Infrastructure has another meaning, too. Cultural infrastructure, social infrastructure: these describe the institutions, customs, ways of communicating, expressions of caring, celebrations, ceremonies, and public spaces that enable people to feel seen and to know they are welcome in their own communities. Cultural infrastructure is the aggregate of innumerable public and private actions, of many threads weaving the social fabric we share. When it becomes badly frayed--when foreclosures, homelessness, long-term joblessness are epidemic, when countless families are forced to relocate to find work, when bleeding-edge gentrification become commonplace, when scapegoating rises and ordinary Americans are unable or unwilling to cross lines of color or class--when the social fabric is as shredded as it has become after decades of me-first corporate-driven politics, mending it is clearly a public sector responsibility. Who else's should it be?
Three-quarters of a century ago, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal drove public-sector interventions that helped to pull us out of the Great Depression. Roads and bridges, parks and ampitheatres were built, to be sure. But the largest single New Deal intervention was Federal One, comprising five massive cultural programs that put jobless Americans to work. They made plays that helped us face the issues we had to resolve and images that reminded people of a history of struggle and cooperation that built their communities. They created enterprises that brought exciting innovative design into the public sphere; taught children to make music so that access to beauty and meaning did not become an attribute of privilege, but was recognized as a human right; and preserved living history as a reservoir of resilience we could draw on to face the future.
FDR understood that shoring up physical infrastructure wouldn't save us without comparable investment in cultural infrastructure. People wouldn't have faith in the future, they wouldn't be willing to spend their hard-earned dollars, they wouldn't be aligned with national goals for recovery, unless they had meaningful, personal connections to our collective story. Unless they felt connected and saw their own actions as helping. Demonstrably, he was right.
Today, we need alignment with green energy goals that treat climate change seriously, that spur all of us to do our part in reversing decades of harm from fossil fuels and industrial wastes. That isn't going to happen unless people feel as well as think it is urgent and imperative, unless we tell the energy story right. Today, we need alignment with a vision of democracy that recognizes and includes every community member, balancing the vicious scapegoating of racial and sexual minorities that has lubricated the rise of the Tea Party right in recent years. Today, we need alignment with a vision of healing as a human right, extending decent care to every person in need; and with an understanding that meaningful work sustains individual, family, and community life. When we tell the story of job creation now, it has to be told right: as a way to put people to work, certainly, but equally to advance the public good at the same time, to repair our social fabric, and to anchor our commonwealth with equal opportunity and equal justice.
When President Obama talked to the nation on Thursday about job creation, he was careful to repeat every few minutes that none of the interventions he proposes is original. He was careful to give as much attention to the truly grotesque idea that new tax cuts are needed as to his advocacy of an extension of unemployment benefits and of tax credits for hiring the long-term unemployed. This is the fatal flaw of the president's proposal: he is so keen to satisfy his critics on the right that he has prioritized this type of pandering over truly meaningful job creation that speaks to both physical and cultural infrastructure. Many of the ideas in Mr. Obama's plan have promise: surely it will help to extend unemployment benefits and subsidize teaching and first-responder jobs. But not enough. I hope to be wrong, but it is very likely that big business will take advantage of these new concessions and rewards, as they have every prior initiative, without taking comparable steps in the public interest.
Any meaningful response to the economy and unemployment must include major investment in public-sector jobs. Attempting to stimulate private hiring can never be enough. For now, I'll give you a taste of what we could be doing, through two essays I wrote when President Obama was first elected. At the time, a raft of proposals for public-sector job creation were floating through the Zeitgeist, carried on a wave of optimism at the election of a president who then sounded like a worthy heir to the legacy of FDR. Even before Mr. Obama was inaugurated, for instance, I began to write a series of essays on public service jobs for artists, published on the (sadly now defunct) Community Arts Network. Check out "The New New Deal 2009: Public Service Jobs for Artists?" from December 2008 and "The New New Deal, Part 2 - A New WPA for Artists: How and Why," published a month later. In the second essay, I laid out a national program that could use $800 million to demonstrate what is possible when creative workers deploy their gifts in service of the public good. The program could be scaled up for optimal impact: multiply it by 100 and we've still spent less than a third of what the administration is proposing to invest in tax cuts alone.
This is a new world. We hear a lot these days about the information economy, the creative economy: people are recognizing that flexibility, improvisation, and innovation--the qualities that are core to artists' work--are the skills most essential to a sustainable future. In the next part of this essay, I will explore what full employment would look like if we faced the problem fearlessly, without tailoring solutions to the most obdurate critics' taste; if we invested our commonwealth in a truly creative economy, instead of war, punishment, and pollution.
A little inspiration from Alice Russell:
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
