Yet most will agree that all is not well in America. Symptoms of our problems are depressingly familiar. Many Americans believe the political system is in gridlock, incapable of addressing serious problems because the political leadership has become inaccessible and unresponsive. Since the Great Society was launched in 1965, the federal government has spent staggering sums on new domestic programs. These programs have not delivered on their extravagant promises. This contributes to cynicism about government in all areas. Ross Perot’s appeal is a symptom of this pervasive mistrust.
When President Bush left office on January 20, 1993, the national debt was over $4 trillion. The budget deficit of over $300 billion in 1993 will be added to that debt. There is little relief in sight, even by the most optimistic projections of the administration’s budget plan. Low rates of savings, investment, and productivity growth menace America’s global economic leadership. The vicious circle of poverty has become worse for millions, despite the billions spent to alleviate it.
There is a growing sense that the social contract essential to a free society has begun to unravel. Since the 1960s, the violent crime rate has increased more than 560 percent. Illegitimate births have increased more than 400 percent. The divorce rate has quadrupled. The percentage of children living in single-family homes has tripled. One child in eight lives on welfare, more than triple the percentage in 1960. The suicide rate among teenagers has more than doubled. Every day, 160,000 students stay home from school out of fear of violence. Drug use continues to escalate, and America’s inner cities still suffer the ravages inflicted by over two million cocaine addicts.
The average American watches nearly fifty hours of television a week, a 25 percent increase since 1960, and ten hours more than the average work week. What he sees is mindnumbing, idiotic, violent, and sexually explicit. A 1991 survey revealed that adults believe television has the greatest influence on children’s values—more than parents, teachers, and religious leaders combined.
What many commentators now join in calling a crisis of the spirit has affected all classes in American society. Mrs. Clinton deserves credit for her courage in articulating the absence of higher purpose in life, despite the fact that since the late 1960s many of her most liberal supporters have relentlessly assaulted traditional values in the name of liberation. Unfortunately, most of the administration’s remedies would make the problems worse. Liberals remain committed economically to a further vast expansion of the welfare state; socially to an agenda of personal liberation from traditional morality and to equality not of opportunity but of result; and internationally to a weak multilateralism whose object is to make America a follower rather than a leader.
The administration’s ambitious agenda to increase the size and scope of government repeats the domestic policy mistakes of the past. What the United States needs is not bigger government but a renewal of its commitment to limited but strong government; economic freedom, which is the only way to assure prosperity and individual liberty; and a moral and cultural system that strengthens the family, personal responsibility, and the instincts for civic virtue.
STRONG GOVERNMENT, BUT LIMITED GOVERNMENT
The 1992 presidential campaign dramatically demonstrated Americans’ dissatisfaction with politics as usual. Three voters in four believed that the United States was on the wrong track. President Clinton and Ross Perot ran as outsiders, denouncing the status quo. Even President Bush was forced to cast himself as the candidate for change. According to polls, distrust of government is at an all-time high. Only 42 percent of Americans have at least a fair amount of confidence in the federal government. By a ratio of more than three to one, most Americans believe that it creates more problems than it solves.
Public dissatisfaction is so strong that a variety of proposals for drastic reform have won widespread support. Most liberals advocate a vast expansion of government as the remedy for the nation’s ills. Many conservatives equate good government with weak government, on the theory that those who govern least govern best. There is a proposal for a one-term, six-year Presidency, another for a balanced-budget amendment. Ross Perot’s answer is plebiscitary democracy, which takes power away from elected representatives and puts it directly in the hands of the people.
All are wrong.
Some proposed reforms have merit. Term limits and the line-item veto are good ideas that should be enacted into law. But the balanced-budget amendment is a bad idea. It is unduly restrictive in theory and unenforceable in practice, and would invite even more cynicism about how government operates. The one-term Presidency is an equally bad idea. Limiting the President to a six-year term would render him less effective, by making him a lame duck the first day he took office, and less accountable, by removing the public’s right to render a reelection verdict.
There is nothing wrong with the American political system that a return to the founding fathers’ wisdom could not cure. But the weakening of political parties, the erosion of the President’s proper authority, a diffusion of authority within Congress, the emergence of an imperial judiciary, an arrogant media following their whims and answering to no one, and a vast expansion of government into areas where it does not belong—all these have fragmented the power, responsibility, focus, and accountability necessary for effective government.
We need to return to first principles on government’s proper role and the appropriate distribution of authority within government. The Constitution provides for three equal branches of government, each balancing the others. We need a limited but strong government that provides “energy in the executive.” We cannot afford government dominated by an imperial judiciary and an imperial Congress dedicated primarily to involving government in subjects it does not understand and problems it cannot solve.
The most fundamental problem is widespread failure to understand the purposes of government and how it works. Our bloated and intrusive government encourages passivity, stifles initiative, and produces gridlock; for all its size, it is weak. A necessary condition for American renewal is to rediscover and act upon the great insights of the founders, which the clamor of contemporary liberals, libertarians, and populists has obscured.
The founding fathers were not utopians but were practical idealists. Recognizing that man is inherently flawed and driven by self-interest, they sought to devise a system of government that took these realities into account. Their intent was not to create a new man, to supply meaning to empty lives, to redistribute wealth, or to run the economy. Rather, their aims were limited but lofty: to create a system able to maintain the conditions of freedom against internal and external threat, to administer the nation’s laws effectively, and to encourage rational deliberation and choice on the part of a self-governing people. As James Madison put it in The Federalist, Number 51, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.” Or as Immanuel Kant observed, “The best government is one that teaches us to govern ourselves.”
The founders wanted government strong enough to protect their security but not so strong as to threaten their liberty, so they placed careful limits on the realm of federal government action. But they also understood that freedom could not survive without a strong Presidency. In foreign affairs, the case for a strong Presidency is overwhelming. Only the President has the capacity, vital in foreign affairs, to initiate prompt and effective action. Legislators have limited constituencies; the President represents the nation. Just as it was wrong for Congress to enact the War Powers Act in 1973, limiting the President’s power to conduct foreign policy because of the unpopularity of the Vietnam War, it would be wrong to limit the President’s power to conduct foreign policy in the future because of the failures of President Clinton’s policies in Somalia, Haiti, and Bosnia. There is always the possibility that a President will make mistakes in acting during foreign policy crises, but it is more likely that the Congress would make an even greater mistak
e by not acting at all. This is particularly true now that only the United States has the power and responsibility to lead the forces of freedom in the world. The leader of the free world must be able to lead.
Today the problem is not an excessively strong Presidency, but a hobbled one. Obsessed by the danger of an imperial Presidency, many seem oblivious to the dangers of an imperial Congress. There are now more than twenty-five subcommittees in the House and Senate dealing with foreign policy. Foreign policy cannot be conducted by committee. Meanwhile, Presidents, with their limited terms, are more accountable to the electorate than an imperial Congress, to which incumbents are reelected 98 percent of the time. The President is subject to impeachment, congressional power over the purse, and other political and congressional constraints. And Presidents, particularly conservative ones, will always be restrained by an adversarial media.
Ironically, Congress has tacitly allowed the courts to appropriate legislative authority even while it has tried to appropriate executive authority. True constitutional government requires an independent judiciary, empowered to strike down legislative and executive acts that violate the Constitution. But some jurists seem to have forgotten that separation of powers depends equally on judicial restraint, which limits them to applying constitutional principles rather than creating them.
Under the guise of keeping the Constitution “current” or the doctrine of a “living and evolving Constitution,” jurists too often substitute their own policy preferences for those of the people’s elected representatives. This allows legislators to shift politically difficult issues away from the Congress, where they belong, to the courtroom, where they do not.
The character assassination of Robert Bork—the most highly qualified man nominated to the Supreme Court since Felix Frankfurter—illustrates the poverty of contemporary liberal thinking about the role of the judiciary under a separation-of-powers system. The founders would find it appalling that the Senate disqualified Bork because of his commitment to “original intent” as the basis for interpreting the Constitution. One of the most urgent tasks for American Presidents in the future is to educate people on the need to restore the judiciary to its proper role as guardian of the Constitution, not its amender.
Many lament the proliferation of big money and influence-peddling in Washington. This focuses on the symptom, not the cause of the problem. High-powered lobbyists go to Washington because of the vast expansion of government into every sector of society and the economy. Without significant retrenchment in the scope of government, lobbying and big money will be here to stay, simply because Washington is where the action is.
The debates about campaign finance reform and term limits, as they are being carried on among Washington’s most immovably entrenched legislators, would both amuse and discourage the founders. The campaign finance reform bill favored by the administration is an incumbents-protection plan. The version favored by the Republicans is a challengers-protection plan. Similarly, opponents of congressional term limits tend to be those who are in power, usually Democrats, while proponents tend to be those who want to be in power, usually Republicans. Since it should be obvious even to the most casual observer that both sides would switch their positions on reform the instant their political fortunes were reversed, their arguments have all the moral grandeur of hogs fighting over places at the trough.
I would rather be governed by a Republican-controlled Congress than a Democratic-controlled Congress. But both parties bear a measure of the blame for the crisis of confidence that sparked the debates about campaign finance reform and term limits to begin with: the pervasive lack of trust among the American people in the competence and good faith of the federal government. Both parties are using the voters’ cynicism as cover for efforts to jigger the system to fit their partisan and personal interests. Republicans and Democrats should stop posturing about campaign finance reform and develop a bipartisan program to attack the root cause of the excessive cost of campaigns: the bloated size of the federal government.
Their failure to do so thus far is the reason longtime members of Congress must be forced to step aside in favor of those who have less of a vested interest in the status quo. Term limits are an unfortunate but necessary remedy. They are unfortunate because they limit the people’s power to freely choose their representatives. But they have become necessary in order to sweep away the entrenched political elite, too many of whom may have come to Washington to do good but stayed to do very well—for themselves.
Some argue that if our government can defeat Saddam Hussein so decisively, then it ought to be able to solve our domestic problems. They fundamentally misunderstand the very purpose of government. Waging war and providing for national security are among those tasks for which governments are designed. Governments are incapable of running an economy, picking winners and losers in cutting-edge industries and technologies, transforming the nature of human beings, or creating a social utopia. The fallacy of contemporary liberalism is its assumption that every problem has a government solution. It does not.
We hear too much today about how to reinvent government and not enough about how to reduce it. Vice President Gore’s National Performance Review has proposed a number of initiatives aimed at consolidating redundant government agencies and instilling business skills in bureaucratic management. Although well-intentioned, these initiatives miss the forest for the trees. One American who better understands the issue is Peter Grace, whose bipartisan commission made comprehensive recommendations a decade ago for massive cuts in government spending. “While the Vice President has taken good ideas from his predecessors and introduced many of his own, he uses a butter knife on a job that requires a chain saw,” Grace observes. “Taxpayers are less interested in building a better bureaucrat than in getting the bureaucracy off their backs and out of their wallets.” Our aim should not be to make government more efficient in doing what it should not have tried to do in the first place.
In trying to do too much that it has no business doing, government does too little to meet its primary responsibility—to protect the lives, liberty, and property of the people, and to maintain those conditions under which a free economy can best create a new prosperity.
More than any reform plan, limiting government to its proper sphere will enhance the public’s faith in government. Reinvigorating the principle of federalism by transferring power from Washington to state and local governments would permit citizens to run more of their own affairs at a manageable level. At the same time, state and local governments provide laboratories for testing new approaches to domestic problems. In Wisconsin Governor Tommy Thompson has introduced a bold state welfare reform program. If it continues to be successful in reducing welfare rolls, it could become a model for a national program.
Many liberals, some conservatives, and Ross Perot have called for more direct democracy as a cure for government gridlock and unresponsiveness. Playing to the populist gallery, Perot has advocated national “electronic town meetings” in which American citizens would decide the fate of complex issues by spontaneous impulse rather than by informed deliberation.
This fatuous idea flies in the face of both experience and the Constitution. With a few exceptions similar to the New England town meeting, systems where citizens assemble and administer the government in person have a miserable record of chaos, faction, tyranny, and mob rule. As Hobbes observed three centuries ago, direct democracy creates an “aristocracy of orators.” The founders established the American system of government precisely because its deliberative institutions offered a cure for the ills of direct democracies. The purpose of delegating decisions to elected representatives is not to subvert the will of the people but to elevate and inform its judgments.
In a representative system, public opinion does matter. Presidents and congressmen who ignore it do so at their electoral peril. During his first debate with Stephen Douglas, Abraham Lincoln made an observation that is as true now as it was then: “In this and like c
ommunities, public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it, nothing can succeed. Consequently, he who molds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions.”
Lincoln and the founders recognized the equally great danger that public officials might merely ratify popular passions of the moment, without refinement, deliberation, or choice. This is precisely what the Constitution sought to avert by establishing a representative democracy based on elective offices and separation of powers.
Our problem today is not too little direct democracy but too many politicians who pander to the ephemeral mood swings of popular fashion.
Public opinion is a fickle mistress. What is popular is often not what is right. But what is right and unpopular can often be made popular if statesmen have the courage and foresight to lead. The contrasting political fates of Neville Chamberlain and Winston Churchill provide a striking illustration. Chamberlain and the catastrophically mistaken policy of appeasement reached their greatest popularity just after the Munich Conference of September 1938, when Great Britain and France sacrificed democratic Czechoslovakia to Hitler in the vain hope of sparing themselves. Meanwhile, Churchill was highly unpopular for heroically urging prompt, effective action to stop Hitler before it was too late. Today most of the world celebrates Churchill as the savior of freedom in one of its darkest hours. Very few celebrate Chamberlain.
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