by Peter Wehner
Ineffective policies are caused by deep structural factors regardless of which party is in charge, according to Schuck. The administrative state, which is not directly accountable to the citizenry, exercises vast discretionary powers. “The relationship between government’s growing ambition and its endemic failure,” he writes, “is rooted in an inescapable structural condition: officials’ meager tools and limited understanding of the opaque, complex social world that they aim to manipulate.” The result is having a corrosive effect on the reputation of government.
National Affairs editor Yuval Levin, in reviewing Schuck’s book, highlights a concrete example of a program that performs a vital service but is failing in many important respects: Medicare, the health insurance program for people over sixty-five (and some younger people with disabilities), which accounts for 15 percent of the federal budget and covers almost 60 million Americans:
By paying a set fee for each service, it creates perverse incentives for doctors to perform more of them. Then, by using the instrument of price controls to limit costs, it creates shortages. By setting those prices administratively, it denies itself the information that only the interplay of supply and demand can offer. By imposing a mid-1960s insurance model on American medicine, it makes the health-care system inflexible. By relying on payment cuts that Congress routinely puts off, it makes a joke of its own fiscal projections. And by abiding billions in fraud, it invites waste and abuse. The sum of it all is a colossal mess at the heart of American health care.13
Schuck points to at least four costs of these government failures: wasted resources and opportunity costs; the indignities people suffer; the dampening effects on economic growth; and undermining the legitimacy of government.
To be successful, public policy needs rigorous measurements, relentless evaluation, and accountability. It has to be adaptable. It needs to put in place the right incentives, simplify rules and administration, and set realistic goals. Wise government sets the circumstances for success while resisting the temptation to centralize power and decision-making. And it needs people in positions of influence who are modest in their expectations, empirical in their approach, and competent in their execution. What government needs, in a word, are professionals. But to repeat: we live in a time when excellence and realism in governing are widely viewed as unimportant, even unfashionable.
Donald Trump understood this far better than anyone else in American politics. Some of the recurrent themes of his rhetoric during the 2016 presidential campaign were that those in power were idiots, the problems facing the United States were simple to fix, and he alone could fix them.
At various points during the campaign he claimed to know more than anyone on earth—and sometimes more than anyone in American history—about tax laws, banking, money, renewable energy, the debt, the visa system, trade, jobs, infrastructure, the military, ISIS, the horror of nuclear war, campaign contributions, and our system of government.14 This despite the fact that Mr. Trump had no previous experience in many of these areas, and frankly knew nothing about them.
At one point near the end of the campaign, Mr. Trump declared, “Together we’re going to deliver real change that once again puts Americans first. That begins with immediately repealing and replacing the disaster known as Obamacare. . . . You’re going to have such great health care, at a tiny fraction of the cost—and it’s going to be so easy.”
But as president, Mr. Trump failed to repeal and replace Obamacare—and in a meeting with the nation’s governors in February 2017, he admitted, “Now, I have to tell you, it’s an unbelievably complex subject. Nobody knew health care could be so complicated.” In fact, everyone who has ever delved into health-care policy knows it is an enormously complicated subject. Donald Trump assumed it was easy to deal with in part because he had apparently never given a moment’s thought to it.
But there was more to it than that. Mr. Trump’s critiques were laced with contempt for the political establishment and policy experts because he was effectively tapping into a populist spirit that is sweeping much of the Western world.
There are numerous reasons for the rise of populism. According to William Galston, a political theorist who was a domestic-policy advisor in the Bill Clinton White House, they include uneven prosperity and widening income inequality, the erosion of the manufacturing sector and the “urbanization of opportunity,” and the fallout from the Great Recession of 2008. These economic factors were combined with the inability of many Western governments to deal with waves of immigration in ways that commanded public support, and with widening cultural divisions between those with college degrees and those without them.15 The result is a backlash that has disrupted the post–World War II bargain between elites and citizens.
It should be said that populism can be, in limited doses, an understandable response to massive and rapid economic and social changes, and it can even offer useful correctives. It can alert elites to problems to which they may be oblivious.
Most populists start with a legitimate issue or grievance, but the danger lies in excessively stirring emotions and passions to gain support, thus sowing cynicism and mistrust. Such was the case with William Jennings Bryan, who, in the 1896 “Cross of Gold” speech that won him the Democratic nomination, argued for an “easy money” policy in response to the depressed economy at the time. Bryan advocated changing the nation’s monetary backing from gold to silver. “Great cities,” Bryan said in his defense of farmers, “rest upon our broad and fertile prairies. Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic; but destroy our farms, and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country.” Bryan saw it as his mission to protect the most vulnerable Americans from the damages caused by industrialization and went after what he called “the money power,” but he ended up exacerbating divisions in the country.
In its more extreme form, populism “pits a virtuous and homogeneous people against a set of elites and dangerous ‘others’ who are together depicted as depriving (or attempting to deprive) the sovereign people of their rights, values, prosperity, identity and voice.”16 Unhealthy populism is defined by a sense of grievance and resentment, which is why it’s a mode of politics that has historically been susceptible to demagogues.
Among the most notable examples of a populist American demagogue is George Wallace, the aggressively segregationist governor of Alabama who ran for president in 1968 as the head of the American Independent Party. (Wallace carried five southern states—Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, and Mississippi—and won forty-six electoral votes.) Wallace railed against, among others, Hippies, Vietnam War protesters, “welfare loafers,” foreign aid, arrogant judges, cowardly politicians, and “pointy-head college professors who can’t even park a bicycle straight.” During that campaign Wallace, doing his part for civility in public discourse, declared, “Hell, we got too much dignity in government now, what we need is some meanness.”
In his book Wallace, Marshall Frady wrote, “There is something primordially exciting and enthralling about him.” Frady added, “As long as we are creatures hung halfway between the cave and the stars, figures like Wallace can be said to pose the great dark original threat,” with “the potential for an American fascism.”17
Wallace’s daughter, Peggy Wallace Kennedy, said of Wallace and Trump, “They both were able to adopt the notion that fear and hate are the two greatest motivators of voters that feel alienated from government.”18
Populism also needs enemies, lots of them, and especially elites who—the narrative goes—are selfish, greedy, insulated, and power-hungry. The out-of-touch elites are viewed as enemies of the people, and they need to be treated as such.
Excoriating elites “is classic populist language,” according to Yale historian Beverly Gage. “Trump has taken it to a whole new level by not only attacking clueless elites but the entire idea of expertise.”19
The result is this: many Americans are drenched in a dista
ste for the actual practice of politics, and among activists in the Republican Party in particular there is an unspoken sense that the activity of governing is somehow illegitimate. This is one of the fundamental differences between the American Right today and the conservative movement that shaped me. It helps explain how Mr. Trump seized on deeply antipolitical feelings and leveraged them to his advantage, why Republicans so devalued any focus on policy during the 2016 election, and why Mr. Trump was not penalized but rewarded for his vast ignorance on matters of public policy.
During the 2016 primary I could not understand how it was that a man who in debate after debate proved he couldn’t string together three coherent policy sentences kept getting stronger rather than weaker. The answer is that such an approach can only work with people who disdain the craft of governing. They were looking for “outsiders” who gave voice to their frustration and rage, even if they had never governed in their lives. Remember, they were (and are) operating on the assumption that governing is simple, lawmakers are fools and knaves, and the system is thoroughly and endemically corrupt. The federal government is “the swamp,” while the political class and civil servants are part of the “deep state.” The system is “rigged.” As a result the village needs to be (figuratively) burned to the ground. Donald Trump was the appointed arsonist.
At the risk of being accused of being an elitist, I believe this attitude is wildly misguided and naive. As I’ve already argued, in many respects government, especially at the federal level, is performing poorly. It is often antiquated, unresponsive, and failing to meet the needs of the citizenry. The unhappiness with government is therefore understandable and to some degree justified.
But the solution isn’t to elect people who are inexperienced, inept, and contemptuous of governing.
THE DELICATE ART OF SOLVING NATIONAL PROBLEMS
The founders articulated the aims of government in the preamble to the Constitution:
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
The purpose of the Constitution, then, was to create an effective national government that would meet the needs and protect the rights of the people in ways they can’t do by themselves. That has always mattered, but it’s particularly relevant now, since, as William J. Bennett and John J. DiIulio Jr. have written, “virtually every aspect of our lives is now touched by government.”20
They list some of the activities, including underwriting support for the elderly and disabled, for medical research, space missions, art museums, farmers, and mass transit. The federal government subsidizes public television. It builds prisons and supports public-housing projects. It provides food stamps, health care, college scholarships, loans, and grants. It involves itself in university admissions, hiring practices, family-leave policies, civil-rights laws, banking insurance and regulation, professional accrediting, air-traffic control, and parks administration. It protects our air, water, and food; regulates tobacco and automobiles; constructs interstate highways; keeps out illegal immigrants; and provides pensions to our veterans. And of course it funds the military.
Many people, particularly on the right, believe the federal government is a modern-day Leviathan—unwieldy and inherently ineffective, its size, reach, and cost ($4 trillion and counting) completely out of control, and in possession of unprecedented and unconstitutional power. The government is profoundly mistrusted, they argue, and it’s time for it to be pulled up root and branch.
There are some parts of this critique I’m sympathetic to, but the simple fact is that there is no evidence the public wants anything like a large-scale rollback of the federal government. Time after time, in election after election, voters have shown that they are basically happy with the domains in which government is acting and prepared to defend the existence of programs that were created in the wake of the New Deal and the Great Society, if not always their performance.
Republicans have now and then made an effort to cut the size and cost of government in significant ways but rarely with success. That is true even of Ronald Reagan, who was the most ideologically conservative president in modern times and the one most rhetorically committed to cutting government. “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,” Reagan said in his first inaugural address.
The reality is that Reagan, contrary to the claims of some of his conservative admirers, did not roll back government to anything like the extent he promised. Indeed, especially after his first year in the presidency, he devoted most of his energies elsewhere. Thus, although at first approving a plan to cut Social Security benefits for prospective early retirees, he quickly capitulated and scrapped the idea. Nor did he ever mount a serious effort to reform the structural design of other entitlement programs. In fact, Reagan enacted what at the time was the most dramatic expansion of Medicare coverage since its inception, including a complex system of price controls. And he not only didn’t eliminate any cabinet departments but rather added to them. During his presidency, federal spending as a percent of GDP was higher than it was under Jimmy Carter. Under Reagan, the national debt skyrocketed. Like most conservatives, Reagan opposed Big Government in the abstract more than he did in the particulars.
There is no doubt that overall Reagan would have preferred to cut government more, but there was no public will for it, and to move adamantly on this front would have forced him to forgo other, more achievable goals, such as deregulation, cutting tax rates, and building up the military.
Most people have forgotten something else Reagan said in his first inaugural address: “Now, so there will be no misunderstanding, it’s not my intention to do away with government. It is rather to make it work—work with us, not over us; to stand by our side, not ride on our back. Government can and must provide opportunity, not smother it; foster productivity, not stifle it.”
Reagan was a conservative, not an anarchist. Unlike too many of the people who call themselves conservatives today, he sought to limit government in order to strengthen its legitimacy—not to disrupt or discredit it.
Conservatives have fallen lately into the trap of believing that the essential question when it comes to governing is how big the government is or how much it spends. But at least as important is what it does and how it works. The trouble with this question is that it requires real engagement with the details of governing and of public policy. And ultimately, to take politics seriously, we will need just such engagement.
Nearly all of the actual policy achievements of the right in the modern era tend to support this point, even if conservatives are inclined to ignore them. In fact, we have seen time and again that when conservatives engage with the political process, they use their principles to make headway against some of our toughest problems.
Let’s start with welfare. The 1996 welfare law (championed by conservatives and signed into law by President Clinton) reversed sixty years of federal policy by ending welfare as an entitlement program. It imposed a five-year time limit on the receipt of benefits, required a large percentage of recipients to seek and obtain work, and enhanced enforcement of child support.
Despite predictions of catastrophic damage to the poor, the results were astonishing. Within half a decade, the national welfare caseload declined by almost 60 percent while employment figures for single mothers rose and overall poverty, child poverty (including among African American children), and child hunger decreased.
What’s less well known is that the shift from the old welfare system (Aid to Families with Dependent Children) to the new system (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) initially cost more money. But the point of welfare reform wasn’t just to cut spending; it was to reform a program that was poorly serving those it was intended to help. This re
quired government to realign rewards and penalties.
It’s the same story with crime. The violent crime rate has been cut roughly in half since 1993, with the homicide and robbery rates each having fallen by more than 50 percent. The drop in crime was not a result of smaller government; it was a result of better and smarter government, including more incarceration, elevated security, better intervention and prevention programs, an increase in police officers per capita, enforcing quality-of-life offenses, more effective identification of criminal patterns, and more advanced use of data. (Unlike welfare, where the federal government instituted reforms, in the case of crime most of the reforms were undertaken by state and local governments.)
A third major policy success is the earned-income tax credit. Created during the Ford presidency, it is a federal tax credit for low- and moderate-income working people. It was expanded under Presidents Reagan, Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama. The program has lifted around 6 million people above the poverty line and reduced the severity of poverty for more than 18 million people.21 While costing the government more than $60 billion per year, the earned-income tax credit is perhaps the best antipoverty program we have. “No other tax or transfer program prevents more children from living a life of poverty,” according to an analysis by the Brookings Institution, “and only Social Security keeps more people above poverty.”22
There have been other successes of a conservative variety, from tax reform and deregulation in the 1980s to the antidrug efforts in the early 1990s to the charter school movement and the greater market competition introduced into Medicare in the 2000s.
These reforms shared a rigorous empirical approach. They took into account the fact that people are free and independent yet also act in their self-interest and respond to incentives. They were open to experimentation and adjustment. They measured success by outcomes rather than inputs. And they rejected what Reagan called a “slavish adherence to abstraction” in favor of a commitment to actual achievement. They were driven not by ceaseless hostility to government but by a restrained, realistic vision of its potential.
