just after the Republicans took over Congress, budget chairman John Kasich put out a hit list of 386 federal agencies slated for elimination. He said that Washington had become an “evil” city corrupted by special interests and bloated government. The idea was to remove government from large swaths of American life. But this July, the same John Kasich became a key co-sponsor, with Indiana senator Dan Coats, of a group of bills that inserts the federal government into large swaths of national life. The Coats proposal, called the Project for American Renewal, would use the tax code to encourage contributions to religious charities. It would encourage states to make divorce more difficult. There would be grants for adoption services and single-sex schools. “The fact that government programs have not worked is no excuse for those in government not to act,” Kasich and Coats wrote in a Washington Times op-ed.
Kasich is no hypocrite; he’d still like to cut those agencies. But he has shifted his emphasis, and that shift perfectly captures the way many Republicans have reacted to the failures of 1995. The direct assault on the size of government was a flop, so they’re looking for other approaches.
In 1995, the Republicans were filled with libertarian fervor. Activist Grover Norquist, who was whitehot during the first months of the Congress, explained that the Republican majority had been elected by the “Leave Us Alone” coalition — by people who simply wanted government off their backs. Norquist was quoted in a Washington Post profile saying that the sight of the executive branch buildings in Washington made him “physically ill. . . . Neo-American fascism, stuff that looks like Albert Speer designed it.”
The Cato Institute was the most prominent think tank, with its experts testifying 16 times on Capitol Hill in the first month of the 104th Congress. Speaker Gingrich declared that his party would show “how to end programs, not just create them.” The New Majority’s Zeitgeist became so libertarian that mainstream Republicans emerged as aggressive opponents of . . . the FBI. For if Washington were incapable of running a good program, its law enforcement inevitably had to be overbearing and oppressive.
There was a positive hunger in those days for a budget train wreck; the fax machines spit out declarations from activist groups topped with slogans like ” No Compromise.” The Republicans were gambling that when they shut down the government, most Americans would discover they didn’t mind. “Have you missed it?” Phil Gramm asked on This Week with David Brinkley during last winter’s federal shutdown.
It turns out that Americans don’t wake up angry because the Commerce Department exists. The shutdown gamble lost.
And ever since, Republicans have been trying to figure out what went wrong. The consensus, at least on Capitol Hill, is twofold. First, they had bad communications (blame Newt and House majority leader Dick Armey). And second, while they told people what they were against, they offered no positive alternative. “All that came across was that we wanted to lop off the government,” GOP freshman-class president George Radanovich recently told David Broder. “We didn’t make it clear we were equally committed to strengthening these other institutions and calling them to take responsibility.”
The essential problem for libertarianism as a governing philosophy is that while this may be a country that distrusts government, it is still a youthful and melioristic nation. When things go wrong, people still look to government to do something. So Republicans have adopted a new strategy.
Put it this way: For decades, conservatives have told each other they can pursue libertarian means to achieve conservative ends. If you cut government, conservative social values will emerge to fill the gap left by government’s departure, thanks to the conservative instincts of the American people. Now it seems the opposite may be true: Republicans have to use conservative means to reach libertarian ends. If you use political power in an attempt to strengthen civil society, build communities, and encourage personal responsibility, then you will have advanced a positive agenda. And then, and only then, will voters allow you to cut some government programs.
If, last winter, the language on Capitol Hill was all dollars and cents, budgets and forecasts, today the place has gone gooey with talk of families and communities, love and compassion. Kasich has said that Republicans need to “show the public more of their soul.” (Kasich does attend Bible study and is called by one colleague a “maturing Christian,” so he is thought to speak with some sincerity on this.) In June the Republican freshmen, led by Radanovich, released a “Vision Statement,” which layered religious and civilsociety thinking over the old Contract with America base. “We believe that reducing the federal government should not and cannot occur without a renewal of family, religious, civic, and business institutions in American society,” the statement declared. Suddenly you can’t walk down a hallway on Capitol Hill without hearing a Republican explication of Arianna Huffington’s phrase “effective compassion.” “If I were asked to reduce the problem to one word, that word would be ‘compassion,'” says Pennsylvania Republican Curt Weldon, echoing the thoughts of many colleagues on the GOP failure. “The voters have to feel that you understand the plight of the working person in this country.”
The actual policy suggestions to go along with the compassion rhetoric are more controversial. Newt Gingrich has been most visible lately championing a special tax deal to address urban blight in Washington, D.C. Gingrich appointed Weldon and Rick Lazio of New York as co-chairmen of his Anti- Poverty Task Force, from which perch they have proposed a $ 100 million increase in federal funding for the Community Service Block Grant program. Rep. James Talent of Missouri included new federal spending on abstinence education in the welfare reform bill. Talent and J.C. Watts of Oklahoma have produced an ambitious piece of legislation that is a grab-bag of pro-civil society, pro-character, anti-poverty efforts (Ways and Means chairman Bill Archer is said to have nixed the package on budget-busting grounds).
Sen. Coats’s Project for American Renewal is the granddaddy of these efforts. The heart of the thing is a tax credit to strengthen private charities. Every dollar up to $ 100 you give to anti-poverty charities would be returned to you in the form of a tax credit. And for donations between $ 100 and $ 500, the government would rebate 75 cents on the dollar. Kasich vows to put the measure in the next budget. Dole embraced the idea this summer in a speech in Pennsylvania and tacked the Coats measure onto his economic package. Privately, several congressmen are skeptical of the charity tax credit, citing its cost and the possibility for abuse. Critics are keeping their mouths shut, though. They need some positive program to get them through the election, and this seems a sturdy ship for the storm.
The realpolitik argument for all this is that it offers Republicans a new way to appear compassionate. In the past, Republicans had to become timid liberals when they wanted to demonstrate they cared. They had to approve minimum-wage increases, increase food-stamp spending, and sign on to all the other Democratic measures Bob Dole celebrated in his farewell-to-the-Senate address. The new agenda gives Republicans a way to be squishy and lovable and still right-wing. Very often it increases the amount of money spent on anti- poverty efforts while ensuring the money is spent on faith-based charities, private schools, and other institutions conservatives actually approve of.
But the Republican change of emphasis also illustrates more profound shortcomings in the libertarian approach to domestic policy. The libertarians are great at rebutting liberalism, but, in Harvard philosopher Harvey Mansfield’s words, “They are governed by logic rather than reason. Their individualism presupposes that individuals are strong and independent, and does nothing to make them so. Libertarians rely on self-interest, as is appropriate in a liberal democracy, but they do not see that when an individual is weak, it may be in his interest to be dependent on government. They forget that self-interest, in Tocqueville’s famous phrase, must be ‘well understood.'”
Over the last decades, libertarians have mounted a devastating critique of statism and of the view that government money is the solution to domestic problems. They have focused public attention on the problem of dependency — on the way government corrupts behavior. The libertarian view is that most any government action produces moral hazard and leads ultimately to self- destructive behavior. Whether it’s providing benefits to single mothers or insuring upper-middle-class people who build their vacation houses too close to the beach, government support corrupts. Charles Murray, among others, has pointed out that people are pretty good at building happy communities. If one does not exist, then the key question should be: What got in the way? More often than not, the answer is: government.
But over the past few years the debate has shifted away from perverse incentives and toward cultural explanations for poverty, crime, and other social ills. Bill Bennett sells 2.3 million copies of The Book of Virtues. Bob Dole doesn’t talk about welfare cheats as Reagan did; he talks about the bad values being transmitted by Hollywood. Analysts like John DiIulio and Robert Rector look to religion as social policy. Nihilism is now commonly thought to be a greater menace than statism.
Some think that bad culture has been the problem all along. Others accept that many people have been corrupted by bad government incentives but then argue that simply by removing government you cannot restore people to their previous behavior. Libertarianism explains the problem but doesn’t solve it. And that in fact is the lesson of the past four years of Russian history.
Many of us who hung around Russia during the collapse of communism thought that once the Party and the State got out of everybody’s lives, society would recover. But we didn’t assign enough importance to the urine in the hallways. Russians who lived together in an apartment building couldn’t even get together to clean the hallways outside their apartment doors. The culture of trust had been destroyed. Simply removing the state wasn’t going to bring it back. In retrospect, it seems obvious that Russia would be overrun by thievery and thuggery, and that it would take more than entrepreneurial spirit for the nation to recover. And the same basic lesson applies to our inner cities.
True, the civil societarians are ripe for ridicule because their language is mushy and their programs are not always hardheaded. They don’t give enough emphasis to individual achievement, which is near the center of American life. But surely there is something valid in their general approach. Private schools do work better than public schools. Faith-based charities do work better than the welfare state. Surely there is something government can do to aggressively expand the institutions that work. Or at least to figure out why those programs do work so well.
Furthermore, the political reality at the moment is that American voters, while critical of some of the government programs we have, have not given up on government itself. Politicians who preach the harsh line of cut, cut, cut end up about where Phil Gramm did when he ran for president.
By David Brooks
