Sunday, October 26th, 2008...9:30 pm
Death of Conservatism?
By Renee Gerber
A couple of weeks ago, National Review published a rather bleak analysis of the history of politics and the importance of our current political climate. Specifically, Mona Charen’s column concludes:
[T]here is a one-way ratchet in public policy. Liberal reforms are never undone. How hard have conservatives tried to eliminate the Department of Education or subsidies to public television? Would they have more success uncreating a new nationalized health-care system?
Ms. Charen asks if this is the end of conservatism. Apparently, the march of progress (or liberalism, or the decline and fall of western civilization, depending on your point of view) is inevitable. It is true that many acts of government are hard to undo. Certainly any man who figured out how to dismantle the Administrative State without dismantling our country would deserve high accolades from my fellow conservatives and me.
However, I think, to paraphrase Mark Twain, reports of the death of conservatism have been greatly exaggerated. I do not resign myself to the idea that all trajectories towards liberal policies are irreversible. And since Ms. Charen brought up the Department of Education, I’ll counter with an educational example of my own: charter schools & teachers’ unions.
I remember when charter schools were considered dangerous ideas of radical fringe reactionaries. Taking kids out of public schools was going to destroy public education altogether. Our children’s educations were not to be thrown to the capricious winds of (gasp) free markets. Since most charter schools are free from the reign of the teachers’ unions, young idealistic teachers would be thrown into a work environment little better than a sweat shop, and since schools would be evaluated based on student performance, students would experience that sweat shop, too.
But now, both presidential candidates support charter schools and the market competition they engender. Both (at least claim to) stand up to teachers’ unions that continue to fight the charter school movement. Charter schools, it seems, are here to stay. Teachers’ unions do not control public education entirely, and a monolithic, monopolistic public education system seems to be a thing of the past.
So I take heart, and look forward to a day when there are many students that have benefited from a competitive market charter school system decide to take the lessons of charter schools to other arenas of public policy. While change might be slow (and maybe it should be), it is rarely irreversible.
2 Comments
November 17th, 2008 at 9:15 am
Are charter schools really a reversal of the march of progress/liberalism/decline? Even if the left opposed charter schools, their introduction doesn’t reverse any left-wing “progress” by returning to some kind of status quo — it simply represents a new evolution of the old idea of compulsory government-funded education.
You’ve certainly made the case that conservative ideas can sometimes be grafted onto the “Administrative State,” perhaps both softening its inefficiencies and helping it achieve its goals (in spite of itself?). But it doesn’t follow that any of the big changes, like the Department of Education, are likely to ever be reversed. You haven’t demonstrated that it’s possible to go for the heart of the hydra, only that it’s possible to chop heads off — and we all know what happens then.
November 18th, 2008 at 2:20 am
Yes, I do think it is a reversal from liberalism of a decade ago — it’s not just an evolution of gov’t funded education, but an introduction of a parental right over the government’s right in the child (which is how most child social services are perceived). Now, parents get to choose what’s important for their child’s education more than they ever did when you and I were kids. All of a sudden, public schools aren’t a monopoly, which means not all kids are going to be taught what some government administrator decided they were going to be taught and in the manner the administrator chose. Add homeschooling to the mix (which wasn’t a given 50 years ago), and I would say that in education we’re seeing at the very least a type of equilibrium, “Yes, let’s have compulsory education, but the government doesn’t get to completely control that education.”
(All this, of course, doesn’t deal with private schools, but let’s just assume for sake of argument that they are small in number and haven’t been touched by the government very much in our history, which is approximately correct.)
As far as big changes are concerned: no, I don’t have huge changes to point to, but I do think that just because our country hasn’t seen massive stripping of the administrative state yet means that it could never happen. All things considered, it hasn’t been around that long. (And if the economy keeps on as it’s going, the government might need to strip down and streamline, even in the hands of the soon-to-be legislative and executive branches.) So, I can only hope. My post was supposed to give some indication that that hope is not completely unfounded, not that the hope is a prediction.