Written by Beth Roy   

Again and again, observers of this year’s legislative stand-offs have commented that the controversies debated have little to do with specifics of taxes and debt. Instead, they note, there are irreconcilable differences in a basic philosophy of government. The national debt, for instance, stands in for concepts of personal responsibility, national autonomy, and stewardship of scarce resources. Strategically, for those on the ideological extremes, focus on the debt is a struggle to define the purpose and control the reach of government. Is government a collective effort to support all members of society, especially those least able to support themselves? Or is it a slim structure for the purpose of defending the borders and producing coin in which to conduct free market commerce?
For the common citizen, however, political questions rarely show up in such core terms. In 2007, during the primaries leading up to the eventual election of Barack Obama, I had the good fortune to interview voters in western Kansas, in a small struggling agricultural community. I went there trying to figure out whether in fact there was trouble with Kansas. I am both a mediator and a sociologist; acting in the latter capacity, I talked with people about how they were viewing the particular election we were in, as well as how they saw their own most compelling needs in relationship to government.
Two findings were particularly striking in light of the fiscal cliff negotiations going on as I write: first, this tiny electorate mapped the national spread of partisanship. There were a small number of committed Democrats and a somewhat smaller number of committed Republicans. The former articulated their choices in terms of loyalty and identity. The latter rested their convictions more on religious beliefs than political ones.
In between, the people I interviewed were startlingly open to diverse possibilities. I heard a good deal of enthusiasm for Obama, and the interest in him was never articulated in terms of race. Instead, he appeared as a fresh voice, a person of conviction – and a darned good inspirational speaker. The same people who spoke about Obama in these terms talked about Mike Huckabee as also interesting to them, and for many of the same reasons. They believed both men meant what they said. They disbelieved most everyone else in what at that stage was a very wide-open race.
When it came to the issues, however, the citizens of this little village were far less personal. They talked about very concrete problems, and they were unhappy that none of the politicians they heard addressed them. Their school districts had been consolidating for years, so now children spent long hours commuting to distant buildings on school buses. They worried about the impending demise of the last hospital anywhere in their vicinity. For routine medical attention, they already were traveling to the nearest big town for services; what would they do when no emergency services were within reach? They were unhappy about agricultural policy as well, especially the requirements attached to subsidies. In order to qualify for assistance on which their farms depended for financial viability, they had to adhere to farming methods they disliked, especially something called no-till. They explained to me, an agricultural dummy, that it meant relying on pesticides produced by Monsanto, and that in turn meant expense and concerns about water-table pollution plus a ream of other problems.
Perhaps most ardently, these voters worried about policing. A central reason they lived where they did was to escape the alienation and insecurity of urban environments. “My husband and I were high school sweethearts,” a woman told me. “Originally his job was in Kansas City. And we were robbed while we were on our honeymoon. I think someone was murdered in our parking lot. And it just wasn’t the life for us.” But having sequestered themselves in their familiar surroundings, they now felt as insecure as ever. The woman went on to describe her anxious vision:
Often, when I get up in the middle of the night and I look out and a car drives by, if it’s 3:00 in the morning—who is it and what are they doing there? A stranger that comes through town, are they going to come back someday and rob us, or … you know? That’s my only fear. Because the police are twenty minutes away. 9-1-1 is not going to help. The nearest help is what’s-his-name, lives six miles out of town.
How much of her fear was justified, I wondered? How much crime had their community in fact experienced? Not much, it turned out. Someone’s car had recently been stolen out of her driveway; it was quickly revealed to be local teenagers joy-riding. That was about the only example anyone could tell me. Just as current political discourse read the fiscal cliff as metaphor, so too it was easy to imagine the villagers’ story of crime symbolized something else, something about looming danger and their vulnerability. Read this way, fear of crime bespoke a significant kernel of truth. Crime was not the looming danger; when I asked one woman what her most worrying fear was, she said, “That our community will dry up and blow away.” In the terms of national discourse, debates about small or large government held little interest. In their terms, government appeared as the last hope for their community’s survival.
Perhaps that’s why Obama’s message of hope resonated with them; they had so little themselves.
So what if we shifted the debate from big/little government to caring for needs? Those people who argued that they are not their brother’s keeper, that it’s a sink-or-swim world and every man, woman and child for her/his self, would, I suspect, find little support among the populace. Instead, we’d be talking about what people’s real needs are and how to satisfy them. We’d be talking, perhaps, about large collective responsibility for protecting rights and small collective responsibility for identifying and meeting needs. We’d be talking about a distribution of resources that made the second part of that proposition feasible. Perhaps we’d even be talking about equitable taxation and single-payer health care. What other questions would we be asking? What else would we be figuring out?
In the absence of true hope, when practical paths toward taking care of compelling on-the-ground interests are lacking, people turn against each other. I’ve studied this phenomenon in terms of seemingly-intractable conflict based in religious identities, and in terms of racism. In Kansas, I heard exactly that dynamic at work. People complained about Spanish-speaking immigrants coming to the area. In fact, few if any lived in the village itself. Mostly, people had come to a nearby area to work in the slaughter houses. They filled jobs that local people no longer wanted to do. People noted the contradiction between their mid-western identity as hard-workers and their disquiet at the people who did the hard work they now shunned. Nonetheless, their vitriol for immigrants was tangible. Two women talking about the issue were very clear about the faults at issue:
First woman: I think if you’re going to be in our country you need to speak English, because that’s our language. I think if you’re going to be in our country you need to pay taxes if you expect to get social security.
Second woman: You need to pay social security to get social security.
First woman: Yeah.
Second woman: Get your social security number. Learn English. It’s not going to happen overnight.
First woman: And quit saying we need to sing our national anthem in Spanish. That’s a bunch of crock!
This last remark took me by surprise. “Who does that?” I asked. Much later, I realized that I too had seen on television a demonstration for immigrant rights in which people had sung the national anthem in Spanish. No one, clearly, had proscribed the English version, but a point had clearly been made. Why did it matter to these Kansas women? I pressed for explanation:
Second woman: It’s our identity. I think it’s the fear of losing our American identity.
First woman: My grandpa fought in World War II for our right to sing our national anthem in English. He’d roll over in his grave.
Given that their right to sing the anthem in English was not in reality challenged, what right was? What they pleaded for was their right to live secure lives, to know that a police officer was nearby if a stranger should threaten them in the night and that their village (meaning all the services that make a community habitable: schools, clinics, etc.) was not going to blow away in the next Kansas-strength wind.
These claims have a broader relevance. They are the same principles I hear people asserting everywhere I listen – except perhaps in Washington. How do we create a polity in which we can insist that the realities of people’s lives be addressed, not debated in coded terms that lead us further and further away from truth and hope?