‘We the People’ Don’t Live Life in the Beltway

The feeding frenzy surrounding Kenneth Starr’s affiliation with Pepperdine University has been an interesting Rorschach test for people with a conspiracy world view. The criticism of Starr--whether from a few on the right for his failure to preemptively indict the president or from the pit-bull element on the left who postulate the ability to exchange a deanship for finding that Vince Foster was murdered--would make the CIA or the KGB proud indeed.

Lost in this stampede has been Pepperdine’s serious effort to address a rapidly changing public policy arena. If, as President Clinton has acknowledged, “the era of big government is over,” then the academic proclivity to seek solutions primarily inside the Beltway surely has been outdistanced by reality.

Any new, more flexible approach to public policy should begin with a reverential reconnection with the “self-evident truths” that nourished our unique origins. Though ridicule of this foundation is fashionable in some sectors, every successful reform movement in our history has been fueled by a return to the verities that anchored the institutions and personal commitments of the founding cohort of our leaders. They had experienced firsthand the abuse of power to which the less noble aspects of human nature are drawn, thus their suspicion of big government.

Whether the abolition of slavery, the women’s right to vote or the civil rights marches of the 1960s, this continuing revolution draws direction and strength from our founding commitments. If we can discover afresh the awe our founders felt before the human search for dignity through meaning, if we have the courage to affirm our consequent belief in a supreme intelligence without apology, if we can intelligently combine religion not with magic but with morality, then, as T.S. Eliot wrote, “The end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”

Equally important, a renewal of public policy should recognize that all the intermediary institutions that thrive in the space between the central government in Washington and the daily concerns of each solitary individual--our nonprofit associations, our churches and synagogues and mosques, our families and even the private commercial sector of labor and business associations--are equally critical as creators and implementers of public policy. Foreign observers ever since Toqueville a century and a half ago have marveled at this thriving center of American life.

Sadly, one of the most far-reaching of the unintended consequences of much of our Washington-centric public policy has been the weakening of this sector. We must find new ways to free these groups to provide even more social services and help change our communities for the better, either alone or in concert with local government. Community is developed and nurtured in such intermediary institutions or not at all.

Pepperdine’s search for more effective ways to deal with long-term social, economic and cultural problems signals the growing importance of Southern California, where diverse peoples struggle to cohabit peacefully. This region epitomizes both the problems and possibilities that will shape the next century. No location--not Washington, Boston or Berkeley--is better suited for defining the future’s challenges and discovering the best means to meet them.

Those who formulated the policies of yesterday’s big government, whether in response to the Great Depression of the 1930s, the Soviet threat or the newly visible poor of the ‘60s, would be the most disappointed of all to see the unintended consequences of a slavish pursuit of their policies. Pepperdine seeks to honor their vigor and courage by drawing on its own distinctive historic and moral roots to discover and nurture a creative and constructive response to these dramatic changes, based on the sanctity of our time-honored spiritual, political and social institutions.

As important as it is--and it is extremely important--Whitewater will someday be a footnote to these larger issues of public policy that should inform any ground-breaking effort to reshape the public policy debate along lines appropriate for the new century.