Fear of Big Scary Numbers

If your primary political concern is the national debt, then you probably aren't primarily concerned with facts and realities.  The national debt and annual deficits are real things, but to almost all Americans, they are abstractions.  When has a deficit ever harmed you?  Hit you over the head or bit you on the ass?   Have you ever noticed a difference in the air or in your own circumstances depending on whether the deficit is rising or declining?  And as to the national debt - seventeen trillion dollars sure sounds like a lot of money, but is it really?  What does seventeen trillion dollars even mean?

The deficit and the debt are important.  But most people have no sense of what they actually are, or what they represent, or whether they're large or small, or rising or declining, by historical standards.  And yet the debt and deficit loom as momentous, even occasionally decisive, political issues in America.

I just read a post by Ta-Nehisi Coates in which he quotes a passage from Tony Judt's Postwar describing a poll that listed the three top concerns of the French people in the immediate aftermath of World War 2 as "food," "bread," and "meat".  Those are concrete concerns.

If your number one concern is that vague beast we call "the deficit", then you are probably doing ok in life.  Your principle fear is a bogeyman and your problem is not actual distress but anxiety about the possibility of distress.  Either that, or you're just using it as a handy rhetorical bludgeon to beat up on the incumbent party and its policies.

And that last point, of course, is the real reason that the deficit is a subject of great concern among the American people.  By inflating a general fear of the great debt/deficit bogeyman, right-wingers generate support for austerities which the public would not otherwise tolerate.  Huge majorities of Americans support Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, public education, food assistance for the poor, etc.  Right-wingers don't support these things, which means that so long as they live in a democracy in which the electorate is well-informed, they will not get their way.  But if the public is terrorized by the specter of economic apocalypse that can only be averted by slashing spending (so long as it's not military spending, or tax breaks for corporations and wealthy people) right away, then maybe they'll go along with - and even actively demand - cuts to social programs.

And so, actual support for poor and working people is withheld or even withdrawn (e.g. food stamps).  Real people are consigned to suffer real distress and deprivation, so that society can defend itself against the great abstract threat of the debt/deficit bogeyman.

There is something horrible about our ability to overlook the actual pain and suffering of others, and sometimes even knowingly to aggravate it, because we are so terrorized by the fearful figments that trouble our imaginations.  Horrible, and sad, and all too human - our own fears are far more real to us than the pain of others.   This is a common, if deplorable, human weakness.  Locating and exploiting this weakness is not a very difficult business, alas, and many have made not just a practice but a veritable art of doing just that.  Anyone who does so, especially for money or for power, is most certainly not one of the good guys.