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 →]

Mark says it all too well:

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. [....]

Liberal wonks are not going out of their way to antagonize their base, calling them names, questioning their intelligence, and attacking their integrity.  The liberal base meanwhile does not go out of its way to antagonize its wonks, calling them names, questioning their loyalties, and attacking their integrity.  Instead what they are doing is lobbying each other, with the wonks making the base better informed about what should and should not be important, and the base making the wonks better informed about what is and is not politically possible.

Which leads me to this post at Right Wing News recounting some reactions to their “Least Favorite People on the Right Poll.”  After summarizing reactions from David Frum, Andrew Sullivan, and Charles Johnson (all of whom made the cut) John Hawkins writes:

See, this is why I find people like Frum, Conor Friesdorf, Kathleen Parker, David Brooks, Meghan McCain, etc., etc., so worthy of utter contempt.

Frum, runs a website called “A New Majority,” so one might presume he wants to a build a “New Majority” of some sort. Yet, look at the reality of what he is best known for doing: He attacks conservatives for the amusement of liberals. But, how do you build a “new majority” doing that?

Liberals have no interest in David Frum’s ideas. They simply want to use him as a stick to beat conservatives with. Conservatives obviously have no use for someone who drips with contempt for them — and moderates, well, being moderates, you can’t build anything with them. They simply don’t have the fire or the ideological coherency to build a movement around.

Out of this batch of squish “reformers,” the only one I have noticed who doesn’t fall into this trap consistently is Ross Douthat. I often don’t agree with Ross, but I at least respect him because he is smart enough to realize that if he is going to change the Republican Party, he is going to have to do it by bringing conservatives on board with his ideas, not by pooping in his hand and hurling it at the conservatives he doesn’t like.

Another perspective from Steve Benen:

If the political world had an honest, serious debate, in which credible experts explored real-world solutions, chances are very good progressive reform advocate would win. When it comes to health care and the broken system, the facts just aren’t on conservatives’ side. Indeed, the NYT piece noted some of the conflicts among conservative wonks who realize that a) they want to cut costs from the health care system; b) the most effective ways to save money in the system come from centralized, government decision-making; and c) they’re against centralized, government decision-making.

So, The Wonks don’t get invited to Tea Parties or onto Fox News. They don’t write nutty pieces for the Wall Street Journal editorial page. Their opinions are not sought out by Republican policymakers.

Instead, we’re left with liars and fools, spreading propaganda and nonsense, leaving us with a discourse unbefitting our democracy. It’s a shame the voice of the opposition is stark raving mad, and the idea of an enlightened debate is a naive daydream.

Lots to chew on…. [Read more →]

Jamelle’s post yesterday stimulated some thoughts in my head, not only about the question of why movement conservatives need to recognize that the Bush Administration’s failures are attributable to conservatism, but also about how Republicans can more quickly return to being a competent governing party.

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.

  [Read more →]

So Dan Miller critiqued me and conservatives in general for not talking about health policy enough, and he’s right.  We haven’t.  Part of this is because when it comes to government planning there is just so much to talk about.  If I were a progressive blogger I could talk about how we could plan this or that development, or structure this or that plan around our education system, or shape this or that policy to use the government to at once cover more people and save money doing etc. etc. etc..

Lots of charts and numbers and predictions would be at my fingertips.  Conservatives scorn social planning and therefore dismiss a lot of this wonkishness.  So you don’t have the elaborate plans that liberals do when it comes to something like health care.  (Ironically the most effective rebuttal to Waxman-Markey was via Jim Manzi who used lots of charts and other wonkish communication tools…)

Now, this is okay up to a point – conservatives shouldn’t want to map out everything as much as liberals do, because part of what conservatism stands for is organic, market-driven growth and individual choice.  But the problem with leaving it at that is that we are in fact stuck with a pretty massive state and we do need to have an exit strategy if we want to deregulate or have a shot at changing entitlements to better fit a conservative model – because, quite frankly, entitlements are popular.  They can be better managed then they are.  They can make better use of market solutions.  But they’re more than likely not going away, and maybe they shouldn’t.  We need safety nets.

Things like vouchers, and direct-payment rather than relying on lots of red-tape-adorned bureaucracies are good ideas that need to be more fleshed out.  Viable alternatives that don’t leave people thinking their health care or their social security would be left as vulnerable to a crash as their 401k’s were are important to articulate.

Conservatives need more wonks, plain and simple.  But the job of conservative wonks should be to plan out the gradual dismantling of big government without falling prey to all sorts of pitfalls that we’ve seen in the past – like hiring private contractors to do government work, both domestically and increasingly overseas.  Deregulatory capture is something I’m interested in but don’t know much about – though I think I know enough to believe that it’s a very real threat.

In any case, not to ramble, but I think a lot of things – from conservative takes on community-building and new urbanism to health care and better schools – all have a need of more in-depth, critical thought from the right of the aisle.  Blaming those damned liberals for everything will simply not do.  I think this is what I was touching on a bit in my post on distrust of government.  Sure, we should distrust it for its inefficiency and the ease with which it is manipulated by special interests, but we should also work to figure out how the bloody clock ticks.  If you can’t figure that out, then any attempt at dismantling it will fail.

Exit question: Why didn’t the Democrats just push Medicare expansion instead of a brand new program?  Wouldn’t that have been a lot safer and cheaper?  This has been raised in the comments and elsewhere.  I’m curious to know if this sort of thing would have been acceptable for progressives.  Certainly it would have been (I imagine) more palatable for conservatives.  It’s more palatable to me – just expand existing programs to cover essentially everyone who isn’t covered now, and then maybe start scaling toward more market-oriented solutions.  Try to get those benefits taxed to help pay for it, etc.