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From RFK to GWB - In 2000, echoes of 1968
National Review, June 5, 2000 by Michael Knox Beran
WHAT can Bobby Kennedy possibly teach George W. Bush about how to run for president? The radical-chic senator-he once praised Che Guevara as a revolutionary hero-is not, after all, the kind of politician to whom a conservative turns easily for inspiration. And yet in 1968 Kennedy did precisely what Bush is trying to do today. He made his campaign for president a campaign, in part, against the mentality of the entitlement state-and he did it in the name of compassion.
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A number of elements of Bush's "compassionate conservatism" strongly resemble RFK's proposals to reform the entitlement state. Bush's plan to use the tax code to put the market to work solving the problems of the poor is reminiscent of ideas Kennedy pioneered three and a half decades ago. Commonplace though they seem today, Kennedy's proposals to use the Internal Revenue Code to bring private enterprise to the ghetto were innovative ones at the time. Bush wants to use the same sort of thinking to help poor and "working" Americans obtain private health insurance, come up with a down payment on a house, or cover the costs of college or starting a business. Like Bush, Kennedy was skeptical of government-directed efforts to fight poverty; he wanted to find ways to help inner-city residents rebuild their neighborhoods themselves. Kennedy's somewhat utopian scheme called for citizens to do the rebuilding with their own hands-a plan that foundered, in a Kennedy- sponsored test project in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant, when unsympathetic unions frowned on the idea of competing with a new army of home-builders. Bush circumvents the union problem by proposing to give tax credits to private developers to build and rehabilitate houses in languishing neighborhoods.
Bush, of course, isn't the only politician in the years since Robert Kennedy's death to propose using the tax code to help the less fortunate. Al Gore has floated similar schemes, some of which have found expression in the administration's "empowerment zone" initiatives, which combine tax incentives, job training, low-interest loans, and community grants. Bill Clinton has turned tax credits for the poor into something of a growth industry-and in the process made the tax code more ludicrously complicated than ever. What sets Bush apart isn't his emphasis on tax credits, but his belief that the entitlement state, as it's currently structured, isn't all that compassionate. It nurtures, not self-confident, self-reliant citizens, but groups of servile dependents hooked on the largesse of the central government. A glance at the history books reveals that this is precisely what the entitlement state was intended to do. Compassion didn't play a role in the creation of the earliest welfare state, that which Otto von Bismarck established in Germany in the last quarter of the 19th century. Bismarck, the historian A. J. P. Taylor observed, "did not promote social reform out of love for the German workers." "Sympathy" and "affection," Taylor wrote, were never among the Iron Chancellor's "strong points." Bismarck instead established the Wohlfahrtstaat in order to make the lower orders "more subservient" to the state. The American entitlement system-which for Kennedy amounted to a cynical "payoff" that substituted "check-writing ma chines for male wage-earners"-hasn't proved to be any more compassionate.
The problem with Bush's current challenge to the entitlement system-a challenge that includes his proposal to modernize Social Security with private investment accounts-is that it lacks an underlying philosophy to hold it together. When Kennedy challenged New Deal and Great Society thinking in the 1960s, he offered an argument, not just a set of policy positions. He pointed out that the entitlement state was, in certain respects, inconsistent with older Ameri can ideas about the importance of self-reliance. He invoked the liberalism of 19th-century America-the liberalism of Emerson and Lincoln-and celebrated its faith in the power of individual effort. Real compassion, Kennedy argued, consisted in giving people the confidence they needed to make that individual effort; he saw no other way to give them a "chance to be fully self- supporting." At the same time Kennedy recognized what contemporary conservatives too often fail to grasp: that the rhetoric of self- reliance by itself long ago ceased to move Americans. Only by presenting voters with a package in which (a certain kind of) compassion is intended to nurture self- reliance and self-confidence does the older vocabulary of liberal individualism become palatable to them. Calls to reform the entitlement state made in the name of individual liberty (like those of Hayek and Friedman) no longer resonate with an electorate that has been taught to be suspicious of naked individualism. Kennedy demonstrated that only by persuading Americans that entitlement reform is what we would now call a kind of tough love-an exercise in a shrewder sort of compassion-will its advocates succeed in making needed changes.
