George Bush and "The Vision Thing,"

...In late December, while the Congressional Joint Economic Committee and the American Economic Association held hearings on the economic implications of the cold war's end, no one in the administration had yet been assigned to focus on the topic...

...And still the party rejects the proposal, and those few who embrace it seem to have forgotten how to defend it...

...It's an issue Bush and Atwater are trying desperately to finesse—the zeal of the Reaganauts is a thing of the past now—though it's not clear or even likely they will succeed...

...The end of the cold war apparently requires the payment of reparations from the losers (or more precisely, from the victims...

...While the critics of Bush's post Tiananmen policy focused on the Chinese repression, Bush responded as if he himself were under attack (and persuaded Republican senators to sustain his veto of the student visa statute on the basis of loyalty only...

...The polls may show that the public wants more spending on education and the environment, or even that it supports funding through more progressive taxation...

...By the new measures of national might, where an educated workforce, a healthy industrial base, and a high level of social solidarity matter more than the Stealth bomber program, America is becoming Richard Nixon's "pitiful, helpless giant...

...As they enter the nineties, an entire generation of Democratic officials seems to have forgotten not only how to practice it, but even how to advocate it...

...As the Wall Street Journal documented, it would have been a blow to the finances of Kissinger & Associates —and until they took up their posts in the Bush administration, those Associates were Brent Scowcroft (now national security adviser) and Laurence Eagleburger (now Deputy Secretary of State...

...The second is rooted in the sense the administration conveys that it has few if any goals to pursue even if the funding were there...

...Problem is, Motorola makes its phones in Malaysia, and Zenith's televisions come from Mexico...

...The first is a recession, now rumored—by the Wall Street Journal, no less—to be lurking round the corner...

...The state has been smashed—not by antiwar activists but by antitax crusaders...

...The cold war's termination threatens the whole, vast military economy that has grown up over the past four decades and that offers Republican administrations reflationary tools, as it did Reagan in 1982-83 when the economy hit the skids...

...Against whom is SDI supposed to be targeted...

...The only stateside HDTV manufacturing takes place at the factories of Sony and Philips...

...The dismantling of Roe clearly has the effect of dismantling the Reagan majority, splitting vast numbers of younger Republicans from the ticket, as last November's elections demonstrated...

...140 • DISSENT...

...At their best, they proposed a little more aid to Eastern Europe, a little more funding for education and the environment, a halfway house measure on health insurance...

...But to throw a cool $100 billion, say, into social spending or rebuilding cities, or into education and the environment could raise real wages for the first time since the sixties, reduce disparities in wealth, enhance the status of women and minorities—in sum, make this a kinder and gentler nation...

...The Democratic congressional leadership, as of this writing, has been downright discouraging toward Daniel Patrick Moynihan's proposal to cut the Social Security tax...

...In Bush's first year, the Democrats mounted an even feebler resistance to inegalitarian and jingoistic policies than they had during the Reagan presidency— something one would have thought not just a political but an arithmetic impossibility...

...Over the long term, cutting the defense budget confronts Bush with a series of unpalatable choices...

...But Bush knows with existential certitude that he was not elected to preside over the dissolution of inequality in America...

...Finally, of course, direct U.S...

...the involvement of that population in politics is correspondingly lessened, that of the standing armies of wealth and power accentuated all the more...

...If he's ever confronted with that prospect, he gets on the phone, he grabs people, he goes on a trip...

...As Keynes pointed out in The Economic Consequences of the Peace, driving this kind of bargain only impoverishes nations we should be seeking to enrich and undermines democratic regimes we supposedly wish to stabilize...

...the Democrats are the party that, here and there, wants to do something, but that knows it can't be done...

...A third peril to Bush and the conservative order is the ending of the cold war...

...Bush is taking a more active role than Reagan in promoting American investment overseas...

...A good idea, of course, though one that has already been under negotiation for a time—Bush's proposal in his State of the Union address comes mostly as a PR ploy...

...In all fairness, Bush never claimed to take an activist view of government...

...Worse yet, it would have undermined the value of China hand Bush's contacts and resume...

...The effect has been to leave virtually without credit a number of major nations—Argentina, Brazil, Chile— that are making a difficult transition back to democracy...

...Democrats were at their worst precisely on those fairness issues that have historically been at the core of the party's identity...

...In March of 1989, the Republican Congressional leadership repaired to Williamsburg, Va...

...On another trade front, Commerce Secretary Robert Mosbacher and trade negotiator Carla Anderson Hills spent much of 1989 persuading Japan to open its markets to Motorola's cellular phones and promoting Zenith's High Density Televisions (HDTV), while discouraging our HDTV competition, Sony and the Dutch-controlled Philips corporation...

...But this is a precept that American fiscal policy seems perversely intended to dispel...

...Last summer, obliged to find some role for Dan Quayle, the administration sent its blunderkind off to the third world with the goal of engendering American factories abroad...

...It's an intimidating charge for an administration whose one contribution to political discourse is the notion that history is over...

...The Medellin Cartel...

...The Chinese uprising and subsequent crackdown confronted Bush with a choice between democratic values and personal ties...

...It is Prague, Bucharest, and Moscow that rivet our attention...

...Three-fourths of American taxpayers —middle class, working class, and poor, the Democratic coalition—pay more in Social Security taxes than they do in income taxes...

...The Democrats suffer from a deeper corruption, though, than that which comes from contributions...

...institutions—have been scrambling to get out of all lending to countries considered to be heavily indebted...

...On Latin America, Secretary of the Treasury Nicholas Brady, Bush's closest friend, has enabled creditor banks to cease all further loans to the continent in exchange for a slight write-off of existing debt...

...Reducing the deficit sizably could plunge an already weak economy into a recession...

...Repudiating Deng would have called into question more than past policy...

...Hungary has similarly had to slash its services and raise its prices and rents...

...It is difficult to impute sinister intent to anyone whose speech is so often goofy...

...By his unending busyness, Bush suggests that beneath his fear of being labeled a wimp lurks a deeper hollowness, an uncertainty of identity to be overcome daily through the reassurances of constant recognition...

...In 1988, after all, Bush commended himself to the electorate (to the limited degree he did) through his experience rather than his program, much less any vision...

...The title has by all accounts given him new confidence, offered confirmation that he is doing something right...

...The United States, allied solely with Margaret Thatcher's Britain, is trying to funnel all Western loans into the private sector only, as if the Warsaw Pact nations had no infrastructure or public sector needs...

...But Moynihan's timing is off...

...By cutting the level of Social Security withholding tax for 111 million working Americans, the proposal would reduce the regressivity of a tax structure where Social Security taxes currently produce more revenue than income taxes...

...George Bush did not by himself hollow out the government...

...That is effectively the difference between the two parties in the age of George Bush: The Republicans are the party that doesn't want to do anything...

...Lee Atwater brings the Flem Snopes Code of Ethical Practices to the Republican National Committee—but these are merely other gestures for other audiences, nothing for which anyone could conceivably hold Bush accountable...

...Democracy and capitalism, George Bush asserted in his address to the UN, are indissolubly linked...

...That's what we're here to find out," Bush's Chief of Staff John Sununu reportedly stated...

...It is a quarter-century this year since the Great Society was proclaimed, a quarter-century since the Democrats practiced, however imperfectly, a politics of equity and opportunity...

...In a third instance, they seem inimical to defending living standards at home...

...The FMLN...

...Similar priorities inform administration fiscal policy toward Eastern Europe...

...for a weekend retreat with administration leaders to learn what agenda the White House really wanted...

...In 1989, the Democrats were beholden more to money and less to more popular constituencies than at any time since the late nineteenth century, possibly than at any time in their history...

...It was empty when he came to the White House, though his subsequent policies have ensured that it stay empty, ineffectual, symbolic only...

...He also exhibits an odd quality of dissociation that goes beyond the normal political bobbing and weaving: Dan Quayle delivers speeches to conservative audiences contradicting the administration's Soviet policy...

...We are much too preoccupied with the immediate year to think about five or ten years out," one official told the New York Times...

...So there is little wonder that the Bush administration's response to the revolutions sweeping the globe has gone well beyond prudence into procrastination and occasional irritation...

...The Democrats have no such excuse...

...Moynihan himself, for instance, dwells more on the misleading use of Social Security surpluses to meet Gramm-Rudman targets than on the equity issue...

...The first is fiscal: at Bush's insistence, we have refused to place enough funds into the public sector (armaments excepted) to address either the world's needs or our own...

...The Democrats—even the best of the Democrats, even Barney Frank in an utterly dispiriting symposium on the party's future in a recent Harper'sknow better...

...Emerging from the darkness of the Reagan years, the nation finds that the Democrats have effectively vanished...

...If we can't get behind an issue like this," Moynihan said recently of his own proposal, "I'm not sure who needs the Democratic party...

...For each superpower to keep 225,000 troops in central Europe is hardly an idea commensurate with the new possibilities for mutual reduction of arms...

...More immediately, the United States-dominated International Monetary Fund is imposing draconian terms on these states in exchange for loans: in the past few weeks, Poland has had to raise the price of bread by 38 percent, of coal by 600 percent as a condition for funding...

...and Soviet armies stationed in central Europe...

...We cannot offer significant aid to the fledgling democracies of Eastern Europe, but we can bag Noriega...

...Government without purpose, action without agenda, Skull without brain, Bones without flesh, George Bush rattles on...

...What do you think it ought to be...

...The network of services and opportunities that would have bound the party to earlier waves of immigrants has never been set in place...

...The second is the abortion issue, where momentum shifted to the prochoice side after the ruling of the Reaganized Court to chip away at Roe v. Wade...

...What language Bush uses remains a subject of ongoing fascination, though his inarticulateness may actually help him out a bit...

...His distinctive contribution to the time is his own lack of purpose and agenda...

...aid to the East is confined to the measly dribs of the Gramm-Rudman era...

...It was no contest...

...In 1988 Democratic members of Congress received $31.7 million from the PACs of corporations, trade, and financial associations, and a mere $24 million from unions...

...Bush's entire approach to life can be summarized in two words: Keep moving," a Bush intimate told the New York Times...

...If the Bush aid policy is dominated by banks, the Bush trade policy caters to American-based transnational corporations—or, more precisely, to their boardrooms...

...Swept along by the currents of history, the Bush administration has, however, proposed mutual cuts in U.S...

...The only discernible goal of the Bush administration, beyond reelection, is defensive:to hold most of the ground conservatives gained in the first years of the Reagan administration...

...And no one yet is willing to drop the necessary other shoe: to suggest an offsetting increase in progressive taxation...

...This man never wants to be alone...

...Statecraft has been reduced to symbols...

...There are two dimensions to the American absence...

...To cite just one example: since the passage in California of Proposition 13 in 1978, the Democratic majority on the board of the Los Angeles Unified School District, where the student population has increased by hundreds of thousands with the epochal immigration from Asia and Latin America, has been able to build a grand total of one new school...

...If you're so damned smart," the Times reports he jokingly tells his aides, "why are you doing what you're doing and I'm President of the United States...

...They failed to offer a serious counterproposal to the Savings and Loan bailout, to the "free trade" policies of domestic disinvestment...

...Bonn, Tokyo, and Brussels that we look to for serious response...

...To this end, the vice-president became the first high American official to lobby foreign governments (Indonesia's and Thailand's) on behalf of particular American companies (General Electric and Guardian Industries) — this from an administration that would never consider asking a General Electric, say, to keep open, let alone build, a factory here at home...

...The Bush administration identifies the national interest with an American transnational corporation's logo, its management, its shareholders —and not with American workers...

...The American Century has lurched to a halt, and George Bush pursues policies that have the effect of dissolving it in a torpor of inactivity...

...Administration policy becomes less personalized, more conventionally conservative, in questions of international economics...

...In an unseemly rush for the door," the Wall Street Journal recently reported, "banks — particularly the big U.S...

...The last thing he must have bargained on was having to reconceptualize the world, to jettison the strategies of decades, to think historically...

...The evisceration of government's interventionary SPRING • 1990 • 139 Comments and Opinions capacity has injected a futility, a purposelessness into politics that renders the Democrats unable to act on behalf of their broad constituencies...

...More than sixty House members crossed over to support Bush's capital gains giveaway...

...When not reeling from one ethics scandal to the next, the Democrats spent 1989 trapped within fiscal-political confines prescribed by the Bush White House...

...The diminution of the Soviet threat and the neutralization of Eastern Europe imperils the military economy, increasingly centered in Sunbelt regions of GOP strength...

...We cannot seriously combat crime, but we can lock up Willie Horton...

...His current polls notwithstanding, Bush remains vulnerable on three counts that resist symbolic solution...

...It is not just that the worldview that has sustained American conservatism for forty-five years is now outmoded, or even that specific weapons systems are without a strategic raison d'etre...

...Nothing better illustrates how postpopulist, how altogether denatured, the party has become than its failure to respond to the Moynihan plan...

...Washington, where government is less inclined to action than at any time since the 1920s, has virtually ceased to generate news of interest...

...In two instances, these policies seem inimical to a presumable major goal of our foreign policy, the care and cultivation of democratic regimes...

...Bush is not the master of symbols that Reagan was, but he dwells in the same hall of mirrors, where the business of government is gesture and polltaking...

...A Gallup Poll last year showed 82 percent of respondents favoring an income tax increase on those making over $80,000 yearly, but this is apparently not a sufficient majority to embolden a Democrat to speak on the subject...

...They cheered the Panama invasion...

...We cannot impede the dismantling of our industrial base or increase funding for research and development, but we can criminalize flag burning...

...One index of how thoroughly American politics has turned around on this issue is that Bush would likely recoil in horror at the SPRING • 1990 • 137 Comments and Opinions prospect of a Supreme Court seat falling open, say, in early 1992...

...His critics, Bush charged, were "using this fantastically, diabolically, anti-me language...

...138 • DISSENT Comments and Opinions It is, all in all, a chilly welcome for our democratic soulmates...

...Everything is spin...