicare and Medicaid), and that leaves $1.3 trillion dollars in spending.

In absolute dollars, that’s a ton of money. A scary lot of money. (Of course, absolute numbers are deceiving. We’re a large country, with 242.5 million adults in the U.S. So that’s about $5,360 per person. Of those adults, the current labor participation rate is 62.9 percent, so that’s 152.5 million workers, and as of January 143.2 million of them were employed. That’s $9,078 per employed worker per year. With our progressive tax system, that amount is also disproportionately paid by the wealthier tax brackets.)

That enormous amount of money funds a lot of beneficial programs. Thousands of them.

Can you name ten of those program? Five? A single one, maybe? C’mon. Can you?

I’m not talking about generalities, like “healthcare” or “housing assistance.” I mean specific programs and how you’d go about applying for them. There’s SNAP, which is the official name of the food stamps program. There’s Section 8, which is HUD’s housing voucher program to help low-income people pay for rental apartments. (And landlords refusing to take them is one of the last legal forms of discrimination, by the way.) Any others?

There are hundreds and hundreds of programs and grants to help people in need. But, in all seriousness: Do you know any of them? Do you think most people can? And since a lot of people don’t want help from the state (and take it begrudgingly when they do), do you think anyone’s in a big rush to learn more? No, they’re not. Most people just see the amount of money spent, the number of programs on which that money is spent, and the overall size of the budgets of the departments in charge of administrating them, and grow frustrated and angry.

This is how you get to the current situation where we can have someone who owns a house because of an FHA-backed mortgage, sends their kids to public school, feeds those kids with a provided school breakfast and lunch, drives them to that school and then goes to work on public roads or public transportation, feeds them dinner with the help of SNAP benefits and subsidies to the agriculture industry, goes to a doctor with Medicare or Medicaid coverage, and other forms of assistance and then is shit-their-pants afraid of the government “taking over everything” or “taking control” of their already government benefits. It’s how people decry “Obamacare” and are certain that is different from their coverage under the Affordable Care Act. The government is huge and complicated. And huge and complicated is terrifying. And terrified people do stupid shit, like vote against their own self-interest.

So if Democrats and progressives want to learn from this and reposition themselves to be successful going forward, they need to do two things.

First, they need to start focusing on all of the good things that progressivism has done for people and educate them. I talked about this in my last post. Spend less time attacking the opposition and spend more time extolling the virtues of your policies, with examples of real human beings who have benefitted.

Second, focus on simplifying the government and making it more transparent. Stop adding more programs, but figure out how to help the most people with the fewest programs. This will require more cash payments and fewer vouchers or other requirements. And that’s harder to justify. But that’s a fight you need to be ready to fight. Republicans and many so-called conservatives, on the other hand, want the system to remain obscure and convoluted, because it gives them fuel to scare voters into voting for them.

In fact, replacing most of the current government programs with a form of a Guaranteed Minimum Income would be the best solution (for lots of reasons that will be the topic of a future column). It might get less help to the people who need it the most, but its effectiveness overall, ease of understanding, and popularity would ensure that it becomes a staple of our society, providing a basic safety net to everyone while also giving each person the freedom to decide for themselves how best to utilize that safety net.