The American Enterprise: What's Wrong With The...

What's Wrong With The...
By Joel Kotkin, James Payne, Glenn Loury

Liberalism’s current decline can be traced to the loss of three ingredients that have been critical to its previous ascendencies: a rising new constituency, a coherent ideology, and a powerful moral sense. Without these, liberalism has become little more than a collection of weakening interest groups that battle against modernity to protect their own parochial concerns.

At the local and national levels, the Democratic party consists primarily of what California state senator Tom Hayden calls "core tenants"—government contractors, trial lawyers, teachers, public employee unions, and so forth. These groups determine party policy, and then try to dress it up in some ersatz populist clothing. Dominated by those dependent on government, liberal Democrats have devolved into little more than the party of bureaucracy. Though today’s liberals occasionally favor deregulation or breaks for business, they haven’t been weaned of their fundamental desire to grow the payrolls and overall budget of government.

Allied with the public employees are advocacy groups seeking protection for their specific interests (like beneficiaries of affirmative action set asides), and groups who directly benefit from legislation, regulation, and litigation (like the trial lawyers). With close personal and ideological links to the media, this Democrats Inc. coalition can be highly effective. It is certainly capable of slowing and even reversing conservative activism, as Newt Gingrich is discovering.

But derailing someone else’s agenda is about all liberals can accomplish today. They are not able to create any real alternatives. Indeed, by linking themselves with the special interests outlined above, those who call themselves progressives have virtually guaranteed their alienation from the dynamic rising constituencies that could help bring them out of the cold.

For a stark portrait of this liberal impasse, see the largest and most important election to take place in the country since 1992: the 1994 California governor’s race. Californians have known for years that Pete Wilson is a remarkably flawed politician, with little personal appeal and few convictions. Yet Wilson, down in the polls by more than 20 points in the spring of 1994, eventually managed to bury his mediagenic Democratic opponent, Kathleen Brown, in a landslide.

The key to Brown’s loss lay in the contradictions of contemporary liberalism. Because she failed to resist the demands of the liberal "core tenants," Brown was unable to develop either a coherent ideology or a sense of moral purpose in her campaign. As a result, liberalism’s golden opportunity to take over the world’s eighth largest economy and the "big enchilada" of American politics dissipated into a humiliating defeat.

At first, Kathleen Brown seemed ready to run as a California progressive, eager to reform, streamline, and modernize government. With her lawyerly suits, pleasant personality, and aristocratic bearing, Brown projected cautious moderation to the middle-of-the-road suburban voters who make up the decisive constituency in most Californian (as well as national) elections. This "new constituency" is made up largely of workers in the emerging information-age industries, already highly developed in California and the northeast, but also evolving quickly in Texas, Utah, and a few other states. Its members are generally younger people who work in communications, business services, computers, entertainment, international trade, health care, and other growing fields.

These voters are far more typical of the Californian electorate than many might believe. Among California voters in 1994, 80 percent were white, roughly two out of every five made over $60,000 a year, 80 percent had some college education. Persons age 30 to 49 accounted for 45 percent of the ballots cast.

Few of these voters rely on government for their livelihood. Outside of the African-American community, less than one in six American professionals work for government. And few share the traditional union point of view. Among the young, the numbers are starkest of all: less than six percent of workers ages 18 to 24 are union members, compared to nearly twice that percentage ten years ago.

Initially, it appeared that Brown’s
Democratic campaign would appeal to voters such as these. In addition to the usual Hollywood backers, she sought out allies in the high-tech centers of Silicon Valley and Southern California. She spoke not so much of protecting the traditional Democratic economic interests of unions, government workers, and affirmative action contractors as of stimulating California’s burgeoning new economy.

Pete Wilson, like George Bush, was an inviting target for the New Democrat strategy. As governor, Wilson had presided over the state’s gloomy economic nose-dive in the early 1990s. His pessimism about California, which he once characterized as a "bad product," alienated many of the entrepreneurs who were already laying the groundwork for the state’s recovery. Even more disturbing to the state’s business leaders, Wilson had passed a huge tax increase early in his administration, while failing to provide critical regulatory reforms to stimulate business growth.

At the same time, thanks to Wilson’s ineffectual jousting with then-Assembly Speaker Willie Brown, the state budget raced upwards. By 1993, salaries for California government workers were 32 percent higher than those in the private sector. During a period when half a million private sector jobs disappeared under Wilson, the state payroll actually grew. Here was a classic issue Brown could have used to separate Wilson from a large bloc of moderate "new constituency" voters—the governor’s failure to streamline government and keep down taxes. That very strategy of "reinventing government" plus a "middle-class tax cut" had helped Clinton whip Bush in California two years earlier.

Yet once Brown had won the nomination, the "core tenants" began to impose conditions on her in exchange for campaign funding. As the service employees’ and teachers’ unions began to ante up, they also began to gain operational control over much of the campaign and party apparatus. When Stephen J. Smith, government relations manager for the California State Employees Association, was appointed director of the California Democratic Party’s 1994 "coordinated campaign," any thought of attacking Wilson for allowing the state government to bloat came to a sudden end. Instead the erstwhile New Democrat Brown began to run as the candidate of union angst. California, already entering a dramatic recovery, was depicted as "the worst economy in the nation," and "Grapes of Wrath" imagery, including blurry black-and-white photographs recalling 1930s destitution, filled Brown’s ads. As former Brown strategist Bill Bradley later admitted, it was an image that "doesn’t look like the California I live in."

Even when Brown talked about the "middle class," she no longer spoke to upwardly mobile, younger, educated workers, but almost exclusively to older, unionized workers at defense plants. Not surprisingly, Brown’s economic strategy focused on fanciful public-private "defense conversion" and "green" schemes favored by environmentalists, labor, some large corporations, and neo-socialist academics. As the economy improved throughout the campaign, Brown’s dark vision of California began to look more and more anachronistic.

Meanwhile, Pete Wilson, the ultimate negative campaigner, began to appear as the relative optimist. In the end, Wilson pummeled Brown, particularly among the new constituency—beating her by a remarkable 27 percentage points among voters making over $60,000 a year. He also beat her by some 12 points among those aged 30 to 49, and by better than ten points among college graduates. Wilson also managed to gain 40 percent—twice the percentage earned by Bush two years earlier—of prosperous but traditionally Democratic Jewish voters. Wilson further demonstrated his command of the new constituency by taking two key Democratic urban counties: Los Angeles and Santa Clara (home of Silicon Valley), both of which had gone heavily for Clinton in 1992. Meanwhile, Republican takeovers in suburban congressional districts near San Diego, the South Bay region of Los Angeles, the northern edge of the San Francisco Bay area, and fast-growing Fresno revealed a gop tide in regions where California’s emerging industries are flourishing.

The process that led to this sad state of affairs for liberalism began at the end of the New Deal, when modern liberalism was at the apex of its power. Prior to the New Deal, liberalism—whether expressed in Republican, Democratic, or various third-party efforts—spoke with a moral fervor in step with mainstream American political values. As far back as the time of Andrew Jackson in the first part of the nineteenth century, American progressives combined ideological clarity and moral intensity, directed to a rising constituency. In the evolving American economy of Jackson’s day, the new constituents were primarily western farmers and entrepreneurs, as well as urban mechanics and artisans. Ideologically, the Jacksonians presented a coherent nationalistic message that appealed to the emerging ethos of American democratic capitalism. The Jacksonians also reflected, rather than opposed, the "restless energy" of that period’s Protestant revival movement.

Likewise, the anti-slavery movement that achieved power under Lincoln based its war on slavery largely on Christian principles, and the abolitionist program of ending slavery and defeating rebellion created a clear, if divisive, message for taking control of the country. The Republicans also captured the energy of rising constituencies, notably yeoman farmers of the West and North, plus the emerging industrial and professional classes. The economic message of these groups managed to blend with the Union cause.

This same confluence of constituency, ideology, and moral power arose again with the turn-of-the-century Progressives. Like the Jacksonians, they identified with the broad middle classes, resisting the encroachments of large, depersonalized corporate monopolies. Their message of reform did not seek so much to expand government as to assure free and fair competition. Critically, the Progressives, like the abolitionists and Jacksonians before them, did not oppose the traditional, largely Protestant, moral ethos of America. Instead, the Progressives drew openly on allies within the churches, particularly reform-minded Protestants.

This variety of liberalism began to fade under the enormous shocks of the 1930s. The economic collapse of the Depression shattered liberalism’s traditional alliance with entrepreneurs. Writing in 1937, Roosevelt "brain truster" Thurman Arnold laid out the New Deal premise that we had passed beyond the era of "pioneer civilization" and its individualistic, capitalist way of life. The rise of big business, "industrial feudalism" as he called it, required a new, more assertive role for government. Equally important, liberalism began to separate from its traditional moral bearings during the New Deal. Under the New Dealers, the language of rights and obligations, of right and wrong, became gradually supplanted by the logic of scientism and social welfare. The "Protestant ethic," Vice President Henry Wallace observed, would now be replaced by a "social ethic."

As long as ordinary citizens felt somewhat threatened by big, industrial capitalism, the New Deal’s ideological agenda retained significant appeal and cogency. Large, growing groups in American society—blacks, trade unionists, urban ethnics, public-sector workers—all shared a common interest in the emerging welfare state. When World War II came along, followed by the Cold War, the need to coordinate industry with government added a moral cause and a practical rationale for a powerful central state.

By the late 1970s, though, New Deal liberalism began to unravel. The role of large corporations as job-providers began to fade, as smaller, nimbler organizations became a more important part of the economy. Very few of these smaller companies looked towards government assistance. Even fewer proved susceptible to union organizing. As such, these new firms and their workers became all but invisible to liberals—except as possible targets for increased regulation or unionization.

At the same time, the rational scientism of the New Deal became more aggressively secularist. Not only was the idea of separation of church and state pressed to extremes, but the very idea of religion as a positive force in society came under attack. Finally, narrow advocacy groups like feminists, homosexuals, and civil rights organizations gained increasing power within liberalism, and began to remake liberal Democratic politics in their own peculiar image. This almost guaranteed the marginalization of progressive politics.

In order to break out of their current dilemma, liberals in or out of the Democratic Party must begin to forge links to a rising new constituency. They must recover the sort of ideological integrity and moral fervor that drove progressive movements in the past. In the end, this will require breaking with the "core tenants" of today’s
Democratic party and seeking a broader bloc of potential voters.

In magazines such as In These Times and organizations like the Economic Policy Institute, many on the left side of liberalism call for a return to what might be called neo-New Deal politics. Rejecting the accommodationist tendencies of
Democratic moderates, they seek to promote class- and race-based political platforms that strongly support higher taxes, bigger and more intrusive government, racial preferences, and trade protectionism.

This program is the sum of the demands from minority warlords, government employees, and unions. As the recent battle over the federal budget has shown, these groups can still muster an impressive coalition capable of slowing any national movement to the right. But in the long run, their strategy cannot prevail. For one thing, it lacks any economic reality. With less than 20 percent of private-sector workers now in unions or employed in Fortune 500 firms, a politics that claims to protect people from big business has limited appeal.

And although today’s economy certainly has problems, these result more from global and technological forces than from anything that government could hope to control. The left-wing strategy also lacks any clear emergency, such as the Depression, World War II, the Cold War, or the civil rights movement, to provide a compelling rationale for a major expansion of government. Perhaps most importantly, the neo-New Dealers lack the kind of moral and ideological underpinnings that steadied earlier progressive movements. Indeed, today’s left-wing Demo-crats insist on carrying a bag of agenda items that alienate many potential supporters. Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and John Kennedy never had to sell such things as gay rights, racial quotas, and the banishment of religion from public life along with their economic agendas.

Ultimately, then, liberalism’s only hope lies in a radical break with the immediate past. Progressives must look, not back at the American economy of the 1930s, but to the industries that are creating jobs and opportunities for the current generation. As Bill Clinton proved in 1992, albeit dishonestly, many Americans are open to a progressive message that combines concern for the poor with a strong advocacy of limited, responsive, and efficient government. They are also likely to support liberals bearing banners against conservatives whose anti-government rhetoric belies their desire to go beyond moral suasion toward outright state regulation of personal lifestyles and morality.

A new liberalism must differentiate itself from conservative Republicanism by opposing special privileges for well-
connected corporations, advocating reduced tax burdens for the poor and working classes, supporting infrastructure expenditures, and proposing reasonable environmental protection. These sorts of positions can appeal to Americans broadly, in the best progressive tradition, and not simply as members of a particular ethnic tribe or interest group.

Finally, liberals need to regain the moral voice that, with the help of religion, drove successful progressive movements throughout our history. Instead of waging war on religious beliefs, liberals must learn again, in the manner of Martin Luther King, Jr. or the turn-of-the-century Progressives, to preach their message in a way that promotes, rather than expresses hostility to, mainstream values.

Only then, in sync with both the economic and moral temper of the times, can liberals find a positive, influential role in shaping 21st-century America.

Joel Kotkin is a senior fellow with the Pepperdine Institute for Public Policy and the Pacific Research Institute. He is a contributing writer to The New Democrat.

The modern megastate has stumbled into dramatic failures on numerous fronts: welfare, education, drug control, financial regulation, racial policy, and on and on. The right declares "I told you so" in response, while the left insists, "It isn’t so." Neither of these rejoinders, however, are majority positions. Today’s dominant perspective on government failure is a remarkable blend of criticism and endorsement.

For most voters, this takes the form of denouncing the state’s taxes and regulations while clamoring for its subsidies and protections. In the political class, it makes for leaders who play both sides of the ideological street, deploring big government even while they are making it bigger. What should we call these ambivalent citizens and ambidextrous politicians? Why "Ambies," of course, in recognition of their odd embrace of the aspirations of both Left and Right. This big, confusing, often confused, middle group dominates contemporary American politics, giving rise to the clashing rhetoric and contradictory policies that are its most striking characteristic.

A number of pundits and a few candidates, ranging from Bill Bradley to Colin Powell to Ross Perot, have stepped forward to give voice to this constituency, often presenting themselves as the "sensible" alternative. Their theme is that modern big government has failed us, even infuriated us, with its wasteful and counterproductive behavior...and that we must have more of it. Does this love/hate critique constitute a coherent intellectual position? Let’s have a look.

One Ambie article of faith is that the suffocating inefficiency of modern bureaucratic government can be overcome. In the Ambie political bible Reinventing Government, which quickly became the handbook of the Clinton administration, authors David Osborne and Ted Gaebler make just this case. "Our governments are in deep trouble today," they note, and afflicted by "staggering" waste. But government’s many failures up to this point constitute no reason for hesitation. "We believe deeply in government," they write. "We do not look at government as a necessary evil."

Of course a government bogged down in staggering waste will be hard for anyone to believe deeply in, so Osborne and Gaebler propose a remedy: All that is needed is sincere, energetic officials who "melt the fat." The book lists upbeat examples of government administrators who’ve reportedly done just that—doing away with regulations, saving money, getting the job done better and faster. The accounts seem suspiciously one-sided, presenting only the administrators’ claims of breakthroughs; but even if one assumes that these particular officials actually succeeded as professed, there is a larger problem that the authors miss.

There are, after all, thousands of governmental units in the United States—counties, school districts, federal agencies, and so forth—and reformers have been "tinkering under the hood" trying to improve them for over a century. (The United States Civil Service Commission, for example, was first set up in 1883.) At any one time, it is bound to be true that in a few units, perhaps even hundreds, an energetic administrator will have introduced certain above-average efficiencies. But whooping up a handful of showcase reforms avoids the main question: what has gone wrong in the other 200,000 or so cases? What is it about governmental units that makes rationalizing them a labor of Sisyphus?

Gaebler is proud that in Visalia, where he served as city manager, fiscal controls were loosened so that a subordinate official could write a check to buy a $400,000 swimming pool in one day, without council approval, thus beating out competitors for this bargain. But he never asks why such controls grew up in the first place.

Let’s review the political science. The analysis begins with the fact that government is a very special institution that gets its money not by voluntary exchange, and not by appealing to generosity, but through taxation: the forcible extraction of wealth. If this process is not to degenerate into a system of robbery or exploitation, as existed in the bad old days of tyrants and warlords, the people giving up the money must have the right to supervise its expenditure; that is, there should be no taxation without representation.

Red tape and the associated delays and inefficiencies connected with government are the result of trying to implement this doctrine, of trying to give citizens control of their government’s activities. Here’s how red tape grows: A free-spending administrator buys a swimming pool in haste that the city council doesn’t want, or perhaps one that leaks. Or he writes a $400,000 check to one of his buddies, or to himself. Out of such betrayals of the public trust come restrictions on government purchasing, procedures to keep these scandals from happening again.

To imply, as Osborne and Gaebler do, that mere crisper administration can sweep away all these restrictions and make life happy ever after is naive. Every day’s newspaper brings some fresh example of misspent tax money and outraged calls for "tighter controls." Take a look at the new batch of banking red tape caused by the s&l fiasco. Wasteful, deadening regulations are an unavoidable feature of government budgeting in any democracy. They will grow back as fast as anyone can prune them away, because we insist that the money taken from us be handled responsibly.

Osborne and Gaebler aren’t the only ones aiming to clip red tape. Another writer who has recently pursued the same theme to great acclaim is Philip K. Howard, whose book The Death of Common Sense appeared in 1994. Howard boils with anger at the modern regulatory state. He pungently reviews dozens of follies: the osha regulations which require a warning label on table salt; the fire regulations that prohibit children’s artwork from being displayed on schoolroom walls; the New York City elevator requirement that prevented Mother Teresa from opening a homeless shelter. He shows how government-imposed regulations have worsened the very problems they try to address. The welfare system, he claims, "perfectly combines the evils of inhumanity and ineffectiveness." Overall, says Howard, our government "crushes our goals and deadens our spirits."

Yet Howard combines this strident anti-government message with a wholesale embrace of modern statism. Everything government tries to do is necessary; anyone who thinks otherwise, he says in a scornful aside, is "dreaming of an agrarian republic." This declaration of fealty to the welfare state saved Howard from being dismissed as a no-account conservative ranting against government, and turned him instead into an Ambie prince, lionized by the media and invited by President Clinton to a photo-op.

Howard’s commitment to big government is especially puzzling because he makes many standard conservative arguments against state regulation. He warns, for example, that one reason why regulation keeps growing is because regulators can always think of one more possible wrong to right. A 1950 fire code is inadequate, officials will say, because fires could still happen. Howard rightly condemns such chasing after the will-o’-the-wisp of perfection because it eventually leads to a totalitarian state that still can’t solve all problems. "Mistakes will always be made," he declares.

Howard even cites the libertarian Friedrich Hayek to support his position. Hayek pointed out that central control of society is always inefficient because the center cannot know enough to regulate wisely the activities of millions of individuals. Government, said Hayek, should therefore be small. Howard agrees that rule from the center is unwise, but, for him, this does not imply a small government. Instead, it means only that government should act differently. "We…have deluded ourselves into thinking that government should only act through central, self-executing rules," he says.

Well, in what other way can government act? At this point, Howard becomes evasive. Although he never comes right out and says it, his solution for destructive, rule-bound government appears to be to give government officials the freedom to be arbitrary, to regulate as they personally see fit. Legislatures should approve general policy goals—reducing fire danger in the community, let us say—and the rest would be up to the individual inspectors. They would be empowered to fine citizens, or jail us, or to let us off the hook, according to their own, subjective estimates of each case.

To avoid suffocating rules and regulations, citizens would not be allowed to protest arbitrary, unfair, or cruel decisions of government employees. After all, to complain to the courts would restart the litigation engine Howard deplores. And if complaints to legislators were allowed, this would lead to the detailed laws that, according to Howard, prevent regulators from exercising common sense.

So Howard arrives at the same place reached by Osborne and Gaebler: to overcome the waste and destructiveness of big government, taxation with representation must go by the board. Whereas Osborne and Gaebler aren’t aware that short-
circuiting red tape is the road to tyranny, Howard, the lawyer, does sense the distastefulness of his solution. That is why he is obscure and self-deprecating in spelling out his position. He knows that, baldly stated, his recommendation could be described as substituting "the whim of a power-crazed bureaucrat" (his own words) for "the rule of law."

Howard has inadvertently exposed a fatal weakness of the modern welfare state: We insist that its coercive powers be under the control of citizens, but the only way this can be effected is through rules and regulations that, as he puts it, "make stupidity and caprice dominant features of our society."

The inability of Ambies to understand the causes of red tape grows out of a larger problem: they don’t understand government. They push into the background its major defining feature, namely, its use of force. This is understandable. Someone who wants to "believe deeply" in government must hold up an image of a sensitive, appealing institution, not a menacing organization whose power grows out of the barrel of a gun.

The impulse to disguise government’s real character produces seriously misleading analysis, however. One notices, for example, that Osborne and Gaebler’s Reinventing Government contains not one word about the sacrifices, abuses, or inefficiencies connected with taxation. As far as the authors are concerned, government’s billions might as well bubble up happily from some artesian money source, causing no inconvenience to anyone. No wonder these authors don’t view government as a necessary evil: they’ve shut their eyes to its hurtful side.

The same blindness undermines their argument that administrators should "reinvent" government by behaving like capitalist entrepreneurs. How could this be possible? Government is a system for the coercive allocation of resources by individuals—politicians, administrators—who do not have a personal financial stake in their efficient deployment. As such, government is almost exactly the opposite of capitalism—where resources are allocated on a voluntary basis by agents who do have a personal stake in their efficient use.

Failure to understand this distinction leads Osborne and Gaebler to misinterpret coercive governmental actions as if they were voluntary business transactions. In Fairfield, California, the city government forced a developer to donate land for a golf course before permitting him to build on his land. This, the authors comment, meant that "the city built its first public golf course with no subsidy from the taxpayers." Quite wrong. Of course there was a subsidy: it was a "tax" coerced from the developer—and all those families who later purchased his lots. This kind of arbitrary abuse of government’s zoning and permitting power is causing much popular anger, and is leading to reprimands from the courts.

Even if we agree to view government officials as entrepreneurs and pretend they’re not carrying guns, the "government reinvention" thesis still doesn’t add up to a defense of government. Take the way Osborne and Gaebler unintentionally undercut the case for government by embracing voluntarism. In one of many examples, Gaebler proudly points out that half the cost of Visalia’s swimming pool was met by a community fund-raising drive, not taxes. That leaves readers wondering, If you can raise half the money for a swimming pool through donations, why not all of it? In that case, a voluntary organization could provide swimming for Visalia without relying on the coercions of the tax system and city administration. Keep letting private, voluntary groups tackle problems, and you get a smaller government.

An exposition of Ambie thinking would not be complete without registering the role played by faith. A century of socialist ideology (which we might date as beginning in the U.S. with Edward Bellamy’s hugely successful 1888 novel Looking Backward) has left every feature of our culture permeated with a pro-government thrust. School and college curricula, books, movies, popular discourse, daily journalism, even our art, from Mt. Rushmore to the nea and npr, all condition us to the idea that a big, active government is the best government. The result is that even when the actual life experience of an average American leads him to the conclusion that modern big government is a failure, he simply has nowhere to go.

To see the power of this reflex, consider the case of Jonathan Rauch, author of Demosclerosis: The Silent Killer of American Politics. The book is a model of clear writing and careful, systematic analysis. The only disconcerting aspect is the way the author’s pro-government prejudice remains immune to his own logic. Rauch is an earnest fan of fdr and lbj, one who thrills at being in the U.S. Capitol building, "catching my breath a little in awe" at the seat of massive governmental power. He is a supporter of redistributive programs, and believes unquestioningly in "government’s power to solve problems." And yet each point of his specific analysis is a heavy nail driven boomingly into the coffin of pro-government ideology. It is almost painful to see this fine mind resist its own arguments.

Unlike most Ambies, Rauch does not evade government’s ugly reliance on force. He begins by pointing out that ordinary commerce is a voluntary transaction. If people offer to sell you useless or destructive things, you can turn them down. No one can force you to buy. "In America, only a few classes of people have the power to take your money if you don’t fend them off. One is the criminal class. People who break into your car or rob your house." Politics, Rauch continues, is dangerously close to the same thing. "Criminals…aren’t the only ones who play the distributive game. Legal, noncriminal transfer-seeking is perfectly possible—on one condition. You need the law’s help. That is, you need to persuade politicians or courts to intervene on your behalf."

Rauch’s analysis leads him to a bedrock truth about government helping programs: every good that government tries to do implies harm to someone else. Government transactions are not like voluntary commercial exchanges where both sides increase utility. They are not even zero-sum games where A’s loss is B’s gain. The overhead costs of running the system of extraction leave everyone poorer. Rauch is eloquent in describing the indirect and hidden costs of "the parasite economy." "Eventually, as everyone seeks subsidies and everyone pays for everyone else’s subsidies, the economic distortions become too numerous to count. Money flies in every direction simultaneously." The end result is "demosclerosis," an economic and political paralysis.

Rauch’s probing analysis doesn’t lead him to be skeptical of government, though. Whatever we do to combat demosclerosis, he insists, we must not turn away from government. "The reason to prune and chop is not to kill government, or even to shrink it, but to restore its flexibility and effectiveness. The point is to break the stranglehold of entrenched claimants and to clear ground for new ventures."

What new ventures? Rauch speaks as though there were a long list of admirable government programs that we want and need, but he is strangely reluctant to discuss them. All of his detailed discussion of policies—from rural electrification to public education—show how wasteful and hypocritical existing programs are. The reader strains to find even a single program recommended. The closest Rauch comes to approving of a federal policy is his comment that "Medicare was a shining reform in its day." This declaration is not elaborated or defended by one word further. The striking absence of specific policy recommendations indicates that Rauch has crossed from analysis into faith. He wants to believe in government, but his thoroughgoing logic has stripped away too much illusion.

What Rauch seems to sense but will not admit is that if 100 government programs result in the wasteful, corrupt, and demoralizing politics he describes, then simply having fewer programs will not make them virtuous. Even one program involves the same sinister, anti-social calculus Rauch warns against. Medicare, for example, had destructive aspects from the beginning: poor working individuals were forced to fund the medical expenses of wealthier non-workers. In the process, some of these poorer workers were thrown into unemployment by the burden of Medicare taxes on small companies. Medicare also perverted medical incentives, rewarding the self-indulgent, self-destructive, and profligate at the expense of the sober, responsible, and frugal. It also led to health-care cost inflation, widespread fraud, and a blizzard of wasteful paperwork to try to stop the fraud.

How long can we expect this ambivalent middle to dominate American politics with its defenses of big government for which there is no foundation in reason? Intellectually, the Ambie position seems threadbare, but that probably doesn’t matter. Intellectual coherence has never been a requirement for political movements. What accounts for success in politics is the durability of a worldview’s errors, and on this score, the Ambies seem well-positioned.

The misunderstanding about red tape, for example, is ancient. People don’t see bureaucracy and paperwork as an integral part of democratic government. They view it as an inessential wart, easily cut off by sincere and resolute public officials. That is why the campaign promise to "clean up the mess in Washington" keeps working even after two hundred years. The illusion that government is something other than a coercive institution backed by violence also has a long deep roots. That’s why when irs officials call the tax system "voluntary," remarkably few people laugh.

Today, the logical gaps and social conditioning that encourage support of big government are magnified by the sheer scale of government funding. Tax money now funds billions of dollars worth of personal transfers, and thousands of schools and buildings and roads, plus television and radio production companies, research organizations, charities, and pressure groups that all propagandize for further government activity. This threatens to become an infinite loop: taxes buy vested interests, who agitate to increase taxes, buying further transfers to the interests, and so on.

For those who fear the specter of Ambie dominance this analysis seems to portend, there is a ray of hope: the growing realization of government failure. This negativism is a looming fact of our era. It is this rumbling force which spawned the Ambies in the first place, driving thinkers like Howard, Rauch, Osborne, and Gaebler from a comfortable confidence in government into their uneasy, ambivalent stances. Another decade of this growing dissatisfaction could well push such people even further to the right. Perhaps some might even join Founding Fathers like Thomas Jefferson in agreeing that government is a necessary evil after all.

James L. Payne’s recent books include
The Culture of Spending and Costly Returns.

Looking back on how I, a black American, came to call myself a conservative, three factors stand out. The first attraction of conservatism for me was that it was not liberalism. By the end of the 1970s I had become disgusted with the condescension which white liberals brought to questions of race. Wearing their guilt on their sleeves, they were all too ready to "understand" the shortcomings and inadequacies of blacks, and blind to the desperate need of these "victims" to take responsibility for their own lives. Liberals thus reinforced what I saw as the debilitating tendency among many blacks to avoid facing squarely the real challenges of the post-civil rights era.

There was hypocrisy in this liberal stance. Though proclaiming the equality of blacks and whites, it was built on a double standard. Whites were expected to change themselves and stop being racists. But blacks got no critical exhortation at all. The presumption was that blacks were without choices, their misery and mediocrity was inevitable, their racial hatreds were derivative from the failings of whites. In effect, liberals were saying that while whites were powerful moral agents, blacks were pitiable subjects shaped by forces outside themselves. This smacked of racism, and I hated it. Conservatives, by contrast, seemed refreshingly unencumbered with such patronizing attitudes.

The second attraction of conservatism for me was that, on the policy issues with which I was most concerned, it made intellectual sense. As a professional economist, I have always been sensitive to the serious incentive problems which plague liberal social policy. High taxes, heavy-handed regulation, bureaucratic service provision, and expansive social benefits reduce economic growth and foster dependence. Some social programs would always be necessary, of course, but liberals seemed too little concerned about the costs of their programs. Also, in the late 1970s, I watched workers in the auto and steel industries price themselves right out of burgeoning international markets while liberals cheered them on. And public employee unions often seemed to be feathering their own nests without concern for the public interest, with the broad support of the Democratic Party. As a result, many of the supply-side economic policies which emerged during the early Reagan years attracted my enthusiasm.

Finally, the cultural assumptions of social conservatism seemed to me an appealing alternative to liberal secularism. In no small part, my move to the political right has been a move away from people on the left who seemed unremittingly hostile to any evocation of spiritual commitment in the public square. With the family disintegrating before our very eyes, liberals could only heap ridicule on "traditional values" advocates who expressed alarm. In the face of over one million abortions per year, liberals could find no place in their political lexicon for considerations of the morality of such a course. Tolerance of individuals choosing "alternative lifestyles" is one thing. But suspension of any public judgment about what constitutes a virtuous way of life amounts to moral relativism, and a political philosophy mired in moral relativism was unacceptable to me.

Concern for racial dignity, confidence in the efficacy of the market mechanism, and anxiety about cultural decay gave me good and sufficient reasons to embrace conservatism. Some years later, however, I have new doubts about the conservative ascendancy. The most fundamental of these doubts concern the manner in which the Right has come to discuss the issue of race.

It is certainly the case that liberal methods on racial questions—such as strong affirmative action leading to racial double standards, or an excessive fear of "blaming the victim" that precludes acknowledgement of social pathology—are flawed. But liberals sought to heal the rift in our body politic engendered by the institution of chattel slavery, and their goal of securing racial justice in America was, and is, a noble one. I cannot say with confidence that conservatism as a movement is much concerned to pursue that goal.

This is not the old canard that conservatives are inherently racist because believers in states’ rights opposed the civil rights revolution. Rather, my concern is that too many conservatives are blind to the need to constructively engage the problem of racial division. It is profoundly mistaken and wildly ahistorical to think that the conservative revolution can become institutionalized without making progress toward the attainment of racial reconciliation. The "race problem" is unfinished business facing whichever party holds power in America. As such, the success of any governing coalition will ultimately depend, in substantial part, on how well it deals with this dilemma that cannot be wished away.

It is now fashionable on the Right to attribute the catastrophe unfolding in the urban ghettos to some combination of mistaken liberal policies and the deficiencies of inner-city residents themselves. David Frum, in his political obituary for Jack Kemp published one year ago in the Wall Street Journal, captured this view well:

[Kemp’s persistent advocacy on behalf of public housing residents] was more than obstinacy. Mr. Kemp believed, believed passionately, that the urban black poor were people pretty much like other Americans. If they seemed sunk in dependency and self-destructive behavior, the blame ought not to attach to some "culture of poverty" or to the bell curvebut to the perverse incentives of the welfare state. Yet Mr. Kemp until the very last weeks of his presidential hopes refused to come out for what he condemned as "punitive" Charles Murray-style reforms of that welfare state. The only escape from the dilemma was to roll back the welfare state in a way that didn’t actually deprive any beneficiary of its benefits.

Clearly, Frum thinks that the urban black poor are not pretty much like other Americans, and he hopes the Republican standard bearer for 1996 will labor under no such delusion.

But the notion that urban minority populations are exceptional is not a fact but a theory, and a dubious one at that. And in any case, what about the needs of urban poor people, black or otherwise, for shelter, health care, education, food, and some hope for a better lifer? Reforming the welfare state in the style of Charles Murray is, at best, only a very small piece of the puzzle. One of the things which commended Jack Kemp to so many Americans was his effusive optimism that help could be provided to the poor even as we sought to free the economy from excessive taxation and regulation. If he was on occasion overly optimistic, then this was a fault much to be preferred to the dour insensitivity of those who, with no first-hand knowledge of or meaningful involvement with the ghetto poor, forecast the coming of "custodial democracy"

A conservatism worthy of majority support in this country would not view with cool indifference a circumstance in which so many Americans suffer such unspeakable degradation. The efforts of various conservative writers to attribute this deep-seated, complex problem to the disincentives of federal assistance programs, the so-called pathologies of black culture, or the cognitive disabilities of certain groups of Americans seem designed mainly to rationalize their disengagement from it. Where is their passion? Where is their moral outrage? In light of the scale of the tragedy unfolding in cities across the land, the narrowly academic and highly ideological posture of conservative intellectuals—who are in effect saying, "too bad about what’s happening, but we told you liberals so"—is simply breathtaking. Is it paranoia for a black to wonder whether this posture toward urban problems would be embraced with such confidence among conservatives if those inner-city hell holes were populated by whites?

The deeper problem here is that "true believers" guided by ideological convictions, to the apparent exclusion of other, higher commitments, have been allowed to define the debate on social welfare issues among conservatives. Faith in the market mechanism, this time in the social arena, rules supreme. Given the powerful influence of Christian conservatives among Republicans at present, this is a curious development. The fact that conservative discussion of welfare policy now derives principally from the speculations of social scientists attests to the power of a consistent ideological vision to dominate moral sensibilities among political activists. We have seen this before of course, on the Left, with tragic consequences.

Intellectual hubris is no more becoming on the Right. When eggs are broken to make the ideologue’s omelet, the lives of real people are at stake. Conservatives should view with skepticism the notion that economic or biological factors underlie problems like those involving sexuality and parenting. After all, behaviors of this sort reflect people’s basic understandings of what gives life meaning. The idea that the mysteries of human motivation within the family are susceptible to calculated intervention by the state would have been rejected out of hand by a classical conservative like Burke, to whom the phrase "conservative revolution" would have seemed an oxymoron. This classical conservatism had a view of society that was inconsistent with the mechanistic zeal of the revolutionary. Yet today’s conservative revolutionaries would have us believe that only by dismantling the federal establishment can the deepest social problems of American society be solved.

I doubt that the cleverest economist (and I know some smart ones) could design an incentive scheme for responsible parenting that would be as effective as the broad acceptance among men and women of the idea that they are God’s stewards in the lives of their children. The best pregnancy deterrent may be to inculcate in the heart of each adolescent the belief that, as Paul wrote to the Corinthinians, "Your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit... Therefore, honor God with your body." When the carpenter from Galilee told his tempter, "Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God," he spoke to economic determinists of all eras. And, though biological determinists seem not to have been anticipated in the Gospels, one readily imagines that He might tell them something like, "God is not finished with us when he deals us our genetic hand."

There is also some wisdom in the New Testament for those conservatives who see in America’s black community another country, separate from and unrelated to the one in which they live, inhabited by a different kind of man. In Acts 10:34-35 one finds Simon Peter saying, "God is no respecter of persons, but in every nation he that feareth him, and worketh righteousness, is accepted with him." The point here is that the problems observed in the darkest corners of our society are human problems, not racial ones. The fault-line between civilization and barbarism runs down the middle of every human heart, and the grace of God remains available to provide a way out for all who would seek it. While rejecting moral relativism, and so standing ready to judge better and worse ways of living, we should eschew collective racial condemnation or notions of collective racial virtue.

Unfortunately, some conservatives now write about "the problem of black crime," about "the crisis of black illegitimacy," about ‘’the threat of black social pathology." But what has race per se to do with these problems? These are problems of sin, not of skin, and I would have imagined that religious conservatives would be the ones objecting most strenuously to this lapse of social virtue on the Right. Sadly, they have not been.

It is true that, in the recent history of American social policy, it was liberals who "played the race card" by arguing that the disadvantages of blacks justified race-based remedies. Some liberals even claimed that the self-esteem of black youngsters could not be secured without rewriting history so as to provide minorities with equal time. But, while those liberal efforts are largely discredited, we now find conservatives, with the political initiative in hand, acting to maintain and reinforce this inordinate focus on race.

Thus, when conservatives talk of the "culture of poverty" in reference to urban black communities they miss the deeper truth, which is that America’s great problem is not cultural but moral relativism—a reluctance to stand behind the traditional ethical standards needed to guide the behavior of blacks and whites alike. Similarly, one conservative critic now declares victory over Afrocentrists by noting that the latter’s search for a black Shakespeare has ended in failure. But surely the larger point is that such a search was unnecessary all along, because Shakespeare belongs every bit as much to the ghetto dwelling black youngster as he does to the offspring of middle class whites. Why are conservatives, who make so much of the importance of being "color-blind" in public policy, not the first to stress this point?

There is hypocrisy in this conservative stance. Critics of affirmative action often invoke Martin Luther King, Jr., who in 1963 said famously, "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." It is a corollary of this principle that, when gazing upon Americans who are welfare mothers, juvenile felons, or the cognitively deficient, we should see human beings with problems, not races of people plagued by pathology. Yet conservatives don’t always do so.

Selective remembrance of King’s call for color-blindness diminishes the challenge which his life, and death, should pose for all Americans. Two years before his most famous speech, King delivered a commencement address at Lincoln University in which he discussed another dream for our nation:

One of the first things we notice in this dream is an amazing universalism…. It does not say all white men [are created equal], it says all men, which includes black men…. And there is another thing we see in this dream that ultimately distinguishes democracy and our form of government from all of the totalitarian regimes that emerge in history. It says that each individual has certain basic rights that are neither conferred by nor derived from the state. To discover where they come from, it is necessary to move back behind the dim mist of eternity, for they are God-given. Very seldom, if ever, in the history of the world has a sociopolitical document expressed in such profoundly eloquent and unequivocal language the dignity and the worth of the human personality. The American dream reminds us that every man is heir to the legacy of worthiness.

This, too, would be a worthy dream for conservatism: to insure that every American can lay claim to his most precious civic inheritance—a legacy of worthiness. To secure it, conservatives must learn not to look upon poor urban blacks as the Other, aliens, apart from and a threat to our civilization. Instead, these Americans must be seen as inseparably interwoven constituents of the larger social fabric.

"...Even the straightest

Of issues looks pretty oblique

When a movement turns into a clique"

—Kingsley Amis

Glenn Loury is University Professor at Boston University, where he teaches economics.