Here are five conservative principles that I personally hold that I’m quickly rattling off:
People deserve to keep most of the money they earn.
The private sector provides more benefit to society than the public sector.
The US and other developed countries need controlled, managed immigration.
Society depends on policing agencies as a defence against criminality.
The US military is a vital element of US foreign policy which has the ultimate aim of making the world freer and more prosperous.
I could easily rattle off another ten, but I believe the above five provide the gist of my personal brand of conservatism. The usual arguments against the statement that these are conservative values are that these values aren’t purely conservative and that they aren’t being enacted by recent Republican administrations. I don’t disagree with those arguments, but I do disagree with the caricatures of US conservatism made in the opening post of this thread. I can easily make a caricature about liberalism stating that its goals are:
Increase the welfare state through higher taxes.
Increase the mission and size of government.
Abolish the Immigrations and Custom Enforcement agency
Defund the police.
Shrink the military and use it only for national defence.
Your idea that conservatism is dead is based on your caricature of it, not values that mainstream conservatives actually hold. And there are plenty of people who believe those values benefit society including, I expect, most Americans. Just like you’ll find there are lots of Americans who would abhor my caricatured version of liberal principles.
I was raised in a moderately Republican family, but I no longer recognize the Republican party. It’s staunchest core supporters seem to be Confederate flag waving, homophobic, anti-minority people who yearn for the pre-sixties days when white people totally ruled the roost.
So, even though I think the OP’s statement is a bit too dramatic, I do agree with his basic premise for the reasons I stated above.
And you demonstrate the problem of using microeconomics to explore a problem of macroeconomics.
What is your reasoning that supply will not increase? Especially given technology that can leverage educational resources. We don’t need people sitting in lecture halls, we don’t need them sitting in classes with 30 other students. They can do all that online, and there is no limit to how many people can watch a lecture. There is no scarcity there.
And by freeing up teachers, professors, and TA’s from rote lecture and regurgitation sessions, they can be available for much more small group or one on one educational opportunities.
Given your example of the plumber and the civil engineer, that’s the whole point of a progressive taxation system. The civil engineer will be paying more in taxes than the plumber. They are either paying it back, or paying it forward, depending on how you look at it, but those who have more success owe a substantial portion of that success to the services for which they pay taxes. The more successful, the more they owe.
I would also think it a good idea to charge businesses a tax on the degrees that they employ. There is a complaint about degree inflation, and that is because businesses have no reason not to circular file anyone that doesn’t meet some arbitrary criteria. They don’t pay for it, they are not responsible for it, they just expect society to provide them with employees that have those criteria. If a tax were levied on job requirements, then that would help to pay to educate the workforce that they demand, and also to prevent them from simply using a degree as a way of easily discarding applicants who were not able to attain a degree, even if the job does not actually require one.
As far as those who attain a degree, and then choose not to use it, that is going to be a pretty small edge case, and basing policy on edge cases is rarely a good idea.
I agree that #2 and #3 are legitimate disagreements between conservatives and liberals, even if the wording I’d use might not be as stark as the bullet points. But no one would come close to disagreeing with #4, and #5 when espoused by so-called conservatives is simply a lie, since there isn’t a stark contrast on average between otherwise-liberal people and otherwise-conservative people when it comes to foreign policy. (For instance, Wilson, Roosevelt, Kennedy, and Johnson were hardly conservative Democrats.)
And with regards to #1, the vast majority of the people already do keep most of what they make. I guess in this sense I’d agree with others that Biden represents conservativism because there are probably people to the left of him who want to change that. But right now, except for very wealthy people in very high tax states, it’s difficult to even have a marginal tax rate of 50% let alone an overall tax rate of 50%. And those very few situations would be even rarer if the red states weren’t subsidized by the federal government, forcing the blue states to have high taxes just to keep their state afloat.
But why? The majority of older people depend on things like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, etc. Those are programs supported by the Democrats. It is the Republicans who want to severely curtail or eliminate the programs they need the most.
I think it would be more accurate to say it never had any life in it to begin with, at least if we mean in terms of having any benefit to offer society. At least not If we’re about the conservatism that Ronald Reagan and the conservatives since him championed.
Eisenhower and Nixon are a different story. They accomplished things that benefitted society. Of course those are now things that, if presented in a vacuum without the names Eisenhower and Nixon attached (or maybe even with in Nixon’s case) would elicit howls of “LIBERALISM GONE MAD” from current day conservatives.
Founding the EPA? Working with the Chinese to improve economic relations? Sending in the National Guard to defend Black people against their white oppressors? Appointing someone like Earl Warren to the SCOTUS? Spending taxpayer money to build a free interstate highway system? Nowadays those would all be described as crazy liberal policies.
Time only makes people relatively conservative. Their actual viewpoints drift, on average, if anything, more liberal, just not as liberal as the new cohorts growing up under them.
With the possible exception of immigration, I don’t see people swinging to the right as they’ve grown older in the past 20 years. For instance, there isn’t a serious push to roll back gay marriage or marijuana liberalization from people who had supported them in the 90s, when even Democratic candidates had to give lip service to opposing both: $45 is around as liberal now as Bill was back then on those issues.
With some quibbles about exactly what some of those things mean, those are things that pretty much everyone agrees on.
The vast majority of people do keep most of the money that they earn. The few, the .1% or less who do not are those who earn more than the combined earnings of thousands, and are usually “earning” that money based on the skills, efforts, and labor of those thousands. It is not a disincentive to make billions because of high taxes. That is not something that will change. Clarification: do you consider medical insurance premiums to be part of what people get to keep?
The private sector has things that it provides better than the public sector, and the public sector has some things that are not provided by the private sector, or are not provided well when the private sector tries to provide them. The private sector is certainly better at allocating resources to meet the unlimited wants of those who can afford them, but often is not capable of meeting the needs of those who cannot.
Yes, we need controlled, managed immigration. There are discussions as to what that means, in how many people we need of different skill levels, and how much of our immigration policy should be based on compassion and empathy, rather than the cold hard equation, but that is another place that your definition of what a conservative principle is is something that is held by nearly everyone.
Of course we need police. There are bad people out there that want to hurt me and take my stuff. The whole point of civilization is to give people a better option than hurting people and taking their stuff, and the stick side of that is that we will chase you down and punish you for doing so. You have pretty much universal agreement on that principle.
As far as the military, there are certainly debates as to how much bigger it needs to be than the rest of the military might of the world, and exactly how involved we should get in the affairs of other nations, but, once again, you have near universal agreement that having a nice big military that can protect our borders and our allies is a priority.
However, your list does not reflect priorities of the current conservatives that are in charge. Their priorities are to gut public programs that try to meet the needs of those who are not able to engage the private sector to meet them, to ensure that guns are freely available to anyone who wants one, to deny women reproductive rights, to demand respect for authority based on might rather than merit and call that “law and order”, to eliminate immigration that is not immediately beneficial to businesses that donate to political campaigns, and to use our military forces to bully our allies rather than using them to promote peace and prosperity in the world.
In the end, I don’t think that your list reflects modern American conservatism very well, and it is also not even close to exclusively conservatives that would hold those principles.
ETA: This was supposed to be a reply to@Wrenching_Spanners, not sure how I ended up talking to myself.
Trump is an authoritarian who got elected from the support of hybrid authoritarian/democratically minded people. These are people who embrace a selective form of democracy, which is why they speak of originalism in the Constitution and have such great reverence for its literal text. Like many people in the 18th Century, the people who support Trump believe in a social hierarchy, and well, whaddya know: just so happens that they believe they should be at its apex. So even though they theoretically subscribe to a society of equals, they believe that they are first among them.
What they don’t understand is that democracy of any stripe cannot survive this way. It cannot survive with nearly half the people believing that it is strictly the individual’s responsibility to achieve economic security and that those who can’t must simply accept their place on the lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder. And in any case, a democratic society surely cannot remain democratic with two halves of the country believing that the other half represents a mortal threat to the Republic.
There’s actually a growing body of academic research on what causes democracies to collapse. According to one study, there are four factors that, when they appear simultaneously, almost always spell doom for democracy: social “cleavage” (i.e. polarization or division), bad economic conditions, unfavorable history, and foreign involvement.
The findings show not only which variables are related to the collapse of democracy, and in what hierarchical order, but that the key to the demise of a democratic system is a combination of variables. The most crucial variables are: cleavages, a malfunctioning economy, unfavorable history, governmental instability, and foreign involvement. If four of these negative factors appear simultaneously, the democratic regime is almost doomed to collapse.Democracy is, therefore, neither fragile nor feeble, but, rather, a highly resilient regime type. A single debilitating factor is highly unlikely to bring about its collapse.
We clearly have growing polarization already. I think that’s evident.
With regard to the economy, there are bad economies and then there are really bad economies like Lebanon. But the United States has economic inequality not seen since the 1920s or even earlier. Lest we forget that there was actually pretty remarkable political violence in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. Fascism was surprisingly popular relative to what it was after WWII. I think we’re seeing a growing resurgence of both the urge to commit acts of political violence and we’re also seeing an open embrace of right wing authoritarianism now, as I believe you noted.
The U.S. arguably does have a strong history of democratic tradition, which works in our favor on one hand, but it also has a history of authoritarianism and anti-democratic behavior as well, which includes long traditions of coordinated attacks against organized labor and institutionally supported (and even mandated) racial apartheid. So the history of the U.S. as a society that embraces democratic thought, despite its being a democracy on paper, is mixed at best.
Lastly, the US is now seeing a shockingly high degree of foreign involvement in its electoral process - something we’re not used to. We’re usually the ones doing the deed, but over the last 10 years, an adversary that is among the most skilled on earth at deploying information warfare, found fissures in our society that it could exploit, and have they ever done so. And they’ve reaped rewards that even they could not have ever imagined, gaining leverage over a sitting US president.
When you take all of these factors into consideration, it’s pretty clear that, as you say, we’re nowhere near being out of the forest here.
You may be inclined to call those “caricatures” of modern American conservative values, but with the conservatives in charge, those are exactly the things that they have made their legislative and judicial priorities. The may not be the values that you hold, but they are the actions that are taken on your behalf.
You’re believing a myth. We have decades of data showing that voters generally don’t change their in their core values (the outlying Gen Xers notwithstanding).
Seventeen million voters become newly eligible every presidential election cycle and they are rejecting current Republican policies by a two-to-one margin. Their base electorate is about to be overwhelmed by two diverse and much more secular generations and it is the GOP which will have to change to win them over, not versa vicey.
Those demographic changes become even more stark if Democrats sweep the November elections, increase the numbers of legal immigrants and grant statehood to DC and Puerto Rico.
The macroeconomic issue is that people, both students and employers, are overvaluing university degrees. It makes sense to spend $123,000 or more on a four year degree if you’re going to have a wage starting point that will be $20,000/year higher than the wage you would have without pursuing a degree. And those people who end up in that circumstance should be quite happy to pay back their student loans. However, many university graduates end up with jobs with wages only slightly higher or equivalent to high school graduates. Many of these jobs don’t need a degree, but employers use a degree requirement as part of the weeding out process. That’s disappointing, but that macroeconomic issue is not an issue the government should be trying to solve.
The societal issue is the consequences for people who take out the big loans but then end up with moderate or mediocre wages. One liberal solution is a loan forgiveness program. But that basically means that people aren’t responsible for their decisions. They get the upside of a good paying job if that’s what their degree leads to. But if that doesn’t work out, then the government will pay for the four years they had fun at university, and too bad that other people will pick up the bill because they made a bad choice. I guess I’m an evil conservative for not wanting society to pay for individuals who make bad financial choices. I’ll happily live with that.
Biden’s plan is to eliminate the moral hazard by making public university educations free for the middle class. I doubt he could actually implement the plan stated as a blurb on his campaign website, but let’s try to look at the costs of a free university education. According to Statista, there were 19.65 million university students in the US in 2018. They offer a further breakdown of public versus private university attendees and the average cost difference between the two types of institutions. 14.53 million students went to public universities at an average cost of $6,818/year, for a total of $99.1 billion. 5.12 million students went to private universities at an average cost of $30,723/year for a total of $157.3 billion. If Biden’s plan covers the costs for 55% of the public university students, so excluding upper and upper-middle class students and those already receiving government grants, that’s a $55 billion/year spending program that doesn’t cover private university students - the ones who have the extreme debts. You want to solve the student loan debt problem? Tell people who can’t afford private universities not to go to them. U.S. college enrollment and forecast 1965-2030 | Statista. Average annual charges for higher education in the U.S. 2021 | Statista
Regarding whether the US government offering to pay tuition for middle-class students going to public universities will increase the supply of public university spots, I think it would. High school graduates who might avoid university for cost reasons who would choose to go if it was free represents a rightwards movement in the demand curve as already stated. That means there’s incentives for the universities to increase their student population sizes and also to charge higher fees since so many more students are wanting to go to university, and hey, now the federal government is paying for it. What I question is how steep the supply curve is for public university spots. Would a 20% rise in charges - mostly paid for by the federal government - result in 20% more spots being offered? I suspect not since university fee rises have been going up over the past decade while the number of student places has not increased. That looks like either the universities have had increased costs, or have decided to increase profits. So you have a flat supply curve. And note that the government tuition payments are a demand side effect. The supply increase is from the increased demand, and at a higher price. If the US government is looking for a cost effective solution for student debt, it should be seeking to increase the number of university places by supply-side interventions, not by paying more for new spots.
Regarding your theory that universities can easily scale up their student numbers due to technology improvements and changes in expectations, if that’s true, then it’s great and the problem’s already solved. That’s a supply-side change resulting in a leftward movement of the supply curve, meaning costs will go down. No federal government intervention required.
And you are predicable in that I specifically explained why your statement was not relevant. But you ignored that and thought you’d score points anyway.
We are not talking about conservative values, we are talking about American conservatism.
I note that, predictably, you ignored the entire rest of my post in order to concentrate on what you thought was your “gotcha”.
And referring to it as such is a trigger to some of its members. Quoting some MAG-hatted minion:
Do people like you have any idea that most of the people you think are “cultists” just support his policies over the radical leftist policies the Democrat Party has adopted.
No, I guess not. Your unhinged hatred trumps rational thinking. Pun intended.
Pointing out what a personality cult actually is got called “psychobabble”.
Agree on the latter. The former are not overvaluing, they are valuing based on the demands of the latter.
So, you agree that it is a problem. But you put the blame on the students rather than the employers. Putting any blame at all on the students for employer requirements is entirely incorrect.
It’s a hard problem to solve. How do you tell private businesses how to run their hiring practices?
That’s why I would propose a tax on degrees that businesses pay. They demand an educated workforce, they should pay for it.
If you eliminate the need for loans, then you eliminate that problem.
Not evil, just short sighted. For one, it is not just those who make bad financial choices. Is it a poor choice to go into a field that is lucrative, but by the time you graduate, the jobs are all filled? Or that your job has become obsolete due to technology within a few years of graduation?
Also, if society is expecting and even demanding people to make these choices, then they aren’t really bad decisions.
In order to get a job that pays better than MW, people have to go get a degree. It is not them making this choice, it is society telling them that they have to do this.
If we get to the point where you have to have a college degree to get a job at McDonalds, will you still b saying that it’s the fault of the student for getting a degree and then working at McDonalds? That it is their poor financial decision?
That’s really not that much money. And I also think that we can get those costs down, as I said in my previous post.
Yes. As I said in my previous post.
But people who go to public college are still saddled with debt. Not as much as a private university, but still enough to hamper their ability to start a life and a family.
Agreed.
There are a number of reasons I disagree with this. If nothing else, just as they want to do with prescription drug prices, they can cap what they pay. When every student is negotiating their own tuition, it is going to be more than if there is a single entity that dictates what it will be.
I don’t see why it would be that inelastic. In fact, if you reduce the tuition payed by each student, then the universities are encouraged to take on more students in order to maintain revenue.
As I said in my previous post, there are a number of ways of decreasing the cost of education, but there is no incentive to do so, as the cost is entirely borne by the student, who has the least negotiating power of anyone involved in the system.
Yes to both. But they haven’t increased the quality of the education along with these costs.
And how do you suggest that they do that, other than to pay to create the capacity for those new spots?
Except that there is no incentive for them to do so. They are fine charging massive rates in order to allow you to sit in a lecture hall. They are fine charging you hundreds of dollars per hour that you sit in a recitation class that is “taught” by a TA who does little but collect and grade your homework.
The universities have no need or desire for an educated work force, their only desire is to get as much out of each product (student), while putting in as little as possible.
Elections are typically won in the middle — so called soccer moms, deplorables, white middle class — but this election may be different. But, there is a lot of attention on the suburbs.
It might have been a different election, if Sanders had been nominated.
The OP is talking about “conservatism” as a philosophy, right? “Republican” and “conservative” share things but are not the same. That said, I’ll cease talking elections.