By Walter Russell Mead
Three states form the base of Democratic political power in the
United States: California, New York and Illinois. All three states are
locked in an accelerating economic, demographic and social decline; all
three hope that they can stave off looming disaster at home by exporting
the policies that have ruined them to the rest of the country.
Mary Williams Walsh, a talented reporter who is doing much to sustain the luster of the New York Times brand these days, has a must-read piece
on the mess that is Illinois, and it is a compelling description of the
misery and ruin that well-intentioned liberals combined with aggressive
public sector labor unions inflict on the poor they ostensibly want to
serve.
Reporting on a bipartisan task force report on Illinois’ grotesquely
mismanaged finances, Walsh tells it like it is. As Walsh summarizes the
findings of the task force co-chaired by Paul Volcker and Richard
Ravitch:
Illinois has the lowest credit rating of the 50 states and has America’s second-biggest public debt per capita, $9,624, including state and local borrowing. Only New York State’s debt is bigger, at $13,840 per capita. But Illinois has not been able to use much of the borrowed money to keep its roads, bridges and schools in good working order, because years of shoddy fiscal practices have taken a heavy toll, the report said.
This of course is President Obama’s home state; one wishes that he
spent more time on the campaign trail describing his horror and remorse
at what decades of bad government have done. Apparently, the subject
holds no interest for him: no lessons to be learned here about where
blue governance ultimately leads.
But there is more. As Walsh writes,
Nearly two-thirds of the Illinois state government’s $58
billion in direct debt consists of bonds the government issued to cover
retirement payments for workers, including a $10 billion pension
obligation bond that broke all previous records in 2003.
Yet despite all that borrowing, Illinois’ public pension system is
still in tatters. In fact, its total pension shortfall is conservatively
estimated at $85 billion. Recent changes that raised the retirement age
for new workers and limited the pensions that future workers can earn
have not reduced the existing obligations.
The task force said that further reductions in pension benefits
appear inevitable, though legally difficult, because the state has
promised more than it can deliver.
Illinois politicians, including the present President of the United
States, have wrecked one of the country’s potentially most prosperous
and dynamic states, condemned millions of poor children to substandard
education, failed to maintain vital infrastructure, choked business
development and growth through unsustainable tax and regulatory policies
— and still failed to appease the demands of the public sector unions
and fee-seeking Wall Street crony capitalists who make billions off the
state’s distress.
Blue politicians speak eloquently and often sincerely about their
desire to help the poor. They speak beautifully about the need for
better education as a ticket to better lives. They speak intelligently
about the contributions a well managed, well organized government can
make to the common good.
But these beautiful sentiments have less and less to do with the actual policies they pursue. Readers of Via Meadia
can see a pattern here. We have “peace movements” incapable of
advancing the cause of peace; environmentalists whose political
ineptitude damages the causes they most hope to serve; and we have a
form of blue state liberalism that blights the lives of exactly the
people it wants to help most.
American liberalism today is in an advanced stage of intellectual
decline. Cynical and short sighted interests wrap themselves in the
increasingly tattered mantles of sacred ideas. Liberals are right to
feel that social justice matters, that the poor should have greater
opportunity and that government in a democratic society cannot remain
indifferent to the existence of great social evils.
But where liberals in America have the freest hand—in states like New
York, California and Illinois—we see incontrovertible evidence that the
policies they choose don’t have the consequences they predict.
California by now should surely be an educational, environmental and
social utopia. New York should be a wonder of glorious liberal
governance. Illinois should be known far and wide as the state that
works.
What’s interesting about the governance failures of these states is
how comprehensive they are. Other than politicians, union officials and
Wall Street investment banks, nobody really benefits from the choices
Illinois has made. As the Volker-Ravitch report tells us, even the
public sector unions, the architects of many of the state’s most
destructive policies, are going to get shafted as a result of the bad
policies they’ve supported. They’ve created a state that simply won’t be
able to honor its promises to the workers the unions represent.
The French say that behind every great fortune lies a great crime.
But it is also true to say that behind every great failure lies a great
blunder. Late 20th century American liberalism is wrong about the way
the world works. It doesn’t understand cause and effect very well. It
cannot feed itself. Given full power it cannot design and implement
policies that advance the causes it honors. Modern American liberalism
can only win Pyrrhic victories, because liberals in power take steps
that advance their decline.
This is not to say that conservatives and Republicans have all the
answers. Sometimes, they aren’t even asking the right questions. What
will happen to the African-American middle class if government
employment continues to be cut, the USPS is allowed to reform, and the
Supreme Court further restricts the use of race preferences in higher
ed? If liberal policies are increasingly failing African Americans and
the poor more broadly, what can be done? If bureaucracies staffed by
unionized, life-tenured civil servants are too expensive and too
inefficient to do the jobs that need to be done at a sustainable cost,
what are some other ways we can organize government functions? Clinging
grimly on to failing policies and dying institutions is the Democratic
answer by and large, even as Democratic policies accelerate the rate of
decline and aggravate the damage done. But the serious work of building
alternative visions and models and testing them out at the state level
is still in its very early stages.
Some 21st century answers, like charter schools, have already
appeared and won a measure of bipartisan support, but much more needs to
be done. Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives need to
think much more clearly and much less sentimentally about policy so that voters can have choices that are both clearer and better than the ones we have now.
In the meantime, it is more than troubling that President Obama seems
so unwilling to reflect on the rich experience of liberal failure in
his home state. A term or two as governor of Illinois, wrestling with
the consequences of liberal decadence for the constituencies he cares
most about, might have prepared him for a genuinely historic role. As it
is, he is running for re-election as the torchbearer-in-chief of an
ideology that has long passed its prime.
Doubts about his opponents (and many of these are well justified) and
the lingering nostalgia many Americans still feel for the values and
institutions of the liberal past may yet enable the President to squeak
out a win next month and if so, I will join his supporters in wishing
him well and in prayer that God will give him the wisdom and the
strength to lead the country for another four years. But at a time when
the overwhelming policy failures of modern American liberalism are
undermining the basic viability of three of our greatest states, it is
to say the least disappointing that the President wants to nail the
national colors to the mast of a sinking ship—and that he has so little
to say about the comprehensive failure of the political allies among
whom he launched his career.
Things Have Changed - Bob Dylan
One two three four…
I'm a worried man, got a worried mind
No one in front of me, no one behind
There's a woman on my lap and she's drinking champagne.
Got white skin, got assassin's eyes
I'm looking up into the sapphire tinted skies
I'm well dressed, waiting on the last train.
Standin' on the gallows with my head in a noose
Any minute now I'm expectin' all hell to break loose.
People are crazy and times are strange
I'm locked in tight, I'm outta range
I used to care, but things have changed.
This place ain't doing me any good
I'm in the wrong town, I should be in Hollywood
Just for a second there I thought I saw something move
Gonna take dancing lessons do the jitterbug rag
Ain't no shortcuts, gonna dress in drag
Only a fool in here would think he's got anything to prove.
Lot of water under the bridge, lot of other stuff too
Don't get up gentlemen, I'm only, I'm only passing through.
People are crazy, times are strange
I'm locked in tight, I'm out of range
I used to care, but things have changed
I've been walking forty miles of bad road
If the bible is right, the world will explode
I'm trying to get as far away from myself as I can.
Things are too hot to touch
The human mind can only stand so much
You can't win with a losin' hand.
Feel like fallin' in love with the first woman I meet
Puttin' her in a wheel barrow, wheelin' her down the street.
People are crazy, times are strange
I'm locked in tight, I'm out of range
I used to care, but things have changed.
I hurt easy, I just don't show it
You can hurt someone and not even know it
The next sixty seconds could be like an eternity.
Gonna get low down, gonna fly high
All the truth in the world adds up to one big lie
I'm in love with a woman that don't even appeal to me.
Mr. Jinx and Miss Lucy, they, they jumped in the lake
I'm not that eager, not that eager to make a mistake.
People are crazy, times are strange
I'm locked in tight, I'm outta range
I used to care, but things have changed.
I'm a worried man, got a worried mind
No one in front of me, no one behind
There's a woman on my lap and she's drinking champagne.
Got white skin, got assassin's eyes
I'm looking up into the sapphire tinted skies
I'm well dressed, waiting on the last train.
Standin' on the gallows with my head in a noose
Any minute now I'm expectin' all hell to break loose.
People are crazy and times are strange
I'm locked in tight, I'm outta range
I used to care, but things have changed.
This place ain't doing me any good
I'm in the wrong town, I should be in Hollywood
Just for a second there I thought I saw something move
Gonna take dancing lessons do the jitterbug rag
Ain't no shortcuts, gonna dress in drag
Only a fool in here would think he's got anything to prove.
Lot of water under the bridge, lot of other stuff too
Don't get up gentlemen, I'm only, I'm only passing through.
People are crazy, times are strange
I'm locked in tight, I'm out of range
I used to care, but things have changed
I've been walking forty miles of bad road
If the bible is right, the world will explode
I'm trying to get as far away from myself as I can.
Things are too hot to touch
The human mind can only stand so much
You can't win with a losin' hand.
Feel like fallin' in love with the first woman I meet
Puttin' her in a wheel barrow, wheelin' her down the street.
People are crazy, times are strange
I'm locked in tight, I'm out of range
I used to care, but things have changed.
I hurt easy, I just don't show it
You can hurt someone and not even know it
The next sixty seconds could be like an eternity.
Gonna get low down, gonna fly high
All the truth in the world adds up to one big lie
I'm in love with a woman that don't even appeal to me.
Mr. Jinx and Miss Lucy, they, they jumped in the lake
I'm not that eager, not that eager to make a mistake.
People are crazy, times are strange
I'm locked in tight, I'm outta range
I used to care, but things have changed.
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