Christopher Caldwell

Christopher Caldwell
Round Two - November 3, 2000

E. J.'s right that it's much better, in theory, to "maintain fiscal space" to pay down the deficit. But failure to do so is a similarity between the candidates, not a difference. You can more easily lose that space by increasing spending than by cutting taxes, and that's why Gore's plan is an abomination. It's not just the $200 billion devoted to creating a "revolution" in education (more accurately described as a revolution in National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers pork). It's not just the universal prescription-drug benefit, the costs of which promise to be as open-ended and unpredictable as those of Medicare, which is about a hundred times more expensive than was envisioned when it was enacted in 1965. No, what's most cynicism-inspiring is the eternal-boom premise on which the Gore plan is based. If growth ever dips below ... what? 7 percent? ... Gore will have to demand massive tax hikes. (And here I detect a note of cynicism on E. J.'s part that reminds me of the Reagan-era left. Is he really suggesting that Bush's first order of business will be to wipe out the surplus, just to make sure we don't do something crazy like spend all the dough on poor people?)

The best voters can do is intuit the way in which the respective candidates will break their promises. Here, E.J. is dead right about Bush's aims to privatize Social Security. While the implication of Gore's plan is that the federal government is going to take a French-style chunk of the national GDP in ten years or so, the implication of Bush's is: here comes a big tax cut; save it, because you're responsible for your own retirement now.

Still, this is conjecture. To judge by the candidates' own rhetoric, the "areas of nondifference" between the parties that Barbara describes are vast. (The drug war is one of the craziest government policies ever -- and yet who opposes it?) Barbara talks about the Democrats' "pact with the devil" coming due, and notes that conservatives are better at maintaining discipline. Harold calls it a "disciplined silence." Both are right, but this has been a nonpartisan pattern for a quarter century -- the out party swallows a lot to become the in party. 1976: Antiwar McGoverniks accepted a southern born-again Baptist as the Democratic nominee. 1980: Social conservatives voted for the man who as California's governor had been a champion of abortion and gay rights. 1992: A party built on big government and minority grievances applauds the arrival of a President who repudiates both.

There's a lot I love about Ralph Nader. For one, he's the only person on the American left to admit that the scare campaign about the overturning of Roe v. Wade is a mere fundraising tactic. What's more, it's conceivable that Naderism could be the core of a more globally focused leftism. That would be welcome. Once the American right accepts the welfare state as a fait accompli (which Bush has done), then we have a European-style politics. The EU is now dealing with what look like the real issues of our time: computer privacy, cloning, genetic modification, global labor, and NGO movements. (We seem less inclined to anticipate such issues than to deal with them on an emergency basis.)

That's why Harold's idea that the Greens can't make a big dent in American politics is nonsense. One would have said the same thing in Europe ten years ago, but the Greens now form half of Germany's governing coalition. They have three cabinet ministries in France. To draw the Perot parallel, as I did in Round One, Republicans may currently be in the position they're in -- on the verge of defeating a Vice President who's played a role in the largest economic expansion ever -- because many voters refused to accept the watered-down, tax-raising Republicanism they were offered in 1992. Republicans retain a coherent ideology largely because many of them used Perot to hold Bush Senior (and, by implication, future presidential nominees) accountable in 1992.

Harold is also wrong about Bush's "radical-right agenda." There is actually a reality to "compassionate conservatism." It's another name for what used to be called "big government conservatism," or "Lindsayism." While Bush has urged reform of certain programs (turning Head Start into a "reading program," for instance), I defy any of my fellow panelists to name a single government program he's urged cutting or eliminating. "Compassion" is a catch-phrase for Bush's ability to capture the hearts of first-generation Mexican Americans in a state that's full of them.

We know the Bushes. They're corporatist, patrician, pro-choice, mushy. The domestic legacy of Junior's presidency probably won't differ much from that of his Dad's: the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Civil Rights Act (enshrining quotas by federal law), the Clean Air Act. Claim, if you want, that Bush's agenda "surpasses anything that Ronald Reagan and Maggie Thatcher even dared to suggest." But remember that Bill Clinton, the most (economically) right-wing president since Calvin Coolidge, has enacted stuff that neither Reagan nor Thatcher even dared to dream of.

I was moved by Barbara's observation about the "skewing of the voting public towards the upper classes." I, too, despair over this. But I think the best hope for the proletariat is to reduce the size of the mightiest tool that the elites have ever succeeded in seizing: the federal government.

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Christopher Caldwell is the senior writer at The Weekly Standard. He writes a weekly Washington column for New York Press and is a regular contributor to Atlantic Unbound.