What I found most surprising about the State of the Union address was its nearly total concern with economics. Obviously, we have been in a recession, and issues like spending, jobs, and taxes are economic ones. But, apparently, so is our environment, which, by being gradually destroyed, has mercifully opened up a “clean energy market” where we now compete for coveted “clean energy jobs.” Education, not to be confused with an effort to develop the intellect, was described as the coordinated mass-production of American laborers who sell their skills in the global marketplace. Health care seemed less about health than about lowering costs and decreasing premiums. Even our good old American spirit was best exemplified not by the citizen who serves but by the small-business-owner who refuses to close up shop.
There are two reasons President Obama spoke like this. First, sadly, we have become a nation of money-makers, money-movers, and money-shakers, and even our professional speech-writers struggle to think in other terms. Second, money-talk is code, an attempt to speak the preferred language of moderates and conservatives.
However, the Republicans spoke in a different language, one even more thoroughly encoded. In Governor McDonnell’s litany of platitudes about limited government, free enterprise, common sense, and strong families, it was easy to decode the conservative message: deregulated financial systems, reduced social services, tax protection for corporations and the wealthy, increased State and local control, Christian values, no gay marriage, no abortions.
McDonnell’s response displayed the curious ability of conservatives to wrap the American flag around fundamentalism and tradition while simultaneously valorizing “free enterprise,” an economic system that has generated more change, chaos, and destruction than any endeavor in human history. Perhaps some conservatives are seduced by their own rhetoric, but for others, homilies about American values are but thinly veiled defenses of the right to become exquisitely wealthy, even as others remain exceptionally poor.
Thus, this State of the Union clarified an important tactical difference, in a time of economic duress, between the Democrats’ use of code and the Republicans’. The Democrats are packaging their progressive ideas in the language of economic security, while Republicans continue to enshroud the pursuit of wealth in patriotic slogans and moral outrage. As we shall see in the upcoming mid-term elections, and as we have seen in elections past, the Republicans may hold the superior strategy: to present self-interest and money-making as freedom and justice, not vice versa.
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