Guest essay by elder law attorney Ron Landsman….

“Liberals Imagine a Better Future – Conservatives Imagine a Better Past.”

   I saw this on a bumper sticker the other day and was sure, given how both funny and profound it is, that some old, wise sage was the source, but Google turned up nothing. So, notwithstanding Ecclesiastes 1:9 (see http://www.bartleby.com/108/21/1.html , although my personal favorite is  9:11, see http://www.bartleby.com/108/21/9.html ), sometimes there is something new under the sun.

   It neatly summarizes the current policy debate. The great social legislation of the 20th Century, born of the New Deal response to the Great Depression, and the New Deal’s last progeny, Medicare and Medicaid, is under attack by people who do not believe in the Great Depression – that is, they view it sort of like the tooth fairy, something you can believe in or not.

   There is no better illustration of modern-day conservatives’ blind eye to the past than their focus on Social Security. Time was when the mantra for retirement planning was the “three-legged stool.” “Historically, benefit managers at companies, when counseling their soon-to-be-retiring employees, would always refer to the three legs that would support their retirement: Social Security benefits, a plan-sponsored pension and an individual’s or family’s personal savings.” This from a Huffington Post column by Thomas J. Mackell, Jr., June 18, 2008, confirming my own recollection of what I was taught as a young lad.

   We still have Social Security, good through 2035 even if nothing is done to improve its reliability – by which time most baby boomers will have died – and even then it could pay 75% of projected benefits through 2100.

   What has happened to the pension plans that American corporations were to sponsor and fund? Many people have 401(k)s, but the defined benefit plan that private industry was supposed to provide as its contribution to its employees’ long term welfare is a thing of the past. Many of those plans that did not convert to 401(k)s have resorted to the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation, where benefits are limited and where the Federal government will likely be the insurer of last resort.

   You could view it as a failure of the market, or as a failure of industry and commerce, but it doesn’t really matter. The fact is that only national government has the interest and durability to plan for the entire Nation.

   If the GOP (rhymes with … – see Landsman’s Lagniappe, Vol.2, No.2, http://www.ronmlandsman.com/content/uploads/Volume-II-Number-2.pdf ) were to gets its way, Medicare and Social Security would be eviscerated and what little financial market regulation we have would be rendered toothless and we would have another Great Depression. The question is, Will we also have another Franklin Roosevelt, someone who can forestall demands for the exercise of dictatorial control and use democratic means to salvage the system, or will we have a new Huey Long who succeeds in converting his one-party state machine into the same for the Nation?

   Only time will tell.

    For some of you, the title might call to mind the George Bernard Shaw quote that Robert Kennedy used to close his standard stump speech in the 1968 presidential campaign, “Some people look at the world as it is and ask, ‘Why?’ I dream of worlds that never were and ask, ‘Why not?'”

   Which reminds me of the cute story reported in one of the post-mortem RFK biographies I read voraciously then. Reporters knew that the Shaw quote meant the speech was almost over and it was time to get on the campaign bus, and they would start to leave before Kennedy had quite finished the quote. One day, with rain drenching everyone, Kennedy finished with, “As George Bernard Shaw said, ‘Head for the bus.'”

   (When I get a chance, I will look up the Shaw quote in my Complete Plays, with Prefaces, and tell you more about it. The Prefaces to his plays are brilliant essays on mankind and society that sparkle with apt observation and deep insight that speak to today as much as his own time, well over a century ago.)

   This might also remind you of my favorite Senator Hayakawa line, which I have quoted, www.quotealbum.com/quote/wFxNQ/we-should-keep-the-panama-canal-after-all-we-stole . He opposed the Panama Canal treaty on the grounds that “we stole it fair and square.” Unlike the Tea Party types of the current day, Senator Hayakawa could acknowledge the hard truth of the past and accept its significance. 

    Where liberals play into this insanity is by themselves being “unhistorical,” like the New Orleans school system, that some years ago changed the name of a school from George Washington to something else because it did not want any schools named for former slave holders. Abraham – you know, the father of all monotheistic religions – was a slave holder (remember Hagar?) – does that mean … Ignoring historical context isn’t all that different from remembering the facts in your favor. Indeed, some of the tenor of the dumb things Michelle Bachmann says isn’t totally dumb. The Founding Fathers were far more equivocal about slavery than their descendants. It was the Founding Fathers who authorized Congress to prohibit the slave trade after 1808, and it was the Founding Fathers who enacted the Northwest Ordinance under the Articles of Confederation that prohibited slavery in the new territory. Of course, they did not “work[] tirelessly until slavery was no more in the United States,” that leaves out that little thing known as the Civil War.

   I don’t mean to equate outright historical revisionism with having a tone-deaf ear, historically speaking. We all have a duty to get the facts right, but getting the facts right is not enough. History is far too complicated to be held hostage to a simple list of facts. Lincoln was something of a racist, he did favor black re-colonization of Africa, and he was at first lukewarm on black sufferage, but that makes all the more remarkable his respectful treatment of Frederick Douglass in the White House and his refusal to back down from the Emancipation Proclamation. We are all sinners, and the sooner we come to grips with that, the better off we all are.

Ed:  Ron Landsman, elder law attorney, fellow MIchigan grad, and all around smart guy.  Thanks, Ron, for letting me post this!