It is difficult to find much to add to the saturation of commentary on the almost surreal election “overtime” period, but I will hit a few points that stood out for me.

The most instructive aspect of the conflict in Florida was the U. S. history and civics lesson, primarily a refresher, as follows: (1) this country is (or was founded as) a federal republic, not a majoritarian democracy, of which the Electoral College is a central feature, (2) Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution makes the selection of Electors a state legislative responsibility, which not only makes this a political process, but a partisan one, as the Founders intended, (3) the notion that we can avoid partisanship through the arguing of legalities before the courts is a myth of the same type that permeated the Clinton impeachment hearings.

In a previous issue (Sept. 2000), I commented briefly on “The End Of Democracy Debate” and the degree to which we have abdicated the political process to the judiciary on many of our most critical policy matters. Lincoln cautioned us on this in his first inaugural address, warning that a people who so abdicate “will have ceased to be their own rulers”. The U. S. Supreme Court, using appropriate judicial restraint, gave the Florida authorities every opportunity to get it right and, in the end, had no choice but to overrule an overreaching Florida Supreme Court. My only wish was that Article II had been invoked by the majority opinion, requiring the Florida Legislature to do its job.

I will take some other lessons from this experience, primarily from those on the political left in this battle. Only the left, with its saturation by postmodernist “no truth” dogma, could factor into every deliberation sufficient cynicism to discredit the motives of every duly elected official involved with this process. Only the left, with its disdain for the objectivity of the law and the strict construction of the Founders, could dismiss the authority of the Florida Legislature as the “ultimate partisan act” and a “blatant attempt to go around the will of the voters”. This is highly irresponsible rhetoric. Only the left is dominated by the view that power trumps principle and that the rule of law is a license to manipulate the law to your best advantage, regardless of the by-product. And the worst of it is that we are led by a complicit media to believe in the moral equivalency of the posture of every demagogue, regardless of the merit of their argument, to the detriment of civil discourse in the body politic. If you want a primary reason why people are turned off by the political process, start right here.

When I asked readers to send their top priorities for the new President, I had no idea it would be mid-December before we knew the outcome! In any event, I received some thoughtful responses, and I appreciate the participation. Given the odds on the Florida results, most of you assumed a Bush Presidency. To summarize the responses, almost all placed Social Security and Medicare reform as a high priority, with strengthening our military, reducing the size of the Federal government, campaign finance reform, adopting successful education models, banning partial birth abortion, health research funding, and “bringing the country together” prominently mentioned. And I agree with my friend Red Griffin that a thorough cleansing of the Oval Office would be in order! Interestingly, not one response listed tax cuts as a priority, which was surprising given its emphasis in the Bush campaign.

For whatever it’s worth, here are my thoughts on setting the tone for the Bush Administration, which is already off to a great start with the cabinet appointments. First, bringing the country together will be a function of governing consistently with the tenor of the campaign. I don’t buy the “no mandate” rhetoric, which is a ruse designed to undermine and co-opt Bush on his central priorities. The terms “bipartisanship” and “reaching out” have already become shopworn. The election, however closely and bitterly contested, is over. Bush won. As John F. Kennedy said the day after his election in 1960, “the margin of victory was narrow, but the responsibility is clear”. Leadership is about taking people from where they are to where they have never been, as Kissinger said, and I would add that it is also about defining the governing priorities, not waiting for the people to tell you what they are. Second, Bush should forget “deal-making” with the Democratic Congressional leadership. His father is an expert on that, to his regret. The case for his policies and governing philosophy must be made, a la Reagan, directly with the American people. As James Carville has noted, the Democrats will respond to fear above all else, and this anxiety should be exploited. In saying this, I don’t underestimate the difficulty of finding consensus in a divided legislative branch, but the American people want and will respond to conviction and moral authority. It is here that Bush has a mandate.

As to specifics, an across the board marginal income tax rate cut should be at the top of the list. It is sound economic policy, the timing now is even better than early in the campaign, and, contrary to liberal orthodoxy, it has strong moral grounds. Next, Bush has touched the “third rail” of Social Security reform without political penalty and can now proceed to lead a transformation of this system toward privatization. After launching these two initiatives Bush should begin to build the case for school choice and the extinction of racial preferences in civil rights policy. It’s time we moved these two issues out of the judicial system and back into the legislative process. Did I mention partial birth abortion? He should send the message early that a bill banning this procedure would be welcomed and eagerly signed. These steps along with the reversal of a few dozen Clinton executive orders would represent an excellent start. Beyond that, I like what my new Congressman John Culberson said about his test for support of legislation—it must include the words repeal, restore, abolish, or cut.

The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) was founded in 1995 under the leadership of Lynne Cheney and Joe Lieberman to promote improved academic standards and greater accountability in the higher education community. Ms. Cheney, long one of my heroes for her tireless work in education and the arts, now serves as ACTA’s Chairman and has been an outspoken advocate for active governance on the part of university trustees and alumni in attacking the status quo of lower standards and lax accountability. Last summer, the ACTA released its report, “Losing America’s Memory: Historical Illiteracy in the 21st Century” which, among its shocking findings, revealed that 81% of 556 randomly chosen seniors at 55 top-rated colleges and universities received a D or F on a high school level American history test, and the average score was 53%. I’ve seen the test and I can say without equivocation that these results should be worse than embarrassing to anyone associated with these schools. And yet, complacency was the word used to characterize the response by most of the administrators.

Thomas Jefferson admonished us long ago that “if a nation expects to be ignorant and free, it expects what never was and never will be.” And the worst place in which to exhibit ignorance in a democratic republic is in the transmission of our common heritage and founding ideas. G. K. Chesterton defined education as simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another. The Council on Civil Society has declared that a “basic responsibility of the school is cultural transmission, particularly a knowledge of the country’s constitutional heritage, an understanding of what constitutes good citizenship, and an appreciation of the society’s common civic faith and shared moral philosophy”.

A recent Portrait of America survey found that roughly one-half of American adults would vote for the U. S. Constitution if it was on the ballot today. To me, this is a frightening statistic, but not surprising, given the fact that Americans as a whole seem to have only a remote understanding of American civilization and our best and brightest have no sense of our history. How can we be knowledgeable critics of public policy or even sustain this experiment in self-governance in this environment?

“This much I think I do know—that a society so riven that the spirit of moderation is gone, no court can save; that a society where that spirit flourishes, no court need save; that in a society which evades its responsibility by thrusting upon the courts the nurture of that spirit, that spirit in the end will perish.”
–Judge Learned Hand

A friend who is knowledgeable in Federal agriculture policy recently sent me an article from The New York Times which reminded me of the failures of policy in this area and the political difficulties in dealing with them. Since the passage of the acclaimed Freedom To Farm Act in the mid-1990’s, which was supposed to wean food producers off their heavy government subsidies, annual direct payments to farmers in the U.S. have tripled to $28 billion in 2000, one-half of all the money made by farmers! Clinton’s Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman admitted that farming has “become largely an income transfer program”, with the government underwriting rural businesses and requiring very little in return. These subsidies, of course, are not about food supply but about keeping rural areas afloat, and they are kept in place by what I call the “agricultural way of life lobby”. The huge dependencies are a problem for President Bush and the Republicans because a large majority of the money goes to states that sent Republicans to Congress (and Bush to the White House). If Social Security is the “third rail” of American politics, this may be the fourth. Still, it’s time for intellectual honesty in agricultural policy and I haven’t heard much of it lately.

Of all President Bush’s proposals to date, the most difficult and potentially most transformational is the centerpiece of his compassionate conservatism, the plan for Federal support of faith-based social programs. Fully competitive school choice and full privatization of Social Security would certainly be more dramatic, but these aren’t in the cards for awhile and don’t represent as bold a leap into the unknown. Not that it will be brand new; Catholic Charities USA has been receiving government funds for years. But the ambition for this plan and its ultimate scope could be quite sweeping.

There are problems to address, of course, and the usual secular humanist and First Amendment crowds will be out in droves. My concern would be more about the corruption or impairment of the mission of the faith-based organizations by government than any church-state or proselytization problems. In fact, some of the latter will no doubt be beneficial in the often necessary behavior modification of the recipients. And there are operating details to be worked out, but we should not fear innovations that have the power to transform lives if they are well structured and offered as an option to public programs on a competitive basis. This is compassionate, but also empowerment conservatism, much like school choice, because it is bottom-up driven, not top-down. Alexis de Tocqueville noted over 160 years ago that the genius of America lay not in its government but in its free associations. To a large extent we have allowed government to supplant independent charities and have come to rely on a coercive one-size-fits-all approach to treating social pathologies that usually creates dependence. We have often forgotten that many of these pathologies have as their root cause a spiritual void that must be filled, that behavior matters, and that true welfare reform requires more than money.

In my October, 2000 Special Pre-Election Issue, paraphrasing Pat Buchanan, I wrote that the 2000 election was not to be about who gets what or the details of policy, but rather was to be about who we are. Now, three months after Election Day, I’m even more convinced. The post-election fight in Florida and the Ashcroft confirmation process have combined to highlight for me the opposing forces in the war for cultural hegemony that is raging in our public life at every level of policy deliberation. These opposing forces have been characterized as the Beautiful vs. the Dutiful, Old vs. New America, urban vs. rural America, coastal vs. middle America, and the hedonistic/individualistic/secular vs. the puritanical/family-centered/religious America. However the forces are characterized, the real underlying issues that are driving our politics have become cultural ones that can only indirectly be addressed through public policy. As an example, the Ashcroft nomination fight was an impasse of the type not before experienced (with the possible exception of the Bork hearings), not of the type that the “let’s make a deal”, LBJ-style political processes can deal with. The left is a religion and its adherents believe that conservatives are evil and, to some conservatives, the reverse is true. These differences won’t be worked out over bourbon and water in the cloak room.

Several books have helped me understand this phenomenon, notably Gertrude Himmelfarb’s One Nation, Two Cultures. She describes an assimilation process in which the former adversary culture of the bohemians has been democratized and popularized as a major factor in the dominant culture over the past thirty years. One of the results is that once honorific words are now pejorative, so that the worst transgressions are to be “moralistic” or “judgmental”, tolerance is the only virtue, and morality itself is trivialized. The most visible element of this dominant culture, the elite, generally conforms to traditional ideals of propriety, but with no firm confidence in the principles underlying their behavior, and they find it difficult to transmit their own principles to their children. In fact, they are unable to judge what is right or wrong for themselves. I call this the “Dr. Laura syndrome” and if you’ve ever listened to her call-in radio program, you know what I mean.

This ignorance of the grounding of our morality and the resulting lack of conviction and assertiveness about matters that define us as a people are the sources of much of the confusion in the public policy arena. For if, as I suspect, there are no more than a small minority of energized partisans on either side of an issue in the culture war, the “diffident middle” will seem confused and disengaged, and will be subject to demagoguery.

This is a battle of ideas at the deepest level, a conflict over the foundation of the American ideal. It is a tug of war for the future of the country. Rabbi Daniel Lapin, author of America’s Real War, believes that the basic question is whether America is a secular or religious nation and my reading of the exit polls tells me that of all the voting patterns in the recent election, religion was the most precise determinant. Whatever your views on this, it’s pretty clear that the fault lines open along the division formed when modernity divorced humanity from its source and end in a God-centered universe. Shelby Steele says that George W. Bush is the first conservative on the presidential level to understand that he is in a culture war. I believe and hope so; he’s going to need that insight.

I have just read a short book by R. C. Sproul with the same title as this essay, in which he traces the key strains of Western philosophical thought from the Greeks to the present in order to illustrate the consequences of the ideas on our present condition (a kind of takeoff on Richard Weaver). Nothing new here, but I was struck by his highlighting of the concept of pragmatism, America’s only homegrown philosophical movement, and its dramatic impact on our system of public education. John Dewey (1859-1952) was the chief architect of the form of
pragmatism that had the most long lasting impact. Put simply, pragmatism holds
that a theory is true only insofar as its actions are “successful”. In pushing this philosophy, Dewey succeeded in revolutionizing our public school system. He did so by denouncing well founded theories of knowledge and objective truth as a waste of time and removing the norms for determining the purposes of education and even what is ultimately pragmatic. In short, he took away the question, “what kind of child are we trying to produce?” The result was the destruction of the classical method of education from which we are still struggling to recover.

California has written the book on how not to pursue utility deregulation, and now the damage is that their leaders will use the current crisis to demagogue against the concept. As Pete duPont has recently reminded us, the idea of price controls goes back at least 4,000 years and they have always failed, particularly when prices are capped at retail and allowed to float at wholesale. True deregulation would have allowed the price structure of supply and demand to balance the market, and would have included market entry by new competitors. Deregulation should mean less political control, not more, but California’s liberal establishment wants “consumerism” and “environmentalism” simultaneously, an impossibility which has led to policies encouraging unlimited demand without incentives for growth in supply. The solutions now will be difficult, but re-regulation is not a viable option, nor is more cost-plus rate setting, a flawed concept that left us with much of the “stranded cost” debacle from the nuclear plant construction fiasco of the 1970’s and 1980’s. The only remaining choices are anathema to the left: back off on their long held hostility to new power plants or pay increasingly higher prices for electricity. Welcome to the realities of the market.

In the September 2000 issue, I identified six debate points the Republicans should use in selling an across the board reduction in marginal income tax rates. All of them remain valid for President Bush’s plan that now faces a difficult challenge in the U. S. Senate, but I would now add another point and re-emphasize two that have been used only sparingly. My added point is that tax cuts in a dynamic economy do not have a cost that can be identified in linear terms by a static behavior model, so we should not think in terms of the size of a tax rate cut in absolute dollars, $1.6 billion or any other number, which is essentially meaningless. Two points that bear repeating: (1) the Reagan tax cuts were not the cause of the enormous deficits of the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, but were, in fact, the primary impetus for a seventeen-year economic boom, and (2) if there is a real budget surplus, it is because of an overpayment of taxes and there are only two things government can do with it – spend it or refund it; history shows that public debt reduction is not a “tax cut” in the form of lower interest costs.

The most compelling economic lesson of the century just past is that there is a clear correlation between the degree of economic freedom and the rate of economic development. Bush’s proposed tax cut is much smaller, percentage-wise, than Kennedy’s in 1962. If anything, we need to be bolder.