Brown leads left on march to right

It is exquisite burlesque, Jerry Brown leading tattered remnantsof America's hapless left into supporting conservatism's agenda.

Conservatism has rhetorical and fiscal strategies fordiminishing government power. One strategy is to peel awaygovernment's authority by flaying it rhetorically as an incestuousjumble of corrupt elites incapable of empathy with ordinary peopleand incompetent at government's basic tasks - budgeting, educating,maintaining public works. Brown's rhetoric abets this strategy.

Brown's flat-tax proposal serves the conservative fiscal goalsof reducing government power three ways - by shrinking its revenuebase, curtailing its ability to fine-tune society's "fairness" andaugmenting the private sector's countervailing power.

For example, Brown would end the deductibility of state andlocal taxes. This would ignite state tax revolts, particularly inhigh-tax states such as New York, which have become liberalism's lastredoubts.

Brown is not an economic man, he is a moralist, and his tax planis a measure for political hygiene. He believes, plausibly, thatradical simplification of the code would put out of businessWashington's swarm of complicators who gain advantages from generallyunnoticed nuances in legislation and regulations.

Brown is extreme but not nutty when depicting Washington as amare's-nest of interests bending public power for private advantages.But Brown's moralism stops short of acknowledging this: Today'sWashington is what you get when you have a hyperactive modern stateusing its myriad subsidizing and regulating activities to allocatewealth and opportunity in the name of "fairness" and for the ultimatebenefit of elected officials.

Brown disdains his party's recent obsession with the tax code's"fairness." But the correct implication of his critique ofWashington is that the modern state is inherently unfair because itis so susceptible to manipulation by well-heeled and well-connectedinterests. It is axiomatic: He who wills the end, wills the means tothat end. If Brown wants the modern state that liberalism hasrationalized, he should not be shocked that he gets modernWashington, too.

To be on the left is to believe this: The goal of politics is tocapture state power to force egalitarian social change. Brown'splatform makes this problematic.

The left's agenda presupposes a government strong in fiscalresources and moral authority. Brown's rhetoric - the most acidanti-Washington rhetoric since George Wallace's (which prepared theground for Reaganism) - and Brown's tax plan subvert both strengths.

Most arguments for progressive taxation are implausible orempirically unsupported.

Economic distress moves America to the right, not the left.

As America's economy falters, many Americans become more wary ofthe economic effects of progressivity on savings, investment,entrepreneurship and industriousness generally. Also, the commitmentto progressivity weakens as people become concerned that theexistence of large pools of private wealth - a prerequisite forprivate hospitals, universities, research centers, publications andmuch more - is necessary to counteract the encroachment of governmenton society.

Brown and the ragtag of the left sharing his raft are riding ona wave of revulsion against the modern state that liberalism hasmade. And Brown is making the wave larger.

In this, as in his self-congratulatory moralism, he is a repriseof the 1960s, when the campus left played a large part in provokingthe nation's move to the right.