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The Democrats Rejoice

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mwkruse
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New York Times: The Democrats Rejoice  David Brooks 

I especially loved the last paragraph.

Parties come to embody causes. For the past 90 years or so, the Republican Party has, at its best, come to embody the cause of personal freedom and economic dynamism. For a similar period, the Democratic Party has, at its best, come to embody the cause of fairness and family security. Over the past century, they have built a welfare system, brick by brick, to guard against the injuries of fate. …

… Yet I confess, watching all this, I feel again why I’m no longer spiritually attached to the Democratic Party. The essence of America is energy — the vibrancy of the market, the mobility of the people and the disruptive creativity of the entrepreneurs. This vibrancy grew up accidentally, out of a cocktail of religious fervor and material abundance, but it was nurtured by choice. It was nurtured by our founders, who created national capital markets to disrupt the ossifying grip of the agricultural landholders. It was nurtured by 19th-century Republicans who built the railroads and the land-grant colleges to weave free markets across great distances. It was nurtured by Progressives who broke the stultifying grip of the trusts.

Today, America’s vigor is challenged on two fronts. First, the country is becoming geriatric. Other nations spend 10 percent or so of their G.D.P. on health care. We spend 17 percent and are predicted to soon spend 20 percent and then 25 percent. This legislation was supposed to end that asphyxiating growth, which will crowd out investments in innovation, education and everything else. It will not.

With the word security engraved on its heart, the Democratic Party is just not structured to cut spending that would enhance health and safety. The party nurtures; it does not say, “No more.”

The second biggest threat to America’s vibrancy is the exploding federal debt. Again, Democrats can utter the words of fiscal restraint, but they don’t feel the passion. This bill is full of gimmicks designed to get a good score from the Congressional Budget Office but not to really balance the budget. Democrats did enough to solve their political problem (not looking fiscally reckless) but not enough to solve the genuine problem.

Nobody knows how this bill will work out. It is an undertaking exponentially more complex than the Iraq war, for example. But to me, it feels like the end of something, not the beginning of something. It feels like the noble completion of the great liberal project to build a comprehensive welfare system.

The task ahead is to save this country from stagnation and fiscal ruin. We know what it will take. We will have to raise a consumption tax. We will have to preserve benefits for the poor and cut them for the middle and upper classes. We will have to invest more in innovation and human capital.

The Democratic Party, as it revealed of itself over the past year, does not seem to be up to that coming challenge (neither is the Republican Party). This country is in the position of a free-spending family careening toward bankruptcy that at the last moment announced that it was giving a gigantic new gift to charity. You admire the act of generosity, but you wish they had sold a few of the Mercedes to pay for it.

Comments

2 responses to “The Democrats Rejoice”

  1. mcnealystephanie Avatar
    mcnealystephanie

    First, the country is becoming geriatric. Other nations spend 10 percent or so of their G.D.P. on health care. We spend 17 percent and predicted to soon spend 20 percent and then 25 percent.”
    The U.S. is not more geriatric than the European countries and Japan that provide excellent health care, better than ours, for their whole populations and for the price of, as Brooks says, about 10% of GDP rather than 17% and going up sharply. These countries also, on the whole, have better public education systems, good public transportation, and don’t have crumbling infrastructures. Nor do they have a distorted income distribution with a large percentage of poor people and a layer of hugely rich people at the top.
    So the “vibrancy” that Brooks admires is fading, and not because of the federal debt. Rather the federal debt is a result of our wanting to have our cake without paying for it. A country that believes that taxes are a kind of theft rather than the price civilized people pay for the privilege and responsibility of taking care of themselves and their fellow citizens is on a downward slope. Look at what has happened in California since 1978 when Proposition 13 was brought to the Golden State by tax-hating Republicans. There was a budget surplus at the time but 30 years later the state is on the verge of bankruptcy.
    Maybe Brooks will write in his next column about prudent Republicans whose sense of responsibility includes their fellow citizens, who believe in a common national enterprise. Yesterday there was ugly shouting inside the House chamber to say nothing of racial and homophobic slurs by protesters inside and outside the Capitol building.
    Are these people to whom Brooks feels “spiritually attached?”
    I’ll take the Democrats any day
    Stephanie Mcnealy
    http://www.famous-philanthropists.org Customer Service Team

    Reply
  2. William Halikias Avatar
    William Halikias

    David Brooks, a thoughtful person known to embrace complex ideas and sometimes postmodern philosophical frames, has become a surprisingly vacuous commentator. One reads with sadness his latest attempt to craft an interesting or compelling narrative about recent events. Like his superficial people-hate-Washington mantra, his editorial linking the passing of historic healthcare reform to a childhood chimera recalling some poster of Hubert Humphrey in his bedroom (Was this, David, a campaign poster for the somewhat kind but ineffectual HH, or when he stood behind LBJ during the signing of The Civil Rights Act of 1964?) is a pathetic attempt to cast current events as more-of-the-same; Democrats as a regressive party who spend too much on social programs because they’re nice but who don’t get it. Republicans, for Brooks, on the other hand, are the Roman Gladiators he came to respect with age and puberty: they “embody the cause of personal freedom and economic dynamism.” Putting aside for the moment the disastrous “economic dynamism” of the George W. Bush years—including that Administration’s costly yet hollow, self-indulgent, and misguided foreign policies—casting the Democratic victory on health care as another “grand liberal project” is a rather empty idea that misses—pro or con—the enormity of recent cultural shifts.
    Brooks has been one of the more creative, engaging, and thoughtful commentators on the right, a mantle that David Frum now holds. But he has succumbed, like the Republican party at large, to an incoherent, superficial, emotional, trite, shriveled balloon kind of rhetoric. Indeed, the man is looking a bit neurotic these days in his talk show appearances.
    I want good ideas from David Brooks, and he can do better. Stop whining, David. Frame current events in ways that move the debate forward, not backwards or, worse, nowhere. Pull up your underwear, get out of your childhood bedroom, and start thinking man!

    Reply

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