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Drooling on the Pillow

Sunday, February 20, 2005

Adhocracy 

An article by William Voegeli, The Endless Party, in the latest Claremont Review of Books about the Democratic Party's struggle to discover/define/be honest about their message quotes Claremont's Editor Charles Kesler "Clinton apparently believed that there was a Third Way between fidelity and adultery and between telling the truth and lying."

According to Voegeli the lack of clarity and coherence concerning what exactly Democrats stand for goes back many years.
Raymond Moley, an erstwhile advisor to FDR, wrote of
the New Deal in his memoirs, "To look upon these programs
as the result of a unified plan, was to believe that the
accumulation of stuffed snakes, baseball pictures, school
flags, old tennis shoes, carpenter's tools, geometry books,
and chemistry sets in a boy's bedroom could have been put
there by an interior decorator." In 1940 another New
Dealer, the economist Alvin Hansen, admitted, "I really do
not know what the basic principle of the New Deal is.
I know from my experience in the government that
there are as many conflicting opinions among the people in
Washington as we have in the country at large."
This was perhaps not a liability during the Depression as they gave the largely accurate impression that, no matter who you were, there was something in the grab bag for you. They were sustained through World War II by a strong leader who, while not clarifying a unified message of the party, replaced it with a crystal clear voice of his own.

On they drifted through the decades, staying in power by being all things to all people until they bumped up against 9/11 when, what until then was merely exasperating to conservatives and annoying to thoughtful liberals became a positive liability. There's no question that mid- to late-twentieth century liberalism had accomplishments, some of which anyone would call a net gain for the nation, but their programme remained throughout this time merely rhetorical, a stew of inspiration and feelings. The bien penseur with hardening arteries.

He points out that the list of things Democrats are for is endless. Liberal policy prescriptions are aimed less at the polity than at the expansion and enhancement of individual license and potential. "We have seen the future, and it's an adult education seminar, where ever-greater latitude is afforded to ever-smaller souls, and where freedom means nothing higher than the care and feeding of personal idiosyncrasies. "The question they have to answer is what are they against?
Tell us that the stacking of one government program on
top of the other is going to stop, if indeed it will, well short
of a public sector that absorbs half the nation's income and
extensively regulates what we do with the other half.
Explain how the spirit of live-and-let-live applies, if indeed
it does, to everyone equally; to people who take family,
piety, and patriotism seriously, not merely to people whose
lives and outlooks are predicated on regarding them ironically.
Answers to these questions , or at least awareness of their relevance, were forthcoming from Scoop Jackson, Daniel Patrick Moynahan and, even today, from Joe Lieberman (Pariah-CT). Nancy, Ted and Harry? Over to you.
Posted by: Sluggo / 10:40 AM
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