Articles

America needs leaders to cross gulf of neglect

Opinion by James Pinkerton
Newsday
Sept. 6, 2005

For $3.8 trillion, we should get more than this.

That's the combined expenditure of the federal, state and local governments in 2005, nearly a third of the national economy. And yet the results in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast speak for themselves: Warnings went unheeded, levees were neglected, cops and rescuers were short-shrifted.

At the root of problem is a deep failure in the vision of both left and right as to how government should work. The basic vision of a nation-state was laid down four centuries ago by Thomas Hobbes, who said that the sovereign had to keep a monopoly of force on the state's own territory. Since then has come the greater understanding that state power also means state responsibility, to keep people from suffering. So we have come to expect that government assure basic functions and utilities--that doesn't seem too much to ask.

So what went wrong?

In a nutshell, neither the left nor the right seems much interested in upholding Hobbesian responsibility anymore. To the ideological elites, both port and starboard, the basic maintenance of the American social contract--in which people agree to behave well and in turn expect to be cared for in emergencies--seems boring compared with the glittering possibility of remaking the entire world.

It wasn't always like this. George Washington's secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton, saw himself as not only a booster, but a builder. He was preoccupied with building roads and industries, for the betterment of the nation's citizens. That Hamiltonian vision predominated for a century and a half; Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration embraced public works, notably the Tennessee Valley Authority. In their Keynesian enthusiasm, New Dealers would have been putting locals to work strengthening New Orleans' levees.

After World War II, that vision changed, for two reasons.

First, the elites went global. The hottest post-war issues were international--Communism, world trade, foreign aid. In 1961, when John F. Kennedy proclaimed that America would "bear any burden," he was talking not about the obligation of Americans to each other, but rather about America's obligation to the world.

Today, the presumed "best and brightest" on the left get most excited over multiculturalism, AIDS and human rights. And the avant-garde right mirrors, if not mimics, the left in its international preoccupation. On the day the hurricane hit New Orleans, George W. Bush was in California making a speech about Iraq, leading The Wall Street Journal's Peggy Noonan to ask, "Does he understand that what has happened in our gulf is as important as what is happening in the other gulf?"

So to the second reason that the Hamiltonian domestic vision has withered: The elites have simply lost interest in such nitty-gritty. Aside from a few abstractions, such as reproductive and gay rights, liberals work hardest in the blind defense of entitlement spending, such as Social Security--even for the rich. Meanwhile, the active functions of a good society, such as teaching poor people how to live productive lives, are neglected.

For its part, the right has been happy to seize upon the failures of government as an argument for not having much of a government--although, thanks to the left's foolish but effective defense of runaway entitlement spending, the government continues to grow. Meanwhile, eager-beaver conservatives are discouraged from public service, except the military; being an investment banker or a right-to-life activist is a higher calling.

But there's just one problem. Amid all this international worrywarting and globe-girdling crusading, the well-being of ordinary Americans is ignored. Who bothers with something so dull as infrastructure? We spend money, lots of it, but neither party sweats details to make sure public services work routinely, let alone in a crisis.

So there's a huge hole in the middle of American politics waiting to be filled by a leader who puts the American nation, and the American people, first.

Copyright: 2005 Newsday

Reprinted from New America Foundation website.

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