Conservatism

"I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities."

--GOP Vice Presidential Candidate Sarah Palin

"OK, OK, maybe this [being a community organizer] is the first problem on the resume."

--Rudy Giuliani

I couldn't agree more. And Obama isn't the worst of the community-organizer crowd. Some other even more problematic community organizers without actual responsibilities:

• Jesus of Nazareth
• The Founding Fathers of the United States
• Paul Revere
• Jane Addams
• Mahatma Gandhi
• Rosa Parks
• Martin Luther King, Jr.
• Nelson Mandela
• Lech Walesa
• Václav Havel

In today's NYTs Carl Hulse explains that: "Conservative Republicans in the House plan to urge their colleagues to rally behind a new manifesto that mixes antispending initiatives and tighter restrictions on government benefits as the party seeks a fresh message after a string of election defeats." Hmm, "antispending initiatives" and "tighter restrictions on government benefits", now that's a fresh message for conservatives.

Here's more on those proposed restrictions:

Leaders of the Republican Study Committee intend to use a closed-door party meeting on Tuesday to present a seven-point proposal calling for a constitutional limit on federal spending, a new simplified income tax alternative and a proposal to require recipients of food stamps or housing aid to meet work requirements.

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The draft ... said that House Republicans should extend existing welfare work requirements to food stamps and housing assistance "so that those who who are not old, young, or disabled are either working in the private sector or are serving in their community."

....

The real problem with both Food Stamps and housing assistance is that they exclude far too many families who are struggling because they're trying to subsist on low-wage jobs. As the chart below (from the CEPR-CSP Bridging the Gap project) shows, the eligibility rules for food assistance are set so low that they exclude almost two-thirds of working families who are economically insecure (ie, have incomes below the basic family budget for where they live).

For more on a proposal that resembles the House Conservative's, see this earlier post of mine.

With the left winning in Paraguay, Columbia (if I'm counting right) is the only country left in South America with a right-wing government. But, things aren't going so swimmingly in Europe these days. Although Sarkozy is probably still somewhat to the left of say Obama and Clinton on many issues, the right that won the Italian elections recently is a different story altogether, as Henry Farrell notes:

... it’s worth noting that the biggest winner in the elections – the Lega Nord – is one of the most genuinely revolting political parties in the Western world. The picture ... (nicked from Foreign Policy’s Passport blog) gives some idea of what their winning electoral strategy involved.

According to Passport, it appears that Lega leading light Roberto Calderoli is likely to become deputy Prime Minister. Regular CT readers may recall his resignation from a previous government after wearing a t-shirt with one of the Danish anti-Muslim cartoons; he has distinguished himself in the meantime with his dismissal of the French football team as “negroes, communists and Muslims” after Italy beat them in the infamous Zidane-headbutt game and by threatening to have a pig ‘defile’ a site in Bologna where a mosque was to be built. US readers who aren’t familiar with European politics should try to imagine a political party with a program co-written by Mark Steyn, David Duke and Tom Tancredo, and they’ll be at least half-way there.

The Lega Nord's poster, very roughly translated, is something like: "Guess Who Comes Last? For the Right to Housing, Jobs, and Health."

And there's this, also via FP's Passport blog, from the new PM Berlusconi:

Silvio Berlusconi, who takes power shortly as Prime Minister of Italy for the third time, caused outrage in Spain after he suggested that the new Government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero was “too pink”.

Mr Berlusconi, who won a sweeping victory in this week’s Italian election, told a radio station: “Zapatero has formed a government that is too pink, something that we cannot do in Italy because there is a prevalence of men in politics and it isn’t easy to find women who are qualified.”

In a new paper, the Entitlement Crisis Crew uses an interesting metaphor—the federal budget as a plane on "autopilot":

The first step toward establishing budget responsibility is to reform the budget decision process so that Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid—the major drivers of escalating deficits—are no longer on auto-pilot.

Sunday's WaPo editorial on the report parrots this line with some extra screech added to make sure you're listening:

The federal budget is on an autopilot course to ruin[!] Spending on the three big entitlement programs -- Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid -- grows automatically, consuming a large and growing share of the budget with benefits that flow mostly to the elderly.

Not wanting to be left out, even the conservative Dems at PPI get into the act writing that "a prominent group of veteran budget and policy analysts today proposed a novel way to avoid a fiscal train wreck[!]: Take entitlement programs off auto pilot."

I'm not sure "auto-pilot" is an especially effective frame for the Entitlement Crisis Crew to use if they want to achieve their goal of convincing everybody that the fiscal sky is falling. Autopilot in the non-metaphorical sense is an incredibly sophisticated, entirely sensible, and, as far as I know, utterly uncontroversial element of modern aviation that reduces fuel usage, shortens flight times and has plenty of other benefits.

If you really want to scare people, it might be better to say that Social Security is like a plane full of explosives and rotten herring being flown by a bunch of Swedish terrorists into the heart of America. Or, if that's too extreme, you could compare it to a plane being flown by bunch of crazy monkeys on the lam. Most travelers don't worry too much when the pilot says she's putting the plane on autopilot, but if you see a bunch of insane monkeys heading into the cockpit, you know you're in trouble.

Talking about Social Security as a program on autopilot is another example of Third Way-types and conservative Dems adopting a conservative framing of a core progressive issue. The last time I saw auto-pilot used to refer to the budget was in an Wall Street Journal op-ed by conservative William Voegeli in November 2007 who claimed that Social Security and Medicaid will bring about "the Swedenization of America on autopilot[!]" Instead of copying conservatives, Entitlement-crisis centrists and conservative Dems should come up with something more original. They can even use my crazy monkeys on the lam framing without crediting me.

I can't say anything good about the politics of conservative William F. Buckley, who died today at the age of 82, but I do recommend reading this post by Rick Perlstein of Campaign for America's Future:

He knew exactly what my politics were about—he knew I was an implacable ideological adversary—yet he offered his friendship to me nonetheless. He did the honor of respecting his ideological adversaries, without covering up the adversarial nature of the relationship in false bonhommie. A remarkable quality, all too rare in an era of the false fetishization of "post-partisanship" and Broderism and go-along-to-get-along. He was friends with those he fought. He fought with friends. These are the highest civic ideals to which an American patriot can aspire.

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... The game of politics is to win over American institutions to our way of seeing things using whatever coalition, necessarily temporary, that we can muster to win our majority, however contingent—and if we lose, and we are again in the minority, live to fight another day, even ruthlessly, while respecting our adversaries' legitimacy to govern in the meantime, while never pulling back in offering our strong opinions about their failures, in the meantime. This was Buckleyism—even more so than any particular doctrines about "conservatism."

Nice people, friends, can disagree about the most fundamental questions about the organization of society. And there's nothing wrong with that. We must not fantasize about destroying our political adversaries, nor fantasize about magically converting them. We must honor that some humans are conservative and some humans are liberal, and that it will always be thus.

....

As much as I hate to admit it, Buckley was a movement builder, and I have trouble coming up with a progressive analogue who has done as much to build a progressive movement over the last 50 years as Buckley did to build the conservative movement. Which isn't to say there have been no great movement builders who were both progressive and of considerably greater moral stature than Buckley, but what they built was something different than the kind of cross-issue intellectual and political movement that modern conservatism became. When American political histories are being written 50 years from now, I can only hope that Buckley's passing also marks the passing of movement conservatism as a political force.

I recently chuckled over Michael Gerson's attempt to portray GW Bush as a Rawlsian Republican, and suggested that associating social-justice conservatism with Bush will only pound another nail in its coffin. Similarly, in a review of Gerson's new book, Michael Lind finds Gerson's ideas more interesting than his defense of GW:

More interesting than his panegyric to his former employer is Gerson’s polemic in favor of what he calls “heroic conservatism.” While he accuses liberals of moral relativism, Gerson’s harshest criticisms are directed at the two major elements of the Republican conservative coalition, small-government libertarians and the religious right. Of libertarians, he writes: “Republicans who feel that the ideology of Barry Goldwater — the ideology of minimal government — has been assaulted” by the Bush administration “are correct.” He goes on to say, “If Republicans run in future elections with a simplistic antigovernment message, ignoring the poor, the addicted and children at risk, they will lose, and they will deserve to lose.”

And a partisan of the left could hardly be more hostile to fundamentalists: “The religious right has also contributed to dangerous social divisions in our country. ... It emphasized issues of sexual morality while ignoring equally urgent matters of economic and racial justice.” Witnessing Gerson’s solitary attempt to purge the Republican Party of its most powerful factions, one thinks of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, who tells the Roman mob that has come to banish him: “I banish you!”

Lind concludes with this interesting point:

The current ascendancy of populism in the Republican Party and national politics as a whole spells trouble for Bolton’s Goldwater-Reagan conservatism, as well as for Gerson’s heroic conservatism. The populist right shares Bolton’s suspicions of international institutions, but not his enthusiasm for wars of regime change. And populists favor big government programs that help the economically distressed working and middle classes, whom Gerson completely ignores in his focus on race rather than class. The moment for Bolton’s movement conservatism may have passed. The moment for Gerson’s heroic conservatism never arrived.

Coincidentally (or maybe not), today's NYT also includes an op-ed by Ross Douthat, a proponent of a reformed conservatism that cares more about the working class than the plutocracy. Douthat is a more interesting conservative than Gerson, so if I read one conservative tract this year, it's likely to be his forthcoming Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream.

Former GW Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson in an op-ed pens the funniest thing I've ever read in the WaPo:

... by any fair historical measure, Bush's achievements on social justice at least equal those of Bill Clinton, who increased the earned-income tax credit, pushed for children's health coverage and reformed welfare to encourage work.

In my view, the Clinton legacy on social justice is extremely mixed, but it's still better than abysmal, which is the first adjective that comes to mind in reflecting on the GW Bush social justice legacy (just putting the words "GW Bush" in the same line as "social justice" gives me the giggles). During the Clinton years, the number of people experiencing poverty in the United States fell by almost 6.2 million. By comparison, in just the first six years of GW Bush, the number of people experiencing poverty rose by about 4.9 million. Bush put all his eggs into regressive tax cut baskets that increased inequality and did absolutely nothing to improve the living standards of low-paid workers.

The sad thing is, Michael Gerson may actually believes in the idea of "compassionate conservatism." But associating it with the failed presidency and failed conservatism of GW Bush will only do the idea more harm than good.

PS: For more on Michael Gerson, this article in the Atlantic is extremely enlightening. Written by another one of GW's former senior speechwriters, it notes that Gerson's "tendency to rearrange and romanticize events could be observed in the scores of media profiles and other articles that Mike sat for over the years."

Here it is:

"There's a lot of games, smoke, mirrors, incomplete numbers, basically there's not much realism [in the budget] .... They're playing the usual games.''

That's from Sen. Judd Gregg, the ranking Republican on the Senate Budget Committee.

Reading the budget and some analyses, I'm wonder if this country is as bored with conservatism and the Bush budgets as I am.

The budget is a recycling of old conservative ideas: turn everything into a voucher. Cut taxes. Cut programs. Pump tons of money into defense. Turn whatever isn't a voucher into a marketplace. Give the President more power.

Haven't we heard this before?

This is the conservative brand on display. This is it's time to shine. And it's looking like Sears, something that's lost its cache.

But maybe that's just me. I do wonder, though, if in a country that says it wants something different, lots of people are reacting this way. Because this budget really is boring. Its unrealistic and ideological conservativism is boring. We saw it all last year, and the year before that- nobody liked it then and yet they propose the same stuff over and over again. The exceptions are the even bigger budget cuts that just about nobody is taking seriously. They're giving us more of the stuff nobody wanted in small quantities. As if the accounting gimicks weren't absurd enough...

Anyway, if you're still curious, here's a couple of important things to read:

• Washington Post
• Center on Budget and Policy Priorities
• The Budget Overview straight from the President.

For the finer details, go to each agency's website, where they should have the longer version of their (de)funding proposal.

Speaking of the divide between the Wall Street wing and the middle/working-class wing of the Democratic Party, movement conservatism has its own such divide, as CAP's David Madland notes in this op-ed:

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In my research, I have found that people who are pro-life are just as likely as people who are pro-choice to support progressive economic policies, such as increasing benefits for the unemployed and reducing income inequality. Similarly, sociologists like Robert Wuthnow and Stephen Hart have found that religious conservatism is not linked to economic conservatism.

Most evangelicals today are not necessarily wed to a pro-business agenda. According to a January 2007 poll by the Pew Research Center, more than two thirds of white evangelicals agreed that business corporations make too much profit. Further, almost three quarters (72 percent) of them said there is too much power concentrated in the hands of a few big companies. These views are largely anathema to those held by the corporatist wing of the conservative movement.

There is also evidence that on a few particular issues white evangelicals tend to embrace a more progressive economic outlook. According to the same Pew survey, 78 percent of white evangelicals favored increasing the minimum wage from $5.15 to $7.25 an hour, and 59 percent supported the government guaranteeing health care for all citizens.

This evidence suggests that Mike Huckabee's electoral success and popularity is not just a product of his social conservatism. In fact, he more accurately than other, more economically conservative candidates, captures the economic concerns of many evangelical voters.

More fundamentally, Mike Huckabee's success highlights the underlying tensions in the conservative movement. The fusion of economic and social conservatives has been a ticking time bomb for nearly 30 years. Economic and social conservatism do not naturally fit together. Their fusion has been a marriage of convenience.

Since I'm quite happy watching the conservative movement self-destruct, I'm hoping that conservatives ignore David Frum. Former American Prospect editor in chief Michael Tomasky has a review of Frum's new book, Comeback: Conservatism That Can Win Again, in this week's NYRB:

... Given both the apparent ideological heterogeneity of the candidates and the soul-searching taking place even in the pages of National Review about how badly conservatism has failed the country, one might think that the GOP in 2008 would disclaim at least some of its current radical conservative positions and inch back toward the political center.

David Frum, the conservative analyst who formerly wrote speeches for Bush, proposes something along these lines (although he prefers calling it conservatism updated for the twenty-first century rather than centrism) in Comeback. To help the GOP recover from its present shabby state, for example, Frum preaches a "Green Conservatism" in which the GOP fights the Democrats for the allegiance of environmentally minded voters, going so far as to endorse a carbon tax. He also advocates a conservatism for the middle class that actually wants to do something about the problem of uninsured middle-class Americans. He even calls for a conservatism that respects the rights of prisoners, including "conjugal visits" and "enjoyable food." He combines these with newfangled defenses of traditional conservative positions—for example, a softer opposition to abortion that emphasizes "education and persuasion rather than coercion, changes in attitudes and beliefs rather than changes in law and public policy." More than once while reading Comeback, I nodded, thinking that the GOP could do worse than to listen to him. In urging a new course, he joins other conservative writers like Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam, who argued in The Weekly Standard in 2005 for a "Sam's Club Conservatism" that makes economic appeals to working-class voters.

Whatever Frum may hope for, however, we have to deal with actually existing Republicanism, as it is being played out in the current race. And that Republicanism is quite the opposite: on nearly every issue, the major candidates have run hard to the right, exceptions (John McCain on immigration) being vastly outnumbered by the rule. All of the major candidates agree, among other things, on policy toward Iraq and Iran, on judicial appointments, and on low taxes for the well-off.

Tomasky's piece mostly uses Frum's book as the starting point for his own thoughtful discussion of the current state of conservatism and conservative presidential candidates. Of particular note is what Tomasky has to say about Mike Huckabee, who has become something of a populist darling in certain circles. As Tomasky correctly explains, Huckabee is no populist:

As an example of courageous heterodoxy on economic matters, some have pointed to Huckabee, whose record as governor of Arkansas, when he increased some taxes and spending on education, did indeed place him at loggerheads with the Club for Growth, which is distrustful of his record. But this is fantasy. Huckabee—as he hastens to point out when pressed on this matter—was compelled by state law to balance the budget (state governments can't run deficits or print money), and he was under court order to increase spending on education.

For the nation as a whole, Huckabee proposes a regressive and onerous national sales tax. Called, with the usual spin, the "fair tax," Huckabee's tax plan would add about 30 percent (by conservative estimates) to the purchase price of durable goods, many household items, and even automobiles. It is arguably the most regressive tax plan put forward by any candidate. It comes as no surprise that despite the Club for Growth's remonstrations, Huckabee is in good standing with Americans for Tax Reform, whose famous "pledge" not to raise taxes under any circumstances he has agreed to.

Club for Growth, the enforcers of far-right economics orthodoxy, on Mike Huckabee:

Over the past ten months, it has become abundantly clear which path Governor Huckabee has chosen, and it looks more like the path of John Edwards than it does a limited-government, economic conservative. Huckabee himself admits that he is a "different kind of Republican," a code word for more government involvement, less personal freedom, and greater dependence on government bureaucrats. Huckabee is proud of his tax hikes, his spending increases, and his regulatory expansions as governor, and he has not indicated that he would govern any differently as President. Nominating Mike Huckabee for president or vice-president, would constitute an abject rejection of the free-market, limited-government, economic conservatism that has been the unifying theme of the Republican Party for decades.

I wish. If Huckabee were that good, I'd be sending him money (although I may start just to help the conservative crack-up along). Snatches of populist rhetoric aside, when it comes to Huckabee's stated positions on issues, it's hard to find any evidence, other than a mention of supporting "fair trade," that he would do populist things if elected to office.

Peter Goodman has a good piece in today's NYT on how the political pendulum is swinging away from laissez-faire and toward greater recognition that government regulation of markets is beneficial. The piece includes quotes from Dean Baker and Jared Bernstein as well as this reminder of how extreme and simplistic much of modern conservatism has become:

"Every regulation reduces people's freedom," said David R. Henderson, a libertarian economist at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. "The more regulation we get, the worse we do."

This is dogmatic libertarian nonsense. Whether or a not a particular regulation adopted by a democratic, representative government reduces freedom in the aggregate depends on the specifics of the regulation. Quite commonly, a regulation reduces the freedom of some individuals, while increasing the freedom of others in such a way that freedom overall is enhanced. This is a good thing that makes us a better and freer nation.

To cite just one example, anti-discrimination laws reduce the freedom of prejudiced people to discriminate on the basis or race or other classifications, while increasing the freedom of people who would be subject to discrimination if no such regulation existed. We're a better, freer, and wealthier nation as a result of the increase of regulation that took place during the civil rights revolution in the latter half of the 20th century. This seems like a rather obvious fact, but it's one that libertarian conservatism denies.

In an attempt, I guess, to argue that Ronald Reagan wasn't engaging in race-baiting when he told stories about "welfare queens" driving Cadillacs or described a "strapping young buck" using food stamps to buy T-bone steaks, conservative Ross Douthat makes the odd choice of updating the welfare queen slur:

If you click through to the story [about the proposed demolition of four public housing complexes in New Orleans], you'll find a photo of Ms. Jasper's digs, paid for out of the public purse, which in addition to having been recently renovated appear to house an absolutely enormous flat screen television. There was, admittedly, no Cadillac in evidence, so calling her a "welfare queen" is a tad unfair. "Welfare duchess," though, seems like a reasonable term of art ...

One would think a smart conservative trying to make the case that "welfare queens" are not mythical, and that people telling stories about them are not engaged in race-baiting, would have the good sense to point to an real-life example that is both clear cut and not a person of color. I thought The Atlantic's Ross Douthat was a relatively smart conservative, but judging from his post, he's not. The evidence he points to of the underlying truthiness of the welfare queen myth, a photo of a "welfare duchess" and her "digs" reveals her to be—surprise!—a black woman. And the article provides no information on Ms. Jasper to support Ms. Douthat's implication that she is a "welfare duchess", whatever that is.

More generally, as the comments on Mr. Douthat's post reveal, pointing to a photo of a black woman who receives a housing subsidy and using a revised form of the welfare queen slur inevitably leads to discourse that is hostile and uncivil, even by blog standards, and full of negative characterizations of working class individuals.

Mr. Douthat should know by now that, in the words of Republican pollster Frank Luntz, "it's not what you say, it's what people hear." And when you say "welfare queen", or "welfare duchess" for that matter, what comes to the minds of many people are nasty stereotypes of people of color.

Research conducted by UCLA's Franklin Gilliam provides further evidence on this point:

... among white subjects, exposure to [the welfare queen narrative] reduced support for various welfare programs, increased stereotyping of African-Americans, and heightened support for maintaining traditional gender roles. ....

Of course, there's always the possibility that Douthat, who may be unfamiliar with the research on stereotyping, may have made an "innocent mistake" of the same kind that conservatives argue Reagan made. If that's the case, he'd be smart to apologize to Ms. Jasper, and, to not, like Reagan, keep making that same mistake over and over again.

Dean Baker rightly takes issue with the more extreme form that "the ideology of home ownership" took in recent years, with devastating consequences for some:

For years many conservatives, and even some liberals, touted the virtues of homeownership as an end in itself. They argued that this was the way for the poor, and especially minorities, to gain economic security and enter the middle class. This was really bad advice to give people in the middle of a housing bubble.

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We can and should try to help moderate income families facing foreclosure. One possible mechanism, is my “own to rent” proposal. But we should also point a finger at the proselytizers of homeownership. If progressives ever pursued a policy of social engineering that had such negative consequences it would be a highlight of political debates for the next 50 years. We should not allow the blunders of the conservative ideologues to be swept quietly under the rug.