Cruikshank, “Oliver Twist”
Wednesday
Although Donald Trump, the big winner in last night’s GOP primaries, has been captivating certain audiences with his inflammatory rhetoric and his carny shtick, he really is no different than the other GOP candidates when it comes to his economic plans. Along with everyone else, he is calling for large tax cuts for the rich, to be paid for by unspecified cuts from he doesn’t say where. These are supposed to bring back the boom times.
Meanwhile states like Kansas, Louisiana and Wisconsin, which have tried out this approach, are currently slashing education budgets as they grapple with crippling debt. In Kansas it got so bad that the State Supreme Court had to step in to protect the schools, which in turn has led to impeachment talk. One columnist has invoked Oliver Twist to describe what is going on.
Republicans are miffed that the Supreme Court insists that, however intent they are on slashing taxes and budgets in their T-party tantrum, the state’s constitution requires them to fund public education, not starve it like Oliver Twist.
The governor and legislature do indeed sound like Dickens’s Board of Directors: squeeze the poor on the grounds that they are all freeloaders. Dickens’s sarcasm is scathing:
The members of this board were very sage, deep, philosophical men; and when they came to turn their attention to the workhouse, they found out at once, what ordinary folks would never have discovered—the poor people liked it! It was a regular place of public entertainment for the poorer classes; a tavern where there was nothing to pay; a public breakfast, dinner, tea, and supper all the year round; a brick and mortar elysium, where it was all play and no work. ‘Oho!’ said the board, looking very knowing; ‘we are the fellows to set this to rights; we’ll stop it all, in no time.’ So, they established the rule, that all poor people should have the alternative (for they would compel nobody, not they), of being starved by a gradual process in the house, or by a quick one out of it. With this view, they contracted with the water-works to lay on an unlimited supply of water; and with a corn-factor to supply periodically small quantities of oatmeal; and issued three meals of thin gruel a day, with an onion twice a week, and half a roll of Sundays. They made a great many other wise and humane regulations, having reference to the ladies, which it is not necessary to repeat; kindly undertook to divorce poor married people, in consequence of the great expense of a suit in Doctors’ Commons; and, instead of compelling a man to support his family, as they had theretofore done, took his family away from him, and made him a bachelor! There is no saying how many applicants for relief, under these last two heads, might have started up in all classes of society, if it had not been coupled with the workhouse; but the board were long-headed men, and had provided for this difficulty. The relief was inseparable from the workhouse and the gruel; and that frightened people.
For the first six months after Oliver Twist was removed, the system was in full operation. It was rather expensive at first, in consequence of the increase in the undertaker’s bill, and the necessity of taking in the clothes of all the paupers, which fluttered loosely on their wasted, shrunken forms, after a week or two’s gruel. But the number of workhouse inmates got thin as well as the paupers; and the board were in ecstasies.
Interestingly, the contempt that Dickens’s directors have for the poor resembles the contempt that some GOP elites have for Trump supporters. Here’s the conservative National Review’s Kevin Williamson unloading on the rural poor in a diatribe that could have been delivered by a Dickens plutocrat:
The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. Forget all your cheap theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap. Forget your sanctimony about struggling Rust Belt factory towns and your conspiracy theories about the wily Orientals stealing our jobs. … The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin. What they need isn’t analgesics, literal or political. They need real opportunity, which means that they need real change, which means that they need U-Haul.
Whew!
The alliance between Wall Street and poor white racists that has sustained the GOP in the past appears to be flying apart. Trump may not have much of an economic plan, but he at least is not threatening to dismantle our contemporary workhouses—which is to say, Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid. This may explain why he did so well in yesterday’s primaries.