America needs politicians who stake out interesting, politically-courageous positions on important policy questions. What it doesn’t need is politicians who occupy the safest possible ground on the great issues of the day, shift slightly left or slightly right depending on the state of public opinion, and then get congratulated by the press for being so independent-minded.

To which Erik quipped,

Reading this, it struck me that there really are two kinds of so-called “moderates” out there. Or maybe even more. Maybe the term “moderate” or “centrist” is just a blanket term used to either applaud or tear down people with whom we agree or disagree.

I love Erik, I really do, but we seem to be on very different tracks right now. Pivoting on Ross’ post by slicing and dicing the various ways in which one may or may not be a moderate is not really the point here.

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Douthat is considered a “reasonable conservative” in liberal circles, but this column is downright nutty. It’s frightening enough that someone who attended school in a city as international as Boston could endorse the idea of viewing Muslims worldwide as a “foe” of Christianity.  But consider the fact that there are probably a number of people in charge of making foreign policy decisions in the last administration, who saw Christianity and Islam as “foes” and acted or advised accordingly. In fact, the march to war in Iraq despite the lack of evidence of weapons of mass destruction, the false linkage of Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, and even the argument that the use of torture is justified against Muslims are easily explained by the worldview of a person who sees Christianity and Islam as being “foes,” particularly if one sees America as a “Christian Nation.”*

I mean, what? Other than his willful misinterpretation of the word “foe,” I challenge Serwer to identify anything at all in Douthat’s column that endorses religious conflict between Muslims and Christians.

It’s true that Catholicism and Islam compete for spiritual converts. But this isn’t Lepanto or the Siege of Jerusalem. It’s a straightforward case of religious pluralism, with both faiths striving to attract adherents through persuasion and institutional expansion. Are secularists like Serwer threatened by a robust public competition between Islam and Christianity? And if so, why?

The assumption that seems to undergird this line of thinking is that religious leaders should always avoid public agreement. This strikes me as both hopelessly naive and antithetical to the very idea of religious faith. Islam and Catholicism are spiritual cousins, but both faiths also have serious doctrinal differences. Denying these distinctions empties religion of any meaning other than some vague, Unitarian-lite belief in a higher power, which does serious violence to two venerable theological traditions.

*I also think Bush deserves some credit for distancing his (admittedly disastrous) foreign policy from any religious conflict.

Perhaps we’re getting at what puzzles and galls me so much about recent posts at The League of Ordinary Gentlemen about how dissident conservative writers ought to conduct themselves. The notion is that these writers should assess an ideological subset of the American public, discern their sensibilities, and craft all subsequent writing so as not to offend them. What a fool’s errand. There are times when people react badly to hearing the truth plainly stated. It is a journalist’s job to tell them that truth anyway, as forthrightly and accurately as one can put it.

Although I don’t wish to speak for Freddie, Jamelle, or E.D., this seems to miss the point of our critiques entirely.

Our point has nothing to do with insisting that Conor or anyone else soft-pedal their critiques of Limbaugh, et al, although those attacks may well have the effect of making matters worse.  It certainly does not suggest that reform-minded conservatives should refrain from objecting to torture or the conduct of the War on Terror or civil liberties violations by the Bush Administration – quite the contrary, Ron Paul’s growing influence on conservatism shows that it is possible to passionately dissent without forfeiting the ability to move conservatism in your direction.  Nor do I think we are suggesting that Conor or any other specific reform-minded conservative is to blame for the current state of the Republican Party.

No, the point is that reform conservatives need to recognize that there is an ideological problem with conservatism as currently constituted as an amalgam of libertarianism, hawkishness, and religious fundamentalism that leaves modern conservatism incapable of governing well or ethically.  It is all well and good to criticize the Bush Administration or to take issue with talk radio, but until reform conservatives recognize what caused the Bush Administration’s faults and the hyper-vitriol of talk radio, they will be unable to do anything about it.

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This is sloppy reasoning. It treats conservatism as though it is indistinguishable from the Republican Party and the Bush Administration — as though a political philosophy and an American political coalition are the same things — and it proceeds to make a rather stunning implicit assertion: that if one objects that conservatism isn’t responsible for some ill, one must necessarily believe that no one is responsible for it.

I am broadly sympathetic to this type of argument, but I’ve come to realize that it largely misses Freddie’s point, which I take to be a criticism not of any specific strain of conservatism but rather of the notion that modern movement conservatism is a salvageable governing philosophy.  In other words, as I wrote this morning:

Individually, each of the various forms of conservatism can present a viable philosophy of governance such that no individual strain of conservatism can bear the brunt of the blame for conservatism’s failings.  Collectively, however, the need to keep each strain within the tent leaves conservatism as a movement incapable of governing well on the national level based on the issues this country faces at this moment.

Regardless, Conor’s point above fails for a more basic reason insofar as it is specifically an attempt to defend Douthat against Freddie’s criticism: Douthat himself does not distinguish between the conservative movement and the GOP.  Indeed, in his remarks at Princeton University yesterday, he spent several minutes explaining why he views the conservative movement and the GOP as “interchangeable” terms. 

Again, it may be that no individual strain of conservatism can be viewed as consistent with the activities of the Bush Administration.  But collectively, the amalgamation of all those strains of conservatism into one master ideology is what not only enabled those activities, it perhaps made them inevitable.  For that, those interested in the notion of a conservative “movement” need to be prepared to accept responsibility if conservatism is to emerge from the wilderness as not merely an electable movement, but also a competent and coherent one capable of governing.

One thing that made this panel so worthwhile was that it provided a good cross-section of the various schools of thought that have largely made up the conservative coalition for the last 30 or so years.  Equally notable was that even though each speaker represented an individual strain of conservatism, each speaker was also something of a dissident that would be readily labeled a RINO by most movement conservatives. [Read more →]

And finally, I wonder how Douthat explains away Northern Europe’s high economic growth rates and robust welfare states?

I’m no economist, but I think this has something to do with the fact that government in Northern Europe, while large, is effectively limited and rather efficient. Denmark, for example, enjoys low trade barriers, a largely unrestricted labor market, and excellent protections for civil liberties. If I thought Obama was about to embark on the Denmark-ization of America, I’d probably be a lot more sanguine about the next four to eight years. Instead, our European trajectory seems to point south, with trade barriers slapped on as a sop to political constituencies, a health care reform package that hinges on subsidizing massive insurance corporations (regulatory capture, anyone?), and a stimulus bill that handed out goodies to just about every special interest imaginable. In other words, our political future looks more Mediterranean than Scandinavian, which should worry just about anyone familiar with Greek, Italian or Spanish politics.

Jamelle persuasively argues that taxation can be effective at reducing income inequality, but that’s only one half of the equation. The point of redistributive taxation isn’t to soak the rich – raising taxes, after all, imposes economic penalties. The larger goal is to improve the lot of poor and middle class citizens through redistributive programs. If the effectiveness of those programs is compromised by the Democratic Party’s core constituencies – teacher unions, the pro-immigration lobby – then perhaps it’s time to reconsider the scope of the Left’s political ambitions. This, to me, is one of Douthat’s better arguments, and I’m not sure that Jamelle has refuted it yet. If we are going to tax only to spend irresponsibly, I’d rather not tax at all.

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?

Three hours, two cups of coffee, and a nice helping of sense later, I think I can safely say that my original assessment was a little…off.  First, here’s Douthat in his own words:

America has had its share of disastrous chief executives. But few have gone as far as Bush did in trying to repair their worst mistakes. Those mistakes were the Iraq war — both the decision to invade and the conduct of the occupation — and the irrational exuberance that stoked the housing bubble. The repairs were the surge, undertaken at a time when the political class was ready to abandon Iraq to the furies, and last fall’s unprecedented economic bailout.

Both fixes remain controversial. But for the moment, both look like the sort of disaster-averting interventions for which presidents get canonized. It’s just that in Bush’s case, the disasters he averted were created on his watch. [...]

And perhaps his best decisions, on the surge and the bailout, were made from the bunker of a seemingly-ruined presidency — when his approval ratings had bottomed out, his credibility was exhausted and his allies had abandoned him.

This is not a blueprint that future presidents will want to follow. But the next time an Oval Office occupant sees his popularity dissolve and his ambitions turn to dust, he can take comfort from Bush’s example. It suggests that it’s possible to become a good president even — or especially — when you can no longer hope to be a great one.

I’m not sure how much of this is the fault of the medium rather than the messenger, but I don’t think Douthat quite grasps the gravity of President Bush’s mistakes.  The Iraq War wasn’t just a run-of-the-mill piece of unfortunate, but easily corrected, policy.  It was – and is – a strategic and humanitarian disaster of the highest order.  Over the course of six years, the United States has squandered trillions of dollars, destroyed hundreds of thousands of lives and done almost irreparable damage to Iraq’s social fabric.  In retrospect, the surge was a welcome breath of pragmatism from the Bush administration, but even with that (limited) success in mind, it’s incredibly difficult to say that President Bush “fixed” anything.

The same goes for the financial crisis.  While there’s plenty of blame to go around for the collapse of the housing market and subsequent collapse of the financial system, it’s fair to say that the Bush administration deserves a fair amount of blame for stoking the “irrational exuberance” that in turn stoked the housing bubble.  What’s more, the twin collapses have yielded a tremendous amount of suffering, especially among the poor and working-class.  Since the recession officially began in December 2007, the country has had a net loss of about 5 percent of its non-farm payroll, the brunt of that borne by the most economically insecure members of our society.  The bailouts and TARP were certainly good moves by the administration, and should be recognized as such despite their flaws, but again, to say that those make up for the initial failures is a bit of a stretch.

And I guess that’s my main complaint with Douthat’s column.  To borrow a phrase from President Bush, what Douthat has written is a classic example of the “soft bigotry of low expectations.”  Saying that we should applaud President Bush for taking steps to salvage his disastrous presidency is like praising a roommate for cleaning up a bit after trashing the apartment.  Not only should the place never have been trashed to begin with, but cleaning up after oneself is a matter of course and not particularly praiseworthy.

Update: I left out a pretty critical part of the Douthat column.