What kind of government?

Greg Anrig has a long, fairly good column in the Washington Post today, offering a pretty solid explanation of why McCain's campaign has failed to take off so far. The problem, of course, is that McCain is yoked to failed Republican ideas. As Anrig sees it, the basic Republican/Democrat divide is that Democrats trust the government and Republicans don't:

The single theme that most animated the modern conservative movement was the conviction that government was the problem and market forces the solution. It was a simple, elegant, politically attractive idea, and the right applied it to virtually every major domestic challenge -- retirement security, health care, education, jobs, the environment and so on. Whatever the issue, conservatives proposed substituting market forces for government -- pushing the bureaucrats aside and letting private-sector competition work to everyone's benefit.

So they advocated creating health savings accounts, handing out school vouchers, privatizing Social Security, shifting government functions to private contractors, and curtailing regulations on public health, safety, the environment and more. And, of course, they pushed to cut taxes to further weaken the public sector by "starving the beast." President Bush has followed this playbook more closely than any previous president, including Reagan, notwithstanding today's desperate efforts by the right to distance itself from the deeply unpopular chief executive.

But in practice, those ideas have all failed to deliver on the promises the conservatives made, and in many instances, the dogma has actually created new problems. Particularly after Hurricane Katrina, when Americans saw how hapless the Federal Emergency Management Agency was, the public has begun to realize that the right's hostility toward government has produced only ineffective government.

I think that something like this is close to the truth, but I have two problems with Anrig's thesis.

My first quibble is that he's not really right about conservatism. To say conservatives "see government as the problem and market forces as the solution" ignores things like:
* the Right's support for massive military spending
* "privatization" of government operations that often ends up being no-bid contracts given out to friends of Republicans (in other words, fake privatization)
* the efforts of cultural conservatives to legislate morality
* massive government spending growth under both Reagan and Bush

Basically, it seems to me that conservatives love big government, they just love a very different kind of government from the kind liberals love.

My second quibble with Anrig is something a lot of people have pointed out: just because the conservative movement crumbles doesn't mean the liberal movement will automatically gain credibility. Sure, the conservative approach to governing has failed. So we need to come back and say "See? Government is important...and here's what government needs to do." It's the second part I feel like we're still missing.

Lots of people still believe that liberalism is "socialism lite" - they think that liberals want the government to redistribute wealth in order to increase the "fairness" of society. And they're not completely mistaken; lots of liberals really do want that. "Socialism lite" has been around for a long time, and it's always been a losing idea, because most people just don't think of "fairness" that way.

But there is a winning idea out there. The government has a very important role that has little if anything to do with redistribution, and that role is nation-building. Government is needed to create the framework and provide much of the investment that makes a market economy possible - when that framework and that investment collapse, we have a nation in decline that needs desperately to rebuild its institutions. We need better infrastructure, legalized immigration, a rational health system, a rational public education system, a sustainable energy base. Providing these things on the taxpayer dime is not guaranteed to increase equality of wealth - some individuals inevitably amass fabulous wealth when the economy booms - but if we create Kennedy's "rising tide," we give the country the economic resources to attack a vast host of social ills. The "progress" in "progressive" should be defined as national progress in the classic sense. That makes a good sound byte, right?

Fortunately, it feels like a lot of liberals are moving in this direction, away from the redistribution idea. But we're not quite there yet.