The tea partiers, in insisting that economic policy derives from and reflects political principles, and not the other way around, help make this clear. Take taxes. When taxes are too many and too high, the economy suffers. But, as this decade has brutally taught us, taxes do not necessarily enrich the state, but they always aggrandize it. The evil of taxes is not primarily economic but political. When a government learns how to use taxes to coerce, control, and manage the behavior of its citizens, a country is placed on a perilous road — not to serfdom, necessarily, but to tyranny, a tyranny that lords over even the rich and famous, even when they happen to profit from its favor. The GOP is supposed to keep this kind of tyranny at bay, and when it comes near, the GOP is supposed to ward it off.

It’s in this regard that, over the past ten years, the GOP has failed. The trouble with RINOs is that, in their liberalism, they are often either blind to the threat of tyranny or they do not really see it as a problem. This is not because they ‘fail to understand the nature’ of tyranny. Tyrannical regimes can rule over dynamic, exciting societies, over huge numbers of people full of promise and purpose. They can focus resources on big challenges and execute amazing feats of efficiency and publicity. Just ask the growing number of American commentators suffering from China envy.

Three things are mistaken here.

First, that “taxes do not necessarily enrich the state, but they always aggrandize it” strikes me as a very odd thing to assert n the context of the past decade.  While taxes may indeed aggrandize the state, how James can reach this conclusion after a period in which tax rates have been at historical lows is beyond me.  If anything, the past decade has revealed the state’s capacity to endlessly borrow in order to pay for the spending that Republicans and Democrats alike cannot seem to cut back.

And while taxes can indeed be corrosive to liberty and used to coerce citizens and distort the natural economy and a whole host of other abuses, they can also be used for legitimate purposes – though no two people can agree on what those purposes may be.  I assume James approves of our tax dollars going to our national defense, for instance, but perhaps not toward national healthcare.  Calling this tyranny without explaining why it is tyranny is mostly unsatisfying, especially coming from someone who can certainly think past such trite assertions. [Read more →]

As a commenter at Balloon Juice pointed out: “It’s great that at this point “making fun of” Broder literally means nothing more or less than just blockquoting his words.” 

But beyond that, I think it important to note how Broder gets to draw an equivalency between the murder of 3000 and a guy blowing up his junk in order to justify using the latter incident as a basis for war.  This is the position of the  DC establishment that Broder so often seems to represent.  Somehow, this is deemed a “moderate” opinion, while opinions of movement liberals and movement conservatives are dismissed as radical and insane.

H/T: DougJ.

“In a lot of cases, the aim of liberals isn’t necessarily to massively expand the reach of government as much as it is to add some intentionality and rationality — as well as make explicit — the ways in which wealready intervene in the economy (health care reform is a perfect example of this, I think).  “

Here’s the thing: Jamelle is claiming that liberals use the “hidden welfare state” as justification for expansion of the “visible” welfare state.  In essence, however, the logic underlying this set of preferences is precisely the same as the libertarian, and often conservative, argument for scaling back the scope of government as a way of improving net social welfare.  The broad Right has as much or more problems with the “hidden welfare state” as  do liberals.  There would be, in fact, a fairly easy coalition to be built in favor of simplifying the tax code, doing away with various subsidies, etc.  If this common logic is correct – ie, that existing social injustice is largely a result of the “hidden” welfare state – then removing the “hidden” welfare state would obviate the need for much of the “visible” welfare state. 

In other words, if this critique is accurate, then social injustice may be cured either by growing the “visible” welfare state or by scaling back on the “hidden” welfare state.  Yet liberals expend virtually no effort, and seemingly take very little interest in, the latter, and seem to entirely emphasize the former.  This despite the fact that choosing the latter route would present a seemingly easier path to achieving allegedly liberal ends because of the simple fact that it is an area upon which the broad movement Left and movement Right would seem to be in virtual lockstep – if, in fact, liberals are serious when they rail against “corporate welfare” and the like. 

I think it’s entirely fair to ask why this is.  Why, if the “hidden welfare state” causes so many problems, is the preferred solution the expansion of the “visible” welfare state rather than the elimination or reduction of the “hidden” welfare state?  I can think of a number of possible reasons, but foremost among them is that the cultural divide between movement liberals and movement conservatives prevents them from being willing to work together on many projects where they have actually quite a bit of ideological compatibility.  This forces both movement liberals and movement conservatives to find groups on their side of the cultural divide - or at least not entirely on the other side of the cultural divide – with whom to ally.  We typically call these other groups “centrists” or “moderates.”  In reality, however, these “centrists” or “moderates” are little different from an independent third party, some of whom have “D’s” next to their names and some of whom have “R’s,” with the exact proportion being the primary thing up for grabs in a given election year. 

But I’m increasingly convinced that the divide is far more cultural than ideological.  You see this most obviously in the appeal of Sarah Palin, who, ideologically is really not much different from any other Republican politician in recent years, yet she is adored by die-hard conservatives because she’s “one of us.”  This “one of us” mentality might get expressed in any number of different ways – she’s “plain-spoken,” or she “speaks honestly,” but ultimately, the justification is primarily a cultural one.  And it’s not just a race thing (though that certainly plays a role) – it’s how she speaks, her background, etc.

But it’s more than just that.  Conservatives have a tendency to spend an inordinate amount of time denouncing the “liberal elite” culture of the coasts.  Meanwhile, I’ve seen too many liberals rave about how they simply cannot take anyone seriously who doesn’t believe in evolution, regardless of what the topic of discussion may be.  In short, both liberals and conservatives have this tendency to use cultural markers as a sort of first line of defense in filtering out who they will and will not work with.  Liberals and conservatives may well each hate the centrists in their midst, but they’re also far more willing to work with those centrists, who at least lack the cultural markers of ignorance or elitism (depending on who you’re talking about) than they are to even consider that they may actually have as much or more common policy ground with their cultural opposites. 

In short, liberals and conservatives refuse to see the areas in which they have common ground because far too often they simply cannot get past the cultural markers that prevent them from even listening to the substance of what their cultural opposites are saying.  So rather than having two or more potential sets of negotiating partners from whom to choose on a given policy issue, they are each permanently left with only those centrists who have the right letters next to their name or who in some other way avoid identifying with the “wrong” cultural markers.

In the grand discussion of where should Conservative leaders lead and where do they go, it’s important to get a good lay of the land, a solid bearing of where Republicans and Conservatives are, and an accurate reading of where the competition is. Building off of Mark’s exploration of the relationship between the base and wonks and E.D. taking that ball and running with it, I hope to add another piece to the puzzle.

In talks about conservative dissidents, conservative wonks, what we really need to talk about are conservative elites, of which some of the former are included. Elites are, leaders, columnists, idea-mongers, and purveyors of vision.

In that sense, Rush Limbaugh, reviled though he may be, is certainly an elite but not a dissident nor wonk. What he does do, is project an image of what conservatism is and just as importantly what is not. Some elites are dissidents, quite a few are wonks but they are – for better and for worse- leaders of conservatism.

The conservative base and its elite leaders are fractured unlike their competition, Democrats, progressives, and/aka liberals. The very strong alignment between the liberal base and liberal elites forms an iron binary, a group whose fundamental agreement on issues joins them inviolably. Their broad agreement on social and economic issues allows them to work – more or less – in harmony. By contrast, the right has a fairly sizeable disconnect between both. For example with the bank bailout and gay marriage there are sizeable chunks of the conservative elite who either support them or simply don’t care at the same time that the huge chunks of the base have been positively apoplectic over them. There’s a reason you see one of the most prominent conservative lawyers in America working for marriage equality but zero liberal lawyers seeking to overturn Roe.

Another contrast between the two, effective signaling between elites and the base allows liberal elites to organize for health care and channel the energy of a strong base into focused issues of consensus whereas tea parties and town halls reflected a base only enough organized enough to be a disorganized mess.

We saw this contrast as early the 2008 presidential primary. The Democratic candidates came in all regions, genders, and colors but basically agreed on 90%-95% on their policy. The Democratic contest was a contest of packaging not direction or political identity.

The Republicans were the exact opposite. They were all wealthy, white, men but their ideas couldn’t have been more heterodox. Giuliani, Thompson, Huckabee, Romney all presented very different visions of the future of the Republican Party and consequently conservatism’s role within the party. The only candidate whose selection and platform amounted to tinkering around the edges rather than changing directions was also the one least offensive to the most number of people, John McCain. This is also why he suffered from an enthusiasm gap until he picked Palin.

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It’s not that opinion writers should have bad consciences about not being party activists, or that a fondness for Edmund Burke actually makes one “responsible” for whatever some racist loons shout at a town hall, which would be silly, but is also an easy way to read the claim on a first pass. Rather it’s that there’s an actual conservative base out there supporting the political actors, they’re not going away anytime soon, and if the conservative movement’s going to pull out of this toxic death spiral, someone who’s not an imbecile or a psychopath is going to have to identify with them enough to lead them out of the fever swamps.

And so we’ve been focusing on the relationship between dissidents and the base, and gotten into issues of leadership and tone and rhetoric, with Mark and E.D. offering their advice. Now, the League is more of a confederation than a union, so I don’t have to join up with my co-contributors on this line of argument. And so I’m actually with Conor on the idea that, in Mark’s phrase, “conservative wonks aren’t doing their job”:

Put another way, tweaking Rod Dreher for his failure to fully invest himself in reforming “the conservative movement” with wonky solutions acceptable to the base makes about as much sense as criticizing Reihan Salam for failing to abandon his cosmopolitan tendencies long enough to convince culturally conservative Texans to raise backyard chickens in the name of spiritual fulfillment and environmental sustainability. What a shame it would be if everyone who understood and embraced conservative insights uniformly turned their attention toward or away from politics! It is preferable that folks who identify as conservative adopt different postures toward “the conservative movement,” play greater and lesser roles in shaping it, wield influence in different places, and make varying contributions to American culture, political and otherwise, more generally.

All of which is to say, I have no interest in telling conservative wonks or dissidents what they should be spending their time writing or arguing about. I do, however, want to try out another angle on “taking responsibility,” and I think it might actually be more in line with what Freddie was ranting about.

In his piece, Conor reiterates a point he’s made before:

…I insist on reaffirming the distinction between the political philosophy conservatism and “movement conservatism.” The flaws that are so evident on the right are entirely due to the latter. [emphasis added - wrb]

This distinction can be made for any political philosophy that gains enough popularity to become significant in the halls of power. (Although when I try it for liberalism, I feel like I have to drop in a modifier like “Millean” or “Rawlsian.” Can we really take it for granted that “the” conservative philosophy needs no such modifier?) Since politics is a realm where concern for the common good has to contend with every kind of individual or communal interest, only rarely does a political philosophy find anything approaching a pure representation.

It seems obvious that no one would subscribe to a political philosophy if she believed that philosophy would ruin the world. But it’s not so hard to believe that someone could endorse a political philosophy without considering the problems that will come from imperfect instantiations of that philosophy.

To take a small-scale hypothetical: let’s say I become convinced that deregulation is generally good for the economy, with only rare exceptions, and that the widget industry has been under heavy regulation for years and years. Now, I conclude that a comprehensive deregulation of the widget market will lead to lower costs for consumers, lower barriers to market entry for would-be widget makers, and more innovation in widget design. It seems like I should advocate deregulation, right? Except — WidgetCo Inc. has a powerful lobby in Washington. If they manage to get their hooks in the deregulation process, they’ll skew it so that the rules they like stay in place and the rules they don’t go. It still counts as deregulation, but it redounds to the benefit of WidgetCo. If it turns out that partial deregulation is worse than the status quo, and it’s apparent that partial deregulation is ever so much more likely than comprehensive deregulation, my anti-regulation stance starts to look a little bit, well, irresponsible.

So, if you advocate for a political philosophy, taking responsibility means that you ask yourself: what does it look like when this philosophy goes wrong? What happens when it’s taken up by self-interested people? How will it be twisted by power? When Freddie says he takes responsibility for liberalism, I think what he means is that he can look at his how his political philosophy worked out in the real world, even in its Carter-years excesses and mistakes and say, “It was worth it.” Not: “They called themselves liberals, but it’s like they never even read Mill!”

In 2009, at what may or may not turn out to be the close of a conservative era, I’m not sure what I can say. The excesses and missteps of Buckley-style conservatism (which conceives of itself as in opposition to and separate from contemporary liberalism) strike me as fearsome indeed. But, really, that’s neither here nor there for this post. The point is that a person bears some responsibility for making sure the political philosophy she advocates isn’t an unstable equilibrium, prone to breaking down into something bad when deployed in the mess of political reality.

The other day, I struggled to think of a single unifying characteristic for the various strains of dissident/reform conservatism and blamed the lack of such a characteristic for the fact that the conservative agenda nowadays amounts to little more than “we’re not liberals.”  Beyond that, though, what unifies these strains of dissident conservatism is that the dissidents are almost all drawn from the conservative elite: they’re wonks, not foot soldiers.  Moreover, it increasingly seems that what unifies the old conservative wonk class is that they’re almost all dissidents.  The set of non-wonkish dissident conservatives is close to null, as is the set of wonkish conservatives who maintain close ties to the base.

One area where Freddie has taken a bit of heat is for going after so-called reform conservatives for being unwilling to try to fix the problems with conservatism.  For a long while, I thought this heat was deserved and that Freddie was being quite unfair to people who were clearly trying to do exactly that.  And while two Ordinary Gentlemen do not a trend make, I read enough liberal blogs to see that their opinions are shared by quite a few on the Left, so while liberals may not have the disdain for the reformers that they have for the hardcore movement types, the reformers are hardly respected by liberals. 

Meanwhile, the hardcore movement conservatives truly cannot stand the reformers, who they view as RINOS at best and traitors at worst.   This animosity is even understandable since, to the extent the reformers even try to interact with the base, it is more often than not to criticize it for extremism in rhetoric or style. 

This question has perplexed me for months: how is it possible for a group of well-intentioned conservative wonks to be so reviled by the Left, despite sincerely opposing the worst of the Right’s extremism and attempting to make the Right serious about governing again, and the Right, despite sincerely opposing most all of the Left’s agenda?  It’s not as if these people are just squishy centrists and moderates – they almost always have a pretty clear set of principles underlying their actions. 

Reading Jamelle’ s post, though, the answer finally became clear: the conservative wonks simply aren’t doing their jobs.  What they are doing is picking apart liberal proposals, picking apart conservative proposals, attacking the low-hanging fruit of conservative extremism, and occasionally making suggestions to liberals on ways of either improving liberal proposals or making those proposals more palatable to conservatives.  What they are not doing, and largely are not even trying to do, is to drive the GOP agenda.  They are, in effect, content to leave the GOP agenda as little more than “vote no on everything” and tear down whatever the liberals do.

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Distributism, in the end, came to feel more like an ideal than a practical solution.  What insufferable inequities exist in modern capitalist societies often do because of statist interventions into the market – corporate welfare and subsidies, protections of industries and bailouts, and so forth (crony-capitalism to put it bluntly).  Governments are far better at shoring up power than at providing truly meaningful safety nets.   What little the state can do to reverse these inequities, almost always communities left alone to self-govern can do better.  [Read more →]

First, Michael wonders whether the concept of libertarianism-as-vector means that libertarianism can be a component of any and all lines of political thought, and asking ”what is it that distinguishes a libertarian qua person from someone who merely allows the libertarian vector a healthy role within her thought” if libertarianism is merely a vector?  Then Bob goes on to note that the libertarianism-as-vector concept that I stole from Jaybird (who stole it from an unknown source) appears to originate from an article that labels all political ideology as vector.  The implication, then, is presumably that these vectors are presumably at work within all of us at a given time.  I don’t know if Bob also intended to suggest this, but I think this also implies that political labels are truly meaningless for any purpose other than stating which vector a person believes carries the strongest priority at a given moment in time.

I think both Michael and Bob are basically right, here, particularly in suggesting that all ideologies are just impulse or vectors that reside in varying degrees within us all.  If this is true, then, why would it be important that there be a group of people who self-identify as libertarians in our national debates?

The answer to this is, I think, non-obvious.  But what it comes down to is this: depending on the core political philosophy with which we most readily identify, we are going to be more likely to ignore, more or less completely, our impulses that would ordinarily lead us in the opposite direction.  It’s a confirmation bias problem that can be solved only by listening to people whose philosophical underpinnings lead them to predominantly favor other vectors. 

What’s important to recognize here is that we all have philosophical underpinnings for our vectors that lead us to self-identify as libertarian, conservative, liberal, etc.  I think this is true whether or not we’ve actually read Hayek, Burke, Rawls, or Marx.  However, no philosophically pure state of any sort has ever existed as a stable society (maybe I’m wrong about this).  There’s never been a stable anarchic society in recorded history, nor has there ever been a stable large-scale society that has managed to completely block dynamism, nor has there ever been a purely egalitarian society.  Yet the lack of such societies does not invalidate any of these philosophical underpinnings, which are at root normative beliefs about the ultimate “good” that are simply unfalsifiable.   

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No one denies that our current system is simply not working.  No one denies that it causes a lot of unnecessary suffering.  To be sure, there are disagreements as to which aspects of the system are failing and which are causing unnecessary suffering. 

But the way in which conservatives and libertarians approach the issue often comes across as if we’re just proposing solutions for the sake of proposing solutions.  The impression left on the average person is that the interest in fixing the health care system is subservient to the interest in creating a freer market, even if what we actually believe is that the problems in the health care system are a result of lack of free markets.

For years, whenever you see a Dem or liberal discussing the health care issue, they almost always begin with an acknowledgement of the problem – the “57 million Americans are uninsured” refrain, or perhaps a story of someone who died as a result of lack of treatment or because they couldn’t get their insurance company to pay for treatment.  These stories and statistics tug at the heart strings, but more importantly they make people care about the issue because they make the issue relatable to those people, making them think “that could be me,” or in many cases “that is me.”  As importantly, they give the listener the impression that what follows is a good faith proposal to solve that problem, not some half-assed proposal that’s really intended to advance a broader ideological agenda.

When you hear a conservative or libertarian speaking about the issue, though, you rarely get an acknowledgement of the problem.  Instead, you may get a set of objections to the Dem proposal (usually including a rant about “socialized medicine”) or a statement that the free market solution is the better solution or some discussion of the areas of our health care system that are not the problem and that must be preserved and defended.

While Freddie’s argument is making a generalization, and it’s problematic to draw generalizations from one example, I think this exchange from one of the debates last year between McCain and Obama helps explain what I (and I think Freddie) am talking about:

Q: Is health care in America a privilege, a right, or a responsibility?

McCAIN: I think it’s a responsibility, in this respect, in that we should have available and affordable health care to every American citizen, to every family member. And with the plan that I have, that will do that. But government mandates I’m always a little nervous about. But it is certainly my responsibility. It is certainly small-business people and others, and they understand that responsibility. American citizens understand that. Employers understand that.

OBAMA: Well, I think it should be a right for every American. In a country as wealthy as ours, for us to have people who are going bankrupt because they can’t pay their medical bills–for my mother to die of cancer at the age of 53 and have to spend the last months of her life in the hospital room arguing with insurance companies–there’s something fundamentally wrong about that.

Notice how McCain just assumes that everyone, including himself, ”understands” their responsibility and, by extension, the problems in the health care system.  Obama, however, actually shows he understands the problem. It’s thus not surprising that the average person, who has neither a strong commitment to free market economics nor a strong commitment to government centralization, would decide that Obama’s discussion of the issue is more credible.  Again, this is true even if McCain’s proposal would better solve the problem.

And let’s be honest, the reason conservatives and libertarians rarely put the problem front and center is because our interest in improving health care is often a lower priority than our interest in defending free markets.  It’s not that we don’t care about health care reform, it’s that our ideological commitments force us to defend the ideology first: liberals and Democrats first diagnosed the problem and we’ve been doing little but play defense ever since. 

This isn’t to say that this is an inherent flaw in libertarianism and conservatism – after all, there’s no shame in believing that on a macro-level, freer markets solve more problems than they create, and there’s also no shame in defending your ideology against what you believe to be unfair and/or inaccurate criticisms.  It’s just to say that most people are a lot less concerned about some ultimate vision for society than they are about individual issues that affect their day-to-day lives.  If you don’t show that you understand how that individual issue affects their day-to-day lives, then you’re going to have a hard time convincing them that your solution is better.

For what it’s worth, I suspect that ultimately liberals and Democrats are going to face a similar problem on the issue of school choice.  There, conservatives and libertarians have the advantage because we’re talking about parents with children stuck in failing schools, while liberals and Democrats are left talking about how “public schools work!” (the equivalent of “the free market works!”), and warning about separation of church and state and privatized education (the equivalent of “socialized medicine!”).

I don’t know. I guess I don’t consider myself to be “a conservative” but rather consider the “conservative disposition” to be essential to the well-being of society.   Oakeshott resonates with me.  Limbaugh does not. [Read more →]