As the economic crisis that has come in the wake of Wall Street’s financial meltdown deepens, one response from the American right has already begun to take shape – a politics of resentment and fear. For these laissez-faire market evangelists of deregulation and unfettered corporate power and greed, the current economic debacle is not a reason to reflect on the real world consequences of their ideological dogma, but a political opportunity to pursue ‘divide and conquer’ strategies designed to set working people against each other. Since so many working people are falling on hard times, this line of thinking goes, they will be open to attacks on the economic achievements won by other working people – especially those organized in unions. Union health insurance plans are portrayed as ‘cadillacs,’ as if the ability to provide health care for oneself and one’s loved ones, regardless of what illness might come our way, is a luxury. Union pensions are denounced as favoring older generations at the expense of younger ones, as if those now in the twenties and thirties will never reach an age when they, too, want a secure, dignified retirement after a life of hard work. The object here is to use the economic crisis to set off a “race to the bottom” which ends only when all working people are stripped of meaningful health insurance coverage and secure pensions.
In the world of American education, these refrains of the ‘politics of resentment and fear’ have been taken up by Mike Petrilli of the Fordham Foundation, at their Flypaper blog and elsewhere. With pages right out of a Depression era playbook, he proclaims that public school teachers and retirees – not Wall Street financiers and the corporate benefactors of his rightwing political friends – enjoy unearned and undeserved privilege. Our sinecures? Nothing more than our health care insurance and our pensions. Father Coughlin and Huey Long meet the 21st century prophet of Fordham, Mike Petrilli.
Petrilli is right about one thing: teacher unions will fight his politics of resentment and fear “tooth and nail.” America does not need a “race to the bottom,” but the extension of quality health care and secure retirements to all working people. That’s why we are supporting Obama, and why we are saying now is the time for a new New Deal.
