I have learned far more about healthcare reform than I ever thought I would in recent months.  In the end, what leaps out at me is that this issue – unresolved – will become a more and more of a thorn in conservative’s side.  If people think the Tea Party phenomenon is bad, just wait until a real populist movement rises up that is fundamentally opposed to free trade, that wants more rather than less government, that demands protectionist policies and entitlements.  The one thing which I can see spurring on something like this more than any other issue is a combination of poor employment and poor (and expensive) healthcare.  Is it so hard to imagine the Tea Partier who wants government to keep its hands off his Medicare, to be turned into an advocate of protectionist policies?

The current reform bill is not nearly liberal enough to avoid such a movement, nor is it conservative enough to really put into place any real chance at a market solution.  It keeps the lousy system we have in place now, and adds to it a tremendous cost to the middle class.  Furthermore, I see no future political will to actually implement any true market solution for healthcare.  So Republicans should think about ways to make national healthcare more sustainable via market mechanisms (choice, HSA’s, etc.) while still accepting the fact that an overall national/social model will be adopted eventually.  Otherwise healthcare will likely persist as an issue and Republicans will be increasingly on the losing side of that issue.

I think the best model would probably be something like single payer plus health savings accounts.  Make people of whatever income responsible for basic healthcare costs, but protect them from really damaging bills.  Free up businesses and entrepreneurs from the chains of healthcare uncertainty.  Somehow find a way to increase the supply of healthcare; and work toward means by which we can make cheaper, alternative healthcare solutions more available.  Alternatively we could adopt something like Wyden-Bennett.  My reluctance to support this bill, pure ideological concerns aside, is that I worry it will only help persist the status quo, and the status quo is no good.

Whether there is a reasonable alternative is harder to say.  Federalism is quickly going out of style – and the next real national movement may be a unity of tea partiers and union members, social conservatives and progressives – the sort of movement Mark has predicted, but one that is bereft of libertarian and free trade principles.  What would that do to our trade policies?  To our employment rate and productivity?

Suffice to say, for anyone with a libertarian economic outlook, or for anyone with concerns over civil liberties, this should be a concern.  Perhaps fending it off with a reasonable compromise on healthcare reform would actually make a great deal of sense.

“I don’t want to say that liberaltarianism is dead. But is it endangered? Sure. It deserves to be.” ~ Jason Kuznicki

I think the hopes placed in the Obama administration by libertarians have been fairly well dashed at this point.  On civil-liberties issues and on economic issues, the President has not gone nearly far enough to end the bad practices of the last administration, or to promote anything like market solutions to the many problems facing the country.  Jason goes on to write:

If libertarians seem more conservative lately, it’s not only that we’ve been pushed away by the left. Attendees at this year’s CPAC ranked “reducing size of federal government” and “reducing government spending” as by far their highest policy priorities. They also chose Ron Paul as their preferred presidential candidate. Those same attendees even booed speaker Ryan Sorba for condemning gay Republicans:

I’m not sure the left-libertarian alliance was ever really meant to be anything more than a fragile oppositional alliance to the big-spenders masquerading as conservatives during the Bush years, united by a common antipathy over the wars and the infringements upon civil liberties.  I know Mark has hopes that a populist left-right alliance could rise from the ashes of the current establishment, but I see the fundamental divide between Tea Partiers and progressives as too wide a gap for anything but a similarly tenuous & oppositional alliance.

[Read more →]

The race is now on around what end of the political spectrum to place Joseph Stack, the clearly very disturbed man who crashed his single-engine plan into a building in Austin, Texas that housed IRS employees, against whom — the IRS — he apparently launched himself on a kamikaze mission yesterday. Opinions vary around whether Stacks motives for the act come from a right wing or a left wing bent and no doubt the debate will rage on given the broad nature of what is being referred to as Stack’s “manifesto”.

But at the end of the day, I’m with Michael Tomasky who writes that the point really is moot,

Stack was in fact angry at everyone. Angry at the IRS. Angry at the government generally. Angry at unions. But also angry at corporate greed and at rich people and at “thugs and plunderers” of various stripe.

Not only do I think the point is moot, I don’t think it matters nearly as much as to ask why Joseph Stacks did what he did. What were the conditions that lead to such a heinous and violent act?

[Read more →]

Scott has a thoughtful follow-up to my anti-pettiness screed.  I want to point out, however, that far more than the problems with populism, I was writing about the problems with elites manipulating it for their own purposes – which, in a sense, is the problem with populism.  It is not so much that the huddled masses are wrong, or not to be trusted, or any of that.  It is that they are all busy people.  They have kids.  They work for a living.  They don’t have as much time, money, or education as the elites do.  They don’t have the connections or the wherewithal or the behind-the-scenes knowledge of the political system. They’re not as connected to government or the media.  This doesn’t make them foolish or ignorant or bad.  Quite the contrary. 

In many ways the people out there opposing the Iraq war or the tea-partiers out there opposing big government or any of these grassroots groups are good people, honorable people doing good and important work.  Scott is involved in some activist efforts up in Canada, and if people didn’t get involved at the grassroots level or with politics in general, we’d be in much worse shape than we are now.  I am not against this sort of popular politics.  Indeed, we have a Democratic Republic so that we can elect representatives to do our will, to some degree, and in order for them to really understand our will a little bit of populism is necessary and vital to the health of our democracy.

But it can be misused and abused by the very people who so often populist anger ought to be directed.  And right now I believe we’re seeing a Republican leadership that is disingenuously manipulating populist sentiment against the president and the Democrats.  (I would argue that Obama has done much the same thing by running a very populist campaign and then following it up with a very insider-oriented administration.  He’s simply more charming than his Republican rivals.)  They are stooping to petty rhetoric and exaggeration and sometimes outright lies to rile up the base against a president who they describe as “radical” and worse. 

Now, I have no problem with opposition.  I think the Republicans should oppose Obama in many ways.  They are well within their rights and indeed within their obligations to do so.  It’s the pettiness and the dishonesty of their methods which rub me the wrong way, and I believe they stoop to these methods in order to gain populist support.  And populists are vulnerable to these elite leaders because the elites have everything the populists don’t have – high podiums, connections, funding, and so forth.  It’s a dysfunctional relationship, and one played out time and again throughout history.

So when I see Newt Gingrich on the Daily Show calling Obama a radical because we read a terrorist his rights on American soil, I just cringe.  It sounds ludicrous to me, because it is ludicrous.  We’re not talking about reading some enemy combatant over in Iraq or Afghanistan their rights after we capture them.  We’re talking about a guy we caught in a plane landing in Detroit.  There is a difference.  And of course, there is precedent with the Shoe Bomber, just as there is precedent with trying terrorists in non-military courts as George W. Bush did over five hundred times during his presidency.  Gingrich and other ostensibly smart people should know better than to dress this up as some “radical” anti-American and dangerous practice. But they do it because they believe it stokes the fires of angry populist sentiment in America, and because they want to be in charge of the narrative however absurd and petty that narrative may become.

Has it always been thus?  I suppose it has, to one degree or another.  Nor are the dividing lines so easy to define.  Some elitism is just as necessary as some populism.  Indeed, we can’t really do away with any of it can we?  The point is, however, that we can do away with some of the pettiness, some of the dishonesty, and shoot for more reason and integrity.  We don’t have to be nice or amicable either.  We don’t have to ditch partisanship in favor of some mythical bipartisan Utopia.  We can be partisan and honest at the same time.  We can be partisan and still not so petty.

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.

It is impossible to understand politics in the United States over the last 12 months without some in-depth discussion of the impact of the Tea Party movement.  Over the course of the last several days, I had the good fortune to engage in a dialogue with Stephen Gordon about a wide range of Tea Party-related topics, including what the Tea Party movements are about, where they’re going, what their influence has been and will be, and whether there is the possibility of a right-left alliance under the Tea Party umbrella.  There are, frankly, few people as qualified as Gordon to discuss these topics, as he’s been partying with tea since long before it was cool, having helped organize a successful state-level Tea Party in Alabama as early as 2003.  Gordon has also been heavily involved in libertarian politics for a number of years, including acting as Communications Director for Michael Badnarik’s 2004 campaign, and e-Campaign manager for Bob Barr’s 2008 campaign.  Recently, he’s appeared several times on the Rachel Maddow Show, and contributes to several well-regarded blogs, including the Liberty Papers, the Next Right, and Examiner.com.  He is now the Director of Media Relations for the political consulting firm Forward Focus Media.

MT: It’s quite clear that the Tea Party movement is primarily a grassroots-based movement without any clear leaders.  Moreover, although the Tea Party movement seems to be primarily focused on government spending, there have been numerous documented Tea Party-affiliated protests focusing on anything from the Democratic health care reform bills to illegal immigration.  Is there any kind of coordination of message that takes place within the movement, and if not, what would you say is the common theme that runs through all of the Tea Party organizations?

SG: This is a point I tried to make the other night on Rachel Maddow’s show.  If there had been enough time to elaborate, I would have stated because these are grassroots operations led in many places by people with no political experience, they are ripe for takeovers by established political organizations.  Obviously, organizations taking over elements of the movement have their own agendas. What I see most often is an attempt to guide the Tea Party movement to do what they initially opposed: re-electing politics-as-normal big-government Republicans.

 To me, healthcare is a very relevant topic for Tea Parties.  Immigration, abortion, foreign policy or even reform of marijuana laws, not so much.  I’ve been vocal about this in the past.  

Because of the nature of the movement, top-down coordination of the message can’t be planned by Karl Rove.  This also means that each Tea Party event or organization will have a slightly different flavor.  If I was in charge of the movement, my message would be one of fiscal responsibility. This encompasses deficit spending, corporate bailouts, stimulus packages, the current health care legislation, etc.  To a great degree, this is also the message of my Tea Party groups I’ve encountered. This, in my opinion, is a good thing.

MT: How do the Tea Parties overcome this problem of co-option, which seems to infect grassroots movements of all political stripes?  Is some sort of organized – and independent – top-down leadership eventually going to be necessary, or can the Tea Parties maintain their momentum without maintaining a narrow focus on fiscal issues?

SG: I’d offer any Tea Party organization the same general advice. First of all, stick to a single or narrow range of issues.  Every time a new, and especially an unrelated, issue is introduced the movement will lose supporters. Second, develop organic lists. Make sure you obtain e-mail addresses, phone numbers, etc. at every event and from as many website visits as possible. Third, don’t let them take you over but make them come to you. Alabama Tea Party activists just held a gubernatorial debate and straw poll and their favorite candidate was made apparent. Had that particular movement been co-opted, I’m sure the result would have been different. 

While the laws  vary by location, if any local movement becomes large or influential enough, state and federal laws are eventually going to force some legal organizational entity to be formed. This will require a bit more top-down approach in some regard, but hopefully the Tea Party groups will be very mindful of the grassroots activists who made their organizations possible in the first place.

MT:Changing gears slightly, many commentators certainly have questioned where the Tea Partiers’ anger was during the Bush Administration’s spending orgies, not to mention the bank bailouts.  This isn’t to say that all of the Tea Partiers can be accused of suddenly discovering their passions when the Democrats took over in Washington – obviously, libertarians like you and your old boss Bob Barr, not to mention Ron Paul’s legions, have been banging this drum for a long while.  But why has the rise of the Tea Parties seemingly coincided with the Democrats – and President Obama - obtaining overwhelming power in Washington? [Read more →]

I can see where Jane Hamsher’s tea-party/populist left united front thing could seem appealing as a movement against something (the no-good politicians in Congress and their corporate special-interest shenanigans).   [Read more →]

Scott: So, ’tis the season where we annually get into the inimitable argument over whether people should be saying, “Merry Christmas” or “Happy Holidays”, whether there ought to be school plays involving the birth of the baby Jesus or not, and where everyone gets a little twitchy from hearing the same old songs mind numbingly lilting out of every speaker in ear shot. It’s time for the War on Christmas/Pluralism — depending on your point of view.

As a long defunct Christian, I’ve never really understood why the arguably most dominant religious pocket on the entire continent gets so bent out of shape over the idea that some folks would like to not feel pressured or forced into participating in a holiday that their religion just doesn’t recognize. I mean, as one friend once said to me, “We swim in a sea of Christianity here in North America.” So why the big brouhaha over some folks pushing back and saying, “You know, that’s not my bag. Decorate your home however you like, but don’t make me sit through your religious rituals. I don’t make you sit through mine!”

Am I missing something here?

Erik: If you haven’t read Julian Sanchez on the “politics of ressentiment” then you should. I think the idea of a “war on Christmas” is largely grown out of this sense of ressentiment (which also animates much of what drives the conservative base in the larger cultural/political wars. [Read more →]

A few weeks ago, The Nation had a great editorial on breaking up the banks:

The heart of our predicament is the Too Big to Fail (TBTF) problem. Banks have grown so large that they can’t go down without threatening the whole system. Reforming the financial sector thus means breaking up TBTF conglomerates and reinstating the Glass-Steagall Act, with its firewall between investment and commercial banking.

The media have labeled the break-up-the-banks camp as the most “liberal” or “left” option, the bankers’ position as the most conservative (also the one the GOP in Congress will courageously defend) and the White House position as the sensible, Goldilocks compromise.

But while critics of reinstating Glass-Steagall dismiss it as wildly impractical, it is supported by a roster of people who hardly count as liberals: John Reed, former head of Citigroup; Mervyn King, governor of the Bank of England; and, most notably and vocally, Paul Volcker, ex-Fed chair and current chair of the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board.

My knowledge of financial regulation is sadly lacking, but this strikes me as an excellent idea. As the editorial points out, breaking up large financial institutions largely avoids the problem of regulatory capture. Instead of crafting sophisticated banking guidelines hand-in-glove with industry insiders, it relies on a fairly blunt instrument – the separation of commercial and investment banks – to reform the financial sector.

Moreover, this approach seems less complicated (and potentially less costly) for the banks themselves. In place of some some exotic regulatory scheme, large financial institutions are left with a simple mandate: don’t mix investment and commercial banking.

As I said, I think this is a sound approach to financial reform. But I also think the politics of a “break up the banks” platform are tailor-made for a smart conservative populist. Populism of the conservative variety is supposed to be more concerned with the concentration of political and economic power than free market purism. “Too big to fail” banks – whose very existence holds taxpayer dollars hostage to the threat of systemic failure – are the embodiment of centralized financial clout. Yet despite the persistent aftershocks of one of the biggest economic collapses in modern history, the cause of financial reform continues to languish behind debates over health care and the stimulus.

Fetishizing the electorate’s prejudices is not a blueprint for responsible governance, but at its best, populism is a useful corrective to the insularity and narrow-mindedness of the governing class. The current debate over financial reform – dominated as it is by insiders who are either content with the status quo or satisfied by a few minor regulatory changes – seems ripe for a populist counter-reaction.

So far, the conservative response to the bailout has been strikingly incoherent. Other than vague noises about limited government and lower taxes, the tea party movement is largely bereft of new ideas, and their political leaders are scarcely better. It is striking, for example, that Matthew Continetti’s long encomium to Palin’s populist persuasion is void of any platform that could be meaningfully distinguished from bog-standard Republican orthodoxy. Whatever one thinks of William Jennings Bryan and Andrew Jackson (Palin’s ideological precursors, according to Continetti), both were associated with readily identifiable policies that broke with contemporary political orthodoxies. Palin and other would-be conservative populists, on the other hand, are left with tired old nostrums and little else.

The bank bailout has stuck taxpayers with an enormous bill. The contrast between a government-subsidized Wall Street recovery and skyrocketing unemployment rates could not be more stark. An infuriating new report alleges that Obama’s  Treasury Secretary overpaid his former employer (not to mention other major firms) for worthless derivatives. Despite this obvious political opening, conservatives like Palin are more interested in book sales and stoking cultural resentment than crafting a response that taps into this populist zeitgeist. If conservative populism is to become something more than a bundle of cultural grievances and tea party slogans, it should latch onto a program that addresses serious concerns and grasps the importance of diluting concentrated political and economic power. Breaking up the banks that got us into this mess would be an ideal place to start.

The interesting thing about Glenn Beck is that aside from being completely crazy, his substantive views on policy (if someone like Beck can be described as having substantive views on anything) are about as far as you can get from doctrinaire Republicanism. In a widely circulated post from last week, Glenn Greenwald explains how Beck gives voice to transpartisan anti-establishment sentiment. Andrew Sullivan has also noticed that Beck’s foreign policy views – a mish-mash or “more rubble, less trouble” and nascent non-interventionism – differ substantially from conservative orthodoxy.

So while Republican congressmen may ape Beck’s anti-establishment rhetoric, they don’t come close to endorsing the substance of his libertarian-ish views. Similarly, Beck’s newfound suspicion of the Patriot Act or his isolationist rhetoric have not exactly caught fire with the RNC.

Movement organs have been willing to promote Beck’s crusade against ACORN and his attack on former green jobs czar Van Jones, however. In the grand scheme of things, these issues are incredibly trivial, but they allow the Republican Party to channel popular enthusiasm into an issue that doesn’t highlight the profound differences between people who sympathize with Beck’s anti-establishment rhetoric and people who basically buy into Republican Party orthodoxy. Liberals have correctly noted that the ACORN sting and the resignation of a minor administration functionary aren’t really that important, which is precisely why movement operatives are so eager to latch on to them. Trumpeting Beck’s hidden camera antics is a way for Republicans to coopt libertarian/conservative populism without making any real concessions to the genuinely radical critique embodied by the Tea Party Movement.

I read Steven Hayward’s article on intellectual conservatism with some interest, mainly because I thought Hayward – as a scholar with the American Enterprise Institute and frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard – would have enough movement credibility to convincingly argue that talk radio populists aren’t conservatism’s best standard bearers. The substance of this critique has been around for awhile, and anyone who frequents this site is probably already familiar with the case against Happy Meal Conservatism. Hayward’s article, however, seems tailor-made for a skeptical audience – unlike perennial talk radio-bashers David Frum or Andrew Sullivan,  he is incredibly (some would say overly) solicitous of the Becks and Limbaughs of the world. The piece makes no mention of Beck’s questionable history, praises his “intellectual curiosity,” and readily acknowledges the importance of conservatism’s populist roots.

So it was depressing to hear the exact same epithets that are routinely hurled at a Sullivan or a Frum directed at Hayward, who was immediately derided as elitist and out of touch with the movement’s grassroots for criticizing conservative populism. The closest I’ve come to finding an actual refutation of Hayward’s arguments is from Redstate’s Erick Erickson, who seems to have given up on defending the conservative movement’s intellectual bona fides in favor of denying that a lack of carefully thought-out policy ideas is a problem in the first place.

It is not surprising to read the Right’s vituperative reaction to, say, David Brooks’ latest column on talk radio. Whatever his faults, Brooks, at least, has never been a movement hack. But if people aren’t willing to give someone like Hayward a respectful hearing, I wonder what it will take to convince the base that following Levin, Limbaugh and Beck off a cliff isn’t a blueprint for conservative revival. At this point, one suspects that if Glenn Beck renounced his talk radio populism tomorrow, he would immediately be dismissed as a traitorous elitist.