Reality Check 101

Mid-term elections are a month away.  Does it really matter?

Every month Hillsdale College publishes Imprimis as an analysis of both political and cultural issues.  September’s Imprimis featured an adaptation of a speech by Philip Hamburger of Columbia Law School.  The article was disturbing, not because Dr. Hamburger is wrong but because he is so right.  He has exposed the growth toward absolute power in government, the very willfulness of kings that the United States Constitution was formulated to prevent.

Sounds theoretical.  Sounds like a subject for Political Science professors.  It is not.  Bureaucratic despotism bleeds civil liberties by assuming powers of legislation, judicial review and enforcement.  In essence it pirates all three branches of constitutional government.  When faceless enforcers control private and public rights over air, water and energy resources, when impersonal agencies decide distribution and quality of health care or how our children’s minds are trained, administrative power is no longer theoretical – it is frighteningly real.

Matt Grossman has offered a second important perspective and it is no more encouraging than Hamburger’s.  In his newest study, “Artists of the Possible:  Governing Networks and American Policy Change Since 1945”, he effectively challenges long time assumptions that public opinion and media exposure guide federal public policy.

Grossman’s book finally recognizes what every day common Americans have already known and expressed through political apathy and an almost antagonistic attitude toward the federal government.  To quote, “Institutionalized entrepreneurs, actors with political and policy skill set as well as an institutional position and ties, are responsible for the bulk of domestic policy change.”  Catch that?  With the exception of a few very rare public outrage movements like the TEA Party phenomenon, public policy is an insider process.

One finding illustrates this especially well.  In spite of the fact that between 1961 and 1976 the American people were still overwhelmingly of a conservative mindset, regardless of the pandemonium generated by a leftist minority during that time, “Liberal policy changes outnumbered conservative changes 15 to 1; all three branches moved policy to the left.”  By the way, both Democrats and Republicans were operatives in the process.  This period also represented over 40% of all public policy changes for the entire past seventy years.

There is no doubt that any historian looking back at that fifteen year period would consider it a heyday of government effectiveness. Especially in comparison to present day congressional gridlock.  But think through it and things are not that simple.  First of all, this was a period of what could be called imperial governance.  Just as much as Washington D.C. does now, it operated in spite of and beyond the will of a very substantial majority of Americans.  The political conquests of the Left were accomplished by, to borrow both Hamburger’s and Grossman’s concepts, a burgeoning administrative royal class of rulers composed of insider players.

Two things are important here.  While progressives/liberals have reason to gloat, they need to be realistic.  Their agenda may have made monumental strides but it was done at the expense of their value as citizens because they ceded ultimate power to their overlords rather than “the people”, just as conservatives did.  They also lost a vast amount of their ethical souls in the process.  Pragmatically, more than anything, their methods could come back to haunt them.

Secondly, for conservatives, that paradise of government effectiveness only happened because they voluntarily surrendered territory time and time again.  They convinced themselves that they were being reasonable and, naively, that they were working with something other than very far-sighted ideologues.

The center-right people don’t have a lot of options anymore but there are a few.  In order to save this nation, they must outperform the left at the ballot box.  Most basically that means showing up in powerful numbers at the polls no matter what election cycle is involved.  They also have to be willing to put their money where their hearts and mouths are.

All politicians understand a threat to their security and they most definitely lust after constituent money.  Quite frankly, at this point, if the motive is nothing more than “throw the bums out”, it is better than surrender to absolutism and enslavement to untouchable bureaucrats.