Leveling America's Playing Field

According to this story, "Meritocracy in America," recently published by the conservative British publication The Economist:

A growing body of evidence suggests that the meritocratic ideal is in trouble in America. Income inequality is growing to levels not seen since the Gilded Age, around the 1880s. But social mobility is not increasing at anything like the same pace: would-be Horatio Algers are finding it no easier to climb from rags to riches, while the children of the privileged have a greater chance of staying at the top of the social heap. The United States risks calcifying into a European-style class-based society.

The article went on to quantify how dramatically income inequality in America has risen:

The past couple of decades have seen a huge increase in inequality in America. The Economic Policy Institute, a Washington think-tank, argues that between 1979 and 2000 the real income of households in the lowest fifth (the bottom 20% of earners) grew by 6.4%, while that of households in the top fifth grew by 70%. The family income of the top 1% grew by 184%—and that of the top 0.1% or 0.01% grew even faster. Back in 1979 the average income of the top 1% was 133 times that of the bottom 20%; by 2000 the income of the top 1% had risen to 189 times that of the bottom fifth.

Along these same lines:

[M]ore and more evidence from social scientists suggests that American society is much “stickier” than most Americans assume. Some researchers claim that social mobility is actually declining. A classic social survey in 1978 found that 23% of adult men who had been born in the bottom fifth of the population (as ranked by social and economic status) had made it into the top fifth. Earl Wysong of Indiana University and two colleagues recently decided to update the study. They compared the incomes of 2,749 father-and-son pairs from 1979 to 1998 and found that few sons had moved up the class ladder. Nearly 70% of the sons in 1998 had remained either at the same level or were doing worse than their fathers in 1979. The biggest increase in mobility had been at the top of society, with affluent sons moving upwards more often than their fathers had. They found that only 10% of the adult men born in the bottom quarter had made it to the top quarter.

President Bush has often (justly) been criticized as exacerbating the rise in inequality in America with his tax cuts that disproportionately benefit the richest among us. But the underlying problem precedes the Bush Administration, as The Economist's article shows.

Cynthia Tucker, a liberal columnist for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, agrees in this column, which quotes The Economist's article, that it's not all Bush's fault: "President Bush is not responsible for the hardening of class status; social mobility has been limited by a range of trends, including the demise of manufacturing jobs that guaranteed middle-class wages and lifelong benefits."

But she also faults Bush and his "so-called Ownership Society." She says it

... will make things worse for those stuck in the bottom half. His policies help those who already own stock, bonds and real estate; they do little for those who don't have much. As just one example, Bush has done little to help working-class and poor students pay college tuition (except to offer them the chance to serve in the military).

oldstyliberal, this blog's proprietor, doesn't think the Ownership Society itself a bad idea ... but he also agrees with Ms. Tucker that "if America is to live up to its ideals as an egalitarian nation where any child can grow up to be president of the United States or CEO of her own software company, we're going to have to level the playing field."

One way to level the playing field is to take Rep. Harold Ford, a Democratic congressman from Tennessee, up on his proposal to create American Stakeholder Accounts. In an op-ed column in the Washington Post of Jan. 25, 2005, the congressman wrote:

The time has come for a national strategy to give every child an ownership stake in America's future. In the tradition of the GI Bill and the Homestead Act, Congress should act on a bold initiative to introduce more middle- and lower-income Americans to the financial markets.

New Deal and Great Society programs have had great success reducing poverty. But these programs are not oriented toward wealth accumulation. To renew America's tradition of upward social mobility, we have to find new ways to help those living on modest incomes save and invest.

To do that, according to an online press release here, Ford proposes "the creation of American Stakeholder Accounts, savings accounts established at birth to give all children 'an ownership stake in America's future.'"

These investment accounts would be financed something like IRAs, with tax-free contributions. The accounts would be established for a newborn child by its parents; they would receive regular tax-free contributions from the parents thereafter; they would be restricted to relatively "safe" private investments, not wild speculation; and they could not be touched until the child is 18.

Then, after age 18, money could be taken out of the accounts, tax free, for a limited list of purposes such as paying college tuition.

These American Stakeholder Accounts would make even children born to families of limited means active participants in the Ownership Society. They would help America level its playing field, and that's all to the good.

Of Pinpricks and Exit Strategies

oldstyleliberal has been struggling to understand the "Support Our Troops" bumper ribbon phenomenon. What does it mean that so many cars these days display ribbons, especially since Americans' support for the war in Iraq itself is not all that strong, percentage-wise, according to polls?

To this blogger, it means just one thing: Americans don't want to happen to their troops today what happened during and after the nightmare of Vietnam. When support for the Vietnam War itself began to erode in the late 1960s, the bubble of moral/psychological support for those who were over there fighting got quickly pricked. The GIs came home to epithets, scorn, and widespread indifference ... if they came home at all. And somehow that was more wounding to a lot of them than anything they had experienced in 'Nam.

To put your life on the line, to stand ready to kill in order to protect someone or something, to actually do some killing and to see your buddies die ... and then come home to find no one cares, no one approves, no one supports what you did, no one wants to shake your hand. That's what happened after Vietnam.

No one wants the "Support Our Troops" bubble to be pricked this time, that's for sure. Not if it leads to Vietnam-like trauma, déjà vu all over again.

So many Americans are quite understandably afraid of anything that, however reasonable-seeming on its face, might turn into a pin to prick the "Support Our Troops" bubble.

It's accordingly no surprise that when on Jan. 27, 2005, just three days before the Iraqi elections, Democratic Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts made an address calling for a troop withdrawal beginning post haste and finishing in early 2006 (see news articles here and here; see text of address here), it was reviled by some as if, just possibly, it were an incipient pinprick:

Republican National Committee spokesman Brian Jones criticized Kennedy's timing. "It's remarkable that Senator Kennedy would deliver such an overtly pessimistic message only days before the Iraqi election," said Jones. "Kennedy's partisan political attack stands in stark contrast to President Bush's vision of spreading freedom around the world."

Kennedy had made what seemed like a reasonable case for starting the troops on their way home now:

"There may well be violence as we disengage militarily from Iraq and Iraq disengages politically from us, but there will be much more violence if we continue our present dangerous and destabilizing course," said Kennedy. "It will not be easy to extricate ourselves from Iraq, but we must begin."

Yet there was not a lot of GOP or bipartisan support for Kennedy. Some Democrats such as Massachusetts Congressman Marty Meehan applauded, but by and large Americans held their collective breath and hoped the Kennedy rhetoric wouldn't morph into a pin to burst the "Support Our Troops" bubble.

oldstyliberal agrees with Kennedy to this extent: We need an exit strategy, and its implementation must begin now — now that the elections have taken place in Iraq, that is. In truth, though, the quickest exit strategy from Iraq runs through "building a competent and well-equipped Iraqi [security] force," in the words of Michael O'Hanlon, a Brookings Institution defense analyst, in this article from The Baltimore Sun.

Republican Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Richard Lugar is cited in the article as holding out hope that:

... by the end of the year or in early next year there will be 200,000 Iraqis in a security force controlling the cities and countryside. At that point the Americans would provide a "peripheral presence," Lugar said, and there would be talks about a timetable for U.S. troop withdrawals.

Another expert, retired Maj. Gen. Robert H. Scales, Jr., a Vietnam War veteran and former commandant of the Army War College, is quoted as citing as a parallel case:

... the British effort to defeat a Communist insurgency in Malaysia, beginning in the late 1940s. Over time, the British abandoned large-scale military attacks in favor of small raids, rebuilding the Malayan Army and eventual elections. But it took 12 years to subdue the insurgency and create the beginnings of democracy there, Scales said.

Our military commitment in Iraq will accordingly not end all that soon. Yet, as Scales points out, there's a big danger of "running out of Army and Marines before the job is done in Iraq. The clock is ticking."

To keep that time bomb from ever exploding, we're trying to put Iraqis more and more on lead in the counterinsurgency effort. Instead of having American troops running the show, as now, our guys will increasingly act in support and advisory roles — which may put them at greater risk in the short run but will be aboslutely necessary if they are to start coming home in 12 months rather than 12 years.

So here we are in a war that was originally justified under false assumptions — nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, nonexistent support for al-Qaeda on the part of Iraq's tyrannical dictator. It is, as Vietnam was, an undeclared war. The U.S. Congress' authorizing resolution gave the President carte blanche to launch it, but he never asked Congress for an official declaration of war. He flirted with trying to get U.N. support for the invasion, then pressed ahead with a tiny "coalition of the willing" at his side. His Defense Secretary did a poor job of running the original invasion. It succeeded anyhow at toppling Saddam Hussein ... but the President's glowing "mission accomplished" speech was premature. There were a lot more U.S. deaths to come. And there was the gross embarrassment of Abu Ghraib still in the offing.

Yet the Democratic challenger, whose true views on the war were murky at best, couldn't unseat Bush in the American elections in November, 2004. As the post-election polls showed support for the war slipping slightly from levels that weren't particularly high in the first place, at the very same time the "Support Our Troops" bumper ribbons proliferated. Now we're challenged by the need to consider exit strategies while at the same time not undercutting the thrust of the President's "no justice without freedom" inaugural address, nor pricking the fragile bubble of home-front support for our brave troops overseas.

No one said it's easy being an American ...

"Organic" Liberalism vs. Social Engineering

"Even Medicaid, originally designed to be a 'welfare program,' has become the primary source of funding of nursing-home care for all but the most wealthy," Chicago Tribune essayist Clarence Page writes in a recent column titled "Is it fair to label Bush's 'risk-taker' pitch as racist?" (Clarence Page's column archive can be accessed here.)

Sidestepping for the moment that question about how race plays into recent Bush Social Security reform initiatives, oldstyleliberal is struck by the idea that those "welfare programs" that are "so four decades ago" do sometimes morph into something more permanent and valid. Medicaid would seem to be one of these.

In a not-unrelated vein, TIME Magazine columnist Joe Klein writes recently in "Playing with Fire":

Bush's declaration [in his inaugural address] of war on tyranny reminded me of nothing so much as [President Lyndon] Johnson's announcement of an "unconditional" war on poverty: "It will not be a short or easy struggle," Johnson proclaimed to the Congress in 1964. "No single weapon or strategy will suffice, but we will not rest until that war is won. The richest nation on earth can afford to win it. We cannot afford to lose it."

Johnson's slovenly idealism came at the end of a great liberal pendulum swing. His attempt to throw money at urban problems created all sorts of unintended consequences. It hastened a new culture of poverty, subsidizing the collapse of poor families, reinforcing a plague of out-of-wedlock births and soaring crime rates.

That failure of the Johnson Administration's War on Poverty was one of the things Theodore H. White complained of in The Making of the President—1972:

By the early 1970's it was clear that the Liberal-inspired programs of the Great Society had failed in the cities; they had been based on a political misreading of how those cities functioned, and what communities in those cities required for community survival. What had actually happened in the great cities of America in the 1960's, and was continuing to happen as America entered the seventies, mocked all the billions of dollars spent on programs to "save" them.

Accordingly, those aspects of the Great Society targeted specifically at cities were colossal failures. But Medicaid, another Great Society program, took root, not as a "welfare program" per se but as (among other things) "the primary source of funding of nursing-home care for all but the most wealthy."

What of other "liberal" initiatives of the sixties and seventies? oldstyleliberal was recently heartened to hear that "today our automobile only puts out about two percent of the pollution that a ... new car put out in 1973." This assessment comes from energy expert Daniel Yergin, author of The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power. Yergin was recently a guest on Ben Wattenberg's PBS show Think Tank. The transcript of the program on "The Future of Energy" may be read here.

Yergin added to the above comment, "And, you know, government policy, regulations, standards have been a very central part of it." In other words, if it hadn't been for the likes of the federal government's Environmental Protection Agency, today's tailpipe emissions would be a lot higher and the air a lot more polluted. Three cheers for a "liberal program" that succeeded!

So what makes the difference? Why are some "liberal programs" able to take root and others not?

It occurs to oldstyleliberal that the ones that take root bear some kind of "organic" relationship to the culture, with its aspirations, fears, and woes, while liberalism's failures are generally nothing but pure "social engineering."

The Great Society programs to renew the nation's cities were "wholly inorganic." To wit, they were disrespecters of existing urban communities, as they tore everything apart in order to build anew. But communities are organic entities. The social engineers forgot that.

Medicaid as a "welfare program" was originally little better. oldstyleliberal remembers how, when he was a VISTA Volunteer in the early 1970s, it was (like Aid to Families with Dependent Children, or so-called "welfare," itself) roundly despised by many of the poor people it was meant to serve. Later, though, Medicaid seems to have found fertile soil in America's need to deal with the medical problems associated with longer lifespans.

Likewise, the EPA's rules about auto emissions became accepted law as part of the price Americans had to pay to keep from rotting their lungs as they continued to galavant about freely in their cars. For the most part, federal air-quality standards, though seemingly just a matter of abstract environmental engineering, appear to have had an "organic" component that let them take root in American political acceptance.

And the same can be said for that grandaddy of all "welfare state" programs, Social Security. When it was passed in the mid-1930s, conservatives hated it. It didn't take long, however, for Social Security to become the "third rail of American politics": touch it and die. Now conservatives like President Bush don't want to end it, they want it opened up to private investment to make it a better fit with today's "ownership society" — Clarence Page calls it a "risk-taker society" — and, not incidentally, to keep it from going broke in the next couple of decades.

oldstyleliberal suspects that Social Security will be privatized, at least partially, and that the Bush reforms will take root and become an organic part of Americans' retirement expectations. For that indeed seems to be the key to "liberal" programs' success: are they "organic" enough, and will they take root?

Cal Thomas: "Embracing and exporting freedom"

oldstyleliberal does not often agree with opinion columnist Cal Thomas, whose views are (he feels) too religiously conservative and morally absolutist. But this column, "Embracing and exporting freedom," dated Jan. 24, 2005, is one he can agree with wholeheartedly. (The Cal Thomas column archive may be accessed here.)

Well, maybe not this part: "If we don't export freedom, we risk importing the viruses which have corrupted other nations." That may be a little strong. The main thing, though, is not that other nations are all virus-corrupted without our ministrations; it is rather that America has a longstanding love affair with helping others gain their liberty.

President Kennedy: "In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility — I welcome it." And, "If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich." And, "Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty."

President Reagan: "Let us ask ourselves, 'What kind of people do we think we are?' And let us answer, 'Free people, worthy of freedom and determined not only to remain so but to help others gain their freedom as well.'" And, "Let us now begin a major effort to secure the best — a crusade for freedom that will engage the faith and fortitude of the next generation. For the sake of peace and justice, let us move toward a world in which all people are at last free to determine their own destiny."

The current President Bush: "There is only one force of history that can break the reign of hatred and resentment, and expose the pretensions of tyrants, and reward the hopes of the decent and tolerant, and that is the force of human freedom. We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world."

As Cal Thomas says, "By boldly embracing freedom as his second term theme, President Bush stands in some pretty good company."

oldstyleliberal is frankly discouraged and ashamed at the many among his fellow liberals who in their post-inaugural punditry have sneered at Bush's address. G. Jefferson Price III of The Baltimore Sun, on Jan. 25 in "President's grand speech on freedom rings hollow" (available here until the newspaper starts wanting dollars for it), wrote that "the speech President Bush made last week could have been made by any president of the United States in the last century — and in one way or another it has ... ."

Amen to that! But Price also snarled, " ... and with more credibility."

And, he further groused, "Authoritarian rulers the Bush administration does not like — such as the rulers of Iran — have plenty to worry about. Authoritarian rulers the Bush administration gets along with don't have much to worry about at all."

Price thus turned himself into — in the immortal words of one Spiro T. Agnew, ex-Vice President of these United States — a "nattering nabob of negativism."

Another nattering nabob is Ted Widmer, director of the C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience at Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland. He wrote in The Sun, "Certainly, many presidents have seen America — rightly — as a beacon of light in a world where enlightenment was often hard to find, as [President] Bush expressed Thursday [in his inaugural address]. ... But there is a world of difference between a hope and a plan, just as [President] Lincoln reminded us there is a wide distance between a horse chestnut and a chestnut horse." (His Jan. 23, 2005, opinion piece, "Hints of danger in bold pledge," is temporarily available here.)

The nattering nabobs have carped and caviled that the President's inaugural address gave no specifics, no plan, no criteria by which Administration-suggested U.S. initiatives to "export" liberty — especially those involving the military — might be limited to those with a chance of success that can be pursued with justice and honor. oldstyleliberal agrees that we need to know the limits of Bush's bold policy thrust. But he feels it is wrong to trash the thrust just because in the context of a 21-minute inaugural address it could not be thoroughly nuanced and encyclopedically qualified.

And he feels it is short-sighted of liberals to dump on the President's "bold pledge" simply because it was made by a President they hate. For that pledge of extending a helping hand to liberty seekers the world round is an august part of liberal American history itself. How graceless for liberals today not to honor this fact with the respect it deserves!

R.I.P. Liberal "Theology": War Is Always Bad

In 1972, Republican Richard M. Nixon defeated Democratic Sen. George McGovern in a cakewalk and was re-elected President for a second term. Theodore H. White wrote in The Making of the President—1972 that by that year the "Liberal Idea" which had informed U.S. politics in the 1960s, and had been inherited from the 1930s, had ossified into a "Liberal Theology." Among the three main tenets of this theology was the dictum that War Is Bad.

In the 1960 presidential race, Democratic Sen. John F. Kennedy had narrowly defeated then-V.P. Nixon by adopting the original seed idea of American liberalism — in White's words, "to keep opportunity for individuals open" — as a defense against Soviet communist threat.

When U.S.S.R. Premier Nikita Khrushchev told us, "We will bury you," it had jolted Americans out of their 1950s complacency. Kennedy had convinced his countrymen they needed to "move" to solve problems at home — civil rights issues, medical care for the aged, what would become the War on Poverty — to keep pace with Soviet growth in strength and stature in the eyes of the world.

In his inaugural address, JFK said, "If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich."

As President, JFK followed up on his campaign and inaugural commitments to help the poor and strengthen our society at home. He launched the Race to the Moon ... and he embraced an incipient war in far-off Vietnam.

All these initiatives were what would later be insistently called "liberal" ones. Yet at the time White wrote The Making of the President—1960, "liberal" politics were so taken for granted that neither that word nor its antonym, "conservative," had to be used much in White's narrative of the 1960 race. If American had to "move" in liberal directions to offset its erstwhile complacency, that was seen as a pragmatic response to external threat. We must be strong at home, the reasoning went, if we are to be strong abroad. And we must be strong abroad if we are to stave off the Soviet threat.

So the pragmatically "liberal" JFK did not for one moment believe that War Is Bad, always and everywhere. We can argue today over whether, had he lived, he would have sidestepped Vietnam. But if he would have done so, it would have been because of a pragmatic re-evaluation of our commitment there. For his basic instinct was to fight communist expansion wherever and whenever necessary.

By, say, 1969, the year in which the Liberal Idea really began to ossify into a Liberal Theology, JFK had been assassinated. His successor, President Lyndon B. Johnson, had (to put it mildly) not seen his way clear to sidestepping the Vietnam War. JFK's brother, Democratic Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, orgininally a hawk, had (again, pragmatically) come to see the folly of the war, had tossed his political hat in the 1968 presidential ring, and had himself been assassinated.

Meanwhile, the liberal braintrust in America had divided in two, many following RFK and other leaders such as Sen. Eugene McCarthy as doves, others remaining true to the original hawkish liberal commitment to fight communists in Vietnam. But the doves were in the ascendant, and by 1972, War Was Definitely Bad.

Fast forward, now, to 2005. America is again challenged by an external threat: the terrorism associated with Radical Islamism. The U.S. President, George W. Bush, nominally a neo-conservative Republican, has taken us to war in Iraq. His justification for doing so has shifted from dismantling weapons of mass destruction (not found) and quashing links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda (not proven) to the noble-sounding goal of sowing democracy and liberty in the Middle East. To this "old-style liberal" blogger, it sounds like an initiative the Kennedy Administration might have pursued.

True, JFK would have done it more deftly, one hopes, with less alienation of allies. He would have, with his vaunted gift of rhetoric, sold it better to the American people. But I think it fits admirably with his "pay any price, bear any burden" philosophy.

But liberals today are still haunted by the War Is Always Bad credo which frightened mainstream America away from George McGovern in 1972, despite their manifest disaffection with the particular War in Vietnam. In the 2004 election, President Bush harped incessantly on the notion that his Democratic challenger, Sen. John Kerry, was a "liberal" and couldn't be trusted with the nation's security. It worked.

In truth, today's liberal Democrats have not managed to come up with any strategic vision for fighting the War Against Terrorism to match the one President Bush has put forth. His "no justice without freedom" inaugural address theme rings like JFK's own stirring inaugural address.

"We have seen our vulnerability, and we have seen its deepest source," he said. "For as long as whole regions of the world simmer in resentment and tyranny — prone to ideologies that feed hatred and excuse murder — violence will gather, and multiply in destructive power, and cross the most defended borders and raise a mortal threat." Liberals shoud take their heads out of the ideological sand and recognize words and sentiments worthy of JFK.

"There is only one force of history," Bush went on, "that can break the reign of hatred and resentment and expose the pretensions of tyrants and reward the hopes of the decent and tolerant. And that is the force of human freedom." JFK could have said that, too.

Now, this blogger faults the President for his noteworthy failure to prosecute the Iraq War with candor and dexterity. What's more, there should be a clear exit strategy, and there isn't. It is for such reasons that oldstyleliberal displays the "Support Our Troops: Bring 'Em Home" ribbon on his blog.

Yet this blogger faults liberal Democrats just as much, if not more, for failing to present America with a strategic vision as valid and sweeping as Bush's own. For Bush is, in essence, extending the venerable liberal desideratum of promoting individual freedom and opportunity, in a democratic context, to the world at large ... and all liberals have done is carp and cavil.

That's not going to be enough to put a liberal Democrat back in the Oval Office in the 2008 election!

Letting Go of Roe

Abortion perhaps more than any other domestic issue divides liberals from conservatives. It may surprise some that old-style liberals of the 1960s might not be all that happy about the 1973 Supreme Court decision, Roe v. Wade, that made abortion a so-called constitutional right.

In the Jan./Feb. Atlantic Monthly magazine, Washington Post editorial writer Benjamin Wittes comments: "By removing the issue [of legal abortion] from the policy arena, the Supreme Court has prevented abortion-rights supporters from winning a debate in which public opinion favors them."

In "Letting Go of Roe," the pro-choice Wittes shows why today's liberals ought to accept that Roe must go. The decision which rendered state anti-abortion laws unconstitutional has actually, says Wittes, been bad for America, bad for its politics ... and bad for the pro-choice cause!

Wittes says, first of all, that overturning Roe would put abortion back in the political-legislative arena where it really belongs. Ceasing to have abortion rights protected by judicial decisionmaking — by what oldstyleliberal would call the politics of edict — would have several benefits:

• The shaky constitutional grounds on which Roe was originally decided would no longer vex our politics. Wittes says it's not true that "the right to abortion—like minority civil and voting rights — [is] unambiguously protected by the Constitution." To the contrary, he says, "the right to abortion remains a highly debatable proposition, both jurisprudentially and morally. The mere fact that liberals have to devote so much political energy to pretending that the right exists beyond democratic debate proves that it doesn't."


• The fact that a solid majority of Americans historically want abortions in some (but not all) circumstances to stay legal means pro-lifers couldn't easily pass legislation making all abortions illegal.


• Pro-life politicians would no longer enjoy the "free pass" Roe now gives them. Today, they can fulminate all they want to against abortion, and it just helps them solidify their conservative political base. With Roe gone, they'd have to put their political lives on the line with not just conservatives but the large bloc of middle-of-the-road voters that favor moderately pro-choice positions. They'd have to put up or shut up by trying to implement the no-abortions-at-all policies they claim to covet. That, says Wittes, "would render those politicians quite unpopular."

So liberals would get the abortion monkey off their backs! Meanwhile, most states would pass laws legalizing abortion in certain situations and/or with certain restrictions. And those laws would be in the long run more reliable than the "guarantees" of Roe, because, says Wittes:

Legislative compromises tend to be durable, since they bring a sense of resolution to divisive issues by balancing competing interests; mustering a working majority to upset them can be far more difficult than rallying discontent against the edicts of unelected judges.

The downside? Surely it would be unlikely that all abortions that happen legally today would remain legal: some abortions now legal under Roe would almost certainly become illegal in every state. And some states would undoubtedly outlaw abortion entirely, necessitating travel to another state. We'd end up with an abortion checkerboard, just as we already have a capital-punishment checkerboard.

Messy? Yes, indeed. Elegant? Not at all. Democratic? Emphatically. By abandoning the politics of one-size-fits-all edict for the politics of democratic debate, liberals would simply have to accept that a 50-state democracy such as ours is a pastiche, a dynamic crazy-quilt of law whose patterns, furthermore, shift over time.

Welcome to OSLBlog

Hi, I'm oldstyleliberal. My real name is Eric Stewart. This is my political blog.

I call myself an "old-style liberal" because the liberalism I espouse went out of style after the Kennedy and King assassinations in the 1960s.

"From the founding of the country on, the central instinct and pride of the American liberal has been to keep opportunity for individuals open," Theodore H. White wrote in The Making of the President—1972.

White continued, "For two centuries the wars of American liberals — against King George, against the banks, against the slaveholders, against the railways, against the trusts, against the bosses — have reflected a doctrine which is more than politics, a doctrine which is of the essence of the culture of the nation: No man must be locked into or be hammered into a category from which he has no opportunity to escape. He must not be locked in by the color of his skin or his racial genes; he must not be locked in by lack of educational opportunity; he must not be locked in by birth, or parentage, or age or poverty." (Bantam ppbk., p. 40)

By 1972 the Democratic Party was, however, beginning its long and disabling romance with the politics of category. It started, as White documents, with Democrats' lurch to require quotas — not just open representation, but hard quotas — for blacks, women, and youth in state delegations to their national convention of that year.

"The quota idea was a wrench from this [original liberal] tradition," wrote White. "It set up stark categories within the political process; and the voters must, whether they will or not, confirm those categories in selecting representatives."

The liberals inside and outside the Democratic party went on from there to turn the politics of category into the politics of edict — bypassing wherever possible the time-honored politcal processes. Thus, the question of legal abortion was soon to be settled along liberal lines in the Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, in effect a fiat by unelected officials that took abortion out of the hurly-burly of the legislative arena.

oldstyleliberal thinks the politics of category and of edict have been the downfall of American liberalism. It's time for liberals to reclaim their "central instinct and pride": to fight the oppressors of individual liberty and opportunity without themselves becoming oppressors.

That (re)definition of liberalism as the politics of liberty and opportunity will be the ongoing thrust of this blog!