How Perversity Propelled GOP Into Power : Policy: Republicans insist that programs often perpetuate the very problems they were created to solve. But the public wants something done.

Republicans are sounding anxious and frustrated these days. The old applause lines don’t seem to work as well. Increasingly, it is they, rather than liberals, who seem to have a political tin ear. The problem has nothing to do with campaign staff, or a “liberal” media. The real culprit is their philosophy of do-nothing conservatism.

Exhibit A, of course, is President George Bush. The message: I can’t. Can’t clean up the cities. Can’t rebuild the infrastructure. Can’t help working women. Want to; just can’t. Don’t have the money. Besides, don’t know how.

Today, conservatives offer a shriveled vision of national possibilities. But in a country that still has great expectations for itself, that’s a losing proposition. Ironically, the very ideas that first energized the conservative revolution--their critique of government as unable to solve problems--now threaten their hold on power. They continue to preach the limits of government, even as the public increasingly wants action on a variety of domestic problems. They fail to see that the political ground has shifted. They’re on new terrain, but they’re still using the old map.

The old route was simple: Attack Big Government. Social programs, it was asserted again and again, don’t work. There was, of course, some truth in these claims. And in the wake of a fortuitous (for conservatives) string of government failures--including Vietnam, Watergate and rampant inflation--they had the right idea at the right time.

But conservatives weren’t content to argue that programs sometimes fell short of the mark. The claim became that they actually worsen the problem they are designed to solve. The arguments are familiar: poverty programs cause poverty; the minimum wage increases unemployment; affirmative action breeds racism. This was the Law of Perverse Consequences: Government action will produce the exact opposite of what is intended. Most conservative intellectual work of the past generation has built upon this one idea.

To be fair, the intellectuals earned their keep. Selling an idea as inherently implausible as this cannot be easy. You must elide or obscure decades of government success stories, including the world’s first mass higher education system, public-health advances, rural electrification, the elimination of many childhood diseases through inoculation programs, a broad assault on elderly poverty (Social Security), recent improvements in air and water quality and literally thousands of others.

Moreover, if this “law” were true, we could rid our society of all that troubles us by following a campaign of perverse intentions. We would establish the Centers for the Spread of Disease, the Department of Injustice, the Commission on Civil Wrongs and the like. The law of perverse consequences would take care of the rest.

In fact, the Reagan Administration did try this approach. It cut taxes to reduce deficits, and slashed housing funds to increase affordable housing. And America got a national debt and homeless population of Third World proportions. There is one other possibility: Conseratives’ goals were not what they claimed.

This brings us to the real significance of the perverse-consequences thesis, which is polemical not analytical. It allows conservatives to claim common cause with liberals. We’re only thinking of you, dear worker/woman/minority. We don’t challenge your goals, only your methods. We object to your means precisely because they will undermine our shared ends.

This has proved addictive for conservatives, especially as the public thirst for government action grows. Conservatives must stick with the perverse-effect theorem, because the alternative is unthinkable: Telling people what they really believe. Consider what conservatives are saying--and what they aren’t saying:

Democrats have proposed a tax increase for the wealthiest 2% of Americans. Republicans reply that the middle class should not be fooled, because that 2% will eventually grow to include them. And isn’t such a tax wrong on its own terms? Doesn’t it penalize the most “productive” members of our society? Nobody seems ready to say so.

Throughout the last half of the 1980s, conservatives argued--against accumulating evidence--that economic inequality was not growing. Having lost the argument, they continue to assert that Reagan-era tax policies had nothing to do with the increase. But why not take credit? Doesn’t this new distribution more fairly reflect the true underlying distribution of talent and effort?

Conservatives have repeatedly resisted increases in the minimum wage. They always maintain hikes will most harm the poor, destroying low-wage jobs. Perhaps, though most studies refute this idea. What they don’t have the courage to say is the traditional conservative argument: Workers should receive as pay only what they can command on the free market.

Bush has vetoed family leave legislation that requires employers to provide leave for parents caring for newborns or sick relatives. The Administration says it believes such leave should be granted--but government shouldn’t require it.

It is said that hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue. So liberals can take some comfort in all this conservative dissembling. But they can take more comfort in knowing conservatives pay a long-term price for hypocrisy. A movement that dares not reveal what’s on its mind--or in its heart--will find it hard to sustain allegiances. It also cedes intellectual ground every time it claims to share--however falsely--the goals of its enemies.

More immediately, conservatives are left with a cramped and timid program. This was foreshadowed four years ago in Bush’s inaugural address, when the custodian of a $5-trillion economy told the nation it had “more will than wallet.” Those now disappointed by the President’s lack of a domestic agenda just weren’t listening. He promised us complacency, and that’s one promise he kept.

Some see this as a personal shortcoming of the President’s, but problems like his invariably reveal deeper political realities. His agenda reflects the small-minded conservatism that results when government is abandoned. Without government, there simply can be no pursuit of great national purposes. And that is fundamentally at odds with core American values: our national pride, our can-do self-image and our enduring optimism.

This is not to suggest that Americans have dropped their reservations about government. Not at all. But the reservations are being overridden by the increasingly urgent feeling that something must be done about our nation’s problems. Opinion polls reveal a public no longer content to see the urban decay, declining educational achievement, trade deficit, skyrocketing medical costs and other problems ignored.

Are they mad at government? Sure. But they want it fixed, not dismantled. And the last thing they’re looking for is someone to tell them it can’t work.

Some conservatives seem to sense this. Jack Kemp, for example, proffers an “activist conservatism.” But Kemp is restricted by his quasi-theological attachment to capital-gains tax cuts as a solution to every problem. When John F. Kennedy--Kemp’s hero--set a goal of landing a man on the moon, he didn’t reduce taxes on the airline industry in the hope they would reach escape velocity. He used government to assemble human and technical resources and direct them toward the goal--and it worked.

This fall, Bush faces not one but two challenges to his anti-government presidency. Both opponents have made government central to their candidacies.

Ross Perot’s anti-Washington campaign is sometimes seen as the latest in a series of assaults on government. But that misses the real story. Perotism is a revolt against politics, not government. Indeed, it is intended, more than anything else, to allow government to work again. His answer: Get politics out of it, and run government like a business.

Bill Clinton stands firmly in the “neo-liberal” tradition of the Democratic Party, which for years has emphasized the need to make government more efficient and accountable. Clinton calls for an “entrepreneurial government,” which would be more results-oriented. He claims his years of experience as a governor are the perfect preparation for this task.

Both formulas are subject to fair criticism. Both will surely meet with significant skepticism from a public grown cynical about government and about any promises a candidate might make. But both have one overriding virtue missing on the Republican side: They promise to do something. In today’s climate, that’s a tremendous advantage.

As John Arbuthnot noted more than two centuries ago, “All political parties die at last of swallowing their own lies.” Republicans have become trapped by the very ideas that brought them so much success. They continue to “dance with the one that brung ya,” but it’s looking more and more like the last waltz.