Erie, PA. Presidential speeches are evaluated in two basic areas, style/delivery and substance. President Obama’s Afghanistan speech was well delivered. The president appeared serious, determined, candid, and was articulate. Coming on the heels of a president who was often awkward and fumbling in his speeches, Obama’s rhetorical skill is a welcome change. Yet style is no substitute for substance. Superficially considered, the president’s address was excellent. On substantive grounds, where the stuff of politics is made, the speech was odd. There was something incongruous about the style and substance of the speech.

It may be that the president is learning that politics is the art of the possible and that governing and political campaigning require different skills, visions, and tactics. That Obama was more idealistic during last year’s campaign is no surprise. That he has struggled to strike the same tone in raising expectations regarding the possibilities of politics is also no surprise. The healthcare debate has surely frustrated the president as has the economy, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The campaign rhetoric about changing the world and changing everything is rubbing up against the realities of typical political life.

During the campaign, Senator Obama needed to bolster his foreign policy credentials. As a campaign strategy, he had to find a way to distinguish himself from Senator McCain and at the same time, avoid appearing soft on terrorism and unprepared to be commander-in-chief. Candidate Obama chose Afghanistan as the dividing line between the Bush/McCain Republicans and his approach to American foreign policy. The strategy made sense in the context of the campaign but as the president’s speech on Afghanistan indicates, it does not translate well into effective foreign policy. Iraq was the undoing of the Bush presidency and the Republican Party. It made no political or policy sense for Obama to support a continued war in Iraq. McCain was stuck politically with Iraq. He could not easily abandon a policy he had been supporting in the Senate for years. Like a boxer who has studied his opponent’s weaknesses and tendencies, Obama saw an opportunity to both tie McCain to the unpopular Bush and to the unpopular war in Iraq while creating an alternative vision of foreign policy that shifted the focus from Iraq to Afghanistan which, after all, was the breeding ground for the September 11 attacks against the U.S. Obama committed himself then, but not in his recent speech, to capturing Osama bin Laden. He appeared to refocus American foreign policy on the real battleground of terrorism and play a strong hand in an area of the campaign considered his greatest weakness. As campaign strategy, it was an astute maneuver.

There was, of course, a risk to the strategy. If Obama committed himself to shifting the war on terror to Afghanistan, he could not easily retract his position once in office. However it was done, troops would have to leave Iraq and more troops would have to be sent to Afghanistan. The president would have to do something in this vein to match his campaign rhetoric. He struggled for almost a year to figure out what that something was, and in his speech to West Point Cadets he outlined his long-awaited Afghanistan policy. In the speech, the president argued that for Americans, the Afghanistan-Pakistani border region “has become the most dangerous place in the world” and that “the safety of people around the world is at stake.” Consequently, because American security and interests are at stake, the president is sending thousands of additional troops to Afghanistan. The troop increases and mission represent a surge with a timeline that has as its objective American withdraw from Afghanistan by 2011.

If the president’s assumptions about the importance of the region are correct, it seems incongruous to attach a timeline to the war. Yet, if viewed from the perspective of Obama’s campaign strategy and his first State of the Union Address, the policy makes more sense. In his 2009 State of the Union Address, the president created a long list of ambitious policy objectives that included ending the Iraq War, fixing the economy, reforming the healthcare system, cleaning up the environment, fixing social security, rebuilding American infrastructure, creating new energy policy, reforming American schools, and accelerating the war in Afghanistan. All of these objectives and more would be done while reducing the federal budget deficit. Wanting to keep to his campaign promise and understanding the political need to establish himself as a competent commander-in-chief, the president created an Afghanistan policy that will not infringe on the rest of his ambitious policy agenda.

Readers of the Front Porch Republic Magazine are likely to recognize the immodesty in the president’s agenda and the danger of a brand of democracy that too often leads to populist campaign strategy determining actual governing policies. Candidate Obama would have had a tough time arguing that both wars in Iraq and Afghanistan need to end. He needed Afghanistan to convince voters that he was up to the job of leading the strongest military in the world. Now that he is in office he feels compelled to honor his commitment to a policy that he supports halfheartedly. His tepid commitment to Afghanistan will, however, bring him to a place he likely wanted to be during the campaign but could not go for fear it would cost him the election: opposition to both wars.

The president is far more sober about Afghanistan than healthcare. He is willing to spend tremendous political capital to change a healthcare system that provides the best healthcare in the world. He is far less willing to change the part of the world that he considers the most dangerous to Americans. I would like to think that the president’s attitude toward Afghanistan represents a maturity that comes with governing and that will carry over to other areas of presidential politics. My fear is that it is the product of a campaign strategy that helped him to win an election but will lead to disaster in Afghanistan. There are many reasons to question the increasingly populist flavor of American politics. The president’s foreign policy in Afghanistan can now be counted among them.

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Erie, PA. Readers of the Front Porch Republic are likely looking for new ways to conceive of American politics and culture.  They are in search of alternative categories to the existing options that are usually reduced to liberalism and conservatism.  Why is it that some Americans are discontent with these ideologies and their corresponding political parties?  Both Democrats and Republicans have become big government liberals and big government conservatives respectively.  In the mass media one finds a similar lack of variety.  CNN, MSNBC, and FOX NEWS are considered by some to be networks of varying political views.  They are different in a superficial way, but they share in common an affinity for big government and an obsession with politics.  The common thread that runs through both political parties and the mass media is large-scale government solutions to political, economic, and social problems.  The two political parties were largely indistinguishable in their respective responses to the recession.  While Republicans promote the war state, Democrats advance the welfare state.  In either case, big government and politics are the solution.  Discontented Americans may wish to consider an alternative to the prevailing ideologies, what I and others call modest republicanism.

Communism lost its political vibrancy and energy when after decades it became apparent that it would not produce the promised workers’ paradise.  Democratic societies are not immune from ideological dreaming.  Twentieth century American politics was an age of idealistic dreaming and metastatic faith, belief in the transformative power of political action that changes human nature and the very limits of politics.  Both liberalism and conservatism have reached a point of exhaustion because of their embrace of metastatic faith.  They will either regenerate or, like communism, dissolve.  The exhaustion of conservatism was readily apparent when the Republicans lost control of Congress in 2006 and by the end of the Bush presidency.  The Republicans were intellectually bankrupt in facing the prospects of the 2008 recession.  They resorted to a largely Keynesian approach to economic policy.

The exhaustion of the Democratic Party has been masked by Barack Obama’s rise to the presidency.  The appeal of his personality and his historic election combined with Bush’s failed presidency, has led some to believe that the Democrats and the liberal ideology they promote are alive and well.  With few exceptions, though, Obama represents the same old liberalism in more extreme forms.  He is taking big government to new heights from where it may come crashing down.  Compare Obama to the two previous Democratic presidents, Carter and Clinton, and one gets a sense for just how much further he has pushed liberalism toward the point of metastatic politics at its extreme.  In some respects, those that pertain to metastatic faith for example, Obama has more in common with Bush than he does with either Carter or Clinton.

What may become more common is the voter who is disenchanted with both Bush and Obama, annoyed by both Bill O’Reilly and Keith Olbermann, and in search of a new brand of politics.  This search is likely to lead to modest republicanism if such ideas are available to opinion molders and the leadership class. Modest republicanism is, then, an alternative to the politics of metastatic faith.  It calls for less government not more but it also moves toward a more sober brand of politics that includes more than a back to basics (e.g., security, efficient administration) style of politics.  It finds nobility in the aim of the American Framers to create a republic of liberty that avoids tyranny and works toward a state that allows individuals the freedom to do what is right and leaves it to the culture, (i.e., families, churches, communities) to be the primary instruments that direct individuals to the good life.  It assumes that government cannot create the ethos that makes liberty possible but it can help protect and preserve it.

In short, the problem is one of imagination, how we conceive of the possibilities of politics.  Generally speaking, the left wants more government to do more things because it desires what it thinks possible, a transformed world that has liberated man from the obstacles to what Herbert Croly called “the new republic.”  Some conservatives have become, apart from specific public policy prescriptions, indistinguishable from liberals in their enthusiasm for big government.  Consider Bush’s education policy and his foreign policy.  Both were transformative policies that intended to eliminate intractable problems once and for all.

The challenge for modest/front porch republicans is to provide a sense for what we can realistically hope for in political life without succumbing to cynicism.  What is to be hoped for?  There are historical examples of modest republicanism that can illuminate the way.  The American Framers constitutional system and the political and philosophical ideas that serve to justify it are a good starting point.  Their tradition, however, is not adequate in itself; it must be reconstituted to meet the challenges of the day.

One rather basic problem in contemporary politics is that character matters in the affairs of politics and governing.  The budget crisis is a case in point. Government needs to spend less of the taxpayers’ money.  Abiding by this need is not so much a matter of intellect but of character. What the nation and states need are representatives who will spend public revenue responsibly and in accordance with the general welfare and voters, scholars, and journalists who will call them to account when they fail to do so.  Many will respond to this suggestion by stating that fiscal discipline is easier said than done.  This is, however, precisely the point.  What the times call for are men and women of character who have the courage to act in accordance with the public good.  What we have are too many bright well educated leaders who provide persuasive reasons why we should spend more than is prudent and an electorate that is predisposed to believe what politicians claim is possible and desirable.

In Pennsylvania voters recently punished state representatives who gave themselves a pay raise by voting many of them out of office. Where is the same outrage when representatives spend in an even more irresponsible way for the sake of interest groups and ideology?  Government will not stop overspending until the general prejudice in favor of spending for both the reelection of career politicians and for metastatic faith is replaced by something more in line with modesty.  Such individuals will not appear from nowhere.  They are most apt to appear in a culture that is capable of cultivating them in the mediating institutions that foster the common good.

What is proposed on the pages of the Front Porch Republic is not “solutions” to political, economic, and social problems, but a disposition of mind and imagination that prepares individuals for the work of recovery and reconstitution as necessary and never-ending parts of civilized life.

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In the current economic and political crisis, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics is not likely to be one of the first places that Americans go looking for wisdom. It should be. Throughout the book readers find a wealth of knowledge and practical wisdom about what is necessary to live a happy life and what is necessary to promote the common good. What readers will not find is what is omnipresent in American culture, a blueprint for economic and political recovery. Aristotle is not concerned with public policy, today’s cultural obsession.

One of the reasons why political philosophy tends not to be a reservoir of intellectual capital for contemporary politics is that it is among the most challenging types of reading. Deciphering the meaning of dense works of political theory takes time and patience. Another reason, however, is that many political theorists consider the spiritual condition of human beings to be a significant part of what determines their happiness and the degree to which justice is achieved in political and social affairs. The use of terms like “moral,” “spiritual,” “virtue,” or “soul,” can create uneasiness in those who prefer to conceive of politics only in secular and mundane ways. Unfortunately, the consequence is that the horizons of political thinking are narrowed; the full range of human experience is sacrificed in order to satisfy an ideological predisposition that amounts to an aversion or refusal to ask meaningful questions about the human condition. By contrast, Aristotle makes such questions the focus of his political theory.

For example, in the Ethics, Aristotle distinguishes between pleasure and happiness. Pleasures are fleeting and insatiable. Some are consistent with the good life and others are destructive to it. Happiness requires that the former pleasures be sanctioned and the latter be prohibited. Refraining from alluring pleasures that breed discord and injustice requires the virtue of self-control aided by good habit. Without self-control, individuals become self-indulgent and to varying degrees engage in ethical anarchy. They are a slave to their passions. They live by the passion of the moment and consider all passions equally valid. They fail to see the danger in continually pushing beyond limits that are designed to keep human behavior within the boundaries of civilized life. To the individual lacking self-control and moderation, such boundaries may be considered part of an antiquated bourgeois or Victorian way of life. Emancipation from the limits of tradition and custom is the way to happiness. To this way of thinking, human beings will behave in a civilized manner without performing the ethical work that Aristotle considered the very substance of civilized life. Scientific organization of political, social, and economic institutions infused with humanitarian sentiment substitutes for virtue.

If Aristotelian philosophy does not directly address the public policy needs of the day, then why spend time reading the Ethics? This question, in one form or another, is often asked on college campuses as a way of undermining the liberal arts. Higher education, it is argued, should be subordinated to the practical and not anything higher. What, after all, does Aristotle have to do with things that really matter like the current economic and political crisis? This line of thinking is itself demonstrative of the problem of immediacy that Aristotle recognized undermines happiness and civilized life. He knew the tendency of human beings was to be short-sighted. Political theory aims to look beyond the immediate and ephemeral to the permanent and enduring. What endures is more instructive to the needs of the day than what, in the end, merely provides a temporary respite from the anxiety of momentary political life.

In what way can Aristotle bring understanding to current political and economic affairs? To the extent that American consumers failed to refrain from indulging their passion to consume more than was consistent with their happiness, they lived outside the Aristotelian mean. Moderation is for Aristotle a virtue that helps to keep individuals from excess and self-indulgence, vices that result in misery. Individuals who act moderately Aristotle calls “magnificent” or “magnanimous.” Those who are incapable of acting in accordance with moderation Aristotle calls “vulgar.” If the existing ethos creates a cultural climate that is conducive to vulgarity, then individuals will be more apt to engage in pleasures that are destructive to happiness. The celebration of vulgarity in popular culture indicates that vulgar men and women are setting the tone rather than magnanimous men and women. In this way, economic and political problems are largely ones of conduct, practical wisdom, and leadership not intellect or public policy.

Moreover, the burden to live a virtuous life is too great for individuals to bear on their own. The path to happiness requires friendship of a particular quality. Aristotle calls this “true friendship” and he distinguishes it from friendship based on mere utility or pleasure. True friends are essential in the quest for happiness because they act in a way that fosters virtue. Such friendships are uncommon and individuals are only capable of a small number of them. True friendship develops gradually over time; it requires a consistent regard for moral well being that does not sacrifice friendship for self-indulgence or convenience. True friends help one another live a moderate life.

In the recent economic crisis, the greed that drove some individuals to engage in immoderate economic behavior is common in political and social life. What marks the character of a community, society, or nation is how it responds to such behavior. Justice requires that each be given what is deserved. Those who engaged in risky and irresponsible behavior ought to bear the bulk of the consequences for that behavior. This, however, has not been the general approach to the economic crisis. Banks and homeowners alike were bailed out by government spending that was repeatedly justified by appeals to the economy. In both instances the behavior of individuals in and out of government was immoderate and directed to immediate gratification rather than concern for happiness.

Aristotle offers two important insights that are worth keeping in mind as the economic and political crisis is discussed. Moderation is a virtue and self-indulgence is a vice. Encouraging consumers and businesses to be more self-indulgent by feeding their habits of reckless spending and consumption is not wisdom or leadership but folly.

In the early 1980s when conservatives were searching for their identity and purpose in American politics, George Will wrote a book that offered an Aristotelian thesis that was captured in its title, Statecraft as Soulcraft: What Government Does. Our current circumstances are in need of the reminder that politics and economics cannot function outside of the spiritual domain of human life and society. Plato and Aristotle made the point in the ancient world and it bears repeating. Public policy cannot take the place of virtue. This is not to say that all politics is virtue but that matters of the soul are an essential part of guiding political and economic life to justice and happiness.

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Erie, PA. Americans were reminded last month that since the time of the New Deal, it has become customary for presidents and other public officials to be judged by their performance during their first one-hundred days in office. It is time to reconsider the usefulness of the one-hundred days standard for judging public officials. The standard is outdated, inappropriate, and suggests that regardless of circumstances all presidents should be judged by the extent to which they measure up to FDR’s flurry of policy programs intended to combat the Great Depression.

The standard is based on the assumption that the more activist a president is, the better the nation fares. Moreover, it attempts to assess most policies before they have been implemented or had sufficient time to succeed or fail. Judging presidents by the first one-hundred days in office rushes judgment by forming it in the passion of the moment when critical distance is extremely difficult, if not impossible. While the first one-hundred days standard may be misguided and inappropriate, the use of a one-hundred years standard might indicate a movement toward a new realism in American politics that marks the end of big government and the romantic humanitarianism that is its animating force.

The first one-hundred days standard assumes things that are open to question. For example, it assumes that public policy is the appropriate response to virtually any economic, cultural, or political problem. Government can fix what is broken because, unlike local or state communities, it has the capacity and resources to address the problem at hand. In short, the scale of national and international political, social, and economic problems requires an institutional response of equal scale. It is often remarked that national problems can only be solved by national solutions or that global problems can only be solved by global solutions. The inclination of many Americans is to accept the assumption that “the economy,” “poverty,” “education,” “healthcare,” “the environment,” and so on are national or international problems beyond the capacity of local communities.

We suffer from what Wilhelm Röpke called “enmassment,” the creation of a uniform mass culture in which individuals are increasingly alienated from genuine and local communities that provide identity, purpose, obligation, love, happiness, and a sense of place or belonging. Because we are increasing alienated from these communities and increasingly psychologically attached to distant national and global identities, the importance of local communities ceases to be part of how we imagine politics. We find it difficult to imagine how the problems of political, social, and economic disorder can be addressed on a local scale. Wendell Berry’s novels and essays are a good starting point for reshaping political imagination in a way that can perceive local community as the foundation for a new pedigree of politics. The unintended consequences of national policies and the “progress” they engender are evident in the loss of friendship and belonging. Berry reminds his readers of the consequences mass culture has on what Burke calls one’s “little platoon.”

A second assumption of the first hundred days standard is that government action is better than inaction and that quick action is better than a slower more deliberate response to political, social, and economic ills. The rush to act is inconsistent with the tenor of constitutional government and consequently, it conditions representatives to behave less like republican statesmen and more like demagogues. The American constitutional system is not designed for quick momentary action. To the contrary, it is designed especially in the realm of law making to be slow and deliberative. Why? So that disparate voices and interests can be heard, a more sober reflective spirit will prevail over the passion of the moment, and sufficient attention will be given by lawmakers to reaching a harmonious compromise that incorporates aspects of multiple interests. The aim of American constitutionalism is, to use James Madison’s words, to allow “the cool and deliberate sense of the community” to prevail. The American political system is designed for individuals with a temperament that exhibits patience, compromise, and deliberation. Quick momentary inhibition was considered by the Framers to be the cause of passions that were contrary to reason and the enduring interests of the people and their nation. The Framers rejected “pure” (i.e., direct) democracy precisely because it gave free reign to the momentary majority will and allowed it to dominate minority interests.

The conduct of contemporary American politics is increasingly characterized by gnostic impatience. The world in general and American society in particular are poorly organized and in need of significant if not revolutionary change. Evil, imperfection, and injustice are not tolerated to any degree. Politics is not the art of the possible but the instrument of metastatic transformation, i.e., not only can particular political, social, and economic problems be effectively addressed by public policy, but they can be permanently eradicated. In the past one hundred years, Americans have been promised by their presidents a permanent end to war, poverty, fear, drug use, terrorism, and deep recessions. None of these promises have been kept because they are the products of metastatic faith.

From this perspective, it might be useful to use the one-hundred years standard rather than the one-hundred days standard to measure the performance of American presidents. Doing so might be a sobering experience that inspires a new realism in American politics that is less prone to gnostic impatience and more tolerant of imperfection, less apt to confuse heaven and earth and more apt to see enmassment as destructive to ordered liberty and constitutionalism.

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ERIE, PA. As a new contributor to the Front Porch Republic, I would like to thank Mark Mitchell for his invitation to participate in what is shaping up to be a thoughtful exchange of important ideas.

My April contribution is the result of a panel debate held at Edinboro University in Pennsylvania regarding the current economic crisis. I was asked to participate on the panel because I am known as an intellectual conservative. It was apparent the evening of the debate, and it seems to be the case with the Front Porch Republic, that categories like “liberal” and “conservative” require qualification and clarification. Why?

For one thing, intellectual conservatism is not a monolithic community. At its best, it treasures genuine diversity and deplores a stale uniformity that tends to characterize much of today’s politics. This is partly why many conservatives refused to defend the economic policies of the Bush administration that violated both the principles of sound economics and the prejudices of traditional conservatism.

My reaction to our recent economic troubles is influenced by several thinkers who are known less for their technical contributions to the field of economics than they are for their imaginative conception of economic life. They include: Wendell Berry, Wilhelm Röpke (A Humane Economy), Joseph Schumpeter (Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy), E. E. Schumacher (Small is Beautiful), Karl Polanyi (The Great Transformation), and Pope Leo XIII (Rerum Novarum).

What they share in common, and what Americans in general seem to have lost, is a concern for a humane scale and thus what Röpke calls the humane economy. Röpke’s book by that name is an excellent starting place for understanding what he considers a third way or middle path between the statism of totalitarianism, socialism, and the welfare state and the economic anarchy of libertarian capitalism or neoliberalism. Both extremes cause what Röpke called the “enmassment” of society. Whatever the shortcomings of my arguments, my purpose is to join Röpke in advocating a humane economy, and Schumacher in insisting that the humane requires attention to the problem of scale. Generally speaking, small is apt to be more beautiful and more humane than the scale of mass culture.

Because the humane and human scale are my standards, I part company with those on the left, like Keynesians and the Obama administration, who tend to argue for big government as the solution to the economic crisis. Generally speaking they believe that more government control of the economy, property, and wealth will lead to a more just and a less volatile economy. Their tendency is to view economics through the prism of classes and egalitarianism and to use economic policy as a means to develop social policy.

Both the Bush and the Obama administrations have responded to the recession by assuming that significant government intervention in the economy is the correct approach to cure the sick economy. Unlike President Obama, I see little evidence that a new New Deal, a Keynesian approach, will work in helping the economy recover. Even if it can work in the sense of bringing economic recovery sooner, I have problems with its consequences. As Wendell Berry argues, efficiency and wealth are not the greatest goods. Science and technology, if divorced from a concern for the humane, can alienate individuals from community and dignified work. Robert Nisbet calls such people “loose individuals” because they have been ripped from social institutions that have a civilizing and harmonizing effect. Polanyi’s notion of “embeddedness,” (i.e., the economy does not exist outside social, political, and religious community) is a reminder that economics is merely one dimension of several inseparable aspects of human life. The unintended consequences of grand economic policy may include multiplying the number and degree of loose individuals.

I also, however, part company with big business conservatives, neoliberals, and libertarians who cling tightly to unfettered capitalism and who tend to believe that economic efficiency is one of the primary objectives in human life. The notion of a “free-market” is an abstraction that tends to obscure the reality of life in its many dimensions. Moreover, as Burke might have argued, we ought to know what individuals are going to do with their economic liberty before we give license to it. The fruits of economic liberty must be measured against the standards of the good life. Like Röpke, I believe that there is a third way, a middle path that centers economics on community and the spiritual character; it leads to the humane economy and more complete human beings. In short, the mass economy is dehumanizing.

As a general principle, I oppose big government bailouts of big companies and industries that behaved irresponsibly. Both John McCain and Barrack Obama supported President Bush’s bailouts because they argued with most other American political leaders that we cannot afford to let AIG or other companies fail. If they fail, we were told, the economy will fail.

What sense does it make, in the first place, to allow companies to get so large that the economy cannot survive without them? In my view neither business nor government should concentrate power. The American Framers defined concentrated power as the very definition of tyranny (Federalist 47). We have lost sight of this enduring wisdom and need to remind ourselves that bigger is not always better. We would do well in the current environment to revisit Schumacher’s and Berry’s arguments for a smaller scale in economic life and to remember that mass society breeds not the beautiful but the ugly. James Howard Kunstler’s work provides numerous illustrations of the ugliness and vulgarity of mass society.

Part of the problem is that there is a tendency to view the economy as a machine that government can control by pushing the right levers. Economics, however, is not a science at least in the way Keynesians think it is. When I was an undergraduate studying economics, we performed economic computer modeling that required mathematical exactness to “fix” the broken economy. We were given certain conditions and numbers regarding unemployment, inflation, interest rates, etc. and had to adjust interest rates, taxes, or government spending accordingly. When we did, the numbers were plugged into the computer and the results were formulaic. Such exercises condition the imagination to conceive economics in a way that divorces it from the texture of concrete human beings and communities. Unintended consequences, like the loosening of individuals or ugly commercial development, tend not to be part of Keynesian economic models.

Economies don’t work like machines; they do not exist in a realm of mathematical abstraction and certitude. And yet both past and current economic policy makers act as though they are mechanics working on a great economic engine. In the year or so leading up to the 1929 stock mark crash, government cut the money supply by one-third. In the current economic crisis, President Obama assured us that we will see progress in employment numbers, if his stimulus plan is working because he accepts the Keynesian belief in government’s ability to manage economies. It is worth remembering that when FDR came to office he faced double digit unemployment. After seven years of the New Deal, unemployment stood somewhere between seventeen and twenty percent. We were led into this economic mess in large part because of reckless spending; we will not find our way out by spending in an even more reckless way.

It should be remembered that like so many things in life, recessions have a life of their own. Although they do not follow as clear a pattern as the weather, the winter of recession is always followed by the spring of recovery. This recession will be no different. This does not mean that nothing should be done while we wait for recovery, but it does mean that we need to realize that only part of life, including economic life, is in our control. Some things get better on their own, others require a bit of nudging or even aggressive action. When a gallon of gas was more than four dollars a year ago many screamed that government should do something. Government didn’t do much of anything and the price dropped to two dollars a gallon. Our economic well being should not be left to market forces alone, but we also need to acknowledge that, like the weather some things are out of our control and it is possible to make a bad situation worse by trying to do more than is humanly possible. It is possible, as some have argued, that Keynesian policies deepened and lengthened the Great Depression. Hubris feeds the desire to control the uncontrollable; it fosters an impatience with things as they are that often leads to rash and imprudent public policy. At its extreme this disorder takes on a gnostic dimension and attempts to change not merely existing public policy but the very order of being in which we live.

It is a mistake to repeat the New Deal strategy and use the economic crisis to engage in grand social engineering. President Obama indicated in his 2009 State of the Union Address that he wants to:

a) End the Iraq War
b) Accelerate the War in Afghanistan
c) Fix the Economy
d) Fix Healthcare
e) Clean up the environment
f) Fix Social Security
g) Fix Medicare
h) Rebuild American infrastructure
i) Create a new energy policy
j) Reform American schools
k) Cut the budget deficit
l) Rid the federal government of fraud and waste, and make the federal budget more transparent

The president said that he wanted “to ensure that a crisis of this magnitude never happens again.” Like FDR he declared war on the broken economy, a war apparently to end all major recessions. Such attitudes move beyond policy reform to what Eric Voegelin calls metastatic faith, i.e., an unrealistic belief in the transformation of human nature and human society.

George Bush exploded federal spending and doubled the national debt in eight years. If massive government spending was good for the economy, we wouldn’t be debating what to do about the economic crisis.

The danger of creating new government programs is that, like with the New Deal, they become entrenched whether they work or not. They burden future generations of Americans just as the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have. We seem to have come to our senses about Iraq and realized that we can’t create a viable democracy in a culture that does not possess the prerequisites for constitutional government. The same kind of realization is necessary when it comes to big government and the welfare state. The War on poverty did not end poverty, as it promised; the war on drugs has not ended drug use in America; the war on terror has not ended terrorism; the world wars were not able to end all wars. These are promises engendered by metastatic faith.

The current economic crisis is not so much a problem of public policy as it is a problem of imagination. If we continue to conceive of politics as the answer to all or most of our needs, then we will repeat the mistakes of the previous century and rest our hopes in institutions that are led by individuals who are men and women, not gods. We should help those who are struggling in the current economic climate and take greater responsibility for our communities rather than turn reflexively to government. It may be that a Wendell Berry novel contains more wisdom about economic life than a room full of government economists. If forced to choose, I side with Berry, Röpke, and Schumacher and place my emphasis on returning to a humane scale in both government and the economy.

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