Rhetoric of Retrenchment: The Discursive Construction of American Fiscal Crisis

In 2011, as the U.S. economy was showing signs of recovery from the financial crisis and recession, another sort of crisis took center stage in national politics. But the so-called fiscal crisis arose by design, a consequence of “planned disasters” fashioned by Congress to coerce its members into a bipartisan solution to what were said to be unsustainable budget deficits and public debt. Fiscal anxiety likewise penetrated public opinion, mainstream media, and policy think tanks. This paper explores the discursive construction of fiscal crisis in the post-recession United States and its historical precedents in the 1980s and 1990s. Building on work by Nina Bandelj, Wolfgang Streeck, Marion Fourcade, and others commenting on European austerity, I show how a coalition of conservative economic and political elites strategically linked deficits and debt to welfare state policies as opposed to tax increases. They accomplished this through a set of moralizing and catastrophizing frames, which took on a “common sense” character even among liberal elites. This paper contributes to the growing literature on the construction and institutionalization of economic knowledge in the public sphere, particularly on the moral and temporal justifications for welfare state retrenchment. Methodologically, the project combines computational text analysis with qualitative discourse and historical analysis, allowing the researcher to inductively uncover discursive frames as they originate and diffuse among actors and submit these frames to a contextualized reading. As for broader relevance, this paper offers a partial explanation for the weakened legitimacy of expansionary fiscal policy and welfare policies in American political culture in spite of slow and uneven recovery from the Great Recession.