The Ownership Society and Its Discontents

You can't count on George Bush and the GOP Congress to transform the welfare state.

Ryan H. Sager from the November 2006 issue

(Page 4 of 4)

Social Security was far from the biggest issue in the 2004 campaign, but when Bush won reelection, he decided it was time to take his big gamble. He dedicated a 1,200-word section of his 2005 State of the Union Address to a call for reforming Social Security with personal accounts, then embarked on a barnstorming tour of America, including 60 stops in 60 days in March and April.

But the push fell flat. Despite all the talk about an Ownership Society, Bush put little effort into pushing the ownership aspects of Social Security reform, preferring to stress the system’s solvency problems. And even then, while he succeeded in convincing many Americans that the system needed reform, he didn’t convince many that it needed to be reformed right then. By late spring 2005, it was clear that reform was going nowhere. As early as March, Bush’s personal approval rating began to dip. Support for his Social Security proposal also dropped. A report from the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that support for private accounts fell among those considered most likely to support them, younger Americans, between February and March, from 66 percent to 49 percent. Opposition among older Americans was much higher. The Pew poll also found that among all Americans, the more they heard about the plan, the less likely they were to support it. And when the public’s support wavered, Republicans in Congress got squirrelly and ran for cover.

Creating a consensus that Social Security needs to be changed and creating broad familiarity with the concept of private accounts among the public were two non-trivial accomplishments. And it’s hard to see how anything short of political miracle-working would have brought a nervous public charging head-first into the most radical reform of the New Deal ever undertaken.

But it’s also worth recognizing that while the ownership pushed by Bush is in some ways more politically palatable than the austerity pushed during the Gingrich years, it is also no political palliative. Tough choices are still tough choices, and the public isn’t likely to believe that it can get something for nothing. Social Security may be the key to creating an Ownership Society, but no one’s found a way to make it click.

Failing, But Not Irredeemable

By accepting the premises behind so much of the federal edifice, Republicans have left themselves with precious little room to maneuver. If a conservative president comes into office set on education reform, but accepts off the bat that the Department of Education’s role should increase, not decrease, and that vouchers are off the table, he’s going to end up with a meaningless clump of sod like NCLB. The same goes for health care, where a lack of confidence and imagination—not to mention a routine triumph of politics over principle—prevented Republicans from even attempting to win free-market innovations like HSAs on their own before tying them to a massive expansion of the welfare state.

Still, Bush’s version of the Ownership Society is not the only version imaginable. Time and again Bush has decided that getting any bill is more important than getting a good bill. A more principled president or Congress might yet do some real good with the ideas Bush has clumsily and carelessly groped toward.

For now, however, all Bush’s Ownership Society has done is prove a timeless law of politics: Once you’ve written yourself a permission slip to bend on principle in the service of a higher good, you end up looking like a pretzel.