Sometimes you run across a presentation of conventional wisdom so pure, so well-framed, and so wrong, that you want to preserve it in amber and give it a special place in the Museum of Washington Folly. Today’s David Brooks op-ed on what he calls the “Do-Nothing Conspiracy” in American politics is a real masterpiece of the genre.
Indeed, Brooks’ offering today reflects a classic sub-genre: the Dover Beach column, wherein the writer, like a giant condor, soars above the grubby plain of politics and pronounces both sides ignorant armies clashing by night, even as the country (or in this case its fiscal condition) slips hellward.
For Brooks, the hellish reality is the rising cost of Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security (which, tellingly, he bundles as “the entitlements”) and the boorish surreality is the partisan polarization of politicians who won’t deal with the crisis.
This is hardly a new way of approaching this set of issues; hell, I wrote pretty much the same thing myself back in 1982 in a National Governors’ Association paper (portentously entitled “December of Decision”) about the dire implications of entitlement spending. But what’s interesting and invidious about it is the way it lends a lofty, bipartisan tone to what is essentially a partisan line of argument.
How so? First there is the bundling of “entitlements,” as though they are indistinguishable elements of the same “crisis.” Social Security, of course, has a dedicated revenue source and significant if impaired pay-as-you-go features; Medicare is partly financed by general revenues, partly by premiums, and partly by payroll taxes. Both programs are federally administered and essentially uniform in benefits. But then you have Medicaid, which is a joint federal-state program financed by federal and state general revenues; its eligibility, coverage, and administrative features vary significantly from place to place; and its focus–on low-income families as well as seniors and the disabled–is significantly different from the other two big “entitlements.”
And in fact, the Republican Party that’s fanning the flames of panic over “entitlements” treats them very, very differently. Their aim is to simultaneously expand Medicare; contract Medicaid; and as we all know, fundamentally change Social Security from a defined-benefit to a defined-contribution retirement system.
But treating them as a single beast called “entitlements” allows Brooks to use scary numbers about the overall growth of three different programs to support the current GOP line that Bush’s approach to Social Security is a statesmanlike effort to head off a “crisis.”
Second, there is Brooks’ implicit claim that the “entitlement crisis” is the source of an impending (and very real) fiscal crisis, while one of the primary causes, the GOP’s endless appetite for tax cuts, is treated as a future problem–a partisan habit, like Democrats’ desire for expanded government services, that it will have to forego in the national interest. Thus, the dramatic change in the size and structure of federal taxation built into our revenue system by Bush and his allies over the last four years is somehow part of the natural landscape, not something that should be reconsidered. And that is exactly the twisted point of view the GOP has gone to extraordinary lengths to promote.
And third, and perhaps most misleading, is Brooks’ treament of “partisan polarization” as a development that has become an obstacle to “doing something” on the “crisis” of entitlement spending. See how the distortions build on each other? Never mind that “polarization” has been the deliberate political and legislative strategy of the Bush administration, with few exceptions, since early 2001. Never mind that the failure of the federal government to “do something” is attributable to the party that controls it lock, stock and barrel. And never mind that Brooks is embracing a definition of government activism that is entirely limited to the administration’s current agenda. Up there in the sky, wheeling above Dover Beach, he can be evenhanded in assessing the motives of the two parties, even as he embraces one ignorant army’s take on the situation in all its essentials.
Look, I am definitely not one of those people who despises, or even dislikes, David Brooks. He remains one of the funniest, and on occasions, most acute observers of big trends in the political landscape, especially in terms of cultural trends–traits that cover a multitude of sins. I have always felt the kind of sleight-of-hand at the heart of this and other Brooks columns represents a degree of self-deception from a man who invariably struggles to reconcile partisan loyalties with an inability to forthrightly embrace “his side’s” ideological shibboleths. And while I have no doubt the GOP is responsible for the current atmosphere of polarization in American politics, I also strongly believe Democrats need a strategy that goes beyond simple counter-polarization.
But that emphatically doesn’t mean accepting a conventional wisdom that treats every Republican-driven change in the policy or political playing field as immutable, and blasts Democrats for “doing nothing” when they fail to cooperate with the the next item on the GOP’s extremist version of the national agenda. That way lies true ignorance, and endless clashes by night.
