Your faithful correspondent donned a collared shirt and ventured into Georgetown last night to listen to Philip Blond’s presentation on “Red Toryism” (Blond’s Wikipedia entry is here; the Porch has a good introductory post here). Blond’s ideas have attracted a murderers’ row of the League’s favorite bloggers, so I thought I’d (briefly) summarize his presentation and offer a few thoughts of my own.

As I understand it, Blond’s argument goes something like this: Both the political Left and political Right have embraced a philosophy of radical liberal individualism, which undermines civic virtue and communal solidarity by valorizing individual choice above all else. Consequently, our political system oscillates wildly between government encroachment and radical deregulation because political rights have become wholly contingent on our relationship to the state. Blond seeks to revitalize conservative politics by restoring what he terms classical liberalism, which emphasizes civic virtue, subsidiarity, and explicitly moral political goals that go beyond maximizing choice. In the realm of ec0nomics, Blond calls for breaking up “corporate oligopolies,” local competition, and encouraging poor and working class citizens to become “stakeholders” in the economy (shades of Bush’s “ownership society?”). In the realm of politics and civic life, Blond stressed the importance of civil society and spoke out in favor of radical decentralization, a concept he explicitly links to Catholic subsidiarity.

Despite my nasty libertarian streak, I found a lot to like in Blond’s talk, particularly in his enthusiasm for decentralization and local competition. My only quibble is that while Blond’s diagnoses are often compelling, his proposed solutions are sometimes less so. When talking about the importance of political subsidiarity, for example, Blond spoke of “giving democracy back to the streets,” which sounds more like a Students for a Democratic Society slogan than a concrete political program. “Driving capital to the periphery” and decentralizing our financial system sound great in theory, but I’m still left to wonder how economic subsidiarity works in practice. One important caveat: I’m new to Blond and was late to the lecture, so my first impressions may not do justice to the Red Tories’ program.

Blond’s philosophy also seems better suited to cultural renewal than, say, political or economic reform. His most compelling examples of Red Toryism in action – A Birmingham neighborhood taking back the streets from pimps and drug dealers; the persistence of Northern Italy’s artisan economy – struck me as the result of cultural factors that aren’t easily replicated or recreated through state action. When we do transmogrify a cultural agenda into a political one, the results are sometimes messier than anticipated, which may have been what Ross Douthat was getting at when he asked Blond about the parallels between his philosophy and Bush’s compassionate conservatism at the end of the presentation.

One last observation: Blond spoke movingly of the plight of poor and working class citizens stuck in low-wage service jobs with no prospects for social mobility. His economic vision stresses the importance of creating stakeholders – skilled artisans, small businesspeople, and so on -  who feel more invested in their communities. This reminded me of the American experience after World War II, when millions of returning GIs received free college educations and federally-backed homeownership loans helped create the American middle class. But while these programs were largeky  successful, they’re not exactly models of decentralized governance. Is Blond willing to compromise or moderate his small government sympathies to create new economic stakeholders? I ask because state efforts to create or impart social capital – from public schools to the Federal Housing Administration to Bush’s compassionate conservatism – are rarely characterized by decentralization or subsidiarity.

Exit question: Is liberal society, as Blond suggests, fundamentally dependent on older traditions, cultural practices, and civic institutions? Does radical individualism undermine these institutions? I know Blond isn’t the first to make this argument, but his prognosis was both unusually grim and surprisingly persuasive. I’d be curious to hear what the League’s commenters and contributors have to say on the subject.

I’m happy to see that disenchantment with Woodrow Wilson – the most bizarre candidate for the pantheon of great American presidents – is reaching a wider audience on the American Right. But this nascent critique of Wilsonian progressivism seems to have missed one of his worst legacies. Namely, Wilson’s blatant disregard for civil liberties (from Wikipedia – emphasis mine):

On the home front in 1917, he began the United States’ first draft since the US civil war, raised billions in war funding through Liberty Bonds, set up the War Industries Board, promoted labor union growth, supervised agriculture and food production through the Lever Act, took over control of the railroads, enacted the first federal drug prohibition, and suppressed anti-war movements.

–

To counter opposition to the war at home, Wilson pushed the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918 through Congress to suppress anti-British, pro-German, or anti-war opinions. He welcomed socialists who supported the war and pushed for deportation of foreign-born radicals.^[86] Citing the Espionage Act, the U.S. Post Office refused to carry any written materials that could be deemed critical of the U. S. war effort. Some sixty newspapers were deprived of their second-class mailing rights.^[87]

Wilson is usually associated with a stirring ideological defense of democratic self-determination. In practice, this amounted to little more than crude ethnic partitioning, but more importantly, Wilson’s respect for the forms of Republican governance was severely lacking.

Perhaps Wilson’s enthusiasm for curtailing civil liberties was entirely unrelated to his progressive politics. But it’s hard not to see the same impulses that animated Wilson’s domestic agenda – a desire for control, rank disregard for individual liberty, confidence that the messy business of civil society can be micromanaged from Washington – behind his horrific record on civil liberties.

So my question for newly-converted Wilson-phobes is simple: If you’re concerned about government overreach, why restrict your criticism his domestic legacy? Why do torture, indefinite detainment, and the PATRIOT ACT get a free pass? Compared to his draconian wartime crackdown, many aspects of Wilson’s progressive agenda look downright benign, or even admirable, in retrospect. Wilson’s blatant disregard for civil liberties, on the other hand, remains one of the most enduring – and bipartisan – legacies in contemporary American politics.

I think Jason and I disagree less than his critique of my post would suggest.  He is correct that my rather brief treatment of markets (and the purpose of markets) leaves a great deal to be desired.  I was not intending to write a piece explaining the many benefits (or limitations) of markets per say – mainly because, like Jason and the other libertarians here, I am an advocate of the free market.  I am not terribly interested in arguing the merits of a free market economy.  Certainly this will lead only to partisans in both camps hurling strawmen at one another.  As Jason notes, both the success and failure of markets can “discover distributed and inarticulate knowledge about preference and utility.”  And this is a good thing.

I think Jason’s strongest point is this:

But the real question is not whether markets work perfectly. It’s whether any of the alternatives can do the job as well or better. When we consider that the real work of markets is to gather up distributed knowledge and render it publicly legible, it seems clear to me that few other social institutions are even seriously trying. Many of the worst of them, government programs above all included, act as if this work has already been done — as if Hayek’s dispersed knowledge had already been aggregated once and for all, and as if the action at hand weren’t going to upset it all in the process.

To be perfectly clear, markets aren’t the be-all and end-all of public policy for me. They are, however, the option we ought to try first, because properly designed, they tend to tell us what’s going on. This is tremendously important, and it’s very difficult to admit that we don’t know it.

He goes on to argue that markets should also be a last resort – and that if there is a market failure, it is often as not a failure of the “given ruleset” not necessarily the market itself.  Healthcare is a prime example of this.

And of course, in order for markets to work, for human progress to continue, and really for a sane and somewhat rational, stable economy to flourish, above all else we must maintain choice.

Indeed, Jason’s advocacy of choice is compelling, and I tend to agree that the more choice the better, if only because I could not tell you where or with whom we should limit it.  The more freedom the better.  I certainly don’t want to be constrained in my own choices, and I am not nearly paternalistic enough to want to constrain others in theirs. Whatever constraint or sacrifice we make based on coercion is a false one.

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Following up a bit on my “General America” piece, I wanted to add that I find the “all markets all the time” position within conservatism to be somewhat unfulfilling as well.  Market solutions are only solutions insofar as they do not necessarily perpetuate problems quite so badly as government solutions.  Choice and economic liberty are only useful instruments within society because they avoid many of the traps that come along with big government picking winners, rewarding rent seekers, and so forth.  To base an entire philosophy of governance along these lines is somewhat short-sighted, I would argue.

Perhaps this comes down, paradoxically, to the philosophy of choice –that very thing which rests at the heart of both liberalism and capitalism and, for that matter, contemporary conservatism.  There is something fundamentally antithetical to conservatism – or to the way conservatism has been classically understood – about the notion that choice should rest at the epicenter of society, should so inform all public debate and should so define who we as a people.  With choice you must also parcel competition, liberty, and a host of other ideas which conservatives and libertarians especially hold dear.  That these things are the best vehicles for our economy is hard to debate, but that a world of limitless choice, fierce competition, and little if any public sector (or ‘commons’ for that matter) is best for society in the long run is a more difficult claim to make.

This is not to say that we should scrap free trade or limited government or any of these things – only that as a philosophy, man cannot live on free trade alone.  A conservatism not rooted in tradition is not really conservatism at all. A conservatism focused too entirely on market solutions inevitably ends up falling short, and may as well be libertarianism with a dash of culture war populism sprinkled on for flavor.

Similarly, a conservatism which takes its first philosophical baby-steps only as far back as the American revolution is doomed to perpetual immaturity.

You might have noticed that I’m on a bit of a hiatus right now. Maybe not, either way is fine. I’ve left the League in the capable hands of my fellow contributors to focus more of my time and attention on various other projects, links for which will be forthcoming as early as Monday.

Today; however, is a bit slow, so I thought I’d drop a quick note in response to Erik’s post of yesterday on the pettiness of current conservative politics, the effort and sincerity of which I appreciated greatly.

In that post, Erik wrote,

Populism, after all, is just a nice word for “mob”. If ever there was a thing that conservatives were meant to protect us against it is the rule of the mob. Conservatives were never supposed to be the mob, were never meant to be its advocates.

In so writing, I think that Erik has succinctly summed up why he, despite twists and turns, ducks, bobs, and weaves, and, ultimately, come what may, is a conservative at heart while at the same time articulating a (if not “the”) pressing Conservative dilemma: Erik and most other conservatives don’t trust people.

I don’t say that to be derisive or condemning, it is a perfectly acceptable position to take given the vagaries of common modern life. But this strikes me as one of the fundamental planks of conservative ideology, when the chips are down, people are not to be trusted. And so we must find ways of protecting ourselves from those that cannot be trusted, namely: everyone — excepting maybe family and close friends, and even then…

I note this primarily because one of the projects in which I am currently engaged is an exercise and exploration into precisely the opposite perspective: given the opportunity, people will, more often than not, demonstrate not only that they are trustworthy, but that they are quite capable of not just meeting, but exceeding your expectations. There are no golden rules here, of course. People cannot 100% of the time either be trusted or not trusted. But I am coming around to the idea that people can be trusted often enough that I find myself increasingly averse to precisely the terms that Erik choose to employ: mob or, in other popular lexicon, the masses.

My projects aside, I think this fundamental lack of trust presents, as I mentioned, a real dilemma for conservatives. Conservatives are supposed to be the advocates of liberty and the watchdogs of tyranny, they rail against the excesses and intrusions of government in all it’s myriad forms. And yet, articulations like Erik’s often break down into beliefs like: keep the government out of my life, except when it comes to those people, if government is supposed to do anything it is to keep me safe from those people! And, of course, the number of ways in which the actions of those people, the mob, the masses, intrude on one’s life are never ending, so the number of ways in which government must be utilized as the means by which the untrustworthiness of those people is mitigated grows in a proportional fashion.

Such is the way that — and believe the legislative trajectory of conservatism bears this out — advocates of liberty and limited government wind up constantly finding new ways to use government as a means of guarding against the excesses and dangers of the mob and, presto change-o, government continues unfathomably to grow under their direction. Call it subtle governmentalism, conservatives claim to be thoroughly averse to government excess and speaking loudly and courageously against it in public, but in private enable a justifyng cognitive dissonance to grow it, time and time again.

At least liberals are upfront about their belief that government is a useful means of providing the needed measures for society, sometimes for the mob/masses and sometimes guarding against. Not so for conservatives who are locked into this sort mistrust-limited government finger trap that seems inevitably to render the majority of their rhetorical flourish empty when the rubber hits the road.

Again, I’m not condemning here, we all have our catch-22s with which to deal. But if this isn’t the major roadblock for conservatives and conservatism in contemporary political practice, it strikes me as a fairly significant one.

I’ve been trying to get at the heart of what bothers me so much about contemporary conservative politics & discourse these days. The closest I can come to an answer is that conservatives have fallen into the trap of modern politics – which is to say, they’ve become petty.  Extraordinarily petty. The endless lament over the liberal menace; the incessant ballyhoo over anything and everything the president does or says; the irksome victimhood – it all boils down to a propensity toward pettiness.  It becomes a cacophony of empty gestures and equally vapid posturing.  (The other side does this as well, of course, but you know what they say about two wrongs.)

The reason for all this pettiness?  I think it goes beyond merely scoring political points.  I think it has much more to do with cheap populism.  And nothing is more damaging or antithetical to conservatism than populism, even the rightwing variety.

Populism, after all, is just a nice word for “mob”.  If ever there was a thing that conservatives were meant to protect us against it is the rule of the mob.  Conservatives were never supposed to be the mob, were never meant to be its advocates. 

The first problem with the rule of the mob is the sort of leaders it produces.  Every mob needs a despot.  That’s why we have a Democratic Republic in the first place as opposed to a more free-wheeling Democracy.  Pure, unadulterated democracy is too close to mob rule, places too much political power into the hands of the majority. All too quickly such democracy leads to tyranny of one variety or another.

Populism can also turn a nation’s spiritual efforts into political efforts.  If one goal of conservatism is to preserve the spiritual buoyancy of a nation or a civilization, then conservatives should avoid the evangelist populism dominating so-called “social conservatism” at all costs.  Subverting faith or religious culture to the narrow and corrupting goals of politics can only backfire in unintended and perfidious ways.  Certainly the divisive culture-wars that this religious populist movement has used have only led to more of a spiritually muddled nation, and a population more resistant than ever to organized religion.  Political-evangelical Christianity is just as vulnerable as any other populist movement to the temptations of despotism, the need for charismatic and extremist leaders, and the shoring up of ever more power in order to achieve ever more ambitious goals.

In other words, populism is anything but limited, and political populism cannot lead to limited government.  That is the great problem with the tea party movement.  Liberty & order are precarious cousins, and populism is not the way to balance the one against the other.  Yet the modern conservative movement has abandoned the “politics of prudence” in favor of the politics of pettiness.  And it will be a while before reasonable people can right the ship.  Populism is the sword of revolution and radical change.  It is the predecessor of the guillotine and the gulags.  It is not conservative in any historical sense, whether or not it manifests itself in the right-wing.

Jonah Goldberg has a very smart response to Jim Manzi’s reflections on “liberty-as-means” libertarians vs. “liberty-as-goal” libertarians.  I want to focus on Jonah’s post here, but you should read Manzi as well.  Jonah writes:

My own view is that the Right is intellectually healthier and more creative because its dogma remains unsettled (yes, I’ve written about this a zillion times). The Right is divided between those who are (in Irving Kristol’s formulation) anti-left and those who are anti-State. Those who believe that the government is bad because it’s working from leftist assumptions, and those who believe that the government is bad because it is the government. (Most conservatives share both outlooks to one extent or another, but usually fit more into one camp than the other. If you’re wholly in the government-is-bad camp you’re more properly a libertarian, but still on the right). There are those who believe that liberty is an end and those who believe that liberty is a means. For more than a half century now, modern conservatives have been debating and redebating the question of where to the draw the lines between freedom and order, liberty and virtue. And because that line continually needs to be redrawn given the evolution of attitudes, changes in technology, etc, conservative intellectuals (though not necessarily conservative activists, politicians and the like) are constantly revisiting first principles and philosophical assumptions or are at least capable of acknowledging the good faith of their philosophical opponents). I do not think you can say the same thing about liberals (again, as a wild generalization). What unites most, if not all, factions of the Left, from socialists to DLC moderates is a dogmatic acceptance that the government should do good when it can and where it can.  Hence the debates on the left tend to be procedural, wonkish, and technical or rankly political. The Right has such arguments as well, of course. But they do not define and dominate political discussions the way they do on the left. And that’s because our dogma is still unsettled.

I think this strikes upon a number of smart observations.  Certainly the continual re-drawing of the many lines between liberty and virtue, freedom and order, etc. is exactly the reason I enjoy reading (intellectual) conservative blogs so much more than I enjoy reading liberal blogs.  On the flip side, I think the best wonkish blogs and writers are found in the liberal corner.

Perhaps this reveals not only the strengths on both sides of the political aisle, but also the weaknesses.

I like thinking of conservatism in these terms – as an “unsettled ideology.” This gets at the bohemian conservatism I was talking about last week.  Russell Kirk was a self-described “bohemian Tory” and I think the intellectual wing of the conservative movement, with its distrust of centralized power and so forth fits that term nicely, if the red-meat activist wing does not.  The “unsettled dogma” concept seems so far removed from the conservative movement’s attempts at purity tests and activism that it’s a bit hard to reconcile the two.  And of course I’ve always been more attracted to the intellectual struggles within the ideology than with the political processes themselves, healthcare blogging notwithstanding.  But I think this can also be a trap for conservative intellectuals, or at least for bloggers with an intellectual streak (I am not really an intellectual as far as I know). More conservatives need to focus on policy and wonkishness if only to provide their ideas with a tangible foundation, but also because the effort to dismantle or reinvent the welfare state – to really limit big government – requires if anything even more policy and wonkishness than the other side.

 

Addendum: I’d like to point out that I in no way endorse some of the more caricatured views Goldberg expresses here vis-a-vis liberals.  Gross generalizations are not really my cup of tea, whether they can be applied to certain people within the larger group or not.  I will, however, note that so far the conservative and liberal response here has been hostile.  That means I’m doing something right.  Re: purity tests and so forth, it’s not so much that ideological groups shouldn’t set out some standards for membership, but that the standards become awfully silly and rigid in a political climate like the one we now have.

“If Obama’s efforts to create a viable regulatory framework in which individuals can buy private health insurance (a) pass congress, and (b) turn out to work well and be popular, then you can imagine a version of Ryan’s plan being put into place. But in the absence of that kind of reform, I just don’t see how you can do this, which is presumably why the implementation is delayed all the way to 2021 which helps Ryan avoid needing to think about implementation details.” ~ Matt Yglesias, writing about Rep. Paul Ryan’s alternative budget

I think Yglesias actually makes a pretty strong point here.  While I’m overall fairly sympathetic to Ryan’s budget – he does, after all, balance it (at least according to the CBO report [pdf]), something virtually no other politician is willing to even propose – I think there is a fundamental flaw with implementing a healthcare voucher program without first fixing the broken, dysfunctional health insurance market.  The exchanges created in Obamacare would be one way to do this. 

What Yglesias does not point out, however, is that Ryan’s budget proposal also puts an end to the tax exemption for employee benefits.  Simply coupling this tax reform with the ability to purchase insurance across state lines creates an entirely new health insurance market.  Suddenly people on the individual market are given the same tax preference as people who receive their insurance from an employer.  Health insurance drifts away from employers and becomes personal and portable.  People wouldn’t lose coverage when they left their jobs.  Meanwhile, insurers would lose their long-held local and state monopolies and be forced to compete nationally, driving down costs both through added competitive pressures and by the better bargaining powers that these large, national firms would have, with their much larger, national cost-sharing pools.

Of course, the hard questions in healthcare will center around two inextricably linked concepts – pre-existing conditions clauses, and individual mandates.  Almost all modern democracies have some form of universal coverage, and the only way that it has been achieved with any semblance of a free market has been by doing away with pre-existing conditions clauses and implementing some sort of individual mandate.  If the former is done without the latter, nobody would buy insurance until they were sick – defeating the purpose (and the viability) of insurance to begin with.

Other alternatives exist, of course.  My personal preference is a model along the lines of Singapore’s healthcare system, which mandates health savings accounts and then picks up the tab on any costs above a certain flat percentage of income.  This puts healthcare directly in the hands of the consumer (cutting out insurance companies altogether) and provides them with catastrophic coverage if something should go wrong.  Furthermore, by placing costs and transactions directly in the consumers hands, it keeps costs from skyrocketing.  The mandated savings would be flat, but the catastrophic coverage functions progressively, covering less and less as income rises.

Either way, before any privatization of Medicare and Medicaid can occur, the private insurance market must be transformed.  Paul Ryan has shown true grit in crafting a budget that is actually balanced, but the possibility of backlash to cuts in entitlements is very real if the systemic problems in our healthcare system aren’t taken care of first.  Both Yglesias and Ezra Klein see this budget as a sort of draconian rationing of benefits for seniors and poorer Americans. If the insurance market could actually be fixed, however, then the system of vouchers which Ryan proposes would be adequate and possibly even better alternatives to the status quo.

One problem with conservatism today is that conservatives are living in a past in which tax cuts were a panacea.  Thattimes have changed does not seem to register, and so new ideas are few and far between.  At some point, more and more conservatives will start thinking like Bruce Bartlett – not necessarily in favor of higher corporate or income taxes (hopefully) but in favor of something like a VAT – because there is simply no way we can cut spending enough to fix the budget.  The political will simply doesn’t exist.  We need a multi-pronged approach, tackling debt, spending, and revenue all at once, and we need serious politicians on the left and the right to do that.  (The tax-the-rich crowd on the left is just as bad as the cut-taxes crowd on the right, ignoring the (un)employment implications that such punitive taxes inevitably entail especially with unemployment in the double-digits.  Certainly raising taxes in the midst of a recession is a very bad idea.)

Another problem with conservatism in its current form is that defense has become so sacrosanct that true, limited government will never be realized.  Entitlements are out of control, but the growth and imperviousness of our defense budget is worse.  This is where I come down (among many other things) on the libertarian side of the aisle.

Meanwhile liberalism, while often the most egalitarian of these ideologies (to grossly generalize, of course) and certainly appealing to people who want to help the poor and to fix the manifold problems with society, too often relies upon the beneficence of the state, of experts and their expertise, and on central planning to achieve its grand (and expensive) designs.

And I guess I don’t trust the experts, even when I find their arguments compelling and even convincing.  And I don’t trust the planners even when the plan sounds pretty good – at least not any more than I trust the nation builders and their militaristic optimism, no matter how much better their nation-to-be sounds than the nation-that-is.  At the end of the day I think the best plan is always the one which allows for the least amount of planning, the one which can unfold organically, the one that allows competition and choice to flourish, and which relies upon local communities and private enterprise rather than Peter Orszag and the Planning Committee.  Ditto that for our foreign policy.

That doesn’t mean we don’t need a government or an army or that any and every action of the state is bad. It just means that we need to find ways to do it through limited government rather than putting so much faith in that institution time and again always with the same disappointing results.

We should be moving toward competitive federalism, not toward further centralization in Washington D.C.  Such centralizing of power is unsustainable at best.  But conservatives should also be distancing themselves from too much market-speak (a curse and a blessing for libertarians and conservatives), from too much of the dispassionate conservatism that defines so much of the movement today, and embrace the spirit that comes along with decentralization and its dismissal of big power in whatever form it takes. (Free trade certainly does end oligopolies and concentration of entrenched powers-that-be, but somehow talking about it too much makes people think quite the opposite.)

Such a spirit, I would argue, is rather more bohemian in nature.  And perhaps there is a streak of this bohemian self-reliance animating the tea parties, or perhaps there could be.  A conservatism that means what it says when it touts family values by understanding the family in terms of its relation to the larger community; and which understands that the power of the self-reliant individual rests as much on those things which support and surround him as upon his own natural talents.

I’ve been a little too hard on conservatives lately – largely due, I think, to my overall frustrations over healthcare reform, but also because of the antics on the right which I find distasteful and discouraging.  Part of what draws me to conservatism is its respect for tradition, restraint and of course the conservative disposition (which I realize is awfully vague and fairly apolitical).  This includes not saying wildly outlandish things or using scare tactics to make your case.  Somewhere along the way, all this has been tossed aside, along with many conservative principles such as limited government (i.e. not “save Medicare from the Democrats”).  Loudmouths like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck dominate the conservative airwaves, and the GOP itself is headed by the inept Michael Steele.  Several weeks ago, after watching that horrible Colbert segment with Andy Schlafly, I let myself sink into despair.

The conservative movement – nay, conservatism itself – was dead (to me, or so I thought).  Or, if not dead, it was damn near.  Andy Schlafly and Sean Hannity were dancing on its grave sputtering nonsense about Jesus and the free market, giving anti-capitalist progressives all the ammunition they’d ever need to spout their own brand of crazy-passionate-yet-uninformed.  What little remained of conservatism’s once robust intellectual movement seemed cordoned off, populated by a few economists, a handful of paleocons and dissidents, and some libertarians.  The neocon’s secret mission to destroy the movement from the inside out was working – had worked.  Game over.

Then came the special election in Massachusetts.  The Scott Brown victory, if nothing else, has restored my faith in the possibility of Big Tent conservatism.  Whatever Brown’s flaws or inconsistencies – and like every politician, they are many – he nevertheless represents a shift away from vapid purity tests and toward a more regionally representative Republican party.  The lesson of the Brown victory is not that moderate/liberal Republicans should be the model for conservative candidates country-wide, but that there should be no status quo at all – no precise model for what works, no one-size-fits-all-conservatism. What works in Tennessee will likely not work in New Yrok (nor should one politician attempt to change their political views entirely to appeal to each of these states consecutively).

Furthermore, Republicans should run more broadly appealing candidates rather than hyper-partisan ones, even if the hyper-partisan candidates are the best at rousing the base.  Republicans can still run very conservative candidates so long as those candidates can speak to a wide swath of voters. – Bob McDonnell in Virginia, for instance, is just this sort of candidate.

Moreover, the liberal reaction to Citizens United (Glenn Greenwald notwithstanding) has made me realize that my recent lack of faith in conservatives/conservatism is more a reflection of my overall lack of faith in humanity/politics. People on both sides of the aisle enforce that lack of faith on a daily basis.  Liberals and progressives can be just as over the top, emotional, and absurd as their conservative and libertarian counterparts.

On the other hand, all these groups can be well-intentioned and simply disagree fundamentally on very core principles and ideas. That disagreement exists does not make one side more wicked than the other. Obstructing the majority’s agenda is not in and of itself wrong. For instance, Republicans actually did compromise on healthcare reform.  Quite a few of them backed the Wyden/Bennett bill which was a much better bill than the one the Senate eventually produced. Big Labor was the lurking opposition to that bill’s passage, and guess who happens to be situated deep in the pockets of Big Labor?

Hint: it’s not the Republicans.

Memo to the conservatives who suddenly discovered that they were in favor of limited government when George Bush left office: if you want people to believe that your conversion is real, it would probably help if you don’t whine and complain about Big Government Obama (see also: Ed Driscoll, AJ Strata) when he actually proposes a cut to a program that you just so happen to like.  Either you’re for limited government, or your not.  You don’t get to pick and choose the areas where you think limited government is good and bad and still claim to be an advocate for limited government on the whole. 

Say what you will about the various proposals for health care reform, at least they have a goal in mind that is intended to help people in the here and now that are, in fact, hurting.  But what, exactly, is a mission to the moon supposed to accomplish in the here and now that makes it so necessary to keep in the federal budget at a time when we’re running unprecedented budget deficits? 

Either you’re for limited government, or you’re against it.  Being for it only when the Democrats try to create a program you don’t like, and against it whenever they cut a program that you do like….well, it kinda sends a mixed message.  It also has a tendency to result in y’all not caring too much about fiscal restraint when you actually do return to power, one day.  And, one day, you can rest assured, you will in fact return to power, probably even one day soon.  It would be rather helpful to the cause of limited government if, when you return to power, you didn’t seem to care more about expanding the programs that you do like than about cutting the programs that you don’t.  It kinda makes it a bit more difficult to fight the Democrats when they’re in power on limited government grounds when you insist on fighting for the expansion of government when we’re talking about your pet projects.  And right now: YOU’RE NOT HELPING!

Sincerely,

The Libertarians

Michael Dougherty’s simultaneously funny and pull-out-your-hair frustrating letter to the conservative movement is worth your time.