Who needs food? The moral bankruptcy of the Republican Party

Should anyone still question—despite mounds of evidence—the idea that the Republican Party is a party for a single class, the employer class, the latest GOP policy initiative should erase all doubts.

Laura Riley of the New York Times reports that “Republican lawmakers in Ohio, Arizona, Arkansas, Missouri, Montana and others have proposed more restrictive policies to qualify for food assistance, cutting off benefits to those who have saved a little money or who drive a halfway decent car, or adding paperwork requirements to document tiny changes in income and efforts to find work.”

Underline the point: These were Republican lawmakers. The NYT article goes on to say that “[T]he moves come even as more than 20 million adults reported their households sometimes or often did not have enough to eat in the week ending June 7, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.”

This is heartless, unconscionable, evil, and exactly what can be expected of the Republicans.

If the federal government steps in to make the bargain less unfair by giving people food assistance to avert hunger, Republicans go ballistic. Republicans are not worried about people going hungry. They are worried about uppity workers demanding a living wage and refusing any work, however exploitative or dangerous. They are really annoyed when, for instance, as the Miami Herald reported in a recent article, lowly paid workers in South Florida’s hotel industry are reluctant to return to work under the previously prevailing conditions. Yet, when ProPublica, based on leaked IRS documents, reveals the fact that many of the richest Americans pay nothing in taxes, they do not bat an eyelash.

The right-wing’s “think” tankers are not subtle about the matter. “There are many unfilled job openings out there, and to the extent that any program holds people back from seeking employment, that’s something states want to counteract,” said Angela Rachidi, a Rowe scholar in poverty studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank.

Sure, bosses love it when there are tons of workers begging for work on any terms. Karl Marx called them “the reserve army of the unemployed.” But that army is now depleted. People are taking their time and trying to strike a better bargain with employers. When there is an excess of unfilled jobs and the supply of available workers is low, the law of supply and demand dictates that the balance of power becomes more favorable for workers. That is why wages, finally, are rising.

A scholar in poverty studies at the American Enterprise Institute is a contradiction in terms, an oxymoron, whose job is concocting excuses for why poverty is the result of the workings of a perfect market. The myth of a perfect market is central to GOP ideology. The conviction is one very few serious academic economists share because they have found out through extensive research that the market is anything but perfect. The work of Joseph Stieglitz, a winner of the Nobel Prize in economics, and a slew of other eminent economists, has demonstrated that.

Beyond the cruelties of the GOP toward anyone who does not fit the image of the “perfect” American because of race, ethnicity, immigration status, gender identity, poverty, national origin, or mother tongue, there is a clear political and ideological strategy behind the GOP’s refusal to approve Biden’s expansive economic agenda.

The GOP’s concern is the 2022 midterm elections. They know that another big bill, like a major infrastructure law, would put Biden in FDR territory, and spell disaster for the GOP, perhaps for a generation.

If Biden’s $1.7 trillion American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 proved anything it is that in a flatlining economy, economic stimulus—Keynesian economics—works. This presents a couple of serious problems for the GOP.

The first problem for Republicans is political. The big infrastructure package the Biden administration is trying to get through Congress now will bring lots of visible benefits to many areas saddled with bad roads, collapsing bridges, and crumbling levees. People will see that and, in the 2022 election, vote for the party with a guy at the top who has gotten things done, not one who wants to re-litigate the 2020 election. This could happen perhaps even in places like super-red West Virginia, which needs infrastructure like a starving wolf needs meat.

Problem 2: Ideologically, the bread and butter of the Republican Party is a single idea, the sum-total of its intellectual breadth and depth: government cannot do anything right and is always bad news.

But what if it turns out the government can succeed in beating back a deadly pandemic, averting an economic collapse, preventing widespread hunger, reducing unemployment, providing tax credits and health care to children and families, and building new bridges and better roads? How would demonizing the government work then?

Such an outcome would be wonderful for the American people but a disaster for the GOP. Their long con delegitimizing government for the benefit of a dog-eat-dog capitalism for the rich, unique to the United States, would be subject to disrepute.

That is an outcome the GOP will try to prevent by any means necessary. Fear and hate is their go-to move. “They—the socialists, the immigrants, the African Americans, the ragheads (Muslims), the queers, the fem-Nazis, will take over unless we stop them.” That is their discourse, and a perverse and pitiful one it is.

My bet is that the politics of resentment and grievance will not prevail over the politics of success. Biden’s policies are good for middle class and working-class white people, not just for those considered “others.” There are millions of whites in the South, in Appalachia, in rural America, and in underpaid jobs across the country that need food aid badly.

The psychologist Abraham Maslow developed the theory that humans have a “hierarchy of needs” and seek to satisfy the most basic ones first, which include food, water, and shelter. The higher needs are attended to once basic survival needs are met. The highest need is for self-actualization.

The pandemic may have made many people rethink their work and career paths. Covid-19 made plain the fragility and brevity of life and the fact that you cannot postpone attaining self-actualization forever. This may have made some workers consider whether they want to spend their whole life in meaningless, underpaid jobs.

The GOP’s willingness to use hunger to spur people into accepting work no matter what makes clear that Republicans systematically favor the interests of employers over those of employees. GOP policies turn Maslow’s hierarchy of needs on its head. Yachts first, food last. The GOP would rather cut funding for food programs than demand that the ultra-rich and the giant corporations pay their fair share of taxes. The GOP crusade to cut food assistance programs at a time of widespread food insecurity demonstrates the moral bankruptcy of the Republican Party.