Public Policy and Governance – Page 344

And I Always Thought “Rapture” Meant Happiness…

If I were one of those Christians who believed in the Rapture, I have to admit it would be looking pretty imminent.

Every time I think things can’t get any grimmer, they seem to: we’ve got global warming (yes, Mr. President, whether you think so or not—one aspect of that inconvenient thing called reality) melting the polar icecaps and threatening to inundate the coasts; more and more people are dying in Iraq, while the Iraqi “government of national unity” shows none of the characteristics of government or unity; the deficit is so big even my great-grandchildren won’t be able to pay it at this rate; Congress wants to round up all the immigrants (except for their grandparents, of course) and expel them; our shortsighted energy policies are getting ready to bite us in the you-know-where…and of course, all of these problems, and any others you can think of, are clearly the fault of the powerful, rich ho-mo-sexual (drool and sneer when you say that) lobby. (We’ve gotta do something about them queers, you know.)

Sometimes, it really doesn’t seem worth getting out of bed in the mornings.

I do try to look on the bright side. Honest. Okay, so the sea waters rise three feet—I always wanted to live by the ocean, and pretty soon, Indiana will have a beach! No oil? I always worry when my kids and grandkids drive, and pretty soon, they won’t be able to. What a relief! I don’t have to worry about war with China, because China obviously decided some time back to just buy America instead…..and now that they own all our debt, there’s no reason to invade. And the President assures us that things in Iraq are really just peachy—if the liberal media would just concentrate on covering school openings instead of suicide bombings, we’d all feel better.

Okay—so I’m not too good at looking on the bright side.

I would really love to live in the alternate universe that so many of our fellow-citizens evidently inhabit, but I can’t seem to summon up the will power to do that. I keep bumping into hard-working immigrants who just want a chance to make a better life for their kids, or gay neighbors who just want the same rights everyone else has, or people who just want the environment to be clean for their children to grow up in. I keep encountering reality.

A lawyer I worked with early in my career used to say that at the end of the day, everything boils down to one question: What should we do? I think that may be the question for our time.

If you live in what some of us have taken to calling “the reality-based community,” what should you be doing? (Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that you have decided against just drinking yourself into a stupor, screwing yourself to death, or finding a deserted tropical island somewhere.) What are the options available?

I think we have to send a message to the people who are running things. That’s not just the people who hold political office; it’s also the people who pay the lobbyists who bribe the people who work for the people in office. I think we send our message two ways: first, by refusing to spend our dollars—to the extent possible—with those who support the current regime; and second, by working as hard as we can to vote out the current crop of officeholders.

Is Company A refusing to fill prescriptions for the morning-after pill? Okay—but I don’t have to shop at Company A. Is Company B supporting homophobic candidates, advertising on Pat Robertson’s television network, or otherwise enabling the dark side? Fine, but they’ll do it without my patronage.

Is the Republican leadership in Congress intent upon dictating my religion, my sex life, my procreation and the way I express my patriotism? Are they supporting a President who routinely and brazenly breaks America’s laws? Are they contemptuous of the very people they are pandering to? Then let’s do our damnedest to throw them out—so we can start cleaning up the mess they’ve made.

Now that would cheer me up!

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War and Peace

We have just “celebrated” the third anniversary of our invasion of Iraq.

Some wars, regrettably, are necessary. Iraq was not such a war. It was a war of choice, impelled by ideology and sold to Americans (wittingly or unwittingly) under false pretenses. Worse yet, it was justified by appealing to our fears—fears of “the other,” fears of terrorism, fears of impotence.

The choice to send our young people into combat in an unnecessary war of choice was reprehensible. But the incompetence with which the conflict was planned and executed was even more reprehensible.

Expert advice was disregarded. It’s obvious that none of the decision-makers in the Administration had bothered to learn what the region’s history had to teach. We sent courageous and patriotic young Americans into a quagmire that was eminently foreseeable to anyone who was not willfully blind—and thanks to criminally misplaced priorities, we sent them there without proper equipment and supplies. There has been plenty of money for Halliburton and other contractors, but not enough for bullet-proof vests or Hummer armor.

After each setback, the Administration and its apologists have said “no one could have known.” No one anticipated the looting that occurred in the wake of our initial attack; no one anticipated the insurgency; no one anticipated the civil war that rages there now. But people did anticipate every one of these things. They wrote articles and editorials warning about every one of them. I wrote some of them myself. Government experts wrote memos that warned about these dangers and many others in great detail. The Administration was warned about precisely what has happened—just as it was warned that Hurricane Katrina could cause the dykes to fail.

In his pursuit of some grandiose “crusade,” Bush has mortgaged our future, and diverted national resources that were desperately needed here at home. Our crumbling roads, our impoverished urban school systems, our embarrassing national health care system, and our neglected national parks all could have benefited from the nearly one trillion dollars his foolhardy, unnecessary and arrogant unilateralism has cost us.

What do we have to show for the young lives and money he has squandered?

We are less safe than we were; Iraq was not a sanctuary for terrorists before the war, but it is now. Our standing in the world community has never been lower. Our citizens are angrier and more polarized than ever. And worst of all, our belief in our own inherent goodness—the belief that America is not an aggressor nation—has been profoundly shaken.

I don’t know what we do now. Colin Powell was right when he warned about “the Pottery Barn rule.” We broke it, and we have a moral obligation to help fix it. Whether that is best done by leaving immediately or staying longer, I simply don’t know. What I do know is that this “adventure”—undertaken by a fatally incompetent and uncomprehending President—has damaged our country profoundly, and it will take a long time to recover.

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Hobgoblins of Little Minds

Emerson once declared a “foolish consistency” to be “the hobgoblin of little minds.” Depending upon your definition of “foolish,” I guess that means our legislature is populated by mental giants, undeterred by the inconsistencies that baffle us lesser folks.

On the one hand, members of the General Assembly are mightily exercised over supposed abuses of the power of eminent domain. The trigger for this sudden solicitude was a recent Supreme Court ruling, Kelo v. New London, that left the definition of “public use” up to state legislatures. While reactions to that ruling arguably misread it, the ensuing debate has revolved around the issue of protecting property rights against inappropriate exercises of government power. Reasonable people will differ over what is appropriate, but most of us would agree that protecting private property from government overreaching is important.

On the other hand, the legislature is poised to effect its own “taking,” by issuing regulations that will effectively require abortion clinics to close. They dictate such minutiae as hallway width and room size. Compliance would require clinics to rebuild or relocate, an expense most could not afford. Ignore for the moment another “foolish inconsistency”—i.e., why these “health” regulations, supposedly based on legislative concern for patient safety, are not being applied to other medical facilities, like hospitals or urgent care offices or surgical outpatient clinics. The immediate question that arises is: how can the same lawmakers who have been delivering pious affirmations of private property rights and the sanctity of free enterprise turn around and pass a measure that will put these particular enterprises out of business?

If one were cynical, one might conclude that neither position is principled, and that what we have here is a classic case of pandering to different constituencies, with little regard for the merits or long-term effects of either policy. But I really don’t think that is the explanation. I really think that our lawmakers are oblivious to the inconsistencies in these two positions.

When I was active in the Republican Party, it was the party of limited government. Republicans wanted to keep the government out of your boardroom, your bedroom, and your conscience. Pundits often opine that contemporary Republicans still want government to stay out of the boardroom, but are perfectly happy to regulate your bedroom and your conscience. I don’t think that’s true, either. Today’s GOP is also perfectly willing to infringe your property rights and overrule your business decisions in the interests of morality. Their morality, not yours.

If your moral code says businesses shouldn’t pollute, that is insufficient reason to regulate emissions. If your moral code dictates paying workers a certain minimum wage, that is unwarranted interference with the market. If your moral code says everyone should have access to health care, that’s socialism. But if their moral code says a legal medical procedure is immoral, it is entirely proper to overrule the professional judgment of doctors and nurses, and regulate that business out of existence.

I guess I’m just hung up on “foolish inconsistency.”

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Different Strokes, Same Folks

American public policy is schizophrenic.

I attribute this to our unique history: despite our tendency to think of America as a creation of the Founding Fathers, their generation was preceded by the Puritans and other religious dissenters who first colonized our shores. Constitutional historian Frank Lambert calls those initial settlers the “Planting Fathers,” and reminds us that in the 150 or so years that elapsed between Planters and Founders, the Enlightenment occurred, and dramatically altered prevailing beliefs about government and liberty.

The Puritans defined liberty as “freedom to do the right thing.” (And they, of course, decided what “the right thing” was.) The Founders—influenced profoundly by thinkers like John Locke—defined liberty as freedom to pursue your own life purposes free of state interference, so long as you did not thereby harm the person or property of others. While it was the Founders’ version that informed our constitution and legal system, our Puritan heritage remains alive and well. These two very different notions of what government ought to do have been duking it out in the body politic and even within our individual psyches ever since.

The Puritan approach—sometimes described as an overwhelming fear that someone, somewhere, might be having a good time—gives us laws aimed at making us godly and upright. The Founders’ approach can be seen in the equally wide-spread American attitude of “live and let live.” We still don’t seem to have noticed that the two approaches are largely incompatible.

The result of these warring impulses is a large measure of incoherence in our public policies. To be blunt, we keep shooting ourselves in the foot. On the one hand, most Americans have agreed with the Founders that government—especially at the federal level—should be limited in size and scope. But in order to deal with all those people who stubbornly refuse to do the right thing, we keep giving government new powers and building new bureaucracies. Historians note that, despite the conventional wisdom, big government didn’t begin with FDR and the New Deal; it began with the federal infrastructure we created to enforce Prohibition.

The disconnect is visible everywhere. Americans want freedom of speech—but not freedom to say that! We want freedom of religion—but maybe not for the Wiccans, or the Nation of Islam. We take pride in America’s scientific leadership, but stem cell research isn’t the “right thing,” so we send that research to competitors overseas.

Here in Indiana, some legislators are making noises about requiring schools to teach “Intelligent Design.” These are the same people who tell us that they support home rule and local control of public schools. They are the same people who have enthusiastically endorsed Administration efforts to recruit employers and jobs in the high paying fields of biotechnology and information technology—precisely the employers least likely to locate in a state seen as hostile to science.

One of these days, policymakers are going to have to choose between Enlightenment logic and their inner Puritans.

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Sing Kumbaya

American employers have come to understand that customers come in all religions, genders, races and sexual orientations, and so growing numbers of them have adopted employment policies intended to say "welcome" in whatever language or tradition will open those customers’ pocketbooks. And globalization of business has meant more interaction and familiarity with people who are different from, say, the folks back in Kansas. All this–I once naively believed–would eventually issue in a sort of "Star Trek" era of goodwill, where people of all sorts (eventually, perhaps, even species of all sorts) would live and work together in harmony. Kumbaya and all that.
Continue reading “Sing Kumbaya”

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