Who will shoulder social responsibility over the next
four years?
Ready or
not, 2017 could prove to be the year of unanticipated subsidiarity—the idea
that social needs should be addressed at the lowest level of personal, civic,
or governmental authority capable of responding to them.
Though Trump
lost the national popular vote by nearly 3 million votes, Speaker of the House
Paul Ryan claims the election of Trump is a voter mandate to dismantle
federal-level social services that have served some of the nation’s poorest and
most vulnerable citizens. Ryan’s antipathy toward the Affordable Care Act,
shared by the Republican congressional majority, is well established, and
repealing the national healthcare program is already the Republicans’ top
priority. But Ryan’s desire to reform Medicaid and Medicare will surprise voters
who had come to accept these programs as imperfect but reliable safety nets.
In the past
Speaker Ryan has rhetorically deployed the Catholic social teaching of
subsidiarity in order to justify targeting federal programs such as Medicaid
and Medicare. The spectacle of the next four years may show the federal
government’s retreat from a variety of social and civic challenges that had
previously benefited from federal aid.
Expect
pullbacks not only in healthcare but in financial and banking industry
oversight, efforts to mitigate climate change, and the enforcement of labor and
clean air and water standards. How should Catholics respond? State and local
governments will need to step up and fill the regulatory or social voids that
will open up as the federal government recedes.
The church
may need to take a more activist role. U.S. Catholic bishops may applaud
alterations to the Affordable Care Act that liberate Catholic and other faith
institutions from a problematic contraception mandate, but they will surely continue
to make a moral argument for universal healthcare as a human right and will
certainly butt heads with the incoming administration over the treatment of
immigrants in the United States.
Frustrated
by years of inaction on the federal minimum wage, frozen since 2009 at a
parsimonious $7.25 per hour, many state and local governments have already
begun to set their own wage standards. In 2016, 25 states, cities, and counties
increased the base wage for 11.8 million workers, and in 2017 and 2018 new campaigns
seek to raise the minimum wage for 8 million more.
States can
set other labor standards to address the misadventures that may emerge at the
federal level in 2017. Likewise, states are already deploying policy reforms
meant to address global ecological concerns, especially climate change, as the
incoming administration appears certain to ignore or roll back previous
commitments. States may also begin experimenting with their own local versions
of a diminished or defeated Obamacare.
How
successfully state and local agencies respond to the abdication of
responsibility at the federal level, however, will depend on how sincere
purported fans of subsidiarity, such as Speaker Ryan, actually are. If local
agencies are going to tackle the social problems of our times from the street
level instead of waiting for a top-down assist from the federal level, they
will need the resources to do the job. Will the money from federal cutbacks be
“saved” in some manner to provide those resources? Unfortunately, if the past is
a prologue, federal “savings” will simply be diverted into more tax breaks for
an entrenched national elite or dissipated into an unreformed and insatiable
Pentagon.
The flip side of subsidiarity suggests larger civic or
governmental actors have a moral obligation to intercede when a social need
cannot be addressed at a lower level. If Congress and the Trump administration
don’t acknowledge that moral claim, all the soaring rhetoric on subsidiarity
will be worth what it can buy at the local food pantry—nothing.
