WHITE HOUSE DAZE by CHARLES KOLB

Author:CHARLES KOLB
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Free Press
Published: 1994-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

7

Empowerment and the

“New Paradigm”

If a paradigm is ever to triumph it must gain some first

supporters, men who will develop it to the point where

hardheaded arguments can be produced and multiplied. 1 —Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

For a brief moment in the fall of 1990, economic empowerment, reflected in the ungainly term “New Paradigm,” came to characterize the Bush Administration’s principal domestic policy agenda. But like many other aspects of our efforts to mount and sustain a domestic message, this activity never advanced much beyond the rhetorical.

Debate about the “New Paradigm” gained prominence first and foremost by default. There was nothing else, no other dominant theme, under consideration. Competition was sparse.

The “New Paradigm” was the brainchild of my fellow deputy, Jim Pinkerton. Jim explained it to me during my first week on the job: “Charlie, here’s how our two responsibilities shape up. I’ll do all the talking, while you’ll do all the work!” Despite Pinkerton’s fantasies about our division of labor, we became fast friends—allies and coconspirators—in developing his “New Paradigm” domestic agenda for the President.

Pinkerton began to advance his ideas in February 1990, when he gave a speech entitled “The New Paradigm” to the World Future Society. Although an inherently awkward term, “New Paradigm” ultimately symbolized what several young White House aides sought to elevate as a central organizing theme for George Bush’s domestic vision. While everyone knew that Bush would be unlikely to use such a highfalutin term as a recurrent theme of his presidency, a battle royal took place inside the White House to install “empowerment” as the centerpiece of Bush’s domestic policy.

The “New Paradigm” described a radical shift in the political world view. The underlying concept was not Pinkerton’s originally. As he acknowledged in his speech, the concept of paradigm shifts came from Thomas A. Kuhn, the noted philosopher of science. Kuhn’s 1961 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions argued cogently that scientific progress and the pattern of new scientific discovery often resulted from a fundamental rethinking of the status quo prompted by the need to respond to some new crisis that could not be properly or adequately addressed under the governing explanation, theory, or “paradigm.” Classic examples of paradigm shifts were the emergence of Copernican astronomy replacing the centuries-old but outdated Ptolemaic System, or the emergence of relativity theory displacing systems of physics premised on the work of Leibnitz and Newton.

Kuhn’s analysis of scientific revolutions was fascinating in many respects, but it was especially relevant for social and political scientists, as Kuhn saw immediate parallels between political and scientific development:

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