Democracy can't function unless both sides are willing to debate the actual proposals on the table instead of trying to change the subject.

I got hit with something of a one-two punch Tuesday on National Review Online. In two different articles, I'd referred to William Voegeli's book, Never Enough, which argues that liberalism's aspirations for the welfare state are essentially boundless. Both Reihan Salam and Voegeli himself take issue with my argument, but both seem to me to be changing the subject.

Let's take Salam's post first. (He's an old friend and one of the smartest young conservatives I know.) He's responding to the column I wrote about Mitt Romney's "I'm not concerned about the very poor" comment. I treated Romney more generously than anyone else (including Romney himself, who took it back). I took the gaffe, along with Romney's speeches about the "entitlement society," to indicate that he's aligned with House Budget Committee chair Paul Ryan and Voegeli in arguing for a safety net carefully limited to the very poor, rather than a more expansive set of supports for those moving out of poverty.

I've got Ryan and Voegeli all wrong, Salam says. (No word on Romney.) They aren't about cutting programs for the near-poor at all. Rather, it's that they are concerned "that the U.S. public sector isn't doing a good job of putting taxpayer dollars to good use." After a long digression about a McKinsey report on public sector productivity, "Baumol's disease," K-12 education, and various other topics, he claims that the "core idea" of Ryan and Voegeli is this: "We need to do a better job of imposing fiscal discipline on the public sector, but...we also need to give public sector managers the tools they need to impose organizational discipline."

That's it? All this huffing and puffing about the "entitlement society" and slashing spending is just about helping bureaucrats do their jobs better? In his piece, Voegeli accuses me of depicting liberalism as "meek and earnest." I would say the same about Salam's depiction of conservatives. I'd also note that he doesn't cite a single word from Ryan or Voegeli to support this benign interpretation. He's arguing that Ryan's changes to Medicaid (turning it into a block grant) and Medicare (turning it into a Groupon to buy private insurance if it's available) are really just a better way to "align incentives" to reduce overall health costs, a goal we share. The Medicaid block grants are just a way to give states incentives to cut costs, because they can keep all the money they save, rather than sharing the savings with the federal government, as in the current system.

This is an argument worthy of a very long separate response, but in short, it's just wrong. States have plenty of incentives to cut costs and there are 84 Medicaid waivers for states that manage their programs more effectively. Unless the block grant is extremely generous (and thus more expensive than the current system), states, which have little ability to control health costs, will respond by simply cutting Medicaid eligibility. Likewise, Ryan's Medicare plan will, as the CBO has shown, increase total health care costs, the opposite of what Reihan claims is the "core idea."

Then Reihan reverses and admits that Ryan and Voegeli are about cuts, not just better management, but only cuts to invisible programs that serve the well-off. Ryan and Voegeli are really "allies," he says, of Suzanne Mettler, whose book The Submerged State calls for reconsideration of invisible and regressive programs like the mortgage-interest tax deduction. I consider myself an ally of Mettler as well, in every way, so maybe we can all just get along. Ryan has "emphasized the importance of 'broadening the tax base,'" Salam claims, which is true, but his budget didn't offer any specifics and he would give the savings from unnamed tax-expenditure cuts away in even more regressive tax cuts. Likewise, Voegeli's book never mentions the mortgage tax deduction or any of the other big tax expenditure giveaways in his definition of the welfare state. The vision Salam's describing -- of an efficient, well-managed public sector with fewer tax breaks for the well-off -- may be his own, and I could live happily in his world. But it has nothing at all to do with the new conservative consensus represented by Romney, Ryan, and Voegeli.

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Voegeli himself weighs in to take issue with a different article, part of a debate with Stephen Hayward, who drew heavily from Voegeli to make the claim that liberals want essentially a limitless welfare state. Again, this is an argument adopted by Romney, so it's not purely academic. I didn't think that was an accurate description of liberalism, which I argued is all about finding the right limits or boundaries between public and private, government and market. If sometimes those limits are not based on an abstract principle, but on living in a democratic society and paring our aspirations to reality, those contingent limits are no less real than "principled" ones. I used as an example single-payer health care, which I'm not for, and never have been for, even though I've never had a good answer for people who point out that it would be fairer and more efficient. I just think pursuing it is a waste of effort.

Voegeli sees a "gotcha" -- the actual liberal principle is "whatever we can get away with." So if I'm setting aside single-payer in part for political reasons, "conservatives have every reason to go on Fox News and rant about socialized medicine, but zero reason to sit down for an edifying, collegial seminar that hammers out the details of the next incremental expansion of federal authority and spending."

I don't see how that follows at all. If, say, I were president and proposed a market-based expansion of health coverage, it is what it is and not something else. It's not a secret incremental plan to get to single-payer. "Ranting about socialized medicine" in this case would simply be dishonest. (And, obviously, this is not hypothetical, except for the fact that I'm not the president.) And refusing to sit down and negotiate about an actual proposal on the table, especially one similar to what conservatives had advocated for years, is simply a defection from democracy. The fact that some supporters of the actual proposal on the table might have trimmed their original aspirations is no justification for treating them as if they had not.

In plenty of cases, the limitations to my liberalism might be "principled" (which is to say, I could articulate a principle), but other people might have different principles. That's politics in a democracy -- an unending effort to balance various people's principles and aspirations and find what John Rawls called the "overlapping consensus" that works for most of us.

As Voegeli notes, sometimes the range of political possibility, or the overlapping consensus, changes. Fifteen years ago, gay marriage seemed as unlikely as single-payer health care and even most liberal politicians voted for the Defense of Marriage Act. Within a few months from now, a quarter of the population might live in states that allow them to marry the person they love. But Voegeli uses this to change the subject entirely, to what he regards as liberals' commitment to "rigging or nullifying" the democratic process through court decisions. That's not something I'd written about, but it doesn't seem to help Voegeli's argument at all. First, it has nothing to do with the "welfare state" or expansion of public benefits. Second, the democracy card cuts both ways. The Ninth Circuit did just throw out a California constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage that had passed with 52 percent of the vote, but by the same token, the constitutional provision would have barred the democratic process in California from ever recognizing same-sex marriage -- and the legislature has twice passed same-sex marriage. And as Jeff Toobin points out, liberals for at least twenty years have been very wary of making gains in courts that they can't achieve through other democratic means. Almost everyone who favors gay marriage (with the interesting exception of Ted Olson, apparently) was gratified that the decision did not go further and actually declare a constitutional right to marry.

But I'm not sure what Voegeli's point is here. Does he object to judicial review in all cases? Citizens United was no less a nullification of a democratic decision. Possibly, like Newt Gingrich, he objects only when the decision goes against his own political preferences. That's hardly principled, though I hope he doesn't go so far as Gingrich, who would eliminate entire circuits if he didn't like their rulings. (Talk about no limits!)

I should conclude by saying that I engaged with Voegeli because I found his book fascinating and challenging. It's far more worthy of your time and money than, say, Charles Murray's latest bit of hackwork. In a sense, my frustration with Voegeli when he says liberals and conservatives have "nothing to talk about" is that it is such a potentially interesting conversation, whether in the form of an "edifying, collegial seminar" or something more raucous.

Mark Schmitt is a Senior Fellow and Director of the Fellows Program at the Roosevelt Institute.

Liberals aren't seeking a limitless welfare state, but the right balance between competing approaches.

Breakthrough Journal, which I predicted would offer a significant contribution to the political debate when it launched last summer, has doubled down on expectations by publishing a companion to their challenging  "Modernizing Liberalism" article from the first issue with "Modernizing Conservatism" by the Reagan biographer and AEI scholar Steven Hayward. The path forward for the country won't be found just by identifying some middle ground between two unyielding ideologies or some magical third way. It will be found by creating some real conversation among people who are fully engaged in reevaluating the future of their own assumptions.

The editors of Breakthrough invited my comments on Hayward's essay, which I tried to offer in a respectful spirit, although of course I'm not a conservative and conservatives don't need my advice. Hayward's main point was that conservatives should back down from the "starve the beast" strategy of cutting taxes and hoping that government will shrink as a result and acknowledge that they aren't going to crush liberalism forever. But before conservatives can make those compromises (which seem more like common sense than compromise), Hayward insists that liberals would have to back down from our aspiration to extend the "welfare state" to infinity.

I had a couple of comments on Hayward's first points, which you can read at the site, but the main point of disagreement, particularly in his reply to me, had to do with the question of whether liberalism's aspirations for the welfare state are limitless. This is worth digging into at length because it's quickly becoming a major theme on the right. William Voegeli of the Claremont Institute has written an entire book, which Hayward draws on extensively, contending that liberalism knows no limits, that for us progress is "Never Enough." It's the central premise of Mitt Romney's new stump speech, which argues that Obama's "entitlement society" economic policies have as their goal "equality of outcomes," rather than "equality of opportunity," and won't stop until they (we) achieve that radical leveling. This is the central charge in the economic culture war: As Hayward puts it, "the absence of any principled limit to the reach of egalitarianism is implicit -- and occasionally explicit -- in modern liberalism. The insatiable egalitarian impulse is only held in check by practical politics, not by any discernible principle."

Here's Hayward's killer piece of evidence: That liberals once talked about "comparable worth" -- that is, a system to adjust pay scales to reduce discrimination based on job classifications. "The idea almost made the 1984 Democratic platform," he says. That's it? An idea that didn't make it into a party platform 28 years ago proves that we're boundless egalitarians? (Actually, it was endorsed in the 1984 platform, and several states were implementing comparable worth standards for public employee job classifications without controversy. But it died such a quick death that most people under 40 have probably never heard of the idea.)

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It's really a pretty good example of where liberalism finds its limits, and why the process of finding those boundaries makes liberalism such a vital and adaptive political philosophy. Employment discrimination was and is a real problem, and formal job classification systems that systematically underpaid women were part of it. The market wasn't getting rid of this discrimination any more than the market eliminated racial discrimination before the Civil Rights Act of 1964. A number of ideas were on the table, some of which worked. (Collective bargaining turned out to be a good way to fix discriminatory job classifications.) Ultimately, most liberals decided that a formal, government-mandated system of classifying the "worth" of different occupational categories across the private sector would be a solution worse than the problem. (I remember that being my view, even as a naïve college student at the time.) Liberalism is always about finding the right boundary between market and state, public and private, fairness and liberty. The process of considering and rejecting an idea like comparable worth is the process of finding that boundary.

Hayward would say that's not a "principled" limit. A principled limit presumably would be obvious and not argued about. But what's the principled limit to libertarian conservatism? Is it the minimal "watchman state"? I know that in practice most conservatives don't go that far, but why not? Part of the answer is "practical politics," as Hayward says of liberalism. But what's wrong with practical politics? In a functioning democracy (which ours, in which money plays a huge role and institutional quirks such as the filibuster play an outsized role, is not), ordinary politics -- elections, debates, fights over values, legislative struggles -- are a perfectly valid or even ideal way of defining the limits of the governing party's philosophy. We even internalize the limits of practical politics. For example, I've never been a supporter of single-payer health care, and most of the liberal wonks I know haven't been either. If pressed on the point by one of the few single-payer supporters I know, I can't give a very good answer on policy grounds. I understand that single-payer would be fairer, more efficient, and would lift the burden of health insurance costs from employers. But it's never going to happen and so I don't waste much time or energy on it. That's a limitation on my aspirations imposed by practical politics, but it's no less real a limit.

Egalitarianism (of opportunity) is one element of liberalism, but it's not the only one. Democratic practice is part of it, too, so the limits of practical politics are real -- not just the way we achieve other social goals, but an end in themselves. It's why making democracy work better is more than just a process concern. At the end of my comments on Hayward's essay, I suggested that the key to "modernizing conservatism" would be for conservatives to rejoin the democratic process, to get over the all-or-nothing impulse that led them to opt out of the health care debate entirely, or to attempt "nullification," to use James Fallows' word, of laws already passed. Hayward, like Romney, is basically saying that no real debate or compromise will ever be possible, that we face a pure clash of irreconcilable worldviews. That's simply not true of modern liberalism, and it shouldn't be true of conservatism either.

Mark Schmitt is a Senior Fellow and Director of the Fellows Program at the Roosevelt Institute.