It’s perplexing. When unemployment is high, and the rich are getting richer, you would think that voters of average means would flock to progressives, who are supposed to have their interests in mind — and who historically have delivered for them.
…Just a quarter of the country is optimistic about our system of government — the lowest since polls by ABC and others began asking this question in 1974. But a crisis of government legitimacy is a crisis of liberalism. It doesn’t hurt Republicans. If government is seen as useless, what is the point of electing Democrats who aim to use government to advance some public end?
So how does he propose to fix this problem?
The Democrats have to start detoxifying politics by proposing to severely limit or bar individual and corporate campaign contributions, which would mean a fight with the Supreme Court. They must make the case for public financing of campaigns and force the broadcast and cable networks to provide free time for candidate ads. And they must become the strongest advocates for transparency in campaign donations and in the lobbying of elected officials.
Can’t argue with the transparency angle but as for the rest…you have to be kidding me.
His fix to a world in which unicorns and candy canes abound is to get the same government bureaucrats that the public distrusts to write laws to limit campaign contributions.
W…T…F
Walter Russell Meade tears this apart in short order, with a lot of words:
In any case, any new campaign finance laws would have to be written by legislators who got their seats under the old system. Wouldn’t the same vested interests who, Greenberg tells us, control the way Congress writes laws also control drafting of new the campaign finance laws? If all the other bureaucracies have been perverted into special interest fiefdoms and incumbent protection agencies why wouldn’t a campaign finance regulatory system be equally if not more perverse and corrupt? Or will the special interests be so stupid and obliging as not to notice that its bought and paid for legislators are plotting to kill their power?
Greenberg is telling voters who deeply distrust the nexus of power and money swirling around Washington to give that nexus even more power: power to regulate and control the process of competition for office. They would be fools to take him up on it; I don’t think they are that stupid and forty years of well funded efforts to get effective campaign finance reform have abysmally failed.
The campaign finance system Greenberg envisions has to come about by immaculate conception: born without taint even though its parents were mired in corruption and sin. The Catholic Church teaches that this is what happened to the Virgin Mary; few would suggest that the possibility is open to an Act of Congress. The election law and the election regulatory system will be written under the same crummy conditions that Greenberg believes are responsible for the comprehensive crisis of liberalism.
Meade doesn’t agree with Greenberg’s assertion that it’s the “special interests”, as Greenberg defines them, that are killing the progressive agenda…no, he explains, it’s because the public sees “the professional classes who staff the bureaucracies, foundations and policy institutes in and around government are themselves a special interest.” And they don’t trust them. I don’t blame them:
It is not that evil plutocrats control innocent bureaucrats; many voters believe that the progressive administrative class is a social order that has its own special interests. Bureaucrats, think these voters, are like oil companies and Enron executives: they act only to protect their turf and fatten their purses.
The problem goes even deeper than hostility toward perceived featherbedding and life tenure for government workers. The professionals and administrators who make up the progressive state are seen as a hostile power with an agenda of their own that they seek to impose on the nation.
This perception, also, is rooted in truth. The progressive state has never seen its job as simply to check the excesses of the rich. It has also sought to correct the vices of the poor and to uplift the masses. From the Prohibition and eugenics movements of the early twentieth century to various improvement and uplift projects in our own day, well educated people have seen it as their simple duty to use the powers of government to make the people do what is right: to express the correct racial ideas, to eschew bad child rearing technique like corporal punishment, to eat nutritionally appropriate foods, to quit smoking, to use the right light bulbs and so on and so on.
Progressives want and need to believe that the voters are tuning them out because they aren’t progressive enough. But it’s impossible to grasp the crisis of the progressive enterprise unless one grasps the degree to which voters resent the condescension and arrogance of know-it-all progressive intellectuals and administrators. They don’t just distrust and fear the bureaucratic state because of its failure to live up to progressive ideals (thanks to the power of corporate special interests); they fear and resent upper middle class ideology. Progressives scare off many voters most precisely when they are least restrained by special interests. Many voters feel that special interests can be a healthy restraint on the idealism and will to power of the upper middle class.
The progressive ideal of administrative cadres leading the masses toward the light has its roots in a time when many Americans had an eighth grade education or less. It always had its down side, and the arrogance and tin-eared obtuseness of self assured American liberal progressives has infuriated generations of Americans and foreigners who for one reason or another have the misfortune to fall under the power of a class still in the grip of a secularized version of the Puritan ideal.
The progressive belief that Government can solve all the ills of the world is one that was always doomed to fail, because at some point that government will have to grow so large, so all-encompassing, so overbearing, that no one will trust it and people will rebel.
But still the progressive believes if we just add more regulations, more boards staffed with more bureaucrats, somehow someway people will trust them again.
I’ll say it again….
W…T…F
Ace is in one of those WTF moods too:
You can ask your average person: Do you wish people would exercise more? Take more of an interest in their health? Stop eating too much? Stop smoking? Stop drinking so much? Stop gambling away their kids’ college funds?
Of course the answer is “yes” to all of these (for most respondents).
But again that’s just the sales pitch, not the actual offer.
Give them the actual offer and most will say No. Because the actual offer is:
Do you wish to empower a cadre of busybody bureaucrats, who frankly are largely mediocrities at best, but believe themselves to be chosen for greatness, to boss you around your whole life, in order to make sure some other people aren’t eating french fries and having a cigarette?
The real answer is “NO!,” because the real answer is, “Look, sure I want other people to live better lives, but frankly, I don’t care very much about that and I’m sure not paying for my own personal censor to scold me for making “bad” choices.”
See, that’s the cost. And if you ignore the cost, you’re not talking about business, or sales, or politics, or anything.
You’re just talking about fantasy wish-lists with no connection to any physical reality.
No connection to any physical reality describes progressives to a T. They want to FORCE people to become a perfect human being, and THEY get to decide how to force you.
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