Desperately Seeking a "Sunny" Liberalism

Traditional conservatism is a philosophy that defends social hierarchy. It states simply: those on top deserve to be there. But this brand of conservatism, so popular in Europe, never caught on in the egalitarian environment of America. In the US, conservatives had to argue that what they really wanted was a dynamic society. By making things better for those at the top, they argued, more people would strive to get there. And by keeping taxes low, it would be easier for people to move up.

Ronald Reagan, with his "sunny" conservatism, was a great pitchman for this view. Rather than argue for a system of ossified, inherited wealth at the top, he argued for a dynamic society with ever more social mobility. "The American dream," he declared, "is not that every man must be level with every other man. The American dream is that every man must be free to become what God intends he should become."

In order to build such a dynamic society, Reagan argued for slashing taxes and government benefits. As governor of California, one of the casualties of his tax cuts was the one-hundred-year tradition that the University of California would be free for in-state students. As president, he pushed similar policies, gutting educational programs to pay for tax cuts at the top.

In recent decades, we have essentially been living in Reagan's America -- a real-world social experiment testing the conservative philosophy that cutting taxes and spending would yield a more dynamic society. And the verdict is in: it hasn't.

In recent decades, social mobility has declined and American society is heading down the dangerous path towards hereditary aristocracy. George W. Bush, a hereditary aristocrat himself, has gone so far as to eliminate the estate tax on heirs and heiresses. While Reagan once said, "What I want to see above all is that this remains a country where someone can always get rich," this has become a country where, new research shows, those who were not born in the top 20% have a harder and harder time moving up. Frozen in under-funded public schools and facing college tuitions that have tripled in real dollars in a generation, moving up is harder than it has been in almost a century. Today we have reversed the egalitarian social progress that reigned during the period from FDR to Reagan. On selective college campuses today, fully 74 percent of students come from families in the top quarter of income earners. And only 3 percent come from the bottom quarter. America now has lower rates of social mobility than Great Britain -- the ossified class society we rebelled against in the first place.

In hindsight, it seems obvious that gutting accessible, free, public education would reduce social mobility. But rather than just harp on these statistics, progressives should present their own vision of a more dynamic society -- the kind of society Americans have always wanted. Progressives need to propose a "sunny" liberalism to counter the right's wildly successful "sunny" conservatism. Now that the facts are in, liberals should propose going in the opposite direction, demanding that those who have struck it rich give something back -- that they be taxed to make sure any talented American can get the kind of education and opportunity they got.

Reagan was right: the American dream is that every person must be free to become what God intends he or she should become. But his programs were dead wrong. And only liberals -- with winning rhetoric and viable programs -- can make this dream a reality.