Monthly Archives: August 2011

Parks and CUMBYs

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The High Line

Image by garvinpr via Flickr

In a City Journal article entitled “Parks and Re-creation,” Laura Vanderkam offers a glimpse at an interesting model for the maintenance and upkeep of city parks in her profile of Manhattan’s successful park conservancies. What is attractive about this model is that it circumvents the quasi-religious debate around whether public services can or should be privately funded, introducing public-private partnerships as a way to improve public lands while preserving the public coffers.

What the article questions, ever-so-gently, is whether public largesse to preserve parks extends beyond prosperous enclaves like Manhattan. One effort in the Bronx, for example, is having trouble sustaining the momentum and enthusiasm around Central Park, High Line Park, and others in Manhattan. The successes in New York seem to extend from moneyed people who want the public spaces near them to be clean and pleasant. I call this the “clean up my back yard,” or CUMBY movement.

The model deserves emulation. There are areas all around the United States that could benefit from such activity, and not just municipalities. With 70 state parks and beaches facing closure due to budget constraints, California could use a wisely managed CUMBY effort.

Not everything worth preserving, though, will be preserved by private interests. At some point the public must step in to preserve those assets that benefit everyone. Using unique models like New York’s, private money may foot part of the bill. The full answer is better management, not just of park services, but of the entire pool of public funds.

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Conservatives and Enterprise

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Both major parties in American politics have a tendency to define themselves by their point of ascendancy. Just as for four decades the Democrats defined themselves by the policies of FDR and the New Deal, so too have Republicans defined themselves by the policies of the Reagan presidency.

The problem in both cases were that the policies pursued by those administrations were a direct response to conditions extant at the time. After several decades, they not only cease to be relevant, the dogmatic pursuit of those policies becomes a malignancy all by itself.

There have been times in American history when the rights of labor were not given their fair attention by government. The reaction to that imbalance, including the shoots of communism and socialism that sprouted during the Great Depression, brought forth the coalition between labor and the Democratic Party, a coalition that remained strong throughout most of the 20th century.

Likewise, a belief that the policy arc from FDR to Jimmy Carter had swung the pendulum too far against the interests of commerce led in no small part to the Reagan revolution. That fierce protection of the rights of business have carried the Republican Party for the past 30 years.

It is time, though, to re-assess the force of habit that has turned conservatives into the knee-jerk defenders of business. We have now, arguably, reached the point where business does not need to be defended against an ambivalent government, but where government needs to be defended against concentrations of money from both sides of the aisle that undermines government.

Conservatism stands for establishing the independence of business from undue meddling of government, and demands that enterprises be allowed to prosper without a shackle to social interests or public ownership. But that is a far cry from acquiescing to the capture of government power by business interests. And yet, we seem to feel obliged to leap to the defense of the power of commerce anytime it is attacked, going so far as to hold our tongues when enterprises are given direct influence in the outcome of elections.

Conservatism stands for the rights of business to operate freely, but not for the right of businesses or any other corporate organizations to act as political actors.

Conservatism stands for the protection of business from gratuitous action of government, insuring that private interests will not be unfairly subordinated to public will. But that does not mean subordinating the public interests to the profit of private enterprise. Conservatism is about recognizing the great value of business to national prosperity and happiness, but also acting against business when it operates in a manner that is destructive to society, undermines democracy, or inhibits individual liberty.

America thrives when there is a dynamic balance between the private interest and public good. That balance is not static, shifting as it does with the times. But we abandon the search for that balance at our peril. Just as allowing the public good to win over the private interest puts us on the road to socialism, allowing private interests to suborn the public good places us on the path to industrial feudalism.

A conservative should be equally galled by either.

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The Slide to Perdition

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Despite assertions to the contrary, America is not a “Christian Nation.” It is, rather, a Nation of Christians…and of Agnostics, Jews, Atheists, Buddhists, Muslims, Hindus, Wiccans, and a lot of people who declare themselves to be unaffiliated. And this is as it should be.

The nation’s founding fathers, nearly all of whom were Christian, were nonetheless moved to base America’s religious life on tolerance, and its public affairs on a studied non-sectarianism. This was neither an accident nor a spasm of fashionable enlightenment realism: it was pragmatism informed by history. The nation’s founders were all-too aware that sectarian violence – or political violence in the opportunistic guise of sectarian fervor – had torn many European countries asunder, and they wanted no part of it. And, of course, many of the colonies had been founded or nurtured by refugees from religious persecution.

These patricians understood that any society that clung to a single faith set the stage either for communal violence or the wholesale expulsion of faith. They understood that it was (and is) impossible to sustain a free nation where are are viewed as equal while placing one faith above all others. Declaring America a Christian Nation would have made all citizens not professing the same faith to become less-equal, second-class citizens, lacking the same rights as their Christian bretheren.

Whatever the intent behind declaring America a Christian Nation, doing so puts the country on a path that undermines the Constitution, flies in the face of the principles on which the nation was established, and marks the first step down an icy slope that leads to persecution, inquisition, and, conceivably, the end of the Republic as we know it.

It is for these reasons that every true conservative, regardless of his faith or fervor, must reject the effort to install any faith as a national religion, even symbolically or rhetorically, no matter how good or “right” it may feel to do so. It may satisfy one’s religious yearnings, but it places in jeopardy the very system that allows us to express them.

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