RETURN OF THE WONKS

It was a successful hunt. I found two events through which it was easy to stay awake. And, interestingly, both entailed thinkers invading enemy turf. The first was a conservative conference on America’s cities — not a usual topic for often urbanophobic Republicans. And the second was a Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) confab that dealt largely with ways to semi-privatize the welfare state. Together, the two conferences were an occasion to measure the intellectual momentum of the rival parties.

The Livable Cities Conference was cosponsored by the Heritage Foundation, the Manhattan Institute, and the State Policy Network. It was a smart idea, because while there are not a lot of conservative voters in big cities — we were informed that only 18 percent of the big-city vote went Republican this year — there has been a succession of effective conservative reformers. This was a chance to gather them together — 34 speakers in two days — and figure out what should come next.

Myron Magnet, editor of the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal, gave an overview of the new approach to urban policy. It consists first of a complete rejection of the welfare-state model. Instead, there are four reform agendas: new approaches to police work (community policing); welfare reform (time limits and workfare); contracting out of services (creating competition in garbage collection and so on); and education reform (charter schools and school choice).

There were a bunch of mayors and other city officials at the conference who exemplify the approach. Indianapolis mayor Stephen Goldsmith, who spoke first, said the easy stuff has been accomplished. Police work has been reformed, city services have been privatized. The problems of the future, he continued, are not so amenable to government action. For example, Goldsmith pointed out, “We’re doing a really good job of getting people off welfare. We’re not doing a great job of getting people into work.” In his city of a million, there are only 8,000 people left on the welfare rolls. They deserve to be there, he said. They have real problems. But another 40,000 who are off welfare are not looking for work. Each of them has an individual problem: One needs lessons in etiquette, another needs to be motivated to get out of bed in the morning, another needs transportation. And these problems are so particular they are beyond the reach of government. The only entities that can address them are small neighborhood groups, often faith-based, which can instill values and tailor assistance one person at a time.

There was an interesting rift at the conference between the conventional policy analysts, who think mostly in legislative terms, and the occasional person like Goldsmith or activist Robert Woodson who looks mostly to this neighborhood and faith-based approach, implying that today’s problems are largely beyond politics and policy. Woodson, who works with neighborhood groups in 38 states and who must be among the most influential activists of the decade, gave an impassioned speech about all the success stories that get ignored. The real experts in solving urban problems don’t come to conferences, he emphasized. That didn’t seem to bother the conference-goers; on the contrary, it moved them. They gave Woodson sustained applause. But in the question period, the discussion reverted to policy talk, bypassing Woodson for a time.

Milwaukee mayor John Norquist, a Democrat, conceded that “on the left half of the spectrum, discussion of cities has become very shallow and brittle.” He’s gone out on a limb on behalf of school choice and as a result could go down in history. He grew most impassioned decrying the decision decades ago to have highways go straight into city centers. This did more to destroy cities than all the horrible social programs combined, he contended, because it wrecked neighborhoods and prompted middle-class people to flee. San Diego’s Susan Golding delivered an inappropriate speech in full advertisements-for-myself mode. Wonks don’t brag, and we feel our intelligence is being insulted when politicians brag at us.

But a number of the subsequent analysts rained on the impression that cities are enjoying a full-scale resurgence. Joel Kotkin, a fellow with the New Democrat Progressive Policy Institute, pointed out that any time cities compete head to head with suburbs for jobs, the suburbs win. As a result, he continued, cities should recognize they are never again going to be as dominant in American life as they were during the first half of the 20th century. They should acknowledge that, despite all the talk of Silicon Alley in New York, high-tech jobs go overwhelmingly to outlying areas. They should recognize that city populations are going to be restricted largely to two groups. The first is upscale childless people who like all the cultural amenities — gays, empty nesters, DINKs (double income, no kids), and scattered bohemians. Kotkin’s old editor Joel Garreau calls them Brick-Sniffers. The second group is immigrants. The proper urban strategy therefore is to play to certain niches. Cities can still thrive with culture-based industries. They can still take advantage of their status as crossroads and specialize in trade. And they can take advantage of their entrepreneurial immigrant populations to develop small specialized manufacturing plants, as Los Angeles is doing.

All of this thinking was hardheaded and encouraging, but there was still a sense that market-based reforms remain on the defensive. The two big ideas that now loom over urban policies are regionalism and anti-sprawl legislation, and in both cases, it’s liberal foundations that drive the debate. Consultants go around the country issuing reports on why each city should get together with its suburbs to create a regional government. All the local foundations jump on the bandwagon, as do the Chamber of Commerce goo-goos. But as Fred Siegel of Cooper Union argued, this is the updated version of the old welfare-state model — only instead of redistributing money from the federal government to the cities, you try to redistribute it directly from suburbs to cities. It allows cities to avoid the reforms they would need to undertake to become economically competitive. It causes cities to try to grab existing wealth rather than think of policies to generate new wealth. Indeed, the idea is based on the presumption that cities are victims of inexorable forces they couldn’t reverse even if they tried.

The sprawl issue is being elevated these days by Al Gore. It’s a legitimate issue. Many people, not just liberals, think something needs to be done about ugly suburban landscapes. But at this conference one got the sense that analysts on the right haven’t figured out a positive way to address such concerns. Sam Staley of the Reason Foundation described the anti-sprawl movement and its various approaches. The city of Portland, Ore., draws a green line in the land and limits development outside it. The state of Maryland directs development into certain prescribed zones and devotes money to land preservation. Staley raised some objections to the plans for sprawl containment. They impinge on property rights. They don’t address factors that push people out of cities in the first place. And they ignore the fact that even today there is a lot of open land in the United States. These struck me as exactly the sort of legitimate but modest objections conservatives always make just before they get flattened by an environmental initiative.

It used to be if you went to a Democratic party conference you’d hear plenty of talk about urban issues. But there was practically none of that at the DLC. Instead, it was middle-class and upper-middle-class issues that were on people’s minds at this large gathering, attended by a convention-scale battalion of journalists. The mood was triumphant. The DLC types see the last election as vindication of their party’s move to the center. The speakers did not stint on self-congratulation.

Nor did they wimp out. In fact, the DLC types seem legislatively emboldened by their success. The first real speech of the morning was by senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, a possible presidential contender, on the subject of education reform. It was a doozy. Kerry, who has been supported by the teacher unions in every race he has run, said the story of American education is “a story of failure.” The school systems, he continued, are “imploding upon themselves.”

This is not the sort of language the education establishment likes to hear. Kerry’s solution is to turn every school into a charter school. This could be bold, depending on how Kerry defines charter school (some phony definitions allow only the appearance of change). But Kerry went further and tackled the truly tough education issues, tenure and teacher certification. He said we have to “end tenure as we know it” and make it easier to fire teachers. He called the certification process an “absurd anomaly” that creates a “convoluted monopolistic structure.” He said it was ridiculous that smart people can go teach in private schools but not in public schools because they don’t have the right certification. This was striking stuff coming from a Democrat.

Later in the morning senator Bob Kerrey of Nebraska was nearly as aggressive on the subject of Social Security reform. Kerrey, a war hero, declared that “live ammunition is used on those of us who propose real change to Social Security.” He went on to attack Washington elitists who believe that American citizens aren’t smart enough to manage their own retirement accounts. “Thank God General Eisenhower didn’t have to face this crowd of doomsayers when he launched the Normandy invasion,” Kerrey continued in full martial mode. His proposal wouldn’t pass muster with some free marketeers, but it does give people more control over their retirement funds, and he is certainly belligerent on its behalf. At the end of these speeches I found myself thinking that with Democrats like these we don’t really need Republicans.

But then along came Al Gore to remind me that the DLC hasn’t exactly taken over the Democratic party. I confess to a bias here. Compared with some of my colleagues on the right, I don’t get all that emotional about Bill Clinton. But Al Gore drives me up a wall. He doesn’t have a genuine bone in his body. He is condescending. He is harshly partisan. He is self-righteous. He is never fair to those who disagree with him. He never steps outside himself to even become aware of his own shamelessness — which I believe Clinton is capable of doing.

Gore’s speech to the DLC was awful. In the first place, it made no mention of any of the interesting policy ideas floated by other Democratic leaders earlier in the day. Instead, the vice president delivered a speech so lacking in policy content it gave pablum a bad name. “Today I challenge America to raise the banner of a new ‘practical idealism’ for the 21st century,” Gore declared. And then, his flag of Practical Idealism flying, Gore had the chutzpah to mock Compassionate Conservatism for lacking substance!

But the essence of Gore-ism, setting the tone for his speech, is that no reasonable person could possibly disagree with him. Life never presents us with trade-offs, competing values that need to be balanced, Gore implies. Instead there is the conflict-free path to harmony and “win-win situations” which is the path preferred by enlightened Democrats like him. And then there is the tired old approach “that is plagued by false divisions, conflicts, and instabilities that should be relegated to the attic of the past,” which is preferred by the rest of us savages.

I emerged from my two days of conference-sitting happy, first of all, that the life of the mind — such as it ever is in Washington — has survived the year of Monica, Linda Tripp, and James Carville. Happy, too, that policy thinking still has momentum in sensible directions. I also left convinced there are some close races ahead of us. The DLC types seem to have over-interpreted their mandate in 1998, just as the GOP did in 1994. Today’s voters may like centrism, but it is a cautious, status quo moderation, not the aggressive hyperkinetic centrism the DLC admires. Second, I concluded that Al Gore is not the only one in the Democratic party who seems to think the forces of history are inexorably on his side. As Newt Gingrich just got through demonstrating, that’s perilous thing to believe.

As for the conservatives, many of their ideas involving cities and social policy seem to lead to the door of faith-based charities. That may reflect a true insight into where solutions will ultimately be found. But politically, it’s something of a dead end. Why should people vote for candidates who argue that solutions are beyond the reach of politics?

Still, the two conferences shared a lot of common ground, on charter schools, welfare-state semi-privatization, pro-immigration internationalism, free-trade globalism. If phrases like Practical Idealism and Compassionate Conservatism are ever fleshed out, presumably these are the policies that will make up their substance.

David Brooks is a senior editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.