Reclaiming the American Dream

The Role of Private Individuals and Voluntary Associations

Richard C. Cornuelle

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351494496
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Public Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book was the first to sketch the full dimensions of the nation's voluntary sector, give it a name (the independent sector), explain its unfamiliar metabolism, and imagine its enormous unused potential for defining the central problems of an industrial society accurately and acting on them effectively. Upon publication, George Gallup said the book has sparked "the most dramatic shift in American thinking since the New Deal."

1

Resignation,
Right and Left

Years ago I knew a hard-core conservative who collected Roosevelt dimes. He was an older man with enough money to buy all the dimes he needed. He needed quite a few. Whenever the angry spirit moved him, he seized a mechanic’s ball-peen hammer which he kept handy, and smashed a dime or two.

I thought then he was funny. I know now he was a human tragedy. His basic sentiment was valid. He believed in the ideal of limited government, as most of us do. The belief that we should keep government as small as possible is a deep and essential part of our political tradition. My friend saw government growing at a rate that alarmed him, and in FDR’s face he saw the cause of it all. He knew no practical way to work for his ideal; so he swung his hammer in a helpless gesture, to express a real and valid despair.

The conservative frustration doesn’t often show itself in such a bizarre and pathetic way. But the defeatism it represents is widespread. The more “respectable” conservatives don’t smash dimes. They don’t do anything. They think any action is pointless. More and more businessmen, once the proud champions of limited government, are now convinced that ever broader government is inevitable. “As our society has grown more complex,” said Henry Ford II in a speech at Yale in 1959, “the government has had to play an ever greater role. . . . That trend is not likely to be reversed.” In other words, limited government is impossible in modern America, and we may as well get used to the idea.

Less noticeable, but equally disturbing, is a corresponding frustration among the liberals—at a time when they seem politically invincible. The liberal frustration is of course harder to spot. It is not often advertised by absurdities like dime-smashing. The liberals are in power. They cannot very well picket themselves. They can hardly organize conspiracies against the government they built.

But the liberal restlessness is there. Columnist James Reston writes of “a disenchantment among the liberals.” Irving Kristol, writing in the June, 1963, Harper’s magazine, says:

In private, nowadays, almost every head of every [federal] department will concede that “things are out of hand”—that between the original idea and the terminal reality there is a long and disillusioning gap.

He quotes one in particular:

“Everyone knows things have gone wrong, but no one knows how to go about setting them right.”

And I have listened in conservative amazement to the bitter cynicism of once militant liberals who have decided to hang up their spurs and watch the world get worse.

This, too, is tragic. The liberal impulse is, like the conservative one, essentially valid. The liberal believes that we should handle public problems promptly and sensibly—that we must be alert to the needs of people. This belief is as vital to the American tradition as is our belief in limited government, and most of us accept it. Yet the liberal spokesmen for this ideal are quietly writing it off. Only when they find a relatively new cause, like Negro rights, on which they have not yet built a history of governmental failure, do they revive for the moment their old élan.

Both the left and the right are abandoning their idealism. Their fringe groups angrily kick the machinery. Their “responsible” leaders are deciding to muddle through a basically hopeless situation. And the American dream fades.

I believe that the conservatives and liberals are frustrated for the same reason. The next two chapters tell why.

2

Why the Conservatives
Can’t Win

Why are the conservatives, spokesmen for the valid American ideal of limited government, giving up that ideal? They are coming to realize they cannot win without a program—without answers for the problems that trouble people. When it seems only government can solve most modern public problems, the conservative can only have a program by advocating bigger government. And that is what he is in business to denounce.

Year after year the liberals have won the public’s attention by pointing out urgent public problems. Then they have won public support by proposing specific federal programs intended to solve these problems.

But the conservatives can offer few specific solutions. They have no resources with which to bid against government for public responsibility. They protest without a program, and appear to be rebels without a cause.

This is an awkward stance. “One reason the Democrats appear to be good speakers,” says a GOP Congressman, “is that they are always promoting something. It is easier to be enthusiastic when you are advocating some new service. Objecting to things is a difficult position to be in.”

The conservatives can win public attention by pointing out the failures of government, but they can offer no specific alternatives. They can only whine about the side effects of big government, as one might complain about the mess left by the firemen who put out a fire.

If they grow weary of the negative position or if they feel threatened by the do-nothing charge, conservatives are tempted to borrow pieces of the opposition’s program. “If a Democrat says we need better health,” says Republican Senator George Aiken of Vermont, “I am not going to come out for poorer health just to disagree with him.” Stuck with a choice between a mulish negativism and grudging agreement, the office-holding conservative often becomes a reluctant “me-too” politician. But this doesn’t work either. He violates his own principles, underbids the competition, and loses on both counts.

Lacking a program which does not compromise conservative principle, conservatives can only attack big government. In this battle, they have used every rhetorical, political, parliamentary, and philosophical weapon they can find to assault government. They have tried to repeal it, all at once and in little pieces. They have declared it unconstitutional. They have denounced it as immoral. They have tried to cut off its supply of money and power. They have condemned it as alien to America and tried to deport it. But none of their efforts seem to work.

Consider the conservative crusade against government waste. Researchers camp on the steps of the bureaus and record the waste motion. They add up the number of federal bureaucrats. They count the paper clips. They try to repeal C. Northcote Parkinson’s second law: “Expenditure rises to meet income.” And so it does. If you give a bureaucrat a dollar, he will spend it. If you tell him he’s spending too much on carbon paper, he will thank you for your trouble and spend the savings on filing cabinets.

Nor can you expect civil servants to make government efficient. No realist expects them to.* (In fact, Charles Kettering once said we should be grateful we don’t get as much government as we pay for.) The tireless work of the economizers has some value. It keeps us reminded of the high price we pay for remote control of public service. But waste is only a symptom of a deeper trouble. You can’t beat a leviathan with a red pencil. This form of conservative protest, like the other protests, is vain.

Conservatives have tried to stop big government by starving it. “If we want to stop the Washington spenders from bankrupting our nation, socializing our economy, and reducing us to slavery,” wrote Dan Smoot in 1957, “we must cut off the money supply from the Washington spenders.” Smoot is one of many who preach that we can’t afford big government. To pay its bills with taxes will cripple us economically; to pay them with debt will bring landslide inflation.

But the starvation strategy ignores the fundamental force behind government’s growth. Bills pile up because government has a lot to do. Since it takes responsibility, it needs money. Much as it might like to, Congress can’t give an agency a job to do and then hold back the funds to pay the bills.

Conservatives have tried to fight with philosophy. They say big government is wrong. But Franklin Roosevelt taught liberals how to turn back this verbal offensive. “This country,” he said of the Depression, “was faced with a condition, not a theory.” The programs of modern liberalism grew out of that condition. “What excited Roosevelt,” wrote Robert Sherwood in the official biography, “was not grand economic and political theory but concrete achievements that people could touch and see and use.”

Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr., looking back today in candid admiration of his father, says, “The New Deal was never thought out. It hardly had any philosophy, except one principle: that government has the obligation to step in when the individual can’t handle basic economic problems.” Conservatives have tried in vain to oppose pragmatic programs with philosophical arguments.

Conservatives have sought support by contending that big government is dangerous, leading in time to tyranny. In 1944 the University of Chicago Press published a brilliant book by Friedrich A. Hayek called The Road to Serfdom. Hayek used Germany, which he knew well, to prove his point, demonstrating that the Nazi terror grew out of the Bismarck welfare state. The book, with apologies to Professor Hayek, said this:

If you give government a lot to do, you have to give it the power to do it. As this power adds up, it grows harder and harder to control. In time, in spite of its benign origin, this power can be turned back hideously on the very people who give it up in the first place.

Hayek frightened Americans. Ever since our Constitutional Convention, and visibly since the Civil War, the country had become more and more centralized. In the Depression, and in World War II, the centralization trend seemed to have become total. You could smell the danger everywhere.

Hayek’s book no doubt helped bring about the change in political weather which elected President Eisenhower in 1952. By then, conservatives had seized the Hayek thesis and made it their battle cry. They fought every sign of federal action as another milestone on the road to serfdom. This campaign, like others before it, may have done conservatism more harm than good. Because whether you believe the Hayek thesis or not, you know what it left in the public unconscious: a feeling that big government is dangerous medicine—so it probably works.

The conservative’s campaign against big government has been driven onward, and then repeatedly frustrated, because the public so often seems to be on his side. The average American doesn’t like big government. He doesn’t like taxes. He’s afraid of debt and inflation. He favors free enterprise. He knows that government wastes money.

The polls make these beliefs clear. In a 1962 California poll, conducted by Belden Associates for the Purdue Research Foundation, 62 per cent of the people believed it would be better if private business did more of what the government now does. Only 21 per cent took the other side. No less than 58 per cent believed it would be better for state and local governments to do more of the things the federal government is doing; only 24 per cent thought responsibility should flow the other way.

Such evidence seemed to support the myth that has warped conservative strategy for two decades. The silent majority of adults, we conservatives told each other, were with us. We had only to give them a chance to express their loyalty—a choice. The 1964 Presidential vote demolished this notion. Conservatives know now that there just isn’t much of a silent conservative vote, and the myth no longer provides any comfort.

It never should have. Though the average American opposes big government, he also believes that we have more and more problems which only the government wants to tackle. So he applauds the conservative rhetoric and supports the liberal program.*

T. H. White, in his best-selling The Making of a President, 1960 (Atheneum, 1961), put the conservative dilemma eloquently:

The Democratic philosophy, usually unspoken but quite clear nonetheless, is that government is there to be used as an instrument of action. . . .

The Republican philosophy is entirely different, clearer in metaphysical terms yet murkier in political expression. It is the belief, deep down, that each citizen bears a responsibility in private life and in community life as great or greater than the responsibility of government to shape that life and community. Part of the Republican tragedy in recent years has been the inability of its thinkers to articulate this philosophy clearly enough to draw political conclusions and programs from it.

The trials of 1964 put the challenge directly to the conservatives. The job was not to change their “image,” as the public relations experts always urge, but to confront the real and tangible crisis in the nation’s life. A well-known commentator, Eric Sevareid, writing on the Goldwater campaign, summed it up precisely:

When he [Goldwater] suggests that family relief in the vast, sprawling Harlems of America can be turned over to the lodges, unions, private charities and relatives of the indigent—when he says these things he is not solving the problems, he is wishing them away. Yet he is perfectly correct when he reports that the problems of our time and our society are not being solved as matters are going. And in this profound frustration must lie the key to Goldwater’s large following. It is not half so much a movement with a program as one with a protest. It is a desperate, confused protest against a desperately confused new world of human living rising around us at home and abroad. Millions have simply given up trying to understand it, let alone cope with it.

The demand for a conservative alternative is explicit. Trying to size up the meaning of the noisy renaissance of conservative political action, T George Harris, writing in Look (July 16, 1963), put it in simple terms:

The liberal vision of the future . . . inspired men to specific action toward a better society. Now [liberalism] has grown fat with success and stale in its addiction to federal pills for all ills. What is the right’s alternative?

The conservative can’t, it seems, answer this call. He has no program. He knows now he can’t win without a program. Yet he knows of no honorable way to create one. He is left to talk to himself about his principles, principles which the public already largely supports. And the liberals, because they have a program of sorts, gain votes at a time when the public is least enthusiastic about what they advocate.

* The habit of blaming big government on its employees has persuaded many conservatives that government workers are a special breed put here on earth to bedevil people. Novelist Ayn Rand lists them among “the spoilers.” However, most bureaucrats are earnest citizens who want to win recognition by serving the public. To attack them as a class may win a few votes, but never so many as the bureaucracy itself delivers to the other side.

* So Goldwater did well when he wasn’t a Presidential candidate, and poorly when he was.

3

Why the Liberals
Can’t Win

As the conservative is losing his battle because he has no program at all, the liberal is coming to a different dead end. He finds out he can’t achieve his ideal—the ideal of a society that solves social problems—with the program he has.

To be sure, the liberal always has a program. But as government has emerged as the only agency which seems able to cope with modern public problems, the liberal program is always a government program. The belief in federal action has thus become the central commandment of today’s liberal creed, and hence of the dominant political leadership. Irving Kristol, in the Harper’s article quoted in Chapter I, put it precisely:

The liberal community—i.e., the teachers, the journalists, the civil servants, the trade u...