Christopher Caldwell - Round Three

Christopher Caldwell
Round Three: Concluding Remarks - November 6, 2000

In Round Two, I was making a point about the American style of socialism, not flinging the word "socialist" as an epithet, as E. J. implies. Americans are not wedded to economic inequality, and might be perfectly content to see the salaries of pundits like the four of us halved in order that TV repairmen and shirt-folders at the Gap could live a bit better.

The reason there is no socialism in America is that socialism is more pernicious here than it is in other countries where it's practiced. Here it doesn't involve just shoveling money away from those who've reaped an economic windfall from endeavors that are arguably society's doing. No, it involves forcing everybody, not just malefactors, to live under a regulatory regime, rigging the judicial system, and handing out fiats disguised as "incentives."

From Post & Riposte:

"Dubya and his cronies, those religious right-wingers who have abetted his candidacy by holding their tongues and letting Jr. look 'moderate,' are salivating at the likelihood that they're going to have control of the White House as well as those good old boys controlling congress. The Naderites act like rejected lovers. They don't seem to understand the conditions that Clinton and Gore have been laboring under. Gore should have had the support of the Left. He would, if given the chance, take this country to a cleaner, fairer, safer place than it will be if Bush allows the Right Wing and business to plunder our resources and erode individual rights." --Kathleen Cunningham - 05:53pm EST, Nov 1, 2000

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Gore gives me the creeps in a way that few American politicians ever have, because he embodies this style of American pseudo-socialism. Of course he favored welfare reform, as Barbara noted -- he wants to open up more space in the federal budget for politicians to play with, in order that they might better express themselves.

Now, look: I'm on the right. I'm voting for Dubya, despite misgivings (what kind of misgivings? grave misgivings) about his intellect. Nonetheless, I'd say our politics is not necessarily the better for the lack of a European-style Green party. In Europe, they're the most diverse party there is. In Germany, for instance, for every crunchy Jürgen Trittin, there's a Joschka Fischer -- who, although I disagree with him on everything, is beyond doubt one of Europe's great statesmen. In France, the Greens have been a sanctuary for moronic left-wingers like Dominique Voynet, but they've also provided a berth for really, really inventive politicians like Daniel Cohn-Bendit, who has moments of sounding like Ralph Nader and moments of sounding like Ronald Reagan.

This is a suitable politics for the paradoxical, ideology-defying issues of our time. To take just one issue, look at prescription drugs. A prescription-drug benefit in Medicare is coming like Christmas. Once one grants that Medicare is a legitimate program, it's just a matter of efficiency to grant in turn that it should reflect a shift in treatment from what gets done with tweezers and scalpels to what gets done with pills. What's curious is that Al Gore's plan for Medicare (the result of Stanley Greenberg's FDR-focused fetish for "universalism" in American welfare programs) is actually more regressive than George Bush's. Why should those with already mammothly subsidized big corporate health plans get this benefit? Answer: they shouldn't.

So we may be in the early stages of another period when the parties cross each other on the way to the other wing. As Texas political scientist Walter Dean Burnham has shown, Boy Bryan's America is Ronald Reagan's. Republicans started off as the party of race-radical urban sophisticates. Democrats are now that party. Maybe we're on the verge of another flip-over.

Harold's right: he and I disagree on just about everything. (That's why he's on the top of my to-see list whenever I do a reporting trip to Los Angeles.) But his disagreements with Barbara really get my goat. The Democrats are a corrupt party, and they're corrupt because of our lack of campaign-finance reform. The ideal situation would be if we could see the establishment of new parties for new times. But we can't, because the parties are basically businesses.

Barbara, given the perverse way we've tended to agree on the stakes of the Nader candidacy, it made me despair to see you tooting the horn of proportional representation. It's poison, just a way for radicals to turn an inefficiently working (but generally decent) political system over to fascists and Bohemian weirdos. Who has been the biggest beneficiary of European PR? Jean-Marie Le Pen.

P.S. -- You know, E. J., I actually do hang around housing projects with union workers.

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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.