I had a fantasy this morning while sitting in a sports bar watching the Seahawks get their clocks cleaned by the Chicago Bears. Is it possible what increasingly appears to be a coordinated conservative attack on public pensions might be a communist plot? I’m only throwing this out there for discussion and I’m not saying it is.
Conservatives, especially radical anti-government zealots, have demonized public sector workers for years. But recently they’ve singled out public pensions for especially harsh criticism, painting them as examples of excessive government spending and fiscal irresponsibility, a level of rhetoric that certainly isn’t justified by the actual financial condition of Washington State’s public pensions, which are well run and among the best-funded in the country. (Washington is one of only four states whose public pensions, overall, are fully funded; and, within the system, at this writing only PERS 1 and TERS 1 are less than 100% funded.) With typical intellectual dishonesty, rightwing partisans habitually compare Washington’s pension system with troubled public pension systems such as New Jersey’s, which is much more generous to public retirees and much costlier to taxpayers.
One is tempted at first blush to write off this attack as merely pension envy: The pensions of private sector workers have been so decimated by corporate underfunding and profligate use of company-friendly bankruptcy laws to abrogate pension obligations (and/or palm them off to the government-run Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation) that it is indeed tempting for the victims of these attacks on private pensions to resent of the beneficiaries of public pensions. Never mind that public workers paid into those pension funds, and that these pensions are partial compensation for the lower salaries generally paid to public sector workers for comparable work.
But the attacks on public pensions seem too widespread and coordinated to be a spontaneous upwelling of crowd frustration. There appears to be a deliberate effort underway to create an anti-pension political climate whose clear aim is to force cash-strapped state governments to default on their pension obligations to present and future public retirees. And this campaign seems to fit very neatly into a much broader ideological matrix.
From that broad perspective, the rightwing war against public pensions is only the latest salvo in a long-running battle that has also targeted union contracts, Social Security, and other elements of the social contract.
Ironically, the most anti-government of all ideologies — the so-called “sovereign citizen” movement, which (falsely, in legal terms) argues that individuals can make society’s laws inapplicable to them by declaring a personal sovereignty — respects the sanctity of contracts to the point of asserting the Uniform Commercial Code is the only law that survives a declaration of personal sovereignty. They base the entire governance of society on the (to them) sacrosanct rule of contracts.
But the ideology targeting union and pension contracts is saying, in effect, that contracts are made to be broken.
Where are they going with this? It certainly appears this particular brand of ideologues are out to destroy the fundamental fabric of society. What if — this is the fantasy that came to me while watching the Bears drub the Seahawks — they intend to dismantle the whole social contract? All of it? That would make them revolutionaries, on the order of the Bolsheviks, seeking to up-end the entire social order. Why would anyone want to do that? For only one reason: To replace the existing order with their own totalitarian rule.
Which leads to this thought: What if they don’t stop with public pensions, union contracts, and Social Security? What if their intention is to abrogate ALL existing property rights? (Public pensions are, of course, a property right created by the law of contracts.) Is it possible these people would abrogate EVERYTHING? Might they turn upon their wealthy patrons and erase their property rights, too? Might not this be a revolution of the dispossessed against not only the middle class but also the wealthy class? The neoconservatives fomenting it, after all, have their ideological roots planted firmly in the soil of Trotskyism via Leo Strauss. Which, after connecting the dots, arguably points to the possibility of a stealthy communist takeover of America and expropriation of all property rights.
Yes, this seems fantastic. But what if it’s true?