Security Is Opprtunity

Regular readers know that I've always seen the Bush Social Security plan as, more than anything else, an attempt to create a showdown between big concepts: Opportunity and Security. Let the Democrats be stuck with Security -- dull, backward-looking, wear-your-mittens, protect-the-losers government security programs. The Republicans, win or lose, become the party of Opportunity -- a little risk in return for progress, dynamism, information-age, "Dow 36,000," take-responsibility-for-yourself, find-the-winner-within-you shiny new Opportunity.

(I'll let the Lakoff fans graft their "nurturing mother"/"strict father" archetypes onto those alternatives. That's not my game.)

That this dichotomy has unraveled as thoroughly as the proposal itself is clear from a recent change in Bush's rhetoric and that of privatization supporters. Trying to salvage something not laughably inconsistent from their many turns of phrase in the last two months, they have taken to describing Social Security itself as "wobbly" and uncertain, while private accounts are secure and "safe" because the government can't take them away. Of course, this is all nonsense from a pre-New Deal netherworld in which the government must never provide any security because what the evil, alien government gives the evil, alien government can taketh away.

But rather than rebut that silliness in detail, let's just note that it is the death rattle of the entire ideological gambit. Because the whole point was supposed to be about risk: ownership and risk, opportunity and risk, personal responsibility and risk. Capitalism and risk. For ten years or more, Americans have been asked to choose between risk and security, and every time, risk has seemed to win. Now, in the ultimate battle between risk and security, the first one in which the choice was made explicit, security won without a shot being fired.

This is one major point (or perhaps my interpretation of it) of Greg Anrig's excellent article from last week: The President's Gift:
The Social Security privatization battle gives liberals more than just a good shot at a legislative victory. It gives them a chance to define themselves, which I highly recommend reading in full. Anrig writes:

Elizabeth Warren, Amelia Warren Tyagi, and Jacob Hacker have demonstrated in recent books that American families across all but the highest rungs of the income ladder today confront a wide array of intensified financial pressures imposed by the market forces that conservatives extol. The list includes rising health-care costs, decreased job security, less stable family incomes, unprecedented levels of household debt combined with negligible personal savings, less reliable pensions, and escalating child-care expenses. Because economic globalization and other free-market dynamics are the very source of those strains, the conservative response -- let the market take care of it -- is worthy of ridicule.

A credible and appealing liberal response to those widespread anxieties should be explicitly connected to the public?s evident enthusiasm for Social Security. To protect families against significant and unexpected hardship due to the heightened risks of the marketplace, progressives want to build a broader system of insurance expanding from Social Security?s cornerstone.

I worry that Democrats, trapped once again in the blinders of "policy literalism," will not fully understand this broader message. The conclusion they will draw is that Social Security is popular, Democrats protect Social Security, Republicans tried to cut Social Security. They will run predictably alarmist ads next fall that are all about Social Security, not about security. And once again, as in 2002 and 2004, they will have no message at all for all the people "across all but the highest rungs of the income ladder [who] confront a wide a array of intensified financial pressures."

That's worry #1, easily solved if people like Anrig who get it and are in some position to influence public debate pound this point home aggressively.

Worry #2, though, is still the security/opportunity tradeoff. Security is not sufficient as a way "for liberals to define themselves." It's not enough, and in fact, it's not what liberalism is. There is something to the idea that there is a difference between the industrial economy and the information age economy, and the difference is that fewer workers feel they are passive pawns in a large company that will govern their life. They feel, or want to feel, that they can make their way in an economy that is changing and challenging, that demands skill and rewards initiative and risk. They want a government that does more than catch them when they fall, but that helps them move forward, and eventually capture some of the rewards that go to capital in this economy.

I think liberals, then, need to find a way to capture both sides of the security/opportunity tradeoff. And it is not hard to do. It involves making clear that security is the platform for opportunity. Security means giving people what they need to make their way with confidence, and to take chances, in a risky, dynamic, uncertain economy. So, for example:

** Social Security, by providing a guaranteed base income in old age, adequate to escape poverty if little more, allows everyone to take much greater risks and reap greater rewards with the rest of their retirement savings.

** Unemployment insurance -- if it worked properly -- would allow you to take a job at a startup company without worrying that the company might fail, or to take some time to learn a new skill after losing a job.

** FHA loans and mortgage insurance allow people to stretch their savings and become owners of real property. Such security programs were central to the creation of the largest middle class in the world's history in the postwar decades, the high tide of liberalism.

** Broadly available health insurance that's attached to the individual rather than the job allows you to quit a job that's going nowhere and take a chance on something new.

** Asset-building strategies such as those proposed by my colleagues (as opposed to the Bush tax preferences for the rich that masquerade under the same name) can eventually give people the most powerful piece of security that any family can have: $10,000 in the bank.

And I could go on but I need to keep this post from spiralling out of control. The point is that liberals and Democrats cannot pause for a minute to enjoy the victory on the program called Social Security. As Anrig says, we have to first convert the victory into a message of commitment to economic security more generally. And second, we need to show that such security is not an alternative to the opportunity society or the ownership society, but deeply intertwined with making the promise of ownership and opportunity broadly available.