The Ideology of Austerity

In an article in the 28 November 2011 issue of The Nation magazine (Night Thoughts of a Baffled Humanist) Marilynne Robinson examines the drive in the United States (and elsewhere) to address the current economic crisis through austerity programs that focus on rolling back many of the public institutions that have come to play such important roles in our lives, and that came about as our society developed a greater sense of community and recognition of the common good.

Though I highly recommend following the link above to read the complete article, I have include below some selected passages from it.  (The bold emphasis and text in brackets are mine.)

 Over the years we seem to have become habituated, even addicted, to the notion of radical threat, threat of the kind that can make virtually anything seem expendable if it does not serve an immediate, desperate purpose of self-defense --- as defined by people often in too high a state of alarm to make sound judgments about what real safety would be or how it might be achieved, and who feel that their duty to the rest of us is to be very certain we share their alarm.  ...  In this climate of generalized fear civil liberties have come under pressure, and those who try to defend them are seen as indifferent to threats to freedom.  The world is indeed dangerous, an for this reason the turning of our society, and of Western society, against itself is flatly contrary to any rational strategy of self-defense.  But this is highly consistent with a new dominance of ideological thinking, and very highly consistent with the current passion for austerity, which gains from it status as both practical necessity and moral ideal.

...

At best there are two major problems with ideology.  The first is that it does not represent or conform to or even address reality.  It is a straight-edge ruler in a fractal universe.  The second is that it inspires in its believers the notion that the fault lies with miscreant fact, which should therefore be conformed to the requirements of theory by all means necessary.  To the ideologue this would amount to putting the world right, ridding it of ambiguity and those tedious and endless moral and ethical questions that dog us through life, and that those around us so rarely answer to our satisfaction.  Anger and self-righteousness combined with cynicism about the world as he or she sees it are the marks of the ideologue.  There is always an element of nostalgia, too, because the ideologue is confident that he or she is moved by a special loyalty to a natural order, or to a good and normative past, that others defy or betray.

...

...in America, an abstraction called capitalism has truly begun to function as an ideology.  The word is not included in the 1882 edition of Webster's Dictionary, and in the latest Oxford English Dictionary "capitalism" is simply "a system which favours the existence of capitalists," as systems like the self-declared social democracies of Western Europe have always done.  In contemporary America it has taken on the definition and the character that Marx ... gave it.  This despite the fact that Marx did not consider the united State of his time essentially capitalist.  This despite the fact that the United States as a society is structured around any number of institutions that are not, under this definition, capitalist.   Suddenly anything public is "socialist," therefore a deviancy, inevitably second-rate and a corruption of, so to speak, the public virtue.  If I could find any gleam of intelligence or reflection in all this, or any sign of successful education, I would be happy to admire it, so passionate are my loyalties.

...

This brings me ... to the subject of competition, great ally of austerity. ... In need of the focus {of competition} that comes with having an alien and threatening government to contend with, an appreciable number of Americans choose to consider their government alien and threatening, and, for good measure, socialist.  Again, this kind of thinking is eminently compatible with austerity, as the redistributive activities of government are exactly what they choose to be austere about.  Other alternatives include returning tax rates for the very wealthy to historically typical levels and cutting subsidies to oil companies.  Or there could be a candid admission that the responsibilities of the government involve it in great expense.  None of these options ignite populist zeal.  This is reserved for attacks --- call them "austerities" --- directed toward public schools, Social Security, national healthcare, the laws that protect air and water quality.