My Examiner column today takes off from the observation by Arnold Kling in his new book Unchecked and Unbalanced, that “knowledge is becoming more specialized and dispersed, while government power is becoming more concentrated.” Kling argues that this causes government to “become less satisfying to individuals,” from which observation I proceed examine the negative reaction of the American public to Democratic health care and cap-and-trade legislation.
I was pleased to see that in the latest issue of Democracy, newly edited by Michael Tomasky and featuring articles by several thoughtful liberals, my very favorite liberal thinker, William Galston, commenting on E. J. Dionne’s review of Alan Wolfe’s book and describing the current plight of American liberalism, advances arguments that are similar to Kling’s. Here are some illuminating excerpts, but you should really read the whole thing.
“This is the central conundrum of modern liberal governance: While state power has grown, America’s anti-statist public culture has persisted. Our national default setting, from which we deviate only under extreme pressure, is suspicion of state power.”
“In a recent NPR/Kaiser Family Foundation/Harvard School of Public Health survey probing public attitudes on health reform, for example, 71 percent of respondents said that Congress listens too little to ‘people like me,’ and only a third thought that there was any group in Washington that ‘represents your own views on what’s best for the country.’ This sense of diminished influence strengthens the suspicion that remote centers of power are controlling events over the head and out of sight of the people.”
“The liberal regard for reason–and its professional expression, expertise–can also shade over into a self-undermining rationalism. You don’t have to travel all the way down Hayek’s road to acknowledge centralized power’s modest ability to aggregate information in the service of policies whose consequences cannot be anticipated. Liberal governance is stronger when liberal leaders don’t claim to control more than they really can.”
Galston also had a post yesterday on his New Republic blog, with specific recommendations for the Obama administration’s program next year. Key graf:
“Second, the legislative agenda for 2010 must reflect and reinforce the renewed focus on job creation. That means postponing items that the American people are bound to regard as diversionary as long as unemployment remains high. While action on items such as climate change and immigration is worthy in principle, the time is not right. If the president and congressional leaders try to force the pace, they are likely to fail—and pay a heavy political price in November.”
