Government's Comeback

By Jim Hoagland

Wednesday, September 26, 2001; Page A25

To defeat terrorism with a global reach, President Bush and his congressional allies must go against the tide of recent history and their own instincts. They will have to return government closer to the center of American life, not whittle away further at its powers and funding.

This is political change on a momentous scale. In Europe and Asia, leaders are also addressing at least subconsciously two questions that follow all of us from childhood: When overwhelming danger threatens, who will take care of me? Or, later for adults, who will help me take care of myself?

These questions have not been much with us in the past decade, as one idea took hold all along the political spectrum: Government was rapidly losing its relevance, its reach and its right to make demands on the purses and practices of private citizens. Global commerce was grinding away the national security state and its instruments of control.

Until Sept. 11, when still unnumbered thousands were massacred by airborne terrorists in New York, Virginia and Pennsylvania, the world seemed to be galloping into a rosy future of efficient markets that inexorably sapped power from rigid bureaucrats and "big-spending" politicians. In this future, ever-growing financial and trade flows would make democracy inevitable or irrelevant in China and Southeast Asia. McDonald's hamburger stands would replace cathedrals and mosques as communal gathering places and make war obsolete.

Ideologues on the left saw government as an evil to be rolled back. Civil libertarians fought to curb the state's powers, and Third Way centrists felt government should be made obedient to market forces.

When Congress was asked to fund and supervise airport security, it palmed off the task on commercial airlines rather than raise taxes. When bankers disliked proposed legislation or international codes that targeted money laundering and other unsavory financial practices terrorists could exploit, their lobbyists knew which senator would kill these measures in the name of protecting private enterprise.

That ignored the balance between the needs of public safety and the necessary focus on profit that is the beating heart of private enterprise. Ever see the commercial trying to lure passengers with the claim that Delta's airport security was tougher than United's? I didn't either.

In fact I disregarded what I did see, and I suspect many of you did too. I often saw porous detection and security systems in U.S. airports. I shook my head at how easily evaded they were. But I did not hammer on the doors of Congress to demand change. I shrugged internally and loped down the concourse to make my flight with five minutes to spare.

We have been lulled by the disappearance of the menace of the Cold War, and the indisputable erosion of the national security state by the cultural and economic forces of globalization. Open borders were inevitable, markets were never wrong and there was an irreversible dependence by all on vast easy flows of goods, capital and people among nations. Why worry?

Those are compelling ideas with solid veins of truth. But even they need to be put in perspective by looking realistically at the chances for evil that such freedom from control offers. Globalization is a circle that pumps poison as well as benefit through the system.

The terror assaults on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and the emergency responses they trigger, should profoundly shake the less-is-more philosophy that was the driving force for the tax-cut politics of Bush and conservative Republicans. They should also give pause to the overly optimistic reformism of New Democrats in Washington and New Labor in London and of the market-oriented Social Democratic parties now dominant in Europe.

The Bush administration must create new federal institutions and overhaul existing ones to meet the threats that suddenly fix us in our tracks. Will Tom Ridge have the success and the support that Jimmy Byrnes and others had when Franklin Roosevelt parachuted them into the War Production Board and other new agencies in World War II? How willing are Congress, the White House and the American public to return to the future: to accept a rebirth of some aspects of the national security state?

There must be balance. There is no absolute security: We cannot end all travel and trade and shred America's precious civil liberties. But the balance had tipped too far the other way before Sept. 11 and had sent this nation into a deluding and damaging silliness that we could not afford but which we bought anyway.