Big Government Conservatism
I’m currently reading The Power Broker, Robert Caro’s biography of Robert Moses, the man who caused most of the freeways, bridges, housing projects, parks, playgrounds, public beaches and sundry monuments (Shea Stadium, Lincoln Center, The United Nations) to be built in New York. Depending on your perspective, he either created modern New York or destroyed it. At the very least, he made it what it is today.
Though I’m only about 15% through the book’s 1100+ pages, a clear picture of Moses is emerging. He’s a fiendishly-competent technocrat, an arrogant elitist with a low tolerance for public debate, a man dead certain that his titanic intellect (and it was indeed titanic) was the only instrument capable of identifying and acting in the public good. He was also, in his later years, addicted to power, and if not personally corrupt, certainly a dynamo that broadcast corruption out across the city. In his dervish-dance of public activity, he ran through an alarming sum of public funds, which later scrutiny showed to be squandered in bizarre and lavish ways with no regard for the interests of the taxpayer. In short, he sounds like the modern Right’s caricature of the “Big Government Liberal.”
What’s interesting about Moses is that he was no liberal. He was not even a Democrat. He was a member of an species now almost extinct, which once roamed the cities, towns and farmlands of the North and Midwest: the “Progressive Conservative.” These were middle- and upper-class folks revolted by the corruption of the big city (mostly immigrant-driven) Democratic political machines, who supported such newfangled ideas as scientific management, proper accounting procedures, civil service standards, government transparency, and public welfare programs to improve the physical, social and moral conditions of impoverished urban immigrants. Every so often, usually following some kind of scandal, the business community would succeed in getting such a “reform candidate” elected, but the political machine would invariably succeed in preventing them from getting anything meaningful done, and eventually sweep back into power once the public tired of the hectoring arrogance of the reformers.
Moses was nearly unique among urban Progressives in both the scale of his success and his longevity in power. Shunning elected office, Moses’ only official title was Parks Commissioner (!), but he exerted his influence through a shadowy network of Authorities, Planning Boards and Commissions that both proposed and approved public works projects in New York City and New York State. Zoning regulations, right-of-ways, and Eminent Domain were the tools of his power; tolls, usage fees, bond-funded debt and mysterious State-secured loans provided revenue without the need for legislative appropriations or public oversight. Caro estimates that Moses ran through over $65 billion (1974 dollars) in public money and displaced nearly a million city residents during his 50 years in power, changing both the political and physical shape of New York City irrevocably as a result.
Again, on the surface, Moses embodied the kind of central planning, anti-private property, Government-knows-best attitude that modern conservatives oppose (at least ideologically). But who were his allies? Business leaders, real estate developers, upstate Republican legislators (whose constituents benefits from his power plants and waterworks), the wealthy and powerful aristocracy of New York. And who were his enemies? Poor minorities who had the misfortune of living in the path of his great projects, community groups, unions, public transportation, and, most conspicuously, Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal brain trust (many of whom hailed from New York, where Roosevelt had been Governor, and ran in the same social circles as Moses). In the final irony, it was two liberal Republicans – Governor Nelson Rockefeller and NY mayor John Lindsay – who finally succeeded in breaking Moses’ iron grip on power in the late 1960s.
For these reasons, Moses and people like him are complicating figures in the narrative of American politics, especially the version that the Right is propagating today. Moses’s arrogance, his elitism, his determination to never account for himself and his actions or answer to the public, and his ruthless use of state power to advance his personal ideals – which often would have failed any kind of democratic test – clearly identified him to his contemporaries not as a liberal but as an arch-conservative, a reactionary. He was practically a monarchist in both theory and practice.
When Moses was active, there was never any confusion about the difference in ways that liberals used government power (as in the New Deal) and the ways that conservatives used it (as in Prohibition). It was a question not of methods, but of aims, and of whose constituencies benefited. People knew where you stood in the political spectrum not by your words, which are cheap and easily fabricated, but by who stood there with you.
The contemporary Right likes to trace its lineage back to the laissez-faire governments of the 1920s (Harding and Coolidge), or further back to the pre-Progressive McKinnley era of the 1890s. In those days, it is true that the authority of the Federal Government was far more limited than it is today. It’s also true that conservative interests exercised power by means other than government: through the exclusivity of class and economic institutions (to which there was no legal or political counterweight), through private philanthropy that was narrow in its goals and condescending in its methods, and through the usual kinds of money-and-favors politics at the State and local level, whenever they were able to dislodge Democratic machines.
It’s therefore important to recognize that the absence of democratic, accountable government over economic and social policies doesn’t just leave that power up for grabs. It puts it in the hands of very specific people: people with much different (and narrower) interests than elected governments. The lack of “government” in the formal, institutional sense actually represents a very specific kind of “government” in terms of the direction it points public policy and the lives of citizens.
The reason that Barry Goldwater was viewed as such a crackpot – even (perhaps especially) by Republicans – when he came along in the early 1960s is that everyone realized that his “small government, personal liberty” idealism was just a façade for the restoration of political and economic power to unaccountable private hands.
In other words, though Goldwater and Moses stood at diametrically opposite ends of the ideological spectrum in terms of the role of government, they stood shoulder to shoulder in the practical effects of their policies. Both aimed squarely at the enrichment of preferred classes, and the political disempowerment of the despised poor. Goldwater’s method was to dismantle Federal government safeguards that protected workers and citizens from the predations of capitalism and the capitalist class; Moses’s was to use state power and state institutions ruthlessly and unaccountably to promote the goals and interests of the ruling classes (including, in some cases, the enlightened self-interest of public works).
Today’s Republican Party is a Frankenstein-like combination that walks like Moses and talks like Goldwater. Bush, DeLay, Frist and the right wing think tank-foundation establishment have mastered the exercise of big government power in ways that would both delight and horrify Robert Moses. Meanwhile, the pleasing rhetoric of self-reliance and personal freedom inherited from Goldwater has, amazingly, insulated Republicans from the reputation they have manifestly earned by their actions: that of a party that ruthlessly uses the political, legal and economic power of government to corruptly enrich their narrow constituency.
Liberals, meanwhile, have been left holding the “big government” bag, but are unable or unwilling to define that position in the way that led to their historic successes. All American government since the Civil War has been “big government” of one kind or another. The question is, in whose interests? Until we focus the debate on that question, rather than the academic point of federal authority, we’ll continue to lose both the arguments and the elections.
10:47:32 AM 
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