AGENDA
SETTING IN AN ERA OF POLITICAL DRIFT
Remarks
before the City Club of San Diego
17
April 1992
©
1992 W. B. Allen
This campaign aims to set an agenda for
California, through which California can set an agenda for the United States.
This is not an exercise in political theorizing. We know we suffer today from
acute political drift—an absence of the leadership and standards adequate to
address the many problems which beset our nation.
When we think of the term political drift and
recognize the prevailing liberal orthodoxy as at the root of our difficulties,
we may imagine that I mean nothing more than what Ronald Reagan meant when he
described liberals, not so much as being ignorant, but as knowing so very much
about what isn’t so.
The drift of liberalism may be captured in a few
words: liberal orthodoxy in general comes to this—divide, divide, divide, tax,
tax, tax, spend, spend, spend; divide us into groups, tax us into poverty,
spend us into dependence.
I go beyond the dangers of liberalism to characterize
the political emptiness which dogs our lives, for we live with many false
orthodoxies, which have turned political discourse into a dialogue of the deaf.
That certainly characterizes Washington, D. C., the one city in America where
everybody talks and nobody listens. The false orthodoxies of today are perhaps
less frequently but no less damagingly conservative as liberal. Today I will
detail many of these false orthodoxies, not in a spirit of criticism but in an
effort to point the way to clear solutions which I know the people of
California are capable of understanding and adopting.
The need for this is clearest in the false
impression of the House banking scandal conveyed by speaker Foley and all too
many malefactors in both political parties. Consider their version: they did
nothing wrong, they spent no public money, it was only a matter of poor organization
and poor bookkeeping.
Baloney. The fact is that members of the House
of Representatives were living like grand poobahs, above the law. Not all were
equally guilty; some were great abusers while others were only guilty of petty
oversights. In the Middle Ages the Catholic Church may have distinguished
between those who were guilty of venial corruption and those who were guilty of
mortal corruption. As it turns out, the venally corrupt were mainly
Republicans, while the mortally corrupt were mainly Democrats.
But the abuses of the accounts were not
significant because of the kited checks.
The
problem is worse. Consider the lame
excuse that no public monies were involved. What do they imagine the Sergeant
at Arms was paid in, green stamps? Of course public monies were involved. And
their very salaries are public monies, which were never intended to give them a
life above the law.
But that is what they had, a life in which they
were free of government regulation of their banking habits, where they could
freely launder monies in a way no one else can do, where they
could
provide public financing for their campaigns (which no challenger could do).
That is the great crime of this company store approach to government. And on
the conservative side of the aisle there is a still more significant problem:
namely that those in the minority, instead of serving as watchdogs to alert
public to the abuses of those who were in charge, simply
bought
into the system all too often. Our Paul Reveres were asleep on their horses,
and we have every right to be angry.
Yes, there exists conservative simple-mindedness
also. It consists in a litany of constitutional amendments thrown at audiences
instead of solutions applied to problems.
School prayer amendments. Balanced budget amendments. Human life
amendments. Line item veto amendments. And the list goes on.
The wonder is that such a recipe for political impotence could be sold to
the public as easier than real leadership applied to real problems.
The agenda of self-government begins by re-establishing the
dependence of lawmakers on the people who elect them. When we re-affirm the
principles of the American founders, the belief that mankind is capable of
self-government, we mean to vindicate the authority of ordinary citizens and to
keep government within law, not above the law. We will succeed in revitalizing
self-government
only if we knock down the ruling orthodoxies of the day, which have blinded us
to serious threats to our freedom.
I will use concrete examples in order to fix in
your minds the seriousness of the problems of political indecision and moral
decay, which work insidiously to corrode the cement which heretofore has bound
Americans into a union of freedom-loving citizens.
Consider the term illegitimacy. What comes first
to your minds, I know this, is the squalor and welfare dependency of urban
minority communities, mainly black. But what will you say if I tell you that
that picture is entirely false? That it is a picture that has been cultivated
with the perverse two-fold effect of isolating black communities at the same
time as blinding Americans to their own serious failings?
Let the numbers tell the story. Americans
generate 1.5 million live births every year, an alarming percentage of which
are out of wedlock. That is the story you have heard again and
again.
You have also heard that among those children born out of wedlock most are
black—which is not so. Rather, it is true that among black women a much larger
percentage of live births are out of wedlock than among Anglo or Hispanic
women. The percentages are 70%, 22%, and 18% respectively. That 70% is the
figure that sticks in your minds and leads you to wring your
hands
about the breakdown of the black family and to encourage social policy mongers
to focus a magnifying glass on black communities, despite the fact that 70% of
a small number may
still
be considerably smaller than 22% of a far larger number. In addition, for the
last generation the rate of increase in illegitimacy for Anglo women has been
steeper than that for black
women.
But these facts are not the source of the
mistaken impression conveyed about the state of our union today. To see the
full picture you must challenge the assumption that the discussion of
illegitimacy ought to be limited to live births out of wedlock. Today, you see
we have as many abortions every year as we do live births—another 1.5 million.
And guess what: two-thirds of those occur among unmarried women. In short, if
we calculated every unmarried pregnancy as a problem of illegitimacy, we would
discover that our problem is far more alarming than we have been told. Nor
could we still focus on the black community as the heart of the problem, for
the statistics regarding abortion are the opposite of those regarding live
births—that is, among Anglo women roughly 70% of the abortions are out of
wedlock, while fewer than one-third of all abortions occur to minority women.
Black women are being singled out because they kill their offspring at a far
lower rate than others and not because they are less disciplined than others
Now
that you see the true picture—namely, that our country has experienced rampant
illegitimacy across the board—it should not be difficult to figure out what
effect the
concentration
on the black community has had. It has blinded you to the fact of pervasive and
deep moral decay in our society. When we fail to see the true problem, we fail
to take any corrective measures to address it.
When we formulate social policies based on an
orthodoxy that distorts reality, we act only to perpetuate the underlying
condition, which is tearing at the vitals of our society. That is why I have
proposed not only to reform dependency-creating welfare policies that spawn illegitimate
births, but also to stigmatize abortion and the underlying moral laxity that
has made it a political issue. The present path we are on can reach no end but
the ultimate cannibalization of the family.
Bearing in mind this extensive example of
perverse orthodoxies, we can cite far more briefly many others no important in
posing obstacles to our future prosperity.
In our foreign affairs we are especially
vulnerable today, for our policy makers seem to be not at all conversant with
the fundamental principles of our republic. That is doubtless the reason that
they imagine that it is possible to build free democracies and free market
economies using the methods of socialism, consumption-driven government to
government aid. Such a “bailout” of the former Soviet Union is doomed to
failure.
This is especially regrettable insofar as known
alternatives, with a real possibility of success, actually exist. This United
States was once a new democracy and a new free economy. It began with a still
more crushing burden of debt and a gigantic need for infrastructure building.
Happily, it built on principles of freedom, letting productive energy rather
than consumption lead the way. Even the foreign money that came in such as that
from Dutch bankers, went into productive channels and not into mere government
expenditures. That is the only way we can truly aid the ex-Soviet Union.
Everything else is a mere illusion of the false orthodoxies of our own time.
Among these false orthodoxies, which explain
much of political drift, none is more prominent than the lie that parents
cannot educate their children. We have built up a Byzantine system of education
that mis-educates every bit as often as it educates—all the time routinely
blaming its failures on the parents and children rather than on the true
authors of this failure, education bureaucracies totally unfit for such serious
work
While attacking parents for the time they permit
their children to watch television, for leaving the children unsupervised, for
failures of discipline at home, and for the parents’ own general ignorance, we
neglect altogether the extent to which the state—acting through its education
bureaucracy—has separated parents from children and undermined parental
authority to the point that only hero parents can overcome the effects of such
a system.
We treat an educational system that has evolved
only in the last eighty years as if it were inscribed in holy tablets. In
reality it was an experiment from early in this century—an experiment which has
failed. But our bureaucrat educators react like the laboratory scientist who,
finding his experiment to have failed, simply sent our for more mice, and who
continued to do so even though each new cohort died in the experiment,
declaring that he was determined to continue until he found some mice who
survived. Well, someone from Missouri might think that he had seen enough, and
that perhaps the experiment ought to be changed.
That is the reason that I support parental
choice—scholarships for students to study where the parents may choose—as a
first step toward taking our children back from the state and establishing them
within the breasts of families that will protect and educate them.
There are conservative orthodoxies that are no
less deceptive in the field of education. For thirty years now we have demanded
a school prayer amendment, not once pausing to notice the incongruity of
training believers to pray to the state for the right to pray. This orthodoxy
suggests that it might be wise for parents to barter away their children into
the hands of godless schools in exchange for a 30-second non-denominational
prayer. That is a lunacy, which it is very hard to imagine any true American
from the founding generation ever falling prey to. The fact is, American
schools have been made more rigorously atheistic than anything ever accomplished
in the old Soviet Union. And it makes far better sense to take children away
from
them
than to beg for a little prayer to leaven the gruel of skepticism that is
routinely poured into them.
A new orthodoxy holds that the end of the Cold
War makes defense spending unnecessary, that we have a peace dividend to pass
around in ever new forms of government welfare. This orthodoxy builds on the
mistake of assuming that the government’s obligation to defend the society
derives only from the existence of a particular, named enemy state. In reality,
our government has the obligation to defend us from any potential threat. In a
world in which it is more rather than less difficult to pinpoint the source of
such a threat, defense may even be more costly.
We do not forget that the policy of Mutual
Assured Destruction was a substitute for a more costly defense—defense on the
cheap. Now that it no longer serves our needs, we face
far
tougher judgments and decisions.
That is the reason that I have rejected proposed
defense budget cuts that make the mistake of undermining American preparedness.
All of the existing proposals threaten to cut out weapons production, leaving
only research and development and armed forces as the basis of a defense
establishment.
On those grounds, within in a very few years we
will find that we have troops using obsolescent arms and an expensive research
industry going nowhere—not to mention the loss of
numerous
jobs in the defense industry. This is not 1941. Never again in the life of this
country will we enjoy 18 months to gear up in order to repel a major threat to
our security. In the future, we will either be prepared for each threat as it
arrives, or we will fall. That is the true price of defense cutbacks now
A less pervasive but still worrisome orthodoxy
is the mob cry for federal term limits, imposed through state enactments. The
arguments seems to be that, since terms limits are a good idea at the state
level, they will be even better at the federal level. To that end, imposing
such a change, which amounts to a change in the federal Constitution, without
going through the
legitimate
process for amending the Constitution, is an irresistible idea.
It is extraordinary that people who pose as
conservatives can join with others far less thoughtful in such a show of
disdain for our federal Constitution. Furthermore, their arguments in defense
of term limits ignore altogether the copious and intelligent arguments against
that very idea by several of our leading founding fathers
No one would insist that the founders were in
every particular invariably right in their judgment. But I would insist that
their deliberate judgments are always relevant, and that no modern statesman
can pose as a conservative who does not accept the obligation at least to respond
to such arguments before rejecting them.
Besides, the founders also sustained that there
was no contradiction between term limits universally imposed throughout the
states while being absent from the federal government. And
every
evidence suggests that that is a workable solution for the United States,
providing more effective challenges for entrenched congressional incumbents
while also securing the nation from the complete parochializtion of its
national politics. A vision of the good of the nation as a whole is an
indispensable condition for the effective operation of the federal government.
Such a vision would be far less likely to emerge in a Congress exclusively in
the hands of itinerant officeholders.
Perhaps the most seriously dangerous orthodoxy
of our age is the belief that questions of civil rights can only be resolved in
terms of group interests. Liberals live and die by this faith
and
conservatives too often offer little more than lip service to resist it.
Indeed, last fall some supposedly conservative representatives and senators
(Mr. Seymour among them) joined with liberals to pass the worst civil rights
law ever placed on our books—a law based squarely on this perverse principle.
The 1991 Civil Rights Act abandoned the ideal of
the same justice for rich and for poor—for which George Washington began to
pray as early as 1783—and replaced it with a regime that explicitly subjects
Americans to different standards of justice based on their circumstances.
There can be no future for freedom in an
American in which this orthodoxy is not successfully challenged and overturned.
That is the reason I have pledged to spare no effort in erasing every last
syllable of race, gender, ethnic, or other preferences in all of our laws.
It is a disgrace among freemen that we are
subject to as many as 150 federal civil rights laws, often mutually
contradictory and always confusing. It is imperative that they be consolidated
into a single, consistent code, re-establishing the principle of common civil
rights for all Americans, without exceptions.
Moreover, in undertaking this work we undertake
as well to drive out of polite society every attempt to divide Americans in
competing racial, gender, and ethnic groups. The politics of
division
that Dianne Feinstein practices serves no useful purpose in America—besides
boosting demagogues into office. Feinstein’s determination to make gender an
issue in this election is a symptom of how deep our illness is, for she
imagines it to be in her interest to exaggerate tendencies, which ultimately,
if unchecked, will destroy America. Similarly, her riding on Anita Hill’s
hemline, with her politics of rage, displays the same cavalier attitude about
the fate of the
country.
I am confident, however, that the people of California will be no less
discerning in dealing with the return of Anita Hill in the form of Feinstein
than they were in dealing with the original.
A deeper, somewhat more hidden orthodoxy is the
belief that no problem can be solved without being referred to Washington for
its solution. The insane proposal to make gang membership a federal crime is a
perfect illustration of this fact, for that idea of Mr. Seymour’s betrays two
ignorances in a single stroke.
First, it demonstrates that he does not
understand the nature of the police power, and its proper placement in the
hands of the state and not the federal government. Thus he will be utterly
incapable of defending state-chartered credit unions from the assault on their
independence, which is right now underway in the federal government. States’
rights mean nothing to Mr.
Seymour,
and every local itch qualifies for a federal back-scratch. There is at least a
kernel of truth in the orthodoxy that, if the federal government doesn’t tackle
a problem, it won’t get done; namely, at least it won’t get done badly
Secondly, he fails to perceive that the problem
of gangs cannot be resolved by exacerbating the very circumstance which enables
them to thrive today—that is the increasing impotence of local communities. One
would proceed far more surely to eliminate gangs by restoring parents to
respect in the eyes of their children. Such respect is always a product of just
authority and power. Parents will put an end to gangs in proportion as they can
actually make the kinds of decisions in their own lives that will compel the
attention of their children Rather than displacing power and authority to
Washington, he ought to be urging its increase in families, churches, and
communities—even devolving too large political units into smaller units in
order to foster the reality and sense of control which will enable parents to
impress their youngsters with appropriate restraints.
When will we ever resolve the terrible dilemma
of illegal immigration, if we continue to phrase the problem mainly as a
question of welfare expenditures on illegal immigrants, instead
of
what is truly the case, luring illegal immigrants into this country to perform
jobs that we cannot get welfare recipients off their posteriors to do? A
government that pays people not to work can hardly afford to be amazed that
others will fill in the vacuum thus created, illegally if need be.
Materially, the most harmful orthodoxy we have
lived with is the notion that a federal debt is a blessing without which no
economic growth is possible. That is a view shared on both sides of the
political aisle in Washington, and it has ruled unchallenged for thirty-one
years.
This is the view that makes the deficit the
annual increase on the national debt a permanent feature of our government, for
one cannot use the debt to manage the economy without increasing the debt each
year.
We might believe that experience alone would
demonstrate the absurdity of this orthodoxy, save that no matter whom we have
sent to Washington the last thirty years, not one of them has seemed to master
it. We might believe that the disastrous consequences in our economy, the
competition for credit and the inflexibility imposed on our financial
institutions in financial hard times, would suggest that a different view was
needed. Still, the orthodoxy prevails
If nothing else, we might believe that even a
little bit of pride would lead to a change. For who wants to live permanently
in his own country as a mere renter rather than as an owner? Still, our
government does nothing to pay off our debt, even though it is very much
possible to do so without increasing taxes and without inflation. That is why I
have insisted on re-directing the debate, formally calling to retire the debt,
and providing sure means for doing so. We can pinpoint the future growth that
will enable us to pay off our debt which, though great, is considerably smaller
than the debt with which the nation began, calculated as a ratio to annual
revenues), and to do so much as a homeowner would anticipate paying off a
mortgage (which often sustains approximately the same ratio to annual income as
our national debt presently sustains to annual revenues).
We confront the orthodoxy of a balanced budget
amendment repeatedly invoked by so-called conservatives, despite its manifest
failure to discipline state governments—instead of
serious
proposals to retire the national debt—another sign of our political drift.
Some, like Mr. Dannemeyer, even propose a constitutional convention for the
purpose, again revealing an extraordinary lack of sophistication about the
foundations of our polity and the dangers associated with inviting tampering
with the foundation documents. Such impossible dreams as these accomplish
nothing more than to blind us to the reality that we hold in our own hands the
capacity to make the needed changes in our national life.
Nor can we afford any longer to accept the
excuse of impotence that all too many offer, on account of their being in the
minority in government. The fact is, we do not have a parliamentary system, and
anyone with intelligence of purpose and dedicated spirit can provide the leadership
that will invigorate our system. Those who, on the other hand, can boast
nothing more than their votes against measures, which nonetheless pass and
precipitate our country’s downward spiral can claim no more reputation than to
be losers.
I have learned this lesson well
at the Commission on Civil Rights. There I gained deep appreciation for the
quiet victories that reward dedicated efforts by altering the discourse and
achieving policy changes long after the tribunes of orthodoxy (who have notoriously
short attention spans) have gone on to other controversies.