Why do people vote against their own interests? How can so many Americans be against health care? It’s like being against food, or houses. And what about this epidemic taxaphobia? Don’t people know that without taxes they’d be choking on pollution and shitting in outhouses?

I’ve been reflecting — no, anguishing — over these questions most of my adult life, but especially since last Tuesday. Chances are you’ve been doing the same.

So here’s a clue to the answers, which I found in the New York Times dining section: salt.

I read about a new shop in Manhattan that purveys 100 kinds of salt and 400 kinds of chocolate. You can have a sampler of the former — 50 varieties — for a mere $298. Chocolate bars run from $2 to $25.

Is salt the Next Big Thing? I wondered. Are Lilliputian cupcakes now passé? How about Barack Obama, or government investment to kickstart a recovery?

You’re still rooting for Obama? Still like the stimulus — even think it should have been bigger?

OMG. You are so 2008.

Even Obama, in his press conference the day after the elections, looked as if he was on to the next thing. The recovery hasn’t been fast enough, he said. His administration hadn’t created enough jobs. He welcomed “good ideas” from Republicans.

Of course, eating humble pie was part of the mandatory political theater. And — as the Timesaccurately put it — the president’s tone was “conciliatory but not contrite.” He didn’t roll over on the correctness of his policies (though reporters pressed him to do so) or promise to extend the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy (though many pundits predict he will). Obviously, Obama has not forgotten that that “good” Republican idea — tax cuts, tax cuts and more tax cuts — helped create the gargantuan deficit his opponents are now so breathless to reduce.

But most voters apparently have forgotten. Or maybe they can’t concentrate long enough to weigh the options. (Excuse me. My cell is vibrating. It’s a tweet from Sarah Palin!) They’re frustrated, Obama said. If you ask me, it’s more like pitching a tantrum.

Impatience was not born yesterday. It is an old American trait — one that struck Alexis de Tocqueville when he visited this continent in 1831. Presciently, de Tocqueville connected Americans’ desire for “physical gratification” with their chronic “restlessness” and “inconstancy” of action and thought — and their sadness. “It is strange to see with what feverish ardor the Americans pursue their own welfare,” he wrote, “and to watch the vague dread that constantly torments them lest they should not have chosen the shortest path which may lead to it.” He saw Americans lurching this way and that in search of the path and the pot of gold at its end.

Now, de Tocqueville did not condemn the material appetites that mobilized America’s infant capitalism. Indeed, he was the original neoliberal. He believed that free markets were the soil in which democracy grew, and political freedom was a prerequisite for economic health (he hadn’t traveled to communist-capitalist China). He wasn’t against pursuing personal fortunes. The danger, as he saw it, was in pursuing nothing but.

Selfish preoccupation imperiled the young democracy, he warned. While everyone is busy boosting the bottom line, a tyrant can easily come to power. The tyrant may bring about general prosperity, but only to solidify his power. Once the people glimpse wealth, they will want only to safeguard it. They will demand order above all. At that point, the tyrant “will find the road to every kind of usurpation open before him.” Next come corruption, political repression and the resurgence of an unaccountable aristocracy. Bye-bye, democracy; bye-bye general prosperity.

Individuals are not the only despots to be feared, said de Tocqueville: “When the bulk of the community [is] engrossed by private concerns, the smallest parties need not despair of getting the upper hand in public affairs.”

Are images coming to your mind? In the first scenario, do you see the smirking visage of Dick Cheney? In the second, do you hear a crowd of Teabaggers cheering Rand Paul?

Viewed under the Tocquevillian lens, our own newest “smallest party” looks even scarier, not only because of what its adherents intend but because of the unintended consequences of their politics. Tea Party members would sell the Washington Monument (or, as in Arizona’s case, the Statehouse; or California’s, the supreme courthouse) to shave a few bucks from their tax bills. They are focused, big time, on their personal fortunes.

But they aren’t threatening democracy by their apathy (if only they’d care a little less!). Rather, they’re also zealous for political power. So, with the Koch brothers in the engine room, they’re pushing the likes of Jim DeMint to the helm.

A glance at the South Carolina senator’s voting record reveals a man not quite as uncomfortable with big government as he claims. He’d prosecute more juvenile offenders, would let the CIA tap phones without a warrant, and has never met a military boondoggle he wouldn’t shovel money into. Nor is he exactly the working man’s friend. While voting no on raising the minimum wage to $7.25, he declined to nix tax subsidies to companies that move U.S. jobs offshore. While opposing extensions of unemployment insurance, he supported extensions of subsidies to oil and gas companies.

This “grassroots” movement (funded by billionaires, with an outreach committee staffed by Fox News) is electing its own tinhorn tyrants. Once in office, they will look out for their patrons, the unaccountable aristocracy — after Citizens United, less accountable than ever.

Then what will happen to “we the people”? To paraphrase Christine O’Donnell, “You’re telling me that ‘the people’ are in the Constitution?”

When my niece was a toddler, I once asked her if she wanted apple juice or orange juice. She looked at both bottles. Then she said, “I want the other one.”

Americans want the other one, the next one, the new one. They want it for themselves, and they want it now. It doesn’t matter if the other one is no better, or is even worse. In fact, for the people who got elected to government to dismantle government, worse is better.

America is rubbing salt in its wounds. It’s designer salt in the latest lovely colors and textures. But it is salt. And it will hurt, a lot and for a long time.

This piece originally ran in  Seven Days.

And then the host, who today is focusing on personal economies during the recession, turns to me: “Isn’t this all a blessing in disguise, Judith? Haven’t we lost our way, and aren’t we now discovering new, and better, values?” I’m getting such questions regularly these days; my 2006 book, “Not Buying It: My Year Without Shopping,” has unexpectedly made me an oracle.

Well, yes, sort of, I stammer. But, uh, actually, no. On one hand, who can argue that the grow-grow-growth consumer economy is outgrowing the limits not just of our bank accounts but also our finite Earth? Part of me is ecstatic to wave goodbye to the $20 martini and the 20,000-square-foot house.

And then there is the other hand. The downturn is giving us fresh excuses for moral flagellation, of ourselves and others. If yesterday’s White House proselytized shopping, today’s is shaming bankers for their greed.

The message: We sinned with profligacy, and now we repent in parsimony.

Thrift is the new abstinence.

Type “recession is good” into Google and you get more than 35 million hits. Some of these are from unreconstructed bulls, explaining how the downturn can help entrepreneurs, supermarkets, something called “cloud computing” — and, of course, thrift stores. Marketers are linking bad times with good selling. Trend hound Faith Popcorn — who could find consumers among the residents of a Darfurian refugee camp — identifies the next surefire ploy: empathy. She attributes Burger King’s recent gains to its “we-feel-your-pain” ads rather than to the desperation of laid-off workers driven to subsisting on French fries.

NPR’s Martin Caste notices another theme, “dignified deprivation.” He plays an Allstate insurance ad: “People are getting back to the basics — and the basics are good.”

The basics — unemployment, bankruptcy, foreclosure — are allegedly good for community (increased donations to soup kitchens, at least from those who aren’t eating at them); for family (playing Scrabble together aids both parent-child communication and spelling); for love (bonking is free; just forgo the platinum dildo); and good for health, thanks to more home cooking and less junk food consumption (except for McDonald’s).

A typical post from a personal-finance blogger at NorthernCheapskate.com sums it up: “There is potential for personal growth, innovation, and kindness that doesn’t always appear when times are good.” Caste calls it “the virtuous recession.”

The religious Web sites are salivating over the soul-saving opportunities opening up. “Our nation has become defined by a total lack of discipline or temperance. That is a spiritual problem, not a financial one,” preaches a Sheworships.com blogger. She happily predicts the return of modest fashion, premarital chastity, parental patience and preferences for G-rated movies. The hellfire and damnation faction is also finding great material, as it always does, in signs of moral, economic and environmental decline. “So what caused this recession?” thunders Kent Brandenburg at a Web site called What Is Truth. “Greed. What caused the Great Depression? Greed.”

“Of course, it’s very deep rooted,” he avers. “Man is depraved and greed is part of it.” There’s just one solution: Jesus Christ.

The cultural critic Ellen Willis called anti-consumerism “the Puritanism of the left.” If she were alive, she’d see that it is now the Puritanism of the right and the middle as well. The operative word, though, is “Puritanism.” Yes, Buddhists and Jews are seeking their own spiritual silver linings in the economy’s black clouds. But thrift is a Christian virtue: Temperance, prudence and self-denial are good for the soul.

Primitive societies didn’t have much use for saving. They hustled to get in food and fuel for the winter, then kicked back. If extra stuff was amassed, it was often for the express purpose of being squandered. Sacrifices, feasts, potlatches, bacchanalia — these rites might inspire the gods to send status, rain or military victory. But there was religious value simply in going over the top. If frugality was practical, excess was sacred.

The religious orgies of their mystics notwithstanding, early Christians got pretty exercised about excess. In 1571 Martin Luther put it in writing: his 95 Theses condemning the Catholic Church for feeding Mammon with the indulgence fees of the faithful. “Money,” he declared, “is the word of the Devil.”

A century later, English and American Puritans were flogging the anti-wealth doctrine. Debt was wicked, as was conspicuous consumption: “‘Tis a Sin … for a man to Spend more than he Gets,” said Cotton Mather. Profit was equally sinful: A Puritan could be jailed for charging the market price for his products. Still, the Puritans exalted labor, God’s punishment of Adam and Eve for seeking knowledge (and sexual pleasure). “Let your Business Engross most of your time,” wrote Mather in a treatise on Diligence. Mather prescribed diligence as a cure for masturbation, but also for something called “economic depression.”

If it was hard to distinguish pious industry from sinful profit-seeking, one thing was clear: Early-Christian thrift fought the need of capitalism to accumulate wealth. By the 17th century, a new Protestant ethic would solve the problem. Now a person could be both godly and rich; indeed the latter was proof of the former. Thrift resumed its Old English meaning: a thriving condition, a means to prosperity. In the mid-18th century, Ben Franklin was recommending thrift as “the way to wealth.”

Franklin was a secularist, prone to poking fun at religiosity, and his Poor Richard was an avatar of practical, if upright, self-interest. That hasn’t stopped anyone from mining the Almanacs for paeans to godly parsimony, however. Now pragmatic, now Dionysian, Americans always retain the Puritan gene.

That gene emerges even in today’s most pragmatic-seeming responses to Americans’ meager personal savings and high debt. A 2005 article in Education Policy Analysis Archives, proposing an “allowance and savings program” for poor students, begins with a moral assumption — the poor stay poor because they “make impulsive choices … driven by a tendency to overweight rewards and costs that are in close temporal or spatial proximity.” This infantile instant gratification seeking, the authors suggest, also explains teen pregnancy among the poor.

The program would teach what wealthier families pass on to their offspring: the value of “delayed gratification through the accumulation, savings, and investment of regular allowances.” And if the students learn thrift? They’ll “move from poverty to middle class status as adults.” With echoes of Victorian “child-saving” crusades, the article is titled “Child Savings Plans: Learning the Value of Self Control.”

“For a New Thrift: Confronting the Debt Culture” — a recent report from the politically diverse Commission on Thrift — blames debt not on personal failings but on the influence of “anti-thrift institutions,” such as payday lenders, predatory credit card issuers and state-funded lotteries. The report makes moral judgments only of institutional venality and dishonesty, and recommends policy, not personal, change.

Yet where it focuses on personal motivation, “New Thrift” becomes a Sunday school pamphlet. It proposes, for example, to “repurpose the lottery” to offer not just gambling tickets but also “savings tickets.” The lottery’s public-relations “wizards” could concoct “jazzy new promotions” and slogans like “Every ticket wins!”

Say the authors: “It ought to be an easy sell.”

Right. About as easy as abstinence-only education, and for the same reasons — or rather, the same faulty reasoning. Teens don’t have sex and babies just to gain status, love or welfare, as conservatives contend. They have sex because it feels good. Similarly, people buy lottery tickets not because they need money, even if they do. They enjoy the libidinal thrill of gambling. There is something sadly sober about a “savings ticket,” no matter how jazzy the promo. Couldn’t those wizards come up with a gamble that’s also a way to save? I’ve got it: the stock market!

From the 17th through the early 20th century, capitalism needed greed, and Christianity found ways to underwrite it. Late-20th-century consumer capitalism needed unending desire to keep the profits coming. Enter consumer credit and an ethos of gratification. Although that came mostly from secular sources, market-savvy evangelicals have proved enthusiastic boosters of consumerism, with their “gospels of wealth.” After Sept. 11, shopping became an act of patriotism, another religion. And now we are asked to keep the faith, spending to save the free market from free fall, and us with it.

The injunction to gratify our desires when we’re scared we can’t meet our needs is like telling a woman with advanced breast cancer to enjoy sex because it’s good for her marriage. In the 1930s, John Maynard Keynes coined an economic term for this recessionary quandary, in which the macro-economy needs consumers to spend confidently, even while self-interest might be better served by putting the pennies in the cookie jar. Keynes called it “the paradox of thrift.”

Add to this a moral paradox: We are damned morally if we don’t save and damned economically if we do.

So is thrift a countercultural message from a chorus of Christians, environmentalists and socialists — and bad for capitalism? Or is thrift, like the Protestant ethic, useful to the economy?

What’s bad for capitalism is surely good for contemporary Jeremiahs seeking evidence of man’s downfall — and thus for the wisdom of thrift. Here is Kent Brandenburg, naming the latest names in a catalog of history’s economic evildoers: “Greedy home ownership painted like Grant Wood’s American Gothic. Greedy mortgage lenders looking for a quick buck. Greedy illegal immigrants who think they’re entitled. And then the greedy politicians who overspent in the time of plenty, instead of creating budget surpluses for the time of leanness.”

But in inveighing against greedy immigrants and wasteful politicians, Brandenburg isn’t dissing the free market. No, he’s singing the hymn of Reaganist Christianity, which figures each man — or each family — an island, and the state, with its handouts of welfare or food stamps, an intruder in the moral justice that rewards the good with prosperity and the wicked with poverty. This is American self-reliance with a punitive face, wielding thrift as its one economic ameliorator: “Young man, work hard while you are Young; you’l Reap the effects of it when you are Old,” proclaimed Cotton Mather. And if you don’t work hard? Then you will reap the effects of that, too.

Thrift is not just a moral antidote to personal profligacy. It is a confederate to collective stinginess. Thrift is good for America’s free-market Puritan state.

I’m thrifty by upbringing and environmentalist principle and, and as a writer, by necessity. For decades I’ve dutifully put money into my IRA. This year, like everyone else, I lost half of it. Did thrift reward me? I cannot say it gave me much spiritually, unless you count a sense of security. And that turns out to have been false.

So I have reflected on what else I might have done with that money. I could have spent six months in Paris drinking wine and perfecting my French, financed a small movie, or bought oceanfront property in Nova Scotia. What effects would I have reaped from my profligacy? Knowledge, adventure, pleasure: riches perhaps exceeding those of a fully funded retirement account.

You can’t take it with you. That’s what St. Paul told Timothy before warning him that the love of money was the root of all evil: “For we brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out.” What lesson does the recession teach? Live now. Be merry. For tomorrow we — or the stock market bull — may die.

This piece originally ran on Feb. 25, 2009 in Salon.com.

Really, it’s fun to shop for holiday gifts. Also nice not to (especially if you’re expecting a pink slip or foreclosure notice). The Sunday Outlook section will — I think — have some funny tips.

The big question (not addressed in this piece) looms: now that Mom & Pop’s agenda is also Mother Earth’s (cut consumption), the grow-grow-grow economy is the odd one out. Something’s gotta give.

Read more

As always, the Reverend (a.k.a. performance artist Bill Talen) exorcised the demons from a member of the audience (a.k.a. “congregation”). Laying his hand on her head, he peeked into her sweater collar at the “Made in China” tag and was propelled backwards by the force of the Devil Consumerism exiting her body. The choir swayed. “Back away from Wal-Mart,” they sang, “Back away!” And “Are you my lover? Are you my logo?”

The faux-yet-real preacher danced and shouted his sermon, excoriating the evils of globalization, worker exploitation and the seduction of the Product while evangelizing the gospel of community, justice and peace. At the back of the hall, a table was piled with the gifts we’d been asked to bring “to give a stranger” — and “recreate the gift economy.”

All the sweat and swelling voices onstage, however, could barely draw an “Amen” from the crowd. They sat, like Lutherans in eastern South Dakota, nodding their heads, laughing, but barely moving. Then, to the tremolos of the keyboard and the hallelujahs of the choir, Billy “sainted” three organizers from Retail Action Project, or RAP, a campaign for fair wages and working conditions in the Lower East Side’s chain stores. The crowd rose to its feet and cheered. Not for nothing are the Reverend and his entourage invited to heat up rallies wherever unions and communities are being organized to hold back the big-box bulldozers.

This one break from quietude was a clue to Billy’s problem, though — that is, the problem of the anti-consumerist movement. RAP is a campaign to do something: organize workers and, that evening, gather the multitudes to march with them the following Sunday. The RAP folks were passionate, their cause righteous. It felt good to get behind them.

Anti-consumerism, by contrast, is a campaign to not do something — shop — something that, if we’re honest about it, feels pretty good, too. This inaction is particularly difficult at holiday time (unsurprisingly, it’s Billy’s busiest season), but not buying is close to impossible at any time of year. That’s what I discovered during the year my partner Paul and I bought nothing but “necessities” — food ingredients, Internet access, insulin for our diabetic cat. I wrote about the experience in my book Not Buying It: My Year Without Shopping.

No question, Paul and I reaped all the rewards of non-consuming — from hours of free, fluid time to weight lost and debts dissolved. To boot, we did our bit for the environment. Still, I learned, without the exchange of goods and services, civilizations would not exist. In a money economy, that exchange involves cash and plastic. So never mind procuring the calories to keep the body warm or the roof to keep it dry; without purchasing, you can’t have a cultural life, a social life, a political life, or even an identity, which is communicated by the clothes we wear, the movies we see, the furniture we put in our homes. If we’re all socially constructed, in capitalism we are commercially constructed.

The gift table at the Great Hall was a case in point. Only one item was homegrown: a dozen potatoes, the soil still on them, in a paper bag. Some gifts were recycled — a used “Doonesbury” book, a 2005 Labor History Month poster — but even these were once bought. Attracted by its newspaper wrapping, I picked up what turned out to be a box of TNT Pop-Its noisemakers, manufactured in You-Know-Where. Paul and I brought a pineapple. Nicely uncommercial? Well, the fruit was purchased at the supermarket, and no doubt grown in a pesticide-soaked field owned by a multinational and tended by underpaid workers.

The preacher and I have discussed this dilemma. (Full disclosure: We did a scene together for Morgan Spurlock’s upcoming documentary, Shopocalypse, and Bill enthusiastically reviewed Not Buying It.) We agreed that the best you can be about shopping is conscious and moderate: Buy local, buy union, buy green, and, when possible, recycle, repair, reuse, and resist the pitch.

Still, tongue in cheek or not (this ambiguity is part of Bill’s genius), the Church of Stop Shopping mobilizes not just desire for all that good stuff — community, etc. — but also guilt about our desire for the “bad” stuff. The preacher even describes the Product as evincing an erotic thrill in the consumer. Back away! sings the choir. The implication is, from sin.

So here’s where I part ways with the good Reverend. Especially this month, I say, forget sin. Yes, these are holy days — but they’re not days of atonement. I’m not advising anyone to purchase a $1500 flat-screen TV for every adult on the list, or for each kid a pile of plastic crap destined for the landfill. By all means, bake cookies for Aunt Sarah, knit a scarf for your girlfriend.

But holidays are feasts, and feasts are rituals of gluttony, which, last time I checked, was one of the Seven Deadlies. At Christmas, Chanukah or Kwanzaa, the thing to do is overdo it.

We eat fat. Christians gorge on buttery cookies and eggnog, ham and goose. Jews consume latkes, fritters and schnitzel, oily foods to commemorate the miracle of the long-burning oil in the victory of the Macca- bean fighters. Kwanzaa celebrants fry coconut-coated chicken and bake coconut cream pies. But the midwinter rites, in anticipation of the cold, dark days, are older than all that. They may not even be species-specific. Polar bears devour a blubbery walrus before crawling into hibernation.

Accordingly, every year, including our Year Without Shopping, Paul and I throw a massive Chanukah Latke Bash. We shop and clean for two days, rise at 6, fry 20 dozen potato pancakes, and scatter the table with bowls of sour cream and a small school of smoked fish — $15 per pound of fatty flesh and skinny bones from Russ & Daughters, New York’s “Louvre of Lox,” as the Times of London called it.

Our Bash is a ritual like those in the gift economies Reverend Billy wanted us to emulate at the Great Hall — societies where diplomacy is conducted and power established or overturned by the passing of symbolic objects from person to person and tribe to tribe. Gift rituals, like the Native American potlatch, are orgies of extravagance. Animal or human captives are sacrificed, gifts too numerous to count are spread before the guests; sometimes, to demonstrate the profligacy of the giver, they are smashed or burnt or thrown into the sea. By the time it’s all over, food, table, house or village may lie in ruins.

To the philosopher Georges Bataille, this devastation is not the unfortunate consequence of a celebration gone overboard, à la fraternity party. Devastation is the point. “It is not necessity but its contrary, ‘luxury,’ that presents living matter and mankind with their fundamental problems,” Bataille wrote in The Accursed Share. Classical economists are wrong, he argued, that consumption is a “productive expenditure” in service of a human drive toward accumulation. Quite the contrary, said Bataille: Consumption is, literally, about using up, compelled by the need to annihilate the excess energy that is around and in us, from the sun to the libido. No matter how materially poor a society, it is driven to “squander,” through gifts and feasts, sex, art and war.

The Latke Bash aspires to such grand-scale squandering. It is a single-minded event; meeting and greeting are secondary. Arriving around 4, our guests throw off their coats, move straight to the table, load their plates, and gorge until a stupor descends on the room.

Where getting and having are concerned, enough is significantly less than we, and Americans generally, think it is. But, as Blake wrote, “You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.” In giving and celebrating, too much is just enough.

This article originally appeared in Seven Days.