I Used to Think Political and Economic Progress Would Emerge from “The System.” Not Anymore

The first article in an eight-part series exploring how one former political staffer’s thinking has evolved.

I’ve always been a work-within-the-system person. That’s probably because the system has always worked for me. Healthy childhood. Stable home. Supportive family. Strong education. Secure financial situation. The only world I’ve experienced is one in which I can strive, stumble, flail, fail, change plans, and keep landing on my feet. A world in which opportunities are there for me to seize if I’m willing to put in the time and effort. A world in which most things have gone pretty well, most of the time. A world that tracks pretty closely to the formula of American meritocracy: hard work equals success.

So, perhaps it was inevitable that as a white guy with a trajectory like that, I’d graduate from a liberal arts college and go to work in government with a conviction that change happens best from inside “the system.”

Like many millennials, I entered the working world in the immediate aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. The Great Recession was as clear an example as any that America’s political and economic doctrines were on shaky ground, if not thoroughly discredited. The crisis decimated retirement savings, forced families out of their homes, and doomed an entire generation to lower earnings. Naturally, of course, many of the big financial players who created the mess were helped back on their feet and promptly returned to earning record profits while opposing new regulations and undermining the existing ones that were put in place to keep such a crisis from happening again. (Government should never interfere in the free market, they said… until they needed the helping hand.)

At the time, it was pretty clear that the conventional rules and expectations of American politics and the U.S. economy — “the system,” in other words — were very much not working. Yet I also noted with great happiness and pride that Barack Obama had been elected president of the United States. Two years earlier, a Democratic majority had swept into Congress on a platform of ethics reforms, led by the first female speaker of the House. Despite the system’s momentary brokenness, it seemed to be self-correcting just as it was supposed to. Just as the rhetoric of American progress said it would. The arc of the political and economic universe was well on its way toward bending back in the right direction.

At the end of 2009, with the conviction that national progress would be tough but ultimately inevitable, I went to work on Capitol Hill. There, as a young Democratic staffer, I rapidly absorbed more rules of the system. These “rules” are not actually rules but rather widely accepted assumptions that constrain America’s public policy debates by dictating what is possible and what is not. These assumptions will sound familiar to anyone even mildly engaged in the political conversation over the past forty years. Assumptions such as: Tax cuts create growth. Tax hikes crush growth. The federal government’s first priority, naturally, is to maximize economic growth. Success shall be measured by GDP and the S&P.

Like someone who had just discovered an old band for the first time, I listened to all of the greatest hits on repeat until I learned the lyrics by heart. Businesses are job creators, first and foremost, so the government should disrupt their welfare as little as possible. With limited exceptions, regulating or restraining corporate behavior threatens economic prosperity and individual liberty. Debts and deficits are morally irresponsible, except when they’re deemed investments in America’s future — such as tax cuts for large companies and people whose financial success demonstrates that they know how to use resources responsibly.

These are all classics, but the title track — the song that we all grow up singing, even if we don’t know the band — is the one that says the United States is a meritocracy, a land of opportunity for all. Here, anyone willing to work hard can thrive. Here, individual success is self-made, a reflection not of good fortune but rather of individual effort and determination. Here, individual failure follows not from bad luck or structural inequities, but rather from poor work ethic or a lack of personal responsibility.

As a young Hill staffer, I absorbed all of this conventional wisdom through talking points, op-ed columns, cable news soundbites, and the political rhetoric and decision-making of both parties. I rapidly adopted the slightly cynical outlook and condescending self-righteousness of someone who had just learned how things really work. I was (and remain) a Democrat, but unlike all those radical liberals on the outside whose advocacy and agitation were making our work on the inside more difficult, I understood the trade-offs and tough choices that had made the United States a global superpower.

Sure, my thinking seemed to go, we can invest in public health programs and clean energy research, but we’re going to have to spend money on it, and you know that money has to come from somewhere.… If we’re serious about fiscal responsibility, we have to be open to bending the cost curve on Medicare and Social Security. I don’t like it either, but governing responsibly means making tough choices.… It would be great if people didn’t have so much student loan or credit card debt, but maybe they shouldn’t have spent all that money in the first place, you know? … Yeah, I want new funding to fight homelessness and improve public transportation as much as you do, but you know we have to pay for it, right? We can’t just spend money we don’t have. We’re capitalists, remember?

I wrote righteous floor speeches in support of Obamacare for the congressman I worked for, but I also adopted the belief that unions were enemies of economic progress. I wanted to make sure every worker had a chance to earn a decent living, but I also shared in the conviction that technology companies disrupting stagnant industries could do no wrong. I never wavered in condemning GOP efforts to cut federal funding for women’s health and family planning, but I also preached that Congress should privatize the U.S. Postal Service. I didn’t necessarily blame anyone for being down on their luck and needing help from the government, but I also generally assumed success in America was the result of hard work.

It’s not as if I suddenly became a doctrinaire libertarian or wanted to work for the House Freedom Caucus or began advocating for trickle-down economics. I just subtly shifted my views to make it clear that even though I was a progressive (“especially on social issues,” I would note), I, too, understood the power of free markets and recognized the importance of hard work and fiscal responsibility.

Where did this way of thinking come from? Why did I absorb this mindset so readily? As I’ve thought more about the countless societal, cultural, and technological factors at play, three stand out. One is the rise and subsequent entrenchment of the “meritocratic” or “professional” class — creatures of the system, like me, for whom the system has worked exceedingly well. Another is the scam of false choices, the self-serving notion that has taught generations of Americans that we can have a strong economy or a strong social safety net, but not both. The third factor is a decades-long effort to make the federal government dysfunctional and distrusted.

In this series of articles, I’ll review these trends in turn. Then, I’ll explore why my understanding of America’s political and economic rules has shifted so radically — or at least “radically” compared to what the conventional wisdom deems acceptable. Before we get there, though, we need to talk about the Serious and Responsible People whose Serious and Responsible Thinking lulled me, like so many of my fellow institutionalists, into a comfortable sense of complacency with the status quo.

This article, which was originally published on Medium, is the first in an eight-part series. Read part two here.