The people (of both parties) who opposed this propositionwhen it came up in the past always argued that there would begreat legal complications involved if it were enacted and also thatit would be extremely costly. I don’t know whether any or all of that is true. But unless the legal complications would amount to the absolute destruction ofour constitutional system and the costs were, say, roughly twice the size of the current federal budget,I’d say: Go ahead with it – it’s cheap.
The reason for my enthusiasm is that I thinkthis measure, though far from being the most sweeping in scope of the Republican-sponsored proposals now being debated, at least touches on the huge problem that lies at the heart of our current political distemper. It is the problem of prescriptive, finger-wagging politics, indulged in on all sides, by all parties and factions and ideological sects. It takes the form ofone large group of people’s demanding or, if in office, compelling, another large group to take itsmedicine. The trouble is that the prescribers tend, often as not, to know virtually nothing at all about the medicine they are prescribing or its prospective effects, and – is this a lucky break or what? – to be providentially excluded from the ranks of those required to swallow it.
This is what makes politics so easy and so much fun for the ones who get to do the prescribing – and so reckless. I don’t say that all the medicine is bad. Some very beneficial legislation has had to be stuffed down the national maw over the decades, against great squalling and resistance. I say only that this particular habit of doing unto others what you would not have them do unto you has become an all-too-prevalent, even defining feature of our politics today. What was widely considered its abuse by the Democrats was surely a leading reason for the upending of the political order in the elections last fall.
Everyone has something to say on this subject but, by and large, only when it concerns the other side. One staple argument against American military involvement abroad will illustrate. It holdsthat old men should not send young men off to fight their warsfor them. In the Vietnam War it was added that the warmaking class of government leaders, well-heeled defense intellectuals and their like were expanding and obdurately defending a conflict that, for one deferment reason and another, their own sons of military age would escape. It was a powerful and deeply felt pitch, so much so that it may seem churlish to point out that many people I know who were making it seem to have spent the years ever since doing something very like what they were complaining about then. They have been tireless in their calls for enactment of a transforming social and economic agenda that would affect them hardly at all, while profoundly changing the way millions of other less-well-off Americans would live in respect to housing, health care, safety and schooling.
I am referring here of course to those on the affluent, well-insulated left who cannot seem to stop calling for sacrifices to be made in the national interest by American middle-class families who live in circumstances far less comfortable and stable than their own and with far thinner margins of security. But the left has no monopoly on that tone. You hear it coming just as insufferably from the right – and have been for some time: all those expensively suited and coiffed ladies and gents delivering their papers at conservative seminars or from within the Reagan and Bush administrations or on the floor of the House or Senate, impatiently lecturing inner-city blacks on how they need to pull up their socks. These are often people who have no feel whatever for the incredible struggle for survival and betterment being valiantly waged every day by so many of those who live in the inner cities; rather they merely see them all as part of an undifferentiated, outlaw continuum, one that must be made by people such as themselves to conform to basic legal and scriptural values – values that they and some of their own best friends ignore.
The kid staff assistant who drafts detailed regulations of a business in which he has had zero experience and which he knows nothing of, the academic consultant who helps draw up restrictive legislation from which universities and the professoriate itself areto be exempt, the intervening judge who hasn’t the foggiest notion of how a hospital or a school or a welfare program should be run and will never be one whit affected by what he decrees, the Senate chairman who never met a payroll but doesn’t let that keep him from instructing others on how it should be done, and – yes – my own tribe of opinion journalists who render judgment and advice on all manner of matters with which we have only the most fleeting acquaintance and in which we have only the tiniest personal stake – all these are familiar objects of anger in our society. Such practitioners and innumerable others like them cut across all classes and parties, are increasingly isolated from one another and from those whose actions – whose very way of life – they seek to alter, inhibit, reform or just dictate. They have in common only their own self-assuredness and frequent want of humility.
Congress, with the proposal to make its own handiwork applicable to itself, is taking a single step that will hardly affect this odd deformation of our politics as a whole, this thunder of voices all demanding that somebody else make the sacrifice, pay the price, shape up, give something away, get used to less or to worse for the sake of the general well-being. But it is something. We should try to build on it – all of us. We could begin, as they say in all those self-help programs, by acknowledging the existence of the problem.
