Economic reds: a diagnosis: understanding Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, and their breed.

MORE amusing than apocalyptic Greens are economic Reds. An economic red is not necessarily a socialist; he does not necessarily believe in, for instance, the abolition of private property, the planned economy, or treating profit as an anti-social crime. He does not necessarily think being rich is evil; in fact, some economic reds are quite rich themselves, and enjoy being rich. He is, however, gripped by three seductive fascinations--the views that 1) government is motherly and warm, 2) a halo attaches to the "leveling" of economic differences, and 3) there exists in corporations and in those who profit from commerce a residual stench of evil.

Economic reds grow up believing that compassion is the highest of all moral qualities, and that it serves as a kind of plenary indulgence making up for a lot of other sins. For some, this sentiment arises from the rational "fraternity" evoked by the Enlightenment. Others learned it from Deuteronomy, or the Sermon on the Mount. These Biblical sources preceded the Enlightenment by many centuries, and may have rendered the "reason" of the Enlightenment a good deal less cold, mathematical, and self-interested than it might otherwise have been. So, at least, Bertrand Russell, Richard Rorty, and Jurgen Habermas--rationalists all--have suggested.

Sociologically, economic reds seem to be found far more often among artists, writers, and professors than among engineers, surgeons, agricultural scientists, realtors, and those who deal with the public as retailers or clerks. Some hard sciences that depend heavily on government subsidies tend also to nurture many economic reds--but also a surprising number of dissenters.

Beyond fantasizing about government as motherly, and about victims as helpless without it, economic reds also fantasize that businessmen, large corporations, and especially CEOs of large corporations, are villainous or, at least, shady. Few today call such persons, as vulgarly as FDR did, "economic royalists." FDR meant to suggest that the new white knights of government were like the heroic aristocrats who obliged King John to sign the Magna Carta, or the Cromwellian republicans who drove James II from power in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Royalists were for FDR the bad guys. And to call businessmen "royalty" when they were not even "barons," let alone "robbers," was a bit of a low blow. Besides, he would soon desperately need their prowess in the war effort.

No, the real philosophical sex change that transformed manly "liberalism" from the party of opposition to government, ever watchful against government as liberty's chief foe, into an entirely different kind of liberalism, now the party of ever bigger and more "compassionate" government, was first made by John Dewey in 1935, in Liberalism and Social Action. Dewey wrote the instruction manual for the modern liberal in how to steal a potent term--one that had meant "free, independent, and self-governing"--and change it into its opposite: Big-government "liberalism" now meant government as the mothering nurse of the weak. From David Hume, Adam Smith, and Francis Hutcheson, Dewey fled to Hegel's "spirit of government"; from Anglo-Saxon history to a world of misty, geistliche concepts; from the old conviction that the New World had much to teach the Old, to the new conviction that the avant-garde battle flag to follow is European red. Thus did the grand dream emerge: Big government is to be visualized no longer as the main threat against the rights and liberties of local communities and independent persons, but as the nurturing mother of social good, from above.

DIVIDE AND CONQUER

   The genius of the American economy in the 20th century was that
   it helped to counter [the] tendency for people to push as far as
   their own interests would take them so that we created a leveler
   playing field that benefited everyone. Unfortunately, for the
   past six years it's as though we've gone back to the era of the
   robber barons. Year after year the president has handed out
   massive tax breaks to oil companies, no-bid contracts to
   Halliburton, tax incentives to corporations shipping jobs
   overseas, tax cut after tax cut to multimillionaires, while
   ignoring the needs and aspirations of tens of millions of
   working families.

   --Sen. Hillary Clinton, May 29, 2007

In preparation for the 2008 presidential election, at least two candidates have competed vigorously for the votes of economic reds. In truth, such competition is mostly concentrated around academic institutions, suburbs that attract the professional class, and centers of new technology such as software. A rather substantial number of union members among what quaintly used to be called "the working classes" are no longer economic reds, even though some others remain so. Many blue-collar workers want their sons and daughters to gain college degrees, and push them to seek out jobs in the professional and upper-middle classes. These parents have become economic "blues": They are mightily in favor of upward mobility, hard work, education, and entrepreneurship. They hate those economic reds who want to level society just as their own children are at last getting a chance to climb upwards. This observation helps explain why John Sweeney and other old-line trade-union leaders are having so hard a time delivering the votes of their members. Sweeney is far too red for many of his members, who look at the blue skies beckoning their children. The number of workers belonging to unions has dwindled, and the unions cannot deliver all the votes of the remaining members.

Thus, the only recruiting ground left for economic reds these days lies among "victims." This net is cast mainly to pull in racial minorities, although to some extent, too, certain segments (single women) of racial majorities. Both single women with children and widows understandably may be more attracted than others to a big, caring government that might fill the place of the missing earners in their lives.

That is why, in politics, economic reds strive mightily to instill victimhood in fellow citizens, and to picture them as helplessly in need of government's assistance. In trying to lift these victims, however, economic reds typically engender greater benefits to benefit-providers than to the poor. There is some merit in what economic reds try to do. Still, their method is like feeding horses as a way of getting to the swallows, when there are far more direct ways to do the job.

Unfortunately, too, the message boomed out by economic reds inexorably divides Americans into mutually resentful constituencies--the "two Americas" (John Edwards); and the "on your own" conservatives who ignore the needy, versus the same needy, for whom government will allegedly provide a larger "share" (Hillary Clinton). The economic reds picture a great X that is holding this country back from its early promises, and portray a big and strong and caring government that will overcome X. Big government rides to the rescue.

Such promises can, in principle, never be fulfilled. In fact, it is crucial for economic reds that they never be fulfilled--otherwise, the basis for having a left-wing politics would simply vanish. This was the urgent warning that Antonio Gramsci tried to pass on to the Italian Communist party. The real problem that capitalism poses is that in actual fact it steadily raises the "proletariat" into the middle classes. It pushes the powerless onto the slow escalator of ownership and upward mobility. Gramsci advised the reds that they could never win the economic argument, and so they should define themselves by a cultural struggle: Their role is to transform the old Christian culture into a new "humanistic" one. They should not tie themselves to the failed economics of the 19th century, but concentrate on changing culture.

In the United States, however, there is not much to be gained politically by attacking the Christian culture of the vast majority (82 percent in recent polls). When only 3 percent of the population defines itself as atheist, and only 10 percent altogether as of no religion, there is not much point in waging an all-out cultural war, at least not in the open. This observation explains why the economic reds of the Democratic party have tried so feverishly since 2004 to "get religion," and to bring it once again back into their party. They have had some real success with this.

THE POLITICS OF CONDESCENSION 

The campaigns of John Edwards (a bit more primitive) and of Hillary Clinton (a bit more sophisticated) show us how the tactics of economic reds these days work out in practice. We do best to concentrate on Senator Clinton, beginning with the revelation of her own economic program at the technical high school in Manchester, N.H., this past May 29.

Senator Clinton's first move was to rotate the dream of President Bush under a frightening strobe light. Bush has set forth a realizable dream of universal ownership for all Americans--the dream of owning their own personal Social Security accounts, their own medical accounts, their homes or apartments, and their own investment plans. He proposes this as real, life-changing help for the poor, by way of independence and self-determination, in local communities of caring. Senator Clinton transforms this vision into the spinning, hellish "on your own" society.

Her first sly suggestion is that her main constituency is not prepared to function "on their own," as independent citizens. Her second suggestion is that the cold-hearted Republicans are simply announcing, "We have ours, now it's up to you to get yours." She turns the president's program into an expression of selfishness and meanness. A neat rhetorical trick, crudely executed.

As a response to the meanness she imputes to her opposition, Clinton rolls out the dearest deception in Democratic politicking. This deception should have been unmasked by someone like Mr. Dooley: The fella what said that Patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels unnerestimated th' possibilities of Compassion.

First, a bit of condescension from our Wellesley College valedictorian, Yale Law School graduate, First Lady of Arkansas, and then of the U.S., and now Senator from New York, poured out before the technical students in Manchester: "We have sent a message to our young people that if you don't go to college and you don't have a high-paying job--something like a basketball player or an entertainer, or maybe someone in a corporation--that you're thought less of in America." We have sent a message? Not most of us. Most of us have come from families quite proud of such roots: born poor, taught to make something of ourselves, mostly without going to college. Still today, 72 percent of American adults do not have a college degree and about half have never even attended college.

Senator Clinton's comment could only be made by one who doesn't know any craftsmen, manual workers, or independent electricians and plumbers (who nowadays can bring in more than a hundred grand a year). Among the rest of us, many relatives have worked in the garment trades, steel mills, coal mines, and other pre-professional positions. In fact, the first few in our families to go to college thought themselves lucky to have escaped heavy lifting.

Watch again as, in her portrait of America, the senator once more teaches victimhood: "In 1970, the top 1 percent of households held roughly 9 percent of our nation's income. In 2005, they held 22 percent, the highest level since 1929." The problem is, the biggest jump in the income of the top 1 percent occurred ... during the Clinton administration. In 1970 it was 9 percent, all right, but by the time the Clintons took office it had grown to 14 percent. Then, by the close of the two Clinton terms, the top 1 percent was raking in very close to 21 percent. Under Bush, the percentile dropped to 16 and then, by 2004, was up to 19 percent. I have not been able to confirm Senator Clinton's number of 22 percent (for 2005), but if it is accurate, the percentage under Bush is one point higher than under Bill Clinton.

Nearly all the statistics used rather shakily by Senator Clinton were aimed at her main preoccupations: painting many Americans as victims, and painting as their victimizers CEOs, corporations, and individual businesses operating overseas (which, these days, include many independent farmers). In writing about inequalities of income, she forgets that since 1970 vastly larger proportions of women, especially married women, have entered the paid labor force. Since like tends to marry like, these much-encouraged achievements by women inevitably result in a sharp increase in inequality among families. When a policeman earning $50,000 a year marries a wife earning about the same amount, their total income is $100,000. When a mid-level executive earning $100,000 marries a woman earning about the same, their family income now becomes $200,000. Whereas before, the gap between the two family incomes was only $50,000, it has now doubled to $100,000.

In short, more education and higher-paying jobs for women must necessarily increase family inequality. Who would want to eradicate this source of inequality?

Yet Clinton's agenda is to portray three constants of left-wing magnetism: victims, oppressors, and the white knights of government. And so she comes to her point:

"One of the most crucial jobs of the next president is to define a new vision of economic fairness and prosperity for the 21st century, a vision for how we ensure greater opportunity for our next generation, and then to outline a strategy and then to implement it."

She offers nine policy proposals toward building her "we're all in it together" society. Her plan is too boring to lay out in detail, but here's a peek:

* 1. Level the playing field, by bringing down the profits of drug companies and oil companies.

* 2. Get rid of incentives to invest overseas by taxing all profits made overseas, even those not brought back to America.

* 3. Regulate corporate governance with more government oversight and restrictions.

* 4. Raise tax rates to pre-Bush levels (the Clinton levels), and raise the tax rates of corporations. (She does not consider the likelihood that higher rates will actually bring in lower revenues, once alert people choose new investment strategies.)

* 5. Provide universal access to college education (guess who pays), and broaden pre-kindergarten education (which in most families parents love to provide themselves).

* 6. Respect those who do not go to college (as if most people don't).

* 7. Increase the minimum wage, expand union membership, and give unions more power. (These policies will boost employment and help the poor?)

* 8. Provide health care for everyone at an affordable cost. (Who will pay, with what impact on health costs, and how shall we cope with ever new technologies and new miracle medicines, at always higher prices?)

* 9. Invest in new technologies that launch new industries that provide millions of new jobs, as did the new telecom industries of the 1990s. Her favorite pick is "clean-energy technology." (As if government, rather than private venture capital, ignited new industries.)

The senator seeks to reduce the federal deficit--but promises newer and bigger government programs. She promises to "save" Social Security--but refuses to change it, even on a voluntary basis, in a way that would immensely reduce both its future obligations and a huge, unnecessary bureaucracy. She promises to expand government-managed health care for everybody, by turning back the tax cuts on "upper-income Americans" and raising tax rates to the high levels of the Clinton years. (But these higher tax rates hurt almost everyone who paid income taxes, including "middle-income Americans.")

In short, the dream of economic reds is not a vision of an America driven forward by new entrepreneurs, new inventors, and those untamed "animal spirits" that are released by a good system of incentives. Rather, it is a vision of rule-making, curbs, limitations, bureaucratic selection among alternatives, new burdens on the private sector--and larger powers unwisely given to the federal government. While Senator Clinton calls her vision "progressive," most of us would call it "regressive." Economic reds are still mesmerized by the imaginary powers that they attribute to the motherly, "caring" state--but, fortunately, this illusion is harder to sell than it was in earlier, less experienced generations.

Mr. Novak is the George Frederick Jewett scholar in religion, philosophy, and public policy at the American Enterprise Institute.