It's obvious, of course, that the right's new concern with deficits is not really about deficits, per se (any more than their new-found concern with government tyranny can be viewed with a straight face). Little fuss was heard from right-wing precincts during the Bush years, when the decider quickly burned through Clinton-era surpluses and ran up large deficits by pursuing reckless fiscal and military policies. And it would be hard to square American conservatives' conferring of sainthood on Ronald Reagan with their now profound, deep, over-riding concern with deficits, given that Reagan oversaw dramatic increases in deficit spending. If deficits are the ultimate measure of irresponsibility, out-of-control government and a failure to live prudently and within one's means -- all values conservatives claim to hold dear -- lionizing as the very embodiment of greatness and true leadership a President who behaved fiscally irresponsibly would simply make no sense.
For some in Washington and its media environs, deficits do mean, roughly, something related to spending too much money. Erskine Bowles, co-chair of the deficit commission, believes that there is a threshold for spending money beyond which very bad things will happen(though Bowles has failed to come up with a coherent rationale for explaining what that threshold is). And people like CNN's Gloria Borgen, who recently insisted that the voters' message on November 2 was that they wanted deficits reduced (despite data showing how utterly laughable that claim is) probably have nothing more in mind when it comes to deficits than what they hear at cocktail parties.
But for the movement that has made the biggest issue out of deficits, the Tea Party, broadly speaking, deficits mean more than arbitrary numbers on a balance sheet or stupid mischaracterizations of what Americans actually care about. And because they've so powerfully shaped political discourse in the past eighteen months, it's worth understanding what the underlying meaning of their concern with deficits is really all about.
Yes, Wall Street, bondholders, banking interests and central bankers care about deficits for their own reasons, and these matter, of course, for what's on the political agenda (including Bowles himself). But as a galvanizing emotional issue, deficits are a big deal in 2010 because they pack the kind of emotional punch and dog-whistle politics that once made crime and welfare such potent wedge issues. Deficits have become code. And the code is quite clear, once you think about it for a moment -- that when government acts, it always acts to help the undeserving and, in doing so, hurts real Americans who are faithful to real American values. In this code, America is awash in free-loaders and law-breakers -- poor, illegal, grubby-handed "losers" who are ruining everything that once made America great. Deficits are government's way of indulging, coddling and abetting these losers. Crime and welfare had an obvious "face" -- an African-American face. And politicians from Nixon, to Reagan to the elder Bush self-consciously exploited that racial code to win elections, as Lee Atwater, among others, openly acknowledged.
But the code is more diffuse now. It's not strictly about race any longer. It's about every sort of un-nerving difference. Yes, swarthy skin is still a surefire way to set off the terror that has galvanized the Beck-istas and the dittoheads -- Muslims and illegal immigrants being easy focal points of the hatred du jour. But it all runs together now -- embodied in what Sarah Palin during the 2008 campaign, when she spoke of the "real" America -- a place of exclusion, fear, resentment and desperation to defend their besieged communities from the tax collector and all those menacing representations of difference on whose behalf the tax collector serves.
This is why, as I've said before, though Obama's skin color, name and background are highly relevant to the right-wing's insane and misplaced hatred of him (he's cut taxes for nearly everybody, presided over record corporate profits, expanded our military operations and continued the most repressive features of the Bush national security apparatus) -- the skin color issue also misses the deeper-seated motives behind that hatred. Had Hillary Clinton been president and pursued similar deficit-spending policies, she would have been subject to similar attacks. It's what deficits represent that matters most -- a hand out to people who are worthy of nothing but hatred and contempt, who have bespoiled "our" fragile community, who are responsible for the dread and insecurity we feel - because what those deficits mean is that the government will help and defend "them," but not "us."
In sum, deficits are code for government taking sides in a tribal war, with the one good tribe -- the real Americans -- under siege from all the tribes of venality, dissipation and filth. We can debate the significance of long-term deficits for our economic well-being and, yes, I am well aware that, in the long run, most economists agree that this is a significant policy problem that we need to tackle. But this fairly technical policy debate is not what's mobilizing the tea party to scream about deficits in 2010, after having watched quietly while their putative conservative heroes acted with fiscal abandon from 1980 on. Spending money on their own kind is one thing (and the Reagans and Bushes can be reliably counted on to do that) -- an affirmation of the natural, acceptable state of things. Spending it on all those "others" out there is something else entirely.
People are entitled, of course, to believe that they and their kind are more deserving than others. But we're under no obligation to take their anger about deficits at face value, when it's so clear that something much deeper lurks behind the crying over spilled red ink.
Jonathan Weiler's second book, Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics, co-authored with Marc Hetherington, was published last year by Cambridge University Press.