Charting America's Future

...First, to liberate those who hold property from the restraints imposed by a Federal government responding to the needs and demands of citizens seeking protection from the uncurbed power of the propertied...

...Congress is essentially conservative in still another way: It has extreme difficulty adjusting to changing times...

...The basic rationale for policy is taken for granted, goes unexamined, even as time and tide erode the original premises...

...Free the market forces from the shackles of the Federal bureaucracy...

...It thus becomes a sort of barrier between the railway corporations and the people and a sort of protection against hasty and crude legislation hostile to railroad interests...

...At all three of the prior turning points in our nation's history the outcome was to enlarge the role of Washington...

...Shortly the Republicans will be back as the voters toss convulsively from one party to another in search of surcease from their pain...

...For workers-the wage and salaried employees in urban and rural America-the class character of the New Deal was tangibly real...

...Action becomes automatic rather than analytic, rote replaces reason...

...they were also class struggles, fought with whatever economic or political weapons were at hand...

...Laissez Faire," is misleading...

...In 1901, Bankers' Magazine summed it all up forebodingly: "As the business of the country has learned the secret of combination, it is gradually subverting the power of the politician and rendering him subservient to its purpose...

...This series is being presented as a contribution to-or, if you will, an effort to stimulate-that discourse...

...The Constitution put an end to the loose life the separate states were living under the Articles of Confederation: "We, the people" decided to "form a more perfect union...

...This inherent inability of politicians to come up with ideologic breakthroughs applies with special force to the Democratic officeholders now in Washington...

...second, because what once passed for a "movement" has now become mere momentum...

...No one (not even Karl Marx) ever set forth the economic basis of politics more clearly than James Madison in his "Federalist Paper Number 10": "The most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property...

...They will no doubt then think of themselves as "radicals," by virtue of their critique not only of present conservatism but also of the New Deal and its derivatives...

...When that happens-as it should and will-the great debate of the '80s will raise issues and evoke voices that are more than an echo of past exchanges...

...The Republicans, under conservative creativity, are no longer the "me-too" party...

...The critique of capitalism was touched off by a Karl Marx, spinning his theories in the British Museum, or subsequently by an Edward Bellamy fabricating his Utopian fantasies...

...In short, at the opening of the '80s decade the conservatives are in the saddle...

...Power that was once sought as a means toward an end becomes an end in itself-indeed, the end...

...To survive, it falls back on habit, on winning the next election, on playing the power game with all its customary pandering to passing passions and preferences...

...The roots of the New Deal were in the socialist and reformist critiques of capitalism...

...Liberals will then have to address themselves seriously to the intellectual challenge of the conservatives...

...free John Q. Citizen from the tax collector...

...At the same time, we will be mindful that the debate involves human beings whose economic circumstance is the most enduring source of the factions-theologies, philosophies, schools of economics- that compete for the heads and hearts of the people...

...And so it went...

...As Sidney Fine put it in his classic Laissez Faire and the General Welfare State: The Hamilto-nian dictum "was the Federalist-Whig program in a nutshell: government aid to business, but no embarrassing government regulation...

...A revitalized liberalism has to examine these schools seriously-individually and collectively...

...The second was about slavery in the years preceding the Civil War...

...At some point the liberals will clear their throat...

...the liberals have not...

...The idea is to grow up by seeing the parent (New Deal liberalism) critically as well as lovingly...

...The conservatives have built up a bright new arsenal of ideas, programs and sellable slogans...

...Coal and iron owned a coterie from the Middle and Eastern seaport states...

...let all be "free to choose...

...There is much precedent for this format...

...Sitting in the seat of power too long puts callouses on the cranium...

...The first of these concerned the ratification of the Constitution of the United States, a highly sophisticated discourse enshrined in the Federalist Papers...

...Further, the older such a commission gets to be, the more inclined it will be found to take the business and railroad view of things...

...That essay was a major argument in the heated exchanges in New York State over ratifying the Constitution...

...To apply a similar scrutiny to a Kennedy or Mondale, a Tip O'Neill or Bill Bradley, may be more difficult-for fear that such criticism of a friend may be injurious in the next election...

...The part of wisdom is not to destroy the Commission but to utilize it...

...free the sovereign states from the dictates of Washington...

...the Democrats, under liberal lassitude, now sit in the Amen Corner like the budget and taxes while trying to deodorize their performance with a spray of partisan perfume...

...H^[ n the ensuing decades, the State granted monopolies, put public money into private ventures, erected tariff barriers, gave land to railroads, and issued injunctions against strikers at the behest of businessmen who treated public money and might as company adjuncts...

...Ideas to challenge conservative hegemony are not likely to issue, in the first instance, from officeholders...

...Finally, liberals must expose the class bias that prompts President Reagan to accept just about every one of these inherently contradictory policies and make them the basis of his program...

...Ironically, yet understandably, Madison did not address himself to the question of which economic classes were moved to compose the Constitution...

...If there be any truth in the remark, the crisis at which we are arrived may with propriety be regarded as the era in which that decision is to be made...

...Viewed in this tight, laissez faire is the fig leaf covering the welfare of an economic elite...

...The real question is-for whom...

...The Civil War had two distinct ideologic bases: For the moral minority, it was to abolish slavery...

...The third arose out of radical and reformist critiques of capitalism in the years before the New Deal...

...Yet behind the rhetoric about freedom lurks the ever-present reality of class interests...

...In most cases, they are none of these-at least, not consciously...

...the liberals repeat their old cliches or echo the conservative catch words...

...Recent reforms that were intended to update Congress, to make it more responsive to the challenges of our times have ironically done exactly the opposite...

...By and large, the former provided the intellectual rationale for the latter...

...It was an American version of the classic revolution of a rising bourgeoisie against a once regnant landed aristocracy...

...The liberals lack ideas and identity-but don't know it...

...President Ronald Reagan spelled out his "dream" to the National Conference of State Legislatures last July 30: "Together you and I will be going back and back and back, until we attain the flexibility that you need and deserve...

...When such an atrophied establishment is challenged by a new set of circumstances or a new complex of concepts, it is nonplussed, dumbfounded, frequently traumatized...

...it has been in the Congress, where Democrats have officially held control for nearly 50 years-except for passing interruptions in the years 1947-49, and 1953-55, and the current Democratic House and Republican Senate split...

...One senator, for instance, represented the Union Pacific Railway System, another the New York Central, still another the insurance interests of New York and New Jersey...

...The Abolitionist movement in the pre-Civil War period was almost exclusively manned and womanned by intellectuals like William Lloyd Garrison and Harriet Beecher Stowe...

...It must analyze the supply-side theories of economist Arthur Laffer and Congressman Jack Kemp, and then go beyond the abstractions to the realistic impact in the world of taxes and investments...

...Unabashedly, these "interests" used the government for their "welfare...

...Second, to use the fiscal and monetary powers of the government-its control over budgets, taxes and money supply-to redistribute income and wealth from the less to the most fortunate...

...In his sprightly book on How to Win Votes, former Tammany chief Edward M. Costikyan says: "If you take an unconventional position, you will need at least a year togetyourmessageacross...

...start in the present dialogue...

...In the debate of the '80s, the traditional agenda is reversed: The proposition is to diminish, rather than enlarge, the role of the Federal government in the economy, in guaranteeing basic rights, and in setting a national design and direction for the "sovereign" states...

...A landed interest, a manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest, a moneyed interest, with many lesser interests, grow up of necessity in civilized nations and divide them into different classes, actuated by different sentiments and views...

...The old loci of power-the strong Speaker, the domineering committee chairman, the seniority system-are now the lacunae of power...

...but practical politicians know that it may be beneficially stimulated by prudent aids and encouragements on the part of government...

...This understandable compulsion makes it hard, really impossible, for Congress to be the source of grand ideas that go beyond the confines of the district and the day...

...For the moment, the great debate is no debate: The conservatives talk and the liberals go "ahem, ahem, ahem...

...each ends by promising a better life for everyone...

...There are monetarists, supply-siders, budget-balancers and, alas, gold bugs...

...It was not until Charles Beard wrote his Economic Interpretation of the Constitution many generations later that historians officially came to look upon the Founding Fathers as mere mortals with their "distinct" interests...

...Most politicians, when thinking a year ahead, think about what their constituents have in their heads and not what ought to be in their heads...

...Italics mine...

...Even at the time of the Revolution and the writing of the Constitution, when this country was blessed with rare souls like Franklin, Jefferson, Adams, and Madison, who were able to play major roles in all three acts, the Founding Fathers leaned on the writings of a Locke, Rousseau, and Montesquieu...

...Once that happens, the great debate will be fruitfully under way-and will probably be one of the most sophisticated in our history...

...Especially in the House, members represent narrowly defined constituencies for brief periods of two years...

...This does not mean that they may not be institutionally based, but that their thought processes will have to go beyond the usual intellectual confinements of the discipline, department, dogma, school, party, or sect...

...It implies that liberals want an active and conservatives a passive condition in economic affairs...

...The New Deal further extended the power of the Federal government, reaching out into the economy to "promote the general welfare...

...Both the maximalists and the minimalists were roughly in agreement on what reforms should be instituted immediately, even though they disagreed on the ultimate design of a democracy in industry as well as in government...

...Here it is sufficient to note that in having the State steer the economy, the New Deal was continuing, rather than discontinuing, the pattern handed down in our republic from Alexander Hamilton with his Report on Manufactures to Herbert Hoover with his Reconstruction Finance Corporation...

...If one factor characterizes the present, it is the intimate interrelatedness of economics, politics and science, of man and the environment, and of the United States with the rest of the world...

...Despite the long and uninterrupted use of the Federal government to support the dominant classes in America, conservatives contend that political intervention in the economy started with Franklin D. Roosevelt...

...CHARTING AMERICA'S FUTURE 1. THE GREAT DEBATE It has been frequently remarked that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country by their conduct and example to decide the important question whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend, for their political constitutions, on accident and force...

...Indeed, the language of the Declaration of Independence- " all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights"-spurred the egalitarian spirit as it exploded in riots, rebellions and forgotten slave uprisings...

...The liberal thinkers will need one other qualification: the ability to be critical even when their own party-the Democrats-is in power...

...The regulation of these various and interfering interests forms the principal task of modern legislation, and involves the spirit of party and faction in the necessary and ordinary operations of the government...

...the postbellum amendments to the Constitution made the Federal goveminent the protector of equal rights for its citizens no matter the state in which they lived...

...They are valid or invalid as tested by facts and logic...

...it will bring on a clash of minds as crucial as any in our nation's history...

...for the mundane majority, it was to preserve the Union...

...Each begins with the need to control inflation...

...My next article will examine how the New Deal and its political progeny served-or failed to serve-a variety of conflicting interests...

...AAt least at the outset, therefore, the burden of the present debate will fall on intellectuals, preferably those whom political scientist Tom Cronin calls Act One types, seminal thinkers...

...and a wrong election of the part we shall act may in this view deserve to be considered as the general misfortune of mankind...

...Those who are creditors and those who are debtors fall under a like discrimination...

...The most far-sighted cosmopolite in Congress shrinks his cosmos to fit the provincial preferences of the "folks back home...

...The big confrontation in the Civil War was not between "those who hold and those who are without property," but between two propertied classes: Northern capitalists and Southern slaveholders...

...The new debate has its ideological formulations, too...

...the first had a long history running back to the controversy over slavery in the writing of both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution...

...But, they lack such a philosophy, first, because they never had one...

...In his Report of Manufactures, he declared: "In matters of industry, human enterpriseought, doubtless, to be left free in the main, not fettered by too much regulation...

...A fourth debate has now begun over whether to reverse the trend toward an expanded presence of the Federal government in the nation's affairs...

...What is more, the conservatives are free to blame the liberals for everything that has gone wrong in the world during that long "liberal hour" from Roosevelt to Reagan...

...If liberals are to offer an alternative to the lemming's way, then America's Left must liberate itself from past patterns, must think anew and afresh...

...The Constitution was produced in a time of turmoil...

...The liberals who are to play a seminal role, like their conservative counterparts, should be noninstitutional in their thinking...

...T he continuing presence of the party in Washington has not been in the White House, where five Democrats and four Republicans have resided since 1933...

...The academic who prefaces his comments by referring to himself as "an economist" or "a political scientist," or as anything less than a wide-lensed mind is not likely to be helpful...

...The younger generations that might be expected to refresh thought with fresh perspectives become an effete echo of their elders, drawn to politics less by ideas and ideologies than by the sweet smell of success, of rising to higher places by learning to imitate and ingratiate...

...For their ideas to come to fruition, of course, there will be a need for Act II types (inspiring and charismatic organizers) and Act III types (politicians and bureaucrats...

...A United States senator represented something more than a state, more than a region," he wrote...

...Yet practical people do not look beyond the hour, let alone beyond the horizion...

...Consequently, the question today- the topic of debate-should not be whether government shall intervene in the economy...

...In addition, it was a means of removing trade obstacles between the states, erecting barriers against foreign products and protecting the borders from enemies...

...This inability is not due to stupidity or a lack of concern on the part of individual Congressmen...

...Out of this chaos could issue order if the Democrats had an ideology, a body of coherent thought that could override the provincialism of the individual congressmen, battle the conservatism of the coalition, and mount an opposition to a Rightist (Republican) President...

...Recognition of this human dimension in the war of words will also reveal that while the debate getting under way is new-and will be fought with updated data, recently contrived syllogisms and freshly minted phrases-it is ancient: It is a modern version of the eternal struggle between those who have, those who have less, and those who have the least...

...It satisfies the popular clamor for a government supervision of railroads, at the same time that such supervision is almost entirely nominal...

...It won't do to call them reactionaries, Attila the Hun, racists, fascists, prostitutes with a PhD, or heartless bastards...

...third, because the Democrats have fallen victim to the fate that befalls all those who have been The Establishment for an extended period...

...The flaw arises from the nature of Congress, from the way it is elected...

...On the contrary, they should reacquaint themselves with the details of the years from 1933-81, view the period less nostalgically and more knowingly, discover the push and pull of Right and Left underneath the seemingly simple and smooth exterior of the era, and-above all-identify those problems that were simply ignored on the liberal agenda and have emerged to plague us today...

...Alexander Hamilton At three pivotal periods in the American republic there have been prolonged and profound debates on the future of the nation...

...To note the social basis and bias of ideologies does not, of course, deny the validity of ideas per se...

...This is not to suggest that liberals should turn their backs on history and ignore the experiences and lessons of the last half century...

...Of the 16 freshman Republicans elected to the Senate in 1980, everyone was appointed to a chairmanship...

...Because the legislators are so confined by space and time, they tend to think in immediate terms, certainly more so than Presidents...

...Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society...

...M? offers a collection of tightly reasoned and well stated theories and theorems, insights and information...

...Congress has been the conservative brake on White House liberals...

...They have both purpose and program-and they know it...

...the liberals are stuck with a warehouse of rusty old flintlocks that can no longer shoot because they have not been used for so long...

...This has inspired the popular illusion that the party of Roosevelt has had a steady source of liberal strength in the nation's legislative branch...

...They were ideological battles, waged with facts and logic and appeals to some higher virtue...

...That is not to say it is insensitive to shifting attitudes on the part of the voters...

...Historically, although the Democratic Party reigned in Congress starting in 1933, it did not rule...

...The colonies were established by governmental decrees that granted huge tracts of land to royal favorites who ruled their turf for theirown economic and political advantage...

...The Right is not a monolith...

...it dances quite readily to political mood music...

...To those who held "property," one of Madison's major classes, the Constitution was in considerable measure a way to establish social order-or, as the Preamble put it, to "insure domestic tranquility...

...Economic and political struggles that had been going on for decades in the colonies continued in the states after liberation from England...

...With minimum wage, Social Security and unemployment insurance laws, working people rightly felt that even if the "state is the Executive Committee of the ruling class," they did hold a few of the committee seats...

...And even Senators, who serve for six years, must think in brief spans if they are that one-third up for re-election every two years...

...The second argument grew primarily out of the exigencies of the moment...

...To the Founding Fathers, the class character of political "sentiments and views" was a given...

...The Civil War reaffirmed the supremacy of "The Union" by denying to the rebellious states the right to secede...

...Cotton had a half dozen senators...

...But it will take creative, informed, daring, and articulate minds to challenge current conservative concepts, to make a critical re-examination of the liberal litany, and to set forth lines of conduct for the future...

...The Wagner Act was hailed as the Magna Charta of labor...

...Occasionally the State stepped in ostensibly to protect the people, as it did when it passed a law setting up an Interstate Commerce Commission to regulate the rates railroads were charging for their services...

...In the next two decades-as in the compromising years between 1840-60-the White House could change party hands just about every four years while the nation stumbles steadily toward the "coming crisis...

...The conservatives have turned out a lexicon of phrases that has become the vulgate for economic and political discourse (supply side, Phillips Curve, Laf fer Curve, capital formation, productivity, incentives, balanced budget, money supply, deregulation...

...By such retrospection, liberals should develop the introspection needed for the maturity to cast aside the habits of an ideologic infancy...

...Put that way, the proposition helpfully recalls the eternal interplay between ideology and self-interest, between the conflict of concepts and the clash of classes, between "different sentiments" and the "various and unequal distribution of property," between social ideas and collective ids...

...Actually, quite the contrary is true, as every Democratic President, including Roosevelt, could testify...

...And if they were, cussing is no substitute for discussing...

...Throughout most of our history the State has played an active role on behalf of the propertied...

...To attack a Reagan and his advisers comes easily, almost knee jerk...

...A Democratic return to power will be almost as useless as it is inevitable if the Democrats offer nothing basically different from the Republicans...

...Businessmen protested this interference in the private sector, until President Grover Cleveland's attorney general, Richard Olney, told them to "cool it" with the following advice to a railroad president on how the regulatee could regulate the regulator: "The Commission as its functions have now been limited by the courts, is, or can be made, of great use to railroads...

...more jobs, more productivity, more income...

...In post constitutional America, Alexander Hamilton provided the prescription for businessmen to make practical use of State power...

...For the conservatives, " freedom" is the word...

...Each of the great debates in the past may be viewed in two ways...

...Hence, in subsequent installments of this series we will examine proposals and policies on their merit, lest what should be a high level discourse be debased into one gross ar-gumentum ad hominem...

...the liberals have to offer explanations and extenuating circumstances even for conservative "crimes" committed by Presidents (Democrat and Republican) and Congresses in the last half century...

...That (government is not] entirely controlled by these interests is due to the fact that business organization has not reached full perfection...

...A critique from the Left must diagnose the high interest rate policy of the Federal Reserve Board and of every President from Nixon to Reagan, as well as the more rigid monetarism of a Milton Friedman...

...Although commonly entrusted with the leadership of American liberalism, the Democratic Party-as a presence in the nation's capital-is deeply morassed in a conservatism arisen out of the party's evolution in the last half century...

...The likely billing, "Welfare State vs...

...The true powers were the partners in the conservative coalition of Republicans and Southern Democrats that dominated both houses, at least since 1938-with roots running all the way back to 1877...

...In this process of being "democratized," Congress has become paralyzed by internal disintegration, a pillar of inaction...

...Each little congressman dreams of the day he (or she) will have his very own subcommittee, and if these fiefdoms continue to proliferate as they have been of late, those dreams of private principalities may yet be realized...

...Although these different expressions of the conservative impulse are really not compatible, they do share two common conditions: The Reagan Administration seems to accept virtually all of them, and they suit the "sentiments and views" of the most propertied...

...But it does not have the capacity to see the big picture, to note subtle yet significant changes in the nation, or to institute actions that require understandings in depth and breadth...

...To be creative as well as critical, though, a revivified liberalism has to go beyond self-understanding and beyond a refutation of conservative error to propose its own program from now to the year 2000...

...it does and always has...

...Yet a consistent and continuing critique of friends as well as foes will be necessary to shape a program capable of carrying us viably into the next century...

...By 1896 William Allen White, a Midwest Republican, saw Congress as a conclave of business interests...

...The composition of the legislative branch is such that it inhibits creative thinking...

...It must address itself to the many myths surrounding budget deficits and deficit spending...

...They have been thinking critically of the period we live in...

...For that reason, the opening round in the current debate should be devoted to the proper framing of the proposition under discussion...

...They suffer from congenital myopia, a valuable and necessary trait for people whose success depends upon their ability to fasten their eyes firmly on the next inch of ground they are about to tread...

...It must recall the history of the gold standard to remind the nation of the repetitive disasters under that uptight and crisis-prone system...

...Such an implication prejudges the outcome of the dialogue by assuming an un-proven conclusion about the conservative stance-a conclusion that runs contrary to our nation's experience...

...Business, the states, the individual will be free to live a la laissez faire, that lotus-eating lifestyle summed up so neatly by the Beatles in their song, "Let It Be...

...The Act Oners in the most recent conservative restoration were pundits of the William F. Buckley variety, followed by a long string of Act II organizers of multiple committees, culminating with Ronald Reagan as the star of Act III...