Not to mention articles by John Parker of The Economist.
American exceptionalism bump! Thanks, William.
This is a very bad and very dangerous policy, and not the duty, obligation, or in the best interest of American citizens, or the safety of the US, or the global community.
The two kinds of religious exceptionalism are connected. Rather as in the economic sphere competing private companies tend to produce wealth and activity, whereas monopoly firms have the opposite effect, so in the religious sphere competing sects generate a ferment of activity and increased levels of belief, whereas state churches produce indifference.For your consideration.
Europeans have long been bothered by this feature of American life. De Tocqueville again: “There is nothing more annoying...than this irritable patriotism of the Americans.” But since September 11th the Europeans have become even more disturbed. They associate patriotism with militarism, intolerance and ethnic strife. No wonder they consider it an alarming quality in the world's most powerful country.I love this passage.Yet European and American patriotism are different. Patriotic Europeans take pride in a nation, a tract of land or a language they are born into. You cannot become un-French. In contrast, patriotic Americans have a dual loyalty: both to their country and to the ideas it embodies. “He loved his country,” said Lincoln of Henry Clay, “partly because it was his own country, but mostly because it was a free country.” As the English writer G.K. Chesterton said in 1922, America is the only country based on a creed, enshrined in its constitution and declaration of independence. People become American by adopting the creed, regardless of their own place of birth, parentage or language. And you can become un-American—by rejecting the creed.
There is one passage in it which is pretty anti-Bush, where I find the author makes what I consider a key mistake that he does not make elsewhere in the article. Before I get to the passage (with comments) I want to explain what I consider the mistake.
Throughout the article (up until the point where he discusses the President), the author notes consistently that 9/11 greatly impacted things, but it's effects might not be permanent and are, in fact, likely to diminish over time. This is a correct view. But when it comes to the President (other than his popularity), the author forgets this.
In some areas of domestic policy, Mr Bush has been almost as far-reaching. The best example is tax. As Bill Galston of the University of Maryland puts it, “Ronald Reagan thought government was the problem. George Bush thinks tax is the problem.” Mr Bush is in fact more radical, or more determined, than his Republican predecessor. Mr Reagan cut taxes in his first year but increased them later in the face of widening budget deficits. Mr Bush cut them in each of his first three years, despite the prospect, by the third year, of deficits as far as the eye can see.When the author speaks of the deficit, there is the first sign that he is forgetting selectively about 9/11 and its impacts. People forget how devastating an economic hit that was. We were already in an economic downturn inherited from the Clinton administration, and then, whammo. The economic downturn has as much, if not more, to do with deficits than anything else. And the tax cuts were, in part, a measure to help correct the downturn. They are starting to work now.This year, total federal revenues stood at 17% of GDP, the lowest level since 1959, which was long before Medicare, Medicaid, federal education programmes and today's defence build-up. Mr Bush's tax policy is consistent with the “exceptionalist” view that, in a twist on Thomas Jefferson's words, “the government that governs best, taxes least.” It has heightened differences in the tax burden between the two sides of the Atlantic.
What about the other George Bush? This is the one who created the biggest new bureaucracy since Harry Truman: the Department of Homeland Security. This is the Bush who has pushed the powers of the federal government into education, hitherto a state preserve, by requiring annual testing of students and raising federal spending to supervise those tests. It is the one who has allowed the Justice Department to detain suspected terrorists for longer periods and with less judicial review.Sounds very critical, but he later makes a very astute observation regarding the nature of this 'growth' of government.This is the Bush who is trying to set up a national energy policy to reduce dependence on foreign oil; who slapped protectionist barriers on steel; who signed a farm bill costing $180 billion over ten years; who set up a White House office to promote marriage (surely the last thing a conservative government should be poking its nose into). And this is the one urging Congress to expand state health care for the elderly to cover some of the costs of prescription drugs—an action President Clinton's Medicare adviser says would be “the biggest expansion of government health benefits since the Great Society.”
In all, the Bush administration in its first three years increased government spending by 21%. It will rise even higher if the president wins a second term and fulfils his promise to reform Social Security, because of the huge transition costs. In contrast, during the Clinton administration government spending fell as a share of GDP. “Appalling,” says Ed Crane, the head of the libertarian Cato Institute which campaigns for small government.
This rise in the scope and cost of government seems to contradict the idea that American exceptionalism is increasing on Mr Bush's watch. Clearly, he is not an exceptionalist in the small-government, Reagan mould. He does not believe government is part of the problem. This qualifies, but does not rebut, the notion that exceptionalism is growing. Still less does it mean Mr Bush is making America's government more “European”.Again, the author still is not recognizing the economic impacts of 9/11, and the fact that when the economy starts growing impressively again and the GDP starts growing impressively again that the receipts will go up again, even though the tax burden as a percentage of GDP is lower. I think the author must be a deficit hawk, which blinds him to that mitigating factor. But continuing...The combination of large tax cuts and increased spending has turned a budget surplus of 2.4% ofGDP in 2000 into a 3.5% deficit in 2003—one of the fastest fiscal deteriorations in history. With more spending pressure, the proposed expansion of Medicare and the desire to make “temporary” tax cuts permanent, the deficit is likely to rise yet further, to around 5% of GDP by 2004-05, near the record post-war deficit set in 1983. This would almost certainly be unsustainable, so Mr Bush's economic policy must be counted a work in progress at best, a shambles at worst.
And even though Mr Bush is no small-government exceptionalist, he is no European-style welfare statist either. As Jonathan Rauch has argued in National Journal, a magazine for Washington insiders, the thread running through his non-defence government expansion is increased choice rather than increased government. Higher spending on school tests enables parents to assess the quality of schools and choose between them. Health-care reform as originally proposed is supposed to let private health providers compete with Medicare. Social Security reform, if it happens, would allow people to save for their own retirement through individual accounts that would compete with the existing pay-as-you-go system.This is an important observation regarding the policies the administration has persued. Throughout the article, there are mentions about how the decentralized nature of America allows for choices to be made, with market forces acting to cause exceptional vigor and strength. Government stifles when it removes choice and institutes standardization (see the passage about state churches in Europe). But Bush's governmental growth tends to increase choice.
These two Bushes coexist uneasily. Neither is likely to dominate the other, because of the way the president runs his administration. Mr Bush has an MBA, and it shows. He sets overall goals but lets his lieutenants work out how to meet them and goes with the policy that best pleases him. Different policies, therefore, reflect different strands of Republicanism. Sometimes neo-conservatives have the president's ear; sometimes traditional realists do. Sometimes corporate barons seem uppermost; at other times, supply-siders. This fluidity makes for a dizzy, sometimes invigorating, often incoherent mixture.Sort of like America itself, no? Isn't this one of the core features of American Exceptionalism?