Pretty much everybody understands at some level that the question of jobs is at the heart of America’s politics today. An old world of stable, reasonably well paid jobs in manufacturing (stuff processing) and in corporate or government bureaucracies (information processing) is passing away. What comes next is up in the air, but as things stand we see growing insecurity, inequality and a darker outlook for youth.

The argument about how to address the jobs question is the single political issue that has the most to do with how the country will develop for the next twenty years. Political disputes over hot button social policy issues like gay marriage or affirmative action often get more attention, but underneath the noise it is the question of jobs that will shape the way our institutions and policies develop. After all, creating the best possible conditions for large numbers of Americans to make good livings and achieve their personal goals engages the electorate’s attention year in and year out. Scandals and controversies come and go, even long wars come to an end sometime, but in times like ours when people aren’t sure that the economy will allow them to make a good living, the job question never really goes away.

But if the debate over jobs is central, it is also confused. As a nation, we haven’t thought very deeply about what an information economy will look like, much less thought about what kinds of government policies can help or hinder the growth of an information-based middle class.

There seem to be two main kinds of confusion at work: the widget fallacy and a skewed idea about what work is and how it relates to human life overall.

The widget fallacy is the idea that only the production of concrete objects really matters. It leads many people to deny that mass prosperity under an information economy is even possible. For this crowd, if you aren’t bashing metal in a noisy place, you aren’t really working. If America isn’t “making things,” these people say, the economy will wither and die.

That may be true, but the jobs question isn’t about whether “America” is making things, but about whether people or machines are making the things “America” or any other country makes. You can have, indeed we have now, a healthy industrial economy that doesn’t create many jobs because factories increasingly use robots and computers rather than human beings. There are going to be fewer and fewer people in the widget works even as widget production hits all time highs. The world’s factories are going to be spewing out widgets like nobody’s business in the next generation, but there won’t be many people involved.

This inevitably means that when we talk about the jobs of the future we aren’t talking about jobs in the widget works. There will still be some factory jobs, just as two percent of American workers still grow food, but manufacturing will never again employ one third of the American workforce or anything close to it.

Because manufacturing jobs have been well paid and many service jobs (like flipping burgers) are not, the collapse of the manufacturing job market is often seen as leading to an inevitable and permanent decline in living standards for American workers. For widget fetishists, this is pretty obvious. Jobs that aren’t ‘real’ can’t possibly pay much because they don’t add real value. From this perspective, a world in which most people aren’t “making things” in factories, will be one in which most people don’t create much if any value and therefore they won’t earn much pay. From this point of view, most of us will be flipping burgers and serving fries when the singularity hits, road kill on the information highway.

Widget fetishists wring their hands pretty elegantly from time, but they have no practical solutions to offer. Just as all the efforts to save the family farm were doomed to fail once most family farms stopped making economic sense, so any effort to build the economy around human manufacturing jobs in first world will run aground. Too many of these jobs are too vulnerable either to low wage foreign competition or to automation and those realities aren’t going to change.

This doesn’t mean that all these jobs are going to disappear tomorrow, and there are things we can do that support the development and retention of the existing jobs base. The ‘insourcing’ of manufacturing won’t bring back the 1970s, but hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs can still be created. For some time to come, “brown jobs” in oil and gas and associated industries can help support the middle class and ease the transition to a new kind of economy.  Even after the housing bubble, it remains the case that homebuilding for a new generation can provide a lot of jobs.

These jobs will not undergird the economy or the middle class long term, but they have their place and it is important that we make the transition to the new economy in the most favorable possible circumstances. Policymakers should not be so carried away by the new economy that they forget the old; America needs to be firing on all cylinders going forward and economic transitions of this magnitude in any case work themselves out over decades and generations rather than a couple of presidential terms.

But caveat all the caveats and except all the exceptions, and you are still left with a tough truth: jobs in the widget works (and clerical and even professional information processing jobs that are the white collar equivalent of making widgets) can’t create the future of the American middle class.

There is another mistake people make about the nature of work that inhibits creative thought about the jobs question. For thousands of years most work was pretty laborious and, much of the time, unpleasant. Carrying buckets of night soil out to the rice paddies every morning is not most peoples’ idea of a good time. Even as mechanization reduced the amount of backbreaking labor in the world of agriculture, the rise of the dirty and dangerous factories of the industrial age reinforced the connection of work with dirty, horrible and degrading activity that breaks the body, dulls the mind, and keeps the worker in a state of anxiety and dependence incompatible with the full expression of human potential.

Building on a tradition that has roots in both Chinese and Greek antiquity (Aristotle and Confucius both believed that a certain leisure and elevation were necessary for the full cultivation of human potential), the thinkers and social critics behind progressive, blue model society divided the world into two quite different camps. Work was a Darwinian sphere of competition and aggression set among the dark, Satanic mills; innocent wives (“hearth angels” to our Victorian forbears) and virginal children populated the clean and happy suburbs where all was sweetness and light.

It is not hard to understand what made them think in this way. In the 1890s, conditions for workers in European and North American manufacturing looked something like life in Bangladesh today. Factory workers routinely worked 14 hour days six or even seven days per week. Young children were at the mills instead of in school. Factories were dark, noisy, and as polluted as anything you would find today in China. There were no safety and fire inspections in most plants; plant fires like the tragedy in Bangladesh were common here. Wages were so low that few working people could save; without unemployment insurance, disability insurance or old age pensions, workers lived hard, insecure and dismal lives.

People looked at this and could not see work as anything but a blight. Progress from this perspective is almost identical to liberation from work; it is about shrinking and ultimately erasing the dark world of work so that all can frolic in the groves of consumption. Nothing was more common in the mid-twentieth century than for reformers and utopians to dream about the ‘end of work’ and the ‘leisure society’.  In a 1930 essay  (“Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren”) that has been getting some play on the internet lately , John Maynard Keynes, the Great Blue Prophet, predicts that as technologically assisted affluence grows, work will just wither away.

Given the rising productivity of humanity based on the increase of technological knowhow and the availability of more capital to invest in using it, Keynes suggests, humanity is on the verge of solving its “economic problem.” Looking 100 years or so ahead of 1930 he predicts that output per capita will be so high, and automation so well developed, that everyone will have enough of the necessities of life that work will gradually disappear. This is revolutionary, says Keynes; humanity is making its escape from the human condition as it has been known since prehistoric times.

Keynes’ vision of the age of leisure saw two kinds of ‘work’. Most work was toilsome and degrading, though practically anybody could do it. The other kind was ennobling and fulfilling: singing grand opera, painting or writing masterpieces. The trouble, he felt, was that most people don’t have the talent for interesting work. Once the world no longer needs the labor of the untalented masses for survival, the shlubs have no work to do. They lie about listlessly, unable to make good use of their free time, watching the talented tenth create, but condemned to be spectators in the game of life.

Nietzsche connoisseurs and Fukuyama readers will have noted something interesting here; Keynes’ vision of post-industrial man is very much like Nietzsche’s vision of the Last Man, and Keynes’ understanding of the end of economics is largely the same as Alexandre Kojeve’s interpretation of Hegel’s end of history. The purpose of history has been fulfilled, the great economic problem solved, but deprived of the challenge and drama of meaningful events and real challenges to overcome, humanity will become rather dull.

The widget fundamentalists and the Keynesian visionaries agree that the mass of humanity has no meaningful economic function beyond the brute labor necessary to wrest a living from reluctant nature. Once a certain stage of development has been reached, they have no further economic role to play. Keynesians and widget fans also agree that since most people won’t have jobs but will need incomes, there must be large transfer payments to make the economy of the future work. The surplus created by the workerless corporations and the handful of talented humans still able to function effectively will have to be distributed to the rest of the population. The information economy will be the greatest and most comprehensive welfare state ever seen. The economy will be large enough to support very large entitlement programs, and the majority of the population will rely on those payments as its chief if not only means of support.

From this perspective, incredibly influential in the shaping of modern progressive consciousness, the core task of politics is to ensure that as the surplus grows in size and becomes concentrated in ownership, the state spreads that surplus around. It can do this by legislating better working conditions, higher wages and earlier retirement; it can also do it by progressive taxation on profits with the funds gained in that way to be spent on entitlements for a majority that would otherwise be left behind. For progressives who embrace these ideas, the transfer state must inevitably grow as the economy develops; the purpose of the political process is to make sure that this happens.

This vision is not wholly wrong; twentieth century progressives were absolutely right to insist that as the economy reached an appropriate level of development, conditions for workers had to improve, social goals (like the conservation of parks and the provision of clean water and air) needed to be reached, and the extremes of poverty and insecurity that characterized earlier stages of industrialization should no longer be tolerated.

But the progressives were wrong about both the nature and the future of work, and those errors today are making it harder to realize the promise of the information economy. The next stage of prosperity is not going to be about wholesale job destruction compensated by growing transfer payments; if we try that route we will find it leads into a dead end.

To understand the place of work in human life, it’s useful to drop Aristotle and consult Genesis. That ancient work may not be a good guide to paleontology or astrophysics, but its insights into the human condition remain unsurpassed. When God creates Adam, he sets him into the Garden of Eden and gives him a mission. Adam is to tend the garden, naming and ordering its animals and plants, and, like God, to express himself in creative engagement with the world. Later, when God expelled Adam and Eve from the garden, God cursed human work: “Cursed is the ground for thy sake; in toil shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life. Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee… In the sweat of they face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground.” (Gn 3:17-19)

Work, in other words, has a dual nature. Laborious, soul-killing toil and drudgery is often part of work but it is not what work is ultimately all about. Curse aside, work is an essential aspect of human nature. When people speak about the right to work, they aren’t just talking about the right to earn an income. They are talking about the right of all of us to take our place in the common enterprise of human life. To be shut away from work is to be marginalized in the most destructive way. There are few things worse for human beings than to feel useless.

That said, the industrial age was an age when work was particularly alienating and depressing. Few large populations have ever been expected to devote so much of their lives to such intrinsically alienating and belittling tasks as Fordist industrial workers on the assembly lines of 20th century factories. Peasants, by contrast, however heavily taxed and exploited, worked at a variety of tasks over the course of a single day and even more over the year. Their work had plenty of toil and sweat in it, but it was also closer in some ways to the Edenic ideal than was industrial work. This is why so many people saw the Industrial Revolution as a step backward from the standpoint of human happiness.

When thinking about the future of jobs during the Information Revolution, it’s important to remember that the drive to work is embedded in human nature rather than in economic scarcity. Human beings don’t just work because they want to get paid so they won’t freeze and starve in the dark; they want to make meaningful contributions to the societies in which they live, and they want to be recognized and esteemed for the contributions they make to the common good.

There is a horrible snobbery lurking beneath the idea that most people will not be able to find meaningful work when the age of scarcity ends. Once the working classes aren’t needed to dig coal anymore, in this view, there is nothing to be done for the mass of mankind than to sit them in front of the TV on a comfy couch with a big bag of chips. They are good for nothing else.

This is a premise which any serious theist or humanist must reject. If we believe that every human being has a unique real worth, we must also believe that every human being has a contribution to make. Keynes rather snidely remarks that few people have the talent to live creative lives; writing about the difficulty many will have adjusting to lives without toil he warns of the intense boredom that most will suffer.  “Yet it will only be for those who have to do with the singing that life will be tolerable and how few of us can sing!”

Actually, a good many more of us can sing than Keynes thought; it’s just that life in the coal mines and the factories means that many people haven’t had the same chances to develop their talents that a son of privilege like Keynes did.

Thomas Gray showed a greater understanding of the vast untapped human potential all around us in his “Elegy in A Country Churchyard” and this 1750 poem can give us some sense of the dynamism we shall experience as freedom from want gives more people more education, more tools and more opportunity than ever before.  Looking at the humble headstones in a quiet English country graveyard, the poet speculates on the lives that the graveyard’s residents might have lived in other circumstances:

Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid
Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire;
Hands, that the rod of empire might have sway’d,
Or waked to ecstasy the living lyre:

But Knowledge to their eyes her ample page,
Rich with the spoils of time, did ne’er unroll;
Chill Penury repress’d their noble rage,
And froze the genial current of the soul.

Full many a gem of purest ray serene
The dark unfathom’d caves of ocean bear:
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

Some village-Hampden, that with dauntless breast
The little tyrant of his fields withstood,
Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest,
Some Cromwell, guiltless of his country’s blood.

Th’ applause of list’ning senates to command,
The threats of pain and ruin to despise,
To scatter plenty o’er a smiling land,
And read their history in a nation’s eyes…

In the old days, when most of humanity had to work in agriculture simply to keep everyone fed, not many people had the opportunity to be teachers or students. Few learned to read, many fewer were able to travel. Humanity was tied down to the material plane; many people spent much of their working lives staring at the buttocks of the ox that was pulling their plough. This was not a very stimulating view.

In the 21st century more of humanity than ever before will escape from “chill penury”; fewer flowers will blush unseen and more people like Milton and Cromwell will be able to take their stands and speak their piece. More than that, as a smaller and smaller share of our total production is made up of the material goods that ensure our basic survival, more and more of the economy is going to be about other things.

Far from approaching a time of rest, idleness and a golden age for couch potatoes on welfare, we are moving into a period of unprecedented activity, endeavor and strife. There will be more than enough work in coming years as newly liberated humanity spreads its wings; a final essay on the jobs question will look at what this means in policy terms.

[Assembly line worker image courtesy of Shutterstock]

After a full and fair trial, abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell was convicted this week on three counts of first-degree murder in the killing of three babies whose necks he “snipped,” as well as involuntary manslaughter in the death of patient Karnamaya Mongar. Gosnell, who performed hundreds of gruesome and macabre abortions out of his Women’s Medical Society Clinic, managed to skirt the death penalty when he agreed to forego an appeal in exchange for a life sentence. The sentencing brings to end a trial that revealed the grisly practices of Gosnell and his staff. But more disturbing is the grotesque lack of oversight and action by the bureaucrats who knew what was happening, and whose responsibility it was to protect the women and infants Gosnell murdered and maimed.

Gosnell spent nearly forty years running his clinic. According to the grand jury report, during that time he performed hundreds of abortions on women who were well past Pennsylvania’s gestational stage for legal abortion, inducing labor and snipping the spinal cord of babies that were born alive. The procedures were filthy, frequently botched, and sent dozens of women to the emergency room with severe infections that left some near death. Anesthetics were frequently overused, which is what led to Karnamaya’s eventual overdose and death. The list of horrors goes on and on, but we’ll spare you further gory details.

This is bad enough on its own, but Gosnell and his trail of carnage could have been stopped decades ago if public oversight organizations had acted they way they’re supposed to. According to the grand jury report, when the Pennsylvania Department of Health performed its first inspection in 1989, ten years after the clinic was founded, it found numerous violations. Gosnell promised to fix them and received a pass. Upon the next inspection in 1992 and 1993, the Department of Health again found violations, but did nothing to ensure that they were corrected. Inspections then ceased for 17 years, largely due to the election of pro-choice Republican Governor Tom Ridge, who ended all inspections of abortion clinics because that would be “putting a barrier up to women.” Meanwhile, dozens of Gosnell-related complaints were flowing into the DoH. But even when it received notice of Mongar’s death, the department failed to act.

Nearly ten years ago the Pennsylvania Department of State received a detailed report on the entire scope of Gosnell’s operation from a former employee. An investigator was assigned to the case but neglected to inspect the facility or question other employees. Department attorneys dismissed the complaint as unconfirmed.

The Philadelphia Health Department regularly visited Gosnell’s clinic to retrieve blood samples but never reported that anything was out of the ordinary. But Gosnell conducted his obscene practices so openly and brazenly that he was eventually caught by accident. When police raided the clinic to “seize evidence of his illegal prescription selling,” they immediately discovered, to their horror, “discarded fetuses,” “dazed patients,” and unsanitary conditions including “blood on the floor” and a smell of “urine in the air.” How the Philadelphia Health Department failed to notice (or report) this sight after repeated visits and numerous complaints is anyone’s guess.

If Gosnell had merely flown under the radar, it would be possible to believe that this was an isolated case. But the sheer number of repeated regulatory failures that allowed this to continue for decades suggests that Gosnell is just the tip of the iceberg. Already, similar stories are beginning to come to the fore. Last year, an AP investigation discovered that some abortion clinics in Illinois hadn’t been inspected for 10 to 15 years. A National Review investigation looked into three Florida abortion clinics whose practices eerily resembled those of Gosnell. Fetal remains were strewn about the clinic. Women were left maimed or sterile. As the clinics repeatedly came under scrutiny, they shut down and reopened under different names. Doctors often escaped penalization and kept their licenses.

Pierre Jean-Jacque Renelique, one doctor at the clinic who murdered a baby shortly after its birth, finally lost his Florida license in 2009. After relocating to New York, he was allowed to continue practicing medicine, and his license was reinstated after the New York Department of Health determined that he “is a physician who provides excellent medical care to an inner city poor population. These patients should not be deprived of this valuable resource.”

Gosnell’s case has spurred departments and investigators across the country to cover their tracks. In the last month alone, Maryland officials shut down three abortion clinics, and Ohio officials shut down one.

Gosnell, though a villain in his own right, is also the product of a system that has recklessly abandoned its responsibilities to the public. That we live in a country that monitors the size of our sodas, but fails to monitor our abortion clinics, is a sign of broken politics. That inspections were ceased in an effort to protect women’s rights, only to lead to the egregious abuse of them, is a sign of broken advocacy. Questions need to be asked, gaps need to be filled, and some bureaucrats need to be fired or worse.

This is criminal and inhuman. It is astonishing that a country that calls itself civilized can tolerate the most horrible torture and murder of women and children, mostly minority, with, apparently, the knowing connivance of a “pro-choice” movement that has lost touch with reason and humanity. We would like to know a lot more about the leadership of organizations like Planned Parenthood. Did they know about the wide scale of unconscionable abuses in the shady abortion business? If not, they seem negligent and uninformed. If they knew and were silent, they connived at unspeakable acts.

This blog does not believe in banning abortion or in inserting government bureaucrats into every sexual choice women (and men for that matter) make. But an industry in which this kind of behavior can go on for so long with so little effort by health regulators, politicians or whistleblowers to end the madness is sick unto death. Big changes must come, and come fast.

[Kermit Gosnell image courtesy of Wikimedia]

Of the Big Five questions facing America today, the most pressing and urgent is the question of jobs. This is more than the problem of recovering from the last economic slump; it is more than the impact of globalization and automation on manufacturing jobs. The American economy is shedding jobs, especially long-term, well-paying jobs with good benefits, and the jobs that replace them are often less secure and less well paid. The relentless transformation of the American labor market is changing the nature of American life, calling into question some of the basic assumptions and building blocks of the last fifty years, and generating a complex mix of political and social pressures that will shake the country to its foundations.

Essentially, the problem is this: automation and IT are moving routine processing, whether what’s being processed is information or matter, out of the realm of human work and into the realm of machines. Factory floors are increasingly automated places where fewer and fewer human beings are needed to transform raw materials into finished products; clerical work and many forms of mass employment in business, government and management are also increasingly performed more economically by computers than by trained human beings.

The transformation is only beginning to kick in. Self driving cars and trucks may reduce the need for human beings in the transportation and freight industries.  Information processing is beginning to change the nature of the legal profession and even as law school applications fall by almost 50 percent there is much more change to come. Computer assisted diagnosis is making itself felt in health care. MOOCs are likely to change the way much of higher ed works.

It is impossible to say now how far and how fast this process will move, but more and more Americans are experiencing the kind of upheaval that blue collar workers in manufacturing began to experience in the last generation and white collar workers and journalists have felt more recently. We are seeing the greatest wave of economic transition since the mechanization of agriculture reduced the percentage of the labor force engaged in farming from more than half the American labor force in 1890 to less than two percent today.

The old engines of job growth, especially in manufacturing, aren’t working, and the competition for good jobs keeps getting tighter. With the entry of billions of Asians and others beyond the old industrial economies of North America, Europe and Japan into the modern economy, the competition is global. And if low wage workers can’t do the job cheaper than you, computers and, increasingly, robots mean that you can still lose your job.

Under the circumstances it is not surprising that many American families and workers see bleak prospects before them.  Even workers who are doing relatively well have to work hard to keep their skills sharp and live with anxiety about the future.

At the same time, some industries and some individuals are doing very well. Modern California is something of an image of the post-Fordist world: in Silicon Valley and in Hollywood, there are pockets of vast wealth creation. Across the state health care does very well, supporting large incomes for highly skilled workers and managers. These oases of wealth support professionals and service providers around them: from accountants and plastic surgeons to pool boys and gardeners.

But the state as a whole is not in good shape; even the presence of world beating, high value added industries in Hollywood and Silicon Valley, two of the world’s most concentrated centers of innovation, is not enough to create broad and stable prosperity across the Golden State.

This is an economy that produces inequality very different from what most citizens of the old industrial economies are used to, and the social and political consequences of rising inequality play a growing role in many countries who once prided themselves on their success in building a vast and stable middle class.

Much of the inequality is generational. For many young people, the road to a middle class job is harder than ever before: more years of school, more years of debt, more internships, more years of scrabbling after graduation until that first real, career building job comes through.

But for many workers, and especially for the young, middle class jobs are less stable, less desirable and less secure than they used to be. Young workers typically get less generous benefit plans than older workers in government and corporate environments. The geezers have been grandfathered into pension and pay schedules that the new kids don’t get. Because there is so much competition from the unemployed, and because industries and companies rise and fall so quickly these days, it is harder to keep good jobs once you have them.

The question, and it is not only a question for Americans, is where do we go from here?  Is the new economy locking us into permanent inequality, insecurity, polarization and class conflict? Are we at the early stage of a Great Unraveling that will roll back the clock on the social achievements of the twentieth century and fall back from Blue Model Fordism to Victorian capitalism red in tooth and claw?  People in Italy and France are asking this as much as people in California and Connecticut; these changes in the labor market are stirring huge and justifiable anxieties across the entire developed world.

A cyclical crisis like the recession and the slow growth following the financial collapse of 2008 makes everything worse, but the transformation of the American labor market and the threat to the middle class has been gathering force since the 1970s. A robust economic recovery will ease our discomfort, and the rise of well-paid brown jobs in the oil and gas business is going to help. But automation and globalization aren’t going away; in both good times and bad the foundations of the old social order will continue to erode.

While the problems are real, I don’t ultimately buy the pessimist, Great Unraveling case. People once squealed in as much (genuine) pain about the collapse of the old farm economy as they do now about the fall of Blue Fordism. People once bemoaned the collapse of independence and dignity as proud farmers were forced to become factory hands, engaging in mindless repetitive toil at the orders of management. Furthermore, the same fears people now voice about the inability of the new service economy to provide good livings were loudly and repeatedly shared from Maine to California as the farms fell and the factories rose.  Vast inequality, the prophets and the protestors warned, would be the inevitable consequence of the collapse of the egalitarian farm system. America would turn from a middle class society into a society of paupers and plutocrats.

Millions of lives were thrown into upheaval by the decline and fall of the family farm. Two generations of American politics were shaped by the pain of this transition. From William Jennings Bryan and the “Cross of Gold” to John Steinbeck and his Grapes of Wrath, the greatest enrichment in human history was accompanied by a nonstop chorus of a nation’s brightest and most sensitive weeping and wailing about the wave of poverty oversweeping the land. Keening with woe, they bemoaned the dying past and shuddered at the threatening future until the 1950s found the country so prosperous that in order to keep wringing their hands the professional worriers were forced to begin the study of the corrosive social effects of mass affluence. All those nice houses in the suburbs were killing the human spirit!

The blue Fordist utopia that today’s sentimentalists see fading into the past was once the hell they feared.  Everything looks better in the rearview mirror. But the pessimists are wrong today for the same reason they were wrong 100 years ago. Then as now the key reality was that the productivity of the human race was rising and not falling. Then as now the challenge was to manage the consequences of success.  Now as then the new era, while different and in some ways more challenging, will be more prosperous than anything ever seen.

That said, we should not underestimate the magnitude of the vast jobquake now shaking the country. One doesn’t have to be a Marxist to understand that the way people relate to the economy is critical to the way a whole society works. An America dominated by family farmers and small independent business proprietors was a different place culturally and politically than the America of big corporations and employees that dominated the twentieth century. Schools, churches, family structures, political parties: all changed as the country’s economic foundations changed between 1850 and 1950.

Not all of these changes were painless or benign and the psychological changes that individuals underwent as their place in the economic order changed were sometimes the hardest to bear. The shift from being an independent small farmer to being one of ten thousand automobile workers in noisy, dangerous factories was hard. And the life of an industrial worker endlessly performing a single repetitive step on an endless assembly line is in many ways less rich and more alienating than a life working side by side with your spouse and growing family on the homestead where you were born.

The old farm economy really had to die. The small family farms of pioneer America could not produce the amount of food the country needed at a price the country could afford. Less efficient small farmers could not survive with agricultural prices set by the vast production of large scale, mechanized agribusiness everywhere from the Canadian prairies to the pampas of Argentina.

When ‘reformers’ like William Jennings Bryan talked about fixing the economy in the 1890s they were thinking about policies that would make the small farm viable. When they thought about providing for American families, they thought about finding ways for new generations of Americans to farm their own land.

In much the same way today, much of our policymaking is about trying to resuscitate the past. Will ‘onshoring’ revive the manufacturing economy? Yes… but it won’t create many jobs. Automation means that a small number of factory workers can produce enough goods for a whole nation, just as a much reduced number of farmers can now feed us.

In the same way, we are going to keep shedding clerical and information processing jobs. There are no policies that can do more than delay the inevitable, just as the host of farm support policies developed during the long transition failed to stop the transformation of agriculture. (These days, farm subsidies developed to help family farmers now mostly fatten the coffers of huge agricultural corporate complexes. More or less the same fate awaits any effort to protect industrial or clerical jobs now: the change won’t stop, and the money will end up in the wrong pockets.)

The old jobs are going away and they aren’t coming back. More, we can’t fix the problem by trying to create new jobs in factories or traditional office bureaucracies to replace the ones going away. We need new kinds of jobs that don’t involve manufacturing or traditional forms of information processing. That leaves the service economy; there is nowhere else to go.

Promoting new ways for people to make a living in this still young century isn’t as simple as getting macroeconomic policy right. And it isn’t about figuring out how to re-industrialize the economy: how to bring the smokestacks back to Buffalo. That door is shut. That day is done.

Solving America’s jobs problem and its consequences—slack demand for workers at many skill levels and the rising consequences for wages, working conditions and inequality—is going to require both policy and cultural shifts. In the 19th century most Americans spent their time working with animals and plants outdoors in the country. In the 20th century most Americans spent their time pushing paper in offices or bashing widgets in factories. In the 21st century most of us are going to work with people, providing services that enhance each others’ lives.

There will have to be cultural changes. We are hearing almost exactly the same laments and breast beatings about this transition that our ancestors so eloquently wailed about the end of the family farm. Manufacturing jobs are ‘real jobs’; hustling for customers is servile and degrading. 100 years ago, farming was a noble, independent occupation worthy of a man and a citizen; a wage slave was a lowly hireling, and factory work crippled the body and stunted the mind.

We are going to have to discover the inherent dignity of work that is people to people rather than people to things. We are going to have to realize that engaging with other people, understanding their hopes and their needs, and using our own skills, knowledge and talent to give them what they want at a price they can afford is honest work.

A service economy resting on the high productivity agriculture, manufacturing and information processing will be a more affluent and a more human economy than what we have now. Human energy will be liberated from wringing the bare necessities from a reluctant nature; energy and talent will flow into making life more beautiful, more interesting, more entertaining and easier to use. By 1960 few American suburbanites really envied their hardscrabble, uneducated ancestors shivering through the winter in sod huts on the open prairie; one suspects that few Americans in 2060 will be pining for the glorious old days of 9 to 5 at GM.

But the change will come hard. The tax system and the financial system will have to change to promote the rise of a new world of jobs. The educational system will have to change to prepare young people for new kinds of lives. We are going to have to make all kinds of changes as our society comes to embody a new kind of economic logic. The changes won’t be easy but they aren’t optional.

Our jobs problem won’t be solved by macroeconomic policy shifts or money manipulation by the central bankers. It’s not going away anytime soon. Like the nation of family farmers as the industrial revolution took hold, Americans used to blue model Fordism are going to have to move on.

[Classified ad photo courtesy of Shutterstock]

So far, 2013 has been a bush league year in American politics. Gay marriage, gun control and amnesty for illegal immigrants are hot button emotional issues and they have a lot of practical importance for a lot of people, but the republic will not stand or fall based on lesbian prenups, gun background checks or green cards for those immigrants formerly known as illegal. Similarly with the sequester; if the country is headed toward fiscal bankruptcy the cuts are too small to save us and if the cuts are unnecessary they are neither large enough to precipitate a depression or so savage and stringent as to take us back to the social conditions of the 19th century.

So the headlines this year have not, exactly, been much ado about nothing, but it’s a lot of ado about nothing much. That wouldn’t matter if we didn’t have serious issues to deal with.  In quiet times we could let media cover politics the way the Weather Channel covers storms, inflating Winter Storms Chutney and Magpie into major world historical events. But we don’t live in bush league times. The United States has urgent business before it today and until and unless we get the big things fixed, we’re going to stagger from one ill-tempered squabble to another even as our underlying problems become more severe.

In Africa people talk about the Big Five, originally the most dangerous animals to hunt, these days the most awesome to see. The elephant, the Cape buffalo, the leopard, the rhinoceros and the lion are the Big Five in the game parks; America’s Big Five are the big make or break domestic issues we face. (I’ll take a look at the big international challenges in another series of posts.) We don’t need 100 percent success, but if we don’t get a handle on these five issues, conditions in America are going to deteriorate painfully no matter how many gay couples marry or immigrants get green cards. If on the other hand we do make progress on these issues, we will gradually find ourselves with more resources and better options as we struggle with the less critical but still very important choices our country must make.

So what are the Big Five?

First comes the question of jobs: what to do about jobs and incomes as the old industrial economy continues to shed middle class jobs? The manufacturing economy is as dead as Prince Albert, at least from the standpoint of providing middle class incomes and long-term job security for a third of the American workforce. If America can’t create new, post-manufacturing jobs to replace the old ones, nothing we do will turn out very well.

Second, there’s the service crunch. The country’s demand for services like education and health care is growing rapidly, but our ability to produce the quantity and quality of services demanded can’t match the need. The systems we have to produce and deliver these services are increasingly dysfunctional. As a result, we are seeing ruinous inflation in costs like college and university tuition and the health care system generally. These problems must be addressed; health care costs are on course to bankrupt the country and education costs have already saddled the younger generation with crippling debt. These problems won’t go away on their own; as time goes on the country is going to need more health care, more education, rather than less, and we also want the quality of both to improve. Governance, by the way, is one of these crises; a more complex and densely populated country needs effective and responsive governance at a reasonable price. In too many ways, all levels of government in the United States are too expensive, too cumbersome and too clumsy.

It’s both ironic and unsettling that just as the United States is leading the world towards a new kind of service based economy, our largest and most important service based industries are so inefficient and poorly organized. We can’t be a successful service economy until our biggest service sectors start working well.

Third, there’s the demographic transition. Our system of pensions and social insurance was built on the assumption that the high birth rates of the mid twentieth century would continue forever, and that each generation would be so much larger than its predecessor that the country could make a decent provision for old people without skimping on the needs of the young. While the United States fortunately is better placed than many other developed and developing countries (partly because our birthrate remains higher than in many countries and partly because a steady influx of younger immigrants increases the number of working adults), public and private pension systems and entitlement programs face a variety of challenges, and the competition between retirees and the rest of the population for resources is getting sharper.

The last two areas where the country faces make or break challenges are different. They are cultural, social and spiritual. They cannot be solved by wonkish ideas or government policy changes. But they are real, and unless we address them wisely the country is unlikely to thrive.

The first of these non-wonky problems is what one could call a coherence crisis. In past generations, a less diverse and more hierarchical America was organized around a set of ideas and cultural values and assumptions more or less brought over from Great Britain in the colonial era. This was not a monolithic culture; scholars like David Hackett Fischer have shown how cultural and political diversity were present in American life from the earliest years of the colonial period. And non-English speaking immigrants (like the Germans who settled much of Pennsylvania and the Dutch in New York) brought more points of view. Africans, free and enslaved, a majority in some states and a large minority in others, were also part of the mix.

But with all the diversity, the country was dominated by a set of values and ideas that came to us from the British Isles: Protestant and individualistic Christianity, an attachment to limited representational government, an affinity for capitalism and a set of ideas and cultural practices around which society cohered.

For all kinds of reasons that old coherence has been lost and cannot be set up again. Racial, cultural and ethnic differences among Americans have changed who we are as a people. Social and economic changes have challenged old ideas and institutions. Economic inequality challenges the idea of a vast American middle class that shaped national consciousness during the Fordist era.

There is no going back to the old days. The genie is out of the bottle, and Humpty Dumpty has fallen off the wall. But even if the old consensus is gone, the country still needs something to rally around. What are the values around which Americans will cohere in the 21st century and will they be both flexible enough to serve the needs of a diverse and diversifying people and robust enough to create a deep and abiding sense of common citizenship and linked destiny among us?

The problem is becoming more acute not less as American society grows and becomes more complex. A larger population and a more complex and interdependent technological base require more collective restraint on individual freedom in small things and large. Shared values and visions make that restraint seem natural and reasonable, but we are heading toward a situation in which there will be more laws and regulations to live under… and less agreement about what those laws should look like, at what level they should be adopted, and how stringently they should be enforced.

Finally and inescapably, there is the question of virtue. The liberal order of representative democracy depends more on the virtue of its citizens than other forms of government do. If most citizens are tax cheats, most politicians are swindlers, many parents are neglectful and most children are ingrates, democracy cannot last, much less prosper. If everyone is thinking about what they can get from the government and no one is thinking about what they give, and if nobody can be trusted when the lights are out, freedom will shrivel up and die. Our founding fathers were haunted by the example of the fall of the Roman Republic; we need to remember that Rome’s fate could be ours.

There are many forces working against republican virtue in America today. Consumer capitalism, as Daniel Bell and others have taught us, breeds attitudes of narcissism and self indulgence. The crisis affecting mainline Protestant and euro-Catholic congregations and institutions has weakened one of the chief props of the kind of self restraint and self governance that democracies need to survive and it’s not clear what if anything can take their place.

These are the Big Five; if we get them largely right, the 21st century in the United States is likely to see another golden age of freedom and prosperity. If we largely fail, things will go badly wrong, and this century could see the end of America as a beacon of hope for humanity. Via Meadia tries to orient our coverage of the news around these big five issues; watch this space over the next couple of weeks for some essays on the most important challenges we face.

[American flag image courtesy Shutterstock]

The Syrian civil war exploded over the weekend, with mass murder and sectarian cleansing along the coast, Israeli airstrikes in Damascus, and confusion, frustration and paralysis in Washington to the point where the New York Times described President Obama as trapped “in a geopolitical box, his credibility at stake with frustratingly few good options.”

Foreign policy, it turns out, is hard. Samantha Power, President Obama’s special advisor on the national security council, author of a very influential history of genocide (A Problem from Hell) that criticized the US failure to save Rwandans under President Clinton, and possible future US ambassador to the United Nations, announced earlier this year that she was leaving the administration to focus on her two young children. It’s an honorable and understandable decision, but it leads to a disturbing truth. Bashar Assad has outlasted Professor Power, and the country’s most influential advocate of the right to protect left office having failed to a make any headway against the greatest mass slaughter since the Rwandan genocide.

Arguably, the greatest triumph of the humanitarian hawks in the Obama administration was the attack on Libya. The “Wilsonian war” encouraged people in Syria to rebel in the hope of western intervention, but made President Obama much less willing to get involved again. Good intentions in Libya made the ghastly spectacle in Syria more likely and meant that the humanitarian hawks had less influence in goading the President to action when the greater challenge appeared.

Acting on good intentions without deep strategic analysis can and frequently does lead to the worst possible consequences. One of history’s most important and least acknowledged truths is at work here: those who want to change the world for the better need to be much better at understanding it than cynical Machiavellian strategists. The cynics are simply focused on surviving; the reformers and the improvers are trying something much more difficult. Like 20th century ballroom dance sensation Ginger Rogers with Fred Astaire, those who want to combine global moral uplift with their diplomacy must do everything the other side is doing, but backwards and in high heels.

Most who try it trip and fall.

As a general rule, sad to say, the good guys and the smart guys often play on different teams. For too many foreign policy humanitarians, it is more important to have good intentions than to understand the crooked and wicked ways of the world you want to change. This instinct for the ideal over the real was a hallmark of humanitarian policy failures all during the 20th century and on the evidence to date the deadly mixture of political amateurism with ambitious humanitarian international agendas has persisted into the 21st. America’s university campuses are packed with people who believe that the flaws in our foreign policy are failures of morality rather than failures of forethought and execution, but morality unhinged from wisdom is one of the most destructive forces known to man.

We don’t mean to be glib or unkind. Trying to stop horrible slaughters is a noble goal, one that American foreign policy can never quite put out of sight, and Samantha Power is nothing if not determined and smart. In our view, she stands head and shoulders above many in the profession and we would never discount her as a force in the land. In any case no single presidential advisor can be blamed for policies that were shaped by many hands. But given the evidence to date, historians are unlikely to hold up the policies of the administration she served as a stellar example of humanitarian foreign policy at its best.

History is a slippery and a twisted thing, and the gap between intention and execution is almost always wider and harder to bridge than every new president and his shiny new team of advisors believe. As it is, Samantha Power is resting from her labors while Butcher Assad is carrying on with his. Our policy on genocide has changed, apparently, from “never again,” to “just one more small one can’t hurt.”

With the ‘right to protect’ based foreign policy now lying in ruins, Syria really is turning into a problem from hell for the White House. Whether considered from a humanitarian or a strategic point of view, all the choices are getting worse while the problem is becoming more important and harder to avoid.

Let’s review where things stand as of this weekend:

1. Assad’s forces seem to be on the rebound militarily and are taking back some territory recently seized by the rebels. This smart analysis in the Jerusalem Post paints a picture of a regime deftly retrenching itself and thinking very strategically about the future.

2. But just because Assad is fighting smart doesn’t mean he’s not being brutal. The regime has been resorting to horrific levels of violence: a mix of retaliation, ethnic cleansing (to create a more secure Alawite base in the coastal area) and a deliberate use of terror to cow opponents. Case in point, there were fresh reports of a massacre this weekend in the coastal city of Banias. The source of this particular report was a pro-rebel group and so its numbers and details must be taken with a grain of salt, but overall there’s little reason to doubt that this kind of stuff is going on.

3. The reason for Assad’s recent success appears to be effective foreign support, especially from Iran. The most glaring evidence for this came this morning, with reports that Israel had struck a warehouse in Damascus full of advanced Iranian missiles intended ultimately for Hezbollah. This isn’t just a nasty local civil war. This isn’t just a broader Sunni-Shiite rivalry which threatens to spill over into Lebanon and Iraq. This is an important proxy battle for influence in the whole region, and Tehran is intimately involved. At the moment, it is defying the United States, the Sunni Arabs and western Europe, and it is succeeding.

You can deep six any hope of a nuclear compromise if Tehran comes to believe that its enemies are paper tigers. The lesson from Tehran’s perspective as of this week is evident: stand up to your enemies and they give in.

The White House’s Syria policy is in ruins. After some highly gratifying and dramatic chest-thumping about the responsibility to protect, tough talk about Assad having to go, and a series of ever-shifting red lines over chemical weapons, the United States looks confused and weak. (The morning report in the New York Times that President Obama’s “red line” comment on chemical weapons was ‘unscripted‘ will not help.) Assad is still sitting pretty in Damascus and the humanitarian toll is rising. Meanwhile, the worst of the worst have gained both power and visibility in the anti-Assad camp, and Iran is asserting itself regionally rather than recoiling in defeat. The prospect of further internationalization of the conflict is growing, given Israeli concerns over weapons transfer. And the worst-case scenario outcome for the US, in which groups linked to Al Qaeda get chemical weapons, is also menacingly more probable if the situation continues to deteriorate.

Presumably at the very least, one result of all of this will be to reduce the feelings of intellectual superiority and moral righteousness many Obama staffers had coming into office. Besides four years of ugly Guantanamo failure, they now have a genuine set of mass murders for which they bear some indirect moral responsibility and for which they have found no effective counter. This is a painful and an unpleasant feeling, but it is also the beginning of wisdom in foreign affairs.

From the cold and amoral standpoint of American interests, the mess in Syria is not a total dead loss. Just as their failure to solve the Bosnian War taught the Europeans that they still needed an American alliance after the Cold War, so the failure of the Sunni Arabs to manage Syria effectively reinforces their understanding that they also need the American connection. However, just as a reluctant Clinton administration was ultimately forced to raise its profile in Bosnia and later in Kosovo, it seems that the Obama administration is going to have to do more in the Middle East.

The Syrian war is also undermining Iran and turning Russia into a hate object across much of the region. It has weakened Hezbollah in Lebanon and it has driven a wedge between Turkey and Iran. It probably will end by increasing Israel’s strategic domination of the neighborhood; it will be a long time before Syria can reconstitute itself as a powerful foe.

So what comes next? The anti-Assad alliance looks to be set to try to change the military balance on the ground. The administration is clearly looking harder at sending lethal aid to the rebels; presumably the Sunni Gulf states are throwing in more money at a critical time. It may be that Israeli airstrikes, though limited in theory to interfering with the transfer of arms to Hezbollah can have a significant collateral impact on the regime’s war-fighting capability. If you bomb a warehouse containing Iranian missiles bound for Lebanon it’s quite possible that the explosion will detonate an ammunition dump containing supplies intended for the domestic civil war. The Israelis are probably hearing from Washington and from anti-Assad Arab leaders that this is one case in which the international community won’t scold Israel over collateral damage.

As the White House looks to escape its geopolitical box, the most important job is to recover a sense of strategic perspective. This administration has two strategic goals in the Middle East: cooling the fires of global jihad on the one hand while avoiding the horrible choice between accepting Iranian nukes and taking military action against Iran.

Given those goals, White House Syria policy from the beginning should have been to do everything possible (short of major direct American military involvement) to ensure a quick rebel win. The quicker the win, the less time international jihadis would have had to hijack the Syrian revolution, the less funding would have gone to radical groups, and the better the chances that post-war Syria would have been relatively calm.

That’s all lost now and we have paid and will pay a high price for the hesitation and dithering since war began. But if US policy inadvertently stoked the fires of the global jihadi movement and helped rebuild jihadi prestige and finances across the Sunni world, there remains the question of Iran.

For Washington, the center of gravity in this crisis is in Tehran rather than in Damascus. The White House needs to be looking at what US policy choices in Syria will induce Tehran to compromise over nukes. A war between the US and Iran could stoke the sectarian war across the region to new levels of genocidal rage along with other consequences too horrible to think cooly about. The alternative, of accepting a nuclear Iran after so much talk and so many categorical threats, is not to be thought of. Whatever the case in the abstract for seeking an accommodation with a nuclear Iran, President Obama has so committed himself and the United States to prevent an Iranian bomb that a flipflop on this issue would carry a catastrophic price. (This is another geopolitical box of the President’s own making.)

What this means in real terms is that having said that Assad must go, President Obama must now make him leave. That still does not mean boots on the ground and may not even mean airstrikes, especially if Israel continues to degrade Assad’s arsenal and perhaps expands its attention to such targets as the regime’s fuel supplies. (If Assad doesn’t have any gasoline, he can’t ship any weapons to Hezbollah.) Over time continuing Israeli airstrikes in Syria might backfire politically, but a short, sharp series of decisive and carefully targeted blows like those reported Saturday night might help tip the balance on the ground.

The United States should do what it can to arm and equip rebel groups opposed to the most extreme of jihadis and be prepared to do what it can (which may not be much) to improve the political climate in Syria after the war. However at this point the United States has little choice but to deal with whatever new Syria emerges. In a perfect world we could wait for an acceptable Syrian opposition to emerge before ousting Assad but in the real world the longer we wait the less acceptable the opposition becomes. Even so, President Obama is bound by his own words and those of his top officials, clearly stated and oft repeated. If Assad “must” go, President Obama “must” help make that happen.

The Obama administration has largely forfeited its ambition to inaugurate an era of humanitarian foreign policy. Support for the Arab Spring hasn’t done much for democracy, development or peace across the region. The reconciliation with the Muslim Middle East policy also looks pretty tattered. But decisive action in Syria now can still improve the chances that President Obama avoids a war with Iran.  There is nothing to be gained by delay.

[Photos of Assad and Obama courtesy of Wikimedia]

My previous two essays on the GOP and President Bush touched off an interesting and mostly civil debate on the blogosphere, though if I’d known I was writing within a few days of the opening of the former commander-in-chief’s Presidential Library, I probably would have waited a week. Alas, even the finely tuned news detectors here at Via Meadia allow stories here and there to pass unnoticed; there was no intention to rain on anyone’s parade and if anyone took particular offense at the timing, I apologize. Discourtesy to presidents present or past is not the goal.

Timing aside, I’m glad that so many people have jumped into the discussion, but we need some clarity on what the debate should be. The conversation the Republican Party and the country need to have isn’t one about the past; it’s about the future. As I said before, it isn’t about whether Bush was, as a matter of fact, a good or bad President. This is something a lot of the responses to my original pieces have missed. Over at Foreign Policy, Will Inboden raised some representative questions about my pieces. Inboden’s main point is most clearly stated here (but read the whole thing)

My fundamental concern with the Mead article is that it concentrates exclusively on the policy mistakes while completely ignoring the successes, and thus presents an imbalanced and even distorted picture of the overall Bush legacy.

If this were a debate about the Bush legacy, as Inboden here supposed (as have others) I would say the following. I would say, first, that I’ve written before and I’m sure I’ll write again about ways in which the Bush administration’s foreign policies deserve more credit than they receive, that many of the errors were in tactics rather than in grand strategy, and that some of the challenges he faced were of a nature that no president could resolve.

Second, I’d point out that a wholesale rejection of everything Bush tried would be as foolish as a slavish imitation. Policy wonks should be going over the Bush record with a fine toothed comb, making subtle distinctions, and carefully distinguishing between baby and bathwater.

Third, I’d say that we are still too close to the Bush years to come to anything like a final assessment of the administration’s strengths and its weaknesses. It’s always a problem for party leadership when the public sours on a president from their party. Harry Truman was a political catastrophe as president; he left office with the country mired in the deeply unpopular Korean War, with the ‘who lost China?’ debate raging, and with Joseph McCarthy at the peak of this power. He plumbed depths in the opinion polls that, with the exception of Nixon as Watergate climaxed, would not be revisited until the time of George W. Bush.

Later historians would substantially revise the negative views that contemporaries had of President Truman and his foreign policy, and many Bush loyalists hope that the same thing will happen to W. Stranger things have happened, and I suspect that historians will ultimately be kinder to Bush than his political enemies have been. (I doubt that he’ll get the full Truman treatment, but a rebound of some kind is almost inevitable.) Whatever happens, that process of historical reflection will take time, and from our standpoint today it is impossible to know what the ultimate rating will be.

Jon Ward has a pretty good account of the argument about the Bush legacy over at The Huffington Post. But those who read my essays as an invitation to debate the merits of the Bush years missed the key point I was trying to make. That point was and is that the country needs to separate the debate over what another Republican presidency will or should be like from the debate over what people think about George W. Bush. Those two are related in some ways, but separable in others. Just as JFK didn’t run as the second coming of Harry Truman but as a fresh face looking forward to new issues in a new time, future GOP presidential candidates won’t benefit much by claiming the Bush mantle or seeking to pick up right where he left off.

Among those who served in the administration of George W. Bush the desire to fight the widespread contemporary verdict on the presidency of a man whose character and loyalty commanded intense dedication is understandably strong. That is a natural human feeling but there are times when the public interest requires a distancing from private concerns, and this is one of them. As long as the GOP foreign policy message is “We were right last time and history will show just how wrong and ungrateful the doubters and naysayers were,” there won’t be many people outside the choir who want to sing along. The message needs to be future focused, and the party needs to project a sense of lessons learned rather than good times remembered.

Another group who responded to my essays on the Bush legacy thought that I was making a coded plea of some kind: that the GOP should be less socially conservative or less libertarian or something else along those lines. One reader wrote to thank me for having the courage to tell the GOP that Jeb Bush should not be its candidate in 2016.

All these readers missed my point. I am not shilling for my own secret special recipe for what the Republicans should do, which Republicans should be thrown under the bus, or who should or should not be considered for 2016. I am simply saying that a failure to deal with the reality that the Bush administration damaged the national Republican brand to a serious degree will, unless it is addressed in some way, undermine national GOP candidates for some time to come, regardless of who they are or where they stand in the party’s internal divisions.

This does not mean that service in the Bush administration disqualifies anybody from making a positive contribution to the next stage in the national debate, or for that matter to a place in the next administration. This is not about personalities. People who serve in serious government positions gain experience and knowledge that can make them more valuable in future administrations, and it is a foolish nation or political party that casts valuable human capital aside.

However, people who held senior positions need to think hard about what they want to do: do they want to re-litigate the Bush experience and argue endlessly about the merits of the past, or do they want to help the country look ahead? Can they learn to share with their colleagues, their party and the country the lessons that they learned in the course of duty? Can they build on their reflections about what has changed since 2008 or 2003 and develop useful insights into what needs to happen in 2017 and beyond? To move on from the past is not to betray it, but to refuse to move on from the past can be a betrayal of the future.

For some people this entire discussion is a foolish distraction. They simply don’t believe that the Bush years damaged the brand. They are welcome to their view, but they do remind me of a riddle: How many ex-Bush officials does it take to change a lightbulb?

Answer: There is NOTHING WRONG with the lightbulb.

If that’s what Republicans really believe, they should stick with the lightbulb they have. But it can get a little lonely in the dark.

American political parties are constantly reinventing themselves. Bill Clinton ran as the un-Carter and un-Dukakis. President Obama ran as the un-Clinton. In 1968 Richard Nixon ran as the un-Nixon or, as he put it, the “new Nixon.” Calvin Coolidge didn’t run as the second coming of Warren Harding; Franklin Roosevelt didn’t run as the second coming of Woodrow Wilson. General Eisenhower didn’t run as Herbert Hoover redux. Hilary Clinton appears to be positioning herself to run as an un-Obama.

Unless President Obama so thoroughly trashes the Democratic brand that the two parties are in a race to the bottom, the next Republican nominee will need to be an un-W—even if the nominee’s own surname happens to be Bush. That doesn’t mean saying that everything W did was wrong, but it means that a successful presidential candidate needs to speak for and embody a future-focused vision and set of policies calibrated for 2016 rather than 2001 or 2004.

Senator McCain might have helped his campaign by doing more of this in 2008. Senator Obama’s camp believed the Bush record was an anchor to be wrapped as tightly around McCain as possible in order to sink his campaign; Senator McCain’s team sometimes seemed to be trying to help make that happen.

Without declaring war on the Bush legacy or insulting the leader of his party, Senator McCain could have developed a message that was more clearly distinct from his predecessor’s. One possible example: Senator McCain could have run as a peace candidate. He could have said to the American people that nobody was more committed to their security than he was, but also that he had learned the importance of peace the hard way. Senator McCain had some serious peace-making credentials to which he could point: his role in helping the United States and Vietnam rebuild relations was outstanding.

There was a serious case to be made in 2008 that a McCain presidency was the country’s surest road to lasting peace. Without making false promises or raising unrealistic hopes, the McCain camp could have pointed out that a tested leader whose credentials weren’t in doubt was more likely to get enduring peace in Iraq and find a solution in Afghanistan than an untested neophyte. These promises would not have been cynical or demagogic; it’s not unlikely that a McCain victory would brought more stability and peace in Iraq than we now see, at least as much progress against al-Qaeda and fewer American deaths in Afghanistan than we’ve had under President Obama.

Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte won the plebiscite making him Emperor of the French in large part because he reversed field during the campaign. The Napoleonic image was all about wars of glory and national prestige; much of his base backed him because he seemed to promise a return to the great days of Napoleon I. But many other Frenchmen remembered just how long and how bloody those wars had been. They didn’t want to march to Moscow again. Louis-Napoleon sensed that concern and adjusted the message: “L’Empire c’est la paix,” he said. Make me your emperor and I’ll give you peace.

Probably nothing could have won the 2008 election for John McCain (though of course in the opinion of some ex-Bush officials that tells us nothing, nothing! about the state of the lightbulb). But what Senator McCain needed to do in 2008, the Republican nominee must also do in 2016. The nominee needs to explain how voting Republican will reduce the risk of war and of terror attacks. The message can (and should) be peace through strength as opposed to peace through retreat and appeasement, but absent the equivalent of another Pearl Harbor or 9/11 event, peace is and must be the goal of someone who wants to be elected President of the United States. “L’Eléphant c’est la paix.”

Five years after the end of the Bush administration, many of the pundits and public intellectuals of the Republican security world have not yet found a new vocabulary and a new set of ideas about our changing world that a new presidential candidate could use to reach out to the center without losing the base. Maintaining links of credibility and trust with the party’s base while reaching out to the center with a compelling national vision is something successful presidential candidates must do; if the national security division of the GOP intellectual does its job, rethinking past shibboleths and developing new and compelling ideas and programs, the party’s task becomes easier. If they can’t pull away from loyalty to the past president to focus on the needs of the next one, the task of the GOP’s next presidential nominee will be considerably more difficult.

The Bush administration’s damage to the Republican brand was not, of course, just about foreign policy. Presiding over the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression has a little something to do with the party’s poor standing. Herbert Hoover loyalists argued for decades that the Depression was not Hoover’s fault and economic historians may agree; practical politicians, however, must deal with the perceptions that exist.

Any effort to reach the youth vote, to reverse the collapse of African American and Hispanic support between 2004 and 2012 and any outreach to suburban moms and other key blocs of swing voters will be hampered until and unless the GOP can persuade voters to put the Bush administration firmly in the rear-view mirror.

When it comes to domestic policy, the GOP is having an easier time disentangling itself from the Bush years. There is more real creative ferment on domestic policy issues in GOP circles these days than among Democrats. Republicans are already well into a new generation of ideas and proposals. Some are better and more practical than others, and a few policy ideas falls well short of a comprehensive and compelling vision for the future of the United States, but this is a moment of actual creativity and innovation, and many state governors and political figures are already carving out an identity for themselves and the party that doesn’t look back to the Bush years. (The relative freedom of state politicians from any perceived voter responsibility for the Bush years is one of the reasons the GOP has been more successful at the state than at the national level since 2008.)

This is the kind of activity that today’s Republican leaders and policy wonks need to introduce to the realm of foreign policy. The world has changed considerably since President Bush left office, and creative thinking in GOP circles needs to figure out how to make Americans feel safe and secure in it. This is almost infinitely more important for the GOP, and for the country, than any attempt to promote a reevaluation of the Bush legacy.

[Image credit: Christopher Halloran / Shutterstock.com]

If Maureen Dowd’s evisceration manqué of President Obama’s gun control strategy in the New York Times is any indication, Ms. Dowd is in the wrong line of work. She doesn’t understand American politics. She doesn’t know how votes are gained and lost, she doesn’t know what presidents do or understand what powers they have, and above all she doesn’t understand how politicians think.

Column writing is dangerous work and long success in the game can lead to the stifling of that Editor Within who keeps you from looking too stupid in print. A rich self esteem, fortifed by decades of op-ed tenure and dinner party table talk dominance, has apparently given Ms. Dowd the confidence to believe that she is a maestro of political infighting, a Clausewitz of strategic insight and a Machiavelli of political cunning rolled up into one stylish and elegant piece of work. From the heights of insight on which she dwells, it is easy to see what that poor schmuck Barry Obama can’t: those 60 votes on gun control were his for the taking, if he was only as shrewd a politician as Maureen Dowd.

The President needs to get his hands dirty, our genteel and accomplished op-ed writer advises the ex-community organizer and Chicago pol. He needs to get real, get down in the dirt, muck around with the senators and exercise raw power. Don’t make empty gestures and don’t give up, she advises him: fight! fight! fight!

Perhaps because she fears that the President is too stupid to understand what she means, or simply out of her benevolent desire to show her readers just what brilliant political insight looks like, she vouchsafes us some examples. Here’s how she sees the President twisting the arm of North Dakota Democrat Heidi Heitkamp:

Sometimes you must leave the high road and fetch your brass knuckles. Obama should have called Senator Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota over to the Oval Office and put on the squeeze: “Heidi, you’re brand new and you’re going to have a long career. You work with us, we’ll work with you. Public opinion is moving fast on this issue. The reason you get a six-year term is so you can have the guts to make tough votes. This is a totally defensible bill back home. It’s about background checks, nothing to do with access to guns. Heidi, you’re a mother. Think of those little kids dying in schoolrooms.”

If only Lyndon Johnson had understood the art of political pressure as well as Maureen Dowd. “You work with us, we’ll work with you.” It’s… brilliant! Reminding her about her six year term… if that doesn’t swing her around, nothing will. “You’re a mother…” This is a set of brass knuckles no one could resist. The NRA must be thanking its lucky stars that a bumbling amateur like Barack Obama is in the White House instead of the arch-politician Maureen Dowd; Heidi Heitkamp would have been putty in her elegantly manicured hands.

This is a politician getting down to what the New York Times editorial page seems to think is a particularly fetching set of brass knuckles: reciting liberal talking points one after another in rapid fire sequence. That’s hardball, that’s brass tacks at least in the mind of Maureen Dowd, a woman who on the evidence of this column could and would teach her own grandmother to suck eggs.

But lest anyone miss the full range of her strategic insight, Dowd gives us another example. This is how she tells us that Obama could have won over one Republican Senator:

Tom Coburn, the Republican senator from Oklahoma, is one of the few people on the Hill that the president actually considers a friend. Obama wrote a paean to Coburn in the new Time 100 issue, which came out just as Coburn sabotaged his own initial effort to help the bill.

Obama should have pressed his buddy: “Hey, Tom, just this once, why don’t you do more than just talk about making an agreement with the Democrats? You’re not running again. Do something big.”

Don Corleone should put it this well. This is how minds are changed, votes are swayed and history is made. Use your male bonding skills for the power of good: “Press your buddies,” liberals, a bright new future awaits.

Dowd still has one Big Idea to share with us: the masterstroke that would have turned it all around and snatched victory from the jaws of defeat:

Couldn’t the president have given his Rose Garden speech about the “shameful” actions in Washington before the vote rather than after?

Yes! Presidential eloquence, better timed.  That would have done the trick. Those mangy Republicans and cowardly blue dog Democrats could never have resisted that nuclear weapon of American politics, a well timed Rose Garden speech. (Ms. Dowd also suggested that the President make some gun control speeches in blue states represented by GOP senators; a somewhat more practical suggestion but one unlikely to sway any votes.)

The Times apparently thinks it has readers who find columns like this either useful or diverting, so we say nothing about whether this is the caliber of political thought that ought to appear at the Newspaper of Record. But the paper may want to recalibrate its intellectual void detectors just a bit; it is hard to read anything this vapid without questioning the judgment of everyone involved.

One interesting thing about Ms. Dowd’s description of “hardball” political tactics is just how dainty and genteel her brass knuckle suggestions actually are. A speech, an appeal to reason: there is nothing here about lucrative contracts for political supporters, promises of sinecure jobs for politicians who lose their seats, a “blank check” for administrative backing on some obscure tax loophole that a particular politician could award to a favored client; there’s not even a delicate hint about grand jury investigations that can be stopped in their tracks or compromising photographs or wiretaps that need never see the light of day. Far be it from Ms Dowd to speak of or even hint at the kind of strategy that actual politicians think about when words like ‘hardball’ come to mind. Ms Dowd speaks of brass knuckles and then shows us a doily; at some level it speaks well of Ms. Dowd as a human being that even when she tries she seems unable to come up with an offer someone can’t refuse.

This is more broadly a problem of gentry liberal politics. Gentry liberals desperately want politics to be clean, to be about the “issues.” And they yearn for their heroes to eschew all those nasty tricks of machine politicians. Thus liberal columnists like Dowd give liberal heroes like Obama two contradictory missions: fight the fight cleanly, but win big. Even when she’s buffeting President Obama over the head with her laptop, screaming at him to fight harder and dirtier, she can only think in terms of ineffective gestures, talking points more clearly recited, and speechmaking.

Maureen Dowd will clearly not be in much demand as a political strategist after this column, but the President needs to pay it some attention. Many liberals like Ms. Dowd have extremely unrealistic ideas about where the country stands and how politics work. They genuinely believe that a huge majority (90 percent!) is slavering at the bit to get more liberal legislation passed. They genuinely believe that the presidency is invested with awesome and numinous powers that can translate the will of the 90 percent into sagacious liberal laws without doing anything dirty or distressing.

When, inevitably, reality falls short of their hopes, they don’t re-examine their ideas about how politics work or where the country stands. Instead they blame the President for failing to deliver what he clearly could if only he were willing to try. As Dowd sums up the gun control fight:

There were ways to get to 60 votes. The White House just had to scratch it out with a real strategy and a never-let-go attitude.

Her efforts to describe a strategy satirize themselves; her attempts to translate a “never-let-go” attitude into practical steps amuse. But none of that causes her to doubt the shining truth: gun control would be ours if the President weren’t so pathetic. If Maureen Dowd’s political fantasies cannot be realized, it is obviously because President Obama just isn’t very good at his job.

The President should watch his back; there are a lot of Dowdians out there in Liberal La La Land, and as an inevitably disappointing second term unfolds they are increasingly ready to blame everything they don’t like about the state of the country on what they are sure is his incompetence, his political cowardice and his sloth.

It makes former Bush aide Peter Wehner really unhappy that anyone would criticize President W. Bush. In our latest essay, we noted that the Bush presidency remains widely unpopular and that national Bush fatigue remains a serious political problem for the Republican Party. We said that “more went right under Bush than most of his critics understood,” but counseled Republicans to spend less energy fighting what is pretty much a settled public judgment about the Bush administration and focus their attention on building for the future. We suggested that the GOP needs to talk about “lessons learned” and give the very large majority of Americans who consider the Bush administration a failure more reason to think that another Republican in the White House would mean something different.

Mr. Wehner’s response, entitled “Walter Russell Mead’s Shallow and Misleading Attack on the Bush Legacy,” is an impressive attempt to prove that everything popularly regarded as a Bush failure was in reality a great success. Insofar as any failure befell the White House, others were to blame. Indeed, reading Wehner’s response, it seems that Hurricane Katrina and the financial crash were both grossly unfair to a set of brilliant policies that deserved much better from an ungrateful world and that Heaven vouchsafed the American people a president whose many excellences they were incapable of appreciating in full.

All this could be true, but our advice still stands. Mr. Wehner’s attention is fixed on the rearview mirror, but political parties and countries need people with their eyes on how to build a better future. Here is a representative passage:

And here’s what else Mead fails to mention: In the aftermath of the March 2001 recession, America experienced six years of uninterrupted economic growth and a record 52 straight months of job creation that produced more than 8 million new jobs. During the Bush presidency, the unemployment rate averaged 5.3 percent. We saw labor-productivity gains that exceeded the averages of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. Real after-tax income per capita increased by more than 11 percent. And from 2000 to 2007, real GDP grew by more than 17 percent, a gain of nearly $2.1 trillion. […]

Mr. Mead mentions none of this, perhaps because they pose inconvenient facts to his thesis. In any event, it’s hardly a record of failure.

Oh come on, Mrs. Lincoln, we can hear Wehner saying, pull yourself together. Other than that one little incident at the end it was an excellent play! The Bush economy was glorious, a triumph… except for that tiny little depression in the last act.

Wehner, who by all accounts is a thoughtful and sensible person with a lot to contribute to the national debate, is so caught up with angry defenses of the brilliance of policy making during the Bush era that he misses our point entirely. We weren’t making a claim about whether the Bush presidency was an overall success or failure. That’s a question for future historians and we are happy to leave that question to their care. Far more important is the fact that except for a minority of true believers, the American public largely believes that Bush failed, and no matter how many blog posts ex-Bush officials write, that isn’t going to change anytime soon.

There are lots of intelligent people out there who think this is a gross injustice, and want the national conversation to focus on setting the record straight. For its own sake the Republican Party has to deafen itself to their piteous pleas; they are sirens luring the sailors to their destruction on the rocks. This will sound harsh and unfair to some, but it is true and it is real.

Mr. Wehner’s touching, honorable but politically toxic Bush loyalty is the kind of gift left-leaning Dems pray for night and day. Liberals want the Republican Party to spend the next four years defending the Bush record as strongly as possible. They want potential conservative presidential candidates to say as many things as possible that will tie them to Bush in the mind of the public. They want Mr. Wehner’s approach to be mandatory for the next generation of Republican candidates; they want loyalty to the Bush legacy to be a litmus test for decades to come. They want to use President Bush the way their grandfathers used Herbert Hoover, and if Mr. Wehner has his way, they will.

Nothing would make Democratic political operatives happier than to watch future GOP presidential candidates or their advisors give on the record speeches about how brilliant Bush’s economic policies were or how cleverly he managed the aftermath of Katrina. It is attack ad manna from Heaven. People on the Republican side of the aisle who hope to play an important role in national policymaking in the future need to take thought about how their reflections on the past might help or hurt those with whom they hope to work.

As long as Republicans maintain that the Bush presidency was a triumph, a sterling example of greatness, of competent benevolence mixed with wisdom almost divine, and that the American people are a bunch of ungrateful boobs for failing to recognize this, then life at the DNC will be pretty darn easy. Nothing will make caricaturing the GOP while avoiding substantive policy arguments easier for the Democrats than if GOP discourse is dominated by people trying to change the public perception of President Bush’s two terms.

Many Bush-era Republicans are rightfully worried about the ground in their party being lost to the neo-isolationists, about the globaloney internationalism of some Democrats, and about the current administration’s blue model policy template. One of the reasons VM wrote the essay we did was to encourage Republicans to start thinking of ways they can address these concerns successfully.

We don’t think this means that everyone who worked in the Bush administration needs to repent in sackcloth and ashes. It certainly doesn’t mean abandoning core beliefs. We don’t even think it rules out a run by Jeb Bush… if he can persuade voters that he is his own man with a distinct vision of where he wants to take the country. But voters want to know what you’ve learned, how you’ve grown, and why you think another round of conservative policy will leave a sweeter taste on the public tongue.

One of the surest ways not to do this is to insist that the responsibility lies not with Republicans to regain the trust lost, but with the poor misinformed voters too stupid to understand that Bush’s deficits were triumphs of wisdom and forethought, too distracted to remember the joy parade that was pre-Obama Iraq, too undiscerning to give the Bush folks all credit for the good times while blaming the Clinton legacy for the crash. If there is a planet in this solar system on which this is going to be a winning political strategy, we have yet to visit it here at VM.

Whatever historians finally decide about the Bush administration is irrelevant to the politics of today. The Democratic goal from 2008 onward has been to tie the GOP to a defense of the Bush administration. GOPers who can’t take their eyes off the rear-view mirror will not help their party regain public trust.

[George W. Bush image courtesy of Christopher Halloran / Shutterstock.com]

What does it mean for the euro that, on paper at least, Spaniards, Italians, and Cypriots are much wealthier on average than Germans? That’s the question Wolfgang Münchau tackled in a must-read column in the Financial Times, and it’s one that VM readers would do well to spend some time thinking through.

Here are the outlines of his argument. A new survey by the European Central Bank has concluded that median German household wealth ranks among the lowest in the entire Eurozone. The median German family is worth €51,000 whereas the median Cypriot household is worth €267,000. Those are eye-popping figures, and the German press is apoplectic over them. Münchau cautions that the median is not the best measure in this case. But even if one were to look at the mean, Germans are worth €200,000 per household, while Spanish net wealth is somewhere around €300,000. There’s another correction to take on board; Germans haven’t bought into home ownership the way many Europeans (and Americans) do. But put in all the caveats and corrections you want, and the numbers are still striking and, to many Germans, infuriating. Why should German households be paying tax money to bail out rich Cypriots?

But anybody who’s traveled in Europe understands that these numbers have something wrong with them. Germans are significantly richer than Italians and Greeks. The answer, says Münchau, must be that varying price levels across the eurozone are responsible.

On the surface, this is not actually as bizarre as it might seem. Price levels vary. The American experience with the dollar is not totally different. A dollar in New York isn’t the same thing as a dollar in other parts of the country. A salary of $150,000 in Manhattan is worth a lot less than a salary of $150,000 in Omaha or Baton Rouge. And while $500,000 can’t buy you a decent sized apartment in Manhattan, it can buy quite a nice house in much of the country. European countries work like this, too. Milan is a lot more expensive than most of the rest of Italy, for example.

But there is a perverse European twist to this state of affairs. In America, it’s the richer parts of the country that have the highest price levels. But in Europe it’s the other way round. Prosperous Germany has lower prices than the dead broke Club Med countries. In American terms, imagine that real estate in Manhattan was cheaper than in Detroit, or that prices in Buffalo, New York, far outstripped prices in Silicon Valley.

There are two ways to solve this problem within the eurozone: Germany can let its prices inflate to match Club Med levels, or the Club Med countries can deflate to match German prices. But the first option is closed: since the Germans are dead set against inflation, prices in the south will have to come down.

They will have to come down a lot. For the eurozone to survive as it now stands, house prices, wages, the cost of meals in restaurants, groceries, and so on would all have to fall by as much as 50 percent in the periphery. That can’t happen without massive losses to banks, which have lent money based on current price levels. These loans cannot be repaid if prices fall that far. And this kind of price adjustment also means massive unemployment, probably dragging on for many years.

As Münchau points out, this situation means that Europe’s single currency has in effect already failed. €300,000 in Germany is not the same as €300,000 in Italy or Spain, and there is no way to equalize values without years of wretched and ruinous pain.

There are lots of consequences, but the one that may cause the most trouble fastest has to do with banking.  If a Spanish euro is really worth much less than a German euro, sooner or later bank deposits in Spain are going to be worth less than bank deposits in Germany. Intelligent people will realize this and start moving their bank deposits out of Spanish banks and into German or even non-eurozone banks; those who fail to do this stand to lose a lot of money when the system finally snaps. Stupid people (some of whom may be operating central banks) will increasingly be the ones whose bank deposits keep the south European bank systems functioning, and there are probably not enough of them to keep the system running indefinitely.

We have no way of knowing how this all ends. One problem is that the smartest solution—having Germany and perhaps a handful of other northern countries leave the euro for a new currency (the Deutche Mark 2.0, or a “neuro” for northern Europe)—would make life easier in the south. The south based euro would fall in value, but since debts and contracts are denominated in that currency, the adjustment would be the same as in a normal devaluation. This course would likely lead quickly to a new burst of growth in the south, though inflation and other problems would take a toll over time.

But the euro’s break up day would cause a lot of problems for Germany and its northern friends. First, the new currency would rapidly appreciate, killing their export markets. Second, all the assets their banks and companies held in the south (loans, etc.) would suddenly be worth much less. This would quickly create a major and expensive banking crisis in the north. The resulting bailout might well bring the neuro back to earth for a while, helping exporters, but it would be an ugly and expensive mess and the German government would end up with a large pile of new debt.

So we’re in an interesting situation. The crisis is crippling the south, but the south has no power to resolve the crisis. The crisis isn’t comfortable for the north but still looks less painful than the solution. So the north, which has the ability to resolve the crisis, doesn’t have the will to do it and the south, which has the will, lacks the ability.

And meanwhile everything in Europe gets worse. As we’ve said before, with the exception of communism itself, the euro has been the biggest economic catastrophe to befall the continent (and the world) since the 1930s. Politicians in Europe thought they were living in a post-historical period in which mistakes didn’t really matter all that much. They were horribly wrong, and the wreck of the euro is blighting lives and embittering spirits on a truly staggering scale.

Many Republicans don’t like to admit this out loud, especially the power establishment that was close to the Bush administration or served in its upper echelons, but the Bush administration was a first class political disaster for the president’s party. Until Republicans find a way to talk about what went wrong and how future Republican administrations will do better, the GOP will face a stiff headwind of well-merited public distrust.

This will be especially true in the realm of foreign policy. President Obama’s own foreign policy approval ratings are sinking, but Republicans should not take much comfort in these numbers. The failures, real and perceived, of the Bush administration hang over the Republican Party like a dark cloud, and the failure to deal openly and honestly with the past could hobble the GOP for years.

I don’t agree with the professional Bush-bashers and am perfectly willing to give the Bush administration its due. Not every decision the President made was bad, and the circumstances of his administration were difficult and harsh. President Bush was, is, a decent and honorable man who did his level best in the world’s most difficult job.  The Democrats who ran against him might have done considerably worse. Some of the things that went wrong were not his fault and more went right under Bush than most of his critics understood. Many of the failings of those years were due more to execution than to vision and to tone more than substance. It was also true, and brutally true at times, that the press corps did everything it could to shine the brightest possible spotlight on every pimple on the face of the Bush administration. There was no wart, no scar, no stretch mark on the Bush administration that didn’t get its full fifteen minutes of fame.

But make every allowance you can, discount the press bias and polish up the accomplishments as much as you like, and the conclusion still cannot be evaded: George W. Bush’s presidency was not a success and its result was to diminish the credibility of the ideas he professed and to damage the brand of the party whose standard he bore.

A lot of official Republican discourse tries to skate past the failures of the Bush years, but this won’t do. It’s a bit like a hostess trying to keep up the bright cocktail party chatter around an eight hundred pound tuna fish rotting in the living room. It isn’t convincing, and the effort does not inspire trust in her judgment. Voters are very familiar with the multiple policy failures of the Bush years (two long unfinished wars, a botched hurricane, no significant domestic reform, frozen immobility on immigration, deficits out of control, the middle class in deepening trouble, the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression); the failure of the party to grapple with those failures, to ask what went wrong and what must change, and above all to tell voters why the next time will be different is the key to Republican vulnerability at the polls today.

Let’s begin with the obvious: the wars in the Middle East. I am by no means the harshest critic around of the Bush administration’s war policy. I supported the Iraq War going in because I trusted Colin Powell’s judgment on WMD and because I did not (and do not) think that containing Saddam Hussein was a viable option in the long run. Once we were in, and things were a mess, I continued to support the war because I believed (and believe) that cutting and running would make a bad situation worse. I did not and do not admire many of the foreign policy types who tried to disassociate themselves from a war they supported when the going got tough, and I felt then and still feel that once we were in Iraq we had responsibilities that we had to fulfill.

But that didn’t mean I wasn’t horrified by the clumsy and foolish international diplomacy surrounding our entrance into that war, appalled by the discovery that the administration failed to find the WMD it claimed were there, and then sickened and disgusted by the serial policy failures that marked year after year after year of unacceptable policy confusion, mixed messages, and strategic flailing about in the sand. I counseled patience during those years and spoke out against cutting and running and I challenged the panicky chorus of voices saying that everything was lost. I supported the surge as a last ditch effort to prevent an even worse catastrophe, and applauded President Bush’s wisdom and courage in going ahead with it. That did not, however, make up for the years of poor choices leading up to the surge. Avoiding defeat after years of bungling in a war you should never have started is better than embracing defeat in that position. But this isn’t the kind of achievement that earns you a place on Mount Rushmore.

The war in Afghanistan was unavoidable after 9/11 and I don’t subscribe to the dreamy little theory cherished by some Democrats that we’d have won that war in short order if the President and the country hadn’t been sidetracked by Iraq. But it remains the case that President Bush started a war in Afghanistan that he failed either to finish or to explain to the American people. The combination of the two wars, and the atmosphere of strategic chaos around both war efforts for so many years left a devastating impression about Republican policy competence in the mind of the Americans who might otherwise be sympathetic to Republican ideas.

However, beyond the central and inescapable facts that the Bush administration started a war in Iraq on inadequate grounds, pursued some of the most inept pre-war diplomacy in American history as it moved toward war, administered Iraq incompetently, failed to explain its policy or its strategy convincingly either to the American people or to the world, and blundered ineffectively against the insurgency for years before finally getting its act together, there are some other problems for the GOP with the toxic legacy of the Bush years.

One issue that the GOP foreign policy world will have to address involves democracy and democracy promotion. As the WMD story lost credibility, the Bush administration placed greater public emphasis on democracy promotion as its goal in Iraq, and during the happier phase of the Arab Spring Bush defenders pointed to the democracy movement in the Arab world as justification for the Bush policies.

Perhaps, but from the standpoint of Republican credibility on foreign affairs, these are dangerous arguments. Egypt is a splintered reed of a staff, warned the prophet Isaiah; it will pierce the hand of all who lean on it. Certainly Republicans are less willing to claim that the Egyptian Revolution is the child of Bush’s Iraq invasion today than some were when the revolution looked prettier. Was the Arab world in 2003 and is it now on the cusp of dramatic moves toward something most Americans would recognize as democracy? And if so, how engaged should American foreign policy be in trying to make that happen? Are we or should we be in the business of promoting democracy with ground troops?

History’s ultimate judgment on the relationship of democracy, the Iraq War and the Arab Spring may be different from contemporary conclusions, but that won’t help Republicans now. Here and now the argument that Bush’s Arab democracy promotion agenda was such a glittering success that we should double down on it is a big time loser in American politics. Most Americans view the current regime in Iraq as anything but a model of enlightened democracy, and given the sectarian war sweeping the region it is hard to be optimistic about its immediate future. Iraq is much closer to renewed Sunni-Shiite civil war than to settled democracy at the moment, and defenders of the Bush legacy probably need to be bracing themselves against news of more trouble in that unhappy land. (Some will blame future troubles on President Obama’s overhasty withdrawal. They will have a point, but there is a difference between a logical argument and a politically effective one. Politically, the argument that any trouble in Iraq is Obama’s fault for getting out rather than Bush’s for going in is a loser.)

More broadly, news from across the region confirms most Americans in their belief that the road to democracy in the Arab world remains a long and a winding one. Right now regionally as well as in Iraq the most powerful political forces in the Middle East seem to care much more about prosecuting the Sunni-Shiite war than about building anything Americans would recognize as a democracy. Replacing pro-American dictators with incompetent Islamists may well be a step forward in Arab history as a whole; the American people are unlikely to think the change worth significant expenditures of money or blood.

One recommendation: more GOP democracy promotion wonks would benefit from a deep study of the history of democracy promotion in statecraft, a history that extends at least as far back as Lord Palmerston’s tenure as British foreign minister in the 1830s. From the failed South American republics of the 1820s through the Arab Spring and Burma experiences of today, there is a long, sometimes depressing and very rich story of primarily but not only British and American efforts to promote liberal politics and policies overseas. The Carlist wars in Spain, the independence movements in Italy and Greece, over a century of promoting reform and liberalism in China, the Balkans, the Ottoman Middle East and Latin America: deeper knowledge of and reflection on this history could allow a more nuanced, pragmatic and politically sustainable approach to democracy promotion to emerge. Democracy promotion is not a new diplomatic idea, and the pitfalls and potholes that the Bush administration encountered have been met with before. What one might call the high liberal tradition of statesmanship, venerable and seasoned, offers rich resources for Americans today thinking about their country’s place in the world, and an immersion in it would guard against some of the mistakes the Bush people made. It’s too bad that so many of today’s democracy crusaders have never really bothered to learn from the past.

Republicans wanting an active foreign policy need all the intellectual reinforcements and support they can get. Americans are not eager to send more troops overseas on nation building, democracy promotion missions in the Middle East, and if they were in such a mood they would not trust Republicans to shape the missions as things now stand. It is not my job to tell the GOP what its new approach should be, but some home truths need to be said. The bungling of the Bush years damaged public confidence in the competence of Republican foreign policy conduct, and the party needs to find ways to regain the trust that was lost.

It is partly about judgment. Americans want a president who won’t hesitate to shoot if there’s a burglar in the house, but they don’t want one who pops off the shotgun every time a squirrel makes a noise in the attic. The GOP has lost tremendous ground on the judgment issue and the party’s foreign policy wonks need to think about how they can respond.

Some conservatives will interpret this is a call to turn the party back over to the establishment’s wise men. Actually, I have a lot of respect for people like General Brent Scowcroft and George H. W. Bush, and I would not be surprised if President George W. Bush doesn’t wish he had listened to some of these calming voices a little more carefully in 2002-3.

But it isn’t that simple. Going back to the good old days is not a solution for America’s foreign policy challenges. The accelerating impact of the IT revolution on the nature of war (we’ve gone from RMA to cyber war in less than a decade), the complex dynamics of the emerging new great power system, the game of thrones in Asia, the economic crisis, the global consequences of the demographic slowdown and many other issues require that foreign policy in our time look forward rather than back. The GOP doesn’t so much need to turn back to its elder statesmen as it needs to start producing the younger statesmen (and stateswomen) who can lead the party forward.

This is not a call for a new party orthodoxy, much less an attempt (by a Democrat, no less) to mandate what the new Republican orthodoxy should be. I am not suggesting the formation of a circular firing squad or a bitter internecine debate over who was responsible for what. There are many different ways to analyze what happened in the Bush years and many different ways to think about lessons learned. It would be natural and healthy to see a variety of Republican takes on the Bush years emerge: neo-neo-conservatives would want to hold to some of the core ideas of W’s first term while articulating the need for certain carefully calibrated changes. We are already hearing from Rand Paul and others a neo-Taftian view of a scaled back American global mission. Others may try to integrate a broader strategic vision with an awareness of budget constraints; historian John Gaddis argues very persuasively that some of the best foreign policy in the Cold War came in times when policy makers believed that severe resource constraints forced the United States to make careful strategic choices.

The Republican Party like all parties in modern democracies doesn’t need a narrow orthodoxy on foreign policy or on anything else; it needs a rich discourse among competing schools of thought and visions. But the reality that cannot be avoided today is that those voices must be able to explain to the public why the choices they recommend will lead to different results than the ones that Bush got. More, the failure of more internationally minded Republicans to advance credible foreign policy approaches based on lessons learned from the Bush years opens the door to the neo-isolationists. If those within the GOP who believe in an active and global American foreign policy don’t distinguish themselves from the Bush approach, and offer a convincing critique and revision, they will inexorably lose ground within the party even as the party itself loses ground with the public.

Fluency in discussing the disasters of the Bush years is going to be a job requirement for Republican candidates and mandarins for some time to come. This doesn’t mean GOPers need to harp incessantly on the subject, but the sooner individuals and the party as a whole can embrace and project a message of rethink and change, the sooner the country will be ready to listen to what else they have to say.  The charge that the Bush administration was a disaster and that Republicans haven’t changed is the strongest weapon in the hands of Democratic politicians; Republicans must either wait for the public’s memories of the Bush administration to fade or they have to think about how they can distinguish themselves from the past.

Many Republicans will instinctively reject this approach and recoil from the thought of a public washing of the party’s dirty linen. Fair enough, but one has to ask whether the party as a whole really wants to pay the heavy political price of this kind of reticence.

Republican and conservative publications have a role to play in facilitating the kind of discourse that can help move the party into a new era. “Lessons learned” conferences, symposia, special journal issues and so on can allow a frank airing of differences and reflections, and give future political candidates and their teams some ideas about the best way to get rid of the bathwater while keeping the babies on board. There are moves afoot to develop new ‘vision statements’ for foreign policy and otherwise to reposition the GOP toward the future. That is a healthy sign, but those projects won’t succeed without engaging in a deep ‘lessons learned’ discussion.

Republicans and more broadly people who favor a strong national security policy and a globally engaged foreign policy don’t have to sit in sackcloth and ashes, they don’t have to say “Thank you sir, may I have another?” every time the New York Times publishes an editorial on an Iraq war anniversary, and they don’t have start every sentence with an apology. But they do need to show the country what they learned from the Bush years, and that they won’t crash the car if they ever get their hands back on the steering wheel.

The inability to tackle the Bush legacy has paralyzed the foreign policy debate among internationally minded, progressive Republicans.  Criticisms of Obama, yes; defense of military spending, yes; ritualistic invocations of free trade, yes; opportunistic pot shots on issues like support for Israel or the Benghazi raid, yes. But partly because people are not ready to take on the Bush experience as fully and as critically as they should, there seems to be very little intellectual excitement in the world of GOP strategic thinking today.

That’s a pity; globaloney liberals and neo-isolationists can’t offer the country the guidance we need. Without a Hamiltonian resurgence of creative, forward looking and profoundly American thought about foreign policy in the tradition of people like George Washington and Theodore Roosevelt, the United States and the world will have a much tougher 21st century than any of us want.