Goto v. Publius in the White House

WHAT is the ideology of the Nixon Administration? Some critics on the left think of it exclusively as an amalgam of Main Street values, Southern strategy and corporate mentality. Such a description is often slapped on in primary colors, and can come close to caricature. In fact, the Administration in its first year evolved through a series of policies that were in many ways ideologically inconsistent. A gesture toward the conservative (the Haynsworth nomination, for example) would be countered by an interventionist policy (such as the Philadelphia Plan). The President embodies both an instinctive conservatism and an intellectual reformism.

For a long time, Nixon deliberately avoided raising any rhetorical pennants; he did not coin his own equivalent of the "New Frontier" or the "Great Society." Lately, he has settled upon the doctrine of a New Federalism--a formula that embodies the Nixonian ideal of power diffused downward to state and local authorities. The notion is not so different from the New Left's "Power to the People!"--except that Nixon has different people in mind. And unlike some participatory democrats, the President would keep the states and localities on a long, loose but authoritative federal leash.

In the White House at the moment, there is something like an essay contest in progress among a few aides and speechwriters attempting to give verbal shape to the President's philosophy. If nothing else, the episode illustrates a difference between Nixon and his predecessor; it short-circuits the imagination to conceive of Lyndon Johnson approving of such a staff forum on what he was thinking, or ought to think.

The first exegesis came from Speechwriter William Safire, 40, who wrote a 19-page tract entitled "New Federalist Paper #1, by Publius"--in imitation of the Federalist Papers, signed "Publius," by Hamilton, Madison and Jay (TIME, Jan. 26). Nowhere does New Publius attempt to equal the lucid grace of the original, but his essay is an enthusiastic effort to erect some theoretical carapace over Nixon's policies. "The purpose of the New Federalism," writes New Publius, "is to come to grips with a paradox: a need for both national unity and local diversity; a need to protect both individual equality at the national level and individual uniqueness at the local level; and a need both to establish national goals and to decentralize government services." -

The Administration's ideal, says New Publius, is a "national localism." Such a notion, stated as a somewhat clumsy oxymoron, reopens the entire question of Federal power v. states' rights. For years, heirs of the New Deal have tended to dismiss states'-righters as rednecked Smerdyakovs. Shortly after New Publius circulated his paper, another White House speechwriter, Tom Charles Huston, 28, a former president of the

Young Americans for Freedom, sent around a rebuttal: "FEDERALISM: OLD AND NEW Or, The Pretentions of New Publius Exposed, By Cato."*

New Publius argued that the Federal Government should allow states the "right of first refusal" in complying with Federal programs, but if they refused to comply (with an order to desegregate schools, for example) the Federal Government could pull the leash taut. New Publius expounds a sort of administratively decentralized liberalism: the Federal Government should define goals and establish priorities, but give over to states the powers of administration, since bureaucratic, central administration tends to be inefficient. The Federal Government, according to New

Publius, would retain the power to dictate overall national objectives.

Cato, a literal-minded constitutionalist, lets fly with oratorical grapeshot: "If New Publius is saying that once the Federal Government determines that a problem--any problem--exists and decides that something should be done about it, the States have the first option to take action and if they refuse the Federal Government may rightly act on its own--if this be his argument, then not only is it objectionable, it is revolutionary. Power implies the right to say No and make it stick, it includes the right of a State to decide for itself whether a 'problem' exists."

As with such debates in the past, it is a fascinating and difficult question whether there is a national social morality, where it lies, and who is to enforce it. Writes New Publius: "To the New Federalists, morality in the nation is determined not by government policy, church decree or social leadership --what is moral is what most people who think about morality at all think is moral at a given time." Rejoins Cato: "Morality then, to New Publius, is the temporary decision of a majority of those who happen to take the effort to think about it ... The 'national conscience' resides in Washington, and if New Publius has his way it will be extended to every nook and cranny of the land at bayonet point, if necessary."

What are the practical applications of New Publius' theory? He cites the President's welfare reform as a program embodying national guidelines and local initiatives. Similarly, says New Publius, the Administration's revenue-sharing plan "recognizes the difficulty of State taxation and acknowledges the better judgment of most States in spending funds within their own boundaries." In each case, "the Federal government systematically yields involvement to local authorities without surrendering the ultimate responsibility."

Cato argues, however, that the Nixon Administration is involved simply in problem solving, that it is fatuous to surround such programs with a philosophical explanation, for it is basic to their philosophy that the programs would be vulnerable. Cato denies that he is advocating a retreat into the past. "There is another option," he writes, "principled convenience." By that he means, vaguely, being chary of enforcing the federal will too strongly. The unanswered question is: Whose principles? Whose convenience?

The President encourages the intramural philosophizing but has no plans to embrace either interpretation. He has taken some courses close to New Publius' theory, others more appealing to Cato. That simply proves that the man in the White House is not a consistent ideologue, which is perhaps just as well. Whatever treatises churn forth from the White House, politics is still the art of the possible.

*For "Cato," the nom de plume of the early 18th century Whigs Thomas Gordon and John Trenchard, who wrote Cato's Letters: Or, Essays on Liberty, Civil and Religious. Also for Cato the Censor, the Roman statesman. Publius, whose name was taken by Hamilton, Madison and Jay, was a Roman moralist of the 1st century B.C.

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