"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?