Tuesday, April 21, 1998

GOP's record refutes party's claims

By George Will

WASHINGTON - The off-year voting 20 years ago was conservatism's sunrise. In June 1978 Californians presaged the national tax revolt by passing Proposition 13, limiting property taxes. And in November five liberal Democratic senators were defeated.

Today sentient conservatives know the sun also sets. And that the future is up for grabs.

Politics today is governed by a familiar dialectic of democracy: Ascendant parties are undone by their successes, and vanquished parties are thereby revived. Future politics will be dominated by the Democratic Party's strategy for strengthening, or the Republican Party's strategy for weakening, the middle class' connection with the federal government.

The end of the Cold War disarmed Republicans, who, after the Democratic Party fractured over Vietnam, excelled at the "capture the flag" facet of politics. But although peace has been disorienting for Republicans, the Novocain of prosperity has been even more so - particularly the government's prosperity since the achievement of the Republican nirvana, a balanced budget.

With the economy generating geysers of revenues, expansion of government is painless for taxpayers. And surging revenue from constant tax rates has become cocaine for the political class, Republicans emphatically included.

As a result, Republicans enter this election season with a problem President Clinton can deepen with a stroke of his pen. Their problem is that their record after three years of controlling Congress refutes their claim to represent government retrenchment.

In a recent lecture at the Heritage Foundation, Michael Solon, executive director of the Senate Steering Committee (conservative Republicans, chaired by Phil Gramm), noted that defense spending is a smaller percentage of GDP than at any time since 1940, when America was isolationist, yet federal taxes take a higher percentage than at any time since 1945. Solon believes "the conservative Congress decided to quit pushing" last September when the Senate swatted aside, 77-23, a measure to end funding for the National Endowment for the Arts, a measure already passed by the House.

Nevertheless, one Republican strategy is exemplified by plans for substantial privatization of Social Security. The strategy is to give individuals a greater stake in the growth of the economy than in the growth of government and to convince the country that the latter is the enemy of the former.

One Democratic strategy is to multiply middle-class dependencies on government for goods ranging from medical care to college tuitions. This will multiply occasions for the political uses of fear - 30-second bursts of broadcast warnings against government withdrawal of benefits that have produced comfortable dependencies.

You might think the Republican strategy would be suited to a nation in which the number of households with annual incomes exceeding $100,000 is 7 million and rising. However, the preponderance of current evidence is that the Democratic strategy will prevail. Granted, there is ample evidence of the country's continuing embrace of conservatism, but it is a conservatism the Democratic Party cannot only live with, it can prosper under it easier than the Republican Party can.

The evidence of continuing conservatism multiplies. It ranges from resistance to tax increases, to the miniaturization of political preoccupations (today's is the tiny percentage of cigarettes sold to people under age 18), to the mounting impatience (e.g., California's 1996 vote against racial preferences and its impending vote against bilingual education) with the Great Society agenda of social engineering beyond the broad-brush New Deal agenda.

The New Deal's political architecture was political Bauhaus, the soul of simplicity compared to the rococo elaborateness of the Great Society. The New Deal agenda was spare because it was targeted at the American majority, which was presumed to be needy but healthy.

Much of liberalism's agenda since the Great Society has been targeted at minorities presumed to be needy because they are, in some ways, socially unhealthy. They are thought to be suffering from social deficits and pathologies the cure of which is the vocation of liberalism's infantry, the "caring professions."

The New Deal agenda was full employment and social insurance. And that, with social insurance broadly defined to include medical care and education, is Clinton's core agenda.

The Democratic recipe for expansion of government and dependency is to identify a value (education, health, art, the environment, "kids," whatever), devise a spending program identified with that value, and dare Republicans to cast a vote against it. That is not a daring dare.

Washington Post Writers Group