The Chump Effect
Progressive policies penalize those who play by the rules and shower benefits on those who don’t.
Via City Journal
Last January, a small but telling exchange took place at an Elizabeth Warren campaign event in Grimes, Iowa. At the time, Warren was attracting support from the Democratic Party’s left flank, with her bulging portfolio of progressive proposals. “Warren Has a Plan for That” read her campaign T-shirts. The biggest buzz surrounded her $1.25 trillion plan to pay off student-loan debt for most Americans.
A man approached Warren with a question.. “My daughter is getting out of school. I’ve saved all my money [so that] she doesn’t have any student loans. Am I going to get my money back?”
“Of course not,” Warren replied.
“So you’re going to pay for people who didn’t save any money, and those of us who did the right thing get screwed?”
A video of the exchange went viral. It summed up the frustration many feel over the way progressive policies so often benefit select groups, while subtly undermining others. Saving money to send your children to college used to be considered a hallmark of middle-class responsibility. By subsidizing people who run up large debts, Warren’s policy would penalize those who took that responsibility seriously. “You’re laughing at me,” the man said, when Warren seemed to wave off his concerns. “That’s exactly what you’re doing. We did the right thing and we get screwed.”
That father was expressing an emotion growing more common these days: he felt like a chump. Feeling like a chump doesn’t just mean being upset that your taxes are rising or annoyed that you’re missing out on some windfall. It’s more visceral than that. People feel like chumps when they believe that they’ve played a game by the rules, only to discover that the game is rigged. Not only are they losing, they realize, but their good sportsmanship is being exploited. The players flouting the rules are the ones who get the trophy. Like that Iowa dad, the chumps of modern America feel that the life choices they’re most proud of—working hard, taking care of their families, being good citizens—aren’t just undervalued, but scorned.
The word “chump” probably derives from an ancient Norse term for a stump or large chunk of wood. The modern word “blockhead” comes to mind, which—no coincidence—was Lucy’s favorite label for the too-trusting Charlie Brown in the Peanuts comic strip. Lucy never tired of snatching away the football; Charlie fell for it every time. We all know the feeling: when you’re inching forward in the freeway exit lane, say, and another driver flies past and swerves onto the ramp at the last second; when your child has to complete her college-entrance exams within a designated time period, but your neighbor’s child gets twice as long because of a suddenly diagnosed “learning disability”; when you pay extra to have your pet travel in the airplane’s cargo hold but the yipping poodle across the aisle, an “emotional-support animal,” gets to ride on its owner’s lap for free. You didn’t know that you could get an emotional-support card just by claiming an anxiety disorder and paying a fee to an online agency? What are you—a chump?
What makes these indignities so infuriating isn’t just that a few people game the system. It’s that their selfish gambits work only because the rest of us follow the rules. If every driver mobbed the freeway exit from the passing lanes, traffic would come to a halt. The student who fraudulently obtains extra test time gets a leg up only if most other students stick to the original time limit. And if every pet were designated an emotional-support animal, airplanes and restaurants would become full-time menageries. (Some airlines have begun tightening rules on support animals for just this reason.)
Thousands of norms, rules, and traditions make civilized life possible. Some, like paying taxes or not littering, are enshrined in law. Others are informal. Most of us take pride in adhering to basic standards of etiquette and fairness, to say nothing of following the law. And we have a deep emotional investment in having the people around us follow these norms as well. There’s a reason that we call selfish, disruptive, or criminal behavior “antisocial.” We know that if everyone stopped paying their taxes, or started running red lights and shoplifting, our society would be on its way to collapse.
It’s bad enough when some random jerk makes you feel like a chump; it’s much worse when government policies create entire classes of chumps. Warren fizzled as a presidential candidate, but her activist positions remain very much in play, promoted by far-left Democrats and party leaders. Many of these plans would penalize people who follow traditional norms and shower benefits on those who don’t. Joe Biden’s platform includes many similar proposals, including a scaled-down college-debt plan. And, across the country, progressive governors, mayors, and district attorneys are pushing local policies—including ultra-lenient treatment of lawbreakers—that turn responsible citizens into chumps, too. The economic and ideological disruptions brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests have only intensified this ongoing bifurcation of America. Call it the Chump Effect.
Chump-Effect policies take two main forms. The first involves bestowing some financial or other benefit on a favored group. Often, these groups are poor or considered victims of discrimination. To be clear, having a compassionate safety net for the poor does not, in itself, turn other people into chumps. The problem arises when antipoverty programs make it more attractive to stay on public assistance than to become self-reliant. When poorly structured incentives reward dependence and penalize work, strivers wonder: Why do I bother? Of course, not all benefit programs are aimed at the poor. Various farm subsidies cost U.S. taxpayers more than $20 billion a year. Most of that money goes to the largest and wealthiest producers. Meantime, most farmers—just like most businesspeople—somehow survive without tapping into a giant federal slush fund. Then there are various “pro-business” programs such as the Export Import Bank, which, as Veronique de Rugy of the Mercatus Center documents, inevitably favor huge corporations such as Boeing. Businesses without armies of lobbyists must fend for themselves. . . .
Everyone knows that resentment can be a powerful force in politics. But the money-pot game and similar experiments show just how primal the impulse to punish perceived free riders can be. Most forms of populism are based on the idea that some other group is getting an unfair leg up, while we are being taken advantage of. On the left, that sentiment leads to calls to punish “the 1 percent.” On the right, it can lead to distrust of “elites” and a backlash against immigration and free trade. Donald Trump’s aggrieved style of political speech ably mines this vein of discontent. So does Elizabeth Warren’s refrain that “the game is rigged.” Around the world, rising populist anger has erupted in the gilets jaunes protests in France and last year’s mass demonstrations in Chile. The initial targets of those protests seemed modest: in France, rural workers complained that climate policies unfairly burdened them with high fuel prices; in Chile, a small rise in transit fares was the ostensible spark. In both cases, though, the broader motivation was summed up in a graffito commonly scrawled on Santiago buildings: “Dignidad.”
Politicians ignore such primal forces at their peril. On the right, free-market advocates have long downplayed the social tensions caused by rising income inequality. Today, many young people, facing poor job prospects despite heavy education debts, see American society—and capitalism itself—as fundamentally unfair. That’s one reason the initial outrage over George Floyd’s death ballooned into a much broader protest movement. But policies promoted on the left can also lead to backlashes. Under Barack Obama, many heartland Americans believed that government policies were biased toward helping undocumented immigrants and educated elites, while undermining opportunities for the middle class. That frustration led to the Tea Party movement and, later, the stunning rise of Trump.
Today, progressives have cultural momentum. Ideas that would have seemed radical under Obama—defund the police, abolish ICE, ban fossil fuels—are now on the table. But that swing of the pendulum may be short-lived. The policies beloved by progressives are particularly prone to creating counterreactions among the citizens they turn into chumps. ... Full Article By James B. Meigs @ City Journal
