The New Promise of American Life
“What is special about this country, what is unique, what no other country has in quite the same way,” Herbert Croly wrote in 1909, “is an almost irrational belief in our unlimited future and the certainty that everyone — no matter what his station — has a chance for a part of that future. That is the promise of American life.”
The first chapter of Croly’s book is as brilliant a statement as I can imagine of the promise of American life. I wish every school child in the country would read it. But the first chapter is only part of what made Mr. Croly and his book famous. More important and powerfully influential in this century were his next twelve chapters, setting forth how he thought the promise should be realized. Croly had concluded that opportunity was not enough, that individuals beset by large corporations and rapid industrialization needed help, and that the help ought to come in a big way from the central government in Washington, D.C.
That is pretty much what happened. Herbert Croly went on to found The New Republic, now eighty years old and still influential (if a bit more skeptical about big government these days). His book and his ideas shaped many of the programs and actions of Liberal Progressives during this century as the New Deal was fashioned, as the New Frontier was explored, and as the Great Society was constructed. Many people still agree with Herbert Croly. A lot of those people live in Washington, D.C. The 103rd Congress, for example, was full of them. So is the Clinton White House.
Let’s imagine what America would be like if those twelve chapters were wrong, wrong for our time if not necessarily for Croly’s. Let’s visualize an America in which “the promise” depends more on rolling government back than on reinventing it, a land where realizing “the dream” depends more on the greatness of communities and individuals, families and schools, neighborhoods and civic organizations, than on authority wielded by the central government in every aspect of our lives.
The 1994 election reminded us that most Americans believe that their government has grown too big, too meddlesome, too greedy, and too controlling. But this was not the first election in which the issue was the arrogance of Washington, D.C. That issue has loomed large for at least three decades.
In October, I was invited to California to help observe the thirtieth anniversary of the address Ronald Reagan delivered in the closing days of Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign. That was in 1964, of course, two years before Reagan served in any public office. His speech “A Time for Choosing” became a landmark for conservatives. It deserved to.
Boiling it down, Reagan said that freedom was our central value and that there were two great menaces to our freedom. One was communism abroad. The other was big government at home.
Reflecting on what has happened during the thirty years since he spoke, it is evident that communism abroad – what President Reagan later called “the evil empire” – has collapsed, spreading freedom all around the world. But big government at home – the other menace that he saw three decades ago – has grown into a sort of “arrogant empire” that now involves itself in practically every aspect of our lives.
The Roots of Centralization
How could this have happened in the great, big, magnificent, diverse, and decentralized America de Tocqueville described in the nineteenth century? From where did we get this impulse to centralize? To standardize? There are several sources. The Industrial Age was one. Big is beautiful. Uniform is efficient. Assembly lines, simplification, repetition. Technological changes encouraged centralism.
Wars also played a role. This has been a violent century from beginning to end, and we naturally relied upon our central government to conduct those wars. That pulled a lot of power toward Washington. Toward the end of World War II, 90 percent of the gross national product was being directed toward the war effort. That meant, of course, that all this economic activity was largely managed by the federal government.
The media, too, have had a huge centralizing effect. Most of our news – and the day’s conventional wisdom – was issued through just a few television networks, a few magazines, a few radio networks. This tended to give us all the same information base and to establish a correct sort of thinking.
Experts contributed to that tendency. Experts seem to have become more important to us. As the world grows more complex, experts keep arriving on television to explain to us that what we think is right isn’t so, what we believe to be true is doubtful, and what we doubt is in fact what we ought to think. No wonder we become confused and go back to watching people sink three-pointers for five or six hours a day.
And – let’s acknowledge it – we’ve also had some tough problems that demanded “central” solutions. Sometimes the federal government has become more involved in our lives because it seemed that nobody else would or could. There was the Great Depression. Wars. And anyone sensitive to the history of civil rights in this country knows that without the federal government we wouldn’t have made the remarkable progress in combating discrimination we made during the last four decades.
The final large source of today’s hyper-centralism, I think, is the breakdown of key civic institutions: the family, the church, the school, the neighborhood. Today there are many things wrong with these essential institutions. Some of their problems were caused or inflamed by well-meaning actions by the government. But it doesn’t take much to throw these institutions out of kilter. And when they malfunction, there is nothing – least of all the government – that can take their place.
What Has Changed
All this has been going on for quite a while. The early signs were evident to Ronald Reagan in 1964, even before the period in the late 1960s and early 1970s when so much fell apart so visibly. But Americans are not as stupid as the experts like to think. They understood that all was not well, that centralization and big government were no longer good for us, and that the world that had summoned forth those forces was changing in fundamental ways. That Washington was not attuned to those concerns is now evident. The electoral jolt of November 1994 made that plain. It was like a major earthquake that happens when the pressure between the plates has built up over a long time and has been unable to release itself in smaller movements.
The political pressure had been swelling for years. The camel’s back finally had too many straws on it, and it was aching. When we looked to see where those straws had come from, we found that most of them had been placed on us by the government in Washington. We concluded that the federal government does too many things we know perfectly well it should not be doing. Instead of a source of energy to propel us toward the American dream, it had become a burden on our lives and a drag on our future. It was on a collision course with the American people, and the time had come to stop it. That is what the voters said last November.
Fading Dreams
Putting a bridle on an ornery government, however, is only part of what we sense is needed. On my drive across the country, I asked this question of many of the families I stayed with: “Looking ahead twenty years, do you think your children and grandchildren will have more opportunity growing up in this country than you have had?” Most of the people I talked with were afraid to say yes. Some said no. And I thought how different and how worrisome this is for the country. I thought about my own college-age children, whose friends say they don’t believe there is any longer such a thing as the American dream. I thought of children whose schools I visited as U.S. Secretary of Education, children who gave me a book of their poems entitled “Farewell to the Morning”. That is how they saw their future.
Then I thought about “The Promise of American Life.” Herbert Croly was correct in 1909 when he said that the promise is what is special about our country – that spirit of optimism about our future. What troubles our country most today is that we are losing some of that spirit.
It won’t be easy to revive. I see three big impediments. First, we may have become addicted to government, and addictions are hard (although not impossible) to overcome. Even some of my fellow Republicans want to hold on to the apparatus of big government now that they have a chance to control it. We could make no larger error, however, than to try to replace their arrogant empire with one of our own.
Second, there is enormous resistance to any effort to roll back the central government. We can already see this. A great many people and organizations, careers and reputations, jobs and habits, now depend on keeping the central government intact and spewing money, programs, and regulations. They must be expected to spread vast quantities of what, during the days of the cold war, we called “disinformation.”
The third reason we won’t have an easy time reviving the American dream – perhaps the most important reason – is that it is so hard to imagine conditions very different from what we have grown up with. We often wear blinders constructed by our own experience. It is hard to imagine what America would be like if, after a century of rolling the central government forward, we were actually to begin rolling it back and out of our lives. This conference is meant to address the problem of our timid reliance on the status quo. It seeks to serve as a kind of aid to our imagination. We need to start thinking “outside the box” boldly and creatively. What would life in America be like if it were really different from everything we have known? What would our lives be like if the arrogant empire were actually to go the way of the evil empire? And how would we live if the promise of American life were revived?
Imagining the Alternative
As we try to visualize what the new promise of American life might look like in a land where the central government played a far smaller role, identifying some general characteristics and their opposites, may help get us started. Let me note five key features of life as it has developed under the arrogant empire – features so ubiquitous that we tend to take them for granted just like the 180-day school year.
The Current System
The defining characteristics of the present arrangement are these: it is centralized, uniform, governmental, monopolistic and no-fault. Let us consider each of these in turn.
Centralized. We have what Phil Burgess calls a “mainframe government in a PC world”.
No, not “politically correct” (though that is a concern, too). Personal computers. Millions of them. Networked every way you can imagine. Able to access vast troves of information and communications so that we can work at home, decide things for ourselves, and get answers to our questions from far away. Yet our mainframe government does not work that way. The arrogant empire still believes in centralizing, because it believes that people cannot be trusted to do what is right and make decisions for themselves. That is what brought us proposals for Clinton-style national health care. National welfare reform. A federal Department of Education charged with approving or disapproving state plans for school reform. An Environmental Protection Agency that not only prescribes the standards of clean air and water that communities and manufacturers need to reach, but also the technologies they must use in reaching them.
Uniform. The arrogant empire believes that identical, standardized, and uniform phenomena are best. It assumes that, in all matters large and small, equal or fair, means uniform. One size must fit everyone. National policies for students who bring weapons to school, for sex education, gender equity, even prayer. National rules for how many months a person gets welfare benefits. National sentencing rules for criminals. National regulations for what every college does to make its buildings accessible to the handicapped and what methods every town uses to treat its sewage. Standards that say what result should be achieved are sometimes desirable. But the arrogant empire favors regulations prescribing exactly how all of us must get there.
Governmental. An ever-larger portion of our gross national product goes to government. Today, William Schreyer tells us, it is up to 42 percent. That is why, despite recent indicators of prosperity, so many Americans do not see any more disposable income in their take home pay. Look at how much government costs. Look at how much we have turned over to government: it runs the post office, the public schools, the trains.
Government gives money to arts and humanities (inevitably politicizing these important parts of our culture). Government builds and operates public housing. Government sets milk prices and grazing fees. Government seizes our property, with little or no compensation, whenever it thinks it knows better than we what should happen on a particular piece of land. Government tells us how to avoid falling off ladders at work. Government pays off our college loans if we don’t feel like paying them ourselves. There are, to be sure, some things the government should do: regulate the securities industry, make sure the food we eat isn’t contaminated, operate the Air Force. But most things it does, it does inefficiently and ineptly. Some days it looks as if even President Clinton has figured this out-though most of his efforts to reinvent government involve reviving it or creating quasi-governmental corporations, “solutions” that solve few of its underlying problems. I cannot imagine why they suppose that the kind of structure that continues to bungle the delivery of mail will do a better job of air traffic control.
Monopolistic. Government is inherently coercive and monopolistic. It does not give people many choices. (The wealthy can sometimes escape from its clutches and buy them directly.) It discourages competition. It shuns incentives and accountability. Look at our public schools. You have to attend school, and, unless you are well-to-do, you have to attend a specific government-run school – the one you’re assigned to. You can appeal to the bureaucracy for an alternative, but more often than not you will be turned down. Monopolies run for their own convenience. They do not respond to their clients. They do not need to. And government monopolies are the least responsive of all. They spend enormous amounts of political energy on fending off competition and closing escape routes.
No fault. The nanny state we have created, especially in Washington, D.C., exonerates people from responsibility for the consequences of their own actions: a woman giving birth out of wedlock; a criminal who knows that, even if caught and convicted, he will be released from prison in a few months; the principal of a bad school who knows that there will be no consequences for educational malpractice. Sometimes the nanny state even creates incentives for behavior that goes against the common morality. That is how we find ourselves with welfare programs that give more aid for additional illegitimate births and provide no real incentives to get off the dole; National Endowment for the Humanities grants for art that many find obscene; and affirmative action programs that confer and deny benefits on the basis of race or gender.
Centralized. Uniform. Governmental. Monopolistic. No-fault. That is the creed of the arrogant empire.
A Better Way
Now let’s try to imagine their opposites. That does not mean thinking like the arrogant empire does, devising more short-term programs to combat turbulence, enhance our self-esteem, or make us feel more secure (and less responsible!). It means visualizing strong, durable alternatives to the maxims by which the arrogant empire operates.
Decentralization, not centralization. We would organize our civic lives much as we organize our personal lives with the help of our PCs. States, communities, families, and individuals would work things out for themselves. They would be free to do so. Washington would stay out of their way. In the information age, Americans in all walks of life would have the tools and the flexibility to make their own decisions, share ideas, and develop their own ways of responding to problems.
The clear message the nation’s state governors have been sending is that states can make most important decisions for themselves – and would prefer it that way. That is why block grants and other forms of resource transfer should replace hundreds of federal categorical programs. That is why warehouses of federal regulations should be torched.
But devolution of many decisions to the states is a beginning, not an end. State bureaucracies can be overly centralizing and regimented, too. We need to get most of these decisions down to families, neighborhoods, and civic institutions. Today, the flow of information is such that people can decide a lot of things for themselves. Isn’t that what freedom means?
Diversity, not uniformity. The word “diversity” has become harder to use lately, because of its embrace by the political-correctness crowd. But America remains a big and varied country, full of people who agree about some things but not others. One size rarely fits all of us. To be sure, standardization is necessary in a few areas (for example, tariffs and air traffic control), but today we are fighting endless battles with one another in our efforts to make other things exactly the same for everyone everywhere.
Instead of a single national welfare system, for example, it would be better for each state or community to work this out for itself. The same is true of education; we don’t need a single, federally enforced model of school reform. Each community and family should be allowed to figure this out for itself. Things work better when a diversity of choices can flourish. People like the results better, too, because they have had something to say about how these ought to be brought about in their particular corner of the country. Diversity doesn’t mean flying apart in a spasm of pluralism where every segment of society looks out only for itself and denies that it has anything in common with the rest of us. Our shared civic culture helps hold us together. But one of the central tenets of that culture is the freedom to be different and the obligation to tolerate differences.
Privatization, not governmentalism. Much of what today is governmental would be handled by private organizations that are more efficient, more varied, less bureaucratic, and more responsive. I am not referring here to quasi-governmental corporations such as the Postal Service, Amtrak, and President Clinton’s air traffic control scheme. Those are still essentially creatures of government, with nearly all its shortcomings. Instead, I am advocating real privatization: returning power to churches, community groups, entrepreneurial firms, and the myriad civic institutions, small platoons, and associations that every perceptive visitor to America has noted for two centuries. Those are durable institutions that the arrogant empire, despite its huge effort, has failed to stamp out. But it has weakened them. And its monopolies have kept others from starting up. Instead of funneling our funds for cultural activities, welfare, and human services through Washington, why not leave them with citizens to deploy directly?
The tax code, of course, has a huge influence on this. What about a credit for contributions to organizations that meet certain criteria, such as helping provide food, shelter, and job placement to poor people? What about insisting that government agencies compete with private providers for the public’s business-and its tax dollars? Others have proposed that the arts and humanities would be best supported by providing individual donors with tax credits to encourage philanthropy, rather than channeling these funds through federal bureaucracies. Similar reasoning might apply to park land acquisition, wetlands preservation, and the like.
Competition and freedom, not monopolies and restrictions. Families would pick the schools that meet their children’s needs-and schools that failed to attract students would go out of business. Firms would compete with one another to provide the most efficient trash collection system for a community. People would make their own decisions about what to do with the funds in their IRA accounts, and perhaps even in their Social Security accounts. There would not be just one welfare office; here, too, competition would foster effectiveness and efficiency.
There are a few things the national government should monopolize: defense, foreign policy, the currency, and the like. But we can count them on our fingers. All the rest would benefit from competition and freedom. Moreover, we would have greater confidence in them. Pollster Frank Luntz’s survey data – and the words of dozens of people I have spoken with directly make clear that most Americans do not trust the central government nearly as much as their local governments and private (nongovernmental) institutions.
Morality instead of irresponsibility. If we are to transform today’s no-fault society into the kind that fulfills the promise of American life, we will have to rekindle personal responsibility and morality. Sometimes that means encouraging good behavior; sometimes it involves withdrawing incentives for bad. Curbing government in favor of freedom is only part of the new promise; just as necessary is what William Kristol calls a “sociology of virtue.”
Communities can figure this out for themselves. I’ll never forget going to Orrville, Ohio, as education secretary, to talk about character education. I had not paid much attention to my schedule before I got there. I found myself in a room filled with four hundred people wanting to talk about character education. I could just imagine what we would get into. But it proved to be a very interesting discussion. First, we spent a few minutes deciding whether we should have values in school. None of the four hundred people thought that we should not. It was just a question of what they should be.
Then the discussion leader said, “Imagine that there is a sign over the door to your neighborhood school, and you only have room on the sign for a few words. What would those words be?” Out of the audience came all sorts of words. We began to narrow down the list. And those four hundred broadly diverse people were able to do that fairly easily in three or four hours for their community and their school. That, I believe, is the way to deal with these difficult questions of values and morality.
We don’t need government programs to do this for us, or even to help us do it for ourselves. Michael Joyce and William Schambra point out that communities can heal themselves when given the right incentives: “The inevitable tendency of neighborhood groups is to incorporate ever more activities into their ambit, until they have grown into genuine communities, within which civic order has been restored, the humble bourgeois virtues reign once again, and the residents once again feel that they control their own lives and are fully self-governing citizens.”
Those five adjectives – decentralized, diverse, private, competitive, and moral – strike terror into the heart of the arrogant empire. They are, for it, what the bucket of water was for the wicked witch in The Wizard of Oz: they can actually dissolve it altogether.
Those five adjectives should be the watch words of our effort to achieve the new promise of American life.