Monthly Archives: April, 2009

Only two men have been nominated five times for national office by one of our two great political parties. One of them was Franklin D. Roosevelt. The other was Richard M. Nixon. Personally and by the long shadow they cast, both shaped American politics and government for a generation or more. Each of them polarized the nation, with most voters coming out most of the time on his side, but with an uncomfortably large number—including many prominent voices in the press—never reconciled to the legitimacy of the man or his works. Roosevelt is perennially rated as one of our best presidents, and I think justifiably so, whatever you may think of his domestic policies, because of his brilliant success as commander-in-chief in World War II. Nixon is perennially rated as one of our worst presidents, and here I disagree, for I have come to think that Nixon, for all his sins, left the country better off than it was when he came to the White House.

That might seem counterintuitive or nonsensical. Against the picture of Roosevelt departing suddenly from the scene as the nation neared the moment of absolute victory, we have the picture of Nixon, physically awkward as ever, making the "V" sign as he boarded the helicopter that would take him away from the White House as the first president so disgraced that he was forced to resign. But if we grant, as I think most Americans would, that the nation was better off in April 1945 than it had been in March 1933, I also think a strong case can be made that the nation was better off in August 1974 than it had been in January 1969.

Rick Perlstein, the gifted author of Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America, seems to disagree. Perlstein is a young man of the Left who won many admirers on all sides with his previous book, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (2001). There he showed the capacity for a sympathetic understanding of a man whose ideas he does not share; here he struggles to do the same for a man whose ideas often were much closer to his own. But of course Goldwater, who never really wanted to be president, was gifted with an appealing personality while Nixon, who longed to be president, was not. My impression is that Perlstein’s attempts to understand Nixon left him loathing him all the more, and regretting the nation—"Nixonland"—he left behind. "How did Nixonland end?" he concludes his book. "It has not ended yet."


Yet my reading of this book left me more appalled by Nixon’s enemies than by Nixon. I lived through this period, while Perlstein knows it only second hand. But I have to say that my own attempt at political narrative, Our Country: The Shaping of America from Roosevelt to Reagan (1990), which Perlstein acknowledges, offers a far less vivid and emotionally rending picture of America in the years from 1965 to 1972 than Perlstein’s. He begins his narrative with an account of the Watts riots in Los Angeles in August 1965 based on television footage from KTLA’s first-of-its-kind helicopter and notes, a few pages later, that it broke out five days after the signing of the Voting Rights Act. That law, the most immediately effective civil rights act, was the product of a national consensus for equal rights and against Southern segregationists’ violent obstructionism. The riot was an advance warning that that consensus would produce not domestic contentment but something more like war.

The most vivid scenes in Nixonland are not those featuring Nixon but those showing the violence and craziness of his times. Most but not all of it came from the Left or forces associated with the Left—rioting blacks and students, war protesters and feminists, hippies and criminals. Perlstein’s pointillist narrative of the Democratic National Convention of 1968 shows how wrenching the violence in Chicago was; his similar description of the Democratic National Convention of 1972 brings out the zaniness of the proceedings.

Perlstein’s accounts of the violence and hatreds loose in the land fortify my judgment that Nixon came to the presidency at the third most difficult time in our history to do so, the others being March 1861 and March 1933. And I would agree that the ultimate failure of his presidency, together with the recent memory of the assassination of John Kennedy, undermined Americans’ belief in a beneficent national narrative.


Even so, I see two Nixons, one of them treated rather glancingly in Nixonland. This is the Nixon who came to office promising to respond to the sign the girl held up in Deshler, Ohio, "Bring us together." This Nixon embarked on creative public policies intended to form a new national consensus at a time of violent division. For that purpose he brought on staff two Harvard professors, Henry Kissinger and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, with whom he had no previous friendly connection. Perlstein gives little attention to policy in Nixonland and mentions Moynihan only a couple of times. Kissinger, an accomplice in some of Nixon’s misdeeds, appears more often, but without much emphasis on the one great initiative which Nixon envisioned even before Kissinger—the opening to China. This Nixon also advanced liberal policies on school desegregation in the South (admittedly made necessary by court decision), on the environment and Indian tribes (here John Ehrlichman was a key aide), and on racial quotas and preferences. Yet he got virtually no credit for them from liberals.

At the same time, he led a major effort to restructure our politics by actively seeking a Republican majority in the Senate in the 1970 off-year elections. This was the year, by my count, which had more seriously contested Senate elections than any other in our history. Perlstein makes it clear that the campaigns of many of these senators were in tension with the thrust of Nixon’s policies. But he also makes it clear that many of the Democrats who opposed Nixon’s policy on Vietnam were behaving dishonorably: the same people who meekly supported Lyndon Johnson’s escalation of the Vietnam War savagely opposed Nixon’s attempt to salvage victory even as he withdrew forces. Nixon had reason, I think, to believe that his opponents were operating in bad faith and reason, I am guessing, to believe that if he secured Republican majorities in Congress he could lead them toward some national consensus. But he fell short. Republicans gained seats in the Senate, but not enough, and they lost seats in the House, in a recession year, as they had in recession years since the 1930s. Nixon’s attempt to reshape partisan politics had failed. In response, he decided to fight for his own survival—he was anything but a favorite for reelection during much of 1971 and 1972—and let his party fend for itself.

Here I think Nixon capitulated too soon, lacking the imagination to see what could be done. In his younger years Nixon was always a fighter. In Perlstein’s view, he was not just shaped by but suffused with a resentment of those one step up on the social ladder—a hatred of the Franklins at Whittier College (he headed the rival Orthogonians), of well-connected Harvard graduates like Alger Hiss (Nixon had been turned down at Harvard and was turned down by Wall Street law firms), and of the New York Herald Tribune establishment Republicans who tried to force him off the ticket in 1952. His response was to work harder, to identify the other side’s weakness, and to strike a fatal blow by appealing to the resentments of those on the rungs of the ladder below him. His exposure of Hiss was one great success; the Checkers speech another. They came early—Nixon became vice president at 40, the second youngest in history—and, in Perlstein’s view, they reinforced his impulse to make such appeals again and again.


The second Nixon I see, the Nixon of the period after the 1970 elections, certainly did so. This Nixon seemed to consider all the old political rules still in place. He no longer thought that the Republicans could become a national majority. Instead, he appointed the still-Democratic John Connally to his cabinet and at the instigation of the former Texas governor issued wage and price controls. He devoted much of his 1972 campaign media budget to ads in which Connally argued that George McGovern was an unacceptable Democrat, with the implication that it was all right to vote for less radical Democrats lower down the ballot. Then Nixon authorized or set in motion the dirty tricks squads and Watergate burglars. He well understood that Roosevelt and Kennedy had employed such methods, and he knew that the press had observed an ethic that held you shouldn’t print things that would disillusion Americans about the purity of U.S. presidents. He didn’t realize that that rule was changing—in the wake of the violence of the late 1960s and early 1970s and out of liberal-left baby boomers’ confidence in their own purity and disgust with the larger society. The press’s willingness to expose a president’s shady tactics proved politically fatal for Nixon in 1974.

Nixon, writes Perlstein, "rose by stoking and exploiting anger and resentment, rooted in the anger and resentments at the center of his character.... What Richard Nixon left behind was the very terms of our national self-image: a notion that there are two kinds of Americans." Nixon took the side of (in terms I used at the time) the dutiful people over the beautiful people. Perlstein is careful not to argue that one side was all right and the other all wrong. "Both populations—to speak in ideal types—are equally, essentially, tragically American." Maybe so. But in Perlstein’s narrative the beautiful people look very ugly—sometimes uglier than Nixon himself.

Consider that other president nominated five times for national office. Franklin Roosevelt, like Richard Nixon, at times used hateful language against a widely despised elite. "I should like to have it said of my first administration that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match," Roosevelt declared in October 1936 in Madison Square Garden. "I should like to have it said of my second administration that in it these forces met their master." Master—a pretty tough word in the decade of Mussolini and Hitler and Stalin. And Roosevelt’s hatred, as with Nixon, was directed at those one rung above on the social ladder: the DuPonts, the Mellons, and the Vanderbilts whose wealth dwarfed that of the squire of Hyde Park.

But for Roosevelt, I think, the hatred was faux, political artifice, adopted in the heat of battle but dispensed with when circumstances dictated. Roosevelt was quite ready, when faced with international disaster and the daunting challenge of winning a third term in 1940, to call in Herbert Hoover’s secretary of state to run the army and Alf Landon’s running mate to run the navy. He recruited Wall Street operators and big corporate executives to run much of the war effort in the years that followed. Roosevelt, who never showed his hole cards to anybody, was a faux-hater. Nixon, at least according to Rick Perlstein, was the real thing.

That was arguably a terrible political handicap. Yet in policy terms Nixon had his successes. His China policy, denounced by every successful presidential candidate but one since his day, remains in place, a more important part of American policy than ever. Some of his leftward domestic policies do, too. But the major difference, perhaps, between Roosevelt and Nixon was that the people Roosevelt professed to hate were still willing to serve with him because they wanted America to win a war. The people Nixon sincerely hated wanted America to lose a war. And, as we have seen in the past few years, the descendants of the people Nixon sincerely despised still want America to lose a war. Rick Perlstein’s indictment of Nixon is an even harsher indictment of the people who cheered when he was brought down. Michael Barone is a senior writer for U.S. News & World Report, principal co-author of The Almanac of American Politics (National Journal Group), and author of Our First Revolution: The Remarkable British Upheaval That Inspired America’s Founding Fathers (Crown).

Former President Bill Clinton told CNSNews.com in an exclusive interview in April that Haiti, Latin America's poorest nation, does not need to rely on U.S. foreign aid alone to help fix its political and economic problems because "a lot can be done by the private sector."

Friend of the Claremont Institute Robert Reilly discusses the Iowa Supreme Court’s ruling on same-sex marriage at MercatorNET.  Reilly makes the case for the relevance of natural law to the same-sex marriage debate and challenges the claim that it is a standard equal protection issue.

"The Odyssey," wrote the great Homer scholar G.S. Kirk, "can be read without having to try too hard and without special preparation." Compared with the heroic grandeur of the Iliad, the adventures of the wily Odysseus can indeed seem a mere crowd-pleasing romance: travelers’ tales, folklore monsters, exotic islands, femmes fatales both mortal and divine, and domestic drama complete with a happy ending—these are the stuff of boys’ novels and other light diversions. Yet for all its entertaining accessibility, the Odyssey is conceptually very ambitious. Homer’s theme in the Odyssey will become the central question of later Greek philosophy: what makes us human beings?

In their classic efforts to answer this question, 5th-century Greek philosophers follow Homer in pondering how culture and nature (in Greek, nomos and phusis) relate to each other as they converge in human identity. How do our time- and body-transcending minds relate to our physical bodies with their passions and appetites rooted in space and time and subject to change and chance, suffering and death? As a point of departure for their wide-ranging inquiries, the philosophers return again and again to Homer’s poetry.

Hard World

Homer’s first insight into human identity is that it is created in part by our existence in an inhuman natural world. Like the Aegean and Mediterranean seas Odysseus must sail, where sudden storms can destroy a ship in minutes, nature is an arena of powerful destructive forces, a harsh world of storms, predators, and plagues, a place where sustenance is scarce and grudgingly given, where even a rich king like Odysseus must wander, begging for his bread. We survive in this world not because of our physical strength, for compared to nature’s power and the other animals we are pitifully weak, slow, and soft. We survive and flourish because of our minds and what our minds create—cities, laws, institutions, and technology—culture, in short, all those things that purely or merely natural creatures do not enjoy.

These existential facts explain Odysseus’s defining qualities, cleverness (polymêtis) and endurance (polytlas). Unlike the typical iliadic hero—"swift-footed" Achilles or "huge" Ajax—Odysseus’s most important characteristic is mental, not physical, which partially explains the antipathy to Odysseus on the part of both Achilles and Ajax. Those heroes prefer to make their way in the world through sheer violence, whereas Odysseus relies more on trickery, rhetoric, and disguise. This contrast between cleverness and violence is frequently dramatized in the Iliad, especially when Achilles and Odysseus quarrel over how Troy will be taken, by brute force or trickery. As we all know, it is Odysseus’s trick of the wooden horse that brings about the city’s fall.

Odysseus, then, is an intellectual hero of sorts, his journey not just a physical movement through space and time but also a journey of knowledge—"many were they whose cities he saw, whose minds he learned of" (quotations throughout are from the Richard Lattimore translation, which is the most faithful to the Greek). But this knowledge has a practical purpose: given the overpowering forces of nature, human physical strength alone is not sufficient for survival. We rely instead on our artful minds and how they can learn and adapt to and alter what we find in the world to make it serve our ends.

Odysseus’s other representative quality, endurance, is also made necessary by the harsh world into which we are thrown. Before we can figure out how to survive, we first have to be able to take the pain and suffering we experience. No scene in the Odyssey shows us Odysseus’s endurance better than the 200-line description in Book V of the storm that destroys his raft and forces upon him a desperate struggle to reach land. Nearly drowned by waves that drag him over rocks that tear the flesh from his hands, Odysseus keeps on fighting until he reaches the shore. But it is not just his prowess at swimming or even his ability to endure pain that saves him: he would have perished, Homer tells us, "wretched, beyond his destiny,/had not the gray-eyed goddess Athene given him forethought," the mental sharpness that sees the mouth of a river into which he swims to safety. We must be able to endure the suffering inflicted by a hard world until our minds can figure out a way to survive.

 

Wretched Belly

Yet the destructive forces out there in the world that we have to endure and use our minds to circumvent are not the only challenges we humans face. For within us are the equally destructive passions, appetites, and irrational impulses of our animal-like bodies. They too must be endured and resisted, compelled to give way to the mind’s control. Throughout the Odyssey, disaster is visited on those who do not control their appetites and impulses, and hunger is the natural need that Homer most often emphasizes. On practically every page, someone is eating or talking about eating, and destruction often follows for those who eat the wrong things or at the wrong time. Odysseus’s men eat the lotus-flower and forget their home and identity; they eat the forbidden oxen of the sun-god Helios and die; they eat the feast of Circe and are turned into pigs. For more than any other need we have, hunger—what Odysseus calls the "wretched belly,/ that cursed thing, who bestows many evils on men"—makes us dependent on a natural world that begrudges us the means of survival.

Sexual desire and greed, too, bring destruction on those who cannot resist their force. The 108 suitors occupying Odysseus’s palace­ are monsters of consumption, devouring his flocks and cattle, corrupting his maids, plotting to murder his son Telemachus, and attempting through force to possess his wife Penelope—just about every time we see them, they are feasting and drinking amidst the remnants of slaughtered animals. When she appears before the suitors in Book XVIII, "their knees gave way, and the hearts in them were bemused with passion," Homer writes, using the same metaphor he uses in the Iliad to describe a warrior’s death. Indeed, Odysseus will "loosen their knees" when he slaughters all the suitors, their deaths the direct consequence of their appetites.
This strength to endure one’s own "slavish and brutish" appetites, as Aristotle calls them, this power not to act on those bestial impulses, no matter how painfully insistent, because the mind can see the destructive consequences of such action, is the virtue the Greek philosophers will call sôphrosunê, the "rational self-control" only humans possess. Odysseus’s qualities of endurance and cleverness converge in this most humanizing virtue, and throughout the epic his survival is clearly a consequence not just of physical endurance and mental cleverness, but also of his ability to resist his own powerful passions and subordinate them to what his mind knows is the best course of action.

One of the best illustrations of this virtue occurs in Book XX. Disguised as a beggar, Odysseus has just had a conversation with Penelope in which has been hatched the plot to destroy the suitors the next day. As he beds down for the night in his courtyard, he witnesses the treacherous maids sneaking out to sleep with the suitors. "His heart was growling within him, like a bitch defending her puppies," goading him to kill the maids for their outrage. But Odysseus

struck himself on the chest and spoke to his heart and scolded it:
"Bear up, my heart. You have had worse to endure before this
on that day when the irresistible Cyclops ate up my strong companions,
but you endured it until intelligence got you out of the cave."

 

In this simile, his righteous anger­­ originates in an animalistic impulse, as the comparison to the dog makes obvious. Yet that irrational impulse is not choiceworthy, since the plot has been laid to destroy the suitors the next day, and if Odysseus were to act now he would be exposed and the plot would fail. He knows this, and so he must scold that impulse, control it the way a man does a growling dog with a cuff or a kick, and subordinate it to the mind’s knowledge of context and consequence. For the moment, he must endure the anger within him aroused by the treachery of his maids, and then he must rely on "intelligence" (Lattimore’s translation of Homer’s mêtis, "contrivance" or "trick") to prevail in the rigged contest with the bow that will take place the next day. Like Odysseus, we humans survive and flourish because we have such a rational virtue that restrains our natural impulses, and because we have minds that can think up ways of getting around the destructive forces of the natural world.

 

Cyclops and the Second Thought

The most popular adventure in the Odyssey, the encounter with the monstrous Cyclops Polyphemus, also happens to be the one where Homer’s vision of human identity is best illustrated. Every detail in the description of the Cyclopes emphasizes how inhuman they are, for everything Odysseus tells us they lack is precisely what makes humans human. They have no technologies like agriculture and shipbuilding, no laws, no political institutions, and no communal "ties that bind." In short, the Cyclopes have no culture to mediate their savage natures. They are pure natural force and appetite, which is why Homer makes them physical monsters, giants with one wheel-like eye, "endowed with great strength,/and wild, with no true knowledge of laws or any good customs." When Odysseus and his men encounter Polyphemus, the inhuman savagery of the Cyclopes is made explicit by the monster’s action: he suddenly snatches up two of the Greeks

and like a lion reared in the hills, without leaving anything,
ate them, entrails, flesh, and the marrowy bones alike.

 

Such a monster is not going to be defeated by force alone. But before Odysseus can figure out how to get his men out of this death trap, he must resist his own impulsive wrath aroused in his "great-hearted spirit" by this brutal and contemptuous challenge to his honor. After Polyphemus falls asleep, Odysseus creeps up to him and feels for the vulnerable spot to plunge his sword—"but the second thought stayed" him. With the monster dead, there is no way Odysseus and his men could drag away the huge stone blocking the mouth of the cave. Nothing better illustrates our defining essence as human beings than what Homer calls the "second thought," the consciousness of consequences that restrains our passions and thus prevents us from foolish actions.

What saves Odysseus is not violence alone but the trick he thinks up, which requires for its execution every defining human characteristic we are told the Cyclopes lack. After getting the monster drunk on wine, Odysseus sharpens with his sword an olive-wood stake, then puts it into the fire until it glows red-hot—a use of nature that is the essence of technology. Then aided by his friends, encouraging them with his words to endure their fear, Odysseus rams the stake into the monster’s eye while his men twirl it, "like a man with a brace-and-bit who bores into/a ship timber," and the hot stake burns and sizzles in the eye like hot iron plunged into cold water by a blacksmith. At the very moment Odysseus overcomes the brutish Cyclops, Homer introduces two similes that appeal to technologies critical for human civilization, ship-building and iron-working. We may be physically weak and slow, but our minds and the alterations our minds can work on the stuff of nature, our ability as "social animals" to work together, and our virtues of endurance and self-control all help us to triumph over the brutal, devouring forces of nature.

 

Odysseus and Us

In some respects, we moderns can identify with the scrappy survivor Odysseus. The honor, clan loyalty, revenge, and warrior valor of the Iliad seem like relics of a benighted age. But Odysseus, the sly democratic everyman, seems like us: he just wants to get back home in one piece. In other respects, of course, Homer’s vision of what we are and how we relate to the natural world cuts against the grain of modern prejudices. Our idealization of nature as the true home we have lost because of civilization and technology, a place of beauty and spiritual sustenance with which we must harmonize ourselves to be more authentically human, would strike Homer as delusional, the luxury of people liberated by technology from nature’s quotidian cruelty. Nature in reality is a brute force indifferent to our pathetic species—it is a one-eyed monster that will devour us raw.

Nor does Homer sympathize with the modern demonization of civilization, the Romantic notion that the modern world has alienated us from our true selves and that, as Freud wrote, "our civilization is largely responsible for our misery." The Odyssey sees civilization as our salvation, what separates us from the brute existence of animals and allows us to be recognizably human in the first place. Five centuries after Homer, Aristotle will agree when he calls human beings "polis-dwelling animals," creatures defined by a communal political-social order of laws, language, and institutions. To be anything else, Aristotle adds, one must be a beast or a god. But one will not be human.

Most important is Homer’s insight that what is best and most admirable about human beings is to be found precisely in how we meet the challenges and risks of the hard natural world of pain and suffering. This is a notion intolerable to therapeutic moderns who believe that suffering and hardship are unfair anomalies to be corrected by progress, rather than the immutable limits that help to define us and create the conditions for our nobility and achievement. Odysseus accepted this paradox of human identity, which explains his rejection of Calypso’s invitation to remain with her and stay young forever, an offer she spices up by emphasizing the hardship and suffering Odysseus must undergo before he can get home and win back his wife. Odysseus’s response is a powerful assertion of the dignity of human life, of the value of living a life of meaning even at the cost of suffering and death:

And if some god batters me far out on the wine-blue water,
I will endure it, keeping a stubborn spirit inside me,
for already I have suffered much and done much hard work
on the waves and in the fighting. So let this adventure follow.

 

Here is wisdom that we moderns, dazzled as we are by utopian dreams of a perfect world, need to relearn.

At a ceremony whose official theme was a new birth of freedom, President Barack Obama wisely chose not to emphasize the similarities between himself and the 16th president. Oh, he used Lincoln’s Bible to swear the bungled oath of office, and rode into town along the railroad route the Great Emancipator had taken. But he did not press the point, allowing the majestic facts to speak for themselves: the country’s first African-American president, being inaugurated on the west front of the Capitol, overlooking the mall that sweeps past the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial.

He had not been so restrained in his victory speech on November 4. Then, he quoted Lincoln’s First Inaugural and, rather egregiously, the Gettysburg Address, assuring his ecstatic supporters that their efforts on his behalf "proved that more than two centuries later, a government of the people, by the people, and for the people has not perished from this earth." Implying what, exactly—that if John McCain had won, slavery and secession would have triumphed?

He struck a more graceful note, indeed many graceful notes, in his Inaugural Address. As an orator, Obama is inspirational rather than persuasive—his speeches contain few arguments—and his post-partisan message fits the moment. The key to his post-partisan appeal is the magic word "new." Obama sprinkled it liberally over his speech, in keeping with his campaign promise to inaugurate "a new politics for a new time." He dismissed the old politics as cynical and full of "recriminations and worn out dogmas." Yet what dogma is more worn out than the empty call for a new politics? And what will generate more cynicism than raising public expectations of government’s efficacy far beyond what it can reasonably deliver?

In his First Inaugural, Lincoln promised not a new politics but government according to constitutional limits. The key word in his Address was not an adjective but a noun, not "new" but "Constitution," a term occurring in virtually every paragraph.

President Obama didn’t mention the Constitution, at least explicitly. He did refer to the Founding Fathers who, he explained, "drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations." But the context was foreign affairs, not domestic. He evoked the Constitution as the emblem of his post-Guantanamo foreign policy in which "our safety and our ideals" would be easily reconciled. Though pledging that the U.S. would defeat its enemies (a shadowy "network of violence and hatred"), he looked forward to "a new era of peace" based on diplomacy, aid for poor nations, and global environmentalism. "For the world has changed," he noted, "and we must change with it." Countries and terrorists who think otherwise "are on the wrong side of history."

It will take hard work to remake America, he admonished. Yet to a surprising extent, history does the heavy lifting for Obama. He dismissed as "false" the choice between our safety and our ideals (as he defines them), between small and big government, between national sovereignty and international authority. We can have it all, it seems, because we’re at a moment—that famous "moment" he brags about—when history has reconciled these competing notions for us. Change has already come.

The most striking aspect of the speech was its repeated invocations of the American Founders and the virtues of the American character. These sentiments lent dignity to the Address and pleased conservatives who didn’t grasp Obama’s ulterior motive: to recapture patriotism for the Left and restore the Democrats as a (actually, the) patriotic party. This is not your Founding Fathers’ patriotism but (inevitably) a "new spirit of patriotism," meaning that we have to "pitch in and work harder and look after not only ourselves, but each other." (That’s from his election night speech.) The old patriotism, he implied, while perhaps good in its day, was insufficiently redistributionist, forward-looking, and cosmopolitan for today’s needs. The old virtues and values like honesty, courage, and patriotism are "true," then, not in themselves so much but for pragmatic reasons: they are indispensable to the vital and continuing work of remaking America and, indeed, the world. Our deepest loyalty should be to this future and therefore more perfect Union, not to America as it is or ever was.

The "true genius of America," President Obama likes to say, is "that America can change." Lincoln would have asked, for better or worse? We shall see.

The political landscape in Washington has plainly been profoundly altered by our recent elections. Although it is too early to tell what President Obama’s priorities are going to be or how they will align with the preferences of the newly strengthened Democratic majority in the Congress, many things may be possible now in our politics that have not been possible for some time. One of those things is reform of the federal government. Like John F. Kennedy before him, Obama seems to have tapped into a vein of idealism in the American people that could lead to an enthusiasm for government service not seen since the Vietnam War and Watergate. The problem is that government service has over the years become ever more unpleasant and unrewarding.

Especially at a time when business as well as play in America are increasingly shaped by the egalitarianism and self-display of the global electronic environment, the federal government remains a dinosaur of hierarchy, regimentation, routine, and anonymity. Individual achievement is difficult to measure and reward. At the same time, even innocent missteps can land bureaucrats in the newspapers or the courts, wrecking careers and bank balances (consider the case of Scooter Libby). On top of all that, federal salary scales have not kept up with the private sector, particularly in certain key areas. As a result of all these factors, those attracted to federal service are no longer necessarily our best and brightest. Rather, as John D. Donahue argues in a data-filled but readable brief study, The Warping of Government Work, federal employment tends to be the preferred option of those seeking what he calls "safe harbor" in government from the rigors of the real economy, with predictably baleful effects on the government’s ability to perform its mandated missions.


Donahue, a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and a former official in the Clinton Administration, takes as his theme the increasing divergence in recent decades between public sector (including state and local government) and private sector employment. In his view, the massive factor behind this divergence is the gradual collapse of the "middle class economy" and the growth of the enormous inequalities in income that we see in the American workforce today. Donahue spends little time bemoaning this development or expecting it to be remedied by government itself, and his bottom line will surprise some. "Government work offers a haven from the roiling turbulence of today’s economy for many millions of workers," he writes. "It is eminently understandable that these Americans cherish and cling to a separate working world that still lets them earn a middle-class living. The problem, of course, is that this is not what government is for."

The real economy’s distorting effect on government work is twofold. Toward the lower end of the pay scale, due largely to the growing power of public sector unions, workers are generally more secure and better paid than in comparable jobs in the private sector, yet have few incentives to excel—or fear dismissal. At the same time, because salaries for top managers and professionals are artificially suppressed by being linked closely to congressional pay, they discourage retention of the most accomplished and ambitious. (With a few exceptions, executive branch salaries are capped at around $155,000, although annual performance bonuses are also routinely given.) Donahue argues that dysfunctional government performance can be overcome only by eliminating these distortions. He would enhance the reward structure of the top echelons of government and attack the perquisites of ordinary workers enjoying government’s "safe harbor."


In A Government Ill Executed: the decline of Federal Service and How to Reverse It, Paul C. Light, a political scientist who has written widely on public administration in the United States, shares Donahue’s assessment of the American government’s declining administrative competence. Focusing on the federal bureaucracy, he offers a litany of recent cases illustrating his point:

taxpayer abuse by the Internal Revenue Service, security breaches at the nation’s nuclear laboratories, missing laptops at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Challenger and Columbia space shuttle disasters, breakdowns in policing everything from toys to cattle, the sluggish response to Hurricane Katrina, miscalculations about the war in Iraq, a cascade of wasteful government contracts, continued struggles to unite the nation’s intelligence services, agonizing backlogs at the Social Security Administration and the Passport Bureau, near misses on airport runways, staff shortages across the government, porous borders, mistakes on airline passenger screening lines, the subprime mortgage meltdown, destruction of the CIA interrogation tapes, and negligent medical care of veterans.

One might complain that Light seems in several instances to confuse policy and administrative failures, and that he doesn’t establish a meaningful standard of comparison. Are our porous borders a reflection merely of administrative shortcomings, or do they point to indecision and lack of will at the policy and political level? Does the United States do worse than other countries, or is it merely that such lapses are better reported in our more transparent society? Were the shuttle crashes worse than earlier disasters in the space program?

Still, the cumulative weight of such examples is telling. There is something new and unsettling about the sheer mindlessness of some of these failures. And Light doesn’t even mention the recent series of inexplicable glitches in the Air Force’s handling of its nuclear weapons.

What is responsible for such incompetence? Disappointingly, he fails to analyze this question, and instead simply describes a number of discrete factors that seem to contribute in some way or other to the overall problem. These include: a mismatch between what we ask of government and the resources we (that is, the Congress) are willing to provide, proliferation of layers of bureaucracy and dilution of clarity of command, the cumbersome process for making political appointments, failure to attract the nation’s best and brightest to government service, misdirected and disruptive reform efforts, and a growing reliance on contractors and grantees to perform governmental tasks. While no one would deny the pathologies Light identifies, they hardly bear the weight of his broad argument that the federal government’s "execution" is fundamentally flawed. It is also odd that the latter two factors are seen in such a negative light, when in fact they may contribute part of the solution.


Both of these books are useful, but like much of the literature on American public administration, their focus is too narrow. Above all, they are insufficiently attentive to the larger political, socio-cultural, and conceptual context that shapes American bureaucratic behavior. What’s more, they paint with a broad brush that blurs important differences between government agencies—particularly the domestic and national security agencies—and therefore also fails to pinpoint the fundamental problem of interagency coordination. The worst failures in government performance occur at the intersection of competing organizational responsibilities. Hurricane Katrina is a classic example.

The political dimension of the federal bureaucracy’s behavior has been widely ignored in the academy for obvious reasons: at its core is the relationship between the bureaucracy and the Democratic Party. Federal workers (and their counterparts in state and local governments) have become since the New Deal an important Democratic constituency, and the public unions that protect them have now eclipsed private sector unions as a source of political and financial support for the party. This is the single most important factor that explains the sorry state of public education in the United States today.

Moreover, Democratic legislators have become fond of using their constituents in public service to advance an array of liberal social policies. It would be hard to overstate the pernicious effects at all levels of bureaucracy of the regulations—grown thick in recent decades—protecting job security and proscribing sexual harassment and discrimination on the bases of race and gender. Whatever the good intentions behind them, these regulations constitute a powerful tool in the hands of unscrupulous employees and a barrier to rational personnel management. In fairness, of course, it should be added that legislators of both parties routinely meddle in the day-to-day operations of the bureaucracy for the purposes of patronage, influence-mongering, and guerrilla warfare against the administration in power.


Compounding these problems in the political sphere is the socio-cultural trajectory of the American elite since the 1970s. The key development here is the decline of public spiritedness and the ethos of public service in the political class since the Vietnam War, and the ongoing decay of American elite education—private as well as public—that is at once a cause and consequence of this. It is this factor, at least as much as the economic realities highlighted by Donahue, that explains why our best students continue to shun military service and find the idea of government service unthinkable. The decay of American elite education is a phenomenon that spans secondary, higher, and professional educational institutions. Quite apart from the unpatriotic ideology that pervades these institutions (as well as much of our popular culture), their ability to inculcate even the basic competencies of active citizenship can no longer be taken for granted. Who believes that today’s public servants are more literate, informed, analytical, articulate, and morally serious than their counterparts of 30, 40, or 50 years ago?

In fact, it is increasingly clear that the private educational sector in the United States is no longer capable of preparing students adequately for public service. Just as some leading corporations in this country have created their own "universities" to train employees to an appropriate standard based on their real-world requirements, the government needs to consider a similar approach. At present, only the military is seriously concerned with higher education (as distinct from professional or technical training), in the form of its various service academies and war colleges. Perhaps new institutions are needed at the graduate level for the wider foreign policy and national security community. A strong argument can also be made for creating a new government-run undergraduate academy for public administration. The Obama Administration may move out smartly on this latter idea. Done the wrong way, of course, such institutions would serve only to reinforce bureaucratic mediocrity and incompetence.

Peeling back the next layer of the onion, there are both agency-specific bureaucratic cultures and generic ones rooted in complex ways in American history. What explains the FBI’s long-standing inadequacies in conducting counterintelligence and counterterrorism operations? The easy, yet essentially correct, answer is that the agency’s underlying culture is a law-enforcement one averse to strategic and proactive approaches. What explains NASA’s space shuttle disasters? That the agency is driven by technological experimentation rather than a flight operations mentality. What explains the ineptitude of the Department of Homeland Security? On the one hand, it has failed to create a genuinely unified organization and organizational culture out of the many disparate agencies making it up. On the other, it suffers from the flawed concepts and operational codes governing much of what it has tried to do. The failure of DHS to counter political pressures against so-called racial or ethnic "profiling" of terrorists, for example, has contributed to the manifold absurdities we are all familiar with in airport security lines and elsewhere. Still another major failing is the department’s susceptibility to political pressures to spread the homeland security dollar throughout every state, regardless of likely threats.


Finally, a word about the structure of the American bureaucracy and the problem of interagency coordination. Important as personnel issues are, it is essential not to lose sight of the enduring influence of organizational factors on bureaucratic behavior. For reasons of history and constitutional structure, the American bureaucracy is decentralized and difficult to control. Agencies answer not only to the president but to Congress, or rather to separate committees of Congress jealous of their own prerogatives; and Congress’s influence over agency structure and personnel policies is extensive—more so than many Americans probably imagine, given the popular image of our all-powerful president. All this tends to reinforce the executive agencies’ autonomy and distinctive cultures. Though in theory presidents can command agencies to cooperate with one another, in practice it is quite otherwise: in general, presidents are reluctant to manage the bureaucracy directly given the frustrations and political costs involved.

In the national security area, a special mechanism exists—the National Security Council, created in 1947—to facilitate at the White House level coordination of the State and Defense Departments, the intelligence community, and other players. When this organization has functioned well, the government’s performance has been markedly superior (the Bay of Pigs and Vietnam War fiascos were not unrelated to the downgrading of the NSC system during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations). The problem, however, is that the NSC is a mechanism for policy development rather than implementation or execution. The absence of a standing mechanism of the latter sort helps explain what went wrong in Iraq following the U.S. invasion in 2003. There are several efforts currently underway in Washington to address this problem; where the Obama Administration will come down on them remains to be seen.

Returning to the personnel issue, Light envisions a comprehensive program of "radical" reform spearheaded by a bipartisan national commission, but doesn’t acknowledge that the real problem consists in achieving consensus among Democrats. Donahue doubts in effect that such consensus is possible, and looks in a different direction—toward a rebalancing of the relationship between government and the private sector. He entertains the idea that government could outsource functions to the private sector, to non-profits or even corporations with a public service conscience, but decides that accountability remains an insuperable stumbling block to any such move. His final suggestion is to use government more effectively to leverage private-sector talents and capabilities. In particular, he argues for reducing the barriers to occasional public service by those who intend to make careers in the private sector. Though he doesn’t mention it, anyone doubting such a step’s practicability should make a study of the personnel practices of the U.S. military—and intelligence community—in World War II.