What the Memorial Day weekend debt ceiling deal teaches us about politics

By E.J. Dionne Jr.

This Memorial Day weekend, there is a strange disconnect in our country’s public life.

In Washington, negotiators scrambling to avoid a market calamity reached a debt ceiling deal that was more narrow than Republicans hoped and Democrats feared it would be. You might expect from this that our politics is primarily about taxes, spending and economics.

But on the 2024 Republican campaign trail, former president Donald Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis are skirmishing over who will be the dominant voice in opposition to “wokeness” and trans rights and who can keep the most books out of schools and libraries. Dollars and cents seem to be an afterthought.

In one sense, this is GOP politics as usual. Going back to Richard M. Nixon’s Southern strategy in 1968, the party has often played down its desire to cut popular government programs, preferring to emphasize (with perhaps more subtlety than Trump and DeSantis) cultural and racial issues that appeal to blue-collar White voters.

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The playbook is quite consistent: Harvest votes from less affluent social conservatives and pursue policies that benefit well-off economic conservatives.

This weekend is surprisingly instructive about how these two brands of politics overlap and reinforce each other. The divisions we see in the country now go back to Memorial Day’s origins in the aftermath of the Civil War.

At the time, the holiday — first held on May 5, 1868 — was called “Decoration Day” because it was an occasion to adorn the graves of fallen Union soldiers with flowers. It was initiated by the Grand Army of the Republic, the vast and politically influential organization of Union veterans at a time when North/South divisions were still raw and the two parties decidedly polarized. Republicans were for racial progress, pushing Reconstruction in the South to democratize the region and guarantee full political rights for Black Americans. Formerly enslaved people were winning elections and enacting more egalitarian policies. Democrats were the party of the Confederate South, reaction and outright racism.

As it happens, 1868 was also the year the 14th Amendment won ratification. It has received a lot of attention lately because of its section declaring that the validity of the U.S. debt “shall not be questioned.” But its core purpose was to guarantee equal rights for all Americans and citizenship for formerly enslaved individuals. Historian Eric Foner rightly called the Civil War amendments the nation’s “Second Founding.”

Why was that debt provision even in the 14th Amendment? As historian David K. Thomson recently wrote in The Post, honoring the debt accumulated during the Civil War was not just a money issue; it was also a moral and political issue, signaling support for “a central government that had not only survived, but also grown in scope.”

The “drastic expansion of U.S. debt,” Thomson added, “reflected democratic buy-in from millions of Americans in the Union cause, and ultimately a shift in war aims to emancipation of the enslaved.”

The arguments around the budget and the debt ceiling in 2023 reflect a similar interaction of fiscal issues and questions of social and political equality (with the two parties largely switching sides).

One of the thorniest issues in the negotiations between President Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) involved so-called work requirements for the recipients of various public benefits.

Because such requirements don’t get anyone a job and mostly create bureaucratic obstacles for working people entitled to benefits, Biden sought and won sharply narrower provisions affecting fewer programs and individuals while increasing help for veterans and the homeless. The work requirements shouldn’t have survived at all. The fact that McCarthy made them a bottom line speaks to the power of the signal they send about who is “worthy” of public help and who is not, with racial stereotypes lurking in the background.

“It is not a coincidence that the reaction to the civil rights movement featured new attacks on the role of government,” said my Brookings Institution colleague Vanessa Williamson, author of “Read My Lips: Why Americans Are Proud to Pay Taxes.” “The counterpoint to the ‘welfare queen,’ a term made popular by Ronald Reagan, was always the poor, hard-working taxpayer — and we can all hear that dog whistle. You see exactly the same kind of anti-tax rhetoric from the white supremacists who violently overthrew Reconstruction.”

At the same time, said Johns Hopkins political scientist Lilliana Mason, author of “Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity,” the rhetorical strategies of Trump and DeSantis move attention away from “broadly unpopular cuts” to “extremely popular programs.”

“The base is being told not to vote based on those policies,” she said in an interview, and to “pay attention only to this culture war, grievance politics stuff that they’re being thrown every day.” Under these circumstances, it’s easier to advance a general attack on government spending, thereby evading debate on the merits of particular government benefits and investments.

The good news about the debt ceiling deal is that the country will not default on its debt (avoiding a fight of this sort for the remainder of Biden’s presidency) and will escape the extreme cuts right-wing Republicans originally hoped for. This is balanced by the reality that divided control of Congress will foil social advances through 2024. As we join in honoring our country’s fallen heroes, we should ponder how far we are — as we were on the first Memorial Day — from the solidarity to which this worthy holiday calls us.