ConservativeHome's Big Ideas blog

Dan Coats: If we're going to save America, we need growth, which means we need to cut spending and reform entitlements...and we can't wait until 2012

No one can accuse Dan Coats of running for the Senate to put a new political feather in his cap. In November, Senator Coats re-claimed the seat from which he retired in 1998 when he thought he had hung up his political cleats for good. Motivated by what he saw as a Washington-generated crisis of historic proportions, he decided to get back in the game to do his part to rescue America's future from fiscal ruin.

ConservativeHome's Ryan Streeter recently put four questions to Senator Coats about why he ran again, what he thinks about our chief domestic and foreign policy, and what's different about his second tour of duty so far. Some main points from the interview (read it in its entirety below):

• He was driven to run again by a gut-level concern for the future of his country. "I watched as families and businesses were making sacrifices, cutting their own budgets, living with less. It seemed as though everyone except the federal government was doing that. I honestly was worried that America would become a second-tier country...We simply cannot be the first generation to turn over a country to our children and grandchildren that is in worse shape than when we started out."
  
• A growth agenda demands getting spending under control, including entitlements. "We need pro-growth policies, and to start, we have to cut spending and reduce the deficit. In that regard, we need to look at every area of government, and ask them to take a haircut – larger than what they think they need...We simply need to restructure our entitlement programs and make them solvent."
• We can't wait around for 2012. "We have got to make tough decisions right now, in this Congress...We simply cannot be the first generation to turn over a country to our children and grandchildren that is in worse shape than when we started out."
• Expanding middle class entitlements, as in the health care law, is exactly the wrong approach to address our problems. "We should not be throwing the middle class a life raft. We need to go upstream and change the economic environment. Taking the right approach to growth and prosperity is where government can and should be spending its time right now."
• Coats is still the compassionate conservative that he was before the term was coined. "It is clear there are limits to what the government can do, and it is probably good that there are. The role of volunteer and community groups and faith-based organizations have always played a fundamental role in promoting and protecting the common good in our communities."

RS: You have just been re-elected to the Senate seat you held from 1990-1998. It's certainly not a normal thing for a former Senator to "come out of retirement," as it were. Why did you do it?

Senator Coats: I was first elected to the House in 1980. I came to Washington when Reagan did, and one of our first major votes was whether to increase the debt ceiling. It was the first time in 200 years the country had to decide to do this, and it was astounding to everyone that the ceiling at the time exceeded $1 trillion. It just seemed historic and immense. Now we are debating a debt ceiling that is in excess of $14 trillion.

During those years, we saw the Reagan agenda implemented: a commitment to limited government, fiscal responsibility, and a focus on growth. It was a privilege to participate in that exciting decade. What we were trying to do was to remain steadfastly constitutional and to focus intensely on improving the fiscal health of the country.

In 1998, I honored a term limit pledge after my years in both the House and Senate, and I never, ever anticipated coming back.

But after 2008, I sat watching the liberal agenda unfold so quickly with such massive spending and government overreach that I couldn’t help thinking, “Everything I had worked for during my time in Congress– limited spending, supporting and promoting the private sector, keeping America strong worldwide both fiscally and in terms of security – was being thrown overboard. I watched with alarm as deficit spending and debt surpassed anyone’s imagination. All I could think was, “How could we become out of control so rapidly and to this extent?”

Meanwhile, during a time of recession, I watched as families and businesses were making sacrifices, cutting their own budgets, living with less. It seemed as though everyone except the federal government was doing that.

I honestly was worried that America would become a second-tier country.

So when the opportunity came along to run for this seat, I decided I had little choice.  I realized that life had been good to me, but I just couldn’t sit back and enjoy the fruits of my labor. I couldn’t think of letting my children and grandchildren deal with the consequences of what had become an out-of-control government. I concluded America was in trouble and we needed to work hard to make it the kind of country that it has been for so long and that all of us aspire for it to be.

Like so many people, I wanted to get off the couch and join the rallies. I wanted to be involved.

And so I decided my best contribution would be to get back in the arena and promote an agenda of limited, constitutional government, fiscal responsibility, personal freedom, and strong national security.

I decided I wasn’t going to let age or anything else influence my decision to run. It was simply the right thing to do. 

Might Arthur Brooks' and Pete Wehner's description of three types of human nature suggest the Tea Party is a source of American renewal?

Ryan Streeter

There are three competing views of human nature at the heart of our debates about how we address our economic troubles, and they've been with us for a few hundred years. This thesis forms the basis of an article in today's American by American Enterprise Institute president Arthur Brooks and Ethics and Public Policy Senior Fellow Pete Wehner. I would summarize the three views this way:

1. People are perfectible, and so we need to engineer society with institutions that make people better, smarter, happier. Utopians, socialists, communists and other fans of collectivism are found here.
2. People are fatally flawed, and so we need strong political power to limit the damage they can do to themselves and others. Hobbsian advocates of pure political power are in this camp, whether they are dictators or those who pursue non-democratic means within democracies to increase power and control economic affairs.
3. People are flawed but not fatally so, and capable of self-government and virtue, but not perfectible; and so they need to benefit from the exercise of virtue, and feel the effects of their mistakes if they are to correct course.  The American founders and others who prefer limited governments and strong markets fall in this camp.

The line of thought Brooks and Wehner pursue stems very much from a tradition familiar to readers of Michael Novak, Irving Kristol, Bea Himmelfarb, and other defenders of a robust democratic capitalism. I won't rehash those arguments here.

The main big idea here is the conclusion they reach that capitalism is ultimately the best system of social organization for building on the insights embedded in the third school of thought. Brooks and Wehner write:

A capitalist society needs to produce an educated citizenry. It needs to be buttressed by people who possess and who teach others virtues such as sympathy, altruism, compassion, self-discipline, perseverance, and honesty. And it needs a polity that will abide by laws, contracts, and election results (regardless of their outcome). Without these virtues, venality can eat capitalism from within and use it for pernicious ends.

We need to understand that capitalism, like democracy, is part of an intricate social web. Capitalism both depends on this web and contributes mightily to it. Morality and capitalism, like morality and democracy, are intimately connected and mutually complementary. They reinforce one another; they need one another; and they are terribly diminished without one another. They are links in a golden chain.

They don't lay out what this means for policy and action. For that, presumably, we need to acquire their new book from which this excerpt is adapted. 

So let me suggest one possible interpretation of their framework: the recent Tea Party-fueled public upheaval may very well be the third view of human nature making its voice heard again at a unique point in history. The Tea Party is apiece with John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and the Scottish enlightenment? Perhaps.

Two considerations:

• The strong reaction to Keynesian stimulus and growing spending was very much a joint cry by millions of people to "let us run our own lives and live by the consequences." Some - especially those in elite quarters - see the tea partiers as ignorant crazies. But that's nothing new. That's how the original tea partiers were viewed. The Tea Party has been an effort to reverse a trend in which an frighteningly large amount of taxpayer money was being used by people who seemed to be trying their hand at social engineering and the brute expansion of political power. At the end of the day, the clash between the Tea Party and elite America looks like a clash between the third view of human nature and the first and second views.
• Although the Tea Party was driven very much by spending and fiscal concerns, there's not much evidence to suggest they don't also care about the kind of virtue and moral order that Brooks and Wehner discuss. Popular conceptions of the Tea Party suggest they are unenlightened radical libertarians. The ConservativeHome Republican Panel, a weekly survey of more than 2,000 conservatives, suggests that a large number of tea partiers and sympathizers are both fiscally and socially conservative. The Tea Party has an underlying moral component to it - or at least there's just as much evidence for this point than against it. Sure there are some nut cases out there. But tea partiers seem to be people who value hard work, independence, and the kinds of habits needed for people to be self-governing citizens.

The point here is that if one accepts the Brooks-Wehner delimitation of the three kinds of human nature, one has to wonder how they're playing out today. If the Tea Party has unleashed new energy to support the third view, one has to ask who the primary advocates of the first two views are today - on both the right and the left.

John Thune: "The Republican Party must reclaim the mantle of reform"

Senator John Thune of South Dakota, whose name has been floated as a potential presidential contender in 2012, recently answered 10 questions from ConservativeHome's Ryan Streeter.

In the interview below Senator Thune says that:

• Republicans need to become reformers again by remembering what limited government, fiscal responsibility, and pro-growth policies require of us.
• America's debt is a national security problem, as Admiral Mullen says, and therefore we need budget reform legislation along the lines of what Sen. Thune proposed this past summer if we're going to get America's fiscal house in order.
• From the real and present danger of Iran's nuclear program to our ongoing commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan, we as a country need to remember just how much it costs to prevent more terrorist attacks.  
• The middle class understands that runaway spending will destroy their children's future. We owe it to them to show serious leadership on fiscal responsibility.

RS: What is your first political memory and/or what event or person first got you interested in politics? 

Sen. Thune: My interest in politics was sparked at a young age. After making five of six free throws during a basketball game as a freshman in high school, I was greeted by a spectator who said, "I noticed you missed one." That spectator happened to be well-known sports enthusiast and U.S. Representative Jim Abdnor. That introduction was the start of a friendship that ignited my career in public service. After completing my MBA at the University of South Dakota, I went on to work for then U.S. Senator Jim Abdnor and have stayed in close contact ever since.

RS: Who is your political hero and why? 

Sen. Thune: President Ronald Reagan is a political hero of mine. I was inspired by the strength of his convictions, by his belief in American exceptionalism and by his willingness to confront the communist threat. There was an authenticity about him that is too often lacking in politics today. He had a big, bold vision for this country but never lost his common touch or his fundamental belief in the greatness of the American people. I had the privilege of serving in his administration and have tried in my public life to live up to the high standard that he set.

Another one of my heroes is former Senator Jim Abdnor, whom I also had the privilege of working for as a young staffer. His decency and integrity were the embodiment of everything that is good about public life and a great example to me.

RS: Looking to 2012, are there 3 big ideas that you think should determine the presidential race (ie, which 3 issues should the Republican candidate use to set him/herself apart from President Obama)?

Sen. Thune: Voters sent a clear message to Washington this past November. Americans are not happy with the direction in which our country is headed and are seeking a new way forward. In order to successfully lead our country to more prosperous days, I believe Republican leaders must return to the time honored Republican principles: (1) A limited government and a government that works, which means unwinding the massive health care takeover, and reform of entitlement, budget, and tax policies. The Republican Party must reclaim the mantle of reform. (2) Fiscal responsibility—living within your means is an American tradition that needs to become a Washington tradition. (3) Pro-growth, pro-jobs policies that focus on free enterprise and free markets as opposed to government expansion. That means reducing America's tax and regulatory burdens on businesses, thereby lowering the cost of doing business in this country, and allowing America's entrepreneurs to be competitive in the global marketplace.

RS: What can Republicans in Congress do beginning in 2011 to respond to the public's mounting frustration with runaway spending, the deficit, and the size of government?

Sen. Thune: According to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, America's biggest national security threat is our national debt. To attack out of control spending and borrowing, this past summer I introduced a budget reform bill, the Deficit Reduction and Budget Reform Act of 2010. My legislation gets our country's fiscal house in order by cutting discretionary spending, reforming Washington's broken budget process, and creating a permanent Joint Committee on Deficit Reduction. There are 26 committees or subcommittees in Congress that spend money, but none that save money. It is high time that changed and my bill does that.

Additionally, I recently proposed a resolution that was accepted by the Senate Republican Conference to cut non-security discretionary spending back to 2008 levels. Since 2008, non-security discretionary spending has increased by over 20 percent, at a time when inflation in our economy amounted to less than two percent. In other words, the federal government has been spending at 10 times the rate of inflation. While every day, hardworking Americans struggle to make ends meet, Washington continues to spend with reckless abandon. This unsustainable level of spending has to stop. We can start by forcing votes on reducing spending back to 2008 levels to see who's serious about fiscal responsibility.

Arthur Brooks: Conservatives still haven't made the moral case for enterprise, put forward real solutions, and explained that real progress comes with a cost

Arthur Brooks, president of the American Enterprise Institute, has emerged as one of America's leading advocates for free enterprise and the moral conditions of prosperity. ConservativeHome's Ryan Streeter recently put 10 questions to him.

RS: In your recent book, The Battle, you have redefined the culture struggle in America away from the social issues, to free enterprise. Why?

Brooks: Yes, the book identifies a culture struggle—but not one as people have typically understood it. Americans are not just arguing over this or that economic policy. They’re really arguing over cultural imperatives.  Do we want to become more of a European-style social democracy, or do we truly want to embrace free enterprise?

Data show that Americans are emotionally invested in the idea that we are a free enterprise country – not because of economics, but because of who we are as a people and what we value. What’s central to America – going back to the founders – is liberty and how we exercise it in our daily lives. Today, as I show in The Battle, we primarily do that through our system of free enterprise.

RS: Who is your intellectual hero and why?

Brooks: Well, I have a few. First, Milton Friedman. He was one of the first economists to lay the cultural groundwork for what we now so commonly refer to as the free enterprise system. He wrote his books as economic works, but they became cultural phenomena, because he wrote in aspirational terms that people could understand and identify with. He saw free enterprise as not just one economic philosophy among many but a core element of who we are as Americans, how we operate, how we live out the freedom we all cherish.

Another hero is Irving Kristol.  His main contribution wasn’t in showing why one must be a conservative, but in helping us appreciate why “liberalism” (as we have come to define it in the U.S.) was so deeply unsatisfactory for happy lives and healthy societies. 

Of course, I would cite James Q. Wilson and Charles Murray as intellectual heroes. They are the most influential social scientists of the past 50 years.  Their work has addressed the essential questions of society and culture, and shown an entire generation of social scientist how to think about big, difficult issues. They were especially influential among social scientists in think tanks rather than in the academy, among those who most influence public policy. I’m a social scientist because of Wilson and Murray. It’s as if they provided a manual on how to work through tough issues in social science.

RS: Which two or three books (besides your own!) have been especially influential on your overall outlook on public policy?

Brooks: Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom has been more influential than anything else. I know it’s a bit of a cliché (and I should probably come up with something under the radar that seems deeply original). But let’s be honest—the book is truly great and everyone should read it, or re-read it.  Contemporary books include Michael Novak’s Spirit of Democratic Capitalism,  and James Q. Wilson’s The Moral Sense.