We Can All Do Better (15 page)

Many of our great historical American achievements—among them the Lewis and Clark expedition, the Interstate Highway System, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the reclamation of our arid West, the oversight of our public lands, the mapping of America's mineral wealth, the breakthroughs at the National Institutes of Health, the effectiveness of our law enforcement, and the honest collection of our taxes—are examples of government workers acting on our behalf. But the present financial crisis and its destructive ramifications—depressed housing prices, stagnant wages, high unemployment—have been brought to us by people who want
no
government involvement in our lives and by those Democrats who collaborated with them in breaking down the basic government safeguards that FDR set in place during the Great Depression, the repeal of Glass–Steagall being the signal example. The irony is that, as linguistics professor George Lakoff of the University of California at Berkeley has pointed out, government controls very little of our daily lives.
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In the United States, it is the private sector that determines which doctors we can see, what food we eat, the news that gets to us, the loans for our homes. The private sector, with its dynamism and innovation, plays
a necessary role in our society—but not a sufficient one. You need a way to “do together what we cannot do as well for ourselves,” and only government is large enough to meet that need.

We need one another now more than ever before. The wealthy have to see, as many do, that their luxury is irrelevant in a world where schools don't work, roads and bridges deteriorate, and more and more people lose faith in the American dream. Yet simply raising taxes on the wealthy (which should be done) will not solve our problems; government, too, needs to be accountable for results in its management of the public trust. Those who believe that government can do great things must ensure that it functions effectively. People need to have confidence that their tax dollars are not being wasted. In an attempt to micromanage government, Congress burdens it with so many narrow reporting requirements from so many committees that fulfilling them leaves little time left to do the important work of running the operations of government. At the same time, the Congress does very little effective oversight of how a particular program measures up against its broadly stated goals. Instead of passing a new budget, Congress simply extends the previous budget for a few months, weeks or days. “Just kick the can down the road” too often becomes the mantra.

Government reorganization is not always reform. It is often an excuse for not doing reform. There should be more government mediation and fewer government lawsuits. Allowing the bureaucracy greater flexibility in means and greater responsibility for results is essential. Otherwise government employees become simply box-checkers trying to cover their behinds and keep their jobs while the problems remain unsolved. Such behavior will not accomplish the necessary things that only government can do for all of us.

Sometimes the bureaucratic rules are in conflict or incomplete. For example, the budget might allow for new computers from approved
vendors but not for new software that will allow the computers to perform as they are intended to. No one sees the whole picture. Instead, government agencies have little communication with one another. (Think of the FBI and the CIA right before 9/11.) The reform of governmental information systems is critical to a more effective government. Yet the daunting costs of doing so are further complicated by arcane purchasing rules that create interminable delays and often prompt vendors to enlist the help of members of the club. A cold mountain stream needs to roll through the federal bureaucracy and the halls of Congress so that government can be revitalized for the twenty-first century.

Can we all do better?

T
he United States, from its inception, has been ambivalent about its role in the world. Protected behind two oceans since the mid-nineteenth century, and continental in size, it has long enjoyed an inherent security. Europe, Africa, and Asia have suffered wars on their own territory. For the United States since the mid-nineteenth century, war was, in the words of the popular World War I song, always “over there.”

From our nation's beginning, as Arthur M. Schlesinger emphasized in the examples below from his
The Cycles of American History
, there was a question about how much we should involve ourselves in the affairs of other nations. Thomas Jefferson, in his first inaugural
address, warned his countrymen against “entangling alliances.” John Quincy Adams, in his July 4 address to the House of Representatives in 1821, went further than Jefferson. He said of America,

Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions, and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will commend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example. She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force. . . . She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.

In 1847, the venerable statesman Albert Gallatin wrote, in a pamphlet entitled
Peace with Mexico
, that America's mission was “to be a model for all other governments and for all other less-favored nations; to adhere to the most elevated principles of political morality; to apply all your faculties to the gradual improvement of your own institutions and social state; and by your example to exert a moral influence most beneficial to mankind at large.”

Henry Clay, in a debate on a Senate resolution condemning Austria for its suppression of the 1848 revolution in Hungary, argued that the resolution made judgments about foreign nations:

as their conduct may be found to correspond with our notion and judgment of what is right and proper in the administration of human affairs [and assumes] the right of interference in the internal affairs of foreign nations. . . . But where is to be the limit? . . . Where, again I ask, are we to stop? Why should we not interfere in behalf of suffering Ireland? Why not interfere in behalf of suffering humanity wherever we may find it?

Clay warned against opening “a new field of collision, terminating perhaps in war, and exposing ourselves to the reaction of foreign Powers, who, when they see us assuming to judge of their conduct, will undertake in their turn to judge of our conduct.” Some twenty years later, President Ulysses S. Grant, soon after assuming office, noted that although America identified “with all people struggling for liberty . . . it is due to our honor that we should abstain from enforcing our views upon unwilling nations and from taking an interested part, without invitation, in the quarrels . . . between governments and their subjects.”

For much of the nineteenth century, America concentrated on building our own nation—settling the West, dealing with the conflict over slavery, developing our natural resources, growing our economy, perfecting our system of government. There were brief, violent nationalistic episodes, such as the wars against Mexico, Spain, and the Philippines, but by and large we stayed out of foreign conflicts. We were not lured into the intrigues of Europe, and we successfully blocked other nations from intervening in the affairs of our hemisphere.

Nevertheless, a conflicting belief intensified in the early twentieth century: namely, that American foreign policy should be rooted in ideals, not national interest alone. Immigrants who had fled their
home countries for America had begun urging the United States government to take action against those countries. Didn't the Declaration of Independence express universal values such as human rights? Shouldn't we champion those human rights everywhere? Ethnic lobbies brought the horrors taking place in the old country to the attention of their congressmen and demanded action. The sense that America was special in the world and had a unique mission had been a part of our hearts from the beginning; now that feeling morphed into condemning other countries for the way they governed their people and calling on the United States to change their behavior. These exigent pleas prompted Teddy Roosevelt, the Rough Rider and no stranger to the use of military power, to warn Congress in 1904 that we should be careful about using force abroad:

Ordinarily it is very much wiser and more useful for us to concern ourselves with striving for our own moral and material betterment here at home than to concern ourselves with trying to better the condition of things in other nations. We have plenty of sins of our own to war against, and under ordinary circumstances we can do more for the general uplifting of humanity by striving with heart and soul to put a stop to civic corruption, to brutal lawlessness and violent race prejudices here at home than by passing resolutions about wrongdoing elsewhere.

For congressmen intent on pleasing their constituents, you could have your cake and eat it too. You could advocate U.S. involvement—on behalf of the Irish, the Armenians in Turkey, the Jews in Russia, Eastern Europe, and the Near East—and know that the president was not about to involve the United States in those distant places. No sons of your immigrant constituents would die for the home country.
Passing a resolution was easy. Doing something about a particular atrocity was more problematic. Ought we to apply our standards to all other countries? To a few? Were human rights to be defended only in service of the national interest, or was the pursuit of human rights an absolute guide to foreign policy?

Woodrow Wilson's worldview was colored by his Christian morality. As a skilled student of government and an admirer of the British parliamentary system, Wilson believed to his very core in the virtue and “sacred mystery” of democracy. When he became president in 1913, he had had very little experience in foreign policy. After a campaign that was almost exclusively about domestic policy, he remarked that it would be ironic if his administration were to be consumed by events outside the United States. Yet, he was possessed of a kind of democratic messianism, determined that America would relate to the world as a moral force.

China had created a more representative government in 1912 after the fall of the emperor, and Wilson made sure that the United States was the first major power to recognize it. Soon afterward, China degenerated into despotism. When President Francisco Madero of Mexico was assassinated by troops loyal to the usurper Victoriano Huerta, Wilson recalled the U.S. ambassador, froze Mexican government funds in the United States, and, after a short wait, used American military power to depose the dictator Huerta in favor of the constitutionalist Venustiano Carranza. Not long afterward, Carranza turned virulently anti-American, and when Wilson sent General John J. Pershing and his troops into Mexico in pursuit of Pancho Villa, a Mexican revolutionary who had shot up the U.S. border town of Columbus, New Mexico, he guaranteed Mexican hostility for several generations.

Wilson looked at European politics with disdain, deeming it selfish power politics at its worst. During the early years of World War I, he maintained U.S. neutrality and ran for re-election in 1916 as the
man who “kept us out of war.” As the war dragged on, Wilson used diplomacy in an attempt to get the belligerents to the table. He wanted a negotiated settlement and proposed a lasting peace that recognized the rights of small nations and guaranteed freedom of the seas and self-determination for subjugated peoples. The Germans rejected his proposal. Wilson was shocked. On April 2, 1917, he went before Congress and asked for a declaration of war against Germany, announcing, “The world must be made safe for democracy.”

As the war proceeded, Wilson's rhetoric intensified. In a sweeping statement, he said that the war aimed to bring “destruction of every arbitrary power anywhere that can . . . disturb the peace of the world.” Otherwise, “Everything that America has lived for and loved and grown great to vindicate . . . will have fallen in utter ruin. . . . Force, force to the utmost, force without stint or limit, the righteous and triumphant force shall make right the law of the world and cast every selfish dominion down in the dust.”
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Two million American troops turned the tide for the Allies, and the Germans finally sued for peace. The nation was jubilant. At Versailles, Wilson's ambitions were enormous. He wanted to change the structure of international relations so that the power politics that had, from his perspective, led to the war would forever be subsumed under the functioning of a kind of world government embodied in a League of Nations. Wilson's counterparts from Britain, France, and Italy had different ideas. They were interested in reaping the spoils of victory and ensuring with draconian measures that Germany would never again be able to go to war. Wilson's dream of the League floundered, as had his earlier policies in China and Mexico. When the United States' participation in the League of Nations was voted down in the Senate, Wilson left office a sick and dispirited man. He had raised the hopes of millions with his rhetoric of democracy. The League's eventual failure raised the question of whether his ideas had been workable or advisable. Senator Henry
Cabot Lodge, for one, had persisted in asking how the League's purposes would be enforced.