Republicans Want To Paint Scarlet Letters On Student Debtors. Democrats Are Doing It For Them.
Republicans Want To Paint Scarlet Letters On Student Debtors. Democrats Are Doing It For Them.
Democratic voters, with help from party leaders, seem to have internalized the idea, promoted by Republicans, that they are moochers of “other people’s money.”
The Unnecessary Internalized Shame Of Democratic Voters
The badge of shame has a long and ugly history. Most people might be most familiar with the concept from fiction literature, and perhaps the most famous example is Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1850 novel The Scarlet Letter, in which a woman who has birthed a child of unknown paternity is forced to wear a scarlet letter “A” on her chest as a way of publicly shaming her, but art imitates life (and vice versa), and there are various examples throughout human history of people being forced to wear badges of shame, including the markings that the Nazis forced Jews to wear and the badges that both poor people and Jews were forced to wear throughout medieval Europe.
In our contemporary times in the English-speaking world, there is a badge of shame that well-to-do people and bigots place on marginalized people and even middle-class people, the latter as a way of encouraging them to “vote against their own interests,” but the most unfortunate part of this phenomenon is that this happens with the consent of social-welfare-policy advocates, and that is the subject of this essay.
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Last week, President Joe Biden announced a plan to cancel some amount of student-loan debt for student debtors who meet a means-tested income threshold. This announcement was met with a chorus of angry responses from Republicans and conservative and libertarian types, and nearly all of them made the horrid and disingenuous claim that other people – usually portrayed as blue-collar workers with no college education, though sometimes people who had student debt and paid all of it off – would be stuck, burdened with, paying the debts of those whose debts were being canceled.
But how is it that Republicans get away with making this horrid, dishonest accusation?
The answer is, most frustratingly, Democrats and liberal and progressive people in or associated with their coalition.
Let’s start with a quick example of the responses to a tweet from Senator Mitt Romney.
Yes, per my wording of the “example of the responses to a tweet,” the examples here are less the tweets from Republicans and more the Democratic responses to them. Romney claimed that the debt cancelation is a bribe, it fuels inflation, and, most accusatorially and most relevantly, that it sticks “taxpayers” with other people’s debts.
The Badge Of Shame Propagates
What does the top reply, that is from a prominent Democratic-aligned social-media personality with more than a quarter of a million followers, say? Does it question the premise that debt cancelation sticks “taxpayers” with other people’s debts?
No, not only does it not question that horrid “taxpayers” premise, but it also lets that lie slide. Furthermore, it validates the notion that the so-called “national debt” is some problem.
As I wrote in my essay about why “taxpayer” identity and thinking is morally bankrupt in every context, the “tax eater” is the hidden shadow of the “tax payer.” I suspect that austerians refrain from using the “tax eater” term anymore because using it might clue Democrats and advocates of social-welfare policies that perhaps they should drop the “taxpayer” and the dangerous and dishonest tax-to-spend ways of thinking.
The Rhetorical Impotence Of Hypocrisy Dunks
Before we move on to the replies of others’ tweets, we shall examine a response that very well demonstrates modern Democratic voters’ toxic reliance on hypocrisy dunks in lieu of refuting harmful lies and in lieu of making positive moral claims of our own.
The “what about” phrasing is rather galling. The tweeter is essentially agreeing with Romney’s accusations! She is falling back to saying that Romney simply isn’t in a position to make those accusations, but that those accusations are true.
This is a liberal version of whataboutism. We understand why it is bad when Republicans do it.
It’s just changing the subject.
Any impressionable voter reading these replies is going to be left with the impression that they as “taxpayers” will be “paying for” the loans of student debts, and they’ll subconsciously get the impression that their political opponents are confirming that.
In 2018, Nima Shirazi and Adam Johnson of the Citations Needed podcast examined this troubling phenomenon of empty hypocrisy dunks, how they can actually be counterproductive, and I strongly urge you to listen to the podcast episode.
On that podcast episode, guest Roqayah Chamseddine said that this mode of attack gives people "an opportunity to simulate an ideological position when in fact all that they've done is lean on what is least demanding of them politically so that they never have to tow a real political line."
Co-host Adam Johnson said this, and the emphasis is mine.
What we’re not arguing here is that hypocrisy has no use in political discourse. […] Hypocrisy can be a good way of teasing out broader ideological problems, but in and of itself is not a very useful critique, which is to say, if you don’t address the underlying substance of why something is bad, why something is morally bad, why it violates some code of first principles, the charge of hypocrisy is pretty meaningless […] and takes up a lot of Oxygen in liberal discourse in a way that comes off as kind of infantile.
The fact that Trump is friends with some Muslims after he commits a Muslim ban is not a particularly interesting own. The fact that he’s a racist is bad; the fact that he’s an inconsistent racist doesn’t make it any worse, and this [kind of meaningless callout] is something we see time and again.
As Johnson said, a demonstration of hypocrisy can be useful when it is in the broader context of articulating a clear positive vision for the future. The arguments that many Republicans are making that PPP loans were something different are correct. We do not have to argue against that point. We can simply say that they are acknowledging that debts are not absolute moral imperatives regardless of context, and, then, on top of that, make our case about why student-debt cancelation is right and just.
But we aren’t doing that when we say what amounts to, “well, you did what you are accusing us of doing.”
What does it mean that we aren’t responding to Republicans’ assertions and lies by refuting them and advancing our own principles? As someone who grew up conservative and spent early adulthood in the online libertarian movement before coming to his senses, I can tell you – I can promise you – that this method of arguing is, at best, useless in any efforts toward recruiting impressionable voters to our cause(s.)
Validating Conservative Premises
“What Donald Trump did when he first started running was, he kind of baked into the cake that he was a huge prick by telling you he was a huge prick,” Johnson said in the 2018 podcast. People like Trump because he is a lying scumbag, “but for some reason, maybe due to some rhetorical tic or some condition, liberals kept pointing out his hypocrisy as if it mattered.”
With that in mind, we should view the replies to a tweet from someone whom everyone – even his own voters – knows is a dirtbag.
There are nearly 29,000 replies to the tweet. Obviously, I have not read all of them and have read only a relatively small portion of them, but every one that I read didn’t question the grotesque accusation that is the premise of Jordan’s accusation.
So, what @adgirlMM is saying is that “yes, machinists in Ohio would be paying for someone else’s student-debt cancelation.” She is not explicitly saying that, but that is the impression that will be left with anyone reading her tweet.
Impressionable voters see people changing the subject and validating Jordan’s premise, Jordan’s accusation.
Liberal political advisor Fred Wellman not only validated Jordan’s dishonest premise but also doubled down on the “taxpayer” identity.
Calling attention to Jordan’s crimes might feel good, but it changes the subject, and, without questioning his horrid “taxpayer” premise, the deadly “taxpayer” thinking only spreads, scarlet letters are painted onto student debtors, and Jordan ultimately wins. We are only making it more difficult to garner support for canceling all student debt, enacting tuition-free higher education, enacting universal healthcare, enacting universal childcare, building more mass-transit systems, and mass mobilizing against climate change.
Any actual machinist in Ohio who reads through those replies is not going to encounter anyone saying "machinists in Ohio will not 'pay for' any student loans. That's not how it works. Stop lying and trying to emotionally manipulate your voters with lies."
Therefore, any actual machinist in Ohio who reads the replies will be left with the impressions that, yes, I am paying for other people's student loans across the country. Because everybody replying to the tweet, even criticizing it, is basically saying that, yes, that is true.
Wellman’s tweet and others like it are just basically saying "you stole money for something bad you did; so, don't you dare call out us for stealing money for something bad that we did."
It accepts Jordan's dishonest, ghoulish framing and, thus, propagates it. While this might make the people who reply thus feel good, it only makes solving social problems even more difficult, because the ideology of the “tax payer,” with its horribly racist history, only spreads.
Remember Amanda Marcotte’s advice.
Republicans are painting gigantic scarlet letters on people who are getting their student debt canceled.
Democrats are handing them the paint and the brush and are giving them instructions on where to paint. So, actually, Democrats, too, are painting scarlet letters on people getting their onerous debts canceled.
Why This Trope Works Only When Used To Punch Down
An actual blue-collar worker will see this and think that the person is agreeing that he is paying for someone else’s student debt but also other things.
But there is a reason that this rhetoric doesn’t garner anger toward the powerful, why thoughts about “my tax dollars” paying for one thing don’t engender the same reaction as “my tax dollars” paying for something else.
I just think that it should be rather obvious why, if - this "if" is SO big, so relevant here - each individual member of the population has been conditioned to think that his "hard-earned tax dollars" are what funds the government's Dollar expenditures, people will think differently about someone who is supposedly paid with "their money" to go through boot camp and then put himself in harm's way than they do about someone else who, too, is supposedly paid with "their money" just to go to college.
Liberals have this weird habit of assuming that their angry political opponents are somehow completely emotionless about who gets "their money" and how it is spent and think that it's merely about the Dollar quantities, all while they (the liberals) agree with the idea that it really is "your money" that is funding these things.
They'll say silly things like, "well, you're complaining about one hundred of your Dollars funding a college student, but you don't complain about one hundred of your Dollars funding a soldier." Well, NO KIDDING! Because you have agreed with the premise that it is "their money" that is funding these things, and we all instinctively respect people who take risks on our behalf with our money than we do with someone who reads books with our money.
There is a Twitter account called Code Of Vets that posted this.
I think that the proper response to tweets like this is to say something like “that’s an interesting personal story, you have overcome plenty of adversity, and, yes, you are not responsible for anyone’s student debt, but why is this even being mentioned?”
Nip it in the bud! Don’t let them make the claim in the first place. Don’t concede the premise that she would be responsible for anyone’s student debt!
Why can people like that claim “I’m not responsible for your debt” in the first place? As we have seen in the replies, it’s because Democrats validate the conservative-libertarian premise that money originates with “taxpayers.”
This is due to the myth that money pre-exists governments and was created by individuals in barter-exchange markets as a way of getting over the transaction costs of barter, a myth that, as I wrote in a recent essay, both is deeply cynical and services a very specific ideological purpose.
Here is one response that got plenty of attention.
This is so incredibly gross. It validates the dishonest premise of the original tweet, meaning that it only propagates the idea that other people will be “paying for” student debt that gets canceled.
Worse than all of that, though, it backfires. Do people actually think that they're getting somewhere by telling a military veteran who grew up in poverty – this is poverty shaming – that she is somehow in a position that is no different than a college student getting "your money"? that she is just as much of a leech as a college student? Do people think that that message will resonate with impressionable voters?
The way to stop losing this game is to stop playing it in the first place. Military service involves sacrifice from the individual service member, sacrifice from the service member’s family, risk, plenty of work, being away from home for a really long time, and putting one’s self in harm’s way. It makes perfect sense that people would not view it remotely like public funding of someone’s college just because both are publicly funded. In other words, people, for very understandable reason, do not see military service as a “benefit” in the same way that free-college-for-all is, but this matters only if you conflate the two and, especially, claim that it's funded by “YOUR tax dollars.”
Contrary to what this Facebook post says, the Republican position is not hypocrisy.
People having different priorities than you have does not make them hypocrites.
And why focus on supposed hypocrisy at all when we can just address the lies that they tell and the arguments that they make while making arguments of our own?
This is why, as I have been imploring people to understand, the "taxpayer" and "my tax dollars" cudgel does not work when you use it to punch upward. That is by design, and it's just basic human psychology. Nobody considers a soldier paid with "my tax dollars" to be a leech, and the reason should be obvious. Furthermore, while Congress funds the military with no public debate and no questions about “how to pay for it,” questions of social-welfare policies involve plenty long, drawn-out, excruciating public debate, which provides abundant opportunities for austerians to tell impressionable people that they will be “paying for” other people’s benefits – which has the just-as-important effect of shaming people who would benefit from such measures into rejecting them, because they wish to avoid the humiliation of getting “other people’s money.”
That is why people “vote against their own interests,” a phrase that is extremely popular with liberals who seem to be not only immune to the shame of getting benefits funded by other people’s money but also unappreciative of why the idea of getting benefits funded by other people’s money is so off-putting to people who know that they need the benefits.
Hordes of liberal people concede the dishonest premise of the "some welder will now be paying for someone's college debt" by pointing out "well, I had to pay for PPP loans and farmer bailouts."
No, you did not. You just did not. All that you did there was, first, change the subject and, second, agree with the lie that the ghouls are telling!
We can continue to exhaust ourselves trying to convince people that they should be at least as angry if not more when "their tax dollars" fund bank bailouts or the military, or we can stop pissing into the wind and start rejecting that entire horrid "our tax dollars" framing altogether.
Why The Comparison To A Tax Cut Is Silly And Ineffective
A very common response to complaints about student-debt cancelation is that the complainer didn’t have a problem with tax cuts for the wealthy, the implication being that canceling a debt to the government is comparable to a tax cut.
In the narrow sense that both are reductions in the sizes of monetary obligations to the government, they are comparable, but the “taxpayer” and barter premises are why this comparison falls flat. The “taxpayer” myth is precisely why many people see student-debt cancelation as the opposite of a tax cut. If money originates with “taxpayers,” then student-loan money ultimately came from “taxpayers,” and a tax cut means keeping more of your own hard-earned money, while a debt cancelation means someone else keeping more of your heard-earned money.
So many of the same Democrats who make the comparison between tax cuts and debt cancelation promote the idea that money comes from “taxpayers,” which is why the comparison falls flat. Again, we don’t even have to play this game if we just refute their lies and making a positive moral case for student-debt cancelation.
Money is, foremost, a unit of account that measures debt. Currency is a transferable claim of some amount of goods and services measured by money, and currency is issued by sovereign governments. Your taxes don't fund anything, and nobody's money is "going to" either student-debt cancelation or soldiers.
Reject this deadly, fascist myth, and maybe we can actually get somewhere. Do you see why it is politically important, culturally and socially important, to reject the commodity-money and tax-to-spend myths, that it's not a mere arcane technical matter?
The Rot Goes All The Way To The Top, To The White House
"I'm not sure what the constituency is for this other than other liberals." - Adam Johnson said of hypocrisy dunking.
That explains plenty, apparently. The vacuous hypocrisy dunking absent of any positive moral claims was done even by the White House’s Twitter account.
On a tweet of a 35-second video in which Marjorie Taylor Greene claimed that “taxpayers” would be stuck paying off other people’s debts that were being canceled, the White House did not refute Greene’s claim; it only called her out for doing the same thing.
The effect is that Greene’s claim reached more people, as the White House essentially said that, yes, “taxpayers” will be paying off other people’s canceled debts!
The White House’s Twitter thread went on for five more tweets, dunking on people making disgusting-and-dishonest accusations and stupid arguments against student-debt cancelation without doing a single thing to refute those arguments or allegations.
The message by implication is clear: we’re doing a bad thing, and we get to do it because you, too, did a bad thing.
The people who are most harmed by these vacuous hypocrisy dunks are the people whose debts are being canceled. "You, Republican politician, are also a moocher" means that the Republican politician's claim is both correct and further propagated. This is very disrespectful to people whose debts are being canceled, and remember what I have said previously about how, like the effect of fat-shaming Trump, the “taxpayer” myth works only when you are using it to punch down.
Yes, Michael Tae Sweeney, these people are disgusting hypocrites, and pointing that out does have some value, but you just allowed the premise that people are going to pay higher taxes because of student-debt cancelation to go unchallenged, and that was the most important thing to refute.
Classist ghouls will continue to make these “you’re making welders pay for someone else’s sociology degree” for as long as their opponents continue to concede that premise.
Why This Matters In Every Context
As I wrote in my essay on the deleterious effects of the barter myth, this way of thinking is very bleak and cynical. It enables the fascists because it essentially is fascist, and we cannot make a meaningful argument against fascism itself.
Notice that Citizens For Ethics has really backed us into a corner here. We are told that only if the money came from us – only if it was previously in our possession, only if we earned it and then had it taken from us – do we have any recourse over actions that Kushner and Mnuchin took as agents of the US Government. Apparently, if Mnuchin’s and Kushner’s use of their government authority was privately funded (say, by wealthy donors), we do not deserve to know if they used their government posts to engage in grift.
This is the mentality used to justify nosing into the personal choices of people who get welfare benefits, especially food stamps. “If you’re getting MY MONEY, then I deserve to know how you are spending it.”
It’s a grossly paternalistic attitude that doesn’t work against the powerful – like Mnuchin and Kushner – and is devastatingly effective against the powerless.
We deserve to know about the actions of Kushner and Mnuchin because they were agents of our government, not because of whose money they used.
The Opportunities That We Lose
What if the PPP loans had not been forgiven? How would we argue for student-debt cancelation?
What if the pandemic that created the need for the PPP loans had not happened in the first place? How would we argue for student-debt cancelation?
What would the standard liberal/Democratic retort to Republican complaints, lies, and general mean-spiritedness about student-debt cancelation be?
Think about that!
How would we argue for student-debt cancellation if we couldn't point to anything that our political and ideological opponents have done?
In other words, how would we argue for student-debt cancellation on its own merits?
We have an opportunity to do this, but, as Johnson said, the hypocrisy baiting sucks up so much Oxygen.
One of the problems that I initially had with this proposal of partial cancellation of student debt is that there is no positive first principle behind it. The only argument for it is to provide relief to people who are struggling, but that argument does not in any way address whether student debt should exist in the first place, and, as a great many critics pointed out, if the goal is merely to help struggling people, there are better, more inclusive – i.e., not politically-fraught – ways to help people who are struggling. So, the partial-cancelation idea feeds into every conservative caricature of social-welfare-policy advocates, that it's a giveaway to some people at the exclusion of members of some other group.
There is a better way, an actual good way, to frame the question.
Either student debt should exist, or it shouldn't. Either education is a public good, or it is only for people with family wealth. That's why we should either cancel all of it or cancel none of it, regardless of quantity. That is the first-principle question behind the issue. If student debt should not exist, then fact that it excludes anyone who didn't go to college is irrelevant.
I think that we would be on much firmer ground if we took that approach.
We should talk about how education is not a transferable commodity or asset like a house or a sack of flower (which addresses the “but what about my mortgage” arguments), that it therefore doesn’t make sense to put people in debt over it, that not publicly funding education puts children of non-rich families at a perpetual disadvantage.
We should also talk about how every person who didn’t go to college and every young person who has no intention of going to college is helped by abolishing tuition and canceling student debt, because it makes having a college education much less of a class marker – in a way that harms people who haven’t gone to college – than it is now (and this is why some of the most vicious opposition to student-debt cancelation is from people who have a bunch of letters behind their names!)
We should also reject what I have called The Fallacy Of Money Consumability and talk about how enabling more people to buy homes – by canceling student debt – will put money into the pockets of construction workers, contractors, building-materials suppliers, and the like.
However, we say no such positive things when we resort to hypocrisy dunks.
But How Did We Get Here?
Maybe the reason that the Democratic Party has to rely so heavily on vacuous hypocrisy dunking is that it can’t make a positive moral case for student-debt cancelation, maybe the reason that it can’t make a positive moral case for student-debt cancelation is that it can’t make a positive moral case for tuition-free higher education, and maybe the reason that it can’t make a positive moral case for tuition-free higher education is that the party just doesn’t have such a first principle.
After all, using the “deficit” myth and the “taxpayer” myth, the party helped to create the student-debt crisis in the first place. That is why the charge that the party is “buying votes” with student-debt cancelation is difficult to refute!
Afterall, where could Republicans be getting the idea that they can get away with claiming that student-debt cancelation robs hard-working “taxpayers”?
And where could they have gotten the idea that US Dollars are finite even for the US Government, that student-debt cancelation would mean that something else goes unfunded?
There is no “that money,” and now we know that, but the lies that Democrats have told still harm us all.
Sacrificing Lasting, Long-Term Victories For Short-Term Gains
Democrats are on a roll right now. People are fired up because of having reproductive rights stripped away, because of the continued threats from Trumpworld, and thanks to some legitimate legislative victories for Democrats. These things are good!
But we should not build a ceiling over ourselves in the process. We should be wary to avoid winning a battle that makes winning the war more difficult. We should not confuse short-term political gains with lasting, longer-term ideological and social change. Hypocrisy dunks that validate conservative-libertarian premises and don’t advance a worldview of our own will not help us cancel all student debt, enact tuition-free higher education, enact universal healthcare, solve homelessness, enact universal childcare, build a high-speed passenger-rail system, or sufficiently mass mobilize against climate change. Indeed, such approaches only make solving those pressing problems even more difficult.
Any Democratic electoral advantage or political success from canceling student debt is going to be undercut by the new motivation that many voters have from having their “tax money” stolen in order to pay off other people's debts, even though that’s not actually happening, but Democrats act like it actually is happening. This is going to divide people down to the family level. Some plumber may be happy that his daughter's debt is relieved, but he is nonetheless led to believe that he, his coworkers, fellow plumbers, and fellow construction workers are paying for it. There is a scarlet letter of shame, and there is a gendered and even racial element to it, too, especially when you add all of the literature about how student debt cancellation helps black women so much, which itself is undercut by concern controlling people saying that student debt cancellation would help rich white people, because that's the response to the claim that student debt cancellation helps rich white people.
Student-debt cancelation is good. No “taxpayers” will “pay for” it. We do not need to advance these myths as a way of scoring points in a meaningless game against our political opponents.
We need to win the real war, and rejecting taxpayerism and making claims about the kind of world that we want is how we do it.
Let’s root our politics in what is good and just.