A decade ago, Carville helped elect as mayor of that city a man who promised to synchronize the traffic lights on the main drag, Florida Street. By God, said the candidate, using a rhetorical trope then fashionable, if we can put a man on the moon, we can smooth out the herky-jerky stop-and-start nonflow of traffic. So the new mayor straightaway turned to Carville and said: Get it done. Carville called the city’s traffic engineer and said: Make it happen. The engineer said: OK. But it will cost bushels of money. The computers will have to be jiggered. And there will be these problems with left-turn lanes. And, besides…
The traffic on Florida Street still does not flow.
But even if Carville tells this cautionary tale to Clinton and to the swarms of eager beavers now bearing down on Washington, hot to right wrongs, it probably will not do a lick of good. Washington had better brace itself for the arrival of a lot of liberals who really believe that government is a sharp scalpel, and who can hardly wait to operate on the body politic. Or, to change the metaphor, they are eager to go marching as to war.
The Cold War is over, but the governmental hubris that the war engendered lingers on. Liberals, who often have faulted U.S. foreign policy for its alleged bellicosity, are enamored of “wars” on the home front. Burton Yale Pines, a leading conservative, believes the Cold War gave rise to a misplaced confidence in Washington’s capacity to do things not related to the Cold War, but which were called “wars” anyway. The powers Washington acquired to run containment of Communism seemed to give Washington derivative legitimacy as architect of ambitious domestic undertakings. Washington declared “wars” on poverty, crime, drugs and AIDS, spoke of a “Marshall Plan” for the cities and a “Manhattan Project” for education. The language of war lent spurious plausibility to the idea that the government’s skills in foreign policy could be as successfully applied to solving the social problems of an open, individualistic, pluralistic society.
Actually, the importation of martial language into domestic governance began before the Cold War. Franklin Roosevelt, in his first Inaugural Address, said he might ask Congress for “broad executive power to wage war against the emergency as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.” Eight months before that, FDR had told the Democratic convention that the nation should resume the “interrupted march along the path of real progress.” The 12-year interruption had been the interval of Republican rule between Woodrow Wilson–a war leader–and FDR, domestic “commander in chief” treating a domestic difficulty as the moral equivalent of war. Wilson, who disliked the Founding Fathers’ purposes in designing the separation of powers, was impatient with institutional inhibitions on government’s freedom to alter the balance between “the power of the government and the privileges of the individual.”
Before Clinton surrenders to the siren call of the Wilsonian presidency, he should curl up with a good book, Terry Eastland’s “Energy in the Executive: The Case for the Strong Presidency.” Eastland traces some problems of the modern presidency to Wilsonian grandiosity in the conception of the president’s duties. Wilson, writes Eastland, was the first holder of the office to believe “that Presidents are to lead the people ever onwards and upwards-to an unknown destination only history can reveal, but which, as the decades have passed, inevitably seems to have required larger and more costly government whose reach extends more deeply into the states and the private sector.” Wilson declared that “the size of modern democracy necessitates the exercise of persuasive power by dominant minds in the shaping of popular judgments.” Thus began the inflation of the presidential function: The president as the public’s tutor, moral auditor and cheerleader.
Clinton, who will he the sixth Democratic president since Woodrow Wilson, leads a party still awash with Wilsonian liberalism’s desire to conscript the individual into collective undertakings. Wilson presided over the “war socialism” of modern mobilization. Walter Lippmann and other “progressives” thought war could be a healthy antidote to America’s excessive “individualism” and “the evils of localism.” The public, properly led by a “dominant mind” at the pinnacle of the executive branch of the central government, could be nationalized and homogenized and made into good raw material for great undertakings. The greatest of these was to be what Peter Drucker calls “salvation by society”–society, controlled by government, would perfect individuals. Hence, Lyndon Johnson. One of his aides, Harry McPherson, described how LBJ envisioned the nation as a patient whose pathologies were to receive presidential ministrations:
“People were [seen to be] suffering from a sense of alienation from one another, of anomie, of powerlessness. This affected the well-to-do as much as it did the poor. Middle-class women, bored and friendless in the suburban afternoons; fathers, working at ‘meaningless’ jobs, or slumped before the television set; sons and daughters desperate for ,relevance’-all were in need of community, beauty, and purpose, all were guilty because so many others were deprived while they, rich beyond their ancestors’ dreams, were depressed. What would change all this was a creative public effort. . .”
It is a wonder we did not wind up with a Department of Meaningful Labor, a “war on anomie” and an Agency for Friendly Suburban Afternoons. LBJ promised a Great Society “where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty, and the hunger for community.” Today Americans would settle for cities where the most basic needs of the body (such as protection from punctures by bullets) and the rudimentary requirements of commerce (order; adequate education and transportation) are provided.
Clinton’s eager beavers should ponder that, perhaps during a herky-jerky drive down Florida Street.
