“While I agree that it’s fairly pointless, as a tactical matter, for dissidents to attack the talk radio giants, this comes, I think, out of a deep frustration that people with little more than slogans and attitude have bigfooted discussion among conservatives, and have helped turn the GOP and the movement into something that’s extremely hostile to change (as distinct from skepticism of it, as all real conservatives should be), and almost fanatically opposed to dissent from within. A fairly conservative friend of mine and I were talking the other day about something Glenn Beck had said, and my friend looked disgusted, saying, “I’m sick of being associated with conservatives.” The impulse to take on the Becks and the Limbaughs comes from a sense that these guys are hurting us bad, and preventing the kind of clear thinking that we need to get back in the political game. I’d love to know how Mark and the League propose for dissident conservatives to “engage” the base when the kind of people the base trusts and takes its cues from demonize dissidents as RINOs, closet liberals, squishes, wets, suck-ups, and so forth. I’m asking seriously. I don’t know how to go about this in the current climate.” ~ Rod Dreher

There’s no easy answer to this question, of course.  Dreher and other critics of Beckian talk-show conservatism are right: the talking heads do hurt the  cause.  Think of William F. Buckley back in the days leading up to the launch of National Review.  Imagine if he’d had to compete with Fox News for the heart and soul of conservatism.  It wouldn’t have been easy.  Indeed, on the field of battle, Buckley with his more reasoned and polite approach to political discussion (which isn’t to say he always threw soft punches, the man could be rather straightforward after all) may very well have lost to the populists now manning the airwaves in defense of “true conservatism.”  Buckley would be painted like every other East Coast Elite.

But I doubt very much that Buckley would have taken to that particular field.  He was too canny to become embroiled in a fight he couldn’t win, and too immersed in ideas to need to resort to those measures – at least until he was sure of victory.  What’s the point in taking on the Goliaths of the conservative movement anyways?  They have a higher bully pulpit, a wider audience, a louder megaphone.  And they’re okay fighting dirty, and dragging you down to whatever level they need to drag you in order to win.  Wait until they’re marginal players.  Wait until they’ve outworn their welcome.

Conservative dissidents these days have nowhere near enough patience.  Impulsively, they attack the easiest and biggest targets they can find: the talking heads.  As Dreher points out, the impulse for this fight is two-fold.  On the one hand it’s the impulse to remove Rush and co. from the conversation, because they’re “preventing the kind of clear thinking we need to get back in the political game.”  But much, much more importantly, I think, is the desire to simply not be associated with that particular brand of conservatism.  Guilt by association.  We’re not with them, we say.  And to prove it, here’s post after post on just why this is so, on why we hate Limbaugh even more than you do.

And it works.  Nobody who knows Conor or Rod would ever couple them with Limbaugh or Levin – right?  Only, it has unintended consequences.  Sure, you’ve blacklisted the pundits, but you’ve also been blacklisted, by a pretty significant portion of the conservative base.

Isn’t there a better way?

I think there is.  Let’s call it the Trojan Horse strategy. [Read more →]

Someone mentioned recently that conservatives ought not cast so many stones in the health care debate when none of them are coming up with any viable alternatives. I figured I’d use that as my cue to finally jump in and explain some of the principled ways that a conservative ought to think about health care.

Insurance: “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

The first problem that keeps us from intelligently discussing health care is the vocabulary. Health “insurance” is not really insurance. Insurance is how we pay for something in case some contingency in a pre-defined class of contingencies occurs. Health “insurance,” instead, means something more like pre-paid health service, or a fixed-rate health plan. The point is, regular doctor visits, properly speaking, are not part of health insurance any more than oil changes are part of auto insurance. Of course, we know what insurance is supposed to mean. Most of us have car insurance. Many of us have home insurance, or renter’s insurance. We might even have insurance on the flat screen we bought at Best Buy. So why do we insist on speaking as if our annual checkups should be included in our health insurance? To be productive with talk about public alternatives to health insurance, we need to remember what insurance means.

The Dateline Effect

The next thing to think about is what exactly we are trying to accomplish with public health care. Noting the difference between “insurance” and something more like a fixed-rate health plan, it should be pretty clear that what we are not particularly interested in making sure everyone is able to get cheap doctor visits whenever they get a sniffle. My co-pay is just $10. Had I more time and less aversion to doctor visits, I would never opt not to see the doctor. I am not interested in the least in paying more taxes so that everyone can have such whimsical access to chat with the doc. The “least among us” are not known by whether they have ready access to a Wellbutrin prescription.

Instead, what we are after is eliminating the “Dateline effect”—gut-wrenching in-depth news-show stories about families just like yours and mine having financial ruin heaped on top of emotional ruin resulting from little Billy’s bout with terminal cancer, made all the worse by the plucky lad’s resolve to push on beyond all doctors’ predictions and cost estimates before finally reaching the end. That’s what the clamor for the public option is all about. People will still break their limbs and split their heads open and accidentally shoot their thumbs off, requiring the occasional trip to the emergency room. And if they don’t have insurance, they’ll grumble about how to pay for the services they received. But it’s not going to break anybody—and, more importantly, it’s not going to make Dateline. The stories of indigents struggling to pay off a few grand in emergency room bills are not the ones that are galvanizing the move toward public health coverage. If you can’t imagine a story about it on your favorite TV news journal, it shouldn’t be covered by the public option.

The Agony of Having No One to Blame

The other benchmark driving the push for a public option is fault, or rather the lack of it. When we hear about tragic health stories, the first thing anyone does is try to place blame. It’s the natural human response. If we can identify the cause—i.e., smoked too much, drank too much, carried on so fat, visited that dubious third world country, was negligent, etc.—the whole thing becomes much less terrifyingly arbitrary. Humans are stupid and silly and repugnant, to be sure, but at least they’re predictably so. And a surprising amount of satisfaction and all-around peace with the universe can be derived through comeuppance. At any rate, once we find the loathsome culprit, we can direct our fist-shaking accordingly. And then we can forget about the whole thing and get back to Dancing with the Stars.

But things like cancer leave us feeling so unresolved, at odds with the universe. Without someone to blame, we have no way to turn the grief into indignation. After a while, that dull sense of guilt that starts to really eat at us. It’s an entirely irrational guilt, of course. But guilt, like the rest of our emotions, does not shrink at name-calling. So after shaking our fists at the sky yields no results, we turn to the next most powerful and arbitrary force known to us: government.

So long as we insist on waging this war on guilt by devising a public health care option, let’s at least limit the scope of that war to those things that are actually causing the guilt—to those ailments that are not properly attributable to the fault of some individual. The test could be quite simple:

“When you discovered your ailment, what was your response?
A. ‘D’oh!’
B. ‘That bastard!’
C. ‘Goddammit.’”

The public option only covers C; both A and B indicate there’s already someone to blame—yourself or someone else—and thus the rest of us are quite capable of activating our grief-to-indignation conversion mechanisms without footing your bill.

That is the key to the whole thing, after all. This is a war on guilt, and whatever the cheapest way of beating our guilt is the way we ought to go. The best way, incidentally, is to just tell our collective guilt to go suck an egg. But since it seems we’re unwilling to do that, we should examine any public health option in terms of how well it assuages the guilt. I submit that only those ailments that are, by all accounts, arbitrary and owing to the fault of no one, should be covered by a public option.

Of course, I echo the sentiments of E.D. Kain in this post, and thus reserve the right to flip-flop upon further consideration.