David Foster Wallace on Civics

We hear a lot about taxes these days because we have a budget crisis in this country, a ballooning Federal deficit that will soon top $15 trillion. The government can choose to either raise taxes or cut spending, or do some combination thereof. Republicans appear united in their opposition to tax increases, while the Democrat-backed plan floated by President Obama calls for them.

A central plot feature of David Foster Wallace’s unfinished IRS novel, The Pale King, takes a similar situation – a budget shortfall in the early 1980s brought on by President Reagan’s successful bid to lower taxes – and posits a fictional remedy. An obscure IRS memo, the Spackman Initiative, is rediscovered and its theory is implemented, solving the budget crisis and changing the basic operational approach of the IRS. Because a massive gap exists between the taxes that Americans owe the federal government and what the IRS is able to collect, the adoption of more stringent compliance standards (essentially more aggressive auditing practices) have increased tax revenue without any change to the tax code. What this means in the context of the book is that the IRS has recently seen its budget expanded, its regional offices deregulated, and its staff of rote examiners increased. In the process, the Service has moved away from its bureaucratic underpinnings, adopting a corporate philosophy in which profit is the only guiding principle. The changes at the IRS are a reflection of changes that have taken place in America, where corporate values are on the rise and civic responsibility is in decline.

It is on the subject of civics that we get the author’s most direct commentary in this protean, technocratic, occasionally stirring work. Wallace’s discussion of civics resonates in the context of today’s fractious national debate, where taxes are the touchstone. He uses an extended conversation in a stalled elevator between an examiner named Stuart Nichols and Regional Director DeWitt Glendenning to tease out the main point, that civics is dead. Modern-day Americans, emboldened by the anti-establishment zeal of the 60s, have (ironically) chosen to cede moral responsibility to the government in order to pursue a version of citizenship defined by individualism and personal freedom, ideals that have become little more than consumerist expressions and are marketed to the public by corporations, the American Dream meted out widget by widget. As Nichols notes ruefully, “‘Government’s only cultural role will be as the tyrannical parent we both hate and need.’”

Glendenning sees the IRS as executor of the ultimate civic responsibility. Accordingly, he resists the internal shift to a corporate approach to tax collection brought on by the Spackman Initiative. Wallace highlights this conflict in the book’s collection of notes and asides, painting Glendenning as “ineffectual – lost in a mist of civic idealism.” His resistance is futile, but Glendenning’s is still a voice of conscience:

None of this matters. And I’m not even really talking about what we do here except in the sense that it puts us in a position to see civic attitudes close up, since there’s nothing more concrete than tax payment, which after all is your money, whereas the obligations and projected returns on the payments are abstract, at the abstract level the whole nation and its government and the commonweal, so attitudes about paying taxes seem like one of the places where a man’s civic sense gets revealed in the starkest sorts of terms.

These words, though ostensibly uttered in the historical bubble of a nation on the cusp of Reaganomics, target the troubled state of American government in the 21st century. We can’t agree on taxes because we are at war with ourselves. Government has indeed become the tyrannical parent that we both hate and need. We hate pouring money down that bottomless maw, money for waste, money for pork, money for ineffectual wars and bloated bureaucracy, money for corporate bailouts and welfare handouts. Yet our expectations of government have never been higher. Unemployment is at its highest point in twenty years, and it is up to the government to create the jobs that will get us back on our feet, just as it’s the government’s responsibility to see to it that we can always be cared for when we’re sick, educated when we’re young, looked after when we’re old, protected when we’re threatened, pandered to when we feel like spending money, and coddled by the mantra that we remain “The Greatest Country On Earth.”

Everyone should know that a solution to our debt crisis that doesn’t involve tax increases and spending cuts - some Spackman-like miracle - is a pie in the sky. If we abdicate our civic responsibility in favor of some commodified ersatz of personal freedom, the vaunted American dream will be as well.