Seize the Moment

by Richard Nixon

  It has become fashionable, especially in the news media, to measure every effort to deal with America’s domestic needs in purely quantitative terms—and specifically to measure it solely by the number of additional federal dollars committed to federal programs that are labeled, however falsely, as cures. This is nonsense. It represents the sort of one-dimensional thinking that gave us the great failure called the Great Society. The Great Society was given a blank check. It bounced. While some of the poor advanced over the last twenty-five years, most who did so succeeded the old-fashioned way—by their own efforts. Most inner-city poor are worse off today than they were before President Johnson launched the Great Society.

  If we are both serious and realistic about addressing the nation’s key domestic needs, we must make two clear distinctions.

  First, the most critical of our social problems—crime, drugs, dependency, education—center on values, attitudes, and behavior. These are not dependent on dollars, and programs to deal with them that are measured in dollars are often counterproductive. More than dollars we need direction—a clear, forceful set of values and norms that the community accepts and imposes.

  Second, a vital distinction exists between a national response and a federal response. From the beginning, the secret of America’s success has been that it has not depended on government, but rather has been achieved by private institutions and all the many centers of activity that make up our free society. In most matters that directly touch people, those organizations operate more effectively than the federal government would. And they have the energy, the resources, and the skill to get things done. If we depend on government, we force all concerned to follow the government’s rigid prescriptions, on the government’s timetable, and through the often impenetrable labyrinths of the government’s bureaucracy.

  This is not the way a free society is meant to work. And it is not the way a successful society does work. As Goethe observed two hundred years ago, “What is the best government? That which teaches us to govern ourselves.”

  One of the key roles of national leadership is to focus people’s attention on what needs to be done and inspire them to do it. The more the federal government steps in and does things for people—whether for individuals, state and local governments, school boards, or communities—the less they are going to do for themselves and for one another. The best spur to initiative by the private sector is to let people know that if they want something done, they had better roll up their sleeves and do it. The best role for the federal government is to create conditions conducive to doing it.

  Most of our current ills are the direct result of going down the wrong path—of flirting too much with the dreams and doctrines represented by statist, socialist ideals, and in the process eroding the unique and special values that have made America a great nation. At a time when those who have tried socialism are turning our way, we should not turn their way.

  To take one glaring example, we have made a mistake in addressing issues such as the exploding costs of health care in ways that removed market forces from the equation. We have erred by separating health care consumers from any concern about the costs of the care being provided. We need to work out a system that includes a greater emphasis on preventive care, sufficient public funding for health insurance for those who cannot afford it in the private sector, competition among both health care providers and health insurance providers to keep down the costs of both, and decoupling the cost of health care from the cost of adding workers to the payroll.

  On another front, we will not gain the upper hand in the war against drugs until we shift the focus of our efforts from a supply-side battle in distant corners of the world to a demand-side battle at home. There is no way that the United States can seal its borders tight enough to stop drug trafficking. While budgets for drug interdiction have risen, the street price of drugs has dropped as traffickers devised ever-more-artful means to penetrate our defenses. Victory will only come if we reduce the demand for drugs through stronger legal sanctions, education, treatment, and most important, a radical change in community values. The current drug culture has its roots in the permissive attitudes of the 1960s, which glorified the use of both marijuana and hard drugs, and in the condoning of the “casual” use of drugs today. Unless we reach children early with knowledge of the consequences of drug use, and unless we reverse the tolerance and even glamorizing of drug use in the popular culture of Hollywood and the rest of the entertainment industry, we will stand no chance of winning the war on drugs. And unless we adopt and enforce strict gun-control laws—ones much tougher than the Brady bill—we will never succeed in stemming the violence spawned by the drug trade.

  For years, it has been popular in many quarters to say that the answer to poverty in America is to give the poor money. This approach is tragically misguided. We should heed the old proverb, “Give a man a fish, and he has food for a day; teach him to fish, and he has food for a lifetime.” There is a place for welfare payments and other purely financial aid, but only as a means of meeting temporary needs and only in conjunction with a structure of incentives—both positive and negative—designed to make the dependent independent. Dependency weakens the nation and destroys the individual, yet too much of our welfare system today merely institutionalizes dependency and perpetuates it from one generation to the next.

  Attacking the pathology of the urban underclass is central to success in meeting the whole range of our domestic social needs. This underclass is primarily responsible for the plague of violent crime. It drains the resources of our state and local governments and of our social service institutions. It cripples much of our school system. It represents an enormous human waste: millions of people wasting away in slums could be productive members of the larger society, strengthening the nation in the global economic competition and adding to its reputation as a place of opportunity.

  The underclass will be rescued only to the extent that its members can be induced to change their patterns of behavior. They suffer not so much from material poverty as from behavioral poverty—a vicious cycle of illegitimacy, broken families, lax work ethics, and welfare dependency. We have developed this vast and often predatory underclass precisely because we adopted policies that denied the individual’s responsibility for his own condition and for the consequences of his own behavior. Too often, the most effective sanctions in the inner cities today are not against destructive behavior but against constructive behavior, as in the case of those students who try to study and, because of this, are shunned or even persecuted by their classmates for “acting white.”

  The worst thing that we could do would be simply to increase the present programs of welfare maintenance, which make no demands on the recipient and pay no dividends to society. Unless a program motivates the recipients to change their behavior, it cannot be considered a success. By those standards, 90 percent of the current welfare system is an abject failure. It not only perpetuates the behavioral pathologies, but also actively encourages them by making the decision to work or go on welfare purely a pragmatic one of which pays better, with welfare often the winner.

  Liberalism holds as its central article of faith that society—“the system”—and not the individual is responsible for antisocial behavior. This approach has produced disaster in coping with the problems of the inner city.

  The only way to lift people out of the underclass is to change their behavior. This requires national leadership. But above all, it depends on local and community leadership. It requires a wrenching, radical change in the systems of values that govern in the inner city. We must accept the fact that when people are poor because they choose not to make the effort or to accept the discipline needed to earn a living, it is not only appropriate but necessary that they suffer the consequences of that choice.

  The threat of having to do without is central to a productive economy. Some people work because they want to, but most people work because they have to. If you eliminate the necessity, you rem
ove the motivation. Even worse, you introduce a spiritual rot that eats at the foundation of society itself. Those who do work resent those who do not, and they also resent the system that rewards the lazy with leisure. Seeing the lazy rip off the system and get away with it, they are tempted to rip it off in their own ways. Society as a whole goes on a downward spiral of alienation and irresponsibility, which in turn fosters hostility, resentment, and even revenge.

  An approach based on enforcing society’s values will be fiercely rejected by most of the noisiest self-proclaimed tribunes of the poor, who have created a thriving poverty industry of their own. A lot of that poverty industry is built on the hustle. It is about getting and taking in the name of the poor but not for the benefit of the poor. It is about preserving the jobs and status of the welfare bureaucracies that ostensibly serve the poor but primarily serve themselves. It is the old, familiar shell game played out on a grand national stage.

  The exploiting class in the black community today is every bit as despicable as those who lived on the slave trade. Their cynical manipulation of the fears, anxieties, and vulnerabilities of their black constituents is itself a form of psychological slavery. America’s blacks will not be fully free until they free themselves from that exploiting class—until they learn that each of them can make it on his or her own and until they set out to do what it takes to make it on their own. As long as they give their allegiance to the loud wheedlers for alms, they will not have their independence. And without their independence, they will not truly have their freedom.

  Almost anyone can lead a productive life. The basic distinction we must draw is between those who choose to do so and those who choose not to do so. Those who choose to do so but need help in getting started deserve that help. Those who through misfortune falter along the way and need a hand back up deserve it. But those who willfully fail to prepare themselves for a job or self-indulgently sink themselves into drugs have no claim on the community conscience.

  Once we make this crystal clear, the numbers choosing life outside the productive economy will drop drastically. Crime rates will fall. Despair will diminish. Productivity and incomes will rise. Alienation will give way to pride and a sense of community. All of this requires one basic step: a radical change in attitude among those who live on the fringes of civilized society. Like behavior, attitudes are learned. Changing attitudes requires altering our social system of reward and punishment. It requires reinstilling that basic sense of personal responsibility that has been one of the prime casualties of the liberal era.

  Racism will not be conquered with more welfare. It will be overcome when people no longer draw invidious distinctions among one another on the basis of skin color. The best way to speed that day is to get more blacks and other minorities climbing the ladder of opportunity. This requires ensuring that any remaining obstacles are removed. And it requires those at the bottom of the ladder to take the first step and then to make the climb.

  What a person makes of that opportunity is, and should be, up to the person himself. The flip side of individual freedom is individual opportunity. In maximizing opportunity government has a key role in ensuring that individuals are able to take advantage of it. This means promoting educational achievement. It means motivating people to use the advantages available to them. It means knocking down barriers of discrimination that have historically held so many back. It means, in many cases, extending a helping hand to those who have the will to make the climb but have not found the way. This is more than a moral obligation. It represents an indispensable investment in the nation’s future.

  To be both strong and rich is not enough. We must also be an example for others to follow. After Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar, William Pitt was toasted as the savior of Europe. He responded, “Europe will not be saved by any single man. England has saved herself by her exertions and will, I trust, save Europe by her example.” To paraphrase, the victory of freedom will not be won by America alone. We can make freedom work by our exertions at home and enable freedom to win abroad by our example.

  • • •

  How should the United States exercise its leadership in today’s world? The world needs U.S. leadership militarily, politically, and economically. Most of all, it needs our leadership in the critical arena of ideas.

  Even within and among the countries of Western Europe, bitter conflicts have arisen over the extent to which markets should be controlled by the state and over the degree to which democratic choices of individual nations should be turned over to a new supranational bureaucracy. The danger that the united Europe after 1992 will become protectionist and socialist is real. This is one reason why a continued active American presence is essential to Europe, the United States, and the world. Our commitment to democracy and free markets could prove to be a vital counterweight to the forces trying to turn Europe inward and backward.

  As the world’s only complete superpower, the United States must exercise leadership without imposing its political and cultural values on others. This is a fine line to walk. But we can advance our values and ideals with restraint dictated by realism. We should cultivate the growth of democratic principles where a reasonable prospect exists for their success and where they would be supported by national traditions, customs, and institutions. We should not, however, engage in an indiscriminate global ideological crusade.

  Traditionally, nations have chosen to wage war according to the logic of their interests. America is no exception, even though leaders such as Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt skillfully couched their appeals to war in terms of the natural idealism of the American people. To a substantial extent, President Bush also followed this tradition in the Persian Gulf War. This approach should not be dismissed as cynicism. Our basic idealism is not only a defining characteristic and animating force of the United States but also a key facet of our own national interests.

  America’s concern for the Kurds, like its earlier concern for the victims of the Holocaust in World War II, was genuinely based on compassion rather than on a geopolitical calculus. But the plight of the Kurds, like that of the Jews in Europe under Hitler’s rule, cannot be divorced from that equation. The hardheaded calculations of power politics do not exist in a vacuum. They must serve not just our security interests, but our wider values as well.

  America’s central national interest in the world today can be defined in terms of structure and process. In my administration, I spoke often of building a “structure of peace.” By that, I meant a set of interlocking relationships, together with accepted processes for resolving differences and effective deterrents to aggression that would allow even antagonists to live together in a reasonable expectation that peace was secure enough to be maintained among them.

  This kind of structure requires a decent respect for the norms of civilized behavior both among and within nations. Promoting—and, when necessary and possible, enforcing—such norms may seem idealistic. But it reflects a hardheaded assessment that practical idealism represents an indispensable component of realism in the modern world. While our short-term goals must be governed by the limits of our resources and our ability to shape a frustrating and intractable world, such constraints should not limit our long-term aspirations. Just as no man is an island, no nation lives in isolation. When freedom is denied in one country, it is diminished in all.

  This does not mean that we should insist that other nations copy our particular form of government. Many countries are not ready for it. Each nation must develop its own institutions and advance at its own pace. Democracy literally means government by the people. It must come from the people. In contrast to the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, the peaceful revolution in Eastern Europe in 1989 and in the Soviet Union in 1991 were peoples’ revolutions. They were not imposed from above by an elite few—a “vanguard.” They welled up from below—from the people themselves. Democracy has to grow roots and branches in a society before it blossoms. We can and should work to speed this growth, but the pro
cess is vital to realizing the promise.

  In the former Soviet Union, after centuries of autocratic rule, the people have only recently had a chance to begin experimenting with the institutions of self-government. They face enormous challenges, but have shown themselves eager to learn and alert to the lessons of other countries. If they continue to go down this path, they will astonish the world with their achievements.

  To say that we should be realistic does not mean that we should abandon our idealism. Practical idealism differs fundamentally from mere expediency. We should be circumspect about prescribing the political means chosen by others, but we should insist that those political means serve moral political ends. We seek to advance the cause of freedom, but we must recognize that in different cultures it will take different forms and advance in different ways.

  The great danger in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union is that the current high expectations, when not fully met, could themselves lead to impatience and disillusionment and ultimately a return to coercion and control. It is precisely when a faith appears to have been betrayed that a people are most susceptible to the lures of the demagogue. These coming years are critical to the future of Europe and the world. It is vital that the experiments in freedom now being tried should succeed, that those countries enslaved for so long should not stumble back into socialism or some other form of statist domination.

  This means help. It means example. The revolution for freedom currently sweeping the world began with a spark of hope—what Dostoyevsky called “the fire in the minds of men.” It is a testament to the human spirit that this fire continues to burn so brightly in so many places among so many people. As Americans, we carry part of the original flame. We must make sure it is never extinguished.