(And How They Plan to Destroy It)
The interview transcript has been lightly edited for grammar and clarity.
ROBINSON
People do not talk enough about Social Security. Republicans want to kill Social Security but don’t like to talk about Social Security, partly because they know the conversation is a losing one for them. But that does not change the fact that every minute of every day, slowly, behind the scenes, they are working to destroy the program.
You, Alex Lawson, are trying to prevent that from happening. I want to start by going back in time to think about the achievement that Social Security represents. Could tell us about the fight to get it? We didn’t always live in an era where we had this important benefit.
People do not talk enough about Social Security. Republicans want to kill Social Security but don’t like to talk about Social Security, partly because they know the conversation is a losing one for them. But that does not change the fact that every minute of every day, slowly, behind the scenes, they are working to destroy the program.
You, Alex Lawson, are trying to prevent that from happening. I want to start by going back in time to think about the achievement that Social Security represents. Could tell us about the fight to get it? We didn’t always live in an era where we had this important benefit.
LAWSON
That’s a great question and a great part of the story. We do have to actually look further back, before Social Security was created. Everyone more or less knows the story that Social Security was created in the Great Depression. At that time, the country was facing catastrophe. One in two seniors were living in poverty—50 percent. Poor houses are in every state in the country (except for one, New Mexico—I don’t know why). Poor houses are a concept that we don’t even have in our minds anymore. They were debtors’ prisons; it’s where you went if you ran out of money and didn’t have family to support you, and importantly, the doors were locked at night—this was not a place that you could leave. And, in fact, the poor house was the bogeyman that people used to push their children: “You better study in school—”
ROBINSON
“—or you will end up in a warehouse where we put poor people!”
LAWSON
Exactly. And importantly, there is a great one that I love, which is on the original Monopoly board, across from the jail on the other corner, was the poor house. So you could either go to jail, or end up in the poor house.
The Poor House, from when Monopoly was "The Landlord's Game"
Now, you get Social Security, and the poor house is eliminated as a concept. It doesn’t exist anymore because Social Security is there to protect people in the retirement if they run out of wages—because in a capitalist society based on wages, if you don’t have wages, you have to figure out something to do. That something used to be the poor house, and then it was Social Security.
There’s more, but I will just say what I love is: Do you know what that space on the Monopoly board is now? It’s free parking! From the poor house to free parking.
ROBINSON
We’ve marked human progress through the progress of the Monopoly board.
LAWSON
But you do have to ask where those ideas come from. Obviously, it was during the crisis of the Great Depression that Frances Perkins and the New Dealers, working with FDR, saw the opportunity to implement these things. But these ideas come from before. You can read Eugene Debs and see a lot of these ideas that are in the New Deal were rejected previously, as he loses [his bid for presidency]. John Nichols has a great bit where he says, “What is losing when your ideas are winning?”
There was the capitalist billionaire class running the country, and periodic upheavals where every ten years the whole system blows up and everyone gets poor except for the billionaires. A countermovement said if we all work together, we can actually lessen the risk to all of us, and those ideas become Social Security. In the Social Security Act, there was also supposed to be national health care, because everyone saw that you can’t actually have security if you can go bankrupt by getting sick or injured. So, the original intent of Social Security was a big and expanding system of economic security for everyone in this country, and that is an important thing to remember when we’re talking about Social Security. It’s not just the system that eliminates or reduces your poverty to the same levels as the general population—which is too high, but it’s still not one in two. Also, Social Security didn’t do it alone for seniors, because we don’t really see the reduction to average numbers until we also get Medicare some decades later. It really is true that you can’t have economic security without that health component.
ROBINSON
Social Security is an achievement that was the culmination of a decades-long struggle. At the turn of the century, the situation is really desperate for people who can’t earn a living through labor; for the old and sick, there’s nothing there for them, and so there’s a fight. And it is also the case that, going back to those times, the right has always despised the idea of having the government care for people who cannot earn a living through their labor (or who deserve to not have to labor because they worked for many decades). Can you talk about the early history of the right’s attempt to thwart these social insurance ideas?
LAWSON
Absolutely. It is important to always remember, and I think your audience understands, that it’s a dynamic system. The fight didn’t happen when we won it. It required decades of fighting, and the reactionary forces hated everything about the ideas that Frances Perkins and the other New Dealers were pushing. They hated them, because in their hearts, they knew that it worked to do this, but they don’t want it. These are the plutocrats and the robber barons, the ones who are having the parties where they have jewelry in sand and dig out diamonds during the dinner party.
The only way that works is if you have a mass of people to exploit. And so they don’t want people to have economic security. The rich were winning, and then the Great Depression happens. The whole idea of capitalism was, for the first time really, held up as not going to work. [Fascism and communism were growing in Europe.] The idea of the New Deal was actually aimed at creating a form of capitalism that could work—a democratic socialism or something of that nature—but a very uniquely American idea on that as well. That’s where the New Deal comes in, as a saving force that people have been demanding.
It was a compromise. There was a much larger push for a much greater redistributive policy that was incredibly popular at the time called the Townsend Plan being pushed by grassroots groups. But importantly, the Republican, plutocrat, and reactionary forces hated it all the way through, and fought it tooth and nail into passage. Then, the first presidential candidate after it passed, Alf Landon, ran his entire campaign against Social Security. That was his whole platform. He’s most famous, for people who remember his name, as the dude who lost nearly every single state.
They have always been against these programs and systems that work, and has always been a deeply unpopular position to be in, but they’ve gotten sneakier at hiding.
ROBINSON
Social Security became so popular, so quickly, after it was put into place and people could see the benefits. By the 1950s, Eisenhower was saying that anyone who ran against Social Security would never win an election in the United States. But that doesn’t mean that the fight to end or gut Social Security ended. Just because it is extremely popular, does not mean that the fight to end it has stopped. You testified to the Senate Budget Committee, and in your testimony, you cited extraordinary quotes from conservatives in the Reagan era, laying out what they call a “Leninist plan to end Social Security”—the revolutionaries working behind the scenes.
LAWSON
Yes, and that is where it moved to. This throws people off. In my testimony, I said as well, that Reagan actually was one of the last of the Republicans who wasn’t totally hell-bent on destroying Social Security. He actually was, but he got grilled for it so hard that he gave us some of our best quotes when he says, “Social Security has nothing to do with the deficit. It’s fully funded by the payroll tax.” It’s a great clip that I use to great effect still, because it’s Reagan.
But the truth is, it was big money that figured out how to take over or break our political system at the time. His win was a really shocking thing, but the money people and bag men behind him at the Cato Institute and Heritage Foundation were plotting: “Now we’ve got our guy in there, how are we going to destroy Social Security?” They didn’t actually get it done. They thought they were going to do it in 1983 when some legislative action had to happen, and they thought Reagan was going to be able to destroy it. But they run into the buzz saw of public opinion and end up not.
But he does put in a grand bargain. There were benefit cuts in that package, with our retirement age raised to 67. Many people still think it’s 65, but Reagan raised it two years, which is just a 7 percent benefit cut for each year that’s raised. It’s just a mathematical calculation—you don’t actually have to retire on your retirement age, it’s just when you get your full benefits.
So, it had a big benefit cut in it, and some tax side stuff and many other things as well. But it’s right after that they really hit the gas on this Leninist strategy of knowingly lying about what they’re trying to do in order to pit different parts of the population against each other. Pitting the old against the young by telling the old they’re definitely not going to cut benefits and not to worry, and instead, they’re only going to cut the young people’s benefits; and telling the young Social Security is going to run out of money, they’re never going to get anything, and so they need to cut old people’s benefits—really stoking that intergenerational warfare with a divide and conquer strategy. But the main purpose of that Leninist strategy document is to say: lie to the people about what it is that we’re trying to do, because we have to destroy and gut Social Security, and the only way to do it is to lie. That has been their mantra and MO up to now.
ROBINSON
It’s understandable why they feel hell-bent on destroying Social Security. As you point out, it’s not just to make exploitation easier—that’s part of it. But also, the success of Social Security disproves so many conservative talking points. It’s the government providing welfare or universal benefits to people, and it works. It makes people’s lives better and reduces poverty. One of the core conservative talking points is nothing government does can be done right. Everything it does to try and fix a social problem will inevitably backfire and cause disaster, misery, and bureaucracy. Social Security really undermines their case.
It’s understandable why they feel hell-bent on destroying Social Security. As you point out, it’s not just to make exploitation easier—that’s part of it. But also, the success of Social Security disproves so many conservative talking points. It’s the government providing welfare or universal benefits to people, and it works. It makes people’s lives better and reduces poverty. One of the core conservative talking points is nothing government does can be done right. Everything it does to try and fix a social problem will inevitably backfire and cause disaster, misery, and bureaucracy. Social Security really undermines their case.
LAWSON
It totally undermines their case. The other one is efficiency. Social Security is the most efficient thing you can imagine. It does everything it’s meant to. It provides benefits for people who retire in old age; for people who face a life changing illness or accident, become disabled, and can no longer work; and for their surviving children in the loss of a breadwinner, oftentimes in a disaster or mass casualty event, like 9/11 or something like that. The first touch grieving families have from the federal government is a Social Security survivor’s benefit to minor children and military families. The list goes on and on about how massive this system is. For example, because of the survivors benefits, by magnitude of dollars, Social Security is the largest children’s program in the United States.
It’s a universal program of huge magnitude— there’s nothing really else like it, and it does all of that for less than 1 percent in administrative costs. Less than one penny of every dollar that you pay into the system is used to pay for the whole thing. And look at Wall Street—that’s why they hate it. They like people scrambling and not being able to have enough time and comfort to think about, “Why do these guys have all the money?” That’s true, but they’re also just straight up greedy. They look at it and think, “We should be the only ones who offer products like that, and tack on a 35 percent fee.”
by Nathan J. Robinson and Alex Lawson, Current Affairs | Read more:
Image: uncredited/The Landlord's Game
