The Reagan Revolution is nearly complete. All that remains to do is gut Social Security and then make a small change in US Constitution – just remove 'We the People' and add 'Hooray for Me and Screw You.'

It’s not as flippant an idea as you might think. Let me explain.

In a town just south of Boston, on the day after the 1980 American presidential election, my grandfather and I sat at the kitchen table eating breakfast. Sometime between buttering my toast and drinking my orange juice, I asked my grandfather to explain the political philosophy of president-elect Ronald Reagan.

'That’s easy,' he answered, 'Hooray for me, and screw you.'

I was relatively young at the time, and his comment struck me as terribly sharp. After all, Republicans or Democrats, we were all Americans, all committed to the fundamental principle of 'We the People.' Or so I thought at the time.

I figured my grandfather was disappointed that Jimmy Carter had lost, and that the election of Ronald Reagan meant the rise of 'trickle-down' economics ('Pissing down economics,' he later grumbled). And I knew, too, that my grandfather believed Ronald Reagan had betrayed his generation and a solemn social contract with Americans forged nearly forty years before by Franklin D. Roosevelt.

I wondered if my grandfather’s politics had just passed with the times. After all, his politics were shaped by historical experiences mostly forgotten by the post WWII generation. He came of age during the Depression, riding the rails in the early 1930s looking for work. Later, during WWII, he fought for real liberty and freedom, sailing with the Merchant Marine (he was 4-F because of his poor eyesight). He opposed McCarthyism in the 1950s, Vietnam and Nixon in the 1960s and 70s. And I still remember, in 1976, his deep felt hope for America in the honesty, decency, and humanism of Jimmy Carter.

Interestingly, my grandfather was not politically a Democrat. Rather his politics embraced something more basic: he simply cared about the American people – all of them. He believed deeply in the first words of the US Constitution: 'We the People.' But by 1980, politics reflected the ideas of a new generation. And my grandfather suddenly seemed old.

'Remember,' my grandfather often reminded me after 1980, 'you take care of your own.' It was a message that I never forgot. He was still fighting that fight, in the middle of Reagan’s Revolution, when he died in May of 1985.

Why share his story now? Well, after nearly twenty-five years, I find myself remembering my grandfather’s blunt assessment of Reagan’s politics as Reagan’s philosophical son, George W. Bush, begins his ideological attack on Social Security. I say 'ideological' because the Bush attack on Social Security is not just a 'think-outside-the-box' idea for protecting 'We the People.' It’s something far deeper and darker.

Already the Bush Administration has brought a WMD-like fervour to their 'concerns' about Social Security. The crisis in the program, they say, is large and looming, and the program’s collapse is imminent. And as with the Iraqi WMD public relations campaign, Americans are being inundated with facts and figures and dazzling statistics to prove that the Social Security system is fast going bust.

And surprisingly – or perhaps not so surprisingly – some prominent Democrats agree. Time Magazine columnist and former Clinton adviser Joe Klein, for one, thinks privatizing Social Security has merit. Like Bush, Klein sees a cataclysmic future for publicly funded Social Security. And also like Bush, he looks to the 'success' of the Chilean and Swedish privatized retirement programs as models for America to imitate. But Klein and others on the Democratic side who share the Bush vision about Social Security are missing the larger ideological attack under way.

By privatizing Social Security, what the Bush administration is proposing is nothing less than a revolutionary shift in the American commitment to 'We the People.' The proposed changes mean Americans will no longer be obliged to take care of their own: of their elderly, of their weak, of their down trodden.

For a Republican Party whose supporters include so many Christian fundamentalists, one wonders: where, in Bush's privatization plan, is the Christian ideal of being one’s brother’s keeper? The irony, of course, is that this is Christian ideal already informing the existing Social Security system introduced by Franklin D. Roosevelt: that working Americans invest their tax dollars to ensure the safe retirement of those who came before them, that each generation will care for the next.

In this final stage of the Reagan Revolution, 'We' becomes 'Me.' The 'Freedom' and 'Liberty' that President George W. Bush plans to export to the world are simply the new brand names for 21st century social Darwinism – a ruthless, extreme, acquisitive individualism.

Or better yet: Hooray for me, and screw you.



--Steven Laffoley is a writer living in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. You may e-mail him at