A few Raspberry Patch followers have recommended that I say something about my own political views, if only as an orienting courtesy for readers. I resisted this idea at first, since I look askance at the common practice of boxing writers into categories and prejudging their work, without even having to read it, accordingly. “I don’t want to be put in someone else’s box schema. Let them figure me out on their own; the process might do them some good,” I replied to one friend. I still think that’s a sound conclusion.
But I relent in hopes that my saying something about this will actually defy the boxing instinct, and perhaps even persuade a few readers to give up the practice altogether. That practice is of course a spinoff, most of the time, of ideological thinking, and ideological thinking, as I define it, is problematic. As I define it— close to how Karl Mannheim defined it in his seminal Ideology and Utopia, but not the way Clifford Geertz defined it more broadly usefully for some purposes as a “cultural system”—ideological thinking always involves a leap beyond both complexity and experience. It is abstract, usually emotionalized, and time-economical because it often relies on either/or forms of para-logic. But what ideological thinking provides by way of group morale and congealment, and personal commitment to a cause larger than oneself, comes at a price: the discounting of complexity, patience, humility, tolerance, and usually objectivity. If an ideological thinker can label someone and place that person into a box, then whatever views may be expressed can be summarily accepted or rejected, and hence applauded or ridiculed, in a trice. How convenient, but also how foolish.
As with most people, my politics arose out of a context I had no agency over. I was born in Washington, D.C. under what I like to call the Truman Constellation, and grew up for the most part in Northern Virginia. When I was a boy in the Fifties my father, born also in Washington in January1905 as a first-generation native American, was a member of the Teamsters Union, working at Sealtest Dairy. Needless to say, I think, at a time when country-club anti-Semitism and pervasive garden-variety racial bigotry in a still-segregated state—before at the earliest around 1960-61—joined together to form a nasty political broth supped by both Democrats and Republicans, a person, a family, needed some other way to define a political brand loyalty. For us that was the union, which traced back in the extended family to a positive feeling about the FDR coalition and the New Deal. So the house voted Democratic and, more pointedly, I can remember vividly sitting in the living room watching the first Kennedy-Nixon debate on our little black-and-white television set--I was nine years old in 1960 when that debate was aired live--and my father pointing at Richard Nixon on the screen and telling me that this was not a man who could be trusted.
That was my first lesson in practical politics: Integrity was more important in a leader than competence, and competence at getting things done was more important than words, speeches, promises, and all the rest. I doubt my father knew H.L. Mencken quotes to bring to bear, since he never made it past 5th grade, but he would have approved this one: “Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.” Edward Bennett Williams, super-lawyer and sports-team owner, later put it a bit differently: “Politics is the art of getting votes from the poor and money from the rich by promising to protect each from the other.” The gist is the same: Politicians’ words, especially the ones uttered in public, generally are not to be taken too seriously, so look to their character as illustrated by their deeds in order to distinguish the few true patriots from the mass of opportunistic transactionalists. Good lesson; I hold to it still.
I remained a Democrat from the time I turned 18 and could vote in June 1969 until the autumn of 1991. I wore black armband to school—Yorktown High School—the day after Nixon won the November 1968 election. The very Republican librarian scolded me. I think time proved my point, assuming she lived through to Nixon’s well-deserved disgrace. I stuck with the Dems reluctantly even during the McGovern fiasco, despite the fact that my study of security and foreign policy was leading me to a different view than that which the McGovernite wing of the party endorsed. In 1972 I even indulged the heresy of slapping a “Levon Helm for President” sticker on the bumper of my 1966 Impala.
I was becoming a hawkishly inclined Democrat with center-left views on political economy, trade, environment, and racial justice. Not very box-worthy, but I was hardly alone; plenty of what were then called varyingly Truman/Kennedy/Humphrey Democrats still existed. So it never occurred to me to switch parties, not least since I could not abide hidebound Republican domestic political values and policy views despite finding some common ground with then-mainstream Republican internationalism. So when I got a first chance to work for someone on Capitol Hill, in the spring of 1977 when I was still in graduate school, I was thrilled that it was for a Democratic Senator with a 100% ADA (Americans for Democratic Action) rating: Henry “Scoop” Jackson.
I was not a regular staff member for Scoop during that first short stint. I was seconded from my think-tank office in Philadelphia to help with a project that wanted some extra hands: namely, taking issue with the wisdom of President Carter’s nomination of Paul Warnke to be ACDA Director and chief arms control negotiator with the Soviet Union looking toward a SALT II agreement.
Some time passed, a treaty was indeed negotiated, it did reflect more than not Warnke’s views. I was asked to return to Scoop’s service, for a somewhat longer stint this time, for the summer/fall 1979 Hearings on the treaty. Thanks to Scoop’s chief-of-staff, the redoubtable Dorothy Fosdick, and his chief legislative assistant Richard Perle, I got permission to label myself a “special assistant”--my first ever title. I helped craft questions for the Hearings in both the Foreign Relations and Armed Services Committees. The result of the Hearings was that the treaty was not going to get ratified without either some amendment within the four corners of the document or some qualifications about, for example, future U.S. defense budget levels, outside of it, or both…..when, on December 25, 1979 the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan and the Carter Administration, knowing full well from its designated head-counter Alan Cranston that it didn’t have the votes to ratify the treaty, used the Soviet invasion as a pretext to withdraw the treaty from Senate consideration. Some people still think the Carter Administration’s real reason for withdrawing the treaty was umbrage over the Soviet invasion.
I learned from this experience that parsing important issues could and often did create partnerships across the aisle—Nunn and Moynihan were Democrats along with Jackson, while Tower and Baker were Republicans. I learned too that ideas and schemes both are a dime a dozen while actually getting any one of them implemented in the rough and tumble of politics can be excruciatingly difficult. It probably takes personal engagement in politics at some level or other to learn this lesson, and it is unfortunately a lesson that most academics who write on politics from a studied distance never really learn.
I also learned to have great respect for Sam Nunn and his staff; indeed, my desk and not only mine was located downstairs in a space in the Russell Senate Office Building that Nunn “owned” but lent to Scoop for the purpose. And that is why when, in 1991, Senator Nunn refused to support to use of force to liberate Kuwait from Iraqi aggression in hopes of giving sanctions more time to work, he said, I finally could not take it anymore. Scoop had been gone since September 1983, and Sam Nunn, many of us felt, was his ablest successor. So when he did something that un-Scoop-like I reached into my wallet, took out my little Democratic Party card, and tore it to pieces. Thus I became an independent, telling myself that I did not leave the Democratic Party so much as it left me. Joining the GOP never occurred to me. My father also passed away in 1983 just a few months after Scoop, and I knew that if I ever registered as a Republican my father would send Jimmy Hoffa’s entire ghostly security detail after my sorry ass. I wasn’t up for that, and so an independent I’ve remained ever since.
The story of my political associations since 1991 are easily told. As the two major parties increasingly became idea-free, brain-dead associations of plutocratically beholden mendicants, I was hardly inclined to join or re-join either one. I don’t think I voted for any major-party presidential candidate, or if I did it was only a lesser-evil motivated vote. I might have voted for Bill Clinton in 1992—can’t remember, to be honest—but in 1996 I wrote in Bob Dylan, since I wanted to hear the State of the Union Address sung instead of merely spoken. In the 2000 election I wrote in Colin Powell, and that was before I had ever met the man I later worked for.
After the 2008-9 Great Recession, I began to get seriously worried about the hollowness of the American duopolistic political elite and, the Cold War over and won, I invested more time reading and thinking about domestic policy and politics than I had since grad school days. In 2008, just for fun and to force myself to hone my own thinking, I decided to run for President myself and so once decided I had to create a platform, right? And if I had a platform I had to create a name for my party, right? I called it “The If You Want to Get Something Done, Get Up and Do It Yourself Party.” Catchy, huh?
I few years on I elaborated my platform into a small book called Broken: American Political Dysfunction How to Fix It. It was published online-only as an American Interest E-Book in March 2013—as a free-gift-to-subscribers adjunct to the magazine, The American Interest, of which I was founding editor. That led in due course to my joining the New Whig Party in 2016. The Whigs then merged with a few other small parties at a Colorado meeting in October 2018 to form The Alliance Party. I tried to make myself useful to the party leadership as both policy director and communications/media advisor. In the end The Alliance Party failed to gain any significant traction and soon threw itself into the arms of a guy named Rocky De La Fuente because he had some money….. But he didn’t have a whole lot of anything else, and all my policy work and branding language ended up being tossed out like yesterday’s pizza-parlor paper menu.
So what you have here below are two artifacts from my futile Third Party sojourn. The first, entitled “Practical Governance versus Ideological Governance: What Would Henry Clay Do?” dates from some time in 2016. It might have appeared in an electronic-only Whig publication called The National Gazette. It’s not findable anymore, however, and I didn’t save any publication information at the time, so I don’t for sure know if it ever appeared or not. Surely, no one cares anymore if I use it here eight years later.
Try to remember as you’re reading this that it’s 2016, before most people credited even the possibility that someone like Donald Trump could get elected President. It was at a time when most Republicans were still living in the real world, more or less. It was before the attempted coup of January 6, 2021, the failure of a peaceful transfer of power in our liberal democracy, and before the person willfully responsible for both is again the presumptive GOP candidate for President. In 2016 I did not foresee how much worse things would be in 2024. I don’t think hardly anyone did. Reading “back” from March 2024 to March 2016 makes for an interesting exercise in perspective building.
The second artifact is mostly outline bullets and labels, not prose except for the “branding” introduction. It’s the Policy Workshop design I created in January 2019 that, had it ever been seriously engaged, was supposed to lead The Alliance Party to its national 2020 election platform, whether in conjunction, possibly, with SAM (Serve America Movement) or not. That never happened, but the document—succinct nearly to the point of cryptic, thanks in part to all the acronyms, for those not used to working on domestic policy issues—still gives a sense of the array of domestic policy issues a serious party would need to think through in order to shape a policy character. Some of the items in the outline have been overtaken by events, in one case wonderfully so: A February 2019 9-0 SCOTUS decision banned the asset forfeiture outrages of police departments, even though for a reason I have never understood they cited the wrong, or the weaker, constitutional basis for the decision. But most of the policy challenges that could be identified in this planning document more than five years ago remain untouched.
After the Alliance Party crashed and burned the Whigs reformed into the Modern Whig Institute (MWI, as a 501C3 organization run by a fine fellow named Kevin J. Rogers. I then changed the name of the Policy Workshop and gave it to the MWI for whatever use might be made of it. That has turned out to be none.
I never expected consensus on all the buckets in the outline when The Alliance Party was trying to find its footing, but as I explained to the party leadership, it was the process that mattered more than the outcome. Alas, very few of the Alliance Party leaders—none, actually—had any professional experience at the Federal level, and nearly all of their energy was devoted to raising money and parsing ballot access issues. When I escorted the party chairman around Capitol Hill, and arranged a meeting for him with Senator Sasse in his office, he looked like a wide-eyed boy at a carnival—it was all new and awe-inspiring to him, as though he were a typical Cherry Blossom Festival tourist from Lord-knows-where. (He was in fact from Texas.) These leaders were consumed by the “how” to the point that they barely gave thought to the “why.” When they surrendered to Mr. De La Fuente, I lost interest. All I have to remind me of my work for the ill-fated Alliance Party—all gratis, in case you’re wondering—is this Policy Workshop document. If anyone out that finds it useful, wonderful. Really.
Practical Governance versus Ideological Governance: What Would Henry Clay Do?
I’ve been a member of the Modern Whig Party for only a few weeks, but I’ve been thinking like a Whig for many decades, long before the MWP was formed. And one of the reasons comes down to my unstinting admiration for Henry Clay, both as a Congressman and as a Secretary of State.
I admired Clay many years ago when I served briefly as an aide to Senator Henry M. Jackson (D, WA) and I still admired him more than twenty years later when I worked for Colin Powell when he served as a Republican Secretary of State. And the reason was the same: Both in the Legislative and in the Executive Branch, Clay put outcomes before theory, results before abstractions, just as my boss-mentors did in comparable positions of authority. Clay knew that the way to better outcomes was a willingness to compromise, and to act in a civil manner as part of persuading others to do the same.
Now, the standard line today goes that politics in Washington is dysfunctional because politicians are too ideologically minded—Tea Party, market-fundamentalist “small government” types on the Right, and identity politics, statist-prone social authoritarians on the Left—and refuse to compromise. So because of the outsized power of ideologized party activists in raising money and dominating primaries, we end up with a political class more interested in posturing than governing, and so have debilitating gridlock as a result.
There’s some truth in this depiction but things are not as simple as the standard line suggests: Ideological conviction is not always a bad thing; ideological politics do not necessarily cause gridlock; and gridlock isn’t the only or even the main source of our dysfunctional politics. If we Whigs are going to argue for a practical as against an ideological style of governance, we had better do it from a more rather than less informed and sophisticated point of view.
First of all, let’s remember that the man who once said, on February 7, 1839 to be specific, “I had rather be right than be President” was none other than Henry Clay—and you can search high and low for a more ideological statement than that and never find it. What was the subject about which he insisted he was right? Slavery. Clay was for gradual abolition despite the fact that he owned slaves himself; a fellow Kentucky politician told him he would never be elected President if he stuck to his abolitionist stance. That man turned out to be correct; otherwise Clay probably would have won the very close election of 1844. Had he won, a terrible Civil War might have been averted and slavery soon abolished anyway in a far more orderly and civil fashion than it was. Ah, but we all know about the tease of the counterfactual.
Clay understood moral ambiguity and being stuck in a hard place because of it. We can learn two important insights from Clay’s circumstances and his statement: There is nothing contradictory about pragmatism in the service of a high and unshakable principle; and true ideological politics is usually less about policy divergences than about rigid personalities. Let’s look a little closer at these points.
It is possible (indeed, it happens all the time) that a politician feels too strongly to compromise over a particular issue—say immigration, or healthcare reform, or any of the culture war issues—but he (or she) will logroll and horsetrade on a range issues still important but less dear in order to get his way on what he cares about most. So being ideologically committed to some cause does not necessarily prevent compromise on a wide range of significant policy issues.
Clay is the best example of the point. He knew slavery was wrong and he refused to compromise on it as a matter of principle. But he also knew that polarization over the issue, embedded so deeply in the country’s history and economy, might cause a catastrophic civil war, and so he tried as hard as he could to wheel and deal on a whole range of policy areas to head it off. He did that successfully for a good long while, but the maneuvering he had to do toward that end got nearly everyone so upset at him that he failed to win the 1840 Whig Party nomination for President. He put outcomes for the public good ahead of his own personal ambitions. He was, in other words, patriotic in the very best and essential meaning of the word, and he paid a price for it.
Clay died in 1852 at the age of 75, and it was later said by many that had there been someone as skillful and determined as Clay in the Senate in 1859-60 the Civil War might have been averted. That’s a counterfactual so we’ll never know, but I doubt it’s true because by 1859-60 policies had stopped being the real bones of contention as American politics descended a the hell of moral umbrage. Real ideological politics—then and now—is about personal animosity harnessed to political gamesmanship. And it’s an animosity that usually grows out of the casual importation of religious categories and logic into politics, where they don’t belong—of which more below.
When that happens it’s not that the “other guy” is wrong on such and such an issue; it’s that the other guy is evil, and his party is evil, too. An ideological politician opposes others not because of policy differences but because of intrinsic moral judgments, and when politics takes on that ugly hue any tactic to gain political advantage and deny it to the other side becomes permissible, no matter how harmful to the public weal or how uncivil it is.
We’ve reached the point in the United States now where this sort of polarization is having massive social implications: Some highly ideologized people won’t let their kids even date, let alone marry, someone of the opposite political persuasion; and many insist on living around and socializing only with people of their own political school of what passes for thought. This is dangerously neurotic in a way that transcends politics thought of as policy-centered. Indeed, the one good thing about the present, slightly deranged presidential campaign is that the pocketbook populism of Left and Right is putting a well-deserved dent in this elitist nuttiness.
On the other hand, flipping the standard complaint on its head, it’s just not true that ideological politics necessarily causes gridlock. Looking at the data, it turns out that passing legislation on many issues depends mainly on there being enough safe seats in the House of Representatives to allow for some effective triangulation. Congressmen with safe seats, for whatever reasons good or bad—from gerrymandering to earned popularity—can stray from a narrow party line to do business across the aisle without undue fear of being thrown out of office. And it doesn’t matter how polarized politics are in general for that dynamic to work, particularly on issues with a relatively low moral unction profile.
Now, maybe we don’t like the fact that there are too many safe seats and too many essentially one-party districts, where whosoever wins the primary is assured of winning election. Maybe we don’t like the lack of party discipline that allows such triangulating freelancing. And maybe we don’t like the unfair advantages of tenure, especially in raising money for campaigns, in Congressmen keeping their seats. Be all that as it may, it’s those safe seats in large enough numbers that fob off acute gridlock.
Moreover, insofar as we have gridlock it’s not caused just by ideological polarization. It’s also caused by a deficit of effective leadership, both in the Executive Branch and in Congress. An example of the former: After the recent revelations of the Panama Papers about the outrages of the offshore tax-evading “shell” economy, the Obama Administration snapped into highly inadequate action, but action just the same. Yet it did so seven years too late. Obama had co-sponsored legislation on this subject as a Senator with Norm Coleman, and Carl Levin championed this cause consistently after Obama entered the White House….where the new President promptly forgot about it. If we’d had adequate leadership during the first seven years of the Obama presidency on this issue, we’d be way further ahead in dealing with it than we are now. Here we suffered not from gridlock in the Congress so much as obliviousness in the Oval Office.
And to complicate matters just a bit more—but usefully so—the problems we have are not just on account of gridlock, whatever its sources. Many of our problems turn on the fact that we don’t plan well anymore as a political culture. That’s partly a generational phenomenon, and the addiction to short-termism of course affects more than politics. But it also has a lot to do with the fact that the structure of government has become significantly misaligned with a changing reality driven by innovations in science and technology. Infrastructure deficiencies serve as a good example.
We have underinvested in infrastructure for many years, true. But the real reason things are so screwed up is that we have no convening platform at any level of government to take advantage of potential new synergies in different infrastructure systems. Information technology makes it possible now to get smart infrastructure solutions by combining energy, transportation, sanitation, and communications elements into a better integrated system that is more than the sum of its parts, but instead we are trying to patch together stovepiped legacy systems at ever-diminishing returns on the dollar. A lack of leadership in government design has left us with no way to bring together the various constituencies and experts to get the job done right. Most regrettably, we’ve not had a President who really understood the relationship between government design and policy outcomes since Dwight Eisenhower—and that, folks, was a long time ago. But this has nothing to do with ideological politics.
We do have highly ideological and polarized politics in the United States right now, and some amount of policy stasis can be attributed to it even though the sources of our problems go far beyond that. But it’s not for the first time that American politics have been uncivil and seemingly dysfunctional on account of it. Recall the situation between the Federalists and the Democrats over the Alien and Sedition Act and the election of 1800; those were very nasty political times. And of course we can also look at the highly ideologized and polarized situation over slavery and related economic disagreements that led to the Civil War via Bloody Kansas—and that destroyed the original American Whig Party. The fact that these periods come and go in our history ought to make us curious as to why that is, so that maybe we Whigs can get a leg up on understanding the situation better than our competitors.
This is no place for a long analysis, to be sure. But consider that the period leading up to the Civil War was one that saw both the democratization of religious authority thanks in part to the Methodist circuit riders, and sharp increases in literacy, particular female literacy. The capacity and penchant for abstract moral reasoning moved from the pulpit to the pew and thence to politics via, for example, both the abolitionist and the temperance movements, which were both dominated by women.
The combination infused political rhetoric with highly moralistic and abstract language that had been far scarcer in earlier times. It ended up precipitating a war, in which the Northern anthem contained this truly terrifying, telltale line written by Julia Ward Howe: “As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free; His truth is marching on.” Clay, the son of a Baptist minister, was religious too, but he disparaged zealots of all kind and would have been appalled by such language had he lived long enough to hear it. He knew how to keep his faith and his politics separate, but a decade after the Compromise of 1850 that kind of prudence was no longer much in evidence.
Similarly today we have a vastly more educated population, just measured by the percentage of the electorate with a four-year college degree, and we also have a new insinuation of religious energies into policies. I refer not to Evangelicals only or even mainly, but to voters who are devoutly dedicated to various causes—radical undifferentiated egalitarianism, especially expressed as a gender proposition; environmentalism, especially focused on climate change; and a few others we can all think of—without realizing that the energies they are summoning are basically religious in character. Americans are a very religious people, always have been; the fact that so many people think that lacking an established church makes us secular in any deep way is really quite hilarious when you think about it. Many, perhaps most, of our ideological faultlines today are really holdover theological faultlines in drag.
When a new dollop of education, however half-baked it may be, meets the intrusion of religious modes of thought into politics, we get the sort of passion-play politics we are seeing today. I’ve long believed that this is what Mark Twain really meant when he wrote in “The Facts Concerning My Recent Resignation” that “soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run,” because both have the capacity to obscure common sense in a fog of high-minded stupidity. A little education can indeed be a dangerous thing.
The lesson for Whigs who esteem Henry Clay is clear, and it’s a lesson the Founders understood very well, indeed: Democratic politics in a nation that is heterogeneous in creed requires segregating the obligations of faith—however defined, traditional or postmodern—from the quotidian obligations of citizenship. We need to turn down the abstraction volume that is deafening our public discourse so that we may tend to the critical business that a process-oriented liberalism is capable of handling. If instead we festoon our politics with the rigid but opposing moral demands of true believers, such as those characteristic of our culture wars at their shrieking worst, we will not necessarily have all-encompassing gridlock, but we will further deplete our nation’s reservoir of social trust and thus invite a corrosive cynicism into our public life. In the long run, that is far more dangerous to the American future than policy gridlock.
THE WHIG POLICY WORKSHOP
“FOR UNITY, COMMUNITY, RESPONSIBILITY”
Whigs are not afraid of ideas. We relish open debate and welcome an environment in which argument is conducted in the spirit of reaching a common goal, and through it building a better future for all Americans. We invite a spirit of constructive engagement within our ranks and between Party members and the wider American public. To that end, we present here The Whig Policy Workshop [WPW].
The contents of the WPW do not represent settled consensus on policy issues among Whigs. This is not a “platform.” Rather, the Workshop is just that: a place where useful things—in this case practical policy ideas—are in process of being built through common effort. We do not insist that our members or our candidates tow some abstract ideological party line. We are pragmatic centrists with a problem-solving orientation, and given the great diversity of our nation we expect and invite differences of view. Struggling with differences makes us wiser; as Proverbs (27:17) says, “Iron sharpens iron; men sharpen men.”
We are in agreement, however, on a basic philosophy of government, which we express with just three words: unity, community, and responsibility.
Unity: Whigs are dedicated to the principle of E Pluribus Unum, so we will never, like current Republicans, deliberately divide Americans and sow fear and hatred by stigmatizing immigrants, blacks, Muslims, or any group; and we will never, like current Democrats, indulge in “identity politics” blame-game victimization stratagems. We reject all forms of bigotry and artificial exclusion, affirm without reservation the primacy of conscience and free speech as integral to human dignity, and believe we are all Americans first, political partisans second.
Community: We believe in the primacy of local politics—in other words, subsidiarity. We believe the Federal system has become unbalanced toward the center, and that we need to return as appropriate resources and decision authority to the states and to localities in order to foster levels of democratic participation that can justify and fulfill the Founders’ vision. While key functions of the Federal government remain critical to national security and wellbeing, we believe government should better support what Burke called the “little platoons” of social life, and so live up to what Jefferson called “ward democracy.” Our communities are under tremendous stress at a time of massive and rapid change; it is central to the Whig mission to support, strengthen, and, as necessary, help build them anew.
Responsibility: Citizens of a democracy have a civic duty to participate in maintaining a decent social and political order. We hear much talk of rights, but rights are meaningless without responsibilities—what the Founders called republican virtue. Symptomatic of the crisis of participation we face, many Americans have come to assume that the government grants people rights, as it grants some monetary benefits. But the premise of the Constitution is that sovereignty resides with the people; the people therefore grant rights to government, not the other way around. But for the American form of ordered liberty to thrive, citizens must engage in efforts to realize common goals. That means not just voting every once in a while, but actively working together on behalf of the common weal—whether by volunteering to mentor the young or to care for the old, being mindful stewards of the land, or investing resources in a better future.
Just as there are proverbially many ways to skin a cat, there are also many ways to put a philosophy of government into action. The deeper we dive into specific policy zones the more complex and technical problems and options often become. Differences of view are thus natural, and such differences exist within the WPW.
We present the domestic policy landscape divided into two main categories: below political line-of-sight institutions, which form the social bedrock of who we are as a nation; and the above line-of-sight political institutions whose names or labels we all recognize. Within each category are 13 policy domains that, taken together, cover most of the active domestic policy landscape. Government policy at all levels affects both its own institutions and the sinews of the underlying social order, so some overlap is inevitable. Some policy proposals presented in the WPW are therefore cross-referenced.
Ambitions for policy reform in the proposals put forth come in various sizes—huge, merely large, medium, and small. That is appropriate, for our challenges come in different sizes, as well. Each is presented in a four-part tiered fashion so that readers can get the gist of an idea quickly, and then linger on detail if they wish.
The WPW is also interactive, within limits. Anyone wishing to offer a critique of a policy idea or pose a question about it can submit it to the chairman of the relevant policy domain; the chairman will approve and post at his or her discretion. Whigs put a premium on substantive and informed engagement; we will not indulge uncivil or ad hominem language in the WPW. For those who prefer that sort of language, there are other parties, regrettably, that excel at it these days.
WPW Index
I. Below Political Line-of-Sight Institutions
A. Legal/Justice system
a. bureaucratic-administrative reform: overlawyering vs. common sense
b. reverse the militarization of the police
c. end asset forfeiture abuses/4th Amendment violations
d. sane gun control lows, focused on the states
e. modernize patent and copyright laws for IT age
f. drug laws reform issues; no legalization without dedicated taxation to relieve the externalities of legalization
g. privilege jury trials to out-of-court settlements; but speed up docket processes
B. Economic policy issues
a. address national debt crisis, short of a constitutional amendment
b. fix Social Security by lifting tax cap and means-testing benefits
c. simplify tax code; consider VAT + end of corporate income tax
d. states to subsidize rural incomes in proportion to the differential between local wage levels and “national” prices for selected goods and services—in other words, “countercyclical” relief/equalization for the urban-rural divide instead of/in addition to by region
C. Banking and Finance
a. fix the “too big to fail” problem, excessive industry concentration and opacity
b. finally finalize Dodd-Frank
c. incentivize keeping some percentage of savings regional and local
d. limited-purpose banking (Kotlikoff proposal)
D. Veterans Affairs/Pentagon reform
a. revamp the VA; end the dysfunction
b. acquisition reform follow-on
c. personnel modernization
d. reduce civilian staff bloat
e. another BRAC
f. further Tricare reform for cost containment
E. Family/Marriage
a. make all Federal policies family- and marriage-friendly
b. more stringent foster-care regulations at the state level
c. limit the ability of govt. to take children from their parents
F. Labor/Jobs
a. focus all policy on maximizing work/production, not consumption; revamp policy metrics accordingly
b. support right-to-organize for all trade and manufacturing unions; strengthen the right to collective bargaining
c. comprehensive immigration reform, which will dramatically reduce identity theft fraud
d. institute a scaled-up voluntary National Service/Baby Bond program
G. Basic Education reform
a. repeal “No Child Left Behind”; respect and pay teachers as professionals
b. modernize the still-19th century K-12 classroom model; e.g., always team-teach science and math beyond 7th grade
c. ban funding of public schools with property taxes
d. de-emphasize vouchers and Charter schools that impoverish the schools to which the majority of children go
e. encourage STEM/STEAM curricula
H. Higher Education reform
a. stop the student loan fraud/banksters’ giveaway
b. invest in apprenticeship programs; end the “college or bust” mentality
c. more basic science Federal spending
d. work harder and smarter at govt.-Silicon Valley synergy
e. make college athletics amateur again; stop the corruption
I. Infrastructure
a. build a smart/integrated transportation infrastructure; limit NIMBY and vetocracy
b. dedicate a national lab to ARPA-e (energy), and fund it properly
c. bury power and other lines, don’t stick them on poles whenever cost-effective for the long term, which it usually is
J. Media/Publishing/Internet
a. investigate a public utility model for the internet
K. Environment
a. global warming precautions, including a properly designed carbon tax; also reform agribusiness techniques to avoid carbon-leaking from fallow fields
b. emphasize habitat preservation; review Federal parklands policies
c. review Clean Air Act standards
d. oceans preservation measures; focus on nanoplastics pollution as major problem
e. review ESA
L. Healthcare/Health Insurance
a. incentivize Cleveland Clinic group-practice/integrated medicine models as opposed to dysfunctional fee-for-service models
b. consider creating a secondary insurance market for high-expense cases so as to make premiums affordable for the vast majority
c. revamp insurance incentives to emphasize preventative care
d. enable trained nurses to assume more functions reserved for MDs, and expand medical school slots
e. reform the HIPPA/privacy protocols that doctors hate and that cost lives
f. reform electronic files mandate—current system is significantly dysfunctional and counterproductive
g. create an Expeditionary Medical Corps, hospital ships, as part of F.d.
M. Agriculture/Husbandry/Nutrition
a. revamp the Depression/New Deal price support framework
b. reform agribusiness land stewardship practices that contribute heavily to carbon loss and soil deterioration (cross reference with K.a.)
c. stop overdosing cattle with antibiotics
d. stop the ethanol fraud
e. New Pioneer Act: modernize the Homestead and Morrill Acts of 1862 to build new pioneer zones on Federal land
II. Above Political Line-of-Sight Institutions
A. The Presidency
a. Executive privilege limits
b. review immunity and pardons power
B. The Congress
a. Expand the House, but do not site it in DC
b. 17th Amendment review
c. review special perqs Congress has voted for itself
d. end early voting controversies by making election day twice per four years a national holiday (and end the Columbus Day holiday, and merge Veterans Day with Memorial Day)
e. restore the OTA and focus it on AI technology
f. mandate non-partisan re-districting to end gerrymandering
C. SCOTUS
a. Citizens United repeal
b. Reconsider the strange interpretation of the First Amendment that prohibits supply-side campaign finance limits
c. Reconsider the constitutionality of public service unions
d. reverse 2008 and 2010 decisions on 2nd Amendment
e. consider age limits for Justices: mandatory retirement at age 80
D. IRS
a. end deliberate underfunding; depoliticize IRS budget
b. direct to scrutinize offshore shell economy; identify beneficial ownership
c. review ITIN policy
E. Electoral Reform/Federal Election Commission
a. end unconstitutional ballot access stringencies; sue the FEC if necessary
b. structural reform (revive and pass the Udall bill)
c. encourage rank-choice voting
d. do NOT abolish the Electoral College but encourage states to split their electors
e. invoke demand-side controls on campaign finance—requires repeal of Citizens United and more besides: FCC should sell broadcasting licenses and use revenue to subvent air time for small parties.
f. pass the Tim Penny rule: If you can't vote, you can’t contribute
F. NSC/State/USAID/DOD/IC management/reform, and the Interagency
a. create Senior Executive Service
b. re-examine DNI reform
c. make the SectTreasury a statutory member of the NSC
G. DHS/FEMA reform
a. match DHS budget to legal responsibilities
b. integrate FEMA functions into DHS
c. create right-sized professional cadre, reduce contractor bloat
H. Federal science policy
a. create a standing Interagency S&T analysis and forecasting body
b. inventory and reform distribution of govt. science personnel
c. create global bioscience research data base
I. Civil Service reform
a. re-empower Executive management
b. ban Federal public service unions
J. Executive Branch organizational reform
a. reorganize/synthesize functions of FDA/EPA/CDC
b. rename Department of Transportation the Department of Infrastructure, and include most DoE functions in it; build integrated smart infrastructure
c. return nuclear weapons responsibility from DoE to DoD, and eliminate DoE
d. either empower SectCommerce as main trade negotiator and eliminate Office of Trade Rep.; or, better, distribute Commerce Dept. functions and eliminate Commerce Dept. (Patent & Trademark Office to Justice Dept.; Census Bureau to Dept. of Labor; National Weather Service and NOAA to new Dept. of Infrastructure; Public Roads Adm. to the Interior Dept.; US Travel Service to the Dept. of State; FAA into the Dept. of Infrastructure; and eliminate the Minority Business Development Agency
e. merge a reduced Dept. of Education (enabled by repeal of “No Child Left Behind”) into new Department of Infrastructure
K. Budget process reform
a. Westminster method is a bridge too far for our presidential system, but we must limit the amendments period
b. legislate automatic continuing resolutions to obviate shutdowns
c. streamline committee functions; unify appropriations and authorizations
d. consider legislation denying salary to Congressmen if they don’t pass a budget in timely fashion
L. Medicaid reform
a. remove eldercare from Medicare, integrate with reconceived Social Security Adm.
b. remove veterans from Medicare, integrate with a reformed VA
c. states fully fund what is left—i.e., subsidizing medical (and dental) costs for mostly healthy poor people—the original purpose of the program
M. Federal Reserve
a. make into a more normal central bank—changes over time in the unique U.S. system of politicized finance have become problematic