Pres. Barack Obama made the “Sputnik moment” the organizing theme of his State of the Union address, and he chose wisely.
Not because the tiny Soviet satellite and the ensuing space race have any bearing on the challenges of today. They don’t, except perhaps in how the Sputnik panic of the 1950s tracks with today’s overwrought alarm over a rising China.
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No, the Sputnik analogy is apt in what it says about Obama and his hubristic faith in the wisdom and powers of a technocratic elite. The Apollo program put a man on the moon, creating a shining moment of national pride. It also fed liberalism’s disastrously simplistic view of how progress happens — spend a lot of federal money, put a lot of experts in a room, and wait for the wondrous results.
From Lyndon Johnson on, this has been a central element in liberalism. Obama believes in it deep in his bones. His contribution in the State of the Union was to plug this vision yet again, although decked out in red, white, and blue bunting and accompanied by the joyful cacophony of a John Philip Sousa march. The patriotic rhetorical trappings don’t make it any less arrogant or foolish.
“If we can put a man on the moon, we can . . . ” is one of the more tiresome tropes in American public life. What putting a man on the moon proved is that we can put a man on the moon. It was a feat of engineering. With time, resources, and expertise, it could be done. But it tells us as much about our ability to reform society, cure diseases, or manage markets as building the Golden Gate Bridge or the Hoover Dam did.
In the wake of the moon landing, liberalism failed to understand that society is not an enormous engineering project. As Walter McDougall documents in his Pulitzer Prize–winning The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age, one of the heroes of the Apollo project, NASA administrator James Webb, fed the misunderstanding. He thought the space program constituted a breakthrough in the management of large systems that could be widely replicated.
McDougall writes that “the James Webbs had, by their talent and energy, made command innovation look easy — and ‘American.’” In a letter to LBJ, Webb told the president, “The space program lies in your first area of building the Great Society.” And build it he did. “A new political symbolism had arisen,” McDougall notes, “to discredit the old verities about limited government, local initiative, balanced budgets, and individualism.”
LBJ himself remarked on the catalyzing effect of the space program. According to LBJ, people said, “‘Well, if you do that for space and send a man to the moon, why can’t we do something for grandma with Medicare?’ And so we passed the Medicare act, and we passed 40 other measures.”
Most of this didn’t end well. “It [had] become obvious in the 1960s and 1970s that ‘planned invention for the future’ through federal mobilization of technology and brainpower was failing everywhere from Vietnam to our inner cities,” McDougall writes.
Andrew J. Coulson of the Cato Institute reminds us that even the signature federal initiative of the post-Sputnik era, the National Defense Education Act, failed to improve math and science scores. Once it had achieved its important and inspiring propaganda coup against the Soviets, the space program itself sputtered into a line item in the federal budget searching for a mission. NASA’s follow-up act was the white elephant called the space shuttle.
This is the history President Obama has at his back as he promises the federal government will lead the way on innovation, pick winners and losers in the energy sector, and transform education. We have seen this future, and it doesn’t work.
A new cliché about the Apollo program deserves to get currency: “If we can send a man to the moon . . . we can waste lots of money based on false analogies.” It’s a Sputnik moment, indeed.
In the historical "Sputnik" moment, our adversary was the Soviet Union. In Obama's reprise of that event, our adversary is .. Obama. Therein lies a supreme irony.
"In the wake of the moon landing, liberalism failed to understand that society is not an enormous engineering project." - Rich Lowry
Excellent!! Make it more concise, and we can fit this on a bumper sticker!! (Gotta clutter up the back of our cars like them Libruls do... Um, maybe not.)
As for morphing the cliche, how about:
"If we can send a man to the moon . . . we can lay waste to private homes, businesses, farmland and timber by building high speed rail corridors among 80% of our people..."
IMHO, the reference to "Sputnik moment" does not infer success. A more appropriate metaphor would be our "Apollo moment". There may have never been the success of the moon mission if we had not been beaten to the punch by the Russians and Sputnik. Out of failure to beat the Russians into space came the success of our space program. Although on second thought, Mr. Obama may have actually been referring to the failure of the U.S. since he does not feel that we are better than any other Country and that we should be more contrite.
Mr. Lowry, OUTSTANDING!!! You and NR must do all that you can to expose BHO for the fraud-charlatan that he is otherwise the independents will be fooled once again...4 more years of BHO??? God help us all!!!
I agree with the central thesis that top-down planning can overcome engineering problems but not social ones. Where we disagree is in the value of the space program and NASA after the moon landing missions.
Remember all those "secret military satellite" missions throughout the 80's and 90's? Those were the GPS and global mapping satellites that private industry went on to use in revolutionizing communications technology and that I and other military officers rely on daily for navigation and mapping. Without these satellites, we would have a FAR more difficult task coordinating operations.
WMurphy, Because a hugely expensive program has an unintended positive consequence (or several), does that mean we should develop ridiculously huge and expensive programs and hope that they provide benefits? We got many good things from the space program, but at what cost?
"If we can send a man to the moon, can we send a specific man?"
Everyone can then fill in mentally the name of their favorite thorn, for bipartisan fun.
We didn't legislate our way to the Moon, we applied technology to develop a system that happened to work. This approach isn't guaranteed to be sucessful, not even for clean energy development (which is at least a technology problem). For something like Medicare, the analogy should not have been more legislation but a program to deliver a "doctor booth". Grandma (or anyone) could step inside and have their vital signs taken and be put in video chat contact with a Physician Assistant to triage the complaints, with the worst relayed to an actual doctor. That would be a technological solution, albeit I think perhaps a seriously flawed one. Legislating programs to give people money based on random characteristics is discriminatory against all the people who cannot be among the receivers. That is not a Sputnik approach.
Arguably, the Race to the Moon was not won by NASA, but by lousy Soviet health care.
Until 1966, the Soviets, under the direction of Sergei Korolyov, were kicking our butts: the 3-cosmonaut Soyuz was carrying out the first successful space-walk while we were still getting Gemini off the ground.
Then Korolyov got a hemorrhoidectomy, which was botched by an incompetent Soviet doctor, and he died of an infection. The race was over.
Obymandias needs to be reminded of this irony often.
I agree with much in this column, but I don't agree with the idea that this conceit is one that pertains to something called "liberalism". It is a function, I think, of a certain kind of personality - the author of which may be politically "liberal" or "conservative".
Rich does a good job of listing some of the "liberal" consequences of this thinking - but the "conservative" ones are just as glaring. Listen to some "conservatives" speak of using the government to stop women from having abortions, to mold mens' moral character, to affect useful and even drastic change in other nations, to encourage people to marry and raise their children or to deter them from using drugs, etc. - all with little regard for the efficacy or consequences of such efforts. We can do these things if only we put our mind to it and people cooperate and ....
The differences between conservatives and liberals on this are real, but they're a function of subject-matter rather than underlying faith in Government.
I don't know anyone who doesn't occasionally fall for this kind of thinking (you question the most self-satisfied "libertarian" long enough and you'll find something), but some fall for it more than others - and that type of personality seems to be distinct from his party affiliation, religious view or political disposition.
I'm not arguing that this kind of thinking is always fallacious or even bad (I'm not a "no government" guy) - only that it's a genuine and widespread phenomenon that I wish we'd recognize even when we see it displayed by someone with whose opinions we agree.
Bart, "When you spread the wealth around it's good for everybody" BHO.
The difference between liberal-progressives and conservatives is determined by one's agreement or diagreement with BHO's core belief. This, my friend, is not mere "subject-matter"...make up your mind and decide!!!
I don't agree that it's "good for everyone" to "spread the wealth around." But that sentiment - redistribution of wealth - is a "subject-matter", like I said.
I'm not torn between one or another set of politics - only arguing that the belief in the government as engineer is one that is unrelated to conservative or liberal ideology.
In line with the liberal idea of the engineering of society being no different than the engineering of, say, a bridge, is the resurgence in my profession, architecture, of the idea that a properly designed built environment can fix society's ills. This 60s idea was already discredited by research and experience in the 70s when I was in school, yet it's again rearing its head. Where? You guessed it. Acedemia.
Bart, "It is a fact not an idea. We have to choose. And the choice is between freedom and tyranny…That is the difference between collectivism and the market economy."
William F. Buckley Jr., 1978
I leave you to argue with the Patron Saint of Conservatism because as you can see by the quote, for him, it was not mere "subject matter"!!!
What does the quote by Buckley have to do with whether the belief in government as engineer is an artifact of conservatism or liberalism - or as I think, neither? It doesn't address the point, much less prove it or its opposite.
The fact that a subject-matter is important (and you can add an adjective like "fundamentally" if that will make you feel better) doesn't mean it's not a subject. Abortion is also a subject, as is slavery, war, taxation and speed limits. Not all equal in importance and yet all "subjects" of the oft-misplaced vision of conservatives and liberals about using the government as a tool to achieve Big Objectives.
>perhaps in how the Sputnik panic of the 1950s tracks with today’s overwrought alarm over a rising China.
Gee, count me among the overwrought. So Rich, would you and/or anyone at NR want to put together a well, you know, argument about why rising China is no big deal? Perhaps one that uses facts and avoids condescension? It would be a struggle I admit but NR would be the better for it.
Iowadove, Mark Steyn does just that. His argument boils down to Chinese demographics, which show that China will be old and broke before it is a threat to the US. Stick with worry about Muslims. They are young and have very high birth rates.
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