Real change requires real change.
Presiding over the inherited bureaucracies, structures, and laws of the left is an inadequate basis for a long term governing majority.
Things are not working in part because the bureaucracies, regulations and systems of the left simply no longer work. The first and greatest challenge for conservatives is to understand that presiding over and defending the left’s institutions is a prescription for failure.
The Social Security transfer payment model which worked fine when there were 42 working taxpayers for every Social Security recipient (the first year checks were paid) simply will not work when there are only two working taxpayers for every retiree (when my grandchildren enter the work force).
The bureaucratic intelligence system which focused on an even more bureaucratic Soviet Union is simply incapable of staying in touch with and analyzing the modern real time world with its diverse power centers and multiple challenges. The education system which worked well for middle class students whose parents reinforced the teacher has failed more and more expensively in both human and money terms. A bureaucracy which spends billions outside the classroom is a bureaucracy conservatives should be transforming not increasing.
The irresponsible 1965 model of Medicaid is begging for the kind of profound transformation which was applied to welfare in 1996 (with the result that 60% of the people on welfare quit their habit of dependency and either went to work or went to school). The model of bureaucratic public administration was codified by the civil service laws of the 1880s when male clerks using quill pens sat on high stools. For 120 years this system has evolved into greater and greater layers of red tape and inefficient processes. No amount of reform will make bureaucratic public administration as accurate, efficient, and flexible as UPS or Fedex. Yet these companies are the standards of implementation which people have come to expect in their daily life. It is government which is now the obsolete, inefficient, expensive, and frustrating outlier. The American people instinctively know that things are not working.
When there are more than 11 million illegal immigrants and the number rises each day things are not working. When a man carrying a knife, axe, sword and power saw with blood on it is admitted by border guards to the U.S. from Canada things are not working. When the Supreme Court shatters private property rights on behalf of often corrupt city governments things are not working.
When the gap between Chinese and Indian students in math and science and their American counterparts remains devastatingly large after 22 years of reform (beginning with A Nation at Risk in 1983) things are not working. When the demographic realities of living longer create clear requirements for transformation in health and pension policy and the political system simply finds it impossible to have an honest dialogue about the challenges of success (fewer people dying and more people living longer is a great success not a problem) it is clear things are not working.
When four years into the Long War with the Irreconcilable Wing of Islam the Bureau of Prisons has to be embarrassed publicly into hiring its first Arabic translator things are not working. When the United States energy supply relies on anti-American semi-dictators in Venezuela and dictatorships in Saudi Arabia, Libya, Iran, and Kazakhstan and an unfriendly Russian government to keep supply large enough and price low enough with no coherent American strategy for energy security things are not working.
When the amount of debt held by foreigners mounts each year and the relative productive capacity of Asian countries grows steadily larger without an effective American strategy for competing and succeeding things are not working. When housing has become a bubble with no down payments, no payments on principle and in some cases not even complete payment on interest a looming threat to the entire economy exists and clearly things are not working.
The list could go on and on.
The United States faces a lot of challenges. Meeting these challenges is going to require a general strategy of continuing transformation across a wide range of very important and very difficult topics. It will be impossible to govern successfully by trying to solve one or two problems at a time. That approach will guarantee that some zones break down catastrophically (an energy crisis, a housing price collapse, a terrorist attack of large proportions, etc), while the focus is on the selected limited group.
Governing in a time of dramatic change requires a parallel commitment to transformation on many fronts simultaneously.
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