With Ryan’s Ascent, A Few Thoughts On ‘Entitlement’

People are saying that Mitt Romney’s selection of Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan as his running mate creates an opportunity to hold what Ryan likes to call an “adult conversation” about entitlement spending. In the present political climate, it would be heartening to have an adult conversation about anything. But bear in mind that “entitlement” doesn’t put all its cards on the table. Like a lot of effective political language, it enables you to slip from one idea to another without ever letting on that you’ve changed the subject.

“Entitlement” originally had two separate meanings, which entered the language along very different paths. One sense of the word was an obscure political legalism until the advent of the Great Society programs that some economists called “uncontrollables.” Technically, entitlements are just programs that provide benefits that aren’t subject to budgetary discretion. But the word also implied that the recipients had a moral right to the benefits. As LBJ said in justifying Medicare: “By God, you can’t treat Grandma this way. She’s entitled to it.”

The negative connotations of the word arose in another, very distant corner of the language, when psychologists began to use a different notion of entitlement as a diagnostic for narcissism. Both of those words entered everyday usage in the late 1970s, with a big boost from Christopher Lasch’s 1979 best-seller The Culture of Narcissism, an indictment of the pathological self-absorption of American life. By the early ’80s, you no longer had to preface “sense of entitlement” with “unwarranted” or “bloated.” That was implicit in the word “entitlement” itself, which had become the epithet of choice whenever you wanted to scold a group like the baby boomers for their superficiality and selfishness.