THE ERA OF 'BIG' GOVERNMENT A capitalist society depends on noncapitalist values in order to hold together and prosper If Newt Gingrich and his allies think America's problem is government, they misunderstand the past and misread the future
Jr, E J Dionne
THE ERA OF 'BIG' GOVERNMENT Why you'd miss it if it went E. J. Dionne, Jr. The new radicalism in American politics, exem- plified by the Republican Contract with America, means that the debate in...
...Industrialization did not have that same bracing effect in other places where it went forward rapidly, notably the Soviet Union, largely because the political conditions were different...
...Even the most extraordinary breakthroughs in technology and the most ingenious applications of the Internet will not save us from social breakdown, crime, or injustice...
...They see enormous potential in technological change and the global economic revolution, but also know that both carry high costs, challenge old values, and threaten the living standards of many...
...At the end of the century, the central problem confronting the democracies is not excessive government or a lack of economic and technical inventiveness, but a decay in the sort of social and political inventiveness and organization that gave power to ordinary citizens, shaped the economy into an engine of mass prosperity, and strengthened democracy...
...Throughout this century American voters knew better...
...into "the decisive economic power on the planet, which is the most competitive nation, which is capable of leading the human race, and which has reestablished here at home a culture that works...
...They understood that a free-market economy could not function properly in the absence of rules, workers' rights, government spending on public goods, and continuing public investments to enhance the skills and opportunities of the workforce...
...They need to contest the negative definition of liberty as incomplete...
...But government can step in to strengthen civil society and protect it against the disruptions created by the normal workings of the economic market...
...but they also know that rising inequality can be dangerous for democracy...
...Politics has everything to do with building a more just, more civil, more open society...
...Drucker goes on to describe with great clarity the agricultural revolution, the declining role of agricultural employment, the rise of industrialism, and the emergence of the blue-collar worker, "the first lower class in history that could be organized and could stay organized...
...What has been called Third Wave conservatism posits that virtually all the constructive changes in the next era will take place in the private marketplace...
...This century, far from proving the futility of politics, is a history of the triumph of democratic politics...
...Yes, individuals need to be protected against omnipotent, abusive government...
...Moreover, Drucker's entirely accurate assertion about the effective organization of blue-collar workers is a statement about politics itself...
...The overriding need in the United States and throughout the democratic world is for a new engagement with democratic reform, the political engine that made the industrial era as successful as it was...
...Thus the basic inspiration behind the broad Progressive project remains relevant-a belief in the use of government to expand individual choice and protect communities, an effort to improve living standards across the society, and an understanding that a democratic society works best with a broad and thriving middle class...
...He speaks of urbanization and the fact that cities in this age, unlike cities in earlier ages, actually improve public health...
...Clinton's most obvious failure was personal...
...If in the name of "deregulation" the government weakens environmental protections, the new rules it creates will powerfully affect how individuals and companies treat the environment...
...And he did not succeed in nurturing a progressive wing within the business community that accepted the need for government action to solve problems that the free market neither would nor could solve on its own...
...In fact, it is like most conventional political movements, simply reshaping government to serve particular purposes and interests...
...Thus the new conservatism's emphasis on a battle between "big government" and "small government" is a misleading and false choice because it disguises what is at state: not merely the size of government but the direction of government policy-the incentives government will be offering and the values that will dominate policy making...
...It The new laissez faire is simply Gilded Age conservatism dressed up in the finery of a high-tech age...
...The truth is that almost none of the advances Drucker describes could have happened absent the victories of democracy and free government...
...But they also have a right to look to government to help in defending their autonomy and expanding the possibilities of self-reliance...
...These, he says, have had "the lasting, indeed the permanent, effect...
...The central political question is whether such a tradeoff can be managed, and how...
...Only politics, which is the art of how we organize ourselves, can even begin to take on such tasks...
...It was a personal failure that had repercussions across almost every area of policy...
...Nor do most Americans define the moral crisis simply in terms of the misbehavior of others and presume that more and better preaching will solve the problem...
...They would resolve the economic crisis by accelerating the economic transition...
...They cannot leave the definition of liberty to their conservative adversaries...
...Not since the industrial transition at the turn of the century and the mass dislocation of the Great Depression have Americans felt a greater desire for creative approaches to governing...
...A debate that might have been over how business and individuals might fairly share the obligation of providing help for the sick became instead a fight over government "compulsion," as if government itself had created the need for health insurance...
...The great flaw in the binary choice between government and the market is described brilliantly by the sociologist Alan Wolfe in his book Whose Keeper?: "The opposition between individual freedom and state authority that guides so much of contemporary political theory...
...The industrial age needed to be rescued from those who thought that technology on its own could save the human race...
...The demand for a new Progressive departure will not go away, and all these groups have an opportunity to define the project...
...The popular anger at government reflects not simply an impatience with bureaucrats but also a disappointment at government's failure to help citizens who are working their way through a difficult economic period...
...There is overwhelming distrust of government, but this does not translate into the overweening confidence in the corporate sector that so characterizes the new conservatism...
...if anything, rifts in his party seemed to widen...
...One can see in the responses to Pat Buchanan's nationalism and to Ross Perot's anti-Washington pronouncements the rumblings of an Anxious Middle prepared to be radicalized by economic frustrations, moral unease, and impatience with government's failures...
...Americans want some protection from both the government and the market to preserve space in which families, voluntary associations, churches, and the other institutions of civil society can thrive...
...Government should not weaken the bonds of civil society...
...This new conservatism harks back not to Ronald Reagan but to the Gilded Age of the 1890s...
...As David Broder has pointed out, one of the terrible ironies of the health-care battle is that the minority of employers who do not offer health insurance took control of the political debate from the vast majority of businesses that do...
...Their time has come again...
...The new conservatism speaks the language of a joyful anarchism...
...But politics and government do shape the conditions under which such acts of creativity are made easier or harder, more likely or less likely...
...Adam Smith certainly recognized this...
...Like most people facing comparable choices in other times, Americans would like to reap their gains from the new era and minimize the costs it will impose...
...Denying any link between economic developments and the country's moral state, they would leave the solution of the moral crisis to traditional institutions, limiting the government's charitable endeavors in the hope that this would revive religiously based programs for social and personal uplift...
...or discover a cure for cancer...
...That is because he takes democratic politics for granted...
...Even agreements promoting free trade are thousands of pages long, containing scores of new rules that reshape the economy...
...This was, he writes, primarily because the factory produced higher living standards, but also because of "new public health measures: purification of water, collection and treatment of wastes, quarantine against epidemics, inoculation against disease...
...Politics has everything to do with building a more just, more civil, more open society...
...In an otherwise brilliant dissection of the great economic and political transformations of our era, ("The Age of Social Transformation," Atlantic, November 1994) the social thinker Peter Drucker asserts flatly that "if this century proves one thing, it is the futility of politics...
...But most Americans don't believe that...
...By casting "government" and "the market" as the main mechanisms of social organization, the conventional political debate thus leaves out the most important institutions in people's lives-family, church, neighborhood, workplace organizations, and a variety of other voluntary institutions ranging from sports clubs and youth groups to privately organized child-care centers and the loose fellowships created at taverns like Cheers of television fame...
...If all personal ties between employer and employee are deemed to be "irrational" or "sentimental" when compared to the competitive needs of the marketplace, employers need not think at all about how work schedules might affect the ability of employees to rear their children or how cutbacks in medical coverage might affect their employees' lives...
...It's a confrontation between fundamentally different approaches to economic turbulence, moral uncertainty, and international disorder...
...Conservatives, both old and new, have done a good job of reminding us of the Progressives' sometimes excessive eagerness for replacing the mechanisms of private charity and communal responsibility-family, church, and mutual assistance societies-with the often clumsier mechanisms of government...
...All this would resolve the international crisis by transforming the United States, in Newt Gingrich's memorable phrase, E J. Dionne, Jr., is a columnist for the Washington Post...
...Yet precisely because Clinton was on the right track in the questions he asked and in some of the solutions he offered, many of the issues of the Clinton term will need revisiting-perhaps even by Clinton himself...
...This understanding was not confined to liberals or Democrats...
...It is not enough to preach virtue to a family that finds its living standard falling despite its own best efforts to work, save, invest, and care for its children...
...He did not encourage New and Old Democrats to work together...
...If the problem is cast this way, the purpose of Progressivism is not to use government to wreck the free market, but precisely the opposite: to create the social conditions in which the market can work well in its proper sphere...
...Trade agreements affect the lives and job prospects of millions...
...More recently, Francis Fukuyama has written of "the social virtues" behind "the creation of prosperity...
...The responsibility for this failure is widely shared...
...The central issue in American politics in 1996 and beyond is thus not whether new rules will be written but what those rules will be and the extent to which they will make it easier or harder for average Americans- and especially those in the Anxious Middle-to prosper in a new era...
...It is Newt Gingrich's genius to be the first major Republican politician to pose many of these questions explicitly...
...C]ivil society, not the individual, is the better alternative to government in modern society...
...We do have an economic game plan," said the House Republicans in their post-contract manifesto, Restoring the Dream, "and its central theme is to get bureaucratic government off of America's back and out of the way...
...But it would contest the effectiveness of the new conservative program supported by Kristol and his allies, arguing that liberty and virtue require not only freedom from government coercion, but also the active support of a government that understands both its obligations and its limits...
...If income from investments is treated more favorably for tax purposes than income from employment, the government is making a powerful statement about the relative importance of investment and labor...
...Progressives-liberals-thus need to embrace a politics of liberty and community...
...Its roots lie deeper, in a society built on purely individualistic and market values that steadily cut away the bonds of solidarity, morality, and trust...
...The new era, with the rise of the "knowledge worker," Drucker concludes, will demand "social and political innovations"-particularly in education, because the new period will put a premium on "the quality of knowledge and the productivity of knowledge...
...All are places where, as the theme song of "Cheers" tells us, everybody knows your name...
...If profit is all that matters, filmmakers or music producers will not think twice about filling the marketplace with products that foster amoral or dysfunctional values among the young...
...It was Dwight Eisenhower, after all, who sponsored the Interstate Highway System, one of the great public works in American history, and sponsored the first student loan program to help poor and middle-class Americans go to college...
...Now, politics lies discredited and with it the hope that democratic government can respond effectively to change...
...The new radicalism in American politics, exem- plified by the Republican Contract with America, means that the debate in 1996 and beyond is not simply a contest between political parties...
...Such a family surely deserves some support for its own efforts to expand its opportunities-and, at the least, some insurance against the worst economic catastrophes that might befall it...
...Alternatives to the new conservatism will thus arise simply because the voters will demand them...
...Reprinted by permission of Simon and Schuster...
...In casting ballots for Roosevelt and Truman, Kennedy and Johnson, these Americans sensed they were part of historic, and effective, political movement...
...Wolfe notes that while "believers in laissez faire complain that the state has grown at the expense of individuals, and advocates of a stronger state sometimes bemoan individualism, the truth is that the decline of obligations once associated with civil society strengthens both individualism and governmental authority...
...But the game is not played out...
...The Progressives' goal is not to strengthen government for government's sake, but to use government where possible to strengthen the institutions of civil society...
...They experience the moral crisis in their own lives, in worries about whether their own work will be rewarded and how they will raise their children...
...Today," wrote Paul Starr in The American Prospect, "the forces of the nineteenth century are laying siege to the accomplishments of the twentieth century in the name of the twenty-first...
...Much of the American business community came to welcome government's role in preventing chaos in the marketplace and redressing social wrongs...
...It is what Daniel Bell has referred to as "the cultural contradictions of capitalism...
...That is the importance of realizing that the new laissez faire is simply Gilded Age conservatism dressed up in the finery of a high-tech age...
...Both doctrines cast all worker protections as "socialism" and any effort by government to write rational rules for a new style of competition as an attack on property rights...
...Repealing worker safety rules changes the incentives for employers who face enormous pressures from the marketplace to cut corners-even when they would prefer not to...
...His strategy would make technological change itself the priority and push government aside...
...And if government gives no protection for those many employers who do care about such things, it risks forcing them out of business as they are undercut by competitors for whom cost and price are the only factors in business decisions...
...This understanding of politics, drawn from America's Progressive tradition, defined the center of gravity in both parties...
...He did not convince the Left that he shared its goals of social justice and social equality...
...The logic of the new high-technology era demands not the dismantling of this tradition that is now under way in Congress, but its revival and renewal...
...Now the information age must also be saved from the cyberutopians...
...that none of the wings of the potential Progressive alliance fully trusted him...
...The central irony of our time that so many of the new conservatives wish to avoid is this: A capitalist society depends on noncapitalist values in order to hold together and prosper...
...What conservatives, especially the new conservatives, refuse to recognize is the extent to which these organizations are effective precisely because they do not operate according to the logic of free markets, but according to an older moral logic that predated capitalism...
...was accepted also by most Republicans...
...1996 by E.J...
...Progressives do not seek absolute equality or anything like it...
...The new conservatives would resolve the country's political crisis by shrinking government...
...It encompasses "New Democrats" who said they would revitalize government, traditional liberals who claimed to speak for "average Americans," moderate Republicans who now face a choice of being isolated in their party or capitulating to its new disposition, and a Left that lost its way in the controversies surrounding multiculturalism and de-construction and gave up on democratic politics...
...Politics and government cannot raise children, write love songs, create computer languages, invent the technology after the microchip, or discover a cure for cancer...
...The twentieth century turned out for the better in significant part because ordinary people were able to use politics in free societies to do extraordinary things- first to organize themselves and then to demand and win improvements in their living standards, create opportunities for their children, and insist on a basic social equality that is the essence of democracy as a way of life...
...The new conservatism is premised on the idea that there is no tradeoff in the new era, that if only economic change goes forward unfettered, everyone will be better off...
...appropriate to their needs...
...It is visible in the political fatalism of millions of working Americans who once looked to Washington in their efforts to achieve self-sufficiency...
...What is so striking about Drucker's view is that his detailed and insightful analysis of developments in commerce, science, and society flies in the face of his insistence on "the futility of politics...
...The central evasion in the program of the new conservatism is its effort to deny that even the most conservative government will constantly be making rules-through tax laws, regulations, or trade agreements-and that these rules have consequences...
...He did not draw in moderate Republicans, many of whom still have impulses shaped by their party's progressive tradition...
...But politics and government do shape the conditions under which such acts of creativity are made easier or harder, more likely or less likely...
...He argues that the large changes of the twentieth century had nothing to do with the "headline-making political events" and everything to do with social and economic changes that operated "like ocean currents deep below the hurricane-tormented surface of the sea...
...The freedom accorded by democracy allowed the innovators to experiment, the scientists to discover, societies to create forms of organization Politics and government cannot raise children, write love songs...
...Indeed, it is just beginning...
...There is a final difficulty with the new conservatism that goes largely undiscussed: Its program has been tried before and found wanting...
...The tragedy of President Bill Clinton's term, especially his first two years, is that he raised many of the right issues without producing either the results he promised or a set of political alliances that could carry on a long-term project of social reconstruction...
...Those who rallied to Progressivism, the cause of those who believe that democratic government has the capacity to improve society, always understood this...
...Surely anyone who claims to believe in "family values" should want to relieve families of some of the pressures placed upon them by work and economic distress...
...American politics has been unsettled in recent years because most Americans sense that the country has not adapted well to these changes, and because they are ambivalent about them...
...Contemporary liberals have failed to meet this demand, and Americans have paid a high price for their loss of imagination...
...Following Wolfe, one can begin to see how the moral crisis Americans are experiencing grows not simply from the "countercultural" or "permissive" ideas that developed in the 1960s...
...If the old liberals seemed too eager to have the government usurp the authority of those institutions, the new conservatives appear blissfully unaware of how the economic marketplace can encroach on their prerogatives...
...Social protections, through government and private organizations, allowed prosperity to be shared under conditions of social peace...
...The new conservatism will fail not because it isn't bold- it is very bold to try to restore nineteenth-century doctrines- but because it seeks to define away almost all the problems that Americans want politicians to grapple with...
...The technologies of the information age will not on their own construct a successful society, any more than industrialism left to itself would have made the world better...
...A New Progressivism that would operate in accord with these principles would take seriously Republican strategist Bill Kristol's talk about "the politics of liberty and the sociology of virtue...
...This essay is adapted from They Only Look Dead, published this month...
...is a false opposition...
Vol. 123 • February 1996 • No. 4
