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| Richard Perry/The New York Times |
JACOB HACKER & PAUL PIERSON, NY TIMES
Hillary Clinton's struggle to define herself in the race remains a top challenge of her campaign.
Mrs. Clinton has put forth an ambitious and broadly popular policy agenda: family and medical leave, continued financial reform, improvements in the Affordable Care Act, investments in infrastructure and scientific research, measures to tackle global warming and improve air and water quality, and so on.
But voters and pundits alike complain that she’s a cold-eyed realist who hasn’t articulated what George H. W. Bush once wistfully referred to as “the vision thing.” Instead, it’s Bernie Sanders who has been cast as the visionary in the Democratic contest, an idealist brimming with inspiring (if often unrealistic) proposals.
But Mrs. Clinton does have an ambitious vision, and it’s one that should be inspiring. The fact that it remains mostly hidden from view reveals more about our current political environment than it does about her — more about how we understand (or misunderstand) our nation’s past and present than about the comparative merits of her governing philosophy.
A few decades ago, Mrs. Clinton would have been seen as a common political type: an evidence-oriented pragmatist committed to using public authority to solve big problems. Her proposals clearly indicate that she believes in an active and responsive government that supplements, channels and polices markets. Moreover, unlike Mr. Sanders, she sees this role as primarily focused on correcting the shortcomings of weakly regulated markets rather than redistributing income and wealth. In a phrase, Mrs. Clinton believes in a “mixed economy” in which government serves as an essential supplement to and regulator of markets, using its strong “thumb” (as the political economist Charles Lindblom once described it) to assist and counterbalance the nimble “fingers” of the market.
In the middle decades of the 20th century, this pragmatic problem-solving mentality had a prominent place in both parties. Some issues were deeply divisive: labor rights and national health insurance, for example, and civil rights. Nonetheless, a bipartisan governing coalition that included leaders from both business and labor proved remarkably willing to endorse and improve the mixed economy to promote prosperity.
More important, the major policies that this coalition devised deserve credit for some of the greatest achievements of American society, including the nation’s once decisive lead in science and education, its creation of a continent-spanning market linked by transportation and communications, and its pioneering creation of product and environmental regulations that added immensely to Americans’ health and quality of life. In the 20th century, life expectancy increased by more than in all of world history. Americans’ income per capita doubled and then more than doubled again, with the gains broadly distributed for most of the era.
The embrace of an active government, working in creative tension with the private sector, also sowed the seeds for technological and health advances that are still flowering today, including the creation of vaccines and antibiotics to the development of sophisticated medical treatments for hypertension and cancer. Virtually every major computing technology — magnetic core memory, graphics displays, multiple central processors — has its roots in government procurement or financing.
This bipartisan governing tradition still had a strong, albeit weakening, hold in the 1970s and 1980s. Indeed, as recently as the early 1990s, Republicans and Democrats were coming together to use government power to overwhelmingly positive effect (as in the 1990 revision of the Clean Air Act — the landmark law that catalyzed a dramatic improvement in air quality, adding between one and two years to the American life span since the 1970s).
Today, however, this problem-solving mentality is set against powerful currents in our political culture that portray government as corrupt and ineffective. The public sector’s reputation has crumbled, with trust in federal officials and in Congress — once relatively high — reaching record lows. According to the Pew Research Center, “Fewer than three in 10 Americans have expressed trust in government in every major national poll conducted since July 2007 — the longest period of low trust in government seen in more than 50 years.”
The fiercest attacks come from the right: In apocalyptic terms, conservatives attack government as an enemy — not an essential complement — of markets. Yet the left has its own sources of skepticism. Calling for a “political revolution,” Mr. Sanders casts government as so captured by powerful interests that only a popular upsurge will right the situation. This stance may not have the same anti-government tenor as conservatives’, but it sets up an impossibly high standard for reform and slights government’s continuing achievements (including the much-maligned Affordable Care Act, which has broadened coverage without driving up health prices).
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Mrs. Clinton is heir to an enormously successful bipartisan governing tradition. Yet this tradition has been disowned by the Republican Party and has lost allure within a significant segment of the Democratic Party; it also runs sharply against the grain of current public sentiments about government and politicians. In this hostile environment, it should come as no surprise that Mrs. Clinton has proved reluctant to lead the charge for a more balanced discussion of government’s role.
Still, however understandable, this circumspection comes at considerable cost. Mrs. Clinton’s mixed-economy philosophy is what most clearly distinguishes her from both Mr. Sanders and Mr. Trump, and most clearly marks her as an heir to President Obama — who, notwithstanding conservative charges of socialism, has mostly sought to adapt and update existing policies to address pressing problems like global warming, unaffordable health insurance and uneven and poor school quality. Mrs. Clinton’s proposals not only have popular appeal, but they also could be financed with relatively modest tax increases (the bipartisan Tax Policy Center calculates that they will increase revenues by around $110 billion a year over the next decade, with almost all the increase borne by the richest households).
Yet because Mrs. Clinton has had little success articulating her basic governing approach, the case for her has instead come to seem almost entirely instrumental — that she has the best chance of being elected or would be better at haggling with Republicans for incremental gains. In the context of widespread amnesia about what has made America prosper, pragmatism has come to be seen as lacking a clear compass rather than (in the original meaning of the word) focusing on what has actually proved to work in the real world.
This is a problem, and not just for Mrs. Clinton’s campaign. Our nation badly needs a dialogue that reminds Americans why a capable government is essential and how much we are paying for its erosion. Mrs. Clinton understands this,but she may have neither the opportunity nor the inclination to say it.
Jacob S. Hacker is a professor of political science at Yale. Paul Pierson is a professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley. They are the authors of the forthcoming book “American Amnesia: How the War on Government Led Us to Forget What Made America Prosper.”