Presidential elections are seldom pretty to watch, but earlier this year there was wide agreement that Americans were in for a serious contest of ideas — with a historic debate over goverment’s role front and center. That seemed all the more likely when Mitt Romney chose super wonk Paul Ryan as his running mate.
Now, with this week’s flap over the Romney video — and the way the Romney has largely stood by his remarks — we’re starting to see such a deeper debate.
A key issue raised by Romney’s comments is the state of personal responsibility in America. Romney suggested that this core American value was in decline by saying about 47 percent of Americans that he would “never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”
That’s a rather pessimistic view, but Romney is hardly alone in believing that personal responsibility is fading in our society. Is he right?
Hardly. From my reading of public opinion polls over many years, it seems that the American Dream ideology is alive and well. Which is to say that Americans, more than people in any other advanced country, believe that individuals chart their own destiny — as opposed to the dice being cast for them by structural forces. When we Americans fail economically, we’re more likely to blame ourselves than outside forces. And when we succeed, we’re more likely to think we did it ourselves.
For instance, only a third of Americans agree with the statement that “Success in life is pretty much determined by forces outside our control” — a figure that hasn’t changed much in 25 years, according to the Pew Center for the People and the Press. And only a third agree that “work offers little guarantee of success.” A Pew poll in April found that 69 percent of Americans agreed with the statement that “As Americans we can always find a way to solve our problems and get what we want.”
If anything, Americans take too much personal responsibility, given the very real ways that structural forces like residential segregation, globalization, or financial crises shape the opportunities available to individuals. Or the ways that corporations and wealth elites exercise outsized influence in U.S. society. Even in hard times, we can be naive about what is possible for us as individuals. So it is that polls showed that the strong majoritarian belief that individuals control their own fate barely changed at all during the depths of the Great Recession in 2009.
Americans don’t tend to believe that somebody else should solve their problems — and, actually, this needs to change. It is not that more Americans should expect something for nothing, or work less hard to improve themselves. It is that they should start demanding that our society do a better job at rewarding personal responsibility.
Too many Americans do everything right and yet still end up as economic losers. In an America where the minimum wage is $7.25, you can work full-time and still be poor. In an America where college costs a fortune, you can try to get a degree and yet be forced to drop out. In America without universal health insurance, you can see your life savings disappear in a flash and go bankrupt because you get sick. In an America where predatory lending is still perfectly legal, you can find yourself hoodwinked out of your home after decades of building equity.
Personal responsibility may not be decline, but the rewards for such responsibility are — and that’s what we should be talking about this election season. Demos is doing its part with our new report, Millions to the Middle, which shows how to change public policy and build the middle class by better honoring such core values as hard work, self-improve, and thrift.
Politics is about values. And while the Romney video flap is being talked about as a distraction, it’s anything but: Now, we’re really arguing about what counts.
