The stories dominating recent news have a common thread: How can we make the American national government start working again?
Dismay over the Massachusetts special election has given way to good feelings that the president is still good at making speeches, to elation over the Texas-style ass-whuppin’ he is considered to have given Congressional Republicans in their own meeting.
But the undercurrent to all this is a (correct) sense that official Washington has seized up. There’s no evident pathway to passing any major new legislation this year.
It would be churlish of me to point out that much of this is because of procedural miscalculations by Democrats at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, and a paralysis born of gathering dread that many of them will lose their jobs this coming November.
Instead, the rapidly-congealing conventional wisdom is that the Republican Party is to blame for the lack of progress. Let’s take this apart a little.
Democrats have controlled Congress since 2006 and the White House since 2009. They’ve long believed that they had a very small window of time in which to push through a massive package of progressive “reforms,” that would move our government into a more commanding and aggressive position in all aspects of national life.
Indeed, one now hears talk in the world’s salons of a “Beijing consensus,” an incipient sense that one-party states, unbeholden to the will of their people and staffed by the best-educated technocrats, are more able to deliver national prosperity than states modeled on our messy democracy.
In a striking way, the thinking beneath this view also appears in the American context. We hear: “We’ve just elected the most popular president in our history, who is still deeply loved by everyone who really matters. We have overwhelming majorities in both houses of Congress. And yet we can’t get anything done!”
In that, what I hear is: “We effectively have one-party rule, at least until time and tide bring a Republican resurgence. So why isn’t the Beijing style working for us?”
It’s easy for the elite classes to ask in disbelief why the Democrats have done so little with their golden opportunity. It’s less easy for them to recognize that, in all our national affairs, the people retain their voice.
And the people speak not only through polls, but at the ballot box. And in our remarkable and unique political system, this has a powerful effect on our elected representatives, who care as much about their own job security as any of the rest of us do.
(Of course, in their craven arrogance, our representatives consider themselves ill-used when people dare to compete against them. For this reason, you should expect to see a legislative attempt to roll back the Supreme Court’s recent Citizen’s United decision, which powerfully affirmed our right to free speech.)
One often-heard corollary to all this is: “Ram through Legislation XYZ regardless of popular sentiment. Then the people will thank us when they see that it is good.” This is a deeply seductive fantasy, born by projecting the technocratic mindset onto the people at large. Elites think that the popular desire is “Do something, anything!” But it really is much closer to “Do the right thing!”
Congressional Republicans are making political hay in this season of spotty sunshine, and they’re doing so by keeping the Democrats from getting anything done. But it doesn’t occur to our elites that this strategy would be a disaster, as it has in the past (the 1995 government shutdown comes to mind), if it didn’t match the mood of the people.
Leave for others to debate the merits of a massive fiscal stimulus to jump-start job creation, far-reaching bank regulation, government plans to seed green industries, health care reform, and of course broad new taxes to pay for the looming entitlement wave.
The people do very much want to see these problems solved. What they’re emphatically telling all of us is: “Don’t spend all of our money in the process.”
This matters greatly, because all of the proposals that elites would like Democrats to simply ram through by dint of overwhelming majority and presidential popularity, depend on massive increases in government spending. Not just deficits, but total spending. For decades, the government has averaged an 18% share of the national economy, but in the past year it suddenly leapt to 24%. Many elites are on record recommending that we go to 28% or even more.
On strictly utilitarian terms, you could well argue that this makes sense. Remember how I formulated the “Beijing consensus” above: authoritarian states are better able to deliver economic prosperity.
But there’s more to national life than economic prosperity, hard as that may be to grasp by elites who seek electoral advantage in a time of widespread economic distress.
The people are telling us that they want the national government to be more frugal with resources that, after all, are delivered to it by the people. The people are saying, in the old-fashioned New York style, “Don’ do me no favors!”
The people are operating from a deep sense, however inchoately expressed, that the salvation of this country is through the people themselves, and how they capitalize on the unique opportunities presented to them just by being Americans.
Americans want to enjoy the blandishments of freedom, a desire that elites discount at their deep peril.
The people don’t want a major revitalization of government power because they sense its limits, its frightening potential for corruption (the root of the anger against “Wall Street banks”), and its ability to bankrupt them for little or no tangible benefit. In short, the Democratic program may not work, and the elites who push it are the very last to see this.
It now looks like we’re going to have a quiet year, legislatively. This isn’t a good thing, as we still face major problems. But from out here in businessland, the continuous flailing over big new legislation looks like more and more uncertainty. And uncertainty paralyzes economic activity.
What will happen if we realign politically this fall, and return a weakened Democratic majority to Congress and the country’s statehouses and legislatures?
Then it will be time to think about legislative solutions that better match the mood of the people: “Get out of our way and let us find our own way to muddle through this!”
This means that next year, the Republicans, God help them, will need to find the leadership ability to partner with Democrats to arrive at lighter-weight, market-oriented solutions to the health care problem, as well as broad-based tax increases to defuse the entitlement bomb.
That will be a start, at least. If it also means handing the current president enough success to make his case for re-election, then so be it. At least we won’t be hearing any more garbage about how a crisis is a terrible thing to waste.
And what about the optics, how this all is presented to the people?
The Democrats are the party of government, of ambitious, expensive programs, and one-party rule by the Beijing Consensus.
What are the Republicans? Well, the elites portray them as the party of no-government. In other words, of anarchy, political bomb-throwing, bigotry, and all the rest.
No. Republicans are and should be the Party of Opportunity. The party that trusts the people’s sense of what is the right role and the right size for government. The party that gets the government out of the people’s way, so we can get back to the business of fixing the economy, providing for our children, and deciding for ourselves what the good life is all about.
The Party of Opportunity. Repeat it to yourself a few more times. And remember it.
