ETERNAL CORPORATISM
I suppose one cannot talk about Hillary Clinton without mentioning her health-care plan. So much ink has been spilled in that cause it hardly seems worth wading into the details of Clinton's effort to control one-seventh of the U.S. economy. What may be more worthwhile is to see how her health-care plan was the inevitable consequence of liberal empowerment. There was an Aesopian nature to the Clintonites. For example, once Hillary tapped her old friend — and Bill's Rhodes scholar pal — Ira Magaziner to head up her Health Reform Task Force, it was inevitable that a large, government-run, corporatist product would come out of the sausage maker. Why? Because that's what Magaziner does. The scorpion must sting the frog, and Magaziner must propose sweeping new public-private partnerships where experts make all the big decisions.
Magaziner, Hillary's co-leader in Life magazine in 1969, was a true phenomenon at Brown University (his senior thesis, he told Newsweek, was nothing less than a Comtian 'search for a new metaphysics, a new answer to the question, 'Why be good?''). As a junior, he took it upon himself to study the school's curriculum and propose an alternative that was more 'relevant' and pragmatic, leaving it up to the young to design their own educations. He created his own major, 'Human Studies,' and he produced a nearly five-hundred-page report. The shocking part is that he succeeded in getting his Deweyan curriculum (few grades, lots of self-discovery) accepted. For traditionalists, the curriculum has made Brown the joke of the Ivy League ever since; for progressives, it has made the school its crown jewel.48
At Oxford, Magaziner led anti-Vietnam protests and allied himself with a smitten Vanessa Redgrave. James Fallows, a fellow Rhodes scholar and future Carter speechwriter and industrial planning publicist, explained that the main difference between Clinton and Magaziner was 'the difference between somebody who planned to run for office and somebody who didn't.' When Magaziner moved to Boston, he launched an Alinsky-Hayden-style community organization effort in Brockton, Massachusetts. Later, he went to work for the Boston Consulting Group, or BCG, where he acquired a knack for telling companies how to invest in the technologies of the future. Soon he was taking jobs from foreign governments to give them the same advice. In 1977 he got a gig consulting to Sweden. The final result of his efforts was dubbed 'A Framework for Swedish Industrial Policy,' in which he called for Sweden to redesign its economy from the top down, discarding old industries and investing heavily in the winners of tomorrow. Even the Swedes (!) rejected it as naive and heavy-handed. The Boston Consulting Group was so embarrassed it tried to make the report disappear.49
Told by a red-faced BCG he shouldn't do any more governmental planning, Magaziner decided to start his own firm. In 1979 he founded Telesis, which means 'intelligently planned progress' — a nice summation of an attitude described throughout this book. In 1980 Magaziner wrote a book titled Japanese Industrial Policy. In 1982 he co-wrote a book on industrial policy with Robert Reich — a Yale Law School classmate of the Clintons as well as a fellow Rhodes scholar. In 1984, at the age of thirty-six, he penned a giant plan for the state of Rhode Island, the most ambitious state-level industrial planning effort in memory. Dubbed the Greenhouse Compact, the plan envisioned the state as a 'greenhouse' for the right technologies — that is, technologies the government was smart enough to pick even though the market wasn't. The voters of Rhode Island rejected the measure handily. One could go on, but you get the point.
Now, does it seem likely that the Clintons, who'd known Magaziner for twenty years, expected that he'd come up with anything other than a corporatist strategy for American health care the moment they picked him? All of the studying, the meetings, the towers of briefing books, and the forests of file folders: these were all props in a Kabuki dance that had been scripted and blocked out well in advance.
Or consider fellow Yalie Robert Reich. We've already touched on his views on industrial policy and the Third Way. But it's worth looking at Reich as a true acolyte of the religion of government. I have been openly disdainful of psychological theorizing in earlier chapters, but how can we see Robert Reich as anything but a walking Sorelian myth, a one-man band belting out noble lies for the cause?
In his Clinton administration memoirs, Locked in the Cabinet, Reich describes a Thomas Nast cartoon world where he is in constant battle with greedy fat cats, Social Darwinists, and Mr. Monopoly. In one scene he recounts how he told some hard truths to the National Association of Manufacturers, describing a room as billowing with cigar smoke and filled with hostile men whose boos and hisses were punctuated with curses. Jonathan Rauch, one of Washington's best journalists and thinkers, checked the videotape. The audience was polite, even warm. They didn't smoke at all. Plus, the room was one-third female. In another episode Reich reported that a congressman jumped up and down shouting, 'Evidence! Evidence!' at Reich during a hostile hearing. Rauch again checked the tape. Instead of an inquisition, it was a typically 'dull, earnestly wonkish hearing,' and most of the statements Reich attributed to his tormentor were simply 'fabricated' by him. Indeed, vast swaths of the book are pure fantasy — but in a very familiar sort of way. At every turn people say things that confirm Reich's cartoon version of reality. Representative Robert Michel, the former House Republican leader, supposedly tells Reich that Newt Gingrich and company 'talk as if they're interested in ideas, in what's good for America. But don't be fooled. They're out to destroy. They'll try to destroy anything that gets in their way, using whatever tactics are available.' Michel never said any such thing.50
When Slate asked him about the controversy, Reich said, 'Look, the book is a memoir. It's not investigative journalism.' When Rauch asked him about his tall tales, 'Did you just make them up?' Reich responded, 'They're in my journal.' Finally, Reich simply fell back on pure relativism. 'I claim no higher truth than my own perceptions.'51 In other words, his defense is that this is really the way he sees the world. So again, if Reich is capable of bending reality to fit his political-morality tale, if he is programmed to see the world as a series of vital lies and useful myths, how exactly could the Clintons have expected him to do anything but stay true to form? It's not like the Clintons didn't know what their two old friends believed. Bill Clinton's policy manifesto, Putting People First, was essentially a Magaziner-Reich Festschrift.
What seems to motivate people like Reich is an abiding conviction that they are on the right side of history. Their aim is to help the people, and therefore they are not required to play by the rules. Moreover, just as they claim to be secularists, they also claim to be pragmatists, unconstrained by dogma, unlike those hidebound conservatives. Circumstances change, so, too, must our ideas. Or as Jonathan Chait of the New Republic puts it, '[I]ncoherence is simply the natural byproduct of a philosophy rooted in experimentation and the rejection of ideological certainty.' This is a bit reminiscent of a line from Mussolini, quoted in the same magazine by Charles Beard. 'The fascisti,' Il Duce announced, 'are the gypsies of Italian politics; not being tied down to any fixed principles, they proceed unceasingly toward one goal, the future well-being of the Italian people.'52
THINK OF THE CHILDREN
Such self-confidence cannot operate in a vacuum. It needs a mechanism to convince or force others to surrender their interests to the greater good. The New Republic's former editor George Soule, the author of A Planned Society (which popularized the phrase 'we planned in war'), explained it well. The greatest of 'the lessons from our war planning' was that 'we must have an objective which can arouse general loyalty and enthusiasm.' In It Takes a Village, Clinton cheers the way crises erase the wall between business and government but laments that the social benefits of natural disasters and wars are temporary. 'Why does it take a crisis to open our eyes and hearts to our common humanity?'53 In response to this problem, liberals have manufactured one 'crisis' after another in their quest to find a new moral equivalent to war, from the war on cancer, to global warming, to countless alleged economic crises. Indeed, a brief perusal of the last hundred years of economic journalism from the left would have you believe that the most prosperous century in human history was one long, extended economic crisis.
But we should return to Hillary Clinton's crisis of choice: the children. The very concept of 'the children' was designed to circumvent traditional political processes. The giveaway is the prefatory article, which denotes an entire category of human beings for whom all violations of the principle of limited government may be justified.
Constitutionally ordered liberal societies tend to view citizens as adults who are responsible for their own actions. But children are the Achilles' heel of every society (if libertarianism could account for children and foreign policy, it would be the ideal political philosophy). We make allowances for children. We have different rules for them — as well we should — and tend not to hold them accountable for their decisions. The 'child savers' of the Progressive Era were brilliant at exploiting this weakness. In the modern era it was Marian Wright Edelman, the founder of the Children's Defense Fund, or CDF, and Hillary Clinton's longtime friend and mentor, who relaunched this tradition.
Edelman is perhaps America's leading liberal scold. Harper's Bazaar named her
