How our politics treats the one in two Americans who are now poor will be 2012's ultimate test of our moral credibility.

There have been moments this year when the only really pressing question in our politics, it seemed, was precisely how mean we are planning to be to one another. We have dozens of excuses for this. The economy is bad, so somebody out there is Stealing Our Money. Energy prices are skyrocketing, so we could care less what happens either to the caribou in Alaska, or to our fellow citizens and their drinking water in places like Nebraska, Pennsylvania, or New York. Some people are in the streets making noise with their earrings and drum circles, so set the cops on them. Pepper spray was the response of choice in too many of our political disputes in 2011. People on unemployment are lazy and should be made to take drug tests. Women should bear the children of their rapists. (And a single muted huzzah to Rick Perry for declining to accept the always-fraudulent "except in cases of rape and incest" dodge.) Pharmacists and hospitals who have religious objections to dispensing contraceptives should be allowed to tell patients to take a hike to the more heathen precincts of our broken-ass health-care system, which an entire political party is dedicated to maintaining against the first halting attempts to reform it. It is Somebody Else's fault. It is always Somebody Else's fault.

The end of 2011 is a time of breathless anxiety. The economy is still incredibly fragile. Lives are being broken on the wheel in a hundred different ways, not all of them unfamiliar. The lessons learned from the 2008 financial debacle are all the wrong ones. Three years later, we have some pale reforms in place, and the people who turned the international economy into a two-bit poker room in the Nevada desert are still acting as though they've had Jacob Marley's chains draped on their shoulders. The political energy of the moment is powerful, but diffuse and unpredictable. This much is clear: The things that appeal to us to act as a unified political commonwealth for the benefit of our fellow citizens are as far out of fashion as they have been since the days of the robber barons and the cotton kings. What are we being asked to unite behind? Austerity. Sacrifice for thee, but not for them. A crippled middle class is being asked, quite seriously, to cripple itself further, and being told that this is all in the national interest. Our great national purpose is being defined, a little at a time, as giving up that which makes life merely economically tolerable for millions of our fellow Americans as a blood offering to The Goddamn Deficit, which has been transformed quite deliberately into an effective antidote to any kind of optimism. How dare all those families struggling to get by on Supplemental Security Income place all that debt on my grandchildren? Nothing has done more to reinforce the narrative of government's being an illegitimate vehicle through which to pursue simple economic justice than the notion that trying to achieve it in the present is a criminal betrayal of a golden future that — cruelest of all jokes — is being made impossible by the policies being advocated today.

And this has not been strictly a partisan project, either, although watching the various Republicans traipsing around Iowa trying to demonstrate how absolutely tough they'll be against the powerless is a rather vivid demonstration of the phenomenon. In their annual list of the nation's most overlooked stories, the editors of The New Republic shrewdly dug up a column by Walter Shapiro in which Shapiro pointed out that President Obama's fireside chat on the economy back on July 25 marked a turning point in our national conversation about what was done to our economy over the previous decade. The speech was a dead-assed appeal for a "balanced" approach to reducing the deficit:

Now, I realize that a lot of the new members of Congress and I don't see eye-to-eye on many issues. But we were each elected by some of the same Americans for some of the same reasons. Yes, many want government to start living within its means. And many are fed up with a system in which the deck seems stacked against middle-class Americans in favor of the wealthiest few. But do you know what people are fed up with most of all? They're fed up with a town where compromise has become a dirty word. They work all day long, many of them scraping by, just to put food on the table. And when these Americans come home at night, bone-tired, and turn on the news, all they see is the same partisan three-ring circus here in Washington. They see leaders who can't seem to come together and do what it takes to make life just a little bit better for ordinary Americans. They're offended by that. And they should be. 

There is so much wrong with that. The tired "government should live within its means" trope, as though John Maynard Keynes had died as a child. The deflection of perfectly legitimate, class-based anger at the thieves and sharpers who stole the national wealth into a mushy criticism of generalized government dysfunction. What's the takeaway here? That people can't imagine government making their personal economies better, but are ready at all times to believe that it can make their personal economies worse? Ronald Reagan couldn't have said it better. Walter Shapiro is right: This was a moment, and the president's response to it was positively tone-deaf. Yes, I know, you campaign in poetry and you govern in prose. But there are all kinds of prose. A feed catalogue is prose, but so is Moby-Dick. Calvin Coolidge spoke in prose, but so did FDR. And, of course, we must never make the perfect the enemy of the good. But you know what else is the enemy of good? Timidity is the enemy of the good. Cruelty is the enemy of the good, and so are selfishness, bigotry, and ignorance. Why perfection is the only enemy of the good that ever seems worth fighting is a good question with which to launch the new year.

It is a dead-level time for us as a people. There are now 146 million Americans who are ranked as "low-income" or "poor." Somebody really should do something about that. How we treat them in our politics is going to be the ultimate test of our moral credibility as a nation. Do we treat this situation as the national disgrace that it is, and commit ourselves as a nation to eliminating it? Or do we turn away from them, blame them for the malaise we feel in our lives, and drink deeply again from the supply-side, trickle-down snake oil? Do we look at the president — a Democratic president — and scream that this is no longer tolerable to us as a people? Or do we nod sagely and deplore the lack of civility and bipartisan cooperation in our government and hope that cooler heads will prevail, that the great national purpose of our age is to deprive ourselves further of what was supposed to be the promise of the country in the vague and futile hope that somehow, somewhere, things will get better down the line? 

The moral act is to scream.

(Photo Illustrations via Pepper Spraying Cop)