Small Government: Dream the Dream!
Your must-read for the week is Reihan Salam:
On Monday, Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, Ranking Republican on the House Budget Committee, and Arthur C. Brooks, president of the American Enterprise Institute, published an essay in the Wall Street Journal arguing that the electorate faces a choice between a free enterprise system and European-style social democracy. A number of thoughtful commentators, including columnist David Brooks of The New York Times, have taken exception to Ryan and Brooks, arguing that they ignore important aspects of the American tradition and that they fail to give due regard to the value of an energetic and effective government.
The bottom line -- you have to go read Reihan's post to get the full monty -- is, I think, quite simple: it's true that an obsession with small government can blind folks on the right to the upside of able public service. BUT: the question, as Ryan and (Arthur) Brooks make clear, is which dream we're dreaming. The self-styled 'postmodern bourgeois liberal' theorist Richard Rorty used this language of dreams, and though he's on the opposite side of the fence as I am, folks on the right shouldn't feel any awkwardness or embarrassment in embracing that formulation. It's exactly as Ryan and Brooks say. The decisive issue is the ideal that guides our policymaking.
As I said earlier, the competing ideals are liberty versus servitude. A servile life can be very healthy and safe. My well-intentioned liberaltarian friends want to insist that the reality of public policy shows us that freer markets and more left-like redistributive regimes can skip hand in hand down the high road, as they do in, say, Denmark. Setting aside the issue of scale, which Reihan ably addresses, the larger matter is a civilization-scale decision point: is our policy-driven yeoman's work oriented toward the dream of a better kind of servitude or a better kind of liberty? The choice of ideal guides us in the moment-by-moment, deal-by-deal to and fro of policymaking.
Any talk of a 'city on the hill' -- whether a liberal or conservative utopia -- is fatuous without reference to the conceptual lodestar we look to for guidance. Cut to the bone, there are, as Tocqueville recognized, two lodestars on offer: equality in servitude or equality in freedom. In democratic times, there is no third dream. There might be a third way -- a middling or pragmatic negotiation between the two. But without reference to one dream or the other, there is only blundering. This is the 'new culture war' that Brooks, rightly, is hammering on. Back to Reihan:
Politics is not always about highly technical debates concerning progressive price indexing. It is often about shaping our shared normative understandings, and, as Ryan and Brooks argue in their Wall Street Journal essay, our shared aspirations for the kind of society we’d like to live in. And on those grounds, at least, Ryan and Brooks are offering an attractive alternative to a society that looks first to the federal government to solve problems.
Politics not only shapes our 'shared normative understandings', otherwise known as our culture. It reflects and embodies them. The fury on the right these days is reflective of an effort by powerful folks on the left to capture and de-politicize American politics so as to command the culture to bend to their will. For all I know, they have the best of intentions. I don't think there's any doubt that the most motivated smart people on the left really are spending their time and energy trying to bring about the most just, least cruel society they can imagine. The problem is simple: they're dreaming the wrong dream. It's wrong because it's consummated in servitude. It's not an evil dream, of course; we all long for peace and repose and security and a good pension, especially in these troubled times. But it's a city that shines at the end of a misbegotten road.
Small government is not an end in itself. It's a means -- to the particular dream of freedom that makes it worth our while. If folks on the right can't articulate that dream, all the politics and policy and posturing in the world will be for naught. This isn't a recipe for political utopianism. There's plenty of room in the Republican party for more or less 'establishment' types. (Call them what you will.) It is a recipe for re-dreaming the dream of liberty, in keeping with one of our most vibrant and many-faced traditions. Because that, after all, is the American Dream. Isn't it?
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Comments :
Jul '10
Re: Small Government: Dream the Dream!
The "American Dream" is to be left alone, without government interference.
I'll side with an illiterate 1770's plowboy anytime over David Brooks.
Aug '10
Re: Small Government: Dream the Dream!
"Think Globally, Govern Locally" strike anyone as a good bumper sticker?
or
"Small is Beautiful"?
Jun '10
Re: Small Government: Dream the Dream!
Ryan is just proposing that we dial the federal budget back to what it was a few years ago, and face up to the coming entitlement disasters. We have a fiscal gun to our head, and we're just closing our eyes so we won't think about. We'll either start fixing it now, when only some of us are in soup lines, or later, when most of us are in soup lines. The pain will only increase over time.
Jul '10
Re: Small Government: Dream the Dream!
Reihan Salam is a Big Government Conservative, which is to say he's a liberal. So there's no surprise he finds Brooks's arguments (another liberal) about energetic and effective government persuasive.
I'd just like to see this effective government. I understand it's near jackalope in the World Book Encyclopedia.
Even the Department of Defense is largely ineffective and wasteful, and that duty of Government is actually in the Constitution.
Reihan Salam should largely be ignored.
May '10
Re: Small Government: Dream the Dream!
Can we start a movement to impeach David Brooks? He has moved steadily leftward as Obama has disappointed and the Tea Party forces have become insurgent. And yet it feels more as though he's fighting for status quo than over any great principal. He represents the right to the New York Times, The News Hour, AND All Things Considered. It's time for those paragons of quality journalism to be brave enough to entertain an equally erudite but legitimately conservative pundit.
Re: Small Government: Dream the Dream!
Michael Tee: if you read Reihan's post, you'll see that he's defending A. Brooks against criticism from D. Brooks.
May '10
Re: Small Government: Dream the Dream!
I always love these types of comparisons because it affords me the opportunity to send the big government types into a fit of apoplexy by pointing out that the Scandinavian countries are A) the single most literate group of nation in the world and B) the most homogeneous.
The United States may be listed among nations with a 99% literacy rate, but that's only if you define literacy down to a 7th grade level.
And the MultiCulti crowd would find the Scandinavian region a tad too white for their tastes.
Re: Small Government: Dream the Dream!
EJHill
I always love these types of comparisons because it affords me the opportunity to send the big government types into a fit of apoplexy by pointing out that the Scandinavian countries are A) the single most literate group of nation in the world and B) the most homogeneous.
The United States may be listed among nations with a 99% literacy rate, but that's only if you define literacy down to a 7th grade level.
And the MultiCulti crowd would find the Scandinavian region a tad too white for their tastes. · Sep 15 at 6:17am
One very sharp liberal I pressed on this point admitted that my intuition was right that the left really wants the US to be more like France, as opposed to Europe in general or some other lovely little country.