The Politics of Grievance

In the July 12, 2005, TIME Magazine, political essayist Joe Klein waxes perspicacious in "Which Brand Would You Buy?" He says our politics today are really divided into "a Party of Sanity, representing the pragmatic centrism of the business and professional elites, and a Party of Passion, representing populist anger about outsourcing, illegal immigration, social permissiveness and Bush's overseas activism."

Never mind labels like conservative or liberal, Republican or Democratic. With the caveat that "there is no such thing as a pure political product," the actual continental divide in American public affairs now is between what oldstyleliberal would personally relabel the Politics of Responsibility and the Politics of Grievance.

The Party of Passion is easier to describe — albeit less monolithic — than the Party of Reason. It's the new, "moderate" version of the "America First" populism of the 1930s and '40s, the people who couldn't stand the idea that the U.S. might have to fight Germany and Japan. It's, in pundit James Carville's word, the proponents of "neo-isolationism" who see America so beleaguered at home by job outsourcing, illegal immigration, inadequate health-care coverage, and culture-internal threats like abortion and gay marriage, that global involvements are abhorrent.

The Passionist-Populists come in extreme-left versions like Democratic Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich and extreme-right versions like perennial GOP presidential aspirant Pat Buchanan. The two sides are apt to have different emphases, different ideas about what most needs fixing and why. "It is," accordingly, "very difficult to build a Passion coalition." Yet the left-Passionists and the right-Passionists have in common their sense of grievance. This is a tragic sense that things are way, way off track in this country, and it's the fault of our leaders. It is also an angry sense that "the system is rigged by dark and powerful forces that prevent the little guy from getting ahead."


As for the Party of Reason, the common denominator of its "partisans" is perhaps their willingness to put partisanship and pessimism aside and enact the future, however imperfectly. The fourteen U.S. Senators, seven from each party, who hammered out the compromise that forestalled the "nuclear option" vis-à-vis filibusters of federal judicial nominations were meeting future reality head on. They were doing their best to shape it constructively, without jettisoning the past wholesale.

Klein also mentions, along these lines,

... 24 leaders of groups ranging from the conservative U.S. Chamber of Commerce to the liberal AFL-CIO had been meeting secretly for seven months because they were worried about the sketchy, inefficient quality of American health care and wanted to figure out a proposal for universal coverage ...

and

... Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Newt Gingrich, the yin and yang of politics in the 1990s, announc[ing] that they had found common ground on the issue as well.

The Party of Reason is a party of common ground, of accommodation, of wisdom, of responsibility. It's the party which realizes that

Putting up trade barriers may cause massive inflation at home and social turmoil in countries like China; a strong flow of immigrants is absolutely necessary to the economy; and a peremptory withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq might leave civil war and a safe zone for al-Qaeda operatives.

It occurs to oldstyleliberal that the Party of Reason was in charge of the country back in the days of Ike and JFK and LBJ, when (for example) it took the combined efforts of the then-former Senate Majority Leader, President Johnson, and the then-current Senate Minority Leader, Everett Dirksen, to get the Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed. Or when (for instance) the powers-that-be had to join forces, all for one and one for all, to put an American on the moon post haste and steal back the Soviets' Sputnik thunder.

Even the conservatives of that day, Barry Goldwater et al., were basically the right wing of the moderate, centrist Party of Reason. There were, of course, true extremists, such as the John Birch Society on the right, and, on the left, a slurry of Communists, Socialists, and so forth. But for the most part, there was little polarization and little sense of system-is-rigged-against-the-people grievance.

We were basically united in facing a common enemy abroad: Soviet-style state socialism. Today we again face a common enemy abroad: fundamentalist radical Islamism. But, sadly, the difference today is that the Voice of Reason is too often drowned out by the Politics of Grievance.

On Thinking Independently

In yesterday's print edition of The Baltimore Sun, two op-ed pieces talked about Americans' supposedly impaired ability to think for themselves. Oddly, one was from the left and one was from the right.

The one from the left was PBS journalist Bill Moyers' "PBS under siege from right." Moyers, whom oldstyleliberal greatly respects, is the former host of the weekly NOW program on the Public Broadcasting System. He recently made the Sun-excerpted comments in a speech to the National Conference on Media Reform.

Moyers is the former host of NOW because he came under fire for alleged liberal bias in the content of his program. To Moyers, reporting on "the little fibs and fantasies as well as the Big Lie of the people in power," which was job number one of NOW, is not biased, it's the heart and soul of journalistic objectivity.

"The Big Lie" is, to hear Moyers on the subject, the prime modus operandi of the current Bush Administration. Its "princes and priests" are, he says,

... the people obsessed with control, using the government to threaten and intimidate ... the people who are hollowing out middle-class security even as they enlist the sons and daughters of the working class in a war to make sure Ahmad Chalabi winds up controlling Iraq's oil ... the people who turn faith-based initiatives into a slush fund and who encourage the pious to look heavenward and pray so as not to see the long arm of privilege and power picking their pockets ... the people who squelch free speech in an effort to obliterate dissent and consolidate their orthodoxy into the official view of reality from which any deviation becomes unpatriotic heresy.

When "Washington officials to set the agenda for journalism," Moyers says, journalists

... invariably [fail] to provide context, background or any sense of which claims hold up and which are misleading. ... An unconscious people, an indoctrinated people, a people fed only on partisan information and opinion that confirm their own bias, a people made morbidly obese in mind and spirit by the junk food of propaganda, is less inclined to put up a fight, to ask questions and be skeptical. That kind of orthodoxy can kill a democracy - or worse.

The op-ed piece from the right which touched on the same topic of enforced orthodoxy vs. independent thought was Thomas Sowell's Why liberals hate black self-reliance. Sowell, who is himself black, claims liberals intentionally keep African Americans dependent on Democratic-initiated social programs so as to be able to count on their votes.

These purported cynics, the liberals, can't afford to let blacks know "the truth" about their own history — for example, that "reductions in poverty among blacks and the rise of blacks into higher-level occupations were both more pronounced in the years leading up to the civil rights legislation and welfare-state policies of the 1960s than in the years that followed."

"Least of all," writes Sowell, can liberals "afford" to let California Supreme Court Justice Janice Rogers Brown, a black whom President Bush controversially aims to appoint as a federal judge,

... become a national figure on the federal bench. The things she says and does could lead other blacks to begin to think independently — and that in turn could threaten the whole liberal house of cards. If a smear is what it takes to stop her, that is what liberal politicians and the liberal media will use.

So the Bush conservatives are accused of engaging in a plot to "squelch free speech in an effort to obliterate dissent and consolidate their orthodoxy," while the liberal Democrats are allegedly engaging in a "smear" campaign against major Bush judicial nominees. In both cases, if these pundits are right, Americans' ability to think for themselves would be impaired.

Sure, that would be bad news ... but the basic attitude of oldstyleliberal to all this rhetorical mudslinging is, can't we all stop and take a deep breath? Can't we dispense with the bombast, from both sides, and together set about making a more perfect union? Can't we put away these verbal stilletos which turn today's politics into a bloody playground rumble?

Hail! The Fearless Fourteen

These fourteen moderate U.S. senators, seven Republicans and seven Democrats, brokered the compromise which averted The "Nuclear" Option, the proposed rule change which would have made minority filibusters of the most ideologically extreme White House judicial nominations all but impossible to carry out.

Their courage in breaking ranks with their respective party leaders and putting our government above ideological partisanship are to be congratulated by all patriotic Americans. Thanks to them, the U.S. Senate is back in business!

	Senator Robert C. Byrd (D - WV)			Senator Lincoln Chafee (R - RI)
	Senator Susan Collins (R - ME)			Senator Mike DeWine (R - OH)
	Senator Lindsey Graham (R - SC)			Senator Daniel Inouye (D - HI)
	Senator Mary L. Landrieu (D - LA)			Senator Joseph Lieberman (D - CT)
	Senator John McCain (R - AZ)			Senator Ben Nelson (D - NE)
	Senator Mark Pryor (D - AR)			Senator Ken Salazar (D - CO)
	Senator Olympia Snowe (R - ME)			Senator John Warner (R - VA)

The "Nuclear" Option

oldstyleliberal has been trying to figure out how he feels about the looming "nuclear" threat in the U.S. Senate — i.e., the action contemplated by Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist to change Senate rules and allow ending filibusters by simple majority votes when the topic at hand is a federal judicial appointment. Right now, such filibusters, like all other types, require a supermajority of 60 senators to end them.

Some of the bench nominations of the Bush White House are currently threatened with being held up by a coordinated Democratic filibuster. There are 44 Democrats (and one Independent) in the Senate, so a united front on their part could put the kibosh on any particular Bush nomination.

Especially, a nomination (not now but perhaps very soon) to the U.S. Supreme Court, which under the right circumstances could eventually reverse Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision legalizing abortion. Since oldstyleliberal is pro-choice, he naturally leans against changing the filibuster rule. But one should always be leery of one's own biases when something truly important beyond those biases is at stake.

That's why oldstyleliberal was happy to run across an article in the Perspective section of the Sunday Baltimore Sun this A.M. In "Ex-senators wary of 'nuclear' threat," Sun staffers polled several respected ex-senators on their thoughts about Bill Frist's "nuclear" option.

One, Clifford Hansen, a Repbulican senator from Wyoming from 1967 to 1978, gave oldstyleliberal a sound, principled reason, other than his support for Roe, for wanting to keep the Senate rules as they are:

"Being a Republican, we were the minority party, and I suspect there are some similarities between our situation then and those that the Democrats find themselves in today. I am sure that it would have concerned me if there were limits on the filibuster. When I was in the Senate, the Democrats were in control, and we had made a lot of friends with the Democratic Party, and I realized then that if I were going to get anything done, I had to reach out and establish some real friendships with members on the other side."

In other words, the nation is best served when the majority party cannot impose its will alone, without horse-trading with the minority — and vice versa. That's why a filibuster that can be kept alive by 41 senators until the horse-trading takes place makes good patriotic sense.

So count oldstyleliberal as being against changing the Senate filibuster rule vis-à-vis judicial nominees. Senators one and all, just say no to the "nuclear" threat!

Hillary in the Middle

Hillary Rodham Clinton, Democratic Senator from New York, has recently taken yet another position oldstyleliberal favors. According to "Shifting right, or there already?", an article at the MSNBC website, Sen. Clinton has joined forces

... with conservative Republican senators Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania and Sam Brownback of Kansas and conservative Democratic Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut to tout their request for $90 million in federal funds for research on how the Internet, i-Pods, and other electronic media affect children's emotional and behavioral development. ... Hard-shelled cynics might portray her alliance with Santorum, Brownback and Lieberman as a Clinton shift to a more conservative stance, just as some have so interpreted her Jan. 25 speech which stressed the need for teenage sexual abstinence.

Not to mention her recent advocacy of compromise on the abortion issue (see my earlier post The Case for Abortion Compromise).

Senator Clinton's position on children and the media is mentioned in a recent TIME cover story, The Decency Police:

... earlier this month, Clinton took the stage with Santorum and Brownback to decry indecency in pop culture and call for a federal study of its effect on children.

There are two reasons why oldstyleliberal says three cheers for Hillary.

The first reason is that he agrees with social critics: TV (along with other media) has reached a tipping point and gone over an invisible line into hyper-raunchiness.

Now, oldstyleliberal does not favor censorship when it comes to what some call smut and others call free expression of sexual ideas (or of any other so-called "dangerous" ideas). oldstyleliberal has even been known to enjoy outright sleaze occasionally. He is, after all, a normal, red-blooded American male with definite prurient interests. (And by that statement he does not mean to exclude normal, red-blooded American females from having their own prurient interests, also.)

But when raunch and sleaze invade just about every program that is broadcast, of whatever category, at whatever time of day, oldstyleliberal says Whoa! Time out! Hold the mayo!

So he thinks Hillary is right to at least try to set up a federal commission to look into what can be done and why it needs to be done.

But there's a second reason he is in Hillary's corner on this one. To wit, he thinks the Senator from New York's reaching across the aisle, as it were, on issues like abortion, teenage sexual abstinence, and media sleaze makes her an ideal Democratic candidate for the presidency in 2008.

This country needs its liberals to "shift right" somewhat, if they are to elect one of their own to the White House ever again. Entrenched positions at the left extreme of the ideological spectrum don't cut it these days. Compromise and accommodation are the order of the day.

As oldstyleliberal mentioned in You Go, Hillary!, Senator Clinton not long ago lectured on "Women and Leadership in the 21st Century" at the Panetta Institute. In taking questions from host Leon Panetta and from the audience, she bemoaned the loss of a spirit of compromise and bipartisan consensus in Congress today. It appears she has decided to not only talk that kind of talk, but to walk the walk as well.

Imagine it is 2008. Hillary continues to be the hands-down favorite for the Democratic nomination, actually gets the nod ... and then goes on to win the Oval Office. Given Americans' recent penchant for divided government, the Republicans will very likely retain control of both houses of Congress. What kind of liberal Democratic president would be better-suited to working with a right-wing GOP legislative branch than one who, like Senator Clinton, has established her bona fides as credibly "shifting right" when the occasion demands it?

That's oldstyleliberal's second reason for lining up with Hillary on the topic of what media sleaze does to our kids: it bodes well for her anticipated presidential bid in 2008!

The Case for Abortion Compromise

Andrew Sullivan has a fine essay in the March 7, 2005, issue of TIME Magazine on the need for liberals to join conservatives on "doing all we can to ensure that fewer and fewer women exercise" their right to an abortion.

In "The Case for Compromise on Abortion," Sullivan lauds Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton for leading the way in her recent speech to pro-choice advocates:

She said something so obvious and so right it's amazing it has taken this long for it to be uttered: whatever side you're on in the pro-choice vs. pro-life debate, we surely all want to lower the number of abortions. Whether you believe that an abortion is a difficult medical procedure for a woman or whether, like me, you believe that all abortions are an immoral taking of human life, we can all agree on a third principle: we would be better off with fewer of them.

Sullivan then goes on to point out that the conservatives in his hoped-for coalition against the frequency of abortion are likely to blanch at such alternatives as "expanded access to contraception," repugnant to many Catholics. Also, at expanding adoption efforts to include gay couples.

Additionally, Sullivan worries that conservatives will be loath to reduce abortion's frequency all that much, in that "their argument for making it completely illegal may become less salient."

Too bad that he ignores parallel drawbacks from the point of view of dedicated pro-choice liberals (who oldstyleliberal thinks need to take their heads out of the ground). Columnist Ellen Goodman, in one of her columns, wrote of Hillary's speech:

Where exactly is it "possible" to find common cause with those who call themselves prolife? In the three states where women must legally be told the lie that abortion increases the risk of breast cancer? In Virginia, where a state legislator introduced a law that would have made women report "fetal deaths"? Among those who think that stem cell research is homicidal? Or want to overturn Roe v. Wade?

It also occurs to oldstyleliberal that liberals might themselves object to a drastically reduced number of abortions making their pro-choice adamancy less salient. If abortion demand were to dwindle, why would abortion need to remain legal?

So here we have exactly the sort of situation which oldstyleliberal feels points up how his style of liberalism differs from the knee-jerk form prevalent today, as well as from knee-jerk conservatism.

The difference lies in the willingness to compromise, to take a both-and approach rather than an either-or approach.

From Andrew Sullivan's standpoint, America's leadership should damp down the feuding over whether abortion should be wholly unconstitutional and illegal or should be wholly unrestricted and available on demand.

Leave the contentious issue of Roe v. Wade for one minute, quit the ideological bickering about when life begins for a while, take down the barricades, and craft a strategy that assumes abortion will be legal for the foreseeable future, but try to reduce it.

The feuding does not reduce the number of abortions in America by one single abortion. It's in service to entrenched and opposed ideological positions, not to what oldstyleliberal thinks ought to be the watchword of our politics: empowering people.

The Hillary Compromise — Sullivan, in fleshing it out, calls it "the pro-choice, pro-life compromise," but that's too ungainly — would empower women to pursue one or more of several non-abortion strategies: abstinence, which "can work for some women"; increased access to contraception, valuable especially for sexually active teens, as promoted by Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid's proposed Prevention First Act; expanded adoption alternatives, including gay couples. Another possibility not mentioned by Sullivan would be programs that support single motherhood.

In this way, the Hillary Compromise looks like a triumph of pragmatism and people empowerment over entrenched, people-be-damned- there's-something-more-important-at-stake-here ideology. And that suits oldstyleliberal just fine.

Ideological Bubbles

A recent op-ed piece in The Baltimore Sun lambastes the institution of professorial tenure at America's colleges and universities and the notion of "academic freedom" it supports.

Thomas Sowell's "Academic freedom twisted on today's campuses" addresses, specifically, the rantings of Professor Ward Churchill of the University of Colorado, who has written that the World Trade Center workers who died in the 9/11 attacks were "little Eichmanns" doing Nazi-style dirty deeds in "the mighty engine of profit." From this example Sowell extrapolates that tenure and academic freedom are crocks.

Mr. Sowell's logic is itself a crock. For one thing, he is tarring all universities and tenured professors by association with this one admitted "jackass." Furthermore, he himself admits that Churchill's "remarks that provoked so much controversy were not made in a classroom or even on campus" — so no students were at risk of left-wing propaganda. Moreover, if indeed "at one college, some gutsy students start chanting 'OT' — for 'off topic' — when one of their professors starts making political comments that have nothing to do with the subject of his course," then how big could the risk have been, even if Churchill were indulging himself right in the university lecture halls?

So where's the beef?

Manifestly, Sowell's article is an example of rhetoric in service to naught but inflating — or keeping inflated — his particular neo-conservative ideological bubble. This particular bubble is the one which says that unfettered pursuit of the profit motive is the mainspring of American liberty. Private enterprise, good; public welfare, bad. Markets, good; regulation, bad. That kind of thing.

But advocacy of the supposedly "good" things is never enough to inflate an ideological bubble and keep it inflated. Much of the air pressure must come from rhetoric that does nothing but bash the supposedly "bad" things.

Here, the "bad" thing is the seeming near-socialism (if not outright socialism) of Prof. Churchill's stance. It's as if making the slightest room for such ultra-left opinion on our campuses of higher learning threatens to bring down the whole American house of cards.

That's the way it always is with ideological bubbles. They wouldn't be bubbles if their main function wasn't to rigorously exclude whatever notions lie outside the surface of the bubble. It's as if anything outside the bubble might be a pin.

Thus, during the Cold War almost all Americans, even liberal ones, were anti-Communist. But there were ideologues who kept yelling that most of our national leaders weren't stauch enough in their anti-Communism. There were Reds under every bed, they said ... and so the thing to do was denounce, denounce, denounce the few actual Reds and their "fellow travelers" that did exist.

That didn't actually help win the Cold War, but it did inflate an ultra-conservative ideological bubble which persists to this day. The bubble was quite tiny in 1964 when Senator Barry Goldwater, the Republican challenger, lost badly to President Lyndon Johnson on a platform of Cold War staunchness and small-government libertarianism.

But by 1980, the year of the Reagan Revolution, the bubble had grown considerably.

Then, by 1992, when Bill Clinton won the Oval Office, conservatives had to stop bashing Communists to keep their bubble inflated — Communism had fallen on the ash heap of history — and start bashing "liberals." We started to hear the "L-word" used as an out-and-out slur.

Of course, every now and then these days an actual socialist or near-socialist such as Prof. Churchill pokes his head out of the ash heap as if to judge how many more weeks of "capitalist winter" there will be ... and conservatives such as Mr. Sowell gleefully bash away at him, just like in the good old days. Anything to keep that bubble of ideology inflated.

Privatizing Social Security, Part 2

In Privatizing Social Security, Part 1, oldstyleliberal took note of the fact that the water level in the Social Security trust tund "reservoir" will start dropping in a decade or so, and by late in the second quarter of this century the reservoir will fully run dry. That means Social Securiy benefits are threatened in the medium term, and if nothing is done, will one day stop flowing entirely.

What to do? There are two basic options. One is President Bush's proposal to partially "privatize" Social Security, plowing payroll deductions into personal retirement accounts which, if their annual yield is at least 3 percent higher than the inflation rate, will eventually make retirees better off than they are today under straight Social Security. (Or so says the Bush Administration.)

The other basic option is to raise taxes. If more tax money were collected, it could be funneled into the Social Security trust fund to make up the shortfall in contributions. Of course, the contributions themselves are taxes — payroll taxes. Conceivably, raising the (FICA) payroll tax rate and/or the maximum pay level which is subject to the payroll tax could help.

But that idea's not even on the table. Doing that would burden less affluent workers, all of whose pay is under the maximum, more than more affluent workers, some of whose pay is not taxed.

In other words, the payroll tax is regressive. Both politically and mathematically, there's no way a regressive tax could solve the Social Security problem. What's needed would be to target a progressive tax such as the income tax.

That's why critics of the President's plan such as former Social Security Commissioner Kenneth Apfel recommend making the income tax more progressive as a Social Security fix. Apfel wrote in "Unnecessary and unwise" in The Baltimore Sun:

Simply repealing the Bush tax cuts for the richest 1 percent of Americans would resolve a large part of the Social Security shortfall.

In other words, Apfel wants to make tax rates higher for the people with the biggest incomes. That is equivalent to making income taxes more progressive. (And the Bush tax cuts were equivalent to making them less progressive.)

In addition to personal retirement accounts and tax hikes, there are other fixes to Social Security that have been suggested, but privatization and tax increases are the major topics in the debate.

Which leads oldstyleliberal to his suggestion: why not do both?

Why not both institute personal retirement accounts and roll back the Bush tax break for the top 1 percent.

There would be several advantages. First and foremost, a lot of the burden which falls on the Bush privatization strategy, all by itself, would be taken off. Right now, critics charge the Bush scheme with (for example) not being able to adequately replace today's survivor and disability benefits, or not being able to keep its promise to lock in benefits for those currently 55 or over.

Such worries would very likely vanish if the top-1-percent tax cut were rolled back and the proceeds were funneled into the Social Security trust fund.

Likewise, part of the tax-cut rollback could be used to finance a special fund to indemnify those unlucky individuals whose personal accounts tank.

But the main appeal of oldstyleliberal's "do both" approach would be that both sides in the debate would have to give ground. The liberal Democrats would have to get on board with privatization, and all the President's men would have to get jiggy with raising taxes on the wealthy back to pre-Bush levels.

In other words, the "do both" approach nurtures the art of compromise — something sorely lacking on both sides in today's political climate.

Privatizing Social Security, Part 1

oldstyleliberal is interested in trying to follow the debate (if you can call it that) between liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans over President Bush's plan for "privatizing Social Security" via personal retirement accounts. Mostly, oldstyleliberal wishes to cut through the rhetoric to glimpse "the truth," whatever that may be.

Part of the truth seems to be that, unless something is done, Social Security can be expected to slowly start going broke. At some point in the next couple of decades, the benefits paid out to retirees and their survivors — not to mention those receiving disability benefits — will start to exceed contributions from current workers. Due to inexorable population trends, the number of workers will shrink as the number of retirees goes up.

Then, after another decade — or two, or three, depending on who you ask — the Social Security trust fund will finally run dry, like a reservoir that for ages hasn't seen enough rainfall.

For the Social Security fund is very much like a reservoir. Normally, there's an inflow (precipitation routed into the reservoir; payroll taxes routed into Social Security) and an outflow (faucets being turned on; benefits paid out). As long as the inflow tends to exceed or match the outflow, no problem. If the outflow exceeds the inflow briefly, again, no problem. But if the outflow outstrips the inflow chronically for a long period of time, the reservoir runs dry. That's what will happen to Social Security unless something is done.

Bush wants to do something. He wants to lock the current system in place for those 55 and over when (and if) his privatization plan goes into effect (starting, if Bush gets his way, in 2009). For those younger than 55, some of their payroll taxes would be diverted to worker-selected personal retirement accounts (PRAs) instead of reaching the Social Security trust fund. Workers would continue to feed their PRAs until reaching the age at which they would normally retire and draw Social Security. Then (assuming they are eligible for Social Security in the first place) they would draw a reduced amount of Social Security benefits. They would also start tapping into their PRAs to make up the difference.

It would be this reduction in the money amounts paid out to beneficiaries that would keep Social Security afloat.

So one of the key questions about the Bush plan is this: would retirees' PRAs actually make up for their reduced Social Security benefits?

A recent column by personal finance expert Eileen Ambrose, appearing in The Baltimore Sun, said this:

A senior administration official told reporters that workers would come out ahead if they earned more than 3 percent above the rate of inflation annually in their private accounts.

But it also said this:

But markets are hardly predictable. What if you don't earn 3 percent over inflation, which could be difficult if inflation roars back?

Accordingly, it would seem as if the 3-percent-over-inflation target for a PRA's yield is the "figure of merit" here. If PRAs generally manage to achieve that figure, the Bush plan could be workable. If not, then nothing else need be said. The Bush plan will, in that case, not work.

Let's say, temporarily — purely for the sake of argument — that PRAs will generally earn 3 percent over the rate of inflation. What are the other potential pitfalls of the Bush plan?

Ms. Ambrose points out several. One is that there's no certainty yet what the Bush proposal portends for survivor and disability benefits, as distinct from retirees' benefits.

Another is the risk that PRAs will not always meet the 3-percent-over-inflation goal. Since the PRAs will be invested in securities such as stocks, mutual funds, bonds, and so forth, they could run into dry spells and not manifest the intended growth.

If the markets swoon while the investor is still young, there will be plenty of time for them to recover their health. By retirement age, if the inflation-plus-3-percent target has been met overall, the retiree will be fine.

But what if the investment market goes into a coma just when our worker retires? According to Ms. Ambrose:

... the president promised that the government would provide good options to protect accounts from sudden market swings on the eve of retirement.

So, taking Bush at his word, we still need to know what happens if the PRA of any one particular John or Jane Doe tanks, while most PRAs are doing fine.

If one particular PRA loses money, or if it simply fails to beat the rate of inflation by 3 percent, oldstyliberal has so far been unable to learn what insurance, if any, would be in place to offset such a disaster. He encourages liberal Democrats, instead of simply trying to shout down the President's proposal, to work to make sure some form of "account insurance" is incorporated into the program.

There are of course, many other issues. oldstyliberal will go into those in a future installment.

Man of the Center

Theodore H. White wrote in The Making of the President—1972 , of Sen. Edward Muskie of Maine, who tried for the Democrats' presidential nomination in that year, that he "could say, out of his own life, 'I have an ancestral belief in this system. I inherited it from my father. I'm a man of the center, but the center gradually moves left, and it's the Democratic Party that does it.'"

oldstyleliberal agrees with Muskie in part, and disagrees with him in part.

Yes, it is good to be a "man of the center." There are too few men or women of the center in politics today.

But no, I don't think the center "gradually moves left."

What actually happens, I think, is that change happens at the center. It emerges from the center, and over the long run that change tends to be good. If there once was slavery and now slavery is no longer, that is change, and it has been for the good. If grinding poverty was once the lot of most human beings and now the majority enjoys middle-class economic aspirations, that is change, and it has been for the good.

The change which emerges at the center and tends to be for the good makes it seem like the center "gradually moves left." Why? Because for the most part the good change that gradually emerges at the center has originally been advocated by the left. If there was once racism encoded in Jim Crow laws in the Old South, it was "liberal" agitation by Martin Luther King and others that called it into question and paved the way for change.

Thus, while change must emerge from the center, it has to be summoned forth by action at the ideological extreme.

Here's where the situation gets tricky. Sometimes the extreme gets its way too much.

That's what happened in the 1960s and 1970s. The left grabbed so many levers of power — though it never won the hearts and minds of President Nixon's "silent majority" — that America was not coaxed but jerked leftward.

In reaction, the movement we today know as neo-conservatism was born; neo-conservative pioneers said they were "mugged by reality" as the peace-love ideals of the mid-1960s degenerated into violence, and the so-called New Leftists of the day revealed themselves as anarchist proto-dictators. The late-'60s radicals — Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, and the rest — wanted to disrupt "the system" so they themselves could seize control over it.

With the 1980s Reagan Revolution, neo-conservatism summoned forth a healthful, center-seeking response from the American politcal system. But then it was the conservatives' turn to overreach in the mid-1990s. Remember when Rep. Newt Gingrich wanted to shut the government down rather than give Pres. Clinton the budget he wanted?

Gingrich was trying to jerk the country rightward. Oh, he was for the most part quite clever about it, claiming he and his fellow neocons had signed a "Contract with America" to do so. It took a while for some citizens to see through that, but see through it they did.

The moral here is that we need the political extremes, both of them, to summon forth constructive change when it is needed, and to keep the pendulum swinging. But, more than that, the message is that the polity as a whole makes best progress when it is centered.

Not statically centered, that is, but dynamically centered. Think of your hips when you walk. Unless you walk like a fashion model, with no hip sway all, your weight shifts from hip to hip as you march forward, and your hips wiggle. Maybe not a lot. Maybe not in an exaggerated way. But they move from side to side.

That's how God-blessed America ever moves into a better, brighter future: dynamically centered, with a fair amount of hip sway.

You Go, Hillary!

TIME magazine for Feb. 7, 2005, has as its cover story an article on what President Bush "owes" Christian evangelicals for helping re-elect him. A sidebar, "The Democrats: Trying Out a More Soulful Tone," accessible here, features coverage of Democratic Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York's address to abortion rights supporters on the occasion of the (what, 32nd?) anniversary of Roe v. Wade.

(Before going any further, oldstyleliberal would like to make clear that he thinks of Sen. Clinton as "Hillary," and he will refer to her that way not out of any disrespect, but to distinguish her from "Bill," also a noteworthy American political figure ... and in his case, of course, a former President. As oldstyleliberal is about to reveal, he favors Hillary for President in 2008 ... so let no one say that his use of her first name alone is meant to cheapen her or belittle her.)

Hillary noted in her address:

While affirming her view that women should continue to have the right to choose, Clinton urged Democrats to support measures to reduce the number of abortions—encourage abstinence among the young and force insurers to cover contraceptives—and surprised some by saying the goal was not just making abortions rare but eliminating them altogether. She even sought to get on the right of Bush on the issue by noting that abortions have risen in eight states under his presidency.

Her tone did not please many liberals. Ellen Goodman, op-ed columnist for The Boston Globe (link to her archives here), wrote in "Whose common ground?":

Hillary Clinton, in a speech that was widely described as a retreat, said, "There is an opportunity for people of good faith to find common ground in this debate -- we should be able to agree that we want every child born in this country to be wanted, cherished, and loved."

That, on top of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy's (D-MA) recent

"Surely we can all agree that abortion should be rare and that we should do all we can to help women avoid the need to face that decision."

provoked Ms. Goodman to gripe:

Where exactly is it "possible" to find common cause with those who call themselves prolife? In the three states where women must legally be told the lie that abortion increases the risk of breast cancer? In Virginia, where a state legislator introduced a law that would have made women report "fetal deaths"? Among those who think that stem cell research is homicidal? Or want to overturn Roe v. Wade?

oldstyliberal disagrees wholeheartedly with Ms. Goodman's attitude. He thinks Hillary Clinton is onto something in her attempt to close the gap on abortion between liberals and conservatives.

For background on her political instinct to reconcile the differences between ideological extremes, see the transcript of her speech/interview at the Panetta Institute on June 28, 2004. Her lecture on "Women and Leadership in the 21st Century" was followed by a Q&A session led by former Clinton White House chief of staff Leon Panetta. Scroll about three-quarters of the way down to find a segment on the topic of "How does any President govern when this country is so split apart?"

In response, Hillary bemoans the loss of a spirit of compromise and bipartisan consensus in Congress today, an attitude that was typical in her younger days, when as a teenager from a Republican family background she even supported Goldwater for President:

That's not what we currently have in Washington. I think that's a great loss. It breaks the continuity of bipartisan consensus that really did move us through the last half of the 20th century.

You can disagree with the direction of the country, but the majority of people are a little beyond the center to the right or to the left, but basically within a kind of boundary where the disagreements took place.

But there was always a minority on both sides of the political spectrum who were not satisfied with that. They wanted to jerk the country to the left or jerk the country to the right.

Now, Hillary says, there is "increasing intolerance" among Republicans and they are jerking the country to the right. Gone are the days when "you had the Senate on a bipartisan vote passing a budget which included the old fashion concept of pay-as-you-go," with cooperation from the leadership of both parties needed to get the budget passed.

That spirit of cooperation and bipartisanship at the end of the politcal day, after all the back-and-forth rhetoric is done, is sorely needed now, oldstyliberal thinks. And if angling for such a center-seeking climate requires a Hillary Clinton to soften her erstwhile hard-line support for abortion rights by shifting the emphasis to unwanted pregnancy prevention and contraception, oldstyliberal believes Ellen Goodman and others ought to cut her some slack.

It's Hillary Rodham Clinton's wisdom in seeking common ground at (or at least near) the political center that makes oldstyliberal say, "Hillary in '08!"

From the Edge: Postcards from Buster

The latest controversy in the culture wars is reported in this piece in today's The Baltimore Sun. The article by TV critic David Zurawik is headlined "Despite denunciation, 'Buster' episode to air."

It seems the traveling, 8-year-old, asthmatic cartoon rabbit who is the title hero of the PBS children's series Postcards from Buster is scheduled to make a stop in New England, where he will visit — uh oh — "a home with lesbian parents."

Zurawik tells us that "the controversial segment — 'Sugartime!' — takes Buster to Vermont where children show him how maple syrup and cheese are made. The focus is on the children except when Buster is invited to dinner by two families headed by lesbian mothers." These women are, that is, the mothers of children who are Buster's friends. (And they are real, live women. Postcards from Buster is a combination of animation and live action. oldstyleliberal assumes Buster's friends are the women's real, live children.)

Not Buster's friend, apparently, is Margaret Spellings, the new secretary of the Department of Education. She "denounced the use of federal funds for" producing Postcards from Buster. Zurawik writes, "Most of the $5 million financing for Buster came from the federal government."

A sizable number of PBS stations have either refused to air the episode or postponed it pending further consideration. When the headline states "'Buster' episode to air," it refers to the 18 or so local PBS affiliates such as WGBH in Boston, New York's WNET, and KQED in San Francisco who will air the episode as scheduled.


oldstyliberal, this blog's proprietor, feels it is "culture war" issues like this one than most challenge his intention to find his way back to ... well, to "old-style liberalism." This is certainly the kind of controversy which never would have arisen in the period from, say, 1960 to 1968, the heyday of the Kennedys and of Martin Luther King.

So he will just have to explore the issue a bit further.

TV critic Zurawik tells us that a strong supporter of the "Sugartime!" episode, Peggy Charren, "a WGBH board member and pioneer in children's TV," claims that "it's about the children, not the parents. What you learn about is maple syrup — how its made — and that cheese comes from cows."

To which defense of Buster oldstyliberal feels he is forced to say, get real! The pre-schoolers at whom the series is aimed have antennae that will unfailingly lock in on the fatherlessness of Buster's friends' families.

In fact, that's what's another Buster defender, Dr. Michael Brody, a psychatrist and expert on children's TV, lauds: that "the very idea of this series was to show diversity." That doesn't mean different kinds of cows, folks. It means different kinds of people.

And it segues into reason number one why oldstyliberal thinks Secretary Spellings was wrong to raise a fuss. Per the article:

The Department of Education grant that funds Buster specifies: "Diversity will be incorporated into the fabric of the series to help children understand and respect differences and learn to live in a multicultural society."

If that's true, then Spellings hasn't a leg to stand on. The mandate to "help children understand and respect differences" doesn't stop at the doors of same-sex households.

So Spellings is technically wrong to overlook the stated rules. But is she wrong in a broader, more overarching sense? Cultural conservatives will, of course, uphold her stance. oldstyliberal, however, will not. He feels the politics of liberty and opportunity extend also to lesbian cheese and syrup farmers in Vermont.

Limits on the tolerance of oddity and diversity, upheld in the name of cultural conservatism, hold people back in our society. They keep people from maximizing their opportunities for making good and getting ahead. Specifically when it comes to gay and lesbian couples, the political fruits of cultural intolerance block legal recognition of the economic rights, such as those of inheritance and community property, that heterosexual couples — formally married or not — routinely enjoy.

oldstyleliberal thinks that's the decisive factor here. We need Buster and "Sugartime!" to help our children become more tolerant than we adults are, to move the society toward letting gays and lesbians alone so they can, in the old Star Trek expression, "live long and prosper."

Admittedly, the cultural conservatives might be in the right, and oldstyliberal wrong, if exposure to tolerant attitudes on homosexuality might lead children into adopting a gay lifestyle of their own, one day. Which it might, if people choose their sexual orientation. If people are non-heterosexual by choice, then we need to think really carefully about possibly influencing them, and thus the culture, away from "straight" sex.

But oldstyliberal has never seen any convincing evidence that people do choose their sexual preferences. In which case, he insists that TV programs that promote "lifestyle" tolerance are just fine for America.

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!