During the recent health-care debate, a number of Democratic senators asked me, “What are Republicans for?” My answer was that Democrats would wait a long time if they were waiting for Republican Leader McConnell to roll into the Senate a wheelbarrow filled with a 2,700-page Republican comprehensive health-care bill — or, for that matter, a Republican version of a 1,200-page climate-change bill, or an 800-page immigration bill. What has united almost all Republicans and a majority of Americans against these bills is not just that they were headed in the wrong direction, but that they were comprehensive, and, as George Will might write, “Congress. Does. Not. Do. Comprehensive. Well.”
This idea that Washington should advance huge initiatives to try to solve big policy problems all at once was launched by Herbert Croly’s progressive manifesto, The Promise of American Life, written in 1909. Today at the Hudson Institute, I will address a forum on what I call “The New Promise of American Life,” the reverse mirror image of Croly’s progressivism: the idea of an America where citizens expect less from Washington and more of ourselves. These ideas are not new. In fact, they revisit a volume that Checker Finn and I edited in 1995 entitled The New Promise of American Life. William Kristol, William Schambra and Checker — all contributors to the 1995 volume — will be at today’s forum, along with Christopher DeMuth, Kenneth Weinstein, and the National Review Institute’s own Kate O’Beirne. In my remarks I will propose that the Republican approach should be to set the right goals, such as making it easier and cheaper to create private-sector jobs, and then proceed step by step in that direction to re-earn the trust of the American people.
The notion of grand comprehensive change is really a form of fantasy, leading to an enormous amount of broken crockery.
No comments:
Post a Comment