The Borg of Social Security: with its power at stake, keeping you assimilated is the left's mission
As the fight to reform Social Security begins, liberals are launching a counterassault. They argue that there is no impending crisis in Social Security, that the president is serving the interests of Wall Street investment firms and that the system needs only modest, technical fixes to remain solvent.
But in an essay for American Prospect Online, Robert Kuttner makes it clear that the left is motivated at least as much by politics as it is by policy. The debate over Social Security reform, according to Mr. Kuttner, could provide liberals with the chance to "hand George W. Bush a rare, humiliating defeat:"
... the two largest liberal “527s,” the Media Fund and America Coming Together, and their donors are casting about for a post-election role. “They put over $200 million into trying to defeat Bush,” says one activist. “Blowing away his top legislative priority would be a pretty good second best.”
Liberals, Mr. Kuttner admonishes, should offer no alternative plan of their own, and instead train all their fire on the president's proposal. For partial privatization of the largest social welfare program in the world is a major threat to not only left-wing ideology, but also to the Democrats' source of political power:
Ideologically, Bush-style conservatives want everyone thinking individualistically, more like investors than citizens. Politically, if they can fragment the Democrats’ most beloved social program, they can splinter the Democrats’ voting coalition, undercutting both Social Security’s present alliance between the poor and the middle class and its intergenerational compact between the young and the old -- and thus the Democrats’ role as faithful stewards.
Translation: if Mr. Bush succeeds in promoting choice and wealth creation among the Nation's middle and working classes -- at the expense of collectivist dependence, which is the Democrats' stock-in-trade -- he will eviscerate the left.
The liberals' raison d'être is to aggregate power to themselves while superintending the affairs of others. Mr. Bush's plan to privatize Social Security, albeit partially, threatens not only the liberals' understanding of the individual as drone; it also threatens an important source of the liberals' power.
In the days and weeks to come, you'll hear heavy political weapons fire. It will emanate from those who draw their power from The Hive and who don't want you disconnected from it, even partially, lest you think and behave "individualistically."