Beyond Peace (27 page)

Lincoln and the founders recognized the equally great danger that public officials might merely ratify popular passions of the moment, without refinement, deliberation, or choice. This is precisely what the Constitution sought to avert by establishing a representative democracy based on elective offices and separation of powers.

Our problem today is not too little direct democracy but too many politicians who pander to the ephemeral mood swings of popular fashion.

Public opinion is a fickle mistress. What is popular is often not what is right. But what is right and unpopular can often be made popular if statesmen have the courage and foresight to lead. The contrasting political fates of Neville Chamberlain and
Winston Churchill provide a striking illustration. Chamberlain and the catastrophically mistaken policy of appeasement reached their greatest popularity just after the Munich Conference of September 1938, when Great Britain and France sacrificed democratic Czechoslovakia to Hitler in the vain hope of sparing themselves. Meanwhile, Churchill was highly unpopular for heroically urging prompt, effective action to stop Hitler before it was too late. Today most of the world celebrates Churchill as the savior of freedom in one of its darkest hours. Very few celebrate Chamberlain.

Our own history is replete with examples. If Harry Truman had followed the polls in 1947, he would have scrapped his far-sighted vision for the postwar world. His popularity was low. The Republicans had overwhelming majorities in the House and Senate. Internationalism was traditionally unpopular in Republican constituencies. But he had the courage to make a powerful case for what was right. Republicans in the House and Senate provided the votes necessary for approval of the Greek-Turkish aid program, the Marshall Plan, and NATO, the cornerstones of the policy of containment that would lead to victory in the Cold War. More recently, our opening to China in 1972 and President Bush's decision to oppose Saddam Hussein's aggression against Kuwait in 1990 would not have occurred if we had followed the polls rather than leading public opinion.

Pundits frequently ridicule members of the House and Senate for failing to have the guts to vote for what is right even if they risk their seats by doing so. But expecting politicians to cast votes against their political interest is just as unreasonable as expecting reporters to turn in exposés of the business affairs of their publishers. Legislators, like journalists, are only human. A President cannot govern by asking members of Congress to sacrifice themselves. Instead he must use the powers of persuasion inherent in the nation's highest office to transform a position that is right but unpopular into one that is acclaimed. Only by persuading the American people will he be able to persuade the Congress and thus earn support for his policies.

The founding fathers believed that civil rights belonged to individuals, not groups. The principle of natural rights embodied in the Declaration of Independence defined our goal as equality of opportunity, which rejects distinctions of legal status and privilege defined by race, religion, ethnicity, tribe, language, or sex. Everyone is the same in the eyes of the law. But insisting on equality of opportunity is the opposite of demanding equality of result.

Individuals differ significantly in the natural endowments of intelligence, skills, character, perseverance, and just plain luck on which success in life depends. The Constitution and its underlying philosophy affirm that individuals must be given the right to succeed on the basis of merit, which implies that not all will succeed equally.

In 1969, my administration put into effect the Philadelphia Plan, which required goals and timetables for minority hiring in connection with federal construction contracts. It was carefully crafted to crack open what were then the almost completely lily-white construction unions and to compel them to start accepting blacks into their apprentice programs and membership ranks. We deliberately distinguished between goals and quotas, even though numerical goals, over specified periods, were set in the resulting contracts. Compliance was judged not by an arbitrary look at the numbers alone but by a broad review of a contractor's effort to provide equal employment opportunity. This was the right kind of affirmative action—a specifically targeted plan, temporary in nature, designed to remedy a specific, clear denial of equal opportunity. And it worked.

In the years that followed, however, the courts, the civil rights establishment, and some federal enforcement agencies increasingly pressed the notion of affirmative action beyond equal opportunity to require equality of result, regardless of whether or not any deliberate discrimination had taken place. Broad
goals became rigid quotas; in many cases the new test became one of “disparate impact”—that is, whether the ethnic composition of a company's workforce precisely mirrored the ethnic composition of the community, without regard for individual ability, interest, or anything else.

Over the past two decades, courts have sanctioned reverse discrimination and racial quotas in university admissions, hiring, and promotion. They have allowed reverse discrimination in public employment, the private sector, and government contracting. They have upheld and sometimes even demanded the creation of gerrymandered minority districts to ensure that such districts are represented by a member of a particular minority. In some cases, judges have not only authorized quotas in situations in which there was no intentional discrimination but have imposed quotas themselves.

The case of Lani Guinier is revealing. Her nomination for the top civil rights post in the Justice Department was withdrawn by President Clinton because of the storm over her advocacy of proportional representation for politically correct minorities, but what got her into trouble was more her candor than her ideas. American universities and employers routinely accept less-qualified applicants over their more-qualified competitors. In the California college system, Asian applicants with superior qualifications are often discriminated against on the grounds that Asians are overrepresented. Government employers typically give “race normal” tests, which grade minority applicants on a curve only in relation to other members of the same minority.

President Clinton's exaggerated use of the quota system to fill his cabinet was no surprise. Many liberal Democrats have not only demanded such affirmative action but have attempted to apply it to an ever-expanding category of “victims,” who now make up close to two thirds of the population.

This institutionalization of preferential treatment, with the theory of group rights it represents, undermines the basic principles
of our Constitution and a free society. It repudiates the idea of merit essential to a competitive and fair society. It often has the unintended consequence of encouraging rather than overcoming failure. It leads the beneficiaries to think of themselves as passive victims whose fate depends on others rather than on whether they seize the opportunities available to all Americans. It also epitomizes the corrosive entitlement mentality that increasingly pervades American society—one of the greatest threats to our fiscal health, our moral fiber, and our ability to renew our nation. It used to be said that some people thought the world owed them a living. Today, millions of Americans think Washington owes them one. Proponents of the welfare state assert that simply by virtue of living in the United States a person is entitled not only to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness but also to food, clothing, health care, and many other amenities of life.

Some on the right like to bash “welfare queens,” suggesting that the entitlement mentality belongs exclusively to the poor. Although it is true that the Great Society programs of the 1960s fostered a lingering sense of dependency among millions of poor Americans, it is time to tear down the double standard that characterizes most debates about this issue. The poor make convenient targets. But if middle-class and even rich Americans want to find someone to blame for the burden the entitlement mentality puts on the federal budget, they should look in the mirror. Wealthy farmers say they cannot survive without price supports. Steel makers and their unions demand protection from foreign competitors. Bankers expect the federal government to cover their bad loans. Well-off retirees whose Social Security payments far exceed their contributions oppose any politician who suggests their benefits be limited. College students believe they are entitled to low-interest loans secured by taxpayers who could not afford to go to college themselves. Lawyers, doctors, and businesspeople all want their place at the federal trough.

The entitlement mentality has been created by politicians
who promise more than government can afford and professional liberals who demand that government do that which it is not competent to do. It threatens to destroy the virtues of self-reliance, individual responsibility, initiative, and enterprise that built our country and will be indispensable in any effort to renew it. All Americans should have an equal opportunity to earn the good things of life. But except for those who are unable to do so, they are not entitled to receive those good things from the earnings of others.

There is no reason why Americans should receive Social Security, medical benefits, and other government subsidies without regard to their ability to pay. Only one dollar of every five of non-means-tested entitlement goes to the poor. If our political leadership summoned the courage to cut these programs on a means-tested basis, we would achieve substantial savings and also more fairly distribute the burden of cutting costs to middle-and upper-income taxpayers. The most serious shortcoming of the Reagan and Bush administrations was their failure to cut the level of entitlement going to those who are not poor, though it is true they received no encouragement from the Democratic opposition to cut these programs. On the contrary, the current administration has continued to fight not only to preserve the present levels of entitlement but to expand the application of this corrosive principle in new and costly ways.

America was “conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” It was also conceived as a society that would provide opportunity, reward effort, and encourage industry; in which people could go as far as their energy and skill would take them—but in which rights would be coupled with responsibilities.

The founding fathers did not consider human beings irredeemably evil or innately perfectible. Instead, they had a mixed view
of human nature, considering most individuals a composite of potential goodness and wickedness. Man's capacity for evil made restraints on absolute power and unbridled self-interest necessary. But his capacity for good made decent government possible. The founders believed that representative government presupposed a high degree of civic virtue, an insight that modern libertarians do not appreciate.

Knowing that the search for the perfect was the enemy of the good, they sought to establish the best practicable order to bring out man's best and restrain his worst instincts. Hamilton and Madison recognized the importance of self-interest and wished to harness it, rather than to suppress it, to serve the common good.

The grisly history of the twentieth century demonstrates tragically the evil that can be done by governments that try to change human nature. Zbigniew Brzezinski devastatingly describes the attempts of Nazi Germany and communism to achieve through coercion what each considered a utopia as the most arrogant effort in human history to attain control over the totality of the human environment, to define dogmatically man's social organization, and to condition the human personality. Though these attempts ultimately failed, they inflicted death on more than 160 million people through deliberate and “politically motivated carnage.”

By contrast, the American combination of hardheaded idealism and enlightened realism has built a record of world leadership, prosperity, and essential decency that no nation, past or present, can match. It has enabled us to lead abroad and achieve a remarkable degree of prosperity and social justice at home, not on the basis of narrow and selfish interests but through the appeal of high ideals and common values.

Yet even for the United States, idealism invites danger. Utopian idealism has sometimes caused our foreign policy to swing dangerously between ideological crusades and shortsighted isolationism. As the total failure of the Great Society should warn us, the utopian impulse can lead to enormously costly and counterproductive
domestic policies in pursuit of the unachievable and undesirable: a risk-free, radically egalitarian society that would ultimately extinguish man's freedom. Egalitarianism denies human nature. Compulsive risk-avoidance denies human experience. The key to success in both government and life is not risk-avoidance but risk-assessment. In determining what risks to take, we cannot be totally obsessed by what we might lose. We should always keep front and center what we might gain. We should always remember the words of St. Thomas Aquinas seven centuries ago: “If the highest aim of a captain is to preserve his ship, he would keep it in port forever.”

Idealism without realism is naïve and dangerous. Realism without idealism is cynical and meaningless. The key to effective leadership at home and abroad is a realistic idealism that succumbs to neither utopianism nor despair.

The founders profoundly believed in the importance of freedom of speech and respect for, if not agreement with, all expression of opinion. Their hope was that reasonable people would debate issues vigorously but in a spirit of openness and toleration.

Freedom of the press is essential to the vitality of representative democracy and to the protection of individual rights. It provides an indispensable arena for open debate. On good days, it can actually contribute to informing the electorate. Those of us who complain about the behavior of today's media must remember that similar complaints are as old as the republic. Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, Cleveland, Hoover, and Franklin Roosevelt all received media treatment as scathing as any in the present era. An adversarial media culture is a fact of life.