Renewing the American Idea

By Paul Ryan

There are a lot of differences between Detroit and Janesville: our economies, our histories, and our size. But, for our purposes, the most important distinction is the different ideas about government, its proper role, its proper scope, and its approach to sustaining the American Idea—that you find in each place.

This distinction really begins with a simple question. When we look at America, what’s the first thing we see: government or society? For me, the answer is society.

Life isn’t just defined by what we can do as individuals, but also by what we can do together. Society functions through institutions that operate in the space between the individual and the state. They include the family and extend to what academics call “civil society”- our religious organizations, our charitable groups, and the markets that compose our free economy.

(Ryan 2014, 28)

As a member of a legislative body, you don’t always get the choices you want to vote on. Sometimes you are forced to choose between the lesser of two evils. This is an unhappy reality in the lawmaking process, but the answer can’t be simply to oppose every proposal that doesn’t have your complete approval. I’ve seen firsthand the damage that approach can do.

(Ryan 2014, 90)

Every once in a while, the Democrats would send hecklers in with a few talking points. How can you be against Obamacare? they’d ask. Isn’t healthcare a right?

I’d reply that it wasn’t a right, and framing it that way was dangerous to our liberty. To say it’s a government-granted right means that government is in charge of your health care. I think you should be in charge of your health care.

(Ryan 2014, 115)

If we keep going on this way, soon we’ll reach a tipping point where there are too many people receiving government benefits and not enough people to pay for those benefits. That’s an untenable problem. The receivers cannot receive more than the givers can give.

(Ryan 2014, 141-142)

The progressive impulse was what animated Wisconsin’s La Follette to form the National Progressive Republican League. But much to his disappointment, the progressives backed Theodore Roosevelt (instead of him) in 1912 as their candidate for president. That election was a three-way race between Roosevelt, Democrat Woodrow Wilson, and GOP nominee William Howard Taft. Wilson prevailed and brought the new progressive paradigm into the political mainstream.

Wilson was the quintessential progressive. He understood that the American Idea stood in the way of progressive reforms, so he took aim at the founding documents. He argued that the Declaration of Independence was not a document for every season, but relevant only in its moment. He went so far as to claim that the Declaration was merely “a long enumerated [list] of the issues of the year 1776,” and that we shouldn’t “repeat the preface”-that is, the part that talks about self-evident truths and certain inalienable rights.When it came to the Constitution, he was just as dismissive, arguing in his 1912 stump speech that:

Living political constitutions must be Darwinian in structure and in practice. Society is a living organism and must obey the laws of life, not of mechanics; it must develop.

All that progressives ask or desire is permission – in an era when “development,” “evolution,” is the scientific word – to interpret the Constitution according to the Darwinian principle; all they ask is recognition of the fact that a nation is a living thing and not a machine.

This approach treated the Constitution as an evolving, living document and prepared the way for the development of a different approach to governing, which the progressives called “administration.” By this they meant the centralization and consolidation of administrative government and bureaucratic experts, relatively untethered to the popular branches of government and unencumbered by the Constitution, which would govern and guide us toward a more progressive future and a better society—all with scientific efficiency.

This vision of administration—of central planning, bureaucratic rule, and comprehensive government solutions to every problem pulls us away from the American Idea. Unfortunately, through fits and starts over the course of the twentieth century, this approach has become central to liberal progressive philosophy in the modern Democratic Party. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society grew out of this mindset. That does not mean that every idea or particular program associated with those periods is incompatible or cannot be reconciled with our principles, but they must be reformed and restructured so they are compatible with limited government.

(Ryan 2014, 148-149)

Recently, we’ve missed the opportunity to make our elections a choice between the vision we are offering and the reality that liberal progressive ideology has been delivering. Instead of talking about what we’re for, we’ve only railed against what we oppose. Rather than offering an alternative, we’ve primarily framed elections merely referendums on our opponent’s performance and ideas. That may be necessary, but it’s not sufficient.

As a result, too few people understand what the Republican Party stands for and how our principles will improve our economy, revive our culture, restore upward mobility, and strengthen our international standing. Frankly, we’ve become lazy and complacent. Instead of doing the hard work of persuading people, we’ve opted for the easy route, focusing our attention on communities where people already agree with us and trying to turn out the base.

(Ryan 2014, 157)

One of the most harmful habits people in our nation’s capital can fall into is the tendency to speak and think as if Washington is the center of Americans’ lives, hopes, and dreams. You hear that sentiment a lot in executive agencies and federal reports and during debates on the floor of the U. S. Senate and the House of Representatives. But our nation’s capital is not the center of our lives. It’s not where all of the dreaming and working and innovating and risk taking happens—and it’s not where the great renewal of the American Idea will begin.

(Ryan 2014, 249)

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References

Ryan, Paul. 2014. The Way Forward: Renewing the American Idea. N.p.: Grand Central Publishing.

ISBN 978-1-4555-5756-1