It appears that something like 1 million people came to Washington yesterday and participated in the Tea Party march that filled Pennsylvania Avenue from the Treasury to the Capitol and then went onto the Mall. Mainstream Media responded with typical inattention or derision, but from what I can tell the Tea Party protesters are motivated by their strong feelings on one of the most fundamental issues in politics: the size and scope of the state. This enormous and spontaneous movement has threatened to frustrate the efforts of the Obama administration and the Democratic leadership in Congress to increase the size and scope of the state, and perhaps it will give a boost to Republicans in the 2009 and 2010 elections.
But what will Republicans do if they win? What policies will they follow to cap and reduce the growth of the state? Those questions as yet have relatively little in the way of answers. For guidance, they might look to two thinkers on the political left.
Frank Field is a British Labour party M.P. who in the early years of Tony Blair’s prime ministership floated welfare reform policies which were never taken up. In this piece in the Sunday Telegraph, headlined “Bribing voters with their own money is not an option,” he addresses the issue of how to cut state spending, which is posed starkly in Britain since the Conservative party is expected to win the general election that must be held before June 2010.
William Galston is a scholar at the Brookings Institution and a professor at the University of Maryland who was deputy director of domestic policy in Bill Clinton’s White House. In this piece on the New Republic’s blog, headlined “The Economic Storm Ahead,” he takes a look at America’s fiscal prospects and the tough choices ahead.
Some on the political right are also addressing these questions thoughtfully, and I’ll try to link to their writing. But in the meantime Field’s and Galston’s analyses are very much worth the attention of those on the political right, and on the political left and center as well.
