American Politics, Then & Now: And Other Essays

James Q. Wilson

Description

James Q. Wilson is one of America’s preeminent public policy scholars. For decades, he has analyzed the changing political and cultural landscape with clarity and honesty, bringing his wisdom to bear on all facets of American government and society. American Politics, Then & Now is a collection of fifteen of Wilson’s most insightful essays–drawing on thirty years of his observations on religion, crime, the media, terrorism and extremism, and the old-fashioned notion of “character.” Readers of every political persuasion will come away from this volume with a new understanding of how American politics and culture have evolved over the last half-century. These essays are not “the grumpy words of a conservative who can’t be reconciled to the realities of contemporary American life,” Wilson writes. Rather, they are straight talk from a painstaking empiricist and consummate social scientist who believes in American exceptionalism. American Politics, Then & Now is a compelling portrait of a beloved nation.

Sujets

• Legal
• Political Science
• Political
• Essays
• HISTORY
• James Q. Wilson
• Federal government of the United States
• Politics
• Legall de Kermeur
• Social
• Culture

Informations

• Publié par: AEI Press
• Date de parution: 10 juin 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780844743301
• Langue: English

Extrait

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wilson, James Q.
American politics, then & now and other essays / James Q. Wilson.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-8447-4319-6 (hardcover)
ISBN-10: 0-8447-4319-4 (hardcover)
1. United States—Politics and government—1989–2. United States—Politics and government—1945–1989. I. Title.
JK275.W55 2010
320.973—dc22
2010002626
14 13 12 11 10 1 2 3 4 5
© 2010 by the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, Washington, D.C. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without permission in writing from the American Enterprise Institute except in the case of brief quotations embodied in news articles, critical articles, or reviews. The views expressed in the publications of the American Enterprise Institute are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the staff, advisory panels, officers, or trustees of AEI.
Printed in the United States of America
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Arthur Brooks for allowing me to publish these essays in an AEI book, and for the excellent editorial help I have had from Laura Harbold, Anne Himmelfarb, and Sam Thernstrom. Karlyn Bowman at AEI was a valuable coauthor of an essay reprinted here. I also want to acknowledge my great indebtedness to the journals that have published my essays over many years: Commentary , City Journal , The Public Interest , and National Affairs . Robert Faulkner and Susan Shell published my essay on religion and politics in their book, America at Risk (University of Michigan Press, 2009). Much of my work has been supported by the Earhart, Sloan, and Tanner foundations.
Preface
These essays, written over a thirty-year period, are my account of how American politics, and the world in which America’s political system operates, have changed. These changes have been fundamental. The American government does not make decisions today the way it made them in the 1950s or during the New Deal era in the 1930s. Familiar institutions have been weakened or destroyed, replaced by a commitment to ideas and ideologies the consequences of which we do not fully understand.
Franklin Roosevelt led the country during the first hundred days of his administration with policies that were new, but he worked in a political system that had not changed much for about a century. Seventy-six years later, the press celebrated Barack Obama’s first hundred days with accounts of all that he had attempted, and without comment on the new political order of which they were a part. Nobody in 1933 knew whether FDR’s new policies would work; today nobody knows whether Obama’s will work, either. But our political system has changed so dramatically that the current economic recession, one vastly less serious than what greeted FDR, has permitted Obama to attempt to nationalize parts of the auto industry, hire and fire bank managers, and set in motion a plan that may, in effect, nation-alize our health care system.
In his first term FDR created a bank holiday to stop a run on banks, devised an insurance scheme to provide welfare benefits to the elderly, did not attempt to do much about health care, and in the teeth of some public hostility created unemployment benefits and Aid to Families with Dependent Children, which would be administered by the states. The more leftist supporters of the New Deal wanted to create an American social democracy, but had to settle instead for an American state: that is, a sense of national identity managed by a national government to achieve national purposes. The Supreme Court, after initial resistance, approved of this new direction. The Second World War reinforced America’s sense of itself as a nation with a powerful central government that would impose high taxes. And the war did what the New Deal did not: it ended the Depression.
The determination to create a social democracy was reborn with the advent of Barack Obama to the presidency. In his first few months in office, Obama ordered the merger or abolition of several banks, passed out stimulus checks directly to the people, gave money to the auto companies (on the condition that one company get rid of its chief executive officer and that all make the kinds of cars federal officials liked), and called for a federal health plan that would “compete with” (which may mean replace) private health plans. In a government-managed program to help people buy insurance and to manage the prices doctors charge, there will be federal subsidies that permit the plan to price its services below those of private health-care plans, thus driving many out of business. By this means we may move toward a “single-payer” (i.e., government-only) health program, thereby bringing to this country the defects of such plans that are so visible in Canada and Great Britain.
All of this is hard to believe at a time when the economy is in a deep recession and the public wants the government to do what it can to end it. The government, both under George W. Bush and Barack Obama, has tried with, I think, mixed effects. But what is astonishing is that the Obama administration has promised no higher taxes for the middle class when its health care plan will raise taxes and its cap-and-trade environmental plan will raise fuel costs. In 1933 matters were very different: the public wanted an end to the Depression and the FDR administration worked, again with mixed effects, to do that. The magnitude of the changes in public policy between 1933 and 2009 is, to my mind, a measure of the changes in how this country is governed. To be sure, the New Deal had brought about, in Morton Keller’s words, a “sea change in American public life.” But to believers in a Western European model of democracy, much was left to be done. 1 What was impossible or difficult in the first period has become reasonable and even easy in the second.
In part this change has to do with the rise of strict party-line votes. Before the health care plan was adopted in 2010 with every Republican opposed and almost every Democrat in favor, the three most important pieces of legislation in the twentieth century had bipartisan support: Social Security was passed in 1935 with fifteen House Republicans and five Senate Republicans in favor of it; the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed with sixty-four House Republicans and six Senate Republicans in favor; and Medicare was passed in 1965 with sixty-five House Republicans and thirteen Senate Republicans in favor.
In part it has to do with the extent to which the government today acts with indifference to public opinion. The pending passage of the health care bill makes this clear as well. Only one-third of the public favors the plan that Congress has adopted, and the Speaker of the House declared that she was willing for her party to lose forty seats in the next election in order to do what she, but not the voters, thought was important.
Liberals celebrate this new level of vigor and intrusiveness in national policymaking, and conservatives regret it; but whichever group’s judgment proves correct, the fact of the change indicates that our political system today is not what James Madison, Woodrow Wilson, or even Harry Truman would have recognized. The chief mystery of contemporary politics is how such a fundamental change was possible; the essays that follow examine this mystery and try to explain it.
It is all the more important to understand this transformation because it is occurring at a time when the United States is deeply but reluctantly engaged with the rest of the world. At one time our policy was to shun the rest of the world; at a later time it was to mobilize to confront well-known national enemies, such as the German Kaiser, Adolf Hitler, and Joseph Stalin. When we shunned the world, Americans liked that; when we fought national enemies, Americans were united behind the effort. But today, when we try to cope with struggles in Afghanistan and Iraq, our leaders discover that they must cope both with allies who dislike them and Americans who oppose them—just as they did when we fought in Vietnam. The peace party—as Karlyn Bowman and I showed using poll data—is about one-fifth of the American public, and has been that for almost half a century.
The foreign enemies with whom we now struggle are composed not of hostile nations but of stateless radicals driven by what they take to be (wrongly, in my view) the requirements of deeply held religious beliefs. It is a bitter paradox: America, the most religious of all advanced nations, must fight against the distorted religion of certain radicalized people. America had managed, with some difficulty, to reconcile religious beliefs and personal freedom only to discover that it must contend with people for whom religion and freedom are irreconcilably opposed. And in between this country and its enemies lies Western Europe, where freedom has been acquired by downgrading or destroying religion.
Americans fight because they value life and freedom, whereas the jihadists fight because they value death and submission. The tactics necessary to cope with that struggle were slow to develop in the American military and not given a clear written statement until General David Petraeus and his colleagues produced the Army–Marine Corps manual on counterinsurgency, which became something of a best seller in 2007. Its message did not simply outline a new tactic; it called for the American military to rethink its central doctrines. No one should be surprised to learn that the American public now cherishes our military and distrusts Congress and the mass media.