The Perils Of A Policy President - Road to the Middle Class

THE LAST three Democratic presidents are similar. They are policy presidents: they all believe in the rational, systemic approach to governance. That’s what David S. Broder, dean of the Washington press corps, has noticed. And he realizes that it’s a problem.

Of course, liberal Broder did not come up with this on his own. He got it from the inaugural issue of a new conservative magazine, National Affairs, and an article “Obama and the Policy Approach” written by a conservative thinker, William Schambra, from a conservative think tank, the Hudson Institute.

Schambra sees... that "Obama is emphatically a ’policy approach’ president. For him, governing means not just addressing discrete challenges as they arise, but formulating comprehensive policies aimed at giving large social systems — and indeed society itself — more rational and coherent forms and functions. In this view, the long-term, systemic problems of health care, education, and the environment cannot be solved in small pieces. They must be taken on in whole."

In Schambra’s view the policy approach goes back to the Progressive movement that, a century ago, tried to tame the tribal conflicts of democratic politics by applying “the new wisdom of the social sciences to the art of government,” and rising above the narrow and the parochial.

Unfortunately the Progressive approach does not work. That’s what Schambra argues, and what Broder dimly underatands when he writes:

Obama, budget director Peter Orszag and health czar Nancy-Ann DeParle grasp the intricacies of the health-care system as well as any three humans, and they could write a law to make it far more efficient.

But as soon as their rational plan hits the Congress it gets torn apart by special interests and factional rivalries. Reality is not quite as rational as Obama and his czars want to think.

It’s good that David Broder has finally come to the party. Conservatives have been trying for at least half a century to teach liberals that the one-size-fits-all model doesn’t work. It was 1944 when F.A. Hayek argued this in The Road to Serfdom.

In the dim light of dawn, Broder prudently shelters his readers from the full force of Scharma’s argument. Obama is bound to fail, according to Scharma, just like Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton.

Our constitutional system is constructed on [an] understanding of the limits of reason and of the goals of politics. Every effort to impose the policy approach upon it has so far ended in failure and disappointment, and done much lasting harm.

Let us rehearse the conservative critique of the “policy approach” to government:

Different people bring different moral systems “rooted in many centuries of experience and wisdom” to society’s problems. If you treat society as a problem to be solved, you are privileging one moral system over the others.
Government is force. If you have a single, system-wide government program for education, for health care, and for the relief of the poor, you are doing it with force. Is force really necessary?
Hayek’s Law. Thirty-five policy experts “czars” and their staffs cannot beat the knowledge of 300 million Americans on how to make the country work.
Graves’ Law. “Damn it all, a person has a right to be who he is.”
Even if you could come up with the perfect health-care system for today, and get it through Congress, what about tomorrow? How does your brilliant idea get to adapt to changing circumstances?
What about the Law of Unintended Consequences?

If that is all too complicated, here is the issue between conservatives and liberals in a nutshell.

From Daniel Henninger quoting Victor Fuchs: “Every time the state assumes an additional function such as health insurance, child care or benefits for the aged, the need for close family ties becomes weaker.” You get charts like this:

The chart shows that Fuchs’ statement is not strictly true. It needs a qualifier. With each government program “the need for close family ties becomes weaker,” starting with the poor. The problem with rational, systemic liberal government is that it hurts the poor first and hardest. When 40 percent of children born to high-school dropouts do not live with both parents, there is only one thing to say. This is wrong.

For conservatives, Barack Obama’s career in “the non-profits, advocacy coalitions, and foundations” of Chicago, his faith in policy professionals and social science all symbolize the failed liberal experiments of the last century. To liberals like Cass Sunstein, Obama may be an “’anti-Bush’ from whom we will see ‘a rigorously evidence-based government.’” To conservatives, Obama represents fantasy-based government.

What liberals fail to see is that their cozy world of non-profits, advocacy coalitions, and foundations is utterly self-serving and corrupt. It is a world in which rigorous evidence and big money are passed from insider to insider in a derivatives trading scheme.

Some day, a conservative activist is going to figure out how to explain this to the American people. Maybe his name is Andrew Breitbart, and he already did.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

Hugo on Genius

“Tear down theory, poetic systems� No more rules, no more models� Genius conjures up rather than learns� ” —Victor Hugo
C�sar Gra�a, Bohemian versus Bourgeois

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Faith & Purpose

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Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Religion, Property, and Family

But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family. Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family, (and also anti-religion), is not promising.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

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