[Vision2020] Home Truths From A Conservative: Our Secret Sauce

[Art Deco]

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October 23, 2012
Our Secret Sauce By THOMAS L.
FRIEDMAN<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/thomaslfriedman/index.html>

It was striking how much Monday’s presidential debate on foreign policy
came down to two subjects: America and the Middle East. The two actually
provide some instructive contrasts, starting with one that I’ve noted since
the onset of this campaign: the contrast between the high degree of
American pluralism and trust that makes our country work, and the near
total absence of it in the Middle East, the region most vexing us and most
likely to blow up on the next president. Muslims are killing Muslims across
the Middle East and Central Asia today: Sunnis versus Shiites, Pashtuns
versus Pashtuns and Kurds versus Turks. Christians are not faring well
there, either. The absence of pluralism and the prevalence of “rule or die”
politics — either my sect or party is in power or I’m dead — is the
dominant political trend in the Arab-Muslim region today. Nobody trusts
anybody, but it is impossible to build a modern state or an innovation
economy without trust. Meanwhile, here in America, we are debating whether
to replace our first black president — whose middle name is Hussein and
whose grandfather was a Muslim — with a Mormon! Who does that? Nobody else.
That radical pluralism is the secret of our sauce, and blessedly so.
America, take a bow.

But not for too long.

We have a very special country, but we have to take care of it, not kick it
around like it’s a football. And we can’t do that if we’re imitating the
Middle East’s rule-or-die politics: my party or scorched earth. Barack
Obama has been far from a perfect president. At times, he has treated
friends and opponents with arrogance or just a stubborn unwillingness to
play the game of politics to co-opt those who needed to be co-opted (he
should have embraced the Bowles-Simpson federal debt plan) to get
legislation passed. No one would confuse Obama for Lyndon Johnson. But no
one would confuse today’s Republican Party for the G.O.P. of the 1960s or
1970s, either.

It is impossible to look at the G.O.P.’s behavior in the last four years —
from its unwillingness to consider Obama’s jobs bill, which was praised by
independent economists, to the unwillingness of its presidential candidates
to consider a $1 increase in taxes for $10 of spending cuts, to the time it
spent on sheer lunacy such as questioning the president’s birth certificate
— and not conclude that many in the party just wanted Obama to fail in the
hope that they could pick up the pieces. Too many Republicans, particularly
moderate business types, don’t want to admit how much their party has been
led around of late, not by traditional conservatives, but by a radical Tea
Party base that has driven decent, smart conservatives — like Bob Bennett
of Utah, Bob Inglis of South Carolina, Richard Lugar of Indiana and Olympia
Snowe of Maine — out of office.

What I’d say about Obama’s domestic and Middle East policies is that, given
the messes and political constraints he inherited in both arenas, he did
about as well as anyone could. He kept the homeland safe, prevented us from
getting drawn into any sinkholes and killed bad guys. It is not the stuff
of foreign policy legend, but it was not bad. I’d say the same at home. He
stanched the bleeding in the economy and initiated some smart reforms in
education, energy and health — the true effectiveness of which we will only
know in the future. It was not exactly the New Deal, but considering the
deep hole created by the years of George W. Bush, it also was not a New
Depression. A quick turnaround in either arena was never possible.

But while that kind of politics got us through the last four years, it
won’t get us through the next four. We cannot have another term of partisan
gridlock. We are heading into a world where the breakdown of the European
supranational state system, combined with the breakdown of the Arab nation
state system, combined with climate change, combined with a much greater
global interdependence, means that we will be more and more buffeted by
problems that are too dangerous to ignore but too complicated and big to
fix alone. And when a country finds itself in that kind of situation, there
is one thing it absolutely must do, and that is *build resiliency*.

We need to weatherproof our house so we can control our destiny and play
the vital stabilizing role the world needs us to play. And that leads to
another difference between us and the Middle East. We don’t know how to fix
their problems anymore. But we do know how to fix *our* problems. In the
short run, we have to invest in infrastructure, education and research —
the sources of our strength to stimulate growth — while simultaneously
putting in place a credible long-term plan to cut spending and both raise
and reform taxes as our economy improves.

Regardless of what they have on their Web sites, neither candidate has
spoken honestly to voters in their speeches or commercials about what this
will take. Hey, it’s election time. What else is new? Well, there is
something new. Just doing as well as our domestic political constraints
will allow will not cut it anymore — not given where the global economy,
the Middle East and climate change are going. Just doing what the political
traffic will bear will not lead us to resiliency. It will lead us to
painful, destabilizing vulnerability.

We need a whole new traffic pattern. That will require a president who will
dare to challenge the country to do big, hard things together, not just
tack with the winds of public opinion, and it will require an electorate
that is ready to value and demand such leadership.

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-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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