John Boehner's Testing Time

A year ago, in a blogpost entitled The Great Awakening, I argued that conservatives “should be grateful to Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and Rahm Emanuel.” After all, I wrote, they had unmasked “the Democratic Party as a conspiracy on the part of a would-be aristocracy of do-gooders hostile to the very idea of self-government in the United States,” and they had done so by making “the tyrannical propensities inherent within the progressive impulse visible to anyone who cares to take notice.” This is a theme to which I have returned repeatedly in a series of posts – some of them linked here, others archived here and here, and the most recent found here – arguing that, with the proper leadership, the Republican Party could seize this occasion and effect a political realignment.

The heart of the matter is simple. What Franklin Delano Roosevelt falsely claimed in 1936 is now demonstrably true: “A small group” of individuals – lead by our current President, his Chief of Staff, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, and the Majority Leader in the United States Senate – really is intent on concentrating “into their own hands an almost complete control over other people’s property, other people’s money, other people’s labor – other people’s lives.” If they wish to effect a realignment, all that the Republicans have to do is to complete the task of unmasking begun by Obama, Pelosi, Reid, and Emanuel and make it clear that they really do intend to repeal Obamacare, to balance the federal budget without enacting permanent tax increases, to roll back the scope and size of the administrative state, and to restore within these United States limited, constitutional government.

They face two great obstacles. First, as I argued last year in my book Soft Despotism, Democracy’s Drift, the administrative state has been growing for almost a century now, and it has become entrenched. Moreover, its growth has been fueled not only by the ambitions of a self-styled progressive elite proclaiming its expertise and its desire to manage our lives for us. It has also been supported by the political psychology to which – the baron de Montesquieu, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Alexis de Tocqueville contended – commercial, liberal, democratic societies, such as our own, generally give rise. Put simply, men in liberal democracies tend to fall prey to what these thinkers call inquiétude, and under the influence of this uneasiness – this vague, unfocused fear lacking a defined object – they are apt, especially in times of economic distress, to be willing to trade independence for a promise of security. The Americans whom Tocqueville met in the early 1830s had the resources, institutional and moral, with which to resist this propensity. But we can no longer boast that, in the United States, local self-government is vigorous, private associations do much of what was allocated to government in Europe, the Christian religion provides us with a moral anchor, and marital fidelity and family solidarity afford us a haven from the upheavals that typify life in a dynamic, commercial society.

Second, no one really trusts the Republicans in Congress.

Over the last thirty years – after Ronald Reagan first raised the hope that they really would roll back the administrative state and restore constitutional government – they have talked the talk but they have not walked the walk, and they have repeatedly betrayed their supporters. In consequence, during the years of their ascendancy, our claim to be a self-governing people to an ever increasing degree became a joke, and the administrative state based in Washington, DC grew steadily more intrusive. As Angelo M. Codevilla argues with great eloquence in the current issue of The American Spectator, we may have two parties but we are governed by a single political class, and most Americans recognize that neither party actually represents them.

The first obstacle might seem to be insuperable. As a number of critics of my book pointed out, and as one such critic, William Voegeli, has argued with considerable verve in his fine new book Never Enough: America’s Limitless Welfare State, it is hard to imagine that today’s conservatives can succeed where Reagan failed. There are, however, two reasons why we should think the improbable now within our grasp. In two different regards, we are now better situated than was Ronald Reagan.

First, where he had Carter, we now have Barack Obama. President Carter lost in 1980 because he had persuaded the American people that he was not up to the job. President Obama has, to be sure, done the same thing – but he has also done something else of very great importance. As the emergence of the Tea-Party movement demonstrates, he has alarmed Americans. They fear that his policies will ruin their lives, and they fear in a tangible way that he is intent on taking away their liberty. His predecessors were surreptitious; he has chosen audacity. And in threatening to take access to medical care out of our hands into those of his minions, he strikes at our freedom to manage our own lives in a fashion that only the willfully blind can miss.

Second, the welfare state that Barack Obama inherited from his predecessors is bankrupt. The birthrate in this country has dropped, and our fellow citizens are living longer lives. As a consequence, there has been a dramatic decline in the ratio of those working to those retired; and, this year, for the first time, the Social Security Administration is paying out more than it is taking in. Medicare and Medicaid are similarly insolvent. To maintain the current system, it would seem to be the case that we would have to raise taxes drastically – but we cannot do that, as Herbert Hoover and Franklin Delano Roosevelt proved in the 1930s, without restricting economic growth, and, in the absence of economic growth, we will be unable to support Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. As Richard Lamm, a Democrat who served three terms as Governor of Colorado, recently observed, “The New Deal is demographically obsolete. You can’t fund the dream of the 1960s on the economy of 2010.”

In short, the first of the two obstacles I identified in my book is no longer what it was. More Americans fear federal intrusiveness than would like more; their fears are palpable; and their alarm coincides with a crisis likely to be fatal to the welfare state. We can no longer pay civil servants as we have; we can no longer maintain Social Security in its current form; and we can no longer sustain Medicare and Medicaid. Something has to give. Even if Barack Obama had not thrown away a trillion dollars in so-called “stimulus” measures designed to reward constituencies supportive of his party, even if Congress had not enacted a healthcare reform guaranteed to radically increase costs, we would have had to face the facts before long. As things stand, Obama, Pelosi, Reid, and Emanuel have brought things to a head. In their zeal not “to waste” one crisis, they have precipitated another – the crisis of the administrative state.

The second obstacle – the one posed by the ineptitude of the Republicans in Congress and by their repeated betrayal over the last thirty years of the people whom they pretend to represent – is more serious. Here lies a problem that must be addressed. And the clock is ticking. The first Tuesday in November draws nigh, and this problem must be solved within the next few weeks or the moment will pass and the opportunity will be lost. The iron is hot; it is time to strike.

Here is what must be done.

As I pointed out in a recent post, the political parties that we in America possess are peculiar. The Framers of our Constitution did not foresee that there would be permanent political parties, and they designed the separation of powers in part for the purpose of obviating partisanship. One consequence of this is that the parties that did emerge tend to oscillate between being parties of principle, which short-circuit the separation of powers and give to the government a measure of unity of purpose, and parties of patronage, in which individual Congressmen pay more attention to the desires of their constituents than to grand schemes.

In recent years, especially while Dennis Hastert was Speaker of the House, the Republican Party functioned primarily as a party of patronage. If today’s Republicans are to seize the opportunity that Obama has afforded them, they must become a party of principle – and their transformation must be made manifest to the voters.

There is reason to think that John Boehner, the Republican Minority Leader in the House, and Mitch McConnell, the Republican Minority Leader in the Seat, recognize the obstacle they face, for Michael Barone reports that Boehner and his troops intend to respond in the manner of Newt Gingrich by drafting a new Contract with America.

I hope that they do so. To begin with, it is a step towards nationalizing the election. In ordinary times, Tip O’Neills’s claim is valid – at least for the House of Representatives. All politics really is local. In extraordinary times, however, when the American people are alarmed, politics becomes national. It is not an accident that Barack Obama will hardly be campaigning at all. The Democrats want to localize the election; they want their constituents to forget the President, the measures they passed at his behest, and his policies more generally. This the Republicans should not allow.

The function of Gingrich’s Contract with America was twofold. On the one hand, he aimed to nationalize the election by offering the voters a genuine and clear choice with regard to the general direction of national policy. On the other hand, he wanted to bind the members of his caucus, forcing them to stick to a program. His purpose was to take the House of Representatives for his party and to be in a position to direct the government effectively from his position as Speaker of the House.

Of course, it matters a great deal how the Contract is framed. Gingrich’s Contract was more like a laundry list than a clear statement of principle. This time the Republicans should be more ambitious. If John Boehner and his allies are unambitious, if all they really want is to retake the House, a laundry list will no doubt do. But if this is all that they stand for, the voters will quickly catch on, and the Republicans will soon lose all that they have gained.

If, however, Boehner and his troops want to effect a realignment, they will have to do more. They will have to articulate a rationale that makes of their proposals a whole. I would suggest that they do so by prefacing the list of proposals they intend to enact with a clear statement of principle.

The first paragraph should be an indictment of the Democratic Party in something like the terms that FDR used in 1936. It should describe that party as “a small group” of individuals intent on concentrating “into their own hands an almost complete control over other people’s property, other people’s money, other people’s labor – other people’s lives.” And, from this perspective, it should attack the healthcare reform bill; the administration’s fraudulent handling of the bankruptcies Chrysler and General Motors; the incomprehensible, 2000-page financial regulation reform; and the politicization of justice under Attorney General Erich Holder.

There should then be a second paragraph calling for a return to the principles articulated in the Declaration of Independence and given practical form in the American constitution. Here the point should be that one cannot protect the individual’s rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness under a government of unlimited power intent on seizing the fruits of one man’s labor and redistributing it to others for the purpose of “spreading the wealth around.” In general terms, this paragraph should articulate a critique of the tyrannical propensities inherent in the administrative state. In concrete terms, it should indict the healthcare reform as an infringement on the rights guaranteed to individuals by the Constitution. As time passes, more and more Americans are becoming alarmed by this bill. It should be used as an example of what is wrong with having a welfare state as such.

Finally, there should be a list of commitments – including a repeal of the healthcare reform, the establishment of a national market for healthcare insurance, and the posting by doctors, hospitals, clinics, and the like of the prices they charge for particular procedures; a renewal of the tax cuts instituted by President Bush and a balancing of the federal budget without a tax increase; a defense budget genuinely adequate to the demands of national security; and a restoration of civil equality and the rule of law. There are other items that should no doubt be included as well. But the list should be short and sweet.

The authors should anticipate the attacks that will be made. If and when someone argues that the defense budget should be cut, the obvious reply is that the primary function of the national government is national defense and that there is very great danger that in the Pacific in particular we will soon be outgunned. If and when someone asks where the Republicans propose in a draconian fashion to cut the federal budget in order to balance it without a tax increase, they should reply that they intend to bring the pay and benefits received by civil servants into line with the pay and benefits on offer in the private sector and that they intend to re-examine programs with an eye to a single question – whether, under the Constitution as understood by those who framed and ratified it, they properly fall within the purview of the federal government.

What I am proposing is a return to first principles. Absent this, there will be no realignment, and November’s victory for the Republicans will be a blip on the screen. The heart of the matter is that John Boehner and his merry men must remind their fellow Americans who they are and what they stand for – and then act accordingly.