Government Executive - Authors - Jonathan Rauch

Why Not Strip J. Edgar Hoover’s Name From the FBI Building?

Jonathan Rauch, The Atlantic — Tue, 15 Sep 2015 11:16:01 -0400

Now that the Confederate flag has been furled at South Carolina’s Capitol, it’s time to deal with another symbolic insult to minorities and the Constitution—the one inscribed over the door of the nation’s top law-enforcement agency.

A consummate bureaucrat and institution-builder, J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI’s first director, was also a paranoid obsessive who put together a rogue secret service accountable only to himself. His clandestine harassment of civil-rights activists and his illegal surveillance of political dissidents are well known, but the extent of his persecution of homosexuals is only now coming to light.

In 1951, he launched a program to identify and expose homosexuals working in government. (“Each Supervisor will be held personally responsible to underline in green pencil the names of individuals mentioned in any report, letter, memorandum, newspaper article or other communication who are alleged to be sex deviates. This will assure proper indexing by the Records Section.”)

By the time the program ended, in the 1970s, the bureau had collected more than 360,000 files on Americans suspected of being gay or lesbian. Dwight Eisenhower was still president-elect when Hoover confronted him with evidence that one of Eisenhower’s senior aides was gay, getting the aide fired and implicitly warning Ike not to cross the FBI. A few months later, the new president banned gays from all government jobs, an injustice not righted until 1975.

Congress named the FBI headquarters for Hoover in 1972, shortly after he died. “It is a stain and it is a shame,” says Charles Francis, the president of the Mattachine Society of Washington, D.C., a gay-rights advocacy group that has done much to call attention to Hoover’s abuses. “That name needs to come down.”

As it happens, the government is planning to move the FBI from its brutalist building on Pennsylvania Avenue to a new home in the D.C. suburbs. Hoover’s name, according to an FBI spokesman, will not automatically convey. In deciding what to call the new facility, Congress will be required to confront Hoover’s legacy. Some traditionalists, in much the same manner as Confederate-flag defenders, will insist that the status quo commemorates a noble, if flawed, history. They should be ignored. The Martin Luther King Jr. FBI Building has the ring of justice to me.

(Image via Richard Cavalleri / Shutterstock.com)

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The Real Roots of Midlife Crisis

Jonathan Rauch, The Atlantic — Thu, 04 Dec 2014 14:00:00 -0500

This summer, a friend called in a state of unhappy perplexity. At age 47, after years of struggling to find security in academia, he had received tenure. Instead of feeling satisfied, however, he felt trapped. He fantasized about escape. His reaction had taken him by surprise. It made no sense. Was there something wrong with him? I gave him the best answer I know. I told him about the U-curve.

Not everyone goes through the U-curve. But many people do, and I did. In my 40s, I experienced a lot of success, objectively speaking. I was in a stable and happy relationship; I was healthy; I was financially secure, with a good career and marvelous colleagues; I published a book, wrote for top outlets, won a big journalism prize. If you had described my own career to me as someone else’s, or for that matter if you had offered it to me when I was just out of college, I would have said, “Wow, I want that!” Yet morning after morning (mornings were the worst), I would wake up feeling disappointed, my head buzzing with obsessive thoughts about my failures. I had accomplished too little professionally, had let life pass me by, needed some nameless kind of change or escape.

My dissatisfaction was whiny and irrational, as I well knew, so I kept it to myself. When I thought about it—which I did, a lot—I rejected the term midlife crisis, because I was holding a steady course and never in fact experienced a crisis: more like a constant drizzle of disappointment. What annoyed me most of all, much more than the disappointment itself, was that I felt ungrateful, the last thing in the world I was entitled to be. Hopeful that rationality might prevail, I would count my blessings, quite literally—making lists mentally, and sometimes also on paper of all that I had to be thankful for. Reasoning with myself might help for a little while, but then the disappointment would return. As the weeks turned into months, and then into years, my image of myself began to change. I had always thought of myself as a basically happy person, but now I seemed to be someone who dwelt on discontents, real or imaginary. I supposed I would have to reconcile myself to being a malcontent.

As I moved into my early 50s, I hit some real setbacks. Both of my parents died, one of them after suffering a terrible illness while I watched helplessly. My job disappeared when the magazine I worked for was restructured. An entrepreneurial effort—to create a new online marketplace that would match journalists who had story ideas with editors looking for them—ran into problems. My shoulders, elbows, and knees all started aching. And yet the fog of disappointment and self-censure began to lift, at first almost imperceptibly, then more distinctly. By now, at 54, I feel as if I have emerged from a passage through something. But what?

Long ago, when I was 30 and he was 66, the late Donald Richie, the greatest writer I have known, told me: “Midlife crisis begins sometime in your 40s, when you look at your life and think, Is this all? And it ends about 10 years later, when you look at your life again and think, Actually, this is pretty good.” In my 50s, thinking back, his words strike me as exactly right. To no one’s surprise as much as my own, I have begun to feel again the sense of adventure that I recall from my 20s and 30s. I wake up thinking about the day ahead rather than the five decades past. Gratitude has returned.

I was about 50 when I discovered the U-curve and began poking through the growing research on it. What I wish I had known in my 40s (or, even better, in my late 30s) is that happiness may be affected by age, and the hard part in middle age, whether you call it a midlife crisis or something else, is for many people a transition to something much better—something, there is reason to hope, like wisdom. I wish someone had told me what I was able to tell my worried friend: nothing was wrong with him, and he wasn’t alone.

In the 1970s, an economist named Richard Easterlin, then at the University of Pennsylvania, learned of surveys gauging people’s happiness in countries around the world. Intrigued, he set about amassing and analyzing the data, in the process discovering what came to be known as the Easterlin paradox: beyond a certain point, countries don’t get happier as they get richer. Today he is at the University of Southern California and is celebrated as the founder of a new branch of economics, focused on human well-being. At the time, though, looking at something as subjective as happiness seemed eccentric to mainstream economists. His findings, Easterlin says, were for many years regarded as a curiosity, more a subject for cocktail conversation than for serious research.

A generation later, in the 1990s, happiness economics resurfaced. This time a cluster of labor economists, among them David Blanchflower of Dartmouth and Andrew Oswald of the University of Warwick, got interested in the relationship between work and happiness. That led them to international surveys of life satisfaction and the discovery, quite unexpected, of a recurrent pattern in countries around the world. “Whatever sets of data you looked at,” Blanchflower told me in a recent interview, “you got the same things”: life satisfaction would decline with age for the first couple of decades of adulthood, bottom out somewhere in the 40s or early 50s, and then, until the very last years, increase with age, often (though not always) reaching a higher level than in young adulthood. The pattern came to be known as the happiness U-curve

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The Case for Corruption

Jonathan Rauch, The Atlantic — Thu, 20 Feb 2014 13:09:23 -0500

The government shutdown last fall wasted billions of dollars, upset innumerable plans, and besmirched both political parties. But it did have one constructive effect. Surveying the wreckage, grown-ups in both parties realized that the politics of public confrontation is a lot better at closing the government than running it. So, to avoid a repeat, they decided to try something old. Something very old. In a healthy return to machine politics, they handed budget negotiations over to political hacks cutting deals behind closed doors.

Once upon a time, the budget process was reasonably regular. In fact, it was conducted under what was called regular order. The budget-committee chairmen would do some horse trading to build a consensus within each chamber, the House and Senate would then pass those budgets without too much ado, and the two chambers would work out their differences in a conference committee. Then the appropriations committees would do more or less the same thing, making sure to spread around enough pork-barrel goodies to get their friends paid off and the budget passed. The president and the congressional leaders would be involved throughout the process, every now and then calling a budget summit, but most of the real work would go on behind the scenes.

In the past few years, by contrast, regular order has been replaced by regular chaos. Public ultimatums supplanted private negotiations, games of chicken replaced mutual back-scratching, and bumptious Republican House members took to dictating terms to their putative leadership. Last fall, after one tantrum too many, Congress seemed exhausted. As part of a deal to reopen the government, it returned the task of setting the next fiscal year’s budget to the budget and appropriations committees, sending them off to a smoke-free smoke-filled room to cut a deal. The result, a trillion-dollar spending bill loaded with incentives for each side, sailed through Congress in January.

How often backroom deal making will work in today’s age of hyper-partisanship remains to be seen, but Congress’s recourse to it represents a welcome rediscovery of a home truth. Politics needs good leaders, but it needs good followers even more, and they don’t come cheap. Loyalty gets you only so far, and ideology is divisive. Political machines need to exist, and they need to work. No one understood this better than the street-smart political sage George Washington Plunkitt, who articulated the concept of honest graft.

Plunkitt was a factotum of New York’s renowned Tammany Hall political machine during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Among his accomplishments was holding four public offices at once, drawing salaries for three of them. It was his custom to opine on politics from the shoeshine stand at the county courthouse, where his reflections were taken down by a reporter named William L. Riordon and published in a 1905 classic called Plunkitt of Tammany Hall. His greatest insight was the distinction between honest and dishonest graft.

“There’s the biggest kind of a difference between political looters and politicians who make a fortune out of politics by keepin’ their eyes wide open,” Plunkitt said. “The looter goes in for himself alone without considerin’ his organization or his city. The politician looks after his own interests, the organization’s interests, and the city’s interests all at the same time.” Dirty graft is parasitic, mere larceny, whereas honest graft helps knit together a patronage network that ensures leaders can lead and followers will follow. Reformers who failed to understand this crucial distinction, Plunkitt said, courted anarchy. “First,” he reasoned, “this great and glorious country was built up by political parties; second, parties can’t hold together if their workers don’t get the offices when they win; third, if the parties go to pieces, the government they built up must go to pieces, too; fourth, then there’ll be h to pay.”

Plunkitt’s warning, however colorfully expressed, was no mere wheeze. Writing just a few months ago in The National Interest, the political scientist Vivek S. Sharma, sounding like Plunkitt with a Ph.D., made an academic version of exactly the same point, noting that in many countries, patronage “is the grease that keeps the gears of the system running.” Well-intentioned Americans who try to stamp out patronage networks in places like Afghanistan and Iraq usually just make things worse, Sharma observed, because “building formal institutions can in no way substitute for the creation of incentive structures that govern actual lives.”

In other words, in most political systems, the right amount of corruption is greater than zero. Leaders need to be able to reward followers and punish turncoats and free agents. Sometimes that will look sleazy, undemocratic, or both, but it is often better than the alternatives.

For decades, America did a good job of equilibrating honest graft. We called it pork-barrel spending and earmarks, and we brought it aboveboard, so that politicians were openly lining their constituents’ pockets rather than secretly lining their own. We also gave party bosses the power to twist defiant arms. If a member of Congress defied the leadership on a key vote, he might see his campaign contributions dry up, or his committee assignments downgraded, or the party elders throwing their support behind someone else in the next election. Members did defy the leadership, of course. But they thought twice before they did.

Plunkitt would be dismayed to see that since his day, the gears of the party machines have been stripped, one by one. Instead of being chosen by party elders, candidates are now selected in primary elections or caucuses, which tend to be dominated by ideological extremists. Conservative Republicans are thus much more afraid of the Tea Party than of House Speaker John Boehner. Reformers, worried about corruption, also put tight limits on direct political contributions to candidates and parties. The result has been to divert money to unaccountable private groups, many of which clobber candidates who take tough votes to support party leaders. Meanwhile, rules requiring deliberations to be public have proved a mixed blessing, because it’s hard to negotiate in earnest while striking ideological postures for TV cameras.

In a final blow, Tea Partiers and other righteous types waged a successful jihad against earmarks, the appropriations made for senators’ and representatives’ pet projects. No longer could the speaker tell a recalcitrant House member, “If I don’t get your vote for the budget compromise, you can say goodbye to that new irrigation project in your district.” By the time Congress banned earmarks, they were transparent (publicly disclosed) and inexpensive (a rounding error in the federal budget). With them went probably the last remnant of honest graft. Lo and behold, Plunkitt’s prediction that “there’ll be h to pay” has come to pass.

I don’t disagree that the high-handed corruption of Tammany Hall was too much of a bad thing. (Tammany, efficiency-minded, centralized its bribe-collecting for convenient one-stop service.) We obviously shouldn’t go back to the Tammany ways, even if that were possible. Still, one can also have too little of a bad thing, and the overshoot against honest graft is an example. The next round of political reform should make party bosses and political machines stronger, not weaker. The candidate-selection process should be tweaked to reduce the sway of grass-roots activists and return power to party grandees. To bring special interests into the open, limits on direct political contributions to parties and candidates should be raised, if not eliminated altogether (something the Supreme Court may attend to later this year, when it decidesMcCutcheon v. FEC, a challenge to certain contribution limits). Congress should do more business through back channels, off camera. And, yes, the ban on earmarks should be revoked.

More important than such specific tinkering, though, is to relearn the timeless lesson that George Washington Plunkitt taught. Earnest campaigns to take the politics out of politics can make governing more difficult, with results that serve no one very well. The next time you see some new reform scheme touted in the name of stopping corruption, pause to recall the wisdom of another old-school pol, the late Representative Jimmy Burke, of Massachusetts: “The trouble with some people is that they think this place is on the level.”

(Image via kropic1/Shutterstock.com)

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Louisiana parish creeps toward recovery

Jonathan Rauch — Fri, 25 Aug 2006 00:00:00 -0400

At about 9:30 a.m., he noticed the flooding in the parking lot. It was Monday, August 29, 2005, in St. Bernard Parish, La. -- just east of New Orleans.

Bertucci ran down to the first floor to grab his belongings. By the time he got there, the water had already risen to knee level inside the hospital. After 45 minutes it was 6 feet deep, and it kept rising, submerging the first floor but mercifully sparing the second.

The electricity shut down when the generators went under; ventilators, X-rays, suction, and other medical machines died. So, before it was over, did seven patients. One choked on vomit that doctors had no way to suction out.

The hurricane gave way to a stifling heat. Bertucci, who is a family practitioner and the parish coroner, spent the next two days dispensing care as patients were gradually transferred to the jail, which was not flooded. (Prisoners had been evacuated to safety before the storm.)

Then he hitched a boat ride to his house and found his first floor under water; his son's house had floated off its foundation and ended up on a neighboring street. Now homeless, Bertucci had no time to register the shock; he was summoned to the jail, where he treated hospital patients and storm victims for staph infections, heart failure, dehydration.

It was Friday before helicopters got all the sick out of the parish. Over the course of five nights, he had slept 10 hours.

Today the hospital is a ruin. Bertucci works out of a temporary clinic in the Wal-Mart parking lot (the store, like the great majority of businesses in St. Bernard, is closed). The clinic sees 85 to 113 patients a day; 50 to 60 percent of them show symptoms of depression. Bertucci says, "I'll sit down and say, 'How are you doing?' They'll start crying."

To understand what they feel, he suggests, imagine getting up one morning and finding that your lawnmower won't start, your car has been stolen, your house is demolished, your job is gone, and your friends have died or moved away.

And how is Bertucci doing? He gets depressed. He cries at movies, gets angry. "I tell my wife, I think the person I was died that day." He begins to cry. "You can't go through something like this and be the same."

Collecting himself, he explains that his house is gutted. He plans to sell it and buy another. With his wife and three of his five grown children, he lives in a mobile home, which makes him fortunate; most people are living in travel trailers.

"Candominiums," they call them. Or "crampers." For therapy, Bertucci mows lawns in his ruined neighborhood, cleans up trash: Augean chores, but they help him grasp at normalcy.

Why does he stay? The parish needs a new hospital, and he wants to help make it happen. "And I'm a Christian person," he says, "and this is where I'm needed most."

Needed he is. A year after the storm, St. Bernard Parish is struggling to survive. The recovery has gone little better than the initial response. The deluge of water was followed by an alluvium of indecision and a blizzard of red tape.

-- -- --

The parish council -- St. Bernard's equivalent of a city council or county commission -- meets in a trailer behind the half-gutted government building. At a recent session, a resident complains that the streetlights on his block don't work. The parish's public works director explains that staff and equipment are short, electrical poles are expensive, and salt water destroyed much of the circuitry.

"It's just taking too long to get the little things done," the resident replies, his voice bitter. Lynn Dean, the council chairman, retorts curtly, "I'm sorry we're not perfect. Thank you."

As the meeting drags on, the sun sets pink and charcoal. Driving along random streets near the council chamber, a visitor passes empty houses, one after another. Many streetlights work, but they are too far apart to dissipate the gathering gloom. The houses are husks, hulls, dark, their empty or boarded windows black on black. A few appear livable but unlived in; more are gutted; many are simply abandoned.

Here is a caved-in roof, there a vine-covered car amid chest-high weeds in what was once a driveway. Some bear spray-painted messages. One says, "MONEY IS TIGHT AND TIMES ARE HARD IN ST. BERNARD. SORRY WE HAVE MOVED." Another simply: "WE WILL SURVIVE."

Some houses are under repair; trailers are parked in their yards. A family is barbecuing at a gas grill outside a half-renovated garage. Next to another trailer, a few people chat in a pool of light.

On most blocks, however, one encounters no people, hears no human sounds. There are no dogs or cats. The odd car prowls by, picking its way amid potholes. By day, people come and work on their houses. By night, the sense of desertion is overpowering. Even a graveyard feels less desolate, because it is not meant for living.

-- -- --

St. Bernard is low ground surrounded by water on three sides. It shares the levee system that was designed to protect the New Orleans metropolitan area and that failed catastrophically on August 29. Although the parish is geographically contiguous with New Orleans's devastated lower 9th Ward and is an easy 20 minutes by car from the French Quarter, residents insist they are not a "New Orleans suburb."

St. Bernard is predominantly white and working-class. It has oil and sugar refineries, as well as its own port. The parish owes some of its growth to white flight from the New Orleans schools, but St. Bernard retains a deep-rooted identity of its own.

Extended families tend to stay put, with three generations living in close proximity. It's not uncommon to meet people like Beryl Hargis, a school-system employee whose family -- including siblings, grown children, aunt, niece, and cousins -- count, between them, 11 homes in St. Bernard.

Or, rather, counted. On August 29, levees breached to the west and to the north. Water poured in from two sides and then sat for days, as it did in New Orleans. Unlike New Orleans, however, St. Bernard found itself not partly under water, but entirely under water.

Floodwaters covered the entire parish in depths ranging from 2 feet in the south to 28 feet in the north. The parish awoke that day to find it had become a lake -- soon a toxic lake, after a storage tank spilled a million gallons of oil into a neighborhood of thousands of homes.

"There was not a livable house in this parish," says Henry J. (Junior) Rodriguez, the 70-year-old parish president. Officials say that only 40 to 50 structures escaped serious water damage; five or six homes, out of 26,900, were inhabitable.

Everyone in St. Bernard has a story, but it is the same story: I lost my home and everything in it. Intensifying the blow, the storm wiped out St. Bernard's extended families, shattering the relational networks that people could ordinarily have relied on for aid. All 11 homes in Beryl Hargis's family were wrecked. Families scattered around the region and the country.

Slowly, as foot-deep mud was scraped from the streets, people began to return, finding their homes in ruins or vanished altogether. They all say that they will never forget the stench. Mercifully, that is gone.

-- -- --

Showing a visitor around her district, parish council member Judy Hoffmeister pauses at her uncle's house, now only a month or two from move-in condition. It is the exception. Her own house, where she lived since 1965 ("This is where I brought my babies home"), is gutted. She has no neighbors. "No one's coming back in this neighborhood," she says.

Of the 7,200 people in her district, she guesses that fewer than 500 now live there, mostly in trailers. "There's no life, no nothing."

Before traveling to St. Bernard, visitors are warned to prepare themselves for scenes of destruction. Steeled for the worst, an outsider is ready for the caved-in walls and roofs, the upturned automobiles, the child's wagon marooned atop a house, the yards overrun with chest-high weeds, the debris. Even the shrimp boat that washed up on a residential street -- left there deliberately, to help visitors understand the violence of the storm -- is not altogether shocking.

As block after block goes by, however, a reality sinks in for which there is no preparing. Even knowing better, the visitor cannot help expecting to turn a corner and come upon the OK part of the parish. As the hours pass and scenes of wreckage accumulate, a feeling between despair and anxiety surfaces, as it sinks in that there is no OK part. Every turned corner reveals more of the same.

Hoffmeister swings north on Volpe Drive. She came here a few weeks after the storm to check on her cousin's house. "I'm riding along, riding along, looking around," she recalls, "and I realize -- Oh, my God, the house is gone."

The car slows. "This is the roof," she says. It landed on an adjacent property. As for the house, it is concrete slab, empty except for -- well, except for nothing. There is no trace of a house.

"I couldn't even speak to her," says Hoffmeister, whose cousin was waiting on the cellphone when the empty slab came into view. "I just said, 'I can't hear you, I can't hear you.' I couldn't tell her. I just couldn't." She chokes up. "I called her sister and said, 'You call her and tell her.' "

Regaining her composure, she drives on. "People are just in despair," she says. "Eleven months and it's still not livable."

-- -- --

Before Katrina, the parish's population was 67,000. Today, parish officials estimate that 20,000 people are present during the day, and 8,000 to 10,000 by night, though many locals say those numbers seem high.

The school system, showing heroic pluck, managed to open a school only two and a half months after the storm; enrollment looks to be about 3,000 in the fall, down from 8,800 before the storm but a strong showing. Kids are bringing their parents back. If not for the school, and the haven of normalcy it provided, St. Bernard would not have had a chance.

No one is sure exactly how many businesses are back; Charles Ponstein, a former parish president who heads the local business-redevelopment effort, says about 300 of 1,400 or so enterprises have reopened. A post office is open; banks and cash machines operate out of trailers. Mail delivery resumed only recently, and one of the five McDonald's restaurants is rebuilding.

Strip malls are windswept and empty, but a handful of big stores -- Home Depot, two auto-parts suppliers, a Walgreens drugstore, a shoe store -- are operating, and people are excited to relate that two full-fledged grocery stores will open soon. (Residents currently trek across New Orleans for groceries.) You can now even get your hair cut in St. Bernard.

The parish has had utilities since early this year. The sewage system, which was inundated with marsh sludge, is still not fully functional, and so the parish manually pumps sewage into tankers and hauls it to working sanitation systems.

Parish revenues have shrunk by 40 percent or so but have not collapsed, thanks to sales taxes from car purchases and to the continued presence of heavy industry. The parish government has laid off about a third of its employees and cut its operating budget by more than 60 percent, to $22 million.

The courthouse, an imposing New Deal-era edifice, is open. All five local judges and a small host of other refugees rode out the hurricane there; 15 people lived for three days in the courtroom of Kirk Vaughn, the senior district judge, who now resides in a nearby trailer. Greeting a visitor in his chambers, he wears a donated knit shirt -- though he puts on a suit and tie when presiding, to maintain a sense of decorum.

Piles of donated clothes share the courthouse basement with the parish's legal records, most of which survived. Providentially, Lena Torres, the 85-year-old parish clerk, digitized the parish real estate records a few months before the storm. "I think the good Lord led me to do that," she says.

What you will not find at the courthouse is a trial. "We're missing jurors and we're missing witnesses," says Vaughn, holding up batches of jury questionnaires that came back stamped "Undeliverable." Since Katrina, the court has tried two cases, both non-jury civil proceedings.

Other criminal and civil cases are plea-bargaining or settling, and many cases are being repeatedly continued, even as defendants wait in custody. "You can't just keep doing that, because of speedy-trial issues," Vaughn says. The crime rate, fortunately, is low.

Asked if the community can reassemble itself, Vaughn says, "The longer it goes, the more I would have to say it's shattered. It's just taking too long." Others offer much the same assessment. "It's going so slow it's unbelievable," says Larry Ingargiola, the director of the parish's office of homeland security and emergency preparedness.

"I'd like to see 20,000 units right now," he says, referring to permanent buildings with running electricity meters. "We're not close to that. I'd like to see more permanent structures going up. I just don't see it."

How long will it take to recover to something like normalcy and a population of perhaps 40 to 50 percent of the pre-Katrina parish? "We're talking seven years," Ingargiola responds. Others say five, 10, or 15.

-- -- --

In Walgreens, a cashier greets a customer with the question that is the St. Bernard equivalent of "How's the weather?": "You in yet?" The man replies that the kids' room still lacks Sheetrock, but at least they're in. And his mother? Gone, not coming back. The cashier says her family is still waiting on electrical work. She has seven kids, she mentions. The man says he has four. He takes his change and goes on his way.

-- -- --

Why so slow?

A better question might be: Why not so slow? If, almost a year later, St. Bernard is barely showing a pulse, the surprise may be that it shows a pulse at all. The overriding fact is that Katrina's devastation was of a magnitude that defies ordinary understanding.

Michael Brown, who was the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency when Katrina hit, and who was fired soon after (either in disgrace or as a scapegoat, depending on your point of view), says, "I put St. Bernard almost on the magnitude of what I saw in South Asia" -- after the great tsunami of December 2004 -- "where it is just utter destruction."

The parish's industrial base, led by its nationally significant oil and gas facilities, provided some economic continuity, and many residents' deep roots and limited means drew them back. Still, there is no guidebook or preparedness drill for a cataclysm that ruins every structure.

"The initial reaction," recalls Craig Taffaro Jr., a parish council member, "was, we boated around the community and no one could imagine the level of destruction. I think that paralyzed us initially. In the midst of that, the state and federal governments were equally overwhelmed and in their own shock. That set the stage for several months of confusion."

Parish council members earn $600 a month for what is supposed to be a part-time job, though, post-Katrina, it has been more like double time. "We're all in over our heads," says Mark Madary, another council member.

Though the mud has been shoveled out and the lights are on, residents have been slow to return and rebuild. Many are gone for good. Many are absent and undecided, waiting out this year's hurricane season to see if the repaired levees hold. (The Army Corps of Engineers says that the levees will provide the degree of protection that they should have provided in Katrina.)

Many people are waiting for definitive word on how high they will need to rebuild their homes to qualify for federal flood insurance. (The government has issued only preliminary standards, until detailed hydrological surveys can be finished.) Many are fighting with their insurance companies and preserving their wrecked homes as evidence.

And many residents are waiting for other residents. No one wants to live on an empty block, with rubble, weeds, and rats for neighbors. "There's nobody here; there isn't much to do," says Steve Kissee, an accountant who is moving away. "There was a tremendous sense of community here," he says, standing in front of his house, which is for sale. And now? "This isn't the kind of thing I'd come back to."

A further obstacle comes in for particularly frequent and angry blame: bureaucracy. Everyone, it seems, has war stories.

-- -- --

The parish is short of trailers equipped for people with disabilities. Bryan Bertucci has an extra one sitting in his front yard. FEMA brought it in January, but it was too small for Bertucci's family, so he never used it. He has been trying to have it moved, he says, for five months.

"I had handicapped people in the clinic begging for it." They're out of luck: Whenever the trailer is finally taken away, he says, FEMA will send it to Arkansas for cleaning -- never mind that no one has set foot in it since it was delivered. Bertucci never even collected the key.

Since October, the doctor has been trying to get a Small Business Administration loan to rebuild his medical office. He was rejected in January, reapplied in May, was rejected again but told to formally dissolve his business partnership and reapply once more.

Setting up the parish's temporary medical clinic cost $5 million and was delayed by FEMA's refusal to pay for any of three proposed architects. After several months, Bertucci says, the government finally agreed to pay the architect whom it had first rejected.

Until recently, federal rules against re-equipping private hospitals (St. Bernard had no public one) stranded the parish without an X-ray machine, among other necessities. "To have a community not have an X-ray machine for nine months, not have laboratory equipment for nine months, is inexcusable," he says.

"Don't think I'm mad at anyone," he continues. "I'm frustrated -- and there's a difference. I understand why the rules are the way they are, but there's no common sense to them, and there's nobody in authority to appeal to. In the end, I still think common sense wins out, but it takes a hell of a long time, and it takes a lot of persistence."

Doris Voitier, the St. Bernard school superintendent, was determined to have a school open for the first child who returned after Katrina. Without a school, she believed, the community would stall.

Some notion of what lay ahead dawned on her in September, when she met with FEMA and found herself confronting 27 people: an education team, an engineering team, an environmental team, an insurance team, an archeological and historic-preservation team, a Section 404 mitigation team, a Section 406 mitigation team, and more.

When the Corps of Engineers said it couldn't build a school until March, school officials resolved to do the job themselves. "This was a time of emergency," she says. "So I just did it. And we began to fight with FEMA about 'What procedures did you follow?' It was a constant fight for reimbursement. You've got to understand that when you go into this, you don't know the process."

The school system had lost all but six of its 70 buses; when officials set out to buy new ones, they were told they first had to show that used buses of the same vintage were unobtainable.

Voitier says, "I'm trying to open a school. I needed buses right then and there, not two months from now, after this formal bid process." She and Wayne Warner, the principal, vividly remember standing around a ruined air-conditioning chiller with a contractor and a FEMA representative who told them that because it was a 1994 unit, they would need to replace it with another 1994 chiller.

Ultimately, Voitier says, they got a new chiller, but the matter took weeks to resolve; and, she says, virtually everything has been a fight. When the school came up two classroom trailers short, FEMA obliged, but the agency delivered double-wides. Unable to fit both on school grounds, and aware that school personnel living in a trailer park across the street had nowhere to wash their clothes, Voitier asked a FEMA official for permission to convert one unit into a Laundromat.

"He was fine with that," she says, "but he rotated out two or three weeks later." FEMA subsequently notified her that she was under investigation for misappropriating federal property. (The investigation seems to have fizzled out, she says, though she has received no formal notification.)

Cleanup and repair cost the school system tens of millions of dollars, but federal payment has been slow. Reimbursement for small projects goes through five to 10 weeks of federal and state review, according to David Fernandez, the school system's financial manager. Any expenditure over $1 million is subject to another four to 12 weeks of review in Washington, he said.

This is the so-called "million-dollar queue." "Anything over a million dollars has to be reported to Congress," says Brown, the former FEMA director. "Why do you think that is? Congress wants to make an announcement." In other words, members of Congress want to be the first to boast of a federal project in their district.

"This is all political," Brown says. "It has nothing to do with good public policy."

-- -- --

In the parish council trailer, two engineers endeavor to explain why demolition is proceeding at a snail's pace. That day, in mid-July, more than 4,600 houses were on the demolition list; as many as 8,000 more will be added starting in September, when the parish begins to condemn abandoned houses.

After most storms, cleanup means collecting debris and then repairing houses. After Katrina in St. Bernard, however, the houses are the debris. Thousands and thousands of them are unsalvageable, eyesores at best, hazards at worst. Removing them is the prerequisite to recovery. But, as of mid-July, fewer than 1,000 had been demolished.

Logan Martin, a parish staff engineer, and Stephen Bourg of All South Consulting Engineers, a firm that oversees demolition, lay a stack of files on the table, samples of their paperwork. They explain that the parish submitted a demolition plan in December, but state and federal environmental regulators took months to agree on an asbestos-removal protocol. That held up work until early spring.

Under the stringent protocol finally adopted, every house must be tested for asbestos, rather than just visually inspected. Visiting every house and sending samples to labs across the country takes time. The parish asked if it could speed things up by treating all properties as "hot," instead of testing each house, in developments where asbestos is known to be prevalent. The regulators said no.

FEMA's historic-preservation and archeological team had to inspect any property before local officials could clear it for demolition. This step, Martin and Bourg said, took anywhere from one to three months, even for recently built houses.

One house, Martin said, had to go through historical and archeological review despite landing on its slab in the middle of an intersection. On private property, even debris -- including, for example, 1,600 tree stumps -- had to be reviewed for archaeological value before FEMA would pay for removal.

Before demolition, five different specialty crews visit each house (to disconnect gas, disconnect electricity, disconnect water and sewer, recover refrigerant, and remove appliances and toxic chemicals such as paint and bleach). If a house contains asbestos, a special demolition crew is called in.

Each procedure has its purpose, but with thousands and thousands of demolitions ahead of him, Martin closes a file folder and looks up with haggard eyes. "As soon as we get one hurdle cleared, there's another," he says. "Every day there's something staring you in the face and you say, 'I can't believe this. Another hoop I have to jump through.' "

-- -- --

Judy Hoffmeister remembers with particular anger the day FEMA took away the phones. After Katrina, cellphones and even satellite phones worked only sporadically, so FEMA brought in a mobile telephone system and connected it to a building (a refinery office) where the parish government was holed up. Then came word that Hurricane Rita was forging toward St. Bernard. FEMA's people evacuated, advising parish officials to do the same (they refused).

All of that, Hoffmeister understands. But she still recalls council members' dismay as they watched FEMA carry away the phones, leaving the parish's officials to weather Rita without communications. "I could not believe what I was witnessing," Hoffmeister says. "The feeling was, they didn't care." Told FEMA's rationale, she replies, "All I know is, we were already in distress, and it didn't help the situation any."

-- -- --

FEMA did have a rationale. Asked about the phone episode, Darryl Madden, a FEMA spokesman, said that the kind of vehicle-based relay system that the agency would have brought into St. Bernard -- a communications trailer, basically -- is not storm-hardened and requires a crew. FEMA couldn't leave its personnel in harm's way to operate the system, and the coming hurricane might have destroyed the vulnerable equipment.

"If that's the only communications you have, you do normally pull back and reinsert after a storm," Madden said. "That's a call where you say, what if you leave it there and it's totally demolished?"

Asked about the parish's request to treat whole areas as asbestos-contaminated rather than inspecting every house, Barb Sturner, a FEMA public-affairs officer, said, "Asbestos debris removal is expensive. Asbestos demolition is expensive." It involves Tyvek suits, wetting procedures, and specially prepared dump trucks. To go through all of that unnecessarily would be irresponsible, she said.

In New Orleans, FEMA's cultural resources team confirmed that until July the agency conducted detailed historical and archeological reviews of every property to be demolished. House-by-house review was necessary because a parish-wide inventory of historic assets -- "a long process requiring lots of manpower" -- took time to complete.

Now that the inventory is done, team members said, clearing most properties for demolition will take two weeks or less. "The process that's in place now is cutting-edge, streamlined compliance," said Fred Holycross, FEMA's group leader for cultural resources in the New Orleans area.

Even before the expedited process took effect, FEMA officials said, historical and archeological review was taking three to six weeks, not three months. "There is a time period needed to complete the historic-preservation review," said John Ketchum, FEMA's federal preservation officer.

But, he said, "they haven't demolished anywhere near as many properties as have been reviewed for historic preservation." (True, said Bourg. But that is because historic preservation is only one of many bottlenecks -- which is the whole problem.)

Yes, FEMA did require archeological review of debris piles and tree stumps, but those were cleared in a few days, according to officials. On one site, said Lydia Kachadoorian, the area team leader for archeology, uprooted trees exposed 300-year-old Native American pottery. "We have an issue with heavy equipment driving over really fragile resources," she said.

And FEMA employees say they cannot shrug off the requirements of federal statutes, such as the National Historic Preservation Act. "We have a mission. We need to carry it out as quickly and efficiently as possible, but we do have these federal laws that we need to adhere to while we're doing it," Ketchum said. "If at a certain point Congress decides to waive that law, that's their prerogative, but until they do that, these laws are on the books, and we're obligated to adhere to them."

FEMA points to one other important fact: As of late July, the federal government had spent $481 million in St. Bernard Parish, a major commitment by anyone's reckoning -- with much more to come. Moreover, the federal government waived the usual matching requirements, paying a generous 100 percent of eligible costs.

"We're dealing with enormous amounts of money, and there have to be some kinds of controls," Madden said. "Bureaucracy is cumbersome, but its nature is to ensure accountability, so that we know at the end of the day where the money went."

-- -- --

Back in St. Bernard many people, presented with such arguments, will concede that every rule has its reasons. When a fire marshal told Voitier, the school superintendent, that she could not use an urgently needed mobile classroom because the doors were too close together, he was following a rule that may well make sense in normal times.

The trouble is that nothing -- not anything -- is normal in St. Bernard. The collective effect of all the rules and procedures has been to slow recovery in the early stages, when momentum was critical. Still more damaging, perhaps, is the psychological toll, a gooey mixture of anger and demoralization that drains energy and amplifies despair.

It amounts to bureaucracy fatigue. Most welfare mothers know this feeling well, and many become used to it (or learn to game the system), but St. Bernard had always cherished its sense of independence. The parish was stunned by the hurricane, and then was stunned again to be pitched into a blizzard of pettifoggery, precisely when it felt too prostrate to cope.

"It just irritates my soul," says Joseph Di Fatta Jr., a parish council member. "There has to be a balance of the laws and the lives of the people. Right now, the emotional distress people are suffering is greater than the harm of inappropriately burying a can of spray paint."

-- -- --

Council member Mark Madary is standing outside his mobile home in the city government's trailer park, chatting with a visitor, when a car pulls up and a young man and woman emerge. The man is calm, but the woman, his cousin, is panicky.

Between sobs, she tells Madary that someone from FEMA has shown up to take the trailer that she and her 8-year-old daughter are living in. Apparently another trailer was delivered for her grandmother, and FEMA says only one is allowed per property. "I talked to six different people and got six different answers," she says.

Madary reassures her: "They're not going to pull it with you in it." He gives her the name of a parish official. As the two go off toward another trailer, Madary is asked if there really is such a rule. No, he says, but adds, "It depends who you get on the phone."

-- -- --

It's not clear that St. Bernard will survive as a functioning community. Some, indeed, may wonder if it ought to survive, because it will eventually flood again. That question is academic, however, because people are coming back, struggling, rebuilding on land that in some cases is all they have.

At 8412 Colonel Drive, Sandra and Bob Roberts are rebuilding. She is a receptionist at the medical clinic; he is disabled, with heart problems, prostate cancer, and a bad eye. He works on the house, but in his condition, at age 62, the going is slow.

"We don't know if it's ever going to come back," Sandra says, "but we're fighting." A neighbor across the street is living in a trailer. Another house across the street is being gutted. The neighbor next door has put up a new prefabricated home. Seven families live on the block, which has 22 homes. "My street is trying," Sandra says.

The house has drywall, electrical wiring, one working toilet, and not much else. For electricity, the Robertses plug an extension cord into the FEMA trailer in their front yard. Inviting a visitor in, Sandra points to a stack of boxes. "That's everything I have."

She and her husband live in the half-finished bedroom, which is sealed off to give a window cooler a fighting chance against the summer heat. The bedroom is furnished with a $19.95 plastic dresser, a television, and, by way of a TV stand, the cardboard box that the toilet came in.

"We've been blessed," Bob says -- incongruously, one might think, but he says they will emerge stronger in affection for each other and their friends. "We're not a suburb of New Orleans," he emphasizes. "No. We're St. Bernard. St. Bernard is not a parish; it's a family."

Daily life, Sandra allows, is a struggle. "It never ends. There's no light at the end of the tunnel. It's just another battle with the insurance company, with FEMA, whoever. Yesterday while I was getting dressed for work, I thought I heard the doorbell. I burst out crying. 'What am I thinking? We don't have a doorbell. That was the TV.' My husband said, 'Baby, we don't even have a door.'"

True: There is no door. But they intend to build one. Sandra's brother and sister, who lived on this block before the storm came, are not coming back, but she and Bob are staying. "That's one thing we won't do, is stop fighting," Bob says. He expects to have the house finished in a year and a half.

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Bush quietly beefs up government's role

Jonathan Rauch — Fri, 25 Jul 2003 00:00:00 -0400

A Charge to Keep." He might have been pleased to know that "they," the purveyors of conventional wisdom, had said the same of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. "A pleasant man," the pundit Walter Lippmann famously called Roosevelt, "who, without any important qualifications for the office, would very much like to be president." H.L. Mencken dismissed him as "Roosevelt Minor."

When he sought the presidency, FDR had been governor of New York for all of four years. In that brief time, he had used his natural amiability to good effect, working the state's political machinery to pass some modest but significant reforms, but he had also taken care not to be seen as radical. In the presidential race, his views appeared to be eclectic bordering on confused. "He seemed to have no clear philosophy," wrote Michael Barone in 1990, in "Our Country: The Shaping of America from Roosevelt to Reagan." In early 1933, no one in America, including Franklin Roosevelt, imagined how Roosevelt would govern as president.

Quite early in his presidency, as it became clear that Roosevelt would press the powers of his office to the limit and beyond, Mencken's condescension would turn to hatred, an enmity that many Americans shared. In today's era of Saint FDR, people forget that Roosevelt was, in his own day, a bitterly polarizing figure. To his adversaries, he seemed no ordinary opponent but a larger kind of menace, a radical whose determination to aggrandize Washington and himself portended an American dictatorship. Behind the mask of geniality, they saw a ruthless partisan who intended not to govern alongside the Republicans but to obliterate them.

The alarmists misunderstood FDR, as many misunderstand President Bush today, but they did not underrate his significance. By the time he was finished, FDR had greatly enlarged the federal government (from 3 percent of gross domestic product in 1930 to 10 percent in 1940), launched the welfare state, invented the modern regulatory state, and turned a provincial nation into a superpower. He had seized the Progressives' centralizing agenda, thrust it upon what had been a dourly Jeffersonian party, and used it to weld together the coalition-unionists, farmers, Northern blacks, Southern populists, and urban liberals-that brought the Democrats to dominance for a generation.

George W. Bush has been compared to a number of other presidents, such as Ronald Reagan, Harry Truman, and even William McKinley. It may say something, however, that at the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner earlier this year, when National Journal's Carl Cannon brought up the topic of former presidents, Bush expressed singular admiration for FDR. "He was a strong wartime leader, and a very strong commander-in-chief," Bush remarked.

Had he pursued the subject, Bush might have found further parallels. Not the least is that Bush, like Roosevelt, is an accidental radical. He is an amiable establishmentarian who finds himself with the opportunity to effect transformational change, and who is seizing that opportunity and pushing the system to its limits. Or beyond.

Goodbye, Barry Goldwater

Suppose, as seems quite possible, that Bush will sign a Medicare prescription drug benefit into law before the year is out. Then suppose, as a thought experiment, that Bush's presidency were to end next January, on the third anniversary of his inaugural. Bush would have done enough in three years to make an ambitious two-term president happy. On the domestic side:

Taxes. He cut them, not once but annually. He did this despite the fact that, after the first tax cut, it became clear that he was, with the slow economy's help, creating fiscal deficits as far as the eye could see. Bush's tax cuts, as they emerged seriatim, proved to be aimed not just at reducing the government's revenue but also at changing the structure of the tax code to reduce personal rates and, especially, to reduce taxes on capital accumulation.

Grover Norquist, a prominent Republican activist, claims that Bush will come back for a tax cut every year. White House officials I talked to would neither confirm nor deny this-probably because they don't yet know whether it's true-but they make no secret of Bush's commitment to both cutting and reforming taxes. "I think the president thinks the tax code has a lot of problems when it comes to the way it treats individuals and small businesses," says one White House aide.

Spending. At the same time he cut taxes, Bush increased spending, and not just a little. "He's the biggest-spending president we've had in a generation," says Stephen Moore, the president of the Club for Growth, a conservative anti-tax group. Moore noted that Bush has increased federal spending more in his first three years than President Clinton did in eight. "We passed the biggest farm bill, the biggest education bill, and we're about to pass the biggest expansion in an entitlement since the Great Society," says Moore. And an upcoming energy bill might be more of the same. "His fiscal record is appalling," Edward H. Crane, the president of the libertarian Cato Institute, recently told The New York Times.

Federal activism. Barry Goldwater, the father of modern small-government conservatism, argued that the federal government should have no education policies at all. Bush jettisoned that tenet and made Washington a force in education as never before. Bush boasts of "record levels of expenditure for elementary and secondary education programs." His No Child Left Behind Act has increased the federal government's share of education spending and used those dollars to establish annual testing and achievement standards in all 50 states, with the states driving but Washington supervising. Meanwhile, with the establishment of a muscular new Homeland Security Department, Bush has embarked on the most sweeping and centralizing reform of the federal government since at least President Truman's day. Goodbye, Barry Goldwater.

"Competitive sourcing." Commonly and undeservedly overlooked is the Bush administration's drive to open hundreds of thousands of federal jobs to private-sector competition. (See NJ, 7/12/03, p. 2228.) The Clinton White House began this process within the Pentagon, "but outside the Defense Department, job competitions were virtually unknown," reports the June 2003 issue of Government Executive magazine. Bush has expanded so-called "competitive sourcing" by orders of magnitude. A 1998 inventory conducted by the Clinton administration found 850,000 federal employees doing jobs deemed commercial in nature. The Bush administration intends to "compete" fully half of those jobs. This can be done administratively, without Congress's approval, and it's now well under way.

Health. "If a prescription drug bill passes this year, the administration will have promoted and passed a significant expansion of the welfare state in each of its first three years," writes Kevin A. Hassett, an economist with the American Enterprise Institute, in the July 14 issue of National Review magazine. The education and farm bills increased the federal government's power, but the effects of the new prescription drug benefit would overshadow them both. "The biggest expansion of government health benefits since the Great Society," Nancy-Ann DeParle, President Clinton's Medicare administrator, called it in The Washington Post. "Disaster" was the conservative Heritage Foundation's more succinct characterization.

Bush would cut an imposing figure had he accomplished only two or three of those things. And the White House has yet to roll out potential changes in Social Security. "We're not finished yet," one administration official says. "Before he's done, I think Social Security will be there." Bush will likely make private Social Security accounts an issue in the 2004 presidential race and then use his (as he hopes) strong electoral showing as a mandate for reform in 2005. Resetting FDR's crown jewel would, of course, be a momentous change, and note that any politically viable change would entail spending money, probably a lot of money, further widening the fiscal breach.

Throwing Out The Rule Book

"If you can get fundamental reform," the administration official says, "he's willing to put up the dollars to get it." That about sums up the Bush approach to domestic policy. It also describes the president's approach to foreign affairs, where the policy shift is even greater, but where Bush is spending not primarily cash but diplomatic capital and international goodwill. Consider:

Treaties. On coming to office, Bush promptly rejected a series of international agreements. The best-known was the Kyoto global-warming treaty, but out the window with it went a small-arms agreement, a biological weapons agreement, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and the International Criminal Court. He then withdrew the United States from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, a cornerstone of the Cold War order. Most of that was before September 11.

Pre-emption. After 9/11, Bush dynamited the very foundation of Cold War diplomacy when he repudiated the doctrine of containment. "After September 11, the doctrine of containment just doesn't hold any water, as far as I'm concerned," he said earlier this year, with typical bluntness. "We must deal with threats before they hurt the American people again." Not content to act pre-emptively in Iraq, he went so far as to announce a doctrine of pre-emption, thus speaking loudly while carrying a big stick. Bush was well aware that he was knocking over furniture and shocking the world. He didn't mind. He seemed to feel that the world needed a paradigm change and that quiet incrementalism was not going to produce one.

The Middle East. Beginning with a speech on June 24 of last year, Bush likewise upended five decades of Middle East policy. Since the 1940s, the United States had refrained from calling for a Palestinian state and had accepted Arab authoritarianism as a given. Bush not only reversed both policies but yoked the two reversals together by conditioning Palestinian independence on Palestinian democratization. "Throwing out the rule book," is how Daniel Pipes, a prominent Middle East scholar, described Bush's actions, in a recent New York Post article. "It could well be the most surprising and daring step of his presidency," wrote Pipes-a step, he added, that did not emerge from the usual process of consensus-building in Washington but that instead "reflects the president's personal vision."

Underlying all of Bush's foreign-policy departures is a little-noted shift that may be the most fundamental of the bunch. Unlike foreign-policy realists (including his father), Bush does not believe that states should be regarded as legitimate just because they are stable and can be dealt with. And unlike internationalists (including his predecessor), he does not believe that states should be regarded as legitimate just because they are internationally recognized. He believes that legitimacy comes only from popular sovereignty and civilized behavior.

President Reagan horrified realists and internationalists alike by declaring that the Soviet Union was not a legitimate state. He would deal with the Soviet regime but never accept it. He aimed at regime change. Realists argued that Reagan's naivete would destabilize the world order, and internationalists feared that it would threaten hard-won human-rights agreements, but Reagan insisted-perhaps not so naively-that only freedom could produce stability and protect human rights.

Bush embraces Reagan's notion and extends it worldwide. He will deal with Saddam Hussein's Iraq, or Kim Jong Il's North Korea, or Yasir Arafat's Palestinian Authority, or Charles Taylor's Liberia, if he must, but he will not accept such a regime as entitled to exist and, one way or another, he will try to change it. Against such regimes, the use of force may be impractical or unwise, but it is certainly not illegitimate. Indeed, for Bush, the real puzzle is why anyone would object, in principle, to the toppling of a regime such as Saddam Hussein's, or why anyone would regard the United Nations, which no one ever voted for, as morally relevant.

And so Bush, like Reagan but more so, does not accept the world as he finds it. He regards the existing world order as unacceptably dangerous. The existing world order, returning the compliment, regards him the same way.

Demand-Side Conservatism

Onlookers find it hard to get a bead on this man. That he is audacious is obvious, but to what end? As was true of Roosevelt, Bush acts with a unifying style-energetic, daring, even radical in the sense of starting from scratch-but not with an evident philosophical unity. As was also true of Roosevelt, the lack of an evident governing principle gives rise to suspicions. Perhaps the only principle is to win.

Perhaps, but it seems probable that Bush is aiming at something more, both politically and substantively. Politically, he aims, as FDR did, to realign partisan loyalties. Substantively, he aims to redefine conservatism.

"The Republican Party in 1994 tested a proposition," says a White House aide: "that people wanted government to be radically reduced. And they found out that people didn't want government to be radically reduced." Bush saw this, and he saw that the anti-government conservatism of Goldwater and Reagan had reached a dead end; and if there is a single characteristic that distinguishes Bush, it is his willingness to meet a dead end with a bulldozer. In 2002, "he really did set out to have the Republican Party stand for something different," says Michael Gerson, who signed on with Bush in 1999 and is now his chief speechwriter.

Bush's view, expressed in his book and in the 2000 campaign, is that government curtails freedom not by being large or active but by making choices that should be left to the people. Without freedom of choice, people feel no responsibility, and Bush insists again and again, as he put it in the book: "I want to usher in a responsibility era."

If one way to give people more choices is to shrink government, fine. But if another way is to reform government-also fine. And if he needs to expand government to deliver more choices-well, he can live with that. For Bush, individual responsibility and Big Government are not necessarily opposed to each other, any more than global stability and regime change are necessarily opposites. Moreover, small-government conservatism was root-canal politics, but the new approach is a political winner. If you spend more money, people like you. If you give them more choices, they like you. But if you spend more money giving them more choices, they really like you.

And so, in the Bush paradigm, education reform buys tests and standards and public-school choice, and all of that helps parents judge and choose schools. The prescription drug benefit buys alternatives to one-size-fits-all, single-payer Medicare. Competitive sourcing buys alternatives to government bureaucrats. Social Security reform buys individual accounts. And so forth.

Many of these initiatives will make the federal government bigger or stronger, but, for Bush, that is beside the point, which is to change government's structure, not its size. The question is not how much government spends; it's how government spends. Conservatives have been obsessed with reducing the supply of government when instead they should reduce the demand for it; and the way to do that is by repudiating the Washington-knows-best legacy of the New Deal. Republicans will empower the people, and the people will empower Republicans.

"Twenty years from now," Norquist says, "who's demanding extra government if I have a 401(k) medical savings account, I've pre-saved for my old age, I have control over where I send my kids to school? Investing in smaller demand for state power down the road is a rational position."

So that is the sense in which the Bush paradigm is conservative, or at least imagines itself to be conservative. Besides, tax cuts dry up future Democratic spending initiatives; competitive sourcing weakens public employees unions; education reform weakens teachers unions; litigation reform weakens the trial lawyers; trade liberalization, another Bush priority, weakens private-sector unions. "The Democratic Party-trial lawyers, labor union leaders, the two wings of the dependency movement (people on welfare, people who manage welfare), the coercive utopians (people who tell us our cars should be teeny), government employees-all the parts of that coalition shrink," Norquist says, "and our coalition grows, every time you make one of these reforms."

The Progressive Presumption

The plan, therefore, has both tactical and strategic elements. In the short run, give people things they want; in the longer run, weaken the Democrats' base while creating, program by program, a new constituency of Republican loyalists who want the government to help them without bossing them around. Most important of all, however, is what might be thought of as the meta-strategy.

Essential to FDR's success in capturing the loyalty of two generations-first the New Deal generation, then the Great Society one-was his success in capturing the mantle of progressive reform for the Democrats. Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat, had been a reformer, but so was Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican. FDR's hyperactive reformism decisively resolved the ambiguity. Regardless of what one thought of particular New Deal programs, as a group they established the Democrats as the party of progress. From that day to this, Republicans have been stereotyped as backward-looking and nay-saying-the stick-in-the mud party, the perennial advocate of "turning back the clock."

The identification of liberals and Democrats with progressivism is essential to the Democrats' political appeal and, especially, their self-confidence. When all else fails, they remain the party of enlightenment, not least in their own minds. Thus, in his new book, The "Clinton Wars," Sidney Blumenthal, a former Clinton aide, characterizes Bush as attempting "to repeal the progressive policies of the 20th century." Progressive presidents (meaning Clinton) "are elected because they stand for the idea that the old ways will not work-and should not work," he writes, whereas conservative presidents (meaning Bush) "preserve their power through inertia...The allies of conservative presidents are indifference, passivity, and complacency. Nostalgia is the emotion that underlies many conservative sentiments-a magical belief that if little is done, a simpler, happier time can be restored and a world of change kept at bay."

Conservatives, for their part, believe that today they are the ones who stand for progressive change, in the face of "reactionary liberalism," but they have never been able to convince the public. That is what Bush seeks to do, both by rejecting the mantra of minimal government and by passing reform after reform. Never mind how you feel about any one of his initiatives; as a group, they seek to establish that it is Republicans who now "stand for the idea that the old ways will not work." If the Democrats dig in their heels and fall back on stale rants against greed, inequality, and privatization, so much the better. The voters will know whom to thank for the empowering choices that Republicans intend to give them. As for which is the "party of nostalgia," the voters will also remember who defended, until the last dog died, single-payer Medicare, one-size-fits-all Social Security, schools without accountability, bureaucratic government monopolies, static economics, and Mutually Assured Destruction.

Reagan, the other conservative reformer among recent presidents, made important changes, but his agenda was more about undoing (Big Government, inflation, detente) than doing. He also had to deal with a Democratic Congress and a predominantly Democratic country. Bush, by contrast, can reasonably expect to enjoy eight years in office with Republican majorities in Congress and, effectively, on the Supreme Court. Republican and Democratic voter-registration numbers are now about even.

"In a certain way, a president who's willing to take on the way things are has to be presented with a historic opportunity," Gerson says. "The president has been presented with very significant economic challenges, the elements of a war, and the elements of a cold war, all at once. And that's given him both the opportunity and, in foreign policy, the requirement to do some new thinking." No president has been in that kind of position since Roosevelt.

So, will it work? It might. It might not.

Looking Back On Bush

In January 2019, 10 years after George W. Bush left the White House and retired from politics, a noted historian looked back on the Bush presidency.

"That it was a seminal administration is not in doubt. Bush set out to be a president who mattered, and this he achieved. He proved to be a risk taker like few the office has ever seen, and through his first term, difficult though this is to credit now, he seemed invincible.

"Again and again, he gambled and won. His critics said that withdrawal from the ABM Treaty would cause a dangerous rift with the Russians, that his war in Iraq would cause a permanent rift with Europe, and that his refusal to deal with Yasir Arafat would merely enhance Arafat's standing. Yet Russia accepted the ABM decision mildly, Europe moved toward Bush's position on intervention against rogue states, and a new Palestinian prime minister came to power.

"But the bets he had placed were large, and the positions he had taken were exposed, and in time what had looked like victories began to sour.

"The war in Iraq went well, but the occupation afterward deteriorated into a slow bloodletting. Military personnel disliked and resented serving in Iraq; their families protested; the steady toll of casualties discouraged the public. Re-enlistment rates sagged and the military was pinned down-all at a time when Bush was multiplying U.S. commitments. By the middle of his second term, American forces were spread thinner and scattered more widely than ever before, but readiness and morale were declining. In 2006, Bush was forced to float the idea of a military draft. His prestige never fully recovered from the ensuing backlash.

"America was weaker, yet the threat had grown. Bush's pre-emption policy was read, first by North Korea and Iran, and then by other troublesome states, as an invitation to arm up with nuclear weapons before Bush could stop them. One member of the 'axis of evil' (Saddam Hussein's Iraq) had been defeated, but by 2006 the other two had become nuclear powers, and other nations were rushing to follow. With so much nuclear proliferation on so many fronts, the administration found itself with few options but to downplay the very threats that it had once painted so starkly.

"The European Union, though fitfully cooperative, had grown alarmed by America's power and its own helplessness. Its new defense force, a pipe dream when Bush came to power, was deployed and active by the time he left. Alas, it was too weak to do much good against any determined adversary but strong enough to trip up the United States. That became clear when, to the Bush administration's chagrin, the Europeans dispatched military forces to independent Palestine.

"Palestine had been intended as a democratic seed in the authoritarian Middle East, but it was a failed state from the beginning. Born prematurely and unable to control its militants, it had degenerated into a haven for terrorists, who turned their suicide-bombing skills not just against Israel but also against U.S. interests. When Israel threatened war, Europe stepped in as 'trustee.' Predictably, Europe's forces were neither able nor willing to confront and disarm the Palestinian militants, but by blocking Israeli and American action, they became shields for a new rogue state-one that Bush himself had helped to create.

"Bush's opponents charged that the world was now more dangerous than before, and America's strategic position weaker. The charge, not unfounded, resonated with voters, whose confidence both in Bush and in American power was rapidly waning. First in the 2006 congressional campaign and then in the 2008 presidential election, the new call for 'strategic disengagement' caught hold. Left-wing pacifism and right-wing isolationism, both fringe movements when Bush took office, found new strength with mainstream voters. America, assertive and confident when Bush took over, had become gun-shy and inward-looking.

"Bush's domestic policies brought their own share of unintended consequences. Bush had argued that his dramatic expansion of Medicare contained new elements of competition that, over time, could be built upon to modernize the program; but interest-group politics ensured that nothing of the sort happened. Competition remained the small tail of a very large dog, a dog that developed a voracious appetite for tax dollars.

"There were no tax dollars to feed it. The demands of an overstretched military and an aging population, combined with Bush's tax cuts, had created a permanent fiscal crisis. Nor had the economy grown as hoped. Bush had let federal spending soar, both for the military and for entitlement programs, and the initial stimulative effects were more than offset by the economic drag of a burgeoning public sector. America was not Argentina, but by late in Bush's tenure it was clear that the alternative to becoming Argentina was to raise taxes painfully or cut benefits painfully or, more likely, do both. Voters felt angry and betrayed.

"As Medicare costs soared, it was only a matter of time until Washington imposed price controls on prescription drugs. That was what some liberals had wanted from the start; conservatives had counted on Bush to stand in the way, but the fiscal crisis and predictable demagoguery against 'Big Pharma' made resistance impossible. By the turn of the decade, America had established one of the world's most elaborate systems of drug price controls, and the leadership in pharmaceutical innovation had passed to Asia.

"Bush's most fervent wish had been to raise educational quality, but schools had not improved. States had quickly learned to design tests and standards that imposed no pain. From Washington's requiring standards to its actually setting them was but a small step, one that Congress took in 2007. That year the Education Department announced America's first national curriculum.

"The Republican coalition, united behind Bush in his days of early success, splintered and then fractured as his fortunes waned. The Reagan-Goldwater wing abhorred the centralization and carefree spending; business deplored the fiscal crisis and price controls; hawks were dispirited by the country's inward turn. Weary voters grew nostalgic for the Clinton era, with its prosperity and moderation. They wanted a change. In the Democratic landslide of 2008, they got it. The window for a Republican political alignment, open when Bush took office, had closed, probably for a generation.

"In 2009, George W. Bush retired to his ranch in Texas. His nation and his party were not reluctant to let him go. Today he lives in relative isolation, a figure in equal parts imposing and tragic. Bush, like Woodrow Wilson and Lyndon Johnson, had aimed high and achieved much. But, like them, he had let his impatience and impetuousness get the better of him. He was energetic and assertive, admirably so, but, like more than a few politicians before him, he mistook boldness for sustainability. He pushed the system and the public too hard. He had campaigned originally as a 'humble' man, and in the end humility was forced upon him."

"My Faith Frees Me"

When Antonio de Mendoza, Spain's great first viceroy of Mexico, left office in 1550, he left behind advice for his successor. The secret of good government, he said, was "to do little and do it slowly."

Even before the 2000 election, Bush made it clear to anyone who bothered to read his book that he would not be Mendoza's sort of leader-or, for that matter, the sort his father was. "I learned a great deal from my dad's presidency and campaigns," the younger Bush wrote in "A Charge to Keep." "I learned you must spend political capital when you earn it, or it withers and dies." His father, he noted ruefully, "never spent the capital he earned from the success of Desert Storm."

In the book, Bush returns again and again to his theory of political capital. Page 123: "I believe you have to spend political capital or it withers and dies. And I wanted to spend my capital on something profound." Page 218: "I had earned political capital... Now was the time to spend that capital on a bold agenda." His aversion to hoarding approval seems to flow as much from his personality as from his political experience. On page 2 he recounts hearing a sermon that "changed my life." It was, he writes, "a rousing call to make the most of every moment, discard reservations, throw caution to the wind, rise to the challenge." A few pages later: "I live in the moment, seize opportunities, and try to make the most of them."

Bush's mentality seems more like that of an entrepreneurial CEO than of a conventional politician: He tends to look for strategies that cut to the heart of the problem at hand, rather than strategies that minimize conflict. "He doesn't like 'small ball'-that's his term," one of his aides says.

"My faith frees me," Bush writes, early in his book. "Frees me to make the decisions that others might not like. Frees me to try to do the right thing, even though it may not poll well. Frees me to enjoy life and not worry about what comes next." He clearly is not a man who fears failure. Neither was Franklin Roosevelt, though FDR was freed not by faith but by a national crisis in which all the risks were on the side of doing too little.

The point of this article is not to predict failure for George W. Bush, much less to wish it. The point is to dramatize the stakes he is playing for. He is risking his presidency, his nation's fiscal and geopolitical strength, and the conservative movement. If he wins, he is FDR. If he loses, he is LBJ.

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Small wars

Jonathan Rauch — Tue, 18 Jun 2002 00:00:00 -0400

The opening shot in the war launched by al Qaeda was fired not on Sept. 11 but two days before. On September 9, two Tunisian Arabs, posing as journalists and carrying forged Belgian passports, insinuated themselves into the presence of Ahmed Shah Massoud, the leader of Afghanistan's anti-Taliban Northern Alliance. As they began their questioning, they detonated a bomb hidden in a television camera. Massoud died a few days later.

With ample reason (though wrongly, as things turned out), al Qaeda and its Taliban allies believed that taking out the charismatic Massoud might cripple the Northern Alliance. The bold, clever assassination seemed a case study in the kind of asymmetric warfare-that is, warfare aiming at key enemy vulnerabilities rather than at the enemy's main force-that had flummoxed American forces in Vietnam and might soon flummox them again in Afghanistan.

Here is something that al Qaeda didn't know: For a century or more, the United States made a specialty of fighting small wars against elusive foes that used asymmetric tactics. And no one ever did it better.

In 1915, the United States landed about 2,000 Marines in Haiti. Chaos there threatened U.S. interests and raised the possibility of opportunistic German meddling. The American forces quickly installed a government and then set out to pacify the countryside held by warlords and guerrillas called cacos. Within a few months, the Marines had established control over a country of 2 million people. The cost: three American dead and 18 wounded, writes journalist Max Boot. "It was a virtuoso display of counterinsurgency warfare."

In 1919, a second caco revolt erupted, led by a formidable commander formidably named Charlemagne Massena Peralte. "Get Charlemagne," the American leadership ordered. Herman Hanneken, a 26-year-old Marine sergeant from Missouri, got him, not by force but by guile and daring. Hanneken and 20 of his men darkened their skin with lampblack and donned caco rags. Posing as insurgents, they set out after nightfall to report a glorious "victory" in person to Peralte. They managed, just barely, to bluff their way past five rebel checkpoints.

"Finally they reached the edge of Charlemagne Peralte's camp," writes Boot. "Just 15 feet away they saw the guerrilla leader illuminated by the reflected light of a campfire. Peralte sensed trouble and was on the verge of melting into the night when Hanneken drew his .45-caliber automatic pistol and put a bullet through his heart." The rest of the party then routed the encampment with a Browning automatic rifle, suffering no casualties. Peralta's death broke the back of the revolution. Eat your heart out, al Qaeda.

All very inspiring, but surely a Haitian-style "small war," won by wits and adaptability rather than by brute force, is the exception in America's military annals? Surely all-out war, with mighty divisions supplied by saurian logistical tails, is the "American way of war"? Not really. In U.S. military history, the full-scale mobilizations are the exceptions and the smaller actions are the rule; and, despite the lack of overwhelming force, or perhaps because of it, these smaller operations have generally been overwhelmingly successful.

Such is the lesson of Boot's recently published book, The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power. It is, for me, the book of the season. Full disclosure: I have known and occasionally worked for Boot (he is an editor at The Wall Street Journal) over the years, and I'm acknowledged in his book for having commented on drafts of several chapters. Actually, I doubt my comments helped, because I made them before 9/11 and its aftermath brought Boot's message-for which the adjective "timely" might have been invented-into eye-opening focus.

Commentators were amazed last fall when, after weeks of air strikes in Afghanistan had produced no visible results, the Taliban suddenly collapsed. Hanneken, Frederick Funston, Chesty Puller, and Smedley Butler would not have been so surprised. They were among the American professional soldiers who, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, fought small wars all over the world, often against fanatical and shadowy opponents. They triumphed not by deploying raw firepower but by seizing the initiative, inventing tactics on the fly, and out-sneaking and out-maneuvering their stealthy and agile enemies. (In Nicaragua in 1912, the legendary Butler bluffed his small Marine contingent past rebel checkpoints by "waving two little bags of sand in the air yelling 'dynamite.' ")

Afghanistan was, of course, a victory for air power, but it was equally a victory for small-war-style adaptability. By many accounts, what turned the tide was not bombing as such but the landing of small groups of American spotters, who learned to ride around on horseback, laptop computers in hand, so they could send target coordinates to strategic bombers high above. At a talk in Washington recently, a senior Air Force officer remarked that no one had ever thought to use strategic bombers for close-air support, much less from horseback. The grunts on the ground invented this tactic, and it worked.

Between the Civil War and World War II, the United States fought small wars in the American West, China, Russia, Latin America, the Caribbean, and elsewhere. In the process, U.S. forces, especially the Marines, built up a nonpareil expertise in projecting force economically and effectively-often in many places at once, and always with astonishingly few casualties.

In the 1930s, the Marines published a "Small Wars Manual." It declared that limited operations with fuzzy objectives-not to annihilate a hostile army but "to establish and maintain law and order by supporting or replacing the civil government in countries or areas in which the interests of the United States have been placed in jeopardy"-now represented "the normal and frequent operations of the Marine Corps."

Then two cataclysms swept away that accumulated knowledge. The first was World War II, which established massive deployments as the template for American warfare. The second was the Cold War, in which deterrence by overwhelming force was the name of the superpower game. In Vietnam, the Pentagon fought a classic small-war insurgency with big-war tactics, and lost.

In reaction, the military and the public swore next time to fight even bigger, and did so, with success, against Iraq in 1991. Victory in Iraq and defeat in Vietnam combined to entrench the so-called Powell Doctrine: Don't fight unless you mobilize massively.

Although that doctrine has much to commend it, Boot's book suggests that it also throws a century or more of hard-won military wisdom out the window. The world today looks less like the 20th-century world, in which America confronted a few military juggernauts, than like the 19th-century world, in which America confronted troublemakers and failed states all over the place. In this new (old?) world, an allergy to small, aggressive deployments may be literally self-defeating.

And here is an eyebrow-raiser: There is nothing remotely new about wars without exit strategies, or wars in which American troops act as "nation builders" and "social workers." Until recently, Americans who intervened abroad generally expected to stick around and did so to good effect, building roads, hospitals, governments, and often goodwill. The United States has occupied Samoa, Wake Island, Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Panama, Nicaragua, Veracruz, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and the Virgin Islands, to say nothing of Germany and Japan. Many of these occupations were successful, and none was a quagmire. The Bush administration's reluctance to use U.S. forces to pacify Afghanistan may, in a few years, look like a sadly false economy.

The Pentagon, Boot notes, has recently begun to reconfigure itself for smaller wars. "The Air Force reorganized itself into expeditionary units. The Army set up an experimental medium-weight brigade designed to deploy anywhere in the world within 96 hours." The Marines even set about writing an updated "Small Wars Manual."

"But the armed forces," writes Boot, "need to change more than their organizational chart; they need to change their outlook. Their mind-set remains that of a mass army composed of conscripts mobilized to win a big war, but that is not the role of the armed forces early in the 21st century."

What is that role? As you read this, teams of American soldiers are combing the badlands of Afghanistan (and possibly Pakistan) for al Qaeda fighters and fugitives. Herman Hanneken would have understood. Even if U.S. forces in Afghanistan fail to get Osama bin Laden, the significance of their work there is large, because the wars they are relearning to fight are small.

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Beyond Government

Jonathan Rauch — Sat, 01 Jan 2000 00:00:00 -0500

ashington is about to succumb to old age. But at least its timing isn't bad. Although America's government is decreasingly flex- ible and adaptive, America's leading problems are increasingly non-governmental. Strangely, government's debilities may have the perverse but useful side benefit of forcing Americans to focus less on Washington at a time when our problems have become singularly unresponsive to Washington solutions.

A few years ago, at an embassy party on a sticky summer day, I chatted with a man whom I regard as one of Washington's leading analysts of public policy-a scholar and (at that time) government official who leans liberal and Democratic but is well respected by members of both parties. (I keep his name confidential here because public officials aren't supposed to talk as honestly as he did.) We got onto the subject of the country's social problems and how his outlook had changed over two decades, since the 1970s. Even back then, he considered himself a realist: He thought well-designed government programs might be able to improve social conditions by maybe 40 percent. And today? He pondered a minute, sipped his drink, and ventured: probably more on the order of 5 percent. Although he was well aware of government's weakening record of solving problems, at that moment he wasn't thinking about government. He was thinking about a profound change in the nature of the country's problems.

As a rule, large, central governments are best at four kinds of missions. First, they can wage or prepare for war-something no other institution can do. Fighting two world wars and then the Cold War was easily the federal government's most important project in the 20th century, and also the most successful. Second, governments can build big national infrastructure projects: giant, one-shot bricks-and-mortar programs that are designed to leave tracks or roads on the ground for years. The federal government built the interstate highway system, ran the Manhattan Project and flew astronauts to the moon. Insofar as those were focused, do-it-once projects, they succeeded. (By contrast, when the government tried to convert NASA to an ongoing concern, expecting it to adapt without giving it a clear mission, the space program ran into trouble.) Third, although government is lousy at providing services or manipulating human behavior, it is good at writing checks. By doing so, it set up the basic safety-net programs, such as Social Security and unemployment insurance. Finally, government is good at setting minimum standards of political and social freedom. Thus it struck down local barriers to opportunity for blacks, something that no other institution could have done.

On balance, Washington did all those things quite well. Then, having done them, it looked at itself and found that it had been transformed, and it looked around and saw that the world, too, had been transformed. Today we meet the result of both transformations: Washington's golden age, a roughly 30-year period beginning with the New Deal, is over, for good.

Government was transformed partly by its prior successes; it was a victim of its own brand of imperial overstretch. Encouraged by the successes of a relatively flexible government doing relatively manageable tasks, people began to say things like "If we can send a man to the moon, then by God we can solve [here insert favorite unmet social need]"-as though because government can do some things well, it should be expected to do all things well. People didn't see that a government adept at mailing Social Security checks is not necessarily adept at running a health-care system, nor did they see how they might calcify government by demanding too much from it. A million intricate social and human missions were heaped on Washington's docket, each to be accomplished by many programs defended by countless constituencies-all at a time when Washington's adaptability had been gravely diminished.

Meanwhile, however, the world was changing. Much as viruses mutate to resist vaccines, so the country's problems changed in ways that have defeated the postwar toolbox of centralized government programs. By the 1990s, America's leading problems-not the only problems but certainly the most important ones-related not to the physical infrastructure but to the social and moral infrastructure. The murder rate doubled between the early 1960s and the early 1990s, and would have been higher still if not for improved medical care (a homicide occurs only if the victim dies). A young black man in Watts or the South Side of Chicago was likelier to be killed in violence than was a soldier during an average tour in Vietnam. American high school students performed less well than either their parents' generation or their peers in other developed countries, and many of the schools became physically dangerous as well as educationally bankrupt. Early in the 20th century, America saved more than almost any other developed country; by the end of the century, its personal saving rate was at the bottom of the heap. The divorce rate more than doubled between 1960 and 1980; from 1960 to 1995, the illegitimacy rate rose from 5 percent to more than 30 percent. In 1970, one in nine American children lived in a fatherless home; by 1997 more than one in four did (including 60 percent of black children). The link between fatherlessness and pathology-poverty, violence, crime, mental illness, poor education and other social harm-is now beyond denying.

The point is not that all these problems are getting worse. Some of the alarming trends have begun to turn around, partly because people began to focus on them. Rather, the point is that the nature of the country's most pressing problems changed. In 1960, a teen-ager was twice as likely to die of cancer as to be killed by somebody else; only 20 years later, the odds were reversed. Not only did cancer deaths decrease, but killings increased. While we developed the medical technology to prevent and treat cancer, we lost our grip on the social technology to prevent and treat violence, which in theory is more preventable. This seems almost crazy. Who could ever have imagined?

Government no doubt had some role in creating or complicating these problems; no doubt it must play some role in reducing or ameliorating them. But in comparison to family, community, church, school and self, government is the social institution that is least well adapted to solving them. Washington can write a check and build a bomb, but divorce and crime are not the kinds of problems the government can throw money at or solve with a crash development program. Even the most adroit public sector cannot rebuild character the way it can rebuild roads.

As I write these words on the doorstep of the new century, America is enjoying a period of resurgence. Its social and economic problems are not all solved, but many of the trends are going in the right direction. The economy has been performing remarkably well; crime and divorce rates have declined, although they remain well above the levels of the early 1960s and before; people are living longer and staying healthier. No doubt the future will bring setbacks, crises and always plenty of troubles. Still, the contrast between the government's decline and the republic's vigor serves as a powerful reminder that government's end is a disappointment, but it is not a death warrant. It is less a death warrant, in fact, than it is a ticket to whatever comes next.

Beyond Blame

When he left office in 1981, Jimmy Carter delivered a warning. "Today, as people have become ever more doubtful of the ability of the government to deal with our problems, we are increasingly drawn to single-issue groups and special-interest organizations to ensure that, whatever else happens, our own personal views and our own private interests are protected," he said. "This is a disturbing factor in American political life. It tends to distort our purposes, because the national interest is not always the sum of all our single or special interests." He was right then, and he is still right.

To hope that Americans will desist from joining groups that advance their interests, or from voting for politicians who do them favors, is neither realistic nor fair. But to hope that they will understand how their activities contribute to their government's problems-well, that doesn't seem so crazy. Understanding isn't a solution (there is no solution), but it is a big help. It can make the political climate more congenial to radical incrementalism by showing people why constant, consistent pressure from the political center can work, and why spasmodic "revolutions" from the political extremes so often fail. It can also, perhaps, make the public a little better aware of how the blame game, with its "not my fault" mentality, serves the interests of members of the transfer-seeking class, who organize into interest groups in an effort to enlarge their share of the pie.

The rise of the professional transfer-seeking economy, with its breathtaking ability to mobilize antagonism and neutralize enemies, is, of course, a problem. But behind every transfer-seeking professional is a client saying "Gimme," or at least saying "Protect me." In its mindlessly mechanical way, the transfer-seeking game is clever. Generalized voter discontent and inflated political rhetoric about "change" trouble the transfer-seekers not at all, and often play into their hands. As the people become angrier, the groups and associations and lawyers and lobbyists and politicians tell them, "Those fiendish special interests are behind it! Hire me to protect you before they rob you blind! Vote for me to see to it that your interests are represented!" By now, you know where that leads. Blaming some villain for what is in fact a systemic problem is a guarantee that the real problem will not be confronted.

Monkeys ransack the forest for medicinal plants that kill intestinal worms. Dogs gnaw through fur and flesh to rip out ticks or fleas. So the American body politic instinctively flails against the parasite economy, casting votes for politicians who claim to be "outsiders" or who promise to fight the "special interests" that are responsible for all our suffering. No one in politics is eager to repudiate the politics of blame and tell the people the truth: that they-we-are the special interests. Who finances and sustains the parasite economy? Not villainous lobbyists or crooked insiders or crafty foreigners. Look in the mirror.

For the public to get its mind fully around its deep complicity in government's debilitation will, no doubt, be a process of decades. But then, we have decades, and understanding can make a big difference on the margins, which is, after all, where the action is going to be for the indefinite future. In 1982, economist Mancur Olson ended his book The Rise and Decline of Nations (Yale University Press) on a hopeful note. "Ideas certainly do make a difference," he wrote. "May we not then reasonably expect, if special interests are (as I have claimed) harmful to economic growth, full employment, coherent government, equal opportunity and social mobility, that students of the matter will become increasingly aware of this as time goes on? And that the awareness eventually will spread to larger and larger proportions of the population? And that this wider awareness will greatly limit the losses from the special interests? That is what I expect, at least when I am searching for a happy ending."

A year or two before he died, when I last saw him, Mancur Olson was still searching for that happy ending, and he reported being optimistic three days out of five. His spirit was the proper one.

A New Entente

So the end of government is not, after all, a sad time. It's sad, I suppose, if you happen to be a liberal idealist or a conservative revolutionary, for whom nothing less than a new dawn will do. For the rest of us, it is a time of maturely diminished expectations combined with maturely persistent ministrations.

That combination, admittedly, isn't an easy balance to strike, because the two elements are in tension, pulling in opposite directions. One message seems to be "It's all over. You can never win, so give up." The other message seems to be "Keep at it! Open the government and the economy! You'll never finish the job, but every little bit helps!" It's fair to wonder: If there can be no promise of final victory, how can anyone sustain enthusiasm for the fight?

In the end, that is why it's important to adjust our attitudes to government, as well as to adjust government. Like the aging person who knows he'll never be young again but who nevertheless understands why he should stay on his diet and exercise every day, Americans need to understand the limits of change without surrendering to passivity. They need to understand what is doable. Then they need to do it.

To some extent, I think, that sort of mental adjustment is under way. It seemed to begin somewhere around the time the second Republican Revolution flared and burned out. The Washington of the late 1990s was a more jaded but also more realistic place than the Washington of the late 1980s or-certainly-the Washington of the late 1970s or the late 1960s. Voters and politicians and activists all have a long way to go to adjust to government's end. If you squint, however, you can just make out the way ahead toward a new entente between the people and their government: one that deals with government as it has come to be and as it will remain, rather than as we may wish it were or as we imagine it once was.

After half a century of ballyhooed "new deals" in American political life-the original New Deal and then the Fair Deal and the New Frontier and the Great Society and the Reagan Revolution and the Republican Revolution and whatever else-comes a hush, and then a still, small voice. It speaks, to those who have the patience and maturity to listen, of what is perhaps the most momentous new deal of all. Call it Real Life.

Jonathan Rauch is a writer in residence at the Brookings Institution and a columnist for National Journal. He has also written for The Economist , the New Republic, Fortune, The Atlantic, and other publications.

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The dawn of the era of microgovernment

Jonathan Rauch — Wed, 23 Sep 1998 00:00:00 -0400

On Feb. 12, Americans awoke to read in their newspapers that the U.S. government-settler of the West, vanquisher of totalitarianism, conqueror of the moon-now writes the rules of golf.

Casey Martin is a professional golfer who suffers from Klippel-Trenaunay-Weber syndrome, a congenital circulatory disorder that gives him pain and swelling in his right leg. Because Martin cannot walk the links, a federal judge ruled that he had the right, under the 1990 Americans With Disabilities Act, to play the PGA Tour using a golf cart. "Mr. Martin is entitled to his modification because he is disabled," said Judge Thomas M. Coffin. "It will not alter what's taking place out there on the course."

To Martin and the judge, this was a "reasonable accommodation," fair to Martin and therefore required by law. To the Professional Golfers' Association of America, it was an unreasonable intrusion, unfair to all the players who must wear themselves out trudging picturesquely from hole to hole. One interesting question was whether walking is part of the game of golf. A more interesting question, however, was how the government got into the business of deciding whether walking is part of the game of golf. This was a line of work that the most ambitious New Deal economic planner would find startling.

Today, conservatives denounce law-making courts, communitarians denounce the "rights industry," businesses denounce the litigation explosion. Each critique has some merit, as far as it goes; but this article posits that none of them goes far enough. If you want to understand the full implications of the Casey Martin phenomenon, you need to view it-and the many thousands of other cases in which individuals and their lawyers (or lawyers and their individuals) press rights-based lawsuits-as nothing less than America's third and most extraordinary wave of regulation. Call it microgovernment: a style of regulating based on the premise that each individual is entitled to a safe, clean or, especially, fair personal environment.

Microgovernment is not the same thing as small government-far from it. In fact, it is remarkably expansive government, but its immensity takes the peculiar form of an infinity of microdecisions, each building upon, yet separate from, all the others. In this, it is radically different from earlier periods of regulatory activism. The first two waves of regulation dealt in big, clunky agencies issuing one-size-fits-all rules aimed at making people better off, on the average. Microgovernment comes as a steady drizzle of court decisions, seeping through the pores of civic life. Regulatory agencies, such as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, are involved, but mostly as plaintiffs rather than as bureaucratic rule makers. The main regulators are, indeed, not agencies at all, but claimants and lawyers and judges and juries, all working independently to spin, in the fashion of a mass of caterpillars, a cocoon of intricate social regulation that enfolds even the most minute details of everyday life.

"It's basically just an accumulation of micro-outcomes," says Pietro S. Nivola, a political scientist at the Brookings Institution (where I am a writer in residence). "You're not even setting broad targets or goals. You add up a million cases, and that's what you get."

So today, there is nothing unusual about waking up one morning to find the government writing the rules of golf. The New York State Board of Law Examiners is required to give extra time on the bar exam to a woman who claims (contestedly) to have a reading disability. A group of gay municipal workers in Seattle is told it must include a hostile heterosexual man who outspokenly believes in "biblical values." A television production company is ordered to pay a $5 million judgment for refusing to cast a visibly pregnant woman in the role of a seductive vamp. The Supreme Court, in its majesty, decides when a coach may and may not smack a football player on the rump.

This article examines a cluster of familiar, sometimes overfamiliar, goings-on and tries to look at them in a new way: not as artifacts of jurisprudence but as a system of social control. In other words, as regulation-but of a sort that has eluded the scrutiny that regulation ordinarily gets.

Regulation, of course, is necessary, and no system is perfect, and top-down, bureaucratic rule-making has more than its share of problems. But microgovernment is fundamentally different from other regulatory systems: It is less accountable, less rational, and more intrusive than anything the New Deal or the Great Society tried.

The Third Wave

In the standard account of things, there have been two great and distinct waves of regulation in America, one now decrepit, the other still robust. The first was economic regulation, which began a century or so ago, in the days of the robber barons, and lasted through the New Deal; the second was social regulation, which blossomed in the 1960s and 1970s. Each wave had its distinctive theory.

For the economic regulators, the problem was that markets were unstable and prone to manipulation by cartels. The solution was to establish agencies to control prices (passbook interest rates, airfares, farm prices) and regulate entry into markets (banking, communications, peanut-growing). For social regulators, the problem was that markets dump social harms ("externalities") on individuals who can't readily organize to protect themselves. The solution was the creation of agencies to reduce pollution (the Environmental Protection Agency) or to act on behalf of consumers (the Consumer Product Safety Commission), workers (the Occupational Safety and Health Administration), drivers (the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration).

Although the two waves were distinct, they had in common their decision-making style, namely bureaucratic rule-making, otherwise known as red tape. That is where the standard history ends.

It is also where the third wave begins. Like the earlier two, the third is rooted in a theory of market failure: that markets are often unfair or hurtful. Its solution, however, breaks sharply with the earlier two models, by rejecting the bureaucratic model. Instead of looking to the executive branch to issue rules, individuals (or agencies standing in for individuals) have gone to court for redress. Under pressure from activists with regulatory agendas and ordinary people with genuine grievances, the courts have responded. In the 1960s and 1970s, a series of decisions broadened the traditionally narrow tort laws to allow people to collect damages for more harms and for more reasons. The result lies in a peculiar gray zone between a traditional, negligence-based tort system and a randomly enforced right to personal safety. Tillinghast-Towers Perrin, a management consulting firm, reports that, from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s, tort costs more than doubled as a share of the economy (to more than 2 percent), with lawyers getting about 30 percent of the take and plaintiffs less than half.

In general, the tort system is not so much unreasonable (the horror stories are exceptions) as ambitious. People howled in 1992 when a grandmother named Stella Liebeck spilled hot coffee on herself and won a $2.7 million punitive judgment against McDonald's. In fact, the case was not silly: Liebeck's burns required hospitalization and skin grafts, McDonald's acknowledged having received 700 prior burn complaints, and the punitive judgment was eventually reduced to $480,000.

The larger significance, however, was that juries were colonizing the territory previously reserved for bureaucrats and politicians. A National Restaurant Safety Administration, if it existed, could conduct rule-making to decide whether one burn for every 24 million McDonald's coffees sold is a problem worth worrying about, or whether, in the big scheme of things, other safety problems are more important. In the court case, however, the jury saw just a burned grandmother and an arrogant corporation that had dismissed 700 burns as "trivially different from zero."

"The case prompted McDonald's, and other restaurants, to turn down the heat on the coffeepots," reported The Hartford (Conn.) Courant. America must be the only country in the world where juries regulate the temperature of coffee.

The people who worried that product-liability law was becoming a right to safety were not particularly noticing that, on a separate track, another series of lawsuits was establishing a right to fairness. For instance, the courts waded into a swamp of workplace-harassment litigation and embarked upon what became an astonishingly ambitious regulatory project. The courts construed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which forbids racial or sexual discrimination in the "compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment," as covering not just hiring and firing and wages but as striking "at the entire spectrum of disparate treatment of men and women in employment." That was a pretty big spectrum, and striking at it required, among other things, that each individual's workplace environment be free of sexual harassment, as defined by juries and judges. Other decisions established a parallel right to be free of other forms of discriminatory harassment, which was left for entrepreneurial plaintiffs and puzzled juries to define. The chart on page 2152 shows the result: Federal anti-discrimination lawsuits have almost tripled in this decade.

By 1998, regulating through the courts had become, in effect, Washington's default mode. Why bother with a new bureaucracy to regulate health maintenance organizations, when you can just pass a "patients' bill of rights," meaning (in some versions) regulating HMOs through private litigation? No need to hire bureaucrats, make painful political choices or spend taxpayers' money; regulation by lawsuit is self-financing and self-propelled. "It's really a shift to off-budget governance," says Nivola. The trouble is that it is off-accountability, too.

Digging a Tunnel

Imagine that, instead of a Clean Air Act, with its endless rules for sulfides and scrubbers, we just had a Clean Air Bill of Rights: "No corporation or business establishment shall impose an unfair, excessive or unreasonable burden of air pollution on any person or group."

Then suppose that, instead of creating an EPA, we granted everybody standing to sue for large sums of money. In effect, we would give every individual the right to a clean set of lungs and leave it to juries to decide what that means. Instead of viewing, say, Los Angeles as a big patch of air containing 10 million people, we would view Los Angeles as 10 million pairs of lungs, each equipped with a lawyer. The government's perspective is inverted: What was seen from the top down, as a large environment with many difficult trade-offs, is instead seen from the bottom up-as 10 million microenvironments, each to be regulated in its own right. It is this inversion of perspective that distinguishes microgovernment from other kinds of regulation, and that accounts for its often-bizarre behavior.

Over the past few decades, economists and good-government types have learned a thing or two about good regulatory hygiene. Some of the basic rules are:

Set an overall goal before putting particular rules in place;
Target outcomes, not process-success means reducing pollution or reducing on-the-job injuries, not writing rules or levying fines;
Look at the big picture; weigh overall social costs and benefits to avoid chasing wild geese (ever since the 1970s, all major federal regulations are subject to cost-benefit review);
Propose rules in advance (in the Federal Register), and give all affected interests plenty of time to comment;
Write down the finished rules, and make them clear enough to comply with;
Don't give bureaucrats a financial stake in their actions-for instance, don't let them pocket the fines they levy, lest they turn regulation into a money-making scheme;
Allow for at least arm's-length supervision by politicians, so that Congress and the White House can hold regulators to account.

Our hypothetical Clean Air Bill of Rights offers not a single one of those protections. Indeed, it regards them as irrelevant or improper. Courts and juries can't target outcomes, because they control only each particular case. There is no big goal, just the million microgoals of justice in a million particular cases. And so, with our imagined Clean Air Bill of Rights, particular justice always trumps regulatory efficiency. The EPA can say, "Air that is clean for 95 percent of the people is clean enough," but no self-respecting court can say to a plaintiff, "Because other people's lungs are clean enough, you're not entitled to clean lungs yourself." Clear rules, known in advance? No such thing; instead, a million court decisions, often conflicting. Cost-effectiveness? The mandate is to do justice, not to count cash, and in any event, courts are neither equipped nor expected to conduct economic analyses of the decisions they reach. Disinterested regulators? The agenda is driven by angry complainants and entrepreneurial lawyers who have everything to gain from finding new behaviors to punish.

Through it all, the politicians are relegated to the peanut gallery as commentators, except on the rare occasions when they manage to rewrite a whole law, which is far harder to do than summoning a regulator to testify before an oversight committee. "An agency can be punished in a lot of different ways," says Thomas F. Burke, a political scientist at Wellesley College. "You can intimate that they're not going to get the same budget through Congress next year. It's much harder to discipline courts all across the country, and individuals who are bringing lawsuits all across the country."

So what happens with our proposed Clean Air Bill of Rights? Some juries do sensible things, such as finding for plaintiffs who were exposed to high concentrations of lead. Other juries do weird things, such as finding for plaintiffs who claim that trees pollute. Some courts decide that an "unreasonable burden" means a high likelihood of lung disease, but others decide that "unreasonable burden" means more pollution in one area than in another, or any pollution at all. Over the years, things settle down a little, as precedents accumulate in each old area of litigation, but meanwhile complainants keep opening new areas of litigation. In any case, no one can be sure what the environmental rules are, because no one knows what the next jury may decide, or what the next plaintiff may dream up. The result is what Burke has called a "floating legal crapshoot." Anything could happen.

And anything does.

One-Eyed Regulating

In 1989, the Exxon Valdez spilled more than 10 million gallons of oil into Alaska's Prince William Sound. The ship's captain, Joseph Hazelwood, had been drinking (though a jury cleared him of intoxication) and was known to have sought treatment for an alcohol problem four years before the accident. In 1990, with the Justice Department's encouragement, Exxon established a policy barring employees with histories of drug or alcohol abuse from 1,500 safety-sensitive jobs, "where an accident could have catastrophic consequences"-about 10 percent of the company's positions. For people transferred out of such jobs, the company tries to find positions of comparable rank and pay. Nonetheless, the EEOC is now suing Exxon for discrimination under the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA).

United Parcel Service requires that its delivery drivers, who pop in and out of city traffic, have sight in both eyes. It, too, is being sued by the EEOC under the disability act. Walter K. Olson, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and the author of The Excuse Factory: How Employment Law Is Paralyzing the American Workplace, points out that this is not exceptional. Omaha paid $200,000 in damages for refusing to rehire a policeman who had lost his sight in one eye and had suffered loss of peripheral vision in another; Northwest Airlines is being sued for declining to hire a woman with monocular vision to drive maintenance trucks between airplanes. Aloha Islandair Inc. is being sued for declining to hire a pilot with vision in only one eye. (If a plane piloted by such a pilot were to crash, the airline could, of course, be sued.)

Maybe one-eyed drivers and alcoholic tanker captains are unsafe on the average, maybe not. But the important thing to note is that the ADA never reaches that question, because it forbids basing policy on averages. A bureaucratic rule might say that if 90 percent of Exxon's jobs are available to recovering alcoholics, that is enough. But all microgovernment "sees" is each job, and each disabled person, and each person's right to accommodation. Microgovernment is one-eyed.

The threat of ADA lawsuits may not create either jobs or goodwill for the disabled. In a recent study, two Massachusetts Institute of Technology economists, Joshua Angrist and Daron Acemoglu, found that the ADA "had a substantial and statistically significant negative effect on the employment of disabled people under 40." But who knows? Given that court decisions are often nebulous or conflicting, that companies respond to those decisions in many different ways, and that lawsuits often chase deep pockets and settlement prospects rather than urgent national problems, microgovernment does not actually know what it is doing, let alone whether it is doing it well.

The question is not whether helping the disabled is a good idea; it is whether letting lawyers do the regulating is the best method. Successful regulatory systems work by paying attention to measurable outcomes and by feeding knowledge about success or failure back into the system. Goals set by bureaucrats and politicians may or may not be wise, but usually it is at least possible to know whether a given regulation succeeds at, say, reducing sulfur emissions or stabilizing freight charges. The microgovernmental model, by contrast, sets no overall goals, measures no outcomes, allows for little or no evaluation of effectiveness or cost vs. benefit, writes few unambiguous rules, allows no formal public comment even in cases with sweeping ramifications, exiles politicians to the fringe of policy-making, and buys us-well, we have no idea what it buys us. If your goal was to design a regulatory regime that violated every standard rule of good regulatory practice, you could hardly do better.

Strip Search

Microgovernment is micro in another sense: not only is it radically decentralized, but it pokes its nose into everything, and no corner of life is too small for it to reach. Its mandate-attaining fairness in every personal environment-acts as a little microlever, prying here and prying there, opening one door after another to the onslaught of legal process.

Ask the PGA. Or ask Bill Clinton, whose sex life was scoured in fine detail by Paula Corbin Jones' lawyers, thus giving an enthusiastic microregulator a taste of his own medicine. Clinton's alleged conduct with Jones was, at least, patently disgusting. In many cases, distinguishing workplace harassment from ordinary flirting is difficult; courts must go to great lengths to do it.

Workplace harassment law was entirely cooked up by the courts, and is entirely driven by the mandate for fairness in particular cases. It therefore serves as a good example of the microgovernmental regulatory style in its purest form. In Oncale vs. Sundowner Offshore Services Inc., the Supreme Court ruled this year that discriminatory same-sex harassment is illegal. What exactly is harassment, and when is it discriminatory, as opposed to merely, say, mean? The court helpfully announced that a male football coach may smack a player on the behind as the player runs onto the field, but may not smack a secretary (male or female) on the behind in the back office. Well, what about the locker room? In case the exact line of demarcation eludes you, the regulators-meaning the court-provided this guidance:

"The real social impact of workplace behavior often depends on a constellation of surrounding circumstances, expectations, and relationships which are not fully captured by a simple recitation of the words used or the physical acts performed. Common sense, and an appropriate sensitivity to social context, will enable courts and juries to distinguish between simple teasing or roughhousing among members of the same sex, and conduct which a reasonable person in the plaintiff's position would find severely hostile or abusive."

This is rather as if the EPA had defined illegal pollution by saying: "We know it when we see it." To decide whether harassment has occurred, the court needs to sort through "a constellation of surrounding circumstances, expectations, and relationships"-in other words, the intricacies of each relationship in each workplace situation in each case. Every joke, every dinner invitation, every friendship becomes a courtroom exhibit, aswarm with lawyers. Who told which dirty joke, how often? Who was friends with whom? What did that dinner invitation signify? In a recent racial-harassment case involving a black plaintiff and an Asian plaintiff suing their former employer in Los Angeles, lawyers busied themselves debating who was more offensive to whom. Remarks to plaintiffs: "You don't sound like you're black." "Why are your people's faces so shiny?" "You know, we bombed you [Japanese] once. We'll do it again." Remarks by plaintiffs: "dumb Polack," "white trash," "crackers," "redneck," "fucking Korean." The jury decided the workplace was hostile and ordered the company to pay $1.9 million.

Given that a microgovernmental lawsuit is often the legal equivalent of a strip search, the prudent employer understandably takes no chances on jokes, teasing, or personal comments around the office. Lately, legal experts are advising employers not to let workers recount stories from the movie There's Something About Mary, a sophomoric comedy whose scenes include, for instance, some business about genitals caught in a zipper. "If you are telling these kind of jokes, no matter where they're coming from, you're exposing yourself to a sexual-harassment claim," Allen Rad, an employment lawyer, told The Dallas Morning News in July. "You're better off just not talking about it."

Subjecting each workplace, each job, each relationship, each joke to exhaustive legal scrutiny can devastate communities that depend on trust. In Seattle, two successive support groups for gay city employees have collapsed under the weight of legal processes launched by a hostile heterosexual man who was determined to attend their meetings. "I was attempting to find out what special privileges they were being given," says Philip Irvin, a city engineer who favors biblical morality and secular laws criminalizing sodomy. When the gays tried to keep him out, he filed discrimination charges, and last year the city's civil rights office found in his favor. The case grinds on through its eighth year of appeals. Exhausted by the wrangling, the group has not met since 1997.

At the end of the day, as the law thrashes about and tries to make every personal environment fair, the results often become simply bizarre. In one notorious recent case, the restaurant chain Hooters, whose calling card is its scantily clad waitresses, paid a $3.75 million settlement (of which almost half went to lawyers) after three men were turned down for waitressing jobs. A bureaucracy looking at the labor market as a whole, with its 370,000 places to eat, might have decided that letting some restaurants specialize in underdressed female servers is not a terrible thing. Microgovernment, however, sees only the unfairness in each particular case. Discrimination in allocating even one serving job is too much.

The law (under Title IX of the 1972 Education Amendments) forbids sex discrimination in education programs. In classic micro style, judges and juries have interpreted this to mean that each particular school needs to spend as much on women's sports as it does on men's; because women are less interested in sports, this has meant achieving equality by shutting down men's college teams across the country. According to a National Collegiate Athletic Association survey, men's gymnastics teams are down to 32, from 133 in 1975. To comply with a legal settlement, California State University (Northridge) dropped baseball, soccer, swimming and volleyball.

Elementary and secondary schools are now getting the same treatment. ABC's 20/20 noted in May that a lawsuit by two softball players, Jennifer and Jessica Daniels, required Merritt Island High School, in Florida, to mothball a concession stand, a scoreboard and bleachers that parents donated for the boys' baseball field unless the same items were also donated for the girls' softball field. When the program asked the girls' lawyer why she was requesting quadruple legal costs, she replied, "Because we put that money into other lawsuits." She is currently suing 10 high schools. Thus the mindless totalism that gives microgovernment its characteristic resemblance to a lawnmower propelling itself through a rose garden.

Termite Attack

No doubt it is intrusive, in some sense, to require steel makers to put scrubbers on their smokestacks, or landowners to preserve wetlands. Yet the relationships interfered with are business relationships, and the requirements are, at bottom, economic. Microgovernment is of a different complexion. "It's us and our personal behavior," says Robert E. Litan, a Brookings Institution economist and former Clinton administration regulator. "This is telling people how they have to behave." For government, policing jokes at work, or ordering colleges to set up as many press interviews for female athletes as for males, or fining the producers of Melrose Place $5 million for refusing to allow a pregnant actress to play a bikini-clad seductress, represents a higher and stranger order of intrusiveness. Never before has the government concerned itself so minutely with the detailed interactions of everyday life.

Moreover, microgovernment creeps toward you like a swarm of subterranean termites, rather than charging you like an angry elephant. There is no city hall to fight, no bureaucrat to argue with. "There is no forum in which you're having a national, public dialogue about these questions," says Nivola. "It's not happening in a legislature. It's taking place in a myriad of courtrooms, and the cumulative effect of it is the regime. It's so decentralized that it doesn't offer a visible target."

No one has any idea how much microgovernment costs. It may well be less expensive than traditional regulation, given the high costs of such old standbys as trade protections and price controls. However, microgovernment's costs are best measured not in money but in government's loss of respect for people, and people's loss of respect for government. If the excesses of 1960s and 1970s regulation destroyed the public's confidence in the bureaucracy, what will the greater and weirder excesses of microgovernment do to the public's confidence in the judiciary? And how much grinding up of personal and professional relationships is required before someone figures out a way to stop the lawnmower?

Eventually, somehow, someone will. But no one has done so yet. Microgovernment is in its gaudy first flowering, protected from the traditional checks on regulatory excess by its moral prestige as a defender of rights. Indeed, few people even realize that it is regulation. President Bush embraced the ultramicro Americans With Disabilities Act, even as his own vice presidential Council on Competitiveness swore to thwart regulation. President Clinton thinks nothing of demanding a patients' bill of rights, even as his own vice president drums away at the importance of holding regulators accountable to results rather than to process.

In time, either there will be reforms-of a sort not yet invented-or microgovernment will simply collapse, as irrational and unaccountable forms of governance eventually do. America's extraordinary experiment in regulation without regulators will fail, and the country will move on. But what will be the condition of the law when that time comes?

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The Easy Way Out

Jonathan Rauch and National Journal — Fri, 09 May 1997 00:00:00 -0400

Historians will write that in 1997 the Republicans and Democrats girded for budgetary battle, marched afield and sat down together on the grass for a beer.

After seemingly endless negotiations, the two sides agreed on a package to reduce the deficit by about $350 billion over the next five years, fiscal 1998-2002. The result, according to the bipartisan spin, will be a balanced budget in 2002, with enough left over for $85 billion in net tax relief between now and then. "A truly historic event for this Congress and this President," trumpeted the congressional Republican leadership.

Historic the deal may be, but not so much because of what it includes as because of what fell out: just about anything unpleasant for incumbents of either party. From a political point of view, it may indeed be a triumph; certainly, at a minimum, it is clever. From a reformer's point of view, however, it is a washout.

Politically speaking, the deal got Republicans at least part of the way out of the hole they dug for themselves in 1995 and 1996, when their radicalism culminated in government shut-downs, alienated the public and rejuvenated President Clinton. The deal shows the public that Republicans are compromisers rather than scorched-earthers, and lets them claim the first significant tax cut since President Reagan's in 1981.

Democrats did better still. In the 1992 campaign, Clinton promised middle-class tax cuts. He notably failed to deliver--until now. The budget deal made room for his $500-per-child tax credit and his $35 billion tax credit for college tuition, the latter of which economists say will mostly just drive up tuition, but which politicians know will attract politically engaged middle-class voters.

"This ends the critique of the Democrats as tax-and-spend liberals," said economist Robert J. Shapiro of the Progressive Policy Institute, a centrist Democratic think tank. "They've balanced the budget and cut taxes--it denies the Republicans their fundamental issues."

Actually, it's better than that. Democrats get to claim that they deliver not only tax cuts and balanced budgets, but also--eat your hearts out, Republicans--new domestic spending for appealing causes: about $16 billion for health insurance for children, increases in Pell grants for higher education, about $8 billion more for transportation, and so on. If Republicans get to be in favor of eating cake, Democrats get to support having it too.

So everybody's happy, right? Not the reformers. Conservatives wanted a long-term reduction in the size and scope of government. "New Democrats" wanted cuts in corporate subsidies and demolition of stagnant government monopolies, plus major public investments. Above all, pressure is growing to get to work on the great fiscal task of the next 20 years, which is to restructure Medicare (the giant health program for the elderly) to make it affordable when baby boomers start to retire 20 years from now.

What did the reformers get? Nothing.

Granted, to say anything definitive about this deal is harder than usual, because no one, including the negotiators, was actually sure what's in it. The deal was conceived and presented on May 2 as a flurry of "cuts," but actually it had few numbers showing bona fide future spending levels.

As of the middle of the following week, congressional and Office of Management and Budget staff members were still scrambling to make the numbers add up to a balanced budget--which, for some days, they didn't. One experienced budget-watcher said, "This is a truly historic budget deal: It's the first one I've seen without any numbers."

Still, the broad outlines are reasonably clear. Half or more of the deficit reduction comes from cuts in government entitlement programs, mainly Medicare. The Medicare proposals, however, eschew changes that would reform the program's benefit structure, opting instead for further squeezing of payments to health care providers. (The exceptions include an agreement to charge beneficiaries receiving home health care a small premium, which, though modest, asks recipients to give a little. Many recipients will also pay a very small increase in the standard monthly premium.)

Nondefense discretionary spending will be increased above the 1997 level and then will be more or less frozen there for five years. That means that lawmakers and the President can spend more money up front and tighten their belts later on.

Add it up, and you get . . . not much. In 1969, the Johnson Administration put through an anti-deficit plan, including an income-tax surcharge and spending cuts, that reduced the deficit by about 3 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP) in a single year. And the Clinton Administration's own 1993 budget package, though not of that magnitude, brought the deficit down by 2 per cent of GDP in three years.

By contrast, the new budget deal would reduce the deficit by a sum totaling only about 1 per cent of today's GDP over five years. That may or may not be enough to get the budget actually balanced by 2002, but either way, because the deficit has fallen so sharply of its own accord, the amount is small.

"At least a bunch of Republicans and Democrats were able to come to some sort of agreement, but it is marginal," said Rudolph G. Penner, a former Congressional Budget Office (CBO) director who is now managing director of the Barents Group, an economic consulting company. "Compared to some of the major fiscal policy changes of history, or what will be required to adjust for the baby boomers' retirement, it's trivial."

Conservatives may console themselves that they get the first significant tax cut since 1981. But a second look shows that this, too, is minuscule: The tax cut amounts to about 1 per cent of revenues over the five-year period. Not enough, in the opinion of Stephen Moore, a budget analyst with the libertarian Cato Institute, to justify the deal's increases in spending for liberal causes. On the whole, he noted, the deal spends $216 billion more (over five years) than the budget that the Republicans passed in their feistier days in 1995 (and that Clinton vetoed). "I think it's worse than nothing," he says.

Moreover, whereas Clinton pushed for ostentatiously middle-class tax cuts (college tuition aid, tax credit for children), the Republicans demanded reductions in estate and capital gains taxes, which disproportionately benefit the rich. "That strikes me as politically unbelievably foolish," said David Frum, a conservative writer and commentator. "If what they're saying is that, when push comes to shove, the form of tax relief we care most about is estate-tax relief, there is a real danger they're going to find themselves defending simply the class interests of business and the rich."

For fiscal worrywarts, the tax cuts are, if anything, too big--or at least threaten to become so in future years. Clinton did secure a "side letter" from GOP negotiators that pledges, unenforceably, to avoid any tax cut that balloons after 2002.

The much bigger worry, however, is putting Medicare on a secure footing for the long term. In announcing the deal, Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., declared: "This budget vindicates our long Republican effort to preserve and protect Medicare for current and future generations." Actually, if there is one thing this budget does not do, it's that.

True, the deal will postpone the Medicare trust fund's insolvency another five years or so, to about 2007. Also true, the deal's $115 billion five-year Medicare cut is large in the context of a relatively small budget package. But, says Carol Cox Wait, the president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, an anti-deficit group: "That's not a tough number--not from any baseline. It doesn't begin to do the things that you need to do to get that program under control."

Pragmatists reply that there's only so much the process can deliver before the voters are ready for change. Just ask the Republicans, who got hammered for trying to reform Medicare in 1995. Besides, the Clinton Administration argues that stabilizing Medicare in the long run needs to be untangled from saving money in the short run.

With the budget deal done, argues OMB director Franklin D. Raines, any broad Medicare reform "won't be related to a tax cut, or funding the Defense Department, or funding highways. So we separate the issues"--and do Medicare later. Maybe. But Medicare reformers wonder whether politicians will really have any appetite to gore this most sacred of cows, now that the public is being told that the budget problem is solved.

So, if you want to know why Sen. Phil Gramm, R-Texas, is having dyspeptic fits, just bear in mind that he is both a government slasher and a Medicare reformer.

"This is not my revolution we're implementing here," he said in an interview. "There's no doubt about the fact that when you look at this agreement, it's probably going to have three lasting effects. No. 1, a guarantee of the continued growth in the structure of government, and social programs in particular. No. 2, a virtual certainty that we will delay meaningful Medicare reform. And No. 3, by creating the impression that the deficit is behind us, we are probably going to open the floodgates to more spending in the future."

Not only does the budget deal do far less than conservative revolutionaries once demanded as their minimum--it does less than Clinton's own, already quite mousy, budget proposal from earlier this year. For that matter, it does less than the deal that Congress and the White House nearly closed a few days before.

Clinton had wanted to cap the growth of Medicaid spending per recipient. The savings weren't large in the near term, but the proposal would have put a potentially important new limit on long-term health spending. Clinton and Congress also edged toward reducing the consumer price index (CPI), which, many economists now believe, drives government benefit checks up faster than the cost of living actually rises. That, too, would have helped reduce long-run costs.

The difficult political decisions were "just about cast, no question about it," recalled Rep. John M. Spratt Jr. of South Carolina, the senior Democrat on the Budget Committee, in an interview.

And then the phone rang. Just as the negotiators were poised to make some politically difficult decisions, the Congressional Budget Office delivered the news that, thanks to robust economic growth, some $225 billion in unanticipated revenue would flow into the Treasury over the next five years.

After an initial period of distress in which GOP and Democratic staffers worried that the unexpected loot might actually upset momentum for a deal, both sides recognized that they had been handed a windfall. They could now punt any tough cuts they were contemplating, and so, without ado, they did.

Out went the Medicaid cap--an "easy decision," said Spratt. "We knew it was politically problematic because 50 governors opposed it, and practically problematic because it locks in disparities from state to state," he said. Out went the CPI adjustment. "Both sides felt that this should be disposed of, because it was to some extent an inchoate idea," Spratt said.

Up went defense spending because, according to Spratt, the top Pentagon brass "were going to mutiny if we didn't." Negotiators put in another $15 billion for welfare reform, added enough for children's health coverage to cancel out any Medicaid savings and threw in another $25 billion for discretionary spending.

"Thursday night [May 1], when they got the $225 billion, they just went on this frenzy of adding money back--and they added back too much," said one Republican congressional aide. The result was that the next day, when the politicians rushed to announce their triumph lest it come unglued over the weekend, the deal actually fell something like $5 billion short of balancing the budget in 2002. Numbers crunchers at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue were left fishing forlornly for clever ways to squeeze a size-10 budget into a size-9 box.

The story is not over. In Congress, conservatives can be expected to try to toughen the deal, or torpedo it altogether. Indeed, much if not most of the agreement's real meaning will emerge in the details as it makes its way through the legislative process. Still, the signal sent by the new budget deal is unmistakable. The sight of formerly "revolutionary" Republicans signing their names to an agreement that renounces even the most timid of reforms denotes the final humiliation of conservatives' ambitions. For better or worse, centrist, incrementalist Washington has won, leaving no viable reform movement, left or right, alive on the field.

Kirk Victor and Ben Wildavsky contributed to this story.

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The End of Government

Jonathan Rauch and National Journal — Sat, 07 Sep 1996 00:00:00 -0400

National Journal, Vol. 28, No. 36

n June, when congressional Democrats unveiled ``Families First,'' their new policy agenda, the most important part was written between the lines: an acknowledgment that a politician's place, these days, is at the margins. The Democrats contented themselves with a program to prevent teen pregnancy, stiffer penalties for companies that raid pension funds, a tax credit for college students and other such dribs and drabs.

``It's incremental by design,'' Senate Minority Leader Thomas A. Daschle, D-S.D., told reporters. ``We want it to be something that people can understand and believe can happen.'' So much for revolution.

Anybody remember House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga.? When he ascended to the Speaker's rostrum almost two years ago, he brought with him high, maybe overweening, expectations. ``What I can do between now and Easter is break up the Washington logjam, shift power back to the 50 states, break up all the liberal national organizations,'' he told The Washington Times at the time. Two years before that, President Clinton had arrived with similarly big plans: national service, job training, public infrastructure, health care.

Now 1996 is here. Gingrich has gone underground and Clinton is reduced to proclaiming that the era of big government is over. Both men embarked on ambitious reform efforts. Both saw their plans not only defeated but annihilated. Yet Americans remain deeply disenchanted with government. How can government be so disliked and yet so resistant to large-scale change?

In the summer of 1989, Francis Fukuyama, an obscure State Department functionary, proclaimed, in The National Interest magazine, the end of history. He meant not that events had literally stopped happening, but that the ideological battle over how best to run a human society was over. ``The total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism,'' he wrote, led to ``the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.'' If you want to know the way that successful societies will be organized in the future--well, look around. This is it. True, there will be plenty of variations on the theme and lots of struggles and change. But the big question, the history-making question, is settled.

What Fukuyama said about history may now be true of America's central government. That is not to say that Washington won't change, sometimes wrenchingly, and won't face real choices between quite different policies. But if you want to know basically how American government will look decades from now--well, look around. Having passed through a minimalist stage in its first 150 years and an expansive stage in its next 50, Washington has become what it will be: a large, incoherent, often incomprehensible mass that is solicitous of its clients but impervious to any broad, coherent program of reform. And this evolution cannot be reversed.

Well, so what? Does anybody really expect dramatic change? Actually, yes. Hillary Rodham Clinton's health care plan would have entailed a vast, even breathtaking and perhaps also backbreaking, expansion of government's duties. Sorry, Mrs. Clinton. When her husband intoned a requiem for the ``era of big government,'' he meant not the end of big government as such, but the end of liberals' hopes for an ambitious and growing public sector.

Today, curiously, it is the Right more than the Left that clings to millennialist visions of a transformed government. America is full of conservative types--if you doubt it, just tune into talk radio--who rail against government and demand its radical shrinkage. In fact, some of these people were elected to Congress in 1994. Modern conservative rhetoric is premised on the idea that ultimately, government can and should be stripped of many of its current functions.

David Frum, an influential conservative writer and author of the new book What's Right: The New Conservative Majority and the Remaking of America (Basic Books Inc.), thinks that government should be about three-fifths its current size, though he grants that change on that order is unlikely. Others are more optimistic. ``I think we can cut government in half in one generation, 25 years,'' said Grover G. Norquist, a conservative activist who heads Americans for Tax Reform (and is an associate of Gingrich's). ``The age cohort that believes in big government as a matter of faith is dying at a rate of two million a year.''

Here is another view: Conservatives who are waiting in the pumpkin patch for government to get small should just forget it and go home. Taxpayers will not allow the government to do much more than it does now. But government's client groups will not allow it to do much less.

If the end of government has come, that doesn't mean that reforms can never happen. Far from it. It means that reforms will be piecemeal and incremental, will be driven by a constant cash crunch rather than any coherent philosophy, and will alter the composition of the government's activities but not greatly change its size, scope or complexity. If the end of government is here, then programs can be changed but government, fundamentally, cannot.

This may be true, but with two caveats. The first is that the end of government is a theory, not a fact. It may, for example, understate the role of ideas in politics. The second is that the theory applies only to change generated from within the normal political process--not to change generated by outside shocks, such as wars or, some might argue, the civil rights revolution. There will, over time, be more such catalytic shocks. Indeed, the next one is arguably already in sight.

The Arithmetic of Gridlock

The case for enlightened defeatism begins with a standard thought experiment from political science. Imagine a small dinner party--say, four men--at a restaurant. Everyone is going to pay an equal share of the tab. Each person soon notices that if he orders a $10 dessert, he gets to eat the whole thing while paying only a fourth of the cost. So he indulges.

The trouble, of course, is that everyone else makes the same calculation. And so everyone orders dessert. And wine. And appetizers. Soon the bill is high and everyone is distressed. So the four diners talk to one another and decide that from then on, they'll make do with less. End of problem.

Now imagine the same dinner, but with one change. This time there are, say, 10,000 people around the table--so many that any conversation between them all is impossible. So many, indeed, that no one diner can know the intentions of any but a few of the others. Now the problem is greatly magnified, in two ways.

First, the incentive to overorder is much larger. Each diner now pays only one ten-thousandth of the cost of his or her extra dessert. Others may not even notice. Second, there is now no ready solution. You may give up your dessert, and persuade the person next to you to do the same. But how can you have any confidence that others will not merely take advantage of your sacrifice to order more chocolate mousse for themselves?

Lacking someone who can construct and enforce a joint agreement (a point we'll come back to), it's always rational, from any one diner's point of view, to order as much food and drink as he or she can get away with. It is also always rational for the diner to oppose any attempt to take food off his or her own plate.

The very large dinner party is like a society of people and groups who receive, and lobby for, benefits from government. One of the first scholars to explore the resulting dynamic in detail was Mancur Olson, an economist at the University of Maryland (College Park). He noted that any narrow interest group faces strong but ultimately perverse incentives to collect goodies at the expense of the broader public. That is true not just empirically but mathematically.

Take the National Sheep Industry Improvement Center, a scrap of bacon included in the 1996 farm bill for sheep and goat ranchers. It will operate a revolving fund that will have as much as $50 million in federal money ``to strengthen and enhance production and marketing of sheep or goat products in the United States.''

America has lots of farms with sheep, but as of 1992 only 1,773 of them did business of more than $50,000 a year in lamb or wool, and those are the farms that stand to gain noticeably from the new center's activities. How much is it worth to each sheep rancher, on average, to win and keep his new federal toy? To keep matters simple, divide $50 million by 1,773, and the result is slightly more than $28,000 per rancher, a nice little sum. Of course, there are various complications, but the broad point holds. The National Sheep Industry Improvement Center's beneficiaries have much to gain by keeping their foothold in the farm bill, and thus they'll spend ample time and money on lobbyists, campaign contributions, advertising campaigns and trips to Washington.

And how much might anybody else care about stopping the sheep center? This time, divide $50 million by 100 million voters. That's about 50 cents each. At that rate, based on the average hourly wage, a sensible voter who invests three minutes of effort on the sheep center is being overgenerous with his time.

Sometimes, of course, a program becomes the center of a national controversy and attracts attention disproportionate to its cost to the average voter, as with welfare or affirmative action. But in a government as large as ours, such programs are few. Again oversimplifying a bit (but not much): Except in rare cases, only the groups directly affected by any particular program care enough to invest in changing or preserving it, or even in knowing what's going on.

Two conclusions flow inexorably from the arithmetic of governance. First, it is almost always sensible for lobbies to energetically support narrow programs favoring themselves and to oppose reductions in their programs. Second, it is almost never sensible for voters to energetically oppose such programs or to support reductions.

Of course, one hope might be that the lobbies would be few enough to manage. Arguably, that was the situation in Franklin D. Roosevelt's day, when the government could think about getting key business and labor leaders in a room and negotiating a national economic plan. But now add a third element, that of time.

The work of Olson and others shows that lobbies proliferate as the years go by. In 1920, only four farmers' groups had offices in Washington. Today there are more than anybody has counted. In fact, today the majority of Americans are themselves members of groups that lobby. Most people take a special-interest portfolio with them when they enter the voting booth.

By now, therefore, the dinner party is very big indeed, and getting steadily bigger. It is very hard to make any deal involving more than a few of the lobbies at a time. Moreover, it is easy for lobbies to organize and mobilize their own little battalions of voters. There's a fundamental dilemma here. The smaller the group (sheep ranchers), the less reason nonmembers have to know or care about it. But the bigger the group (the old folks' lobby), the more voters it can mobilize.

So however much the idea of reform may appeal in the abstract, when it comes at the expense of any existing group it will always be much more fiercely opposed than supported, usually by orders of magnitude. And voters are fully complicit in resisting unpleasant reforms. That's not because they are selfish or unpatriotic. It's because, as at the dinner party, they are rational. They have a large personal stake in preserving the parts of government that benefit them, and little personal stake in getting rid of, or even knowing about, the parts that benefit others.

Allow this dynamic to work over time, and government turns into a vast collection of programs defended by a vast collection of clients. That was what former Office of Management and Budget director Dave Stockman, when he was still a House aide in the 1970s, denounced as the ``social pork barrel.'' Government becomes like a vast coral reef, populated and tended by thousands of lobbies and their friends in Congress, each looking after its own bit without much caring about anyone else's.

Voters have little liking for the resulting mess. But no one wants to be the first to give up his or her share of it. A tug-of-war ensues. From the top down, voters as taxpayers refuse to pay more than a certain amount for government. From the bottom up, as clients and beneficiaries, they refuse to part with their own goodies. The result is the sort of uneasy equilibrium we have today.

Making Change

That is not to say nothing happens. The key to understanding the end of government is that it is not a state of inactivity; instead, it is a state of much sound and fury, signifying little. At the microcosmic level of particular programs, each in its own small sphere, change goes on all the time. Congresses and Administrations mainly busy themselves with workaday adjustments--these days, often budget cuts--to countless programs. Borrowing conditions are changed, eligibility rules revised, support levels altered.

But--a key point--this change is neither systematic nor coherent. It is a result of bargaining between many particular politicians and many particular lobbies. Budgets may be cut, but almost always in ways that the groups involved find most amenable. Almost always, the result is that existing groups keep as much as they can and, when possible, further entrench themselves.

This year's farm bill radically changed the nature of some of the old-line farm programs, notably the grain subsidies. Wasn't that a big reform? Yes. But it was expensive: The farmers had to be bought off. (See NJ, 5/5/96, p. 978.) And even that would have been impossible if not for two social changes. First, the number of professional farmers has declined sharply, from about 11 per cent of total employment in 1940 to 1.2 per cent today. Inevitably, farmers' influence, though still disproportionate to their numbers, has also declined. Second, farmers themselves became divided about their old program, with a growing number--particularly younger farmers and those relying on sales in overseas markets--resenting rather than liking the old system of price supports.

In such cases, politicians can step in and make a difference. And so reform happens. But such a change in the government does not happen until change in society allows it. When old people are numerous and united, they get more. When farmers are few and divided, they get less. On the workaday level of programs, government does not reflect rational choices of the electorate as a whole. Rather, it is a mirror of the lobbies in society. Like an ant colony, it shifts this way and that as the occupants (the lobbies) struggle against nature (limited budgets).

The big problem is how to make macrocosmic change: top-down, encompassing reform aimed at serving a larger national interest. This is the kind of change that many Americans desire. It can happen only when politicians can roll over the opposition of countless lobbies, each of them able to stick a pin in any foot that steps on it. How can broad, coherent reform ever be accomplished?

At this juncture, a white knight rides to the rescue in the unlikely person of Olson himself. Olson, as much as any living scholar, has demonstrated the insidious power of special-interest arithmetic (the ``logic of collective action,'' as he famously called it) to cause economic and social rot. Yet he is an optimist. Two weapons, he argues, can defeat the tyranny of narrow groups.

The first is the presidency. A President needs a plurality of the whole electorate to win, which means he needs to care more about the economy as a whole than about any one group's piece of it. If a large-scale reform makes the majority better off, than the President will attempt one, sometimes with success. President Carter deregulated banks and transportation, and President Reagan reformed the tax code. In Argentina and New Zealand, leaders put through painful economic reforms that turned around stricken economies. Such leaders, of course, are like the man who takes charge of the big dinner and says, ``No desserts over $4,'' thus pleasing the diners by reducing their bills.

Olson's second source of hope is the electorate itself. ``The only real solution is for societies to acquire a better understanding of economics,'' he writes in a recent article. ``Each of these tiny minorities will easily be defeated if the public wises up. No historical process that is understood is inevitable.''

And so, Olson says, what reformers need is a leader with a national constituency and a vision for change in the national interest. The leader must then persuade the public to rally to his or her cause.

In the past four years, America has had two reformist national leaders: Clinton and Gingrich, while he was acting as de facto head of the national Republican Party. Both offered large visions for change in the national interest: health care reform for Clinton, budget reform for Gingrich. Both depended on overwhelming the defenses of the narrow groups by rallying the public to their cause.

The political process thus delivered leadership. It was Olson's other requisite, followership, that was nowhere to be found. Clinton and Gingrich called, but the people didn't rally to the call. Indeed, they ran the other way. Something went badly wrong. What?

Go back to the overpopulated dinner party. Now the dinner bill is out of hand and somebody prominent proposes a general deal: Nobody will order salad. This could work, but only if most of the diners believe that most of the other diners will cooperate. What if some agree to forgo salad, but the others, seeing the tab drop, order a double dessert? The moment that more than a few diners sniff this kind of foul play, the deal is off.

Last year the Republican Congress was determined to do something about the spiraling costs of medicare. So it proposed a package of reductions. The Republicans knew old folks would be unhappy, and so they plausibly argued, just as Olson would recommend, that the pain they were imposing on one group would be more than offset by the benefits to everybody from lower deficits, lower taxes and a solvent medicare program.

At that stage, the Democrats and the lobbies--which act as a swing vote, supporting whichever side will help them--did exactly as the playbook suggests. They recast the debate as group versus group rather than group versus nation. They stood on a box with a megaphone and warned: ``Don't believe those Republicans. They're not going to give anything back to you once they've cut medicare. They're financing tax cuts for the rich! They're just taking from you to give to someone else.''

Most Americans will sacrifice for a larger public good, but few will sacrifice for a competing group. The elderly are patriotic, but they will not be played for fools. Moreover, the larger public loses interest in reducing medicare if it believes that the only result will be to shift resources from one group to another. By kindling suspicions that the Republicans were acting in the interests of their favorite clients rather than of the nation as a whole, the Democrats and their allied lobbies had no trouble sinking the deal.

On the budget as a whole, the Republicans' many opponents simply turned the coin over. They depicted the congressional budget as harsh and extreme, and insisted that the deficit problem could be managed, at least adequately, without such pain. By kindling suspicions that the Republicans were grinding their own ax rather than taking necessary steps--asking people to skip salad merely because Republicans despise vegetables--the Democrats and their allies again scuttled the deal.

The Republicans, again allied with various defensive lobbies, did much the same to the Democrats with health care reform. ``This doesn't mean more care at lower prices,'' they said, ``it means poorer care for you and better care for other people, with huge new bureaucracies into the bargain.''

Unfortunately for reformers, this trick of kindling mistrust can almost always be used by somebody. The opponents' charges, while overdrawn, had enough truth in them to be plausible: The Republicans were trying to cut medicare while also reducing taxes for the better off, and the Democrats were relying on bureaucratic controls to expand health access for the poor. In a democracy, parties don't get things done unless they reward their supporters, which means the other side can always cry foul. To make matters worse, the voters' cynicism, which admittedly is often justified, makes them quick to believe that politicians are taking them for a ride. Alas for reformers, cynicism is self-fulfilling. Because people do not believe change will really happen, their suspicions are easily mobilized.

In their guts, if not their heads, the voters understand that they are trapped in a lose-lose game. They hanker for a consensus-building politician--a Colin L. Powell or a Ross Perot--to swoop in from outside the system, butt heads together and arrange a grand pact. Indeed, these days Olson himself pins his hopes largely on the emergence of such a leader. But he concedes that this is a faint and perhaps misguided hope. Sensibly enough, Americans prefer seasoned politicians to Napoleonic upstarts.

Here to Stay

And so we wind up where we now are. In the 1990s both parties ventured bold reforms and, for their trouble, both were beaten bloody by a tripartite coalition of opposition partisans, vested interests and alarmed citizens. So this year the two main presidential candidates are running away from reform, rather than on it.

Experience can mislead and analysis can misjudge. Perhaps recent years will turn out to have been a prelude to an era of grand reform. The trouble is that theory and events both point in the same direction. They imply that a nation in crisis--an Argentina, a New Zealand, a Poland--can muster broad support for comprehensive reform. In a nation where ordinary politics prevails, however, narrow groups ``outvote'' broad majorities, and the exceptions are inherently few and far between. Except in galvanizing circumstances, politicians and the broad electorate lack the power to do much more than jiggle the edges of the client-state.

None of this is to say that elections don't matter. It is to say that elections are not about what politicians say they are about, namely a big choice about the size and role of the federal government. In practice, there is no such choice on offer. The real story is the stasis in federal revenues and spending in the post-Nixon era, after the expansionary period ended.

Yes, politics and politicians can and do change things. In 1986, Washington spent 6.5 per cent of the gross domestic product (GDP) on defense; in 1996, defense will receive little more than half that much. But as for the byzantine and vast structure of programs and agencies and subsidies and regulations that makes Washington what it is--that is here to stay.

Politicians talk as though they are engineers holding the controls of a machine-like government, like pilots in a cockpit. In fact, they are more like elephants in the jungle: highly visible and capable of throwing their weight around or toppling the odd tree, but mostly at the mercy of the intricate ecology that surrounds them. It is the aphids and earthworms and dung beetles and algae, the busy little creatures in all their cozy niches--the farm lobbies and veterans' lobbies and corporate lobbies and university lobbies and a million other species--that shape the jungle's topography.

Conservatives see government as the guarantor of individual rights; liberals see it as the solver of national problems. Both have had their day. But perhaps the final victory belongs to neither. It is the client groups who won. And that is the end of government.

Until the earthquake comes.

The end of government implies that any coherent, systemic change in the shape and scope of government is beyond the reach of normal politics. It says little about abnormal politics: the politics of crisis.

Beginning in about 15 years and accelerating thereafter, the large postwar baby boom generation will retire. The number of people 65 and older will have increased from 32 million in 1990 to 68 million in 2030, under current projections. By now most people have heard that this may pose a problem for a government already strapped for money. They may not be aware how large the problem might be.

In 1950, America had more than seven people of working age (20-64) in its population for everyone 65 and older. The burden of supporting social security was light; and, of course, medicare did not yet exist.

By 1990, the ratio of working-age people to seniors was just below 5:1. A large change, but just a beginning. By 2030, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the ratio will be below 3:1. That is, every retiree will be supported by fewer than three working-age people (and, of course, not all working-age people work).

To figure out what this might mean if current policies are not changed, the CBO assumed that taxes and spending on entitlements (such as public pensions, which grow automatically as more people qualify for benefits) will continue as under current law, and that discretionary spending (which Congress has more direct control over) will grow no faster than inflation (a conservative assumption). In effect, pension and health programs are left unreformed, but taxes aren't raised to pay for them. What happens?

The CBO's short answer: Social security and health programs about double as a share of GDP, to 17 per cent. The deficit, shockingly, sextuples, from 2 per cent of GDP in 1995 to 12 per cent. The national debt more than triples, to more than 150 per cent of GDP.

That, of course, is the good news. But those figures hold the economy constant, and long before the national debt tripled, the economy would begin to crack. And so the CBO made a second set of assumptions, this time feeding the effects of soaring public debt (higher interest rates, lower capital investment) back into the economic projections.

Now things look quite nasty. By 2030, the federal government has doubled in size as a share of the economy. At 20 per cent of GDP, federal interest payments alone are nearly as large as the entire federal budget is today. The federal deficit is more than a fourth the size of the whole economy. The national debt now stands at more than 200 per cent of GDP. In other words, America is a basket case.

Will it happen? Almost certainly not. The question, rather, is in what way the future will be changed, rationally ahead of time or willy-nilly at the last minute. The CBO calculates that averting a run-up in the national debt would require a tax increase of 3-5 per cent of GDP today, or an equivalent spending cut. That is a 15-25 per cent belt-tightening. Quite unpleasant, but acting early is cheaper, because it stops the problem before it begins to compound.

Washington may indeed anticipate the crisis ahead. But recent events give scant grounds for optimism. At least as likely is that, as with the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s and last year's proposed medicare reductions and, for that matter, as with the deficit itself, the government will temporize, doing the least possible in any given year. If so, it drifts in a dinghy toward a waterfall.

Back, for a last visit, to our populous dinner party. Despite everything, before the dinner tab reaches, say, $10,000 for each diner, something will happen. What happens may not be an orderly change in the menu; it may not be an orderly anything. It may be, rather, a riot, a walkout, a payment strike--who knows? Similarly, something will happen between now and fiscal Armageddon.

At bottom, then, the end of government does not mean that government does not change. It means that government is the slave of change, rather than its master.

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