A Prescription for Senile Liberalism

[Tigermike 3,053]

A Prescription for Senile Liberalism

Less Howard Dean, more FDR.

by Joel Kotkin

03/14/2005, Volume 010, Issue 24

. . . The sixth age shifts

Into the lean and slipper'd pantaloon,

With spectacles on nose and pouch on side,

His youthful hose, well sav'd, a world too wide

For his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice,

Turning again toward childish treble, pipes

And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,

That ends this strange eventful history,

Is second childishness and mere oblivion,

Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

--"As You Like It," Act II, Scene 7

WITH THE INSTALLATION of Howard Dean as Democratic party chairman, modern American liberalism enters its dotage. As Jaques says in As You Like It, this age resembles "second childishness and mere oblivion." In Dean, we see the last bloom of baby boom liberalism, reverting to its 1960s type, but "sans taste, sans everything"--including a sense of the moment. Today's liberals are too mired in their childhood traumas to focus on what is their party's main chance: domestic issues surrounding middle-class concerns in an era of social and economic instability, the rising challenge posed by China and India, and the cloudy prospects facing the next generation. These problems point to the failings of the political status quo; constant reminders of this failure include the nation's creaking infrastructure, dysfunctional educational system, and ever-expanding trade and balance of payments deficits. These phenomena represent a threat to continued American preeminence. Rising to meet the challenge would seem perfectly natural to a nationalist progressive of the last century: a Theodore Roosevelt, Al Smith, Fiorello LaGuardia, Franklin Roosevelt, or Hubert Humphrey. Such men would have risen  to the challenge with something akin to martial virtue. FDR, in his first inaugural, compared the challenge of the Depression to "every stress of vast expansion of territory, of foreign wars, of bitter internal strife, of world relations." He called not for self-pity, weakness, or redress, but for the "frankness" and "vigor" that he considered "essential to victory. "

The senile liberalism speaking through today's Democratic party--in "childish treble, pipes and whistles in his sound"--shares none of this robust patriotism. The Vietnam-era orientation of its baby boom elite reeks of ambivalence about a strong America. Even the best of contemporary liberals dare not speak in the harsh, uncompromising terms of national power or security but only appeal to abstract ideals.

Arguments about Wilsonian idealism among the Washington-pundit wing of the Democratic party--while more attractive than Deaniac isolationism--will not rally middle-class voters. A far better approach would be to support a strong American military but with the understanding that, for the foreseeable future, defense and security will not constitute the party's strongest suit.

Domestic issues provide far more fertile ground for Democrats. The vast majority of Americans, according to the most recent Wall Street Journal poll, want their government to concentrate on domestic issues rather than foreign concerns. It is here where the Republicans, and the conservative movement in general, are most vulnerable.

THE BROADEST AREA of opportunity for Democrats lies in a series of domestic issues that, for reasons ranging from ideology to class interest, Republicans are ill-suited to tackle with passion or skill. These revolve around factors affecting America's global competitiveness, both as an economic and technological power, in the new century.

Americans confront these realities far more directly than they do broader geopolitical concerns. They feel them when they travel on pothole-filled roads or when they worry about their jobs or businesses or when they interact with an education system that, even in the suburbs, consistently underperforms those of our rivals.

All but the most addled baby boomers grasp that we are producing a generation that may lack sufficient intellectual and physical mettle to compete with the children of China, India, and other fast-rising countries. Turn-of-thecentury progressives sensed a similar process of debilitation and proposed bold steps to deal with it. They started on the local level, with efforts of city leaders in places as diverse as New York, Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee, and Los Angeles to modernize local political and education systems, and to build modern infrastructure. "Sewer socialism," as opposed to today's remedial liberalism, saw increasing the productive capacity of the nation as the best way to improve the prospects for the middle and working classes.

Unfortunately modern liberals, from the New Deal's Adolph Berle to today's Robert Reich, have adopted a more prescriptive and elitist approach. Rather than boosting "internal improvements," they have looked with favor on the European practice of allocating resources to favored companies and industries. In the place of predatory capitalists, they have urged the elevation of elite bureaucrats along the lines seen in Paris and Brussels.

These models have failed miserably on the continent, and not many entrepreneurs, even socially progressive ones, would likely support such an approach. But many might back a program aimed, for example, at correcting congested roads or modernizing the antiquated railroads and waterways that undermine our ability to compete efficiently. The most modern ports today are not in New York or Los Angeles but in Hong Kong and Singapore. Even Mexican ports are bidding to take work from Southern California's congested harbors.

This pattern applies even in high-tech telecommunications, a field where this country has been the unquestioned pioneer. A recent study by the Center for an Urban Future found only spotty access to broadband Internet services in New York, once outside the urban core. In better wired foreign cities such as Seoul, Perth, or Sydney, high-speed access is almost ubiquitous.

The key for Democrats would be to propose improvements primarily to augment the nation's economic power. They would have to resist the temptation to use such expenditures as "pork" to favored constituencies, notably public employees.

Education clearly represents the biggest weakness of all. American public school students are famously behind their foreign counterparts in virtually all critical skill areas, particularly science and math. American teens consistently rank behind most competitors in the advanced world in math, light-years behind such places as Finland, Korea, Japan, and Canada. As the unquestioned party of power, the Republicans can no longer pass the buck to the Democrats. America's shortcomings, by definition, have now become theirs.

The Democratic party, however, cannot provide an antidote to this failure as long as it remains held in fee simple by the education lobby and the teachers' unions. Much of the egregious stupidity in our current education system--bilingual education, for example--stems from 1960s liberalism and its unwillingness to impose rigor on anyone, including children. Instead of being cowed by self-seeking education "professionals," the party needs to reform itself, shifting its primary loyalty to students and parents. Only then can they make a powerful case for more, but better targeted, investments in education, including not only for elite students but also for the non-college bound.

Enduring weaknesses in education, training, and infrastructure can be linked to other symptoms of long-term American decline, such as record trade deficits, an ebbing of our technological leadership, and our inability to deal with our growing energy dependence. Conservatives may argue that these problems can be solved by the market alone and that, along the way, many Americans will reap benefits, as both consumers and investors, from the rise of nations such as India and China. But history is a stern judge. Nations that lose their economic competitiveness and become primarily consuming nations--say, 16th-century Venice, 18th-century Holland, 19th-century China--gradually undermine their place in the world.

Many businesspeople and economists sense that we are entering a new, and potentially dangerous, era. Modern manufacturing and distribution, notes the University of North Carolina's John Kasarda, relies heavily on both skilled labor and ease of transport, two increasingly creaky assets in much of the country. In this sense, America's competitiveness problems stem not so much from trade itself, but from our own homegrown inadequacies. "We spend too much energy worrying about foreigners," suggests Steve Miller, interim CEO at Federal Mogul and former president at Bethlehem Steel, "but the problems are really in ourselves."

Miller worries that mounting pension costs, the lack of skilled younger workers, feckless executives, and inconsistent trade policies may hobble our competitive advantage in the new century. This threatens the critical concern for most middle-class Americans--the upward mobility of the next generation. The concern is particularly acute for immigrants and their offspring, especially those who arrive undereducated from the developing world.

IT IS TRUE that over the past 20 years, contrary to the claims of some left-wing propagandists, millions of people have succeeded against the odds to raise themselves from poverty into the middle class. But the gap between rich and poor--and, perhaps more important in political terms, between the middle class and the rich--has expanded more than at any time since the years before the Depression. This is most evident in the big blue cities like New York and Los Angeles but also in parts of the sunbelt, such as Arizona and North Carolina.

As we lose more industrial, service, and other high-wage jobs, we could see a further erosion in the relative position of the middle class and of their children. Most postelection polls suggested that Americans did not vote for George Bush because they were confident in their economic future; they did so, in large part, because of the inability of the Deaniac Democrats to craft any kind of viable, attractive alternative vision.

These issues provide a possible key to unlocking the electoral map for Democratic presidential aspirants. But one has to understand a country before trying to lead it. Sadly, for many leading Democrats, America, as Shakespeare put it, remains "the undiscover'd country," populated by suburbanites who lack the elevated consciousness of the true-blue metropolitans.

The basic geographic and demographic trends shaping America are not friendly to '60s-era liberalism. Over 90 percent of all metropolitan growth in America since 1950 has taken place in suburbia, which is now home to a majority of Americans. Democrats of the Dean persuasion can barely stand to address these voters, whose tract houses and SUVs affront their aesthetic, cultural, ecological, and social sensibilities. They feel more comfortable trying to extract more votes from their ever-diminishing "base" in places like San Francisco, Seattle, Manhattan, Madison, and Minneapolis.

This is a losing strategy. As the Los Angeles Times has reported, 97 out of the 100 fastest growing counties in the nation went for Bush; almost all are exurbs. The percentages are even higher in counties where there are the highest numbers of young white children; in these "new Mayberrys," reports demographer Bill Frey, Bush won upwards of 60 percent of the total vote.

Some Democrats justify their rejection of the suburbs by imagining them to be bastions of the racist and reactionary. Yet the suburbs are themselves changing. Today immigrants and their children are as likely to locate in the suburbs as in the cities; middle-class African Americans are following a similar course. In Southern California, where I live, many suburban areas are now more ethnically diverse than the hip ultra-liberal reaches of Los Angeles's westside.

Whatever their race, most suburbanites do not seem to regret their move to the periphery. They surely do not want government to herd them into "environmentally acceptable" crowded apartment districts near transit stops. When suburbanites hear liberal new urbanists and environmentalists--many of whom have their own country hideaways--prate about the need for more density, they see an attack on their families and their life's work. What they want are better, more efficient, humane suburbs, with greater access to public open space, better transport, and greater economic opportunity. This should constitute a significant part of the Democratic platform, from the county courthouse to the Congress.

TO SOME DEMOCRATS, a message gauged to appeal to the "undiscover'd country" somehow represents a rejection of all liberal values. If liberalism means affirmative action, unrestricted abortions, ever more invasive controls on small property owners, gay marriage, and opposition to any hint of religious ideals, then the ideas suggested here are indeed heretical. These positions are acceptable to the Democratic party faithful in large part because their base lies with groups such as government workers or university professors, who would benefit from an expansion of government power and control. The other major blocs of support, outside of organized labor, come from social liberals on Wall Street and in Hollywood, and high-tech billionaires, people largely immune to the ill effects of liberal dirigisme.

Academics, public employees, Hollywood stars, and Internet billionaires, along with alienated minorities, do not, however, constitute a basis for a progressive majority. A majority can only grow from a concentration on the middle class and must be in line with its historic aspirations.

Even in Jeffersonian and Jacksonian times, progressive ideals in America focused less on redistributing wealth than preserving the opportunity for the independent proprietor. In America, as opposed to Europe, Jefferson noted, "most of the laboring class possess property." Property owners do not generally want to see the state expanding its controls, but instead seek protection from concentrations of wealth and power.

Extending the rights of these smallholders was a central feature of American progressivism in the era of the Free Soil movement, the Homestead Act, the restrictions on monopoly capitalism and railroad oligopolies. Even Franklin Roosevelt--who saw himself very much in the Progressive tradition--pledged himself to "keeping the homeowner and the farmer where he is" and to giving them protection against foreclosure. He chided President Hoover for providing funds to prop up large economic institutions but not for small property owners.

Once in office, Roosevelt initiated steps to protect the mortgages of both farmers and homeowners, often against the opposition of traditional conservatives. The Homeowners Loan Corporation, established in 1933, was the first of many federal programs, such as the Federal Housing Administration and the Veterans Administration, to encourage home ownership and back mortgages. These same policies would be embraced by centrist Democrats from Truman to Kennedy, to Humphrey, and all the way to Bill Clinton.

The New Deal also saw the birth of the modern liberalism that has since seized control of the Democratic party. If the old progressive tradition lived on in programs from the TVA to the California Water Project, modern liberalism in the 1960s and 1970s produced motley offspring such as racial and gender quotas, judicial fiat over the most intimate social relations, and the nurturing of an ever-expanding unionized government apparat. This latter-day liberalism is unlikely to lead the Democrats back to victory. It may appeal to what Chairman Dean fondly calls "the Democratic wing of the Democratic party," but it is also likely to have scant appeal among the majority of middle-class Americans.

What Republicans should fear but Democrats seem reluctant to provide is a middle-class agenda that would distinguish the public interest from the interests of public employees. That is, an agenda built on the notion, nurtured through our history, that government's role should be not to engineer society to fit the notions of a radical fringe but to serve as an enabler for middle-class dreams and a guarantor of American greatness. Such a program, shaped to address the critical needs of the new century, could win significant support and create the basis for a new majority party.

Joel Kotkin is an Irvine senior fellow with the New America Foundation. He is the author of The City: A Global History, to be published by Modern Library in April.

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[Auburn85 432]

First of all, if I had my way, there would be no SS. I guess the government doesn't trust us to care for our own future.

And Dean, he's self explanatory. Yeah, he can raise money, but what else can he do that is positive?

"I hate Republicans and everything they stand for"

So I guess they disagree with democracy

paraphrase) For Republicans to have diversity, they would have to bring out the hotel staff.(And while Dean was governor of Vermont, how many blacks did he have in his cabinet?)

[Piglet 0]

It is because your kind wishes Social Security didn't exist that we ain't buying your kind's proposal to "fix" it.

[DKW 86 7,441]

DemAnswer to every issue: "Do nothing, raise taexs, throw more money at it."