If, after reading this economic analysis, you perceive the specter of Labor Secretary Robert Reich peering over your shoulder, don't be surprised. Reichian pet phrases dominate the two chapters in which Dionne explains the problems he believes the country faces. Wages are stagnant, companies are relocating offshore, greedy multinationals have broken their implicit "contract" with workers, people need to be retrained for the information age, etc., etc.
Then again, maybe not. As Michael Cox and Richard Alm pointed out in these pages ("The Good Old Days Are Now," December 1995), if you add fringe benefits to wages, calculate median net worth, or simply measure consumption of housing, automobiles, and such new consumer goods as VCRs and PCs, you'll find that American living standards have continued to rise. "If the average consumer owns more of everything plus the bonus of new products," wrote Cox and Alm, "then it's hard to fathom how a nation could have lost grou nd over the past 20 years."
Since Dionne is presumably targeting Democrats, it's no surprise that he might try to shock his readers by exaggerating the substance of the GOP's legislative agenda. Dionne acknowledges that the Republicans are trying to slow d own the growth of government, if not shrink it altogether. But he sees sinister forces influencing Newt Gingrich. The speaker, he suggests, may sound like a futurist, but his ideological mentors are the Robber Barons of the Gilded Age, not the entrepreneur s of Silicon Valley. Newt's soulmate is Bill McKinley rather than Bill Gates.
Dionne likens Gingrich to Mark Hanna, the political architect of the McKinley victory in 1896. "Just as Hanna and McKinley embraced industrialism ('the Second Wave'), [Gingrich believes] the new Republican Party needs to be the conscious agent of the new, global, information age economy," Dionne writes. "Gingrich, like Mark Hanna, believes he sees the future clearly, and he intends to organize and master it." He adds: "Hanna had considerable sympathy for government intervention and Progressivism."
Dionne is on to something here, but he doesn't realize what it is. He claims that the ultimate goal of Gingrich Republicans "is unabashedly a revolt against the New Deal and Progressive traditions...[that revolt would move] American conservatism toward a rendezvous with nineteenth-century laissez-faire doctrines."
But by making Gingrich a champion of laissez-faire, Dionne has set up a straw man. In fact, Gingrich has great sympathy for the muscular Progressivism of Theodore Roosevelt, the man who succeeded McKinley in the White House. Newt's deterministic futurism is not that far out of line with the central planning advocated by the early Progressives. Gingrich's Third Wave rap speaks of "forcing the scale of change necessary to be successful in the twenty-first century," of "accelerating the transition to a high technology, information based economy."
At a more practical level the speaker exposes his resistance to letting messy market forces operate. Even calling a pure flat tax "nonsense," as Gingrich did in February, suggests a sympathy to Progressive-style micromanagement. Both Gingrich and today's Progressives say they embrace the future; rather than letting it evolve on its own, however, they believe they must shape and direct it.
And we've seen little evidence to date suggesting that laissez-faire is the GOP's goal. House Majority Leader Dick Armeyline --Dionne's real ideological nemesis--may want to replace the federal tax and regulatory codes. And Dionne takes his shots at Armey, saying at one point: "To assert as a flat rule, as Representative Armey does, that 'the market is rational and the government is dumb' is to assume that it is rational to accept problems created by unemployment, low wages, business cycles, pollution and simple human failings; and dumb to use government to try to lessen the human costs associated with them. Mr. Armey might believe that; most Americans do not." For the purposes of this book, however, it does little good to attack Armey, because he isn't calling the shots; the speaker is.
Gingrich has made it clear that the Republicans would "preserve, protect, and defend" Medicare and merely cut funds for public broadcasting by a small percentage. Social Security, the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities, and the Tennessee Valley Authority are still in the federal budget and will be in 2002. Meanwhile, the GOP continues to fund 14 cabinet departments, with some Republicans suggesting we add a 15th--the Department of Science. At last check, even the most austere budget the Republicans offered would still have the feds spend $12 trillion over the next seven years. Hardly a move toward laissez-faire.
How did those bad Republicans attract so many voters? Dionne explained this succinctly in a Fox Morning News interview on February 14: Democrats in the 103rd Congress, he said, offered their own "contract with America"--universal health care, along with welfare, lobbying, and campaign reforms--and when the Democrats couldn't pass their contract, voters opted for the House Republicans' Contract with America, with its balanced-budget amendment, term limits, tax cuts, and regulatory reforms.
If we take Dionne seriously, he must be the P.T. Barnum of political analysts, believing there is a sucker born every minute who can't distinguish between a package of policies that would dramatically expand the power of the federal line government (the Democrats' legislative agenda in the 103rd Congress) and one that would restrain it (the actual Contract with America). Dionne seems to say, "No matter what proposals you offer, if you dress them up nicely enough, those dummies will vote for 'em."
There's plenty of evidence that voters knew exactly why they trended Republican in 1994. In a post-election survey by Republican pollster Frank Luntz, nearly two-thirds of the respondents said they felt the federal government was more of an opponent than an ally in their pursuit of the American Dream. And the antipathy of middle-class voters to government remains. Last fall, reports The New Republic, a series of focus groups sponsored by the AFL-CIO (!) found that working-class Americans were somewhat optimistic about the future but "didn't think their wages would rise, nor that politicians, g overnment or unions would come to their aid." They felt they would improve their lives by taking a second job, improving their work skills, or starting their own businesses. And they "thought the biggest threat to their success came from government spending and taxes."
Despite the evidence, Dionne uses his subtitle to assert that "Progressives will dominate the next political era."
"Most in the Anxious Middle," he says, "are wary of the economic change now under way but skeptical of efforts to turn the process back. They are dissatisfied with the responses that have come from government so far, but are worried about their prospects in an economic order in which government withdraws basic social protections."
Dionne may indeed have identified the wishes and longings of the Anxious Middle, even though that's a doubtful assumption. But political realities make a revival of government activism problematic. Dionne conveniently ignores the long-term constraints structural deficits will place on future policy makers. He acts as if such obstacles as the $5 trillion national debt, perpetual $200 billion interest payments, the pending entitlement crisis, the unshakable bipartisan resistance of voters to higher taxes, and the fiscal time bombs of Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare don't exist.
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