A Campaign Out of Balance
WASHINGTON — Mitt Romney’s selection of Paul Ryan as his running mate underscores the central question posed by this campaign: Should cold selfishness become the template for our society, or do we still believe in community?
Romney wanted the election to be seen as a referendum on the success or failure of President Obama’s economic policies. Instead, he has revealed that the campaign is really a choice between two starkly different philosophies. One could be summed up as: “We’re all in this together.” The other: “I’ve got mine.”
This is not about free enterprise and it’s not about personal liberty; those fundamental principles are unquestioned. But for at least the past 100 years, we have understood capitalism and freedom to exist within a larger context — a complicated, real-world, human context. Some people begin life at a disadvantage, and it’s in the national interest to open doors of opportunity for them. Some people make mistakes, and it’s in the national interest to create second chances. Some people are too young, too old or too infirm to care for themselves, and it’s in the national interest to secure their welfare.
This sense of the balance between individualism and community fueled the American Century. Romney and Ryan apparently don’t believe in it.
It is well known that Ryan, at least for most of his career, has been enamored of the ideas of Ayn Rand, the novelist — “Atlas Shrugged,” “The Fountainhead” — whose interminable books touted self-interest as the highest, noblest human calling and equated capitalist success with moral virtue. Ryan now disavows Rand’s worldview, primarily because she was an atheist, but he lavishly praised her ideas as recently as 2009.
What about Romney? While he has never pledged allegiance to the Cult of Rand, his view of society seems basically the same.
At least three times in recent days, as part of his response to President Obama’s “You didn’t build that” peroration, Romney has told campaign audiences variations on the following: “When a young person makes the honor roll, I know he took a school bus to get to the school, but I don’t give the bus driver credit for the honor roll.”
When he delivered that line in Manassas, Va., on Saturday with Ryan in tow, Romney drew wild applause. He went on to say that a person who gets a promotion and raise at work, and who commutes to the office by car, doesn’t owe anything to the clerk at the motor vehicles department who processes driver’s licenses.
What I hear Romney saying, and I suspect many others will also hear, is that the little people don’t contribute and don’t count.
I don’t know if Romney’s sons ever rode the bus to school. I do know that for most parents, it matters greatly who picks up their children in the morning and drops them off in the afternoon.
It may not be the driver’s job to help with algebra homework, but he or she bears enormous responsibility for safely handling the most precious cargo imaginable. A good bus driver gets to know the children, maintains order and discipline, deals with harassment and bullying. Romney may not realize it, but a good driver plays an important role in ensuring a child’s physical and emotional well-being — and may, in fact, be the first adult to whom the child proudly displays a report card with all A’s.
School bus drivers don’t make a lot of money. Nor, for that matter, do the clerks who help keep unqualified drivers and unsafe vehicles off the streets. But these workers are not mere cogs in a machine designed to service those who make more money. They are part of a community.
The same is true of teachers, police officers, firefighters and others whom Romney and Ryan dismiss as minions of “big government” rather than public servants.
And what do the Republicans offer their supposed heroes, the entrepreneurs who start small businesses? The few who succeed wildly would be rewarded with tax cuts so huge that they, like Romney, might one day have a dressage horse competing in the Olympics. The majority who just manage to scrape by — or whose businesses fail — could look forward to only as much health care in their senior years as they are able to afford, and not one bit more.
This is a campaign Democrats should relish. The United States became the world’s dominant economic, political and military power by recognizing that we are all in this together. School bus drivers, too.
Eugene Robinson’s email address is eugenerobinson@washpost.com. (c) 2012, Washington Post Writers Group
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Yikes, who is writing these speeches?
I have become more and more aware over the past few years that conservatives are really all about competing and battle cooperating. It should have been obvious, I can’t believe I never noticed it.
But competition in internal systems (like amongst a nation’s citizenry) is inevitably bound to ruin that institution, or at least sabotage its own success. Companies that use it as a management technique are doomed to fail: more energy is spent defeating co-workers than the competition or in making the company more efficient.
Oh brother. Just as Obama was trying to make a larger point that you have to have a strong community in order to facilitate individual achievement, Romney was making the larger point that individuals still deserve most of the credit for their own success. He wasn’t dissing school bus drivers. Robinson just feeds into the usual partisan BS.
Individuals and community have an impact on individual performance. A healthy and safe community fosters learning. You give me an child in some poor rural area with zero resources or a child in an crime-riddled poor urban area and watch how it is MUCH harder for them to succeed individually. But even saying that, we see those that persevere through determination and grit. But someone in the community always helped create some sort of safe haven for them (how ever brief). So Obama and Romney are both right.
Move along. Nothing to see here.
I agree with DG that Romney isn’t dissing bureaucrats or school employees, though whether he considers them necessary evils in an imperfect world only he knows, but he (Romney) is again using a couple of examples to make a point that really make his opponent’s point. Fuzzing reality once again.
If anything, the businesses which profit from the taxpayers’ expenditures allowing them to deliver their goods and services should pay a little more since those businesses are the end beneficiaries of those tax expenditures for roads and schools (and motor vehicle clerks and school bus drivers).
The businesses should even pay a little more to ensure the schools will produce enough honor roll students who will eventually raise their profits even more by being extra efficient employees while ensuring the roads are capable of also delivering their more mundane employees.
People can’t be employed and wouldn’t need good roads if the business persons didn’t have a saleable idea or used their capital to start their business; but in the end it’s the transportation that delivers the product and then the profit. Ms. Warren and the President are still right, nobody can do it alone.
Agree with T-Steel: Obama and Romney are both right. The question of community vs individual is not an either/or question, it’s a continuum. Obama leans one direction on the continuum, Romney leans the other, and it’s a reasonable discussion as to where we ought to be. Neither Obama nor Romney wants that discussion though, since it doesn’t fit into a soundbite or attack ad.
All lip service aside, it’s no secret where the parties come down on that question . Here’s another question: What kind of philosophy do we want to guide the country our children and their children will be living in – one that emphasizes a sense of unity and mutual responsibility? Or one more akin to the law of the jungle?
If I were to ask an equally loaded question as Robinson:
Should socialism become the template for our society, or do we still believe in individual initiative?
How would the two parties come down on that? Of course both my question and Robinson’s question fail to reflect the actual decision, or the views of either party.
Is the Ryan/Rand theory truly individualism? That seems to be an illusion. In our current world nobody
does it alone….I do not buy the hook that this is individualism vs. collectivism…but rather truth be told, greed/selfishness vs. empathic/compassionate society.
Did we learn anything from the financial crisis about the outcome of greed and selfishness? The Bankers and Wall Street did shrug that one off and on whose life blood did they feed?
“The appearance of selfishness as virtue, a subject of messianic fascination for Rand, is, in my view, precisely analogous to the metastasis of cancer cells, whose single-minded selfish inclinations kill their host and themselves in the process, even as they excel and demonstrate their apparent but fleeting supremacy.”
Charles Hays
DaGoat:
Please share your definition of socialism and how Obama is transforming America into a socialist state. Specifics, please. Including why individual initiative cannot co-exist with Obama’s vision.
Shaun I don’t think Obama is a socialist or making socialist policies. I used the example as a loaded question that does not represent either party, but that a zealot might use. Basically I set up a false choice similar to the one Robinson set up.