The founding of the United States of America differed from that of other countries in several fundamental ways: It was cultivated and planned. It was brought about by citizen leaders respected for their accomplishments more than for their bloodlines. They were determined not to fall as others had fallen before them. They created a country based not on ideology but on a universal philosophy, and a government that, at its best, sought to govern through logic.
Flash forward to today. We gaze out over a landscape of painfully slow economic growth, endless war, budget deficits and looming entitlement crises. We are in the midst of a war of ideology, a war about which worldview should guide this country. Eight years of Bush-Cheney conservatism left the country in a ditch and eighteen months of Obama Liberalism has failed to bring us out of it. We hear cries for a return to true conservatism as well as equally loud calls for continued progressivism.
This country does not need more liberal ideology or more conservative ideology. We need a return to an agenda based on rationality: a logical and impartial analysis of the facts of our situation, an honest diagnosis of our problems, and a willingness to implement the best solutions wherever they fall on the ideological spectrum.
Rigid ideologies are deadly to our political discourse because the debate stops being about what works best. Instead of discovering policies that provide the most economic growth, the best schools, and the optimal size of government, we find ourselves quibbling about which policies help advance whatever abstract concept of society a particular party wants to further.
Republicans want to slash everyone’s taxes (especially the wealthy’s) in this election season. They advocate this despite the fact that to do so would widen the deficit to proportions scarcely imaginable. The actual effect of the policy doesn’t matter; they want to cut taxes because taxes, according to their ideology, “should be” low.
Every two years, the Democratic Party scares senior citizens to the polls with ads about how republicans want to “raise the retirement age through the roof.” The thinking behind these ads is incredibly damaging given our country’s looming entitlement crisis. Unfunded obligations (the gap between the money we will have and the money we will owe) for Social Security alone add up to 15.1 trillion dollars. That is more than the present value of the U.S. economy. Any person with expertise in the matter acknowledges that some combination of a raised retirement age, reduced benefits, and higher taxes are needed to keep these programs solvent.
Yet Democrats won’t allow any of these ideas to be considered simply because they conflict with the worldview of new deal liberalism. They advocate for keeping the retirement age the same because that is where it “should be,” without acknowledging actuarial or financial prudence.
This kind of political discourse, one which views policy through moralistic rather than rational lenses, is borne of a political culture that has not had to confront truly serious domestic issues in decades. The age of unfettered American power, the days of our economy dominating the world, are over. The United States can no longer rely on its size or its strength, but should instead return to the principles of rationality and logic our nation was founded upon to tackle the very real problems we face.
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