What your country should do for you: a new, post-Clinton repudiation of the politics of personal responsibility, though elegant, may still not convince skeptical voters.

• Author: Galston, William A.
• Position: The Age of Responsibility: Luck, Choice, and the Welfare State - Book review

The Age of Responsibility: Luck, Choice, and the Welfare State

by Yascha Mounk

Harvard University Press, 288 pp.

Yascha Mounk surged into public view last year with the release of his research suggesting an alarming loss of support for democracy in the West, especially among young people. Since then, he has become a prominent voice in the debate about the seriousness of populist and authoritarian threats to liberal democratic governments worldwide. But Mounk, who recently received his PhD from Harvard's Department of Government, was trained more as a political theorist than an empirical researcher, and his new book, The Age of Responsibility, reflects this background.

In the postwar decades, Mounk says, there was a broad consensus that many of the obligations the state owed its citizens were largely independent of the choices these citizens made--even if the choices explained why these citizens needed public help in the first place. Today, however, a majority of the population thinks that assistance should be conditioned on "responsible" behavior--a view Mounk regards as "deeply punitive." Many Americans now endorse the sentiment that, like Benjamin Franklin's God, the modern welfare state should help those who help themselves, not those who don't.

The shift toward personal responsibility may have begun with the 1970s conservative revolt that swept Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan into power, Mounk observes, but it soon became the lingua franca among reform-minded center-left politicians as well. Bill Clinton took the lead, developing a New Democratic framework that he summarized in his first inaugural address. "We must do what America does best," he declared: "offer more opportunity to all and demand more responsibility from all. It is time to break the bad habit of expecting something for nothing from our government or from each other."

Tony Blair's senior aides were there, literally taking notes that found their way into the future prime minister's speeches and manifestos. (Full disclosure: I was there too. Before serving as deputy assistant for domestic policy under Clinton, I spent much of the previous four years working with a small band of like-minded Democratic dissidents to create the concepts and policies Clinton took with him into the White House--including the idea of personal responsibility Mounk so relentlessly criticizes.)

Although Mounk has little patience for Clinton, Blair, and other Third Way thinkers of the time, he...