THE NEXT DEAL: The Future of Public Life In The Information Age. - Review - book review

Washington Monthly, March, 2001 by Michael Schaffer

Likewise, scant attention is paid to how instituting the kinds of choices Cherny proposes may limit other, larger choices. For instance, opting to let people put some of their Social Security in the stock market, with its greater rewards, will have a huge impact on issues far from pension policy. The market typically doesn't like increased minimum wages. Next time someone proposes that we--Congress--choose such a hike, the idea that change will wreak havoc on people's Social Security savings will be used to combat the plan. One kind of choice trumps another.

But matters like wage laws, of course, are broad-scale democratic decisions, not individual preferences. They're what make us citizens of a county, not consumers of a government's services. They're the kind of choices where some interests win and some interests lose. Perhaps because of that, they're the kind of choice that appears to be not particularly interesting to this shiny new progressive future. In Cherny's world-view, the will of the people is only disrupted by "experts" and elites, seeking to impose "top-down" solutions. An easy target, those perfidious "experts," and a good mark for a speechwriter to hit. But what happened to the actual economic interests--you know, bosses, polluters, monopolists, and the like--that real progressives once inveighed against?

Reading a book by a speechwriter is a little like listening to a graduation speech that goes on for 251 pages. Cherny pads his book with flowery descriptions of the lives of Thomas Jefferson, Woodrow Wilson, Andrew Carnegie, and other Americans who reshaped their eras. But he doesn't really get around to his own suggestions until page 179. And despite the long wind-up, there's something oddly empty about the book. Letting people choose their own job-training scheme isn't V-chip small--and if it reduces their reflexive hostility to government programs k may even be a good thing. But proposals like that are nothing on which to build a political constituency outside of a pollster's office.

With Bush in the White House, Cherny and other veterans of Clinton's Washington will realize that a lot of what government does can't come down to splitting the difference. The guy who produces the sludge and the guy who lives down the river from his factory have different interests that can't be bridged by making services user-friendly. As those kinds of issues get forced onto their plates after the naptime that came with the economic boom, erstwhile progressives may find themselves falling back on a catch-phrase of the industrial era Cherny seems so eager to bury: Which side are you on?

MICHAEL SCHAFFER is an associate editor at U.S. NEWS & WORLD REPORT.