Two huge domestic policy battles are now underway that will transform the social contract in ways that will have enormous consequences for the American experiment far into this and probably the next century. One, the President’s push to repair the Social Security system, has been given high visibility and top domestic priority in his second term; the other, health care reform, is also high on his list, if not quite so visibly at present. Both of these issues involve the same philosophical conflicts and divergent worldviews that seem to drive much of our domestic policy—more government or more individual responsibility, more socialism or more capitalism, more market-based allocation of resources or more top-down one-size-fits-all solutions. Writing in the January/February 2005 issue of Foreign Policy, Kenneth Rogoff notes that “the next great battle between socialism and capitalism will be waged over human health”. I agree, and I would add the Social Security system to his prognosis. In both cases, the question is not if government will have a role, for, as Rogoff suggests, the case for some government intervention and regulation in both policy areas is compelling on the fairly well settled grounds of efficiency and moral justice (I would add, much more settled as to the latter than the former), but the issue is precisely how much redistribution of income and government intervention is warranted.

At the heart of both issues is the fact that they are central to America’s “entitlement mentality”, in the case of Social Security because of a particular promise made in another world seventy years ago, and for health care because of the employer-based finance system, which was an expedient also devised for another world and different time. Both of these commitments have become deeply embedded in the social contract, but they should be revisited and significantly revised. Many of the solutions being floated are variations of a theme that involves better use of government, on the theory that the public good can be better (or only) served through public sector direction and oversight, while the focus should be on empowerment—how to reverse this entitlement mentality and get many more individuals involved in and committed to personal responsibility for their personal and family welfare. There is a wide gulf between the “entitlement society” and “ownership society” mentalities. President Bush understands this, and I also think he knows that the old paradigm will die hard and not without a huge fight. In fact, his prescription for solutions in both cases would, over time, completely transform the dynamics of the welfare state, which the left cannot abide. But it’s a fight worth having now, for the sake of our economic viability and, more importantly, for the sake of our experiment in self-government.

Of all the immediate responses to the enormous tragedy of the Southeast Asian tsunami catastrophe, the two most misguided were (1) the silly allegations that the U. S. was not responsive enough in timing or financial commitment, and (2) the continuing questions, “where was God?” or “why would God allow this to happen?”. To the first of these, suffice to say that any critics of American response should now have been entirely silenced, if not embarrassed, by the now obvious fact that the U. S. is totally dominating the relief and recovery effort, and, in fact, has shown that its logistical capabilities to do so effectively dwarf all other humanitarian relief capabilities, most conspicuously those of the U. N. And, incidentally, where is the Islamic world in this effort? The last time I noticed, the Arab countries were virtual “no shows” in relief of this devastation, which was primarily centered on Muslim populations. So much for Islamic solidarity.

As to the question of God’s role, this is probably one of the most enduring mysteries of faith, entangled as it is with the issue of theodicy, or the problem of evil in a world created by a benevolent, loving Creator. Although it is human to wonder why bad things happen to innocent people and what sort of God would let a thing like this happen, our postmodern intellectual climate has damaged our capacity to respond. To this question, two Jewish Rabbis had the best responses I have seen. Jonathan Sacks recalled the teaching of Maimonides that natural disasters have no explanation other than that God, by placing us in a physical world, set life within the parameters of the physical. Nature is not benign in this world—sometimes innocents die—and we are called upon to be “partners in the work of creation”. Daniel Lapin reminds us that God runs this world with as little supernaturalism as possible, and gave us the intelligence and commanded us to make ourselves less vulnerable to nature. And, while the casualties cannot be blamed on human actions, many of them can be blamed on human inactions, such as failure to provide warning systems or, I would add, the failure to allow countries like Sri Lanka to participate fully in the global trading system by eliminating tariffs and other impediments so that they and other developing nations can have an opportunity to build better infrastructure and fend for themselves against nature.

There is in these questions, I sense, an element of what the ancient Greeks called acedia, the fear of things spiritual, or, in more current terms, fear of a transcendence that our all-seeing and all-powerful science cannot and will not ever fully explain. In this world, there are no guarantees.

It was called the most philosophical inaugural address ever, and I thought it was Bush’s best ever, until he at least equaled, and might have topped it with his State of the Union speech. One would be hard pressed to find more comprehensive pronouncements of natural right conservatism (some might add neo-) this side of Leo Strauss, and it was blended with his own particular style of Christian political philosophy. Peggy Noonan, surprisingly, said the inaugural contained “too much God”, Joseph Bottum said it had “just the right amount of God”. Whatever your preference, and I lean more toward Bottum, there was plenty of Lincoln and a whole lot of Bush’s favorite new friend and author, Natan Sharansky (whose book, The Case for Democracy, I am now reading and highly recommend). And no one can say that they were not bold, visionary messages from a President who will not be satisfied with anything less than changing the course of world history. These are big ideas—“ending tyranny in our world”, “no one is fit to be a master, and no one deserves to be a slave”, “self-government relies, in the end, on the governing of the self”, “when you stand for your liberty, we will stand with you”, and “there is no justice without freedom, and there can be no human rights without human liberty”—and no bigger ideas have guided an administration since the days of Lincoln. Over-reaching in some respects? Possibly, and as Noonan suggests, some of Bush’s objectives are not possible in this world, only in the next, but we live in a world in need of more, not less, bold vision of the type that is restorative of our founding ideals and less, not more, of the “laundry list” of government commitments of favors to the special pleaders on the right and left.

There is in the insular world of American political life an extreme bias against initiatives that are not absolutely politically necessary as a last resort to respond to a crisis, and there is a void in incentives for strategic thinking that is firmly embedded in D.C. culture. In these two speeches, Bush has confronted these biases with rare choices—conviction over calculation, transformation over transaction, event-making over event-managing, and risk-taking over legacy-building.

The domination of the left in the higher reaches of our elite institutions of higher education may have reached a tipping point with the eruption of Ward Churchill at Colorado University and his characterization of the 9-11 bombers as “combat teams”, the Pentagon victims “military targets”, and the World Trade Center victims “little Eichmanns”. This might just do it—this might finally command the attention of mainstream opinion leadership to the abrogation of responsibility on the part of higher education leadership that has been much needed since the total capitulation of university administrators to the militant left forty years ago. Add to this the remarks of none other than the President of Harvard University, Lawrence Summers: “One of those disturbing tendencies in academic life is that there is a desire on the part of many in the name of open-mindedness to fall into a kind of relativistic denialism in which all positions are equally legitimate, all positions must be respected, and compromise must be entered into no matter what the starting point or reasonableness of the two parties”. This strikes me as an astounding statement from one in his position, and a major breakthrough for common sense. Academic freedom and the cover of tenure can and should be set aside in the case of moral turpitude, and a clear case for it can be made here as with those continuing comments of Robert Jensen of my alma mater, The University of Texas, among many others. We may be bound by freedom of speech to tolerate their ideas, but we aren’t obligated to pay to hear them.

As Edward Feser states so well in his essay, The Opium of the Professors, “the de facto function of the modern university is precisely the opposite of the traditional idea of education, which was to socialize the young by instilling into them, at a higher intellectual level, the culture they have inherited from their forebears. The professor was the guardian of a tradition greater than the student and greater than himself, a tradition which it was his duty to impart—not uncritically, to be sure, but at the same time with a reverence and humility appropriate to the grandeur of a civilization that has existed for over two and a half millennia, and for the wisdom that its institutions embody and its thinkers have articulated.” Dare we hope for a comeback of this mission in its fullest?