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April 21, 2010
What Is to Be Done
In some ways, the Progressives were the opposite of what we need today.They believed that centralization of power and professionalization of government service were the most important items on the reform agenda. To some degree, today's reformers will need to undo the work the Progressives did. The original Progressives harnessed new techniques of management and information control to create large, professionally-administered government bureaucracies. Today we need to use new techniques and technologies to break those bureaucracies down, to make small units of government more powerful, and to make government at all levels more responsive and more user-friendly. In virtually every case this will involve taking on government employees, reducing their numbers, eliminating their job security and cutting back on unsustainable retirement and other benefit levels.... But for social movements to rise past the level of ephemeral protest, they need to do more than talk about what they don’t like. They have to develop a vision of what they want, and they have to build a reform program that hangs together and produce cohorts of members willing and able to take the time to make that program work. When populist movements don’t generate and sustain that kind of consistent political energy directed toward lasting change, we get a politics of slogans and piecemeal, contradictory populist reform. Take California, whose considerable problems are exacerbated by the result of past ballot propositions that came from spasms of anger and resistance rather than reflecting a consistent set of reinforcing and complementary ideas. Or we get movements and political figures like Ross Perot who strut their brief hour upon the stage, their sound and fury signifying nothing. -- Go Home, Mae West - Walter Russell Mead
Posted by Vanderleun at April 21, 2010 12:45 PM. This is an entry on the sideblog of American Digest: Check it out.