UPDATED: Notes from The Marine
I served in Iraq with the young man who occasionally comments under the nom de plume The Marine. I was extremely impressed with him in Iraq; The Marine and The Aussie (who also posts occasionally) were a powerful one-two punch. He’s one reason I wrote about “the new greatest generation” when I returned last fall.
But to the issue of the moment. The Marine read an essay this morning by the Washington Post’s E.J. Dionne and decided he had to respond– and he’s earned the privilege.
Here’s a link to the Dionne essay. Dionne fulminates over a “Democratic platform” (a Contract with America tactical clone). The Marine also read an article in Washington Monthly on the same subject– and thinks it’s rather good. Read both articles then read The Marine.
E.J. Dionne’s lede:
Democrats are obsessed with visions, messages, programs and narratives.
The party’s leaders, thinkers and consultants have held a slew of meetings and are said to be close to a statement of hopes and principles. They are determined to apply the tactical lessons Newt Gingrich taught when he offered a Contract With America in 1994. There is a collective rush to the nearest thesaurus as Democrats consider a Compact With America and a Covenant With America. A Bargain or even a Concordat can’t be far behind. Personally, I’m still fond of the word Deal (as in “Square,” “New,” and “Fair”), but I guess that word is just too 20th century.
Journalists, of course, are the last people who have any right to poke fun at this Democratic endeavor. Indulging the desire to appear nonpartisan, most news stories regularly balance reports about actual Republican disasters and cratering poll numbers with assertions that voters have no idea what Democrats stand for. In going Big Picture, the Democrats are simply responding to critics and the relentless pressure of the Conventional Wisdom.
Dionne finally says:
the Democrats will never fully expose the Republicans’ contradictions without a clear — forgive me — vision of their own and that’s why this business about Compacts and Covenants could yet be constructive.
Dionne then quotes/invokes FDR.
Maybe it was the phrase “tactical lessons” that ignited The Marine. You decide.
Here’s The Marine’s email on Dionne, which he asked me to post. I scrubbed his language in a spot or two, but I’ve done that for years, as a courtesy to jarheads:
Col. Bay–
After 75 years of New Deal Socialism and 35 years of Great Society Enhanced Socialism, the only self evident truths we as a nation can embrace regarding the DNC’s Wistful Visions from Yesteryear (as expressed by Dionne) are (1st) Government does not enhance individual liberty, it steals and stifles it, choking freedom and squelching democracy AND (2nd) Government wealth redistribution and social programing does not create self sufficiency. It creates a culture of dependency and spiraling impoverishment.
So I say to Mr. Dionne, GO AHEAD, Democrats, run a campaign or two or three on a vision that amounts to Socialism’s Reprise. The result: The Republicans will bury you.
It’s too funny. Liberals actually think “New Deal Nostalgia” is a “Vision.” Speaking of lost in the past, did anyone see the cover of Jimmy Carter’s new Book ~ How badly do we need Ronald Reagan to respond once more for the record “There you go again!!”
And speaking of liberals being silly then reaping the whirlwind, as I watch events unfold in France, I cannot help but feel I am watching in living color the modern version of France’s “reign of terror.” It will be interesting to see if the French can save themselves…The fireworks are impressive if not cautionary on many levels. Modern Multiculturalism & Political Correctness are in every respect the tools of a Socialist/Progressive Design to Devastate the very foundations of Western Classic Liberalism, Democracy, Liberty & Civil Government (See J.S. Mill, J. Locke, J Berkeley, T. Jefferson, T. Paine, J. Madison & A. Hamilton).
A heterogeneous society (especially one premised on Individual Liberty and Democratic Freedom) demands a degree of Acceptance & Assimilation by those who seek its sanctuary. The extent to which a society so devoted promotes the balkanization of its own population, it contributes to its own demise. The truth and beauty of the Melting Pot cannot be denied in favor of some pop culture pseudo social science…
As for the Washington Monthly essay, The Marine writes:
Glastris’s article in the Washington Monthly titled “Bush’s Ownership Society - Why No One’s Buying” actually provides the DNC something EJ Dionne could never hope to offer: logical and prescient advice. This essay offers a very probing and compelling critique of Conservative Policy Successes and Failures over the last 35 years. The essay concludes with serious suggestions and potential openings for the DNC to exploit as they formulate their “Vision Thing?!?!” for the 2006 election season.
I just read Glastris’ article. I think The Marine is right.
Here’s Glastris’ lede:
Conservatives have a knack for taking good ideas—say, patriotism or faith—to the sort of ideologized extreme that brands the ideas as theirs and leads liberals to abandon them. We’re seeing that now with the issue of choice and individual empowerment. Those very concepts used to be associated with liberal causes like abortion and voting rights. But over the last couple of decades, conservative intellectuals have roped them to a larger agenda to revolutionize government.
And they’re perfectly open about it. Talk to scholars at the Cato Institute or the Heritage Foundation or to movement organizers like Grover Norquist, and they’ll walk you through the strategy. Big government and individual freedom, they’ll explain, are opposed to each other; more of one means less of the other. The three big areas of non-defense-related government spending are retirement (mainly Social Security), health care (mainly Medicare and Medicaid), and education (mainly K-12 public schools). For political reasons, it is practically impossible to cut spending in these areas. But it is possible to dismantle the government bureaucracies that administer them in a way that enhances personal freedom and makes possible big cuts down the road: privatize the benefits.
The father of this line of thinking is Milton Friedman. In the 1950s and 1960s, the conservative economist dreamed up the notions of education vouchers and private accounts for Social Security. Republican operatives and think tankers seized on Friedman’s ideas in the 1970s, expanded them into areas like health care, and fleshed out their philosophic and political logic. Vesting individuals with more choice, control, and ownership of their government benefits, they argued, would not only enhance virtues like personal responsibility, but over time, it would also result in the shift of hundreds of billions of tax dollars from the custodial care of government to the corporations that would help manage people’s private accounts. Best of all, from the conservative point of view, it would transform the electorate’s political identity. Instead of government-dependent supporters of the Democratic Party, voters would become self-reliant followers of the GOP.
These ideas are the intellectual fuel of the conservative movement that has swept across the country in recent decades. They were well understood in the Reagan administration, and the Gipper’s speeches are suffused with them. But it has only been in the last few years, with both Congress and the White House in conservative Republican hands, that the ideas have truly debuted.
Now, the reviews are in—and they are not good…
Here’s Glastris’ critique of privatized Social Security accounts:
The more intractable problem with the president’s ownership society is its effort to inject choice and control into benefits people already have. Here, the culprit is not complexity but risk. Behavioral economists have described what’s known as an “endowment effect”: People are psychologically prone to be exceptionally risk-averse with benefits they already have. With his Social-Security private-accounts proposal, the president was in essence offering voters a variety of ways to have less retirement security. The reaction should not have been a surprise. Surveys by the Pew Research Center found that 60 percent of those who opposed private Social-Security accounts said they worried about the risk—to themselves, to others, and to the system as a whole.
He goes on to discuss “libertarian paternalism”:
Libertarian paternalism
Choice, then, can be a powerful tool to advance public ends as long as one ironic truth is recognized: People like having choice but often don’t like to choose.
This concept is at the center of a brewing movement within public-policy circles, one that Cass Sunstein and Richard H. Thaler of the University of Chicago have affectionately, if cheekily, dubbed “libertarian paternalism.” The idea is for government to shape the choices people have so that the natural human tendency to avoid making a decision works to the individuals’ and society’s advantage.
Read the entire article. QUICK UPDATE: I see an early commenter thinks Glastris is a bit disingenuous. I still think The Marine’s point is well-taken. Glastris has looked at conservative successes and failures. Glastris is trying to adapt left-liberal approaches to the 21st century, not serve thrice-baked New Deal.
UPDATE: An Instalanche. The Marine will appreciate it, Glenn.
The Glastris article is a bit dishonest, in making a claim that “choice/empowerment” initiatives are not necessarily conservative and are better implemented by “liberals”. The successful public housing program he discusses replaced big-government-as-landlord with private sector operators encouraged by tax incentives: this is the essence of small-government conservatism and the opposite “liberalism” as practiced over the last 50 years. Glastris would be more correct in saying that choice/empowerment as an idea is not owned by Republicans, and that those Democrats who use and talk about small-government conservative ideas can be successful in policy terms and at the ballot box (witness two terms for Clinton and his DLC brain trust).
Comment by Dale West — 11/9/2005 @ 12:00 am
You don’t have to be an EJ Dionne fan to see that The Marine is in fact wrong. Bush didn’t even attempt to cut down the size of government. He threw some tax cuts Grover’s way and borrowed a ton of money from China to INCREASE the total amount of government spending. Delay himself looked at the latest pork-laden budget and declared there was nothing that could be cut out. Fiscally astute people can see the writing on the wall that the 2008 President is going to have to raise taxes to deal with this mess. The new Republican party is not the revolutionary party of 1994.
Comment by Nate — 11/9/2005 @ 1:12 am
“Ownership Society” is code language for “We just made it even more legal and convenient for your employer to raid your pension plan, and we’re not bailing you out. In stead we’re bailing *them* out because they overspent, and despite raiding your pension, they’re still going under.”
Comment by Josh Jasper — 11/9/2005 @ 9:58 am
I hate to have to agree with what Nate wrote (not that I don’t like Nate; I don’t know him), but he’s right. Bush is not a conservative at all. He’s a liberal who invaded Iraq, and tried to privatize a small fraction of the Social Security system. Period. On spending, quotas, education, abortion, he has done nothing inconsistent with what Gore or Kerry would have done. Like his father before him, he’s a liberal who pretended to be conservative to become President. If you think still think otherwise by know, you know you’re kidding yourself. Yes, we need Ronald Reafan to come back and say “there you go again.” But Reagan’s dead. No one can replace him. Few are even willing to try.
Comment by Jim O'Sullivan — 11/9/2005 @ 10:29 am
Democrats have a serious problem, they are trapped between idealogy, special interests, and Beltway inertia. How can you cast yourselves as fiscally responsible when it is literally impossible to present anything like a balanced budget? Ok, Dems arent going to attack entitlement reform, which entails all three obstacles. Their next best target is middle class pork however. Go after the bloated highway bills, go after agriculture subsidies which are expensive here and devastating overseas, go after all the little goodies that make Washington tick. That is a program that would set them apart. Instead of being just another cog in the faceless Washington pork belt, Dems should band together and attack descretionary spending as big-government giveaways. Republicans cant do it and its pissing off their deficit-hawk base, there is a huge opportunity there to win back those former Reagan Democrats who hate big-government. Of course it would take courage to tell Senator Byrd that he cant have his named parking garages and so forth. But the alternative is to keep being the negative, no ideas party, who’s only hope is that the Republicans self-destruct.
Comment by Mark Buehner — 11/9/2005 @ 10:31 am
I don’t know whether not the comment that ” The Marine is in fact wrong…” is correct. I choose to look at the fact that this Marine outwrites and outthinks a large majority of our press. (Intentional capitalization of Marine vs small type press). This guy, I could work for. Most members of the press I would never work with…(couldn’t trust ‘em, couldn’t depend upon them for any original thought or independent action).
Comment by Mike — 11/9/2005 @ 10:42 am
I agree, when we lost Newt Gingrich, the Republicans lost a lot of that good small government ideas. He is going to run for President. I personally do not like the man after how he served his wife divorce papers while she was in the hospital ill with cancer.
Comment by James Stephenson — 11/9/2005 @ 11:57 am
That’s quite a ringing response to Mr. Dionne from The Marine. But then EJ is the shallowest and most trivial of today’s major pundits; taking him down is like knocking down a cardboard cutout figure. That is why it is particularly dismaying for both of you to turn around and more or less endose Glastris’s argument. He actually has some craft to his writing but you miss the evil intent. Liberals have always played up risk as a reason to leave decision-making to elites. Each success becomes the lever for another piece of illogic–you can no longer ride a motorcycle without a helmet because now my tax dollars might have to go to your repair should you crash, that kind of thinking. What Glastris is doing is arguing that choice (he means “freedom”) among the populace (”sheep” in his mind) is not an unalloyed good. In fact, it can be downright confusing and counterproductive. He backs this up with deceptive examples based on consumer-choice psychology.. Instead of playing up risk as a bogeyman, he is playing down freedom. This is a clever but naked attempt to bolster the case for liberal elites to keep plying their social nostrums on our behalf. The Marine’s paean to self-sufficiency would have been better directed to a slippery customer like Glastris than to a lightweight like Dionne.
Comment by Charlie — 11/9/2005 @ 12:13 pm
A couple of observations to those who write wistfully of conservative glory past: Newt Gingrich was a salesman, not a conservative (look more closely at his positions prior to 1994), and Ronald Reagan, if you will remember, is the guy who appointed a not-very-conservative Arizona judge and former-politician to the Supreme Court because he had promised to appoint a woman. Ronald Reagan, Affirmative Action hero. Just bloody great. The strength of conservatism (and, therefore, one hopes, Republicans) is that we are grounded to reality more than are the Democrats. “Ownership” is a matter of Economics 101, a course which most Democrats seem to have slid through on a Pass/Fail basis; a “muscular” foreign policy is a matter of necessity, especially in an age of terrorism fueled by tyrrany; and freedom is a matter of respecting human nature — any other system of government is tyrrany and dangerous even to other nations. Reagan (for instance) had a visceral grasp of much of that, but it does us no good to pretend that our dear, departed President was better than he was. It also does us no good to forget how bad Kerry and Gore would have been had they been allowed into the Big Chair.
Comment by Mike — 11/9/2005 @ 1:31 pm
I agree that GW is hardly a consrvative, but he has brought to the forefront how bankrupt Social Security is. He has exposed the elephant in the living room.How can I risk something I don’t even own, and may not be available in the future? Yes. Indeed. I will practice risk avoidance once I have control over it. Herein we have Rusty’s second law of economics. Individuals are net creators of wealth. Governments are net consumers of wealth.
Comment by BradR. — 11/9/2005 @ 3:13 pm
I have to agree with my namesake above. For us fiscal conservatives, the choice is between bad and worse. Bush is certainly no fiscal conservative. Socially, I find both parties full of repulsive busybodies. There aren’t a quorum of congress critters in Washington who believe in the Constitution and enumerated powers. Nothing short of an Al Quaeda nuclear strike on Washington DC is going to stop the current gang from using my money to buy votes. Don’t like it? Tough because McCain-Feingold is there to prevent us from doing anything about it - unless you own a newspaper. Just wait till the FEC censors the blogs leading up to elections…
Comment by MarkD — 11/9/2005 @ 4:59 pm
As cities expand and communication networks bridge the gaps more effectively, more government and more bureaucracy sadly becomes more necessary. In a rural community, if a neighbor’s meth lab explodes and sets his house on fire, you might laugh and think of it as just desserts. In a suburb, however, you’re going to be more worried that your house will be set on fire by his dumb mistake. If you live in an apartment next door, losing your home and everything in it is guaranteed when (not if) that meth lab goes up. The closer together people live, the more they support bureaucracy and government interference, not out of stupidity, greed, or cowardice, but because their survival often depends on legislation. A lot of the problems people have with talking right past each other stem from such different backgrounds. Still, there are basic similarities people can agree on. No matter how large government gets, it should never be relied on to do more than its three basic functions: maintain order, maintain infrastructure, and ensure the stability of the currency. As Scott at AMCGLTD said, “Expecting them to do anything else will ensure disappointment at best, and a police state at worst.”
Comment by Tatterdemalian — 11/9/2005 @ 5:34 pm
Glastris’ writing is that of a true devotee to the faith. His blind faith in the welfare state is presented so casually in his arguments that you almost forget that it’s completely unfounded. While Glastris’ thinking is highly refined, it’s still highly magical in that rather than examining fundamental human nature and economics to derive a concrete solution, it starts with a clever or romantic idea to solve a percieved injustice. Like all liberals he’s convinced that cleverly worded laws and elaborate regulatory structures can fix people. (This also rests on the Other Liberal Assumption: that people are broken.) Much of his criticism of conservatives is hard to debate since it rests on Bush’s not very conservative policies, but notice how he compares Bush’s lack of success with Clinton’s success: * Only 6.4 million seniors wound up getting the drug discount cards, a million fewer than the government predicted. * In practice, however, only about 1 percent of students in failing schools annually have taken advantage of the opportunity. * A study of companies that instituted automatic 401(k) enrollment, by economists Bridgette Madrian and Dennis Shea, found that participation rates for employees making under $20,000 annually rose from 13 percent to 80 percent. He asks, “Why not automatically enroll all owners of homes on floodplains into the federal-flood insurance program?” To a person who is thinking magically, 100% enrollment means complete success. In each case, the metric is not whether society as a whole is better off or if individual freedom is increased. Rather, he’s concerned with enrollment rates. And when he does look at the actual people involved, as when he blithely explains how clever Clinton’s guys were in fixing up the projects, he ignores the fact that they’re simply shuffling around the collateral damage from the “war on poverty.” Magical thinking is a failure of moral courage because it doesn’t face up to the fact that the responsibility of improving one’s welfare ultimately rests on that person. This is both a practical and a moral reality. Postscript: It sounds convincing, on the face of it, to call a particular policy a failure because few people participate in it. However, take Defense Travel Services as a case where a policy “ought” to work because people have no choice. It’s how people in the military travel on temporary duty, so enrollment should be mandatory. But because the body responsible was so inept at the day to day management, it has faced being dismantled several times already. After years of work, the system is unwieldy and impractical. Much of the reason conservatives push for privatization is not love of choices or the market. Rather, it’s usually because government agencies are fundamentally and irrevocably broken, and that because fixing them would make them unnecessary they will *fight* to prevent any attempts at repair.
Comment by scooby — 11/9/2005 @ 7:45 pm
Charlie is on to something. Glastris’ notion of pandering to some risk-aversion impulse will simply encourage more of it (as would any subsidy), steadily weakening the individual’s ability and desire to make choices, and encouraging the sort of public apathy and passivism attractive to elitist busybodies of all political stripes. Better to incent and encourage people to get the education and tools necessary to assess, manage and, one hopes, minimize risk. As with exercise and practice, strength and capabilities increase rather than atrophy. Freedom ain’t free, and it ain’t easy, either. Public policy wonks don’t help by trying to convince us that it’s all too scary, as well.
Comment by cosmo — 11/9/2005 @ 8:50 pm
(first time didn’t post?) As a long-time (over a year!) Libertarian Paternalist (in Slovakia), I’m glad the phrase is getting some traction. I support mandatory individual accounts (10%) for retirement, but owned and inheritable. But I also think a social safety net is politically crucial. We need to talk about the reality that “below average IQ” folk will likely be worse off in a society whose laws and taxes are optimized for “above average IQ” folk (risks and opportunities). I know this is elitist (not PC!), but it’s prolly also true. The paternalist in me says the policies should force the less smart/ less responsible to be minimally responsible for themselves. The Lib in me says, given state guaranteed forced minimums, there should be freedom to choose as much as possible. All citizens should get some minimum health care voucher, for a minimal mix of health care benefits. With freedom to choose an HMO or use the voucher plus cash for additional benefits from some private insurance. Then the Emergency Rooms that now take care of the uninsured will get some re-imbursement. The Randroid “let the stupid w/o health care die” answer is not acceptable. Health care is a Civilization Benefit — not a right. Such benefits are being mislabeled as rights; terrible for clear thinking. Honestly calling health care a benefit correctly implies there is an issue of how much, and who pays. The huge Democracy problem is that voters are addicted to OPM — Other People’s Money. They vote for systems that take from some and give to others. Instead, their own money needs to be used for their own benefits. Whether this is called “progressive/ liberal” empowerment, or “conservative” anti-redistribution doesn’t matter much. The issue is whether the payers are paying for themselves or for others; whether the patient/ student/ retiree chooses how to spend the cash, or others choose.
Comment by Tom Grey - Liberty Dad — 11/10/2005 @ 6:34 am
I have a Masters in City Planning. For the past 25 years, I have helped people cope with planning bureaucracy in the San Francisco Bay Area. Each year hoops get smaller, hurtles higher. Staff more and more thinks the process is job security. It has nothing to do with the complexity of city life, and everything with Parkinson’s laws of bureaucracy. I had a planner tell me their city no longer does “negative declarations” because they don’t have enough staff. They have twice as many as 20 years ago, and not much more to do. The city is built out, and all you have is infill. This should not even need environmental clearance. It is in the midst of an urban area of 6 million, where development should be encouraged, rather than pushed out to outlying areas of California’s fertile central valley. A mitigated negative declaration is now the size of a full EIR 20 years ago. Empty paper. We pay the price for these things. It is why the Bay Area has the highest housing prices. No one has repealed the law of supply and demand.
Comment by Presbypoet — 11/10/2005 @ 12:31 pm