Finding Something Upon Which to Agree

David Brooks strikes again, pandering to both sides of the political divide while making himself appear the centrist - a "belle of the ball" to be wooed back by the GOP. Almost despite himself, however, he manages to throw in a few gems:

"Nurturing stable families in which children can develop the social and cultural capital they need to thrive.... It means publicly funded, though not necessarily publicly run, preschool programs." First, lets be clear what this means; this entire quotation is an exercise in fence-straddling. Translation for Democrats: "Social welfare/health care/education programs aimed at children, plus billions of dollars of additional support for education." Translation for Republicans: "Social values programs aimed at making good Christian 1950's homes, plus steps towards voucher programs for education." Well, I'll take what I can get - a couple billion dollars for high-quality preschool could solve a lot of problems in this country (one report even claims that every dollar invested in pre-school can save the country $7 (PDF) in the costs associated with crime, drug use, and teen pregnancy).

"Radical school reform: performance pay for teachers, and end to stupid certification rules, urban boarding schools..., locally run neighborhood child centers to service an array for health and day-care needs." Once again, some righty ideas mixed with some lefty ones, couched in language that appeases the far-right, but the sentiment is in the right direction.

"Spread assets. Every citizen, from birth, should have an IRA-type savings account. The tax code should encourage personal and employer contributions." Amazingly, he manages in this paragraph to appease both the personal-savings-accounts right-wing and the redistribute-wealth left-wing. But when a conservative starting a sentence with "spread assets," you know something's changed in America.

"Raise taxes on carbon emissions." ::Stunned silence:: Granted Brooks finishes that sentence by encouraging keeping capital gains and dividends tax cuts permanent (oh, those poor, poor, overtaxed millionaires), but raise taxes on carbon emissions? Music to my ears!

What comes out of Brooks's op-ed? American values are, as Ronald Dworkin says, in reality, a deep shade of blue. We want social welfare programs to help the most disadvantaged Americans; we want enough spreading of wealth that every American has at least the opportunity to succeed in life; we want to help the environment (though we have too much cognitive dissonance to actually do anything about it on our own).

The problem in actually making any of these things happen is that Americans still don't trust government (thank you Ronald Reagan). We're willing to take government funding, as long as it's not under government control. We'll take attempts to equalize wealth, as long as its in the form of private accounts. We'd love social welfare institutions - but we'd rather that private organizations provide them. Here's my problem - and my biggest disagreement with libertarians: while most Americans may not trust the public sector, I see no reason to trust the private sector. Sure, a corporation can probably get things done more efficiently than the federal government - I feel like there's very little disagreement about that. But will corporations actually get anything done? When you show me large scale, sustainable social welfare provided by a private entity, maybe we can have that discussion. Until then, American values must point us to one and only one thing: a progressive government.