Editor’s note: Matt Miller’s column will be ceasing syndication with this installment.
I can categorically deny that I have decided to stop writing this column because the White House has slashed the budget it secretly allocates to columnists to promote Bush administration views.
Regular readers will know I was never in line for those payoffs anyway.
But this is my last newspaper column – at least for some time.
Why? I have started writing a monthly column for Fortune magazine. Through my work at the new think tank, the Center for American Progress, I remain busy promoting the ideas in my book, “The Two Percent Solution: Fixing America’s Problems in Ways Liberals and Conservatives Can Love,” which has just appeared in paperback. Between these commitments, coming efforts for other national outlets, and the weekly public radio show I host, “Left Right and Center,” something had to give. For now, it’s this column.
I’ve cherished the relationship I’ve developed with readers and hope we’ll continue the conversation via Fortune and my other outlets. My work is always available at www.mattmilleronline.com (where you can also sign up to get the latest scribblings via e-mail).
One day, like Douglas MacArthur perhaps, I shall return. But for now, until we meet in another venue, allow me a few parting thoughts to stir the pot.
Much of my work in this column, as well as my book, has been an effort to persuade Americans of all stripes to embrace what I think of as a “fully-funded Third Way” – an agenda that seriously pursues progressive goals in economically rational ways that can attract broad support. We can insure the uninsured, federally subsidize a living wage of $9 to $10 an hour for the working poor, recruit a new generation of great teachers to our toughest high poverty schools, and more – and still have a government as small as it was when Ronald Reagan was president.
When such an agenda can bring us more social justice and more economic growth, what are we waiting for?
But it remains true that our two major political parties are organized around ideologies and interest groups that systematically ban common-sense, well-funded policies blending the best of liberal and conservative ideas. Suppose, for example, you look at the uninsured and think money is the answer (“liberal”), but you also think government should basically give people who need help the money to buy private group coverage themselves (“conservative”). What’s your ideology?
Suppose you see tens of thousands of low-paid, unqualified teachers in urban and rural classrooms and think money must be part of the answer (“liberal”) – but you also think salary hikes should focus on the best teachers or those hardest to keep in the field (“conservative”). What party do you join?
Suppose, like most sensible souls, you think some rules and regulations are needed in this world (“liberal”), but not so much as to stifle innovation and growth (“conservative”). If you’re drawn to any of these notions, you’re simply too subtle a citizen for what the political establishment says can be safely processed or communicated, or for what well-funded interest groups on both sides will allow their hired hands to embrace.
But then what? What do we do if most of us would, in fact, find such common-sense ideas appealing, and these ideas have the potential to move us forward, but our leaders won’t talk about them for the reasons we’ve catalogued?
Many thoughtful politicians and officials have privately told me that they believe there is little hope of changing today’s tyranny of charades short of a galvanizing social explosion. The other possibility, they say, is that the American people become so frustrated that they “kick the bastards out” and start electing people willing to challenge the status quo.
Maybe that will happen. But there’s another scenario as well. The overriding (and depressing) truth in public life today is that neither major party has a political strategy – that is, a strategy for winning elections and acquiring power – that includes solving our biggest domestic problems. I don’t believe this situation is sustainable. If both sides continue to peddle charades in the next few years while real problems fester, I believe it will create enough energy and frustration among enough leaders and citizens that a new “radically centrist” third party movement will be born.
My guess is it would feature something of what Ross Perot brought to public life in 1992, when he won nearly 20 percent of the vote, and thereby changed what we in the Clinton administration did on budget policy thereafter. Perot tapped a broad frustration with a two-party system that let problems like the deficit and the national debt spiral out of control. He respected citizens enough to believe they could understand the stakes, and when he rolled out his charts and graphs on TV, millions of them did.
Today, on the eve of the boomers’ retirement, our fiscal problems are worse than when Perot took up the cause back then – and we’ve had 13 more years of kicking the can down the road on the uninsured, the working poor, schools for poor children, and more. Whether such a movement would find its agenda co-opted by the major parties (as is usually the case in U.S. history) or whether it would become an enduring force for change is impossible to know.
But the one thing that is clear is that such a development is feasible. The U.S. economy generates more than an adequate supply of high-net-worth patriots who could provide the money (and possibly even the candidates) around which such an effort might be built. As the 2004 exit polls showed, a clear plurality of Americans identify themselves not as liberals (21 percent) or conservatives (34 percent) but as moderates (45 percent).
As America’s fiscal collision with the boomers’ retirement nears, yet so many problems remain unaddressed, the idea that this constituency would continue to find little public expression for its aspirations or its temperament or its pragmatism strikes me as implausible. Something has to give. My intuition is that if Washington Republicans continue to veer right, and Washington Democrats (despite my friendly coaxing) find themselves trapped in a “reactionary liberalism” unable to embrace new ideas, at some point a critical mass of leaders on both sides will start to think (and should start to think) about a new force that can move the nation toward real answers.
When they do, they’ll quickly discover there is a constituency out there waiting to be summoned. They’ll discover an army of young people – who have the most to lose from today’s bipartisan charades – who can be taught how our drift robs their future, and who are filled with too much energy and idealism to know what “can’t be done.” They’ll find a press that needs an “official” third force like this to legitimize a style of news coverage that exposes the hoax and points toward common-sense solutions.
And when all that happens, watch out.
Matt Miller, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, is the author of “The Two Percent Solution: Fixing America’s Problems in Ways Liberals and Conservatives Can Love.” Reach him at www.mattmilleronline.com.
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