Cal and the New Conservatism

By Hugh Sidey

Cal and the New Conservatism

Calvin Coolidge, the champion of small spending and small Government, is the warmed-over toast of Washington's summer season. At dinner parties, his pithy sayings ("The business of America is business") are served up as wisdom for this time. Around July 4, television and newspaper commentators noted rather affectionately that it was Cal's birthday (1872) and we might well take a lesson from his penny-pinching. That is quite a comeback for a man whose previous pinnacle of acclaim came when Writer Dorothy Parker, on being told he was dead, asked: "How can they tell?"

What brings Coolidge to mind on these hot days is the rhetoric echoing in the White House, the Congress, state capitals and city halls. In more ways than one, it has a "Calvinistic" ring. Many of the most enthusiastic practitioners of the new parsimony are what we-used to call liberals. California's Governor Jerry Brown is, like Coolidge, applauded for his verbal brevity and his fiscal austerity; Brown deprived state employees of their government-issue briefcases (to cut both expenses and paperwork) and suggested that the University of California administrators take pay cuts. Illinois' Governor Dan Walker notes with pride that he has trimmed the state payroll by 5,000, and his big pitch is on the need to live within one's means. Massachusetts' Governor Michael Dukakis rides the trolley-subway to work and has a vegetable garden in his front yard to help combat inflation; he has also impounded funds, slashed programs and suggested that anybody on welfare who is able to work

had better get busy. All three of these men

ran for office as Democrats and liberals!:

The recession forced many traditional liberals to grope their way down the unfamiliar path of restraint. But the trip may not be just temporary. President Ford's popularity is rising in part because he vetoed bills that were perceived by the people as congressional grab bags. New York City is viewed in Washington as a classic example of ambitious social spending gone too far, of a liberal-dominated polity gorging itself on promises that could not be fulfilled. More broadly, that organ of liberal theory the New Republic warned in an editorial that the growing "fear of big government, intervening government" could undermine all traditional liberal goals. Even on the soft ground of college campuses, a rousing denunciation of the Government as a vague, overbearing menace brings many kids to their feet the way a Viet Cong flag used to.

To conservatives, the spectacle of liberals scrambling onto the high, flinty ground of frugality is more than just amusing. "They are catching up with the country," says Conservative Columnist George Will, who did his bit to elevate the public consciousness of the Coolidge era by noting that under Cal, ice cream production in the United States went up 45%.

A few critics on both the right and left have long-sustained doubts about "throwing money" at problems, as epitomized in parts of Lyndon Johnson's massive Great Society. Even Richard Goodwin, L.B.J.'s intellectual, observed recently that Government departments could no longer cope in the real world because they had never been forced to survive within the free enterprise system.

Joseph Califano, who confected much of Johnson's domestic legislation, sees as the fundamental change that the great American economic pie has, temporarily at least, ceased growing. Almost every year since World War II, the economy expanded prodigiously, and there seemed to be enough for everyone. But alas, says Califano, in a slow-growing economy, this country faces the prospect of satisfying new demands from one segment of society by taking away from others. That is terribly close to redistributing the wealth, something that the champions of liberal spending have talked about but never faced before in such stark reality. A lot of them are now finding cuts in Government more appealing than raises in taxes.

The political debate of the 1976 election will center on whether the Government should shoulder yet more of the burdens or should concentrate on enlarging individual responsibilities. Jerry Ford has no doubts about his side in the debate. He sounds as if he had found an old Coolidge text in a White House closet. "What we need in this country is not a New Deal but a fresh start. What we need is not more federal control, but the adventure of personal achievement..."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.