On March 16, President Donald Trump’s administration released a 2018 budget proposal slapped together by Director of the Office of Management and Budget Mick Mulvaney. The budget proposed is severe. It cuts things like social programs in the most vulnerable territories, such as the Department of Education and, of course, the supposedly “defunct” and “useless” Environmental Protection Agency. In response to attacks from the left, Trump surrogates and sympathizers point out that cuts of this sort, though harsh, are not new. In fact, they’ve been a part of conservative ideology since the 1970s and 80s. Government, they believe, ought to be small and cannot afford to divert resources to small, individualized social programs. How is this any different than the economic philosophy of George W. Bush or Ronald Reagan?
Well, it is incredibly different and here’s why. The basis of Trump’s budget cuts is not in conventional Republican tradition of small government and strength abroad. It is Trumpism, which is less a political or economic ideology and more a cultural phenomena or cult of personality. Mulvaney, the author of Trump’s budget, admitted to using Trump’s political campaign speeches as a sort of reference guide when he was considering what to cut and how to cut it. The problem with that is that Trump’s speeches are inconsistent and contradictory. It’s rhetoric, and rhetoric without some sort of inner beliefs or personal convictions to ground it in is phony. The budget was built on runaway suppositions, fear-mongering and empty words.
Second, Senate and House Republicans, who unlike Trump have personal and deep-rooted conservative convictions, have expressed concern over cuts to the State Department. The projection of American strength and power overseas is a long-standing tradition of the right. We are America, a world power and the greatest country in the world, and should therefore be a diplomatic force to be reckoned with. For republicans, foreign policy is a matter of both hard power (defense) and soft power (diplomacy). A robust military without tactics refined and implored by the State Department is a mean without an ideological, military or political end.
So the budget is a bust with Republicans, too. But the most troubling part of it is that the budget hits the underprivileged and defenseless the hardest. It defunds programs for children, senior citizens, women and both urban and rural poor folks. By stripping Americans of necessary economic and social programs, they lack the capacity, energy or time to participate in civil society which, in any democracy, is essential to a state’s health and prosperity.
By making and keeping a child poor, you are ensuring that he or she will not develop into a conscientious voter or political participant. That’s because the mindset of poor folk is tuned to survival mode — they work. They don’t have the time to go to town hall meetings or vote in midterm elections or protest. And that is not just my individual opinion, it’s a fact supported by mounds and mounds of statistics. By gutting humanities, television and education, you’re making sure that a kid who doesn’t have the money to engage in art and humanities, who can’t afford cable, who can’t scrape together $40,000 to go to a public university, stays that way. Hordes of people become alienated from the political process because they are burdened with excessive poverty and have no supplementary programs to thwart that poverty.
The austerity measures hurt poor white Trump voters the most, a majority of which live in the South. This is because these states don’t have strong and robust programs to cushion the blow. Their social programs are almost entirely dependent on federal aid. If Trump gets rid of that then there’s not much left for the underprivileged in the South.
It’s easy to point fingers. They voted for him, so they should deal with the consequences. Aside from that fact that keeping voters poor and helpless benefits Trump and his crowd, they are our fellow brethren. Suffering at its core is not just a political problem that needs to be dealt with — it is a human and moral dilemma first. Often times, rampant individualism supersedes human connections between groups and people, but no more. That mentality created and elected Trump. If we espouse equal opportunity and liberty, then we ought to ensure access to both of those things. That means collectivity in defense of our ideals and in opposition to Trumpism. It means fighting for Public Broadcasting Service, for the EPA and for civil society.
