Eternal Life

Why government programs won't die.

Jonathan Rauch from the August/September 1996 issue

(Page 3 of 3)

That is the problem which, by blocking in practice the very reforms which they demand in the abstract, the voters both compound and resent. It leads to a recurrent delusion: the Ross Perot or Colin Powell fantasy. A "can-do leader" or a "healer," a man of integrity from "outside the system," will rise above partisan squabbling and "jumpstart reform," "clean house," lift government out of the mire of a fragmented and group-addled American polity. The fantasy is grounded in a powerful insight: The public senses, without fully understanding, that government's problem is social rather than just political, stemming from a lack of agreement on what government should and should not do. But it is a fantasy nonetheless.

For the viper pit of squabbling interest groups is us. There is no hidden consensus out there waiting to be plucked down by a visionary or a healer. Absent such a consensus, reform efforts such as Gingrich's (or Clinton's, in the 1994 health effort) are inevitably polarizing, and so are swatted down by the public as "extreme." Afraid of causing such a polarization, politicians discuss reform in only the vaguest terms, and so an electoral mandate for concrete change is rarely delivered. If this year's presidential race is like most others, both candidates will embrace the rhetoric of reform, but neither will venture the specifics. And God is in the details.

Another, more understandable mistake is especially common on the anti-government right. It is to believe that, just because the people hate government, they actually want to dock it. The experience of the past year, added to the experience of the past 40 years, has persuaded me otherwise. The people only want to be rid of the supposedly great swaths of government that don't "help" anyone--an evasion which conservatives cheerfully encourage. Ever since Barry Goldwater, conservatives have been promising to tame Washington without actually doing anything very unpleasant. No wonder Gingrich couldn't deliver.

One of the more common criticisms of Demosclerosis said, "Rauch explains all the reasons government can't solve problems--and then, against all his own evidence, he puts his money on reforming it. Why doesn't he just admit it isn't going to work? Forget reform--just slash government back." But I'm not the one being naive here. The public doesn't want to slash, and neither do the countless constituencies that view their programs as property and defend them for a living. If it is wishful to expect a Powell or Perot to simply step around all those forces, then surely it is no less so to expect Newt Gingrich or Phil Gramm to do it. One must try to make government more sensible and effective because, simply, there is nothing else to be done. The vast bulk of it is there permanently.

But maybe I'm being wishful, too. If the prospects of miniaturizing the government are poor, what makes the prospects of thoroughgoing reform any better? Dislike of government is diffuse, but reform is inherently specific; on paper, the two should go together, but in practice the one does not translate into the other any more readily than earthquake energy translates into steam power. I cling to the hope that the public is educable. Certainly there is a growing centrist vote that swings for reformist politicians. On the other hand, I have to admit that the public's recent behavior is like that of the 4-year-old who is much bigger than his teacher and does not like being taught. Though the Gingrich experience has not left me disconsolate, it has certainly left me daunted.

If I had to guess about the future, at the moment I would guess that the living death of government, though arrestable in theory, will not be arrested in practice. Anyway, it will not be arrested by a President Clinton or a President Dole, both of whom are inclined to manage government's problems of overload and incoherence rather than treat them. In that case, government will go on being clumsy and dysfunctional, a giant frozen mass of ossified programs trapped in a perpetual cash crunch. The public will go on being angry and mulish. And the country, of necessity, will look for nongovernmental ways to solve problems. In all of this, what will be hardest to endure will be the voters' righteous griping about a government whose agony they do so much to prolong.