A FRENCH TALE:

Tropes of Wrath: Virtue, Markets, and the Family (James Morone, Spring 2005, Dissent)

The left lost the culture war on a sunny winter day in 1994-at least that's as good a day as any to mark the defeat. Donna Shalala, the secretary of Health and Human Services, met the press to explain the Clinton administration's progressive centerpiece, an ambitious universal health insurance plan. First question: "I have good health insurance, why should I pay more for someone else?" Oh, explained Shalala with the Democrats' cheerful B-School logic, thanks to our new efficiencies there is already (almost) enough money in the system to cover everyone. The administration offered the nation economic self-interest, technical wonkery, and a smidgen from the pork barrel. They did not serve the free lunch with moral arguments or family values.

Meanwhile, conservatives were screaming about the meltdown of the American family: broken homes, unwed mothers, a divorce pandemic, abortions, homosexuality, teenage predators, welfare queens, an underclass-the list went on. The right proffered a simple explanation for all the social troubles. The hedonistic culture of the 1960s had eroded the nation's morals. Conservatives managed to seize and reframe two great American canons: Virtue (which they called "family values") and Capitalism (celebrated as "the free market").

The great conservative narrative of American decline-a formidable Puritan jeremiad with all the trimmings-routed the Democrats, who promised only more efficient government and more expansive benefits. Conservatives smeared national health insurance as another big-government, something-for-nothing program aimed at the wrong people-the poor, the failed, and the lazy. Republicans soon converted the backlash into a "Contract with America" and seized control of government by winning the House, the Senate, both legislative chambers in eleven new states, and-over three years-fifteen new governors' offices. Conservatives have been tightening their grip on power ever since.

The left brims with helpful programs (such as national health insurance) and liberating values (like equality) but offers no overarching narrative for our times. It seeks to help working families but does not contest the conservative construction of either virtue or markets.

One of the main reasons that it seems possible that the Republicans will lock in a long term majority is because the Left demonstrates so little grasp of even its own ideas. Equality (or financial security) is the defining end of the Left, but it is and has always been at war with Liberty. Liberty is the idea that all men should be treated as equals. Equality is the idea that all men should be made to have the same status. If not quite opposites they are at least in a permanent state of tension.

Now, as Americans, we tend to come down on the side of Liberty. However, the goal of equality is not a bad thing in the abstract. Indeed, many nations prefer it to liberty. And even we leaned toward it from at least 1929-80.

Similarly, national health insurance is a staple of other countries' welfare systems and has been a goal of Democrats here for decades. The idea that everyone should have health care is certainly attractive. It suffers from only two drawbacks: first, that in its classical Leftist form it requires a massive expansion of government; and, second, it doesn't work out too well in practice, is not ultimately "helpful."

Though Mr. Morone is oblivious to it, when taken together the idea of equality and the policy of national health insurance fit perfectly into the historic narrative of the Left. It is not that the Democrats don't have a narrative anymore but that it isn't one that appeals to a majority of Americans and hasn't since the quite spectacular failures of American liberalism, European socialism, and East European/Asian/African communism in the 1970s. Using the state to impose equality of results just happens not to have worked very well. We were very fortunate that the project was resisted most fiercely here and abandoned most rapidly, but no one who lived through them would choose to go back to the LBJ/Nixon/Ford/Carter years, when the New Deal/Great Society achieved their apotheosis. And, if Western Europe isn't ugly enough, the glimpses we were afforded of what was going on behind the Iron Curtain were enough to scare the bejeebies out of most of us.

So when someone like Mr. Morone comes along, claiming that if only the Democrats would be more explicit and vocal about what they want to do they'd be back on the path to power, it seems fair to wonder if the Left isn't so disconnected from reality in general and from America in particular that they're going to be in the minority for quite some time.

MORE:
The Roosevelt mystique (Jonah Goldberg, June 8, 2005, Townhall)

Franklin Delano Roosevelt has been having a good year. Inspired by George W. Bush's - alas, sputtering - Social Security reform proposals, liberals have sought to elevate FDR to a rank just a few hairs shy of divinity.

On another front, in response to the fight over Bush's judicial nominations, some liberal legal scholars have invented a movement to rally around what they call "the Constitution in exile." According to these frightened acolytes of the "living Constitution," a secretive band of Federalist Society types is hell-bent on restoring the pre-New Deal constitutional order.

Meanwhile, Cass Sunstein - a legal scholar who has never failed to find a pulse in our founding charter - has written a book urging the adoption of FDR's "Second Bill of Rights," arguing that Roosevelt's socialist - or "statist," if that word goes down easier - 1944 plea for sweeping new economic rights should be injected into the living constitution like a new stem cell therapy.

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 8, 2005 7:00 AM