Round 2 of the debate on the future of the American Right between John Hawkins of Right Wing News and Conor Friedersdorf is up.  It is again quite civilized even as both participants remain unapologetic and honest about their positions. 

Hawkins opens with a couple of haymakers, but also throws some straw men into the debate when he treats “moderates” as indistinguishable from “reformers.”  He notes, correctly, that few of the Bush Administration’s worst abuses were “conservative” in any meaningful sense, but also makes the unsupportable statement that these policies were ”a case where conservative politicians were convinced by people of Conor’s ideological temperament to abandon conservative governance, and it led to disaster.”   The reality of course is that the advocates of many of these policies came from both the movement and what is now the reformist camp.   They were in large part the result of political strategists (who, again, fall into both camps) filling the policy void left in a party without any kind of unifying positive agenda, as I’ve argued before.  Indeed, many of the reformist criticisms of the Bush Administration are precisely the same as the criticisms by the movement – specifically, that the Bush Administration pursued an un-conservative agenda. 

After missing this right hook, Hawkins then lands a doozy in discussing why movement conservatives don’t trust the reformers, noting that the reformers often seem more interested in throwing personal jabs at the Right, disowning conservatism, and supporting the Left than in actually working with the Right.  This is followed with a right-left combination, as Hawkins asks “Why do the people who get accused of being racists, xenophobes, and too dumb to understand politics always have to be the ones who forgive while the same blockheads who never learn from their mistakes insist on getting their way again?”  The first punch in the combination on racism and xenophobia hits home hard – it’s tough to earn someone’s trust if you’re making claims like that about them.  The second punch – “learn from their mistakes…” – misses because it again ignores that the mistakes of recent years came from strategists from both camps running the show rather than wonks or the base itself.

Notably, Hawkins sprinkles in a few successful blocks by conceding that the base exhibited too much partisan loyalty to Bush throughout the first term and that there needs to be more open discussion of ideas in the conservative media (though he tries to throw a gratuitous cheap shot that the Left is less willing to openly discuss ideas than the Right – obviously Hawkins doesn’t read many liberal blogs). 

Conor, however, comes back swinging, wearing Hawkins down with some strong blocks and dodges.  He opens his part of the round by narrowing the issues beautifully, conceding a number of Hawkins’ best points from Hawkins’ first post.  Then he goes on the attack with a magnificent roundhouse, writing “As a conservative, I presume you believe, as the Founders did, that political power tends to corrupt. Indeed, long experience teaches that all political and ideological movements sooner or later tend to become corrupted, intellectually lazy, blind to internal weaknesses, captive to orthodoxies of thought, and forgetful of their ostensible ends.

How can the right mitigate these ills so that when Republicans return to power, they’ll govern effectively? You’d think answering that question would be an urgent priority, especially for movement conservatives who regard today’s Republican Party as out of touch at best, and corrupt at worst, even as they pine for its return to power. But I can’t recall ever seeing the matter addressed, except by folks who are dismissively derided as “conservative dissidents.” This analysis applies whether the Republican Party moves to the right or to the center, whether or not it more successfully wins minority voters, etc.”

Yes, yes, a thousand times yes.  This is in many ways exactly the point that I’ve been trying to make for weeks now.  This little flurry brings the crowd to its feet, shouting “Conor! Conor! Conor!”

And Conor isn’t even done.  He follows this punishing sequence with some very hard truths about the policy issues facing this country: welfare isn’t the problem, middle class entitlements are; the looming pension crisis; defense cuts; and the fiscal limits on our foreign policy. 

This sequence puts Hawkins on the ropes, and Conor looks poised for the knockout.  But just before the bell rings, Conor runs out of steam and throws a few weak punches denigrating the quality of the conservative media as compared to the quality of the explicitly liberal media.  This series of punches misses because it’s not clearly tied with the theme of the rest of Conor’s argument and Conor lacked the time at the end of the post to set this line of argument up properly.  The truncated resulting argument thus comes off as unconvincing and quite likely as a gratuitous shot at conservatives that Hawkins will no doubt use heavily to his advantage in the final round. 

Still, the first 3/4 of Conor’s round were near-flawless and landed some clear haymakers, where Hawkins’ round was inconsistent despite landing some solid blows.  Friedersdorf wins the second round of a tough fight.  After two rounds, I have it scored 19-all.  However, had Conor left out the last paragraph, Hawkins may well have suffered a knock-down that would have left the round 10-8.

Be extremely subtle, even to the point of formlessness. Be extremely mysterious, even to the point of soundlessness. Thereby you can be the director of the opponent’s fate.

Confront them with annihilation, and they will then survive; plunge them into a deadly situation, and they will then live. When people fall into danger, they are then able to strive for victory.

Sun Tzu – The Art of War

I’m still trying to decide if Conor is willfully misreading me or if this is simply a rhetorical tit-for-tat.  Conor pounces on the title of my “strategy” for taking responsibility for the conservative movement – which I flippantly called the Trojan Horse Strategy.  If you recall, the Trojan Horse is a story from Homer.  In it the Greeks (think dissident conservatives) built a big wooden horse and filled it with some Greek fighters and then left it on the doorstep of the city of Troy.  They then pretended to sail away.  The Trojans (think: conservative movement) unwittingly brought the horse inside thinking it was a parting gift and were roundly beaten by the Greeks who sneaked out, unlocked the gates, and let their hiding army inside.s

Okay – so it’s a terrible analogy for what I’m trying to do.  I’m not trying to “defeat” the conservative movement, after all.  Just change it for the better.  My point is simply this: quit hurling spears at the walls of the conservative movement in vain.  Don’t you see, the only way to make a real, lasting difference is to get inside?  And to do that you use this big wooden horse and then….yeah.  Terrible analogy.

But that was my point, bad analogy or no.  I fleshed it out with some nice bullet points like 1) don’t alienate the base; 2) don’t alienate the independents; 3) try to reconcile social, fiscal, and defense conservatives; 4) try to nudge these groups in a more practical, productive, and ultimately good-for-the-country direction – etc.  (Nudge is key here.  I think it is more effective than denouncing people as racists or calling their radio show hosts out as bigots or as “rude” or whatever…see the above Sun Tzu quote….)

Anyways.  Here’s Conor’s take: [Read more →]

Reading Ross Douthat’s (terrible) column this morning, I really only have three thoughts:

1) Someone should tell him to shy away from writing policy columns; not only is he not very good at them, but he has this very strange aversion to, you know, facts.

2) On that note, if Douthat had taken a little bit of time to research, he would have quickly found that despite having a progressive federal income tax, the average tax rate for the richest 400 Americans is 17.2 percent.  What’s more, the effective tax rate for the richest 1 percent of Americans is about 31 percent, which is quite low in historical terms.  Contra Douthat then, the tax code isn’t even really that progressive on the margins, in a variety of ways, it offers a whole host of breaks and deductions for the wealthiest Americans, at the expense of services for everyone else.

3) I find it very strange that Douthat would write an entire column criticizing Democrats for having yet to deliver on promises to reduce income inequality without once mentioning that said inequality has been stoked by conservative enthusiasm for massive tax cuts/giveaways for wealthy Americans.  Or, to put it more succinctly, hidebound teachers unions and illegal immigration certainly doesn’t help us tackle the root causes of inequality, but it’s extremely disingenuous for Douthat to argue that the tax code is basically irrelevant to this discussion.  It’s not.  The incomes of high earners rose dramatically in large part because we stopped taxing them.  So again, pace Douthat, the single best thing we can do to reduce income inequality – in the short-term at least – is to simply tax the rich more, either by raising marginal tax rates, reinstating the tax on capital gains, or – better yet – instituting a continuous marginal tax (which I discussed briefly here).

4) And finally, I wonder how Douthat explains away northern Europe’s high economic growth rates and robust welfare state?

The thing that bothers me most about this New York Times piece on the efficacy of sex offender alert programs is… that it focuses on the efficacy of sex offender alert programs, and doesn’t bother to raise any objections to the idea of a sex offender alert program.  Indeed, it’s pretty much taken for granted that everyone wants some sort of program or registry that catalogs and monitors sex offenders.  So, at the risk of sounding objectively pro-sex offender, I’m going to say that I’m a more than a little uncomfortable with the idea of a sex offender alert program, and sex offender registries more generally.

The practical objections are pretty straightforward and are worth repeating.  For starters, the definition of “sex offender” is impossibly broad and varies from state to state.  In Virginia, for instance, a sixteen year old who has a sexual relationship with his fourteen year old girlfriend would would “qualify” as a sex offender, due to Virginia law giving sex offender status to anyone having sexual relations with someone under the age of 15.  And if, for whatever reason, he was arrested, prosecuted and convicted for having sex with his girlfriend, he would have earned himself a permanent spot on Virginia’s sex offender registry.  Indeed, that’s a relatively benign example; in several states, crimes like public nudity or public urination warrant inclusion on a sex offender registry.  Unsurprisingly, this loose definition of sex offender has left us with a ridiculously high number of registered sex offenders.  By the Economist’s count (and I recommend that you read the whole article), there are 674,000 registered sex offenders in the U.S., and considering the huge range of crimes which warrant registration, there’s no question that a plurality – or even a majority – of those are unfairly listed as sex offenders. Which is made all the more problematic when you consider that sex offender registries often don’t provide enough information for the reader to make a judgment on whether or not the person in question is actually dangerous.

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