The American Welfare State: How Ideology Ruins Responsibility

Never Enough: America’s Limitless Welfare State. William Voegeli. New York: Encounter Press, 2010.

In fiscal year 2010, the United States federal government ran a deficit of nearly $1.3 trillion. In a January 2011 report, the Congressional Budget Office predicted that this deficit will increase dramatically in the next quarter century as the government needs to spend more and more to fund Social Security pensions and health care programs for an aging population. The report ended with an ominous warning, “To prevent debt from becoming unsupportable, policymakers will have to substantially restrain the growth of spending, raise revenues significantly above their historical share of GDP, or pursue some combination of those two approaches.”

In Never Enough: America’s Limitless Welfare State, William Voegeli, senior editor of the Claremont Review of Books, demonstrates how difficult it will be to stop or even slow down these spending increases. Voegeli argues that the expansion of the American welfare state during the twentieth century was driven by American liberals’ belief that the welfare state, no matter its current size, should always be expanded. Voegeli surveys the writings of early twentieth century progressives and later twentieth century liberals and finds that the liberal project is best understood as a desire to expand the American welfare state until it is the equal of those found in European social democracies and then to keep expanding it after that (59).

The book describes in compelling and thoughtful terms how American society and government has been changed, probably irrevocably, by the increasing influence of this unrestrained idea; however, it is less successful when it attempts to suggest approaches to restrain these ideological excesses. According to Voegeli, the liberal argument for a constantly expanded welfare state is rooted in the “Progressives’ Second Founding.” Drawing on the work of James Caeser, Voegeli relates that the first founding was a founding on nature, while the second founding was a founding on history. The first founders believed that humans by their nature hold inalienable rights and that government is instituted for the protection of these natural rights. Since any government that continually grows in size and power is itself a danger to natural rights, the first founding recognized the need to limit the size and scope of government.

The Progressive re-founders appealed not to nature, but to a philosophy of history inspired by Hegel. Progressives, particularly Woodrow Wilson whom Voegeli describes as “the most important progressive” (60), perceived human nature as dynamic rather than static. The human condition improves as we make progress in history, and government has a central role to play in fostering this improvement. By the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt, liberals had jettisoned the traditional understanding of rights as essentially negative claims of individual against external interference in favor of a broader conception of rights as positive claims by members of a growing and developing social order to experience improvement in their material well-being (70). This new understanding of rights expands the role of government. Under a historicized understanding of rights, government must constantly find new ways to improve its citizens’ well-being and will seek out problems that can be redressed with new programs. Even the simple idea of a right to a minimum level of welfare and social decency must be defined in the context of a society that is presumed to be constantly advancing.

In sum, every possible advancement in standards of living becomes a candidate for government action. “Once the enterprise of positing that people have a right to a decent life is launched, on what basis can we tell people who repeatedly demand additions to the honor roll [of rights] that some things are indeed conducive to a decent life but, at the same time, are not rights?” (91). Since it is impossible to say how much decency is enough, it is impossible ever to say that the welfare state is big enough.

Making Peace with the Welfare State?

While Voegeli critiques the ideology that spawned the modern welfare state, he does not call for the dismantling of this welfare state. When considering how conservatives should respond to the welfare state, Voegeli dismisses the libertarian position that would call for completely dismantling it as unrealistic in the face of an electorate comprised of voters who enjoy the benefits it provides.

He also dismisses supply-siders who claim that tax cuts will stimulate enough economic growth to provide tax revenue sufficient to fund most of the welfare state’s current commitments. Instead, Voegeli recommends that conservatives make peace with the welfare state while providing the limiting principle that liberalism itself lacks. He urges conservatives to affirm that “a decent society is obligated to prevent the small minority of citizens who are chronically unable to fend for themselves, and the larger minority occasionally and transitionally unable to do so, from leading miserable lives” (258). But as a condition of this acquiescence, conservatives should cooperate only with liberals who understand that resources are finite and agree to implement stringent means testing so that only truly needy members of society are eligible to benefit from government programs.

While Voegeli’s overview of liberalism’s intellectual history covers important ground, the strongest analysis in the book comes in the later chapters when the book considers conservatives’ failure to shrink the welfare state, even after their electoral victories of the 1980s and 1990s. As Voegeli recognizes, even many liberals are fully aware that the welfare state has its limits and that no government can redistribute more wealth than its society actually creates (for example, his discussion of “Neoliberalism,” 172-176). This recognition however has had little impact in a political environment in which politicians are under intense pressure to deliver benefits to their constituents and in which various means are available to shift the burden of paying for these benefits to others. Republicans, it turns out, are no less vulnerable to these pressures than Democrats.

The arguments in the second half of the book imply that the real reason the welfare state has continued to grow has less to do with flaws in the ideology that drives it and more to do with failures of governance in the American polity. Ideologies are a means of simplifying a complicated reality. They explain the world in a way that gives coherence and meaning to communal life and that undermines any evidence that might support competing values or beliefs. Ideologies are thus rarely conducive to the political virtues of prudence and restraint.

Even the classical liberalism that Voegeli associates with the American Founders can be prone to excess (a point Voegeli recognizes in passing, 215-216). Ideological excesses are, in fact, endemic to modern democracies, and among the most prevalent ideologies in American society today are those that uphold personal security and material prosperity as the primary ends of life. In a democratic society where the citizens are attracted to such ends, it is hardly remarkable that the most successful politicians are those most grandiose in their promises to deliver them.

How might such excesses be restrained? One method is through institutional arrangements through which prudent political leaders are able to moderate a democracy’s worst impulses. Voegeli finds such an institutional restraint in the American tradition of constitutionalism. Constitutional limitations on the size of government, and particularly on its power to regulate interstate commerce, once prevented the federal government from attempting to address every social concern and regulating all human endeavors. This constitutional restraint was substantially weakened by a series of Supreme Court decisions that found justification for Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Of course, other means of restraining democratic excesses exist, beyond the constitutional approach focused on in this work.

Suggested Directions for Reform

One possibility is a more robust system of party governance, in which parties are capable of holding their elected office holders accountable and presenting more coherent policy options to voters. Another approach includes reforms to the legislative process that would allow less opportunity for public posturing and create more space for sound and responsible deliberation between party leaders. Joseph Bessette’s The Mild Voice of Reason (Univ. of Chicago, 1999) made thoughtful suggestions along these lines. Or, instead of relying on political leadership and institutions, democracy can be restrained through culture. Institutions such as the church, the family, and even the educational system can restrain democratic passions by teaching that the goods delivered by government should be indulged in with restraint.

Voegeli closes his book by emphasizing such a cultural approach:

“The moral and social capital required by the experiment in self-government is the cultivation, against the grain of a democratic age, of the virtues of forbearance, resolve, sacrifice and restraint. People who have acquired these virtues accept and understand, ‘There will be many long periods when you put more into your institutions than you get out . . . .’” (278).

The difficulty rests in how to cultivate and sustain this social capital. Voegeli accuses liberalism of endangering the American experiment by undermining this social capital; however, he has little positive to say about those on the left who want to cultivate social capital, such as the communitarians he lumps together with other liberals (126-131). Nor does the author acknowledge classical liberalism’s own tendency to undermine the cultural institutions that create social capital.

Never Enough performs a useful service by exposing weaknesses in modern liberalism’s intellectual foundations and by explaining why liberalism’s greatest accomplishment, the welfare state, has continued to grow even during times of conservative resurgence. But Voegeli’s primary response to this ideology is to check it with its opposite, to correct liberalism’s excess of always wanting more with conservatism’s excess of always wanting less. This approach has a certain Madisonian elegance to it, suggesting a deadlock of faction against faction giving way to reasonable and principled compromise.

But such compromise is only possible within a culture that inculcates the political virtues that make compromise possible and within governing institutions that allows leaders who possess such virtues the latitude to exercise them. Liberals will continue to look at the welfare state as never enough, just as conservatives will see it as always too much. A proper and responsible resolution to that debate depends less on intellectual rigor in either camp than on a reinvigoration of the American experiment in self-governance.

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