Forbes Is Dynamism Personified

Five years ago, when another editor and I interviewed Steve Forbes for Reason magazine, he seemed almost too polite to introduce himself, afraid, it seemed, of imposing on us. A contrast not only to his exuberant father but also to the typical corporate executive, he was the most self-effacing rich guy I’d ever met. Judging from a recent campaign appearance in Orange County, he has loosened up a bit, but when it comes to personal dynamism, Steve Forbes will never be mistaken for Alan Keyes, or even Bill Clinton.

Yet when asked by a TV reporter, “What kind of person is Steve Forbes?”, reports Michael Lewis in the New Republic, the unlikely candidate gave an unlikely answer: “He’s forward-looking, dynamic and optimistic.” Lewis moved on, missing the story.

Forbes’ response is telling, and it explains a lot about why he has rocketed to near-front-runner status among Republican candidates. When Forbes says he’s “dynamic,” he’s talking politics, not personality. His great strength as a candidate--like that of his opposite, Pat Buchanan--is that he defines a clear vision of how Americans can best shape their future.

In post-Cold War America, the political-cultural-intellectual landscape is divided not between the old left and right but between dynamism and stasis. On the dynamic side are people who embrace evolving social and economic systems and an unknown but incrementally improving future, a future determined by the decentralized choices of individuals. On the side of stasis are those who want to reverse, or plan, or manipulate change, those who promise to shape the future from the top down and fix it in place.

With his opposition to economic and social change and his consistent harking back to an imagined past, Buchanan is the purest static visionary in the Republican field. But he’s not alone. Nearly all our political discourse assumes some sort of static, politically directed future. Until Forbes entered the race, dynamism had no clear advocate, no one articulating a positive vision of why the future would be better with a less intrusive state. And unlike stasis supporters, who are divided over which specific future to dictate, dynamists compose a single constituency, unified by principle, a constituency looking for political champions.

Forbes can legitimately call himself “dynamic,” then, not because he’s a rousing speaker but because he appeals to that constituency. He extols the open-ended future, the creativity of free people and the importance of clear, simple limited rules within which individuals can shape their own decisions. That’s what the flat tax is really all about--the government as neutral referee in a system everyone can understand. And it’s no accident that Forbes lists progress, along with freedom, individual opportunity and equality before the law among America’s defining “ideas and ideals.”

By the usual standards of politics, Forbes is indeed advocating “risky ideas,” as Bob Dole’s TV commercials put it. Instead of promising to eliminate risks by bureaucratic decree, as most politicians do (deceiving both the public and themselves), Forbes prefers to diversify risks down to a manageable level. “The nice thing about an open economy,” he told us in 1991, “is that you’re not dependent on a handful of people doing something right.”

Regardless of how the rest of his campaign fares, Forbes has pulled off an amazing feat. It’s hard to talk dynamism in a political world that expects stasis, right down to urging people to calculate the effect of the flat tax by assuming their personal circumstances will never change. It’s even harder to convey optimism about the future without specifying exactly what that future should look like. And it’s hardest of all to win elections with a message that promises freedom and progress without guarantees. Forbes has accomplished the first two. We’ll know soon enough whether he can pull off the third.

Virginia I. Postrel is editor of Reason, a Los Angeles-based magazine of social and political commentary. She is a columnist for the technology magazine Forbes ASAP, a role in which she has no contact with Steve Forbes. The Forbes interview can be found after Wednesday on the Reason web site at under “interviews.”