By Paul Starobin, National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Saturday, March 28, 1998

The Nanny State. For decades, this has been the Right's term of opprobrium for the liberal approach to social welfare problems. But now, in an era dominated by conservative political ideas, a provocative new approach to chronic social ailments is gaining ground, and it turns out to be every bit as intrusive as its sneered-at rival. Introducing the Daddy State, an emerging tough-love strategy for treating such festering maladies as unwed parenthood, street crime, drug abuse and poor school performance.

If you believe that virtue is not acquired naturally but must be taught and sometimes compelled, you agree with Aristotle -- and perhaps with a new government approach that emphasizes responsibility, not entitlement.

The defining feature of the Nanny State was an entitlement to benefits and services for poor people and others deemed in need of paternalistic supervision. Daddy Staters also see a role for paternalism, but they aim to recast the relationship between the government and its wards. The purpose of government intervention is no longer to provide a safety net, as it was for the Nanny State, but to curtail bad behavior. Government acts not as a compliant supplier of personal needs, but as a demanding, if caring, enforcer of civic responsibilities. Nanny Staters are interested in social justice; Daddy Staters, in public order. The model on which Daddy Staters aim to build is the 1996 welfare reform bill, which linked welfare benefits to an obligation to work. Slash-the-government libertarians would have preferred to eliminate welfare assistance altogether.

Daddy Statism could be a winning political response to polls showing that the public has lost faith in Nanny Statism but nevertheless expects the government to continue to try to solve entrenched social problems. The Daddy State approach is a logical step beyond bully-pulpit calls by the likes of conservative leader William Bennett for the reassertion of traditional values, including authority, in a culture that has become too permissive. Republicans in Congress, still feeling burned by the public backlash against their support for closing the government in 1995 and 1996 in the budget negotiations with President Clinton, are in search of an activist ideology that keeps faith with conservative principles. New Democrats, who have long viewed their party's advocacy of traditional entitlement programs as bad policy and a political handicap, have also taken up good conduct and civic obligation as a notable theme. Daddy State initiatives thus occupy the most-desired ground in American politics: the middle.

On the heels of welfare reform, Daddy Staters are now supporting a Republican-backed proposal for channeling federal funds to community groups that press unmarried inner-city fathers to accept their moral and financial obligations to their children. Also in the Daddy State mold are the push for national and state educational standards; the trend in drug policy known as coerced abstinence, which would subject drug offenders to frequent tests as a condition of probation or parole; and proposals for making unwed teenage mothers live in government- subsidized homes under the supervision of experienced mothers. "We ought to be using government to enforce the values that people care about," declares Lawrence M. Mead, a prominent Republican social policy analyst and the leading theologian of the Daddy State movement.

Daddy State initiatives are sympathetically examined in The New Paternalism, a new book edited by Mead and published by the Brookings Institution in Washington. In a concluding essay, James Q. Wilson, perhaps the most influential conservative thinker of his generation, cautiously endorses Mead's approach. "Unless we were to return to a minimalist state -- an unlikely event -- paternalism is a permanent feature of the government's relationships with its citizens," Wilson writes. "What is necessary is to ask under what circumstances, to what ends, and in what ways government should expand the extent to which it makes demands on its citizens."

Daddy Statism is provoking intense opposition, however, from libertarians, who say people are generally best off when the government leaves them alone. Mead's ideas are a form of "conservative social engineering that is about as frightening an assertion of 'We know better' as anything that liberals say," says Charles Murray, the conservative policy analyst who is among the Right's most influential critics of the Nanny State. Edward H. Crane III, president of the Cato Institute, Washington's leading citadel of libertarian thought, calls the New Paternalism "wrong" and says it's "part of the philosophical breakdown of the Right and the Republicans more particularly." Other critics view Daddy Statism as a dehumanizing approach toward citizens that smacks of the behavioral science of B.F. Skinner.

But what really matters is whether Daddy Statism can work. That question has not been answered. Nevertheless, advocates can point to promising signs on such fronts as welfare policy. The United States has rejected both the Nanny State and the Minimal State. Now may be the moment for the Daddy State.

Aristotle In America
Paternalism is a pejorative term in the American lexicon. In a society that celebrates choice and liberty, nobody likes to admit that people sometimes use their freedom to make bad decisions. Nevertheless, government, in the United States and elsewhere, often tries to protect citizens from themselves -- and frequently resorts to coercion to accomplish this aim. Social Security, for example, is a paternalistic program. Compulsory paycheck deductions would not be necessary if people could be counted upon to save enough for their retirement. Likewise, education inescapably engages the government in paternalism. Nobody argues that children should be left to learn on their own, and even parents who opt to educate their children at home must comply with rules set by government.

But even if government paternalism can't be avoided altogether, some prominent thinkers on the right argue that the key for making progress on stubborn social problems is giving citizens more choice, not less. For example, student achievement could be greatly improved, choice enthusiasts say, by voucher plans enabling parents to pick between competing schools. This is the core idea of the "empowerment" paradigm offered by conservative policy guru James Pinkerton, a former domestic policy adviser in George Bush's White House. Call it the Do-It- Yourself State.

Although this approach may be politically seductive, Daddy Staters have little faith it will work. Choice advocates "are trying to use freedom to solve a problem that really requires authority," Mead says.

Conspicuously absent from the ranks of the Daddy Staters, not surprisingly, are economists, whose models assume that people choose wisely if they have enough information. Mead, a former deputy research director of the Republican National Committee, is a politics professor at New York University with a doctorate in political theory from Harvard. James Q. Wilson is also a political scientist. Mark A.R. Kleiman, a leading advocate of a paternalistic approach to drug policy, has a doctorate in public policy and teaches that subject at the University of California (Los Angeles). (Kleiman, too, contributed a chapter to The New Paternalism.) Ron Haskins, who is an influential GOP social policy staffer on the House Ways and Means Committee and is sympathetic to Mead's ideas, is an ex-Marine with a doctorate in developmental psychology.

The ideas animating the Daddy State predate Adam Smith and in fact can be found in the moral philosophy of Aristotle, who believed that virtue in human beings is not acquired naturally but must be taught and sometimes compelled. Like an athletic skill or a habit of good hygiene, virtue must be developed and practiced. This notion permeates the work of Wilson, who has written extensively on how to foster good character in individuals to maintain the moral and physical health of a community. The revival of community policing, in which a cop walks a beat, getting to know the street characters and maybe even giving them a nudge or two to keep them out of trouble, is a paternalistic idea that Wilson has long touted. "Aristotle is my guide," Wilson says of his overarching political philosophy.

Although authority-minded conservatives have long bemoaned cultural laxity, many are reluctant to turn to the government as a primary teacher and enforcer of virtue. This is mainly a job, such folks say, for the family and for community institutions, such as the church and the Boy Scouts, that give form and fiber to what is called civil society. Neoconservatives such as historian Gertrude Himmelfarb say contemporary America can profit by looking back to the 19th century, when a well- developed network of private charities and other civic associations enabled Victorian England to remain socially cohesive even in the tumult of the industrial revolution.

Daddy Staters say the restoration of paternalistic institutions in private society is a worthy undertaking, but not sufficient to meet the scale of the ailments that bedevil modern America, a society plagued by the collapse of the nuclear family (nearly 40 per cent of all children are born out of wedlock) and other disorders related to cultural anomie. "Only government has the necessary resources," Mead writes in The New Paternalism. "Only public officials, acting with the mandate of the people, can have the standing" to impose requirements for good conduct "and, if necessary, withdraw benefits to enforce them.... Paternalism has been primarily a government operation and is likely to remain so."

Mead calls himself a "big-government conservative," and he, for one, would like Washington to take the lead in building the Daddy State. However, a hard-headed paternalism is not in principle at odds with devolution -- the effort, embraced by many conservatives, to shift political authority away from the capital and toward smaller, less remote, units of government. After all, there is no reason why a neighborhood school, a police department, a county welfare agency, can't adopt a paternalistic policy on its own. In fact, some conservatives sympathetic to Mead's ideas, such as William A. Schambra, an analyst at the Bradley Foundation in Milwaukee, say a new paternalism is likely to work best when the ideas are conceived and carried out by small, local units of government, since those bodies are most closely in touch with the community.

The architects of the Daddy State don't yet have a Web site or a newsletter -- and some sponsors of proposals that smack of a new conservative paternalism may not even see themselves as part of a broader movement. But important trends in policy typically develop as a result of many practitioners' independently arriving at similar solutions to common problems. The Nanny State, after all, was not constructed by a lone master builder; the contributions were made by numerous people over a period spanning decades. And its political appeal has ebbed, not as the result of a single blow but because of a gradually emerging sense among both elite thinkers and ordinary folks that good intentions have fostered a debilitating culture of dependency. Daddy State projects are nourished by this general climate of opinion.

Construction Sites
A tour of the emerging edifice shows a rich variety of work in progress. One bustling construction site, fittingly enough, is the use of government to promote responsible fatherhood. The most ambitious undertaking on this front was launched on a recent weekday at Paradise Parkside, a housing development in an impoverished neighborhood in the Northeast section of Washington. The courtyard was festooned with colorful banners displaying the faces of black-power leaders from the 1960s, including Malcolm X. This backdrop had been selected with care by Rep. E. Clay Shaw Jr., the Florida Republican who had come to Paradise Parkside to unveil a proposal to provide states $2 billion over five years, for grants to community organizations dedicated to turning wayward dads into righteous souls.

"We have to go back and solve the problems welfare programs have created," Shaw, a key sponsor of the 1996 welfare reform law, said in a brief chat before the event got under way. The trouble, Shaw went on to say in prepared remarks to a small group of reporters, is that "fathers have been ignored, and in many ways even displaced, in the various waves of social reforms that have swept the policy landscape in the last several decades. And yet the foundation of civilized society has always been the two-parent family."

That's the thinking behind his new legislation, crafted by Haskins, staff director for the panel that Shaw chairs, the Ways and Means Human Resources Subcommittee. House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., and Ways and Means chairman Bill Archer, R- Texas, both support the legislation, which Archer distinguishes from the Nanny State approach to poverty on the grounds that it would use the government's resources in the interests of reestablishing civic order. "If the Democrats did this, they would put checks in the hands of these fathers," a spokesman for Archer said. "What the Republicans are doing is putting money in the hands of organizations that nurture loving fathers. It is not a cash-distribution program; it is not a redistribution of wealth."

The bill is intended to fund such groups as the National Institute for Responsible Fatherhood and Family Development, the Washington-based group run by Charles Ballard, a black ex-convict who has become an icon for conservative champions of the fatherhood movement. After years of reckless behavior, Ballard, who himself had been abandoned by his father, experienced a Christian religious awakening in jail, courtesy of an elder Bible-reading cell mate. When he got out, he adopted an out-of- wedlock son he had abandoned. He founded his institute in the early 1980s to induce young black men in similar straits to own up to their responsibilities. Independent evaluators say a large share of the program's participants do, in fact, establish their legal paternity and start paying child support. This shows, Ballard wrote in a 1995 article in Policy Review, that wanton males can be "groomed" to become virtuous contributors to society. Aristotle would approve.

B.F. Skinner might approve of a different sort of Daddy State experiment, the coerced-abstinence idea of drug policy guru Kleiman, which is now being launched in several states. As things stand, drug addicts are dealt with in only two basic ways: serious jail time and treatment programs. Jail simply removes the offender from society, and the standard treatment model hinges on the addict's willingness to admit a problem and take a vow to get better.

Coerced abstinence takes a different tack: Addicts, according to this view, can and will stay clean if they are subject to repeated drug tests with a graduated series of automatic punishments for failed tests. "We're saying, you have to help yourself and if you don't, we're going to whack you on the head. It's behavior modification," says Robert Farr, the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee in the Connecticut Assembly, who recently introduced a bill along these lines that would apply to drug offenders on probation. In Maryland, Lt. Gov. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, a Democrat, is seeking to expand a pilot program structured on coerced-abstinence principles. Kleiman says that scattered use of such methods in various small jurisdictions around the country has produced good results.

A shift to behavioral principles is also the goal for an upstart band of education experts who say that a more-stringent and more-encompassing paternalism is needed to rescue schools from the child-centered philosophy that has dominated educational thinking for decades. The prevailing view holds that "school must be bent to the child's contours rather than the child to the school's," Chester E. Finn Jr., a senior fellow at the conservative Hudson Institute, wrote in an essay in The New Paternalism. Although Finn supports vouchers and other school- choice reforms, he argues that improvements in student performance depend most of all on a clear and firm insistence on mastery of basic skills and knowledge, including the three Rs. His model program would feature strong teachers and structured curricula. "Although nearly all parents would run screaming from schools that call themselves paternalistic," he writes in his essay, "in practice, paternalism seems to be what many want: institutions with explicit standards for skills, knowledge, and behavior, and with the gumption to hold both teachers and pupils accountable for achieving these norms."

Finn is heartened by schools' growing use of the behavioral teaching methods developed by Success for All, a reading program designed by Robert Slavin at Johns Hopkins University. Mead points to the recent radical reform of the Chicago public school system as a promising adaptation of a tough-minded paternalism. In 1996, a new school board directly accountable to Mayor Richard Daley stopped the practice of automatic advancement for students and held back nearly half of all ninth-graders, for lack of skills. Since then, reading and math test scores have gone up, even in the most problematic schools.

An in-your-face approach is also a hallmark of the public welfare agencies in Wisconsin -- a state often praised by experts for running a program that has demonstrably improved the employment prospects of mothers on welfare. "The most successful welfare programs are very intrusive," Schambra of the Bradley Foundation says. "They are going to get down with people and say: 'You have got to change the way you live. Your ability to get a job means a change in how late you stay up, in your drinking habits.' "

The Dangers
Daddy Statism is not without its risks and dangers. The scariest threat is a creeping extension of supervision to aspects of personal life where it is unwarranted. If it is OK to subject drug users to a paternalistic regime, why not use the same techniques to regulate, say, the eating of fatty foods? Some health experts, frowning on America's excessive appetite for Big Macs and Twinkies, have already called for federal and state taxes on junk food. What's next -- spot blood tests for sugar and cholesterol? In New York City, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani is now expanding his successful use of community policy practices in an effort to curtail jaywalking -- a practice that's certainly against the law but hardly rates as an urban crisis.

U.S. history contains a pair of chilling examples of misapplied governmental paternalism -- in the treatment of Native Americans and of blacks. Slavery, remember, was often justified by the white master as in the best interests of the black subject, who was deemed incapable of self-management. Imani Woods, a drug policy expert at the University of Washington in Seattle, says that coerced abstinence emanates from the same "demeaning" mentality. Noting that many of the chronic drug offenders to whom such programs are intended to apply are African-American males, Woods says the idea seems to be that "the black man is supposed to get checked all the time.... It's nothing but racism." Other targets of the Daddy State, such as welfare mothers, also lack the political power that could protect them from abuses of a paternalistic policy.

Daddy Staters concede that their approach poses such risks. "My concern about the New Paternalism is that it demands more temperance from voters and legislators than I fear we have educated them to have," Kleiman says. "As Thomas Jefferson says, If individuals can't be trusted with their own welfare, then how can you trust them with other people's welfare? That is the fundamental challenge to paternalist theory. Where are you going to find these wise people" to carry out a prudent paternalism?

Even if worries about overzealous applications of authority turn out to be overwrought, the Daddy State approach still can't work without intelligence and creativity, qualities that can easily be found in American business but are seen all too rarely in government at any level. The best paternalists in public life (or anywhere else) tend to be charismatic figures, such as Jaime Escalante, the Los Angeles public school math teacher who is much lauded for his demanding methods. But charisma, by definition, does not lend itself to formulaic replication; in fact, of the three principal sources of authority in human affairs (the other two being tradition and the law), charisma is the most magical and elusive.

Although Daddy State ideas are well-known to both of the major parties, their adoption probably faces more hurdles in the Democratic camp. The most heated objections can be expected to come from liberal civil libertarians and civil rights advocates, who are uncomfortable with both cultural conservatism and the general concept of the government's insistence on codes of conduct.

Nevertheless, a Democratic coalition supportive of Daddy State ideas is emerging. This thrust is congenial to such New Democrat activists as William Galston, a former Clinton White House aide who's the executive director of the National Commission on Civil Renewal. Galston calls Mead "a very blunt and gutsy guy," and says, "If standards of conduct are sound, then society is certainly justified towards promoting more- widespread standards of observance."

Galston's former boss, Bill Clinton, has already pursued a conservative paternalism in his support for the GOP-authored welfare reform bill and in his advocacy of national educational standards and school uniforms. (It should be noted, however, that Clinton, ever the zigger and zagger, has also embraced a Nanny Statish approach to health policy, as in his current proposal to make younger workers eligible for Medicare.)

Some Daddy State ideas are also being welcomed by old- style liberals who concede the validity of the basic conservative critique of the Nanny State. Applause for Shaw's fatherhood initiative, for example, comes from Ronald B. Mincy, a senior program officer at the Ford Foundation who formerly served in Clinton's Health and Human Services Department. Mincy, an African-American who grew up in an underclass neighborhood in the South Bronx and went on to earn degrees from Harvard and MIT, co- wrote a chapter in Mead's book, on the application of paternalistic principles to the enforcement of child-support laws. "Over the last 15 years," he says, "I've moved more" toward the conservative position on inner-city pathologies. He has no problem with government's giving funds to religious-based community groups involved in social work -- a sticking point for many liberals, who say this breaches the wall between church and state. Mincy expects that neighborhood groups with which the Ford Foundation has been working will win funding under Shaw's bill.

On the Republican side, the Daddy State impetus meets with disapproval from a cadre of grass-roots libertarian activists for whom a militant antipathy toward government is akin to religion. But libertarians are not in control of the party. The faction of social conservatives, principally energized by the drive to ban abortion on demand, is bigger and more vibrant, and these folks are open to Daddy State arguments. "I'm a governmental activist. As long as you're spending all this money on social programs, you probably should spend more money on things that work, and things that work tend to instill social values in people," said Jeffrey Bell, a close adviser to Gary Bauer, whose Family Research Council has become the most powerful grass-roots force for social conservatism in Republican politics. Naked political considerations also favor a turn to Daddy State ideas, for a party that Democrats unrelentingly paint as lacking in compassion. Shaw says, of his fatherhood initiative: "If someone wants to point at this legislation and say, 'Hey, they care,' that's fine."

Sen. Mitch McConnell, the Kentucky Republican, certainly has caught the spirit of a new paternalism. He proposed requiring all students who entered a scholarship program named for him at the University of Louisville to pledge not to sire or give birth to children out of wedlock. The school's political science department rejected the idea.

"I would bet in the end that the Republicans will be the party of national norms," Mead predicts. "Democrats don't want to make demands, because they are afraid the disadvantaged can't cope.... This is a war that Republicans are prepared to fight -- a war against incivility." He has discussed his ideas with big-think Republicans including William Bennett, and big- think Democrats including New York Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Both are intrigued, Mead says, but neither at this point can be called a convert. The conversations with Moynihan "are very occult," Mead says, and Bennett "likes what I am doing, but I think he's inclined to attach more importance to the moral climate in the country, not the policy."

And what about the public at large? Despite all the publicity given to the militia movement, and to calls for eliminating the Internal Revenue Service and similar causes, anti-governmentalism is overrated as an animating current among ordinary Americans. Today's polls show that a large majority of Americans continue to expect government to fashion solutions to complex, persistent problems, such as urban slums. A recent survey by the Pew Research Center for The People & The Press found that 74 per cent of the public agreed with the statement that the government "has a responsibility to try to do away with poverty in this country" -- compared with 73 per cent in 1964. Asked in a CBS poll, what they'd like the federal government to do with any surplus money it may have after balancing the budget, 21 per cent of the public wanted it applied to education (the most popular response); 15 per cent said poverty and homelessness; and only 13 per cent said tax reduction. Other recent polling data show that public trust in government is on the rise after a long decline.

The real debate is thus not over whether government should intervene, but over which kind of government intervention can achieve the best outcomes. "Anyone who is a conservative has a streak of the libertarian in him," says Curt Anderson, a Republican political consultant. "But it doesn't make sense to say we're going to get rid of the government. It's not what people want."

Public support for Daddy Statism is most prominently seen in the polling done on welfare reform. A 1996 survey by the Public Agenda Foundation, a New York group set up by liberals, concluded that a large majority of Americans "want a welfare system that requires work from the very beginning" and "are outraged by welfare because they believe it fosters an addictive and self-destructive lifestyle that mocks the values they live by." Even many people on welfare echoed these sentiments.

An expanded application of Daddy State principles, however, may not turn out to be what people want. The notion of using the government to instill civic virtue may sound un- American -- the sort of thing the French or the Germans do, not us. Still, advocates of the Daddy State offer a timely and meaty argument that moves beyond simplistic sloganeering about whether government is a good thing or a bad thing. Their voice deserves to be heard.

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