The political crisis: it's the economy and morals....

There are two large arguments going on right now in politics. One is over exactly what it was that happened last November. The other is over what exactly it is that ails us as a country. Contrary to a certain triumphalism apparent in Washington right now, I do not believe that either argument is settled. Indeed, I think one of the arguments--what is troubling us as a country--may be based on faulty premises on the part of both parties to it.

The first question is what happened last fall. The most popular view among Republicans is that November's vote was the big bang, the real revolution, the final fulfillment of the promises of Ronald Reagan's election. In this view, the country really has decided that government is the problem and wants the federal government cut down, chopped up, shipped off to the states. The most interesting iteration of this argument sees the 1994 election as the logical outcome to the end of the cold war. For a sixty-year period, beginning with the New Deal response to the Great Depression, continuing through World War II and then through the cold war, all of the pressures were to increase the power of government and in particular the power of Washington. Some conservatives will even concede that this whole process of aggrandizing government was necessary. But now, they will argue, there is no Depression, no Hitler, no Soviet Union--and thus no need for a big government in Washington. We are, in this view, returning to "normalcy," which is a normalcy of limited government and decentralized power. The state of emergency is over and with it the spirit of American progressivism embodied by the two Roosevelts, Woodrow Wilson, and Harry Truman.

This is a serious argument that contains some truths, but it is not, I think, the whole story. An alternative view of 1994 sees the election in terms that are much less grand. In this view, voters were not dissatisfied with big government so much as with bad government, or, more precisely, disappointing government. This view attributes the election not to the strength of Republicanism or to the power of the conservative idea, but the failure of Democrats and liberals. In 1992, Bill Clinton did indeed offer a promising synthesis aimed at updating the old Progressive and New Deal vision and accepting some corrections. The older vision was embodied in an effort to complete the New Deal and Fair Deal by passing health-care reform and to respond to economic change with various initiatives in job training and job placement. The corrections were designed to deal with the public's legitimate anxieties over the functioning of government--thus the reinventing government project--and the importance of being clear that social policy needed to embody certain values--thus a welfare-reform plan that embodied greater generosity on the side of education, training, and work opportunities, but also a sense of responsibility embodied in a work requirement and an emphasis on the need to reduce the number of out-of-wedlock births and fatherless families.

Yet in the first two years of the Clinton administration, the administration and a Democratic Congress failed to deliver the basic components of the program: Health-care reform failed, welfare reform never got off the ground, political reforms in lobbying and campaign-finance law died, and the administration's quite popular job-training initiatives never got financed at anything like the levels implied during the campaign.

Moreover, the benefits of the economic recovery in its first two years were unevenly distributed. The well-educated posted substantial income gains. Those without college degrees and especially those with only high school diplomas or less held their own at best, and in many cases continued to suffer income losses.

The notion that disappointment rather than ideological realignment was the real story in 1994 is underscored by several facts. First, the Republican victory was, indeed, historic, but it was also narrow. There is no denying that taking over the House of Representatives was a very, very big deal. To deny that the results, in some sense, did embody at the least an impatience with government would be foolish. Yet the fact is that Republican House candidates took only 51 percent of the vote. The Republicans won thirty of their seats with 52 percent of the vote or less.

What is most revealing, and what points most strongly to the disappointment hypothesis, is that the Democrats' 1994 losses were concentrated in the groups that had suffered a long-term decline in their economic fortunes. Between 1992 and 1994, the Democratic share of the House vote dropped a staggering twenty points--from 57 percent to 37 percent--among white male high school graduates who never went on to college. The Democrats also fell fifteen points among white males who attended college but never got a degree. Both groups are suffering in this economy. But among those doing rather well, white male college graduates, the Democrats lost only five points. Among white women, the patterns were the same but less dramatic: The Democratic share among white female high school graduates dropped by four points; it dropped by nine points among both high school graduates and those with some college education. But among white women who graduated from college, the Democratic share actually went up, albeit marginally, by two percentage points. Both Labor Secretary Robert Reich and Ruy Texeira, a political analyst at the Economic Policy Institute, pointed to these figures as demonstrating that the Democrats' 1994 defeat was largely the result of disaffection among Americans who are suffering in the new economy.

This analysis of the election, with its emphasis on the performance of government and the economy rather than on conservative ideology, feeds into the second large argument going on in the country. That argument is over what it is that most troubles us. Conservatives have a clear answer: The country is bothered by too much government and, above all, by a moral crisis. William Bennett put it very forcefully. "Our problem is not economic," he said in a speech to the Christian Coalition. "Our problems are moral, spiritual, philosophical, behavioral...crime, murder, divorce, drug use, births to unwed mothers, child abuse, casual cruelty and casual sex, and just plain trashy behavior."

The other view, put forth among liberals and the Left, is that the fundamental crisis is economic. It relates to the falling living standards of many in the middle and the economic catastrophe in the inner cities. What riles the country most, in this view, is that those who work hard and play by the rules have discovered that many of the rules have been repealed and that no one has let on what the new rules are. Many are working harder for less, as the president likes to say, and are understandably resentful. Technological change and the globalization of the economy have kicked out many of the supports for a middle-class standard of living. For very large numbers of people, there is no longer such a thing as what the Catholic church has called over the years "the family wage."

Traveling around the country during the 1992 campaign, what struck me and many of my colleagues in talking to voters was their anxiety over the impact of economics on their family lives. With both parents having to work, sometimes more than two jobs between them, they felt they were cheating their children. A great many felt they were being forced to choose between providing adequately for their family financially and having the time they needed to spend with their children. Increasingly, they were finding they could do one or the other but not both.

This second argument is central to the future because buying into one side or the other leads to quite different policies and approaches. My argument is that the resources of Catholic social thought could help prevent this argument from becoming a dialogue of the deaf. There is no way forward but to acknowledge both crises. The plain fact is that we will get nowhere if we deny that there is a very real, very troubling moral crisis in the country, a crisis that is indeed destructive to families and especially destructive to children. Anyone who cares about social justice must be concerned with the future of the family because one of the overwhelming forces increasing inequality and immiseration is the rise of fatherlessness. There can be no denying that if we don't figure out ways of putting parents and kids back together, most of the problems that everyone on all sides worries about will get much worse. It is also important to find new structures outside of government to help solve these problems. In the area of teen motherhood, the churches have played an enormously constructive role in trying to create shelters and what Progressive Policy Institute analyst Kathleen Sylvester has called "second chance homes" where teen mothers can live with their children in safe, supportive environments. More broadly, the churches can speak with a clarity and forcefulness about moral obligations and personal responsibility in a way that governments never can.

But the churches can do something else, and the Catholic bishops have done this with great courage: they can remind us that degrading economic circumstances can lead to a degradation of the moral climate. They can remind us in particular that there is no way to help the impoverished solve their own problems in the absence of money. It has been argued that by stepping into so many areas, the government has sapped the energies of private institutions to help the poor. Some government actions, indeed, may have undermined the sector of civil society, the churches, and voluntary institutions. Those policies must be reversed. But as my colleague Laurie Goodstein pointed out recently in the Washington Post, those who run the voluntary institutions organized by the churches fear that they would simply collapse under the pressure of huge new burdens if government withdrew large amounts of support for the poor. The costs of providing food and shelter and those second-chance homes are enormous. By all means let us be open to new ways of helping the poor and let us acknowledge the social catastrophes in our midst. But let us not pretend that simply having government walk away from these problems will lead to a miraculous solution. I believe in miracles, but I also believe God helps those who help themselves and we have to be willing to take responsibility for these problems.

Father Philip Murnion, director of the National Pastoral Life Center, offers a powerful insight from his own experience. After his dad died, Murnion's family was on welfare for several years. But it was, he noted, a very different time. Back then, there was a kind of triad that provided a foundation on which poor people could build themselves up. There was government to provide resources--cash. There was the family to provide love and nurture. And there was the church, with its authority to provide moral guidance. Now all three legs of the stool are in danger. There is family breakdown. The churches enjoy less authority than before. The money is still there, but it is now under threat. Murnion argues, and I think he's right, that we will not solve the problems that trouble us without paying attention to the need to strengthen all three supports.

I would add that we will also not solve these problems unless we take seriously the hugely disruptive effects of the economic changes we are passing through. The issue is not to stop technological change and the huge globalization process in its tracks. This is neither possible nor, in the long run, desirable. But periods such as this one of enormous economic change produce huge disruptions in the lives of families and communities, substantial new opportunities but also substantial problems. It seems to me that those who are doing well because of these transformations have a particular obligation to think about how they, how the community, and how the government can ease the burdens on those from whom this transition period is extracting the largest costs.

My conclusion about what awaits us in politics and public policy in the future is that a policy of laissez-faire, of pure hands-off or anemic government, will not finally satisfy the country because it will not deal with the underlying economic and moral crises so roiling us. But those who believe in something other than laissez-faire will not make their case successfully unless they acknowledge the personal and moral dimension of this problem to which William Bennett among others speaks so forcefully.

Robert McAfee Brown offered what I think is a brilliant insight on how the gospel speaks to us. The gospel "speaks different words to different times," he said, "and even different words to different participants in the same times." The church must indeed preach responsibility to fathers who abandon their families and to teen-agers contemplating the obligations of parenthood. It must teach the virtues of self-discipline, work, and perseverance. But it must also preach to those blessed with the world's riches about their responsibilities to their neighbors and their communities and their country, to the poorest among us. We have individual responsibilities. We also have social responsibilities. We cannot abandon either. We are called to be true to all our commitments.