Our own history is replete with examples. If Harry Truman had followed the polls in 1947, he would have scrapped his far-sighted vision for the postwar world. His popularity was low. The Republicans had overwhelming majorities in the House and Senate. Internationalism was traditionally unpopular in Republican constituencies. But he had the courage to make a powerful case for what was right. Republicans in the House and Senate provided the votes necessary for approval of the Greek-Turkish aid program, the Marshall Plan, and NATO, the cornerstones of the policy of containment that would lead to victory in the Cold War. More recently, our opening to China in 1972 and President Bush’s decision to oppose Saddam Hussein’s aggression against Kuwait in 1990 would not have occurred if we had followed the polls rather than leading public opinion.
Pundits frequently ridicule members of the House and Senate for failing to have the guts to vote for what is right even if they risk their seats by doing so. But expecting politicians to cast votes against their political interest is just as unreasonable as expecting reporters to turn in exposés of the business affairs of their publishers. Legislators, like journalists, are only human. A President cannot govern by asking members of Congress to sacrifice themselves. Instead he must use the powers of persuasion inherent in the nation’s highest office to transform a position that is right but unpopular into one that is acclaimed. Only by persuading the American people will he be able to persuade the Congress and thus earn support for his policies.
EQUAL OPPORTUNITY, NOT EQUAL OUTCOMES
The founding fathers believed that civil rights belonged to individuals, not groups. The principle of natural rights embodied in the Declaration of Independence defined our goal as equality of opportunity, which rejects distinctions of legal status and privilege defined by race, religion, ethnicity, tribe, language, or sex. Everyone is the same in the eyes of the law. But insisting on equality of opportunity is the opposite of demanding equality of result.
Individuals differ significantly in the natural endowments of intelligence, skills, character, perseverance, and just plain luck on which success in life depends. The Constitution and its underlying philosophy affirm that individuals must be given the right to succeed on the basis of merit, which implies that not all will succeed equally.
In 1969, my administration put into effect the Philadelphia Plan, which required goals and timetables for minority hiring in connection with federal construction contracts. It was carefully crafted to crack open what were then the almost completely lily-white construction unions and to compel them to start accepting blacks into their apprentice programs and membership ranks. We deliberately distinguished between goals and quotas, even though numerical goals, over specified periods, were set in the resulting contracts. Compliance was judged not by an arbitrary look at the numbers alone but by a broad review of a contractor’s effort to provide equal employment opportunity. This was the right kind of affirmative action—a specifically targeted plan, temporary in nature, designed to remedy a specific, clear denial of equal opportunity. And it worked.
In the years that followed, however, the courts, the civil rights establishment, and some federal enforcement agencies increasingly pressed the notion of affirmative action beyond equal opportunity to require equality of result, regardless of whether or not any deliberate discrimination had taken place. Broad goals became rigid quotas; in many cases the new test became one of “disparate impact”—that is, whether the ethnic composition of a company’s workforce precisely mirrored the ethnic composition of the community, without regard for individual ability, interest, or anything else.
Over the past two decades, courts have sanctioned reverse discrimination and racial quotas in university admissions, hiring, and promotion. They have allowed reverse discrimination in public employment, the private sector, and government contracting. They have upheld and sometimes even demanded the creation of gerrymandered minority districts to ensure that such districts are represented by a member of a particular minority. In some cases, judges have not only authorized quotas in situations in which there was no intentional discrimination but have imposed quotas themselves.
The case of Lani Guinier is revealing. Her nomination for the top civil rights post in the Justice Department was withdrawn by President Clinton because of the storm over her advocacy of proportional representation for politically correct minorities, but what got her into trouble was more her candor than her ideas. American universities and employers routinely accept less-qualified applicants over their more-qualified competitors. In the California college system, Asian applicants with superior qualifications are often discriminated against on the grounds that Asians are overrepresented. Government employers typically give “race normal” tests, which grade minority applicants on a curve only in relation to other members of the same minority.
President Clinton’s exaggerated use of the quota system to fill his cabinet was no surprise. Many liberal Democrats have not only demanded such affirmative action but have attempted to apply it to an ever-expanding category of “victims,” who now make up close to two thirds of the population.
This institutionalization of preferential treatment, with the theory of group rights it represents, undermines the basic principles of our Constitution and a free society. It repudiates the idea of merit essential to a competitive and fair society. It often has the unintended consequence of encouraging rather than overcoming failure. It leads the beneficiaries to think of themselves as passive victims whose fate depends on others rather than on whether they seize the opportunities available to all Americans. It also epitomizes the corrosive entitlement mentality that increasingly pervades American society—one of the greatest threats to our fiscal health, our moral fiber, and our ability to renew our nation. It used to be said that some people thought the world owed them a living. Today, millions of Americans think Washington owes them one. Proponents of the welfare state assert that simply by virtue of living in the United States a person is entitled not only to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness but also to food, clothing, health care, and many other amenities of life.
Some on the right like to bash “welfare queens,” suggesting that the entitlement mentality belongs exclusively to the poor. Although it is true that the Great Society programs of the 1960s fostered a lingering sense of dependency among millions of poor Americans, it is time to tear down the double standard that characterizes most debates about this issue. The poor make convenient targets. But if middle-class and even rich Americans want to find someone to blame for the burden the entitlement mentality puts on the federal budget, they should look in the mirror. Wealthy farmers say they cannot survive without price supports. Steel makers and their unions demand protection from foreign competitors. Bankers expect the federal government to cover their bad loans. Well-off retirees whose Social Security payments far exceed their contributions oppose any politician who suggests their benefits be limited. College students believe they are entitled to low-interest loans secured by taxpayers who could not afford to go to college themselves. Lawyers, doctors, and businesspeople all want their place at the federal trough.
The entitlement mentality has been created by politicians who promise more than government can afford and professional liberals who demand that government do that which it is not competent to do. It threatens to destroy the virtues of self-reliance, individual responsibility, initiative, and enterprise that built our country and will be indispensable in any effort to renew it. All Americans should have an equal opportunity to earn the good things of life. But except for those who are unable to do so, they are not entitled to receive those good things from the earnings of others.
There is no reason why Americans should receive Social Security, medical benefits, and other government subsidies without regard to their ability to pay. Only one dollar of every five of non-means-tested entitlement goes to the poor. If our political leadership summoned the courage to cut these programs on a means-tested basis, we would achieve substantial savings and
also more fairly distribute the burden of cutting costs to middle-and upper-income taxpayers. The most serious shortcoming of the Reagan and Bush administrations was their failure to cut the level of entitlement going to those who are not poor, though it is true they received no encouragement from the Democratic opposition to cut these programs. On the contrary, the current administration has continued to fight not only to preserve the present levels of entitlement but to expand the application of this corrosive principle in new and costly ways.
America was “conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” It was also conceived as a society that would provide opportunity, reward effort, and encourage industry; in which people could go as far as their energy and skill would take them—but in which rights would be coupled with responsibilities.
HARDHEADED IDEALISM AND ENLIGHTENED REALISM
The founding fathers did not consider human beings irredeemably evil or innately perfectible. Instead, they had a mixed view of human nature, considering most individuals a composite of potential goodness and wickedness. Man’s capacity for evil made restraints on absolute power and unbridled self-interest necessary. But his capacity for good made decent government possible. The founders believed that representative government presupposed a high degree of civic virtue, an insight that modern libertarians do not appreciate.
Knowing that the search for the perfect was the enemy of the good, they sought to establish the best practicable order to bring out man’s best and restrain his worst instincts. Hamilton and Madison recognized the importance of self-interest and wished to harness it, rather than to suppress it, to serve the common good.
The grisly history of the twentieth century demonstrates tragically the evil that can be done by governments that try to change human nature. Zbigniew Brzezinski devastatingly describes the attempts of Nazi Germany and communism to achieve through coercion what each considered a utopia as the most arrogant effort in human history to attain control over the totality of the human environment, to define dogmatically man’s social organization, and to condition the human personality. Though these attempts ultimately failed, they inflicted death on more than 160 million people through deliberate and “politically motivated carnage.”
By contrast, the American combination of hardheaded idealism and enlightened realism has built a record of world leadership, prosperity, and essential decency that no nation, past or present, can match. It has enabled us to lead abroad and achieve a remarkable degree of prosperity and social justice at home, not on the basis of narrow and selfish interests but through the appeal of high ideals and common values.
Yet even for the United States, idealism invites danger. Utopian idealism has sometimes caused our foreign policy to swing dangerously between ideological crusades and shortsighted isolationism. As the total failure of the Great Society should warn us, the utopian impulse can lead to enormously costly and counterproductive domestic policies in pursuit of the unachievable and undesirable: a risk-free, radically egalitarian society that would ultimately extinguish man’s freedom. Egalitarianism denies human nature. Compulsive risk-avoidance denies human experience. The key to success in both government and life is not risk-avoidance but risk-assessment. In determining what risks to take, we cannot be totally obsessed by what we might lose. We should always keep front and center what we might gain. We should always remember the words of St. Thomas Aquinas seven centuries ago: “If the highest aim of a captain is to preserve his ship, he would keep it in port forever.”
Idealism without realism is naïve and dangerous. Realism without idealism is cynical and meaningless. The key to effective leadership at home and abroad is a realistic idealism that succumbs to neither utopianism nor despair.
THE MEDIA: FREEDOM WITHOUT CONSTRAINT
The founders profoundly believed in the importance of freedom of speech and respect for, if not agreement with, all expression of opinion. Their hope was that reasonable people would debate issues vigorously but in a spirit of openness and toleration.
Freedom of the press is essential to the vitality of representative democracy and to the protection of individual rights. It provides an indispensable arena for open debate. On good days, it can actually contribute to informing the electorate. Those of us who complain about the behavior of today’s media must remember that similar complaints are as old as the republic. Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, Cleveland, Hoover, and Franklin Roosevelt all received media treatment as scathing as any in the present era. An adversarial media culture is a fact of life.
Nevertheless, the media bear a large share of the responsibility for the current loss of faith in American political institutions. Although far more hostile to conservatives than to liberals, their institutional bias makes for excessively harsh criticism of all politicians and public officials. There is no easy balance between legitimate inquiry and sensational interest. But competitive pressures too often push the media past the limits of responsibility, destructively and unnecessarily undermining the authority and credibility of government. One egregious example was the attempt by the media to delegitimize Ronald Reagan’s victory in 1980 by attributing it, falsely and without evidence, to a deal with the Ayatollah.
Some elements of the media even continue to give credence to the ludicrous notion that Lyndon Johnson and a host of other officials engaged in a vast conspiracy in the assassination of President Kennedy. They gave serious treatment and positive reviews to the movie JFK, which blended historical fact with blatantly malicious fiction. If they were to be believed, it would follow that the United States has lacked any truly legitimate government since 1963. The character assassinations of Clement Haynsworth, Robert Bork, and Clarence Thomas, in which the media gleefully participated, were also disgraceful episodes that have had the effect of discouraging individuals of high merit from government service. The American press could make a major contribution to improving the American system by restoring perspective and balance to its coverage. Examining public figures with a media microscope is justifiable. Using a proctoscope goes too far.
Walter Lippmann put it best thirty-eight years ago in his classic The Public Philosophy: “The right to utter words whether or not they have meaning and regardless of their truth could not be a vital interest to a great state but for the presumption that they are the chaff with the utterance of true significant words. But when the chaff of silliness and deception is so voluminous that it submerges the kernels of truth, freedom of speech may produce such frivolity that it cannot be preserved against the restoration of order and decency.”
Before the era of Vietnam and Watergate, the media’s neglect of “kernels of truth” in favor of salaciousness and rumormongering was somehow more tolerable because it was at least not obscured by a veneer of sanctimoniousness. Journalists have always been an arrogant breed. Bert Andrews of The New York Herald-Tribune, who worked with me on the Alger Hiss case, once told me that the problem with some of his colleagues who covered the State Department was that “instead of writing about the Secretary of State, they write as if they were the Secretary of State.” A bygone era’s ink-stained wretches, as depicted in the classic film The Front Page—amiable, scandal-mongering slobs sitting around the courthouse pressroom playing cards and waiting for the next hanging—have become our era’s self-certified saviors of the republic. A productive evening spent peering through a politician’s bedroom window can be the key to a prestigious editorship and even someday a shot at the Chair in the Media and Public Responsibility at any number of universities. The result of the media’s appointing themselves as a de facto branch of government, a sort of non-taxpayer-supported team of surrogate special prosecutors, is that they have become even more immune to criticism than ever before, even less willing to admit their errors and excesses. And that will inevitably hurt a profession whose only restraint is what it manages to impose upon itself.
The media would not have physicians certify themselves, politicians investiga
te themselves, or even auto mechanics license themselves, but we are taught to expect that editors, reporters, and broadcasters have a unique capacity to ensure that they themselves act responsibly. The fact that they err just as often as other human beings but atone almost never cannot be good for their professional souls; and it has been demonstrably bad for their public standing.
The 1960s and 1970s brought about a profound change in the media’s perception of their role in society. Rather than pulling an oar while occasionally speaking up about the direction in which the boat is going, the prestige media now appear to observe the race from the shore, raising the occasional eyebrow at one another. Three-hour panel discussions can take place at journalism schools about whether an editor should withhold, at the government’s request, publication of a story about an impending use of military power if American lives were at stake. I could name two dozen journalists from the 1950s, all of them competent pros, who would not have hesitated to come down on the side of the lives of our servicemen and women.
One reason for the change is that journalists have become even more cynical than before. Another is that they seem increasingly to have little if any conception that they share responsibility for building an atmosphere of common purpose in an increasingly fractured society. Like so much of the intellectual establishment, they seem animated by an instinctual negativity about America and its values and a sense of ambivalence about its power and stature.
If American renewal is to become a reality, the media will have to resolve to help the process along rather than to analyze and critique it so relentlessly that it dies aborning. Journalists will have to learn to look in the mirror and not be afraid their National Press Club cards will be revoked if they say, “I want America to be strong and free and fair and civil and to continue to grow and prosper.”
Beyond Peace Page 21