The Death of Conservatism?

[Damuri_Ajashi]

@Sam_Stone

Finally, although I know you like to lay the blame for all the bad things at the feet of the market, government had a pretty big hand in setting up the conditions for the current downturn.

How so? I had a pretty ringside seat to the securitization and credit default swap markets and I didn’t see any government in sight.

[foolsguinea]

@BrainGlutton

BTW, The Nation has an enthralling overview, by Kim Phillips-Fein, of academic/scholarly analyses of the history and dynamics of American conservatism. Tanenhaus is treated briefly near the end:

Kim Phillips-Fein’s Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan is interesting & well-researched.

[Dick_Dastardly]

@Sam_Stone

The world was FAR more liberal in the past. The highest marginal tax rates were over 70% in the U.S., and over 90% in the UK. Unions ran rampant. Governments were indulging in industrial policy throughout the major western economies. The result was a mess. People smartened up, embraced global free trade and abandoned the grand schemes to manage industry from within government, lowered taxes, and the result was the longest economic expansion in history.

The problem today is that the other big problem of activist government was never addressed - the insane level of entitlement spending. It was ignored because it was a problem that was a long way off, and politicians just love to kick the can over the hill to the next administration. Well, now that problem is here, and these unsustainable government programs are now exploding the budgets of the major democracies.

If you thnk the world is moving away from markets and towards big government, here’s something to consider: The country weathering the current economic storm better than any other country in the G7 is Canada. We’re already out of recession, and in the last quarter we actually created new jobs, while other countries were happy to just see the rate of job loss slow down a little. We have almost no debt and a small deficit. Our unemployment rate is 1% lower than the U.S.'s, and that gap is starting to grow larger.

And guess what? Canada is the only country in the G7 that has been shrinking the size of its government. We’ve also been lowering taxes dramatically - especially taxes on businesses and capital gains.

Ten years ago, the situation was reversed. We had higher taxes than the U.S., more social programs, and a bigger government measured against GDP. Back then, our unemployment rate was 1-3% higher than the U.S’s.

In February, Obama went to Europe to plead with the European countries to enact their own stimulus packages as large as the U.S’s. Many of those countries refused. Canada refused. Our stimulus was about 1/3 the size of the US’s stimulus.

Today, almost all the countries that refused are recovering from the downturn faster than is the United States.

I will grant you that the U.S. appears to have taken a hard turn to the left. I also think that unless it backs away from this, times are going to get much harder for Americans.

In the 1960s when unions were much stronger than in the 1980s and marginal tax rates were as high as 90%, the US had a period of economic expansion just as long as the one under Reagan. And the one under Reagan was helped by years of pent-up demand caused by double-digit interest rates preventing people from spending and a dramatic fall in the price of oil during his presidency.
Unionisation and welfare states don’t necessarily lead to economic disaster. Lots of European countries with high unionisation levels and high levels of welfare manage to employ the same or higher percentage of their citizens than the US economy does. The US is at roughly the same percentage employed as Germany which mandates union involvement in yearly pay awards for companies, has excellent worker benefits etc. And Germany absorbed East Germany 18 years ago. If America had ingested Mexico 18 years ago its employment rate, government spending on building Mexican infrastructure etc. would look a lot different to current levels.

Cutting taxes can definitely boost economic growth! But what we saw under Reagan/Bush 41 was no extra growth, in fact less growth than we had in the high-tax 50s and 60s. Fractionally better than Jimmy Carter, fractionally worse than Clinton, average for the second half of the 20th century. But we did quadruple the nationaal debt under Reagan/Bush 41 and it took Clinton most of his presidency to return things to an even keel, only for debt to explode again under the tax-cutting free-market rubbish economic growth Bush 43. So there’s a long-term deficit price to pay for deregulation, tax cutting and so on with very little benefit to 99% of Americans as Americans are now discovering. It’s difficult to see how people can live through even just the last decade of tax cuts and deregulation and argue that more of the same is the way ahead.
I’m not sure what evidence there is to show that less deficit spending equals faster economic recovery. I’m not sure which European countries refused to deficit spend either. And you have to take into consideration that the US created the biggest asset bubble in history, most other large economies had limited or no bubbles by comparison, so the US has had a much bigger crash to recover from. And evidence from the 1930s shows quite clearly that the countries that started deficit spending earliest got iout of trouble fastest while those that didn’t do anything, like France, the original home of laissez-faire economics, did worst.

[Yersenia_Pestis]

God, I hope so. I’m sick of these morons… But never underestimate the ability of misinformation and xenophobia to create new converts…

[BrainGlutton]

Reviving this thread because my library hold on Tanenhaus’ book finally came through.

Interesting conclusion:

Once again the American Right must “face historical reality,” as Whittaker Chambers advised half a century ago. So tightly wedded to the politics of protest, movement ideologues have missed the most salient fact about America today: the nation has entered a conservative phase, perhaps the most conservative since the Eisenhower years. This is why Arlen Specter, a longtime Republican moderate facing sure defeat in a primary campaign dominated by movement conservatives, could abruptly switch parties without altering any of his important positions. It is also why David Souter, who in his nineteen years on the Supreme Court infuriated so many on the right by his refusal to advance the right’s pet judicial causes – instead immersing himself in the study of history, partly to uncover in the past “some relevance to a constitutional rule where earlier judges saw none” – may well endure as the most authentic conservative in the Court’s modern history.

And it is why attempts to depict Barack Obama as a radical or socialist dissolve under the most rudimentary examination of the facts. The decision by his team of conservative, Wall Street-inflected economists to fortify the banking system and improve the flow of credits is patently an attempt to salvage the free market, quite as the economic conservative Roosevelt tried to do in 1933. Obama’s plan to extend health coverage to the nearly fifty million Americans who lack it is pure Disraeli. And Obama’s foreign policy, premised on diplomacy and multilateral concord, is as forceful a repudiation of the imperial presidency as we have seen in the modern era. All these are the actions of a leader who, while politically liberal, is temperamentally conservative and who has placed his faith in the durability – and renewability – of American institutions.

Culturally, too, these are conservative times. The Right should revel in the emergence of a new generation of collect students who have rediscovered the virtues of public service and volunteerism, and of business school graduates who are turning away from Wall Street, either to experiment with Internet commerce or to choose altogether different careers. What better evidence that the young are no longer alienated from our civil society and that the chasm between the “business elite” and the “adversary culture” is negotiable after all – and may someday narrow to extinction? So, too, conservatives should savor the embrace of “family values” by the nation’s homosexual population – who seek the sanctuary – and responsibilities – of marriage and child-rearing, a development unthinkable a generation ago, when gays personified the excesses of the “alternative lifestyle.”

All this illuminates a central truth of human nature. Most of us are liberal and conservative; we cling to the past in some ways, push forward into the future in others, and seek to reconcile our most cherished notions and beliefs – “prejudices” in Burke’s term, “animal faith” in Santayana’s – with the demans of unanticipated events. Politics is the public expression of this drama, the theater in which the modus vivendi of our civil society is continually enacted – and replenished.

What the times demand today of movement conservatives, if they are to reclaim their place at the center of American politics, is a recognition that the age of orthodoxy – of uncompromising certitude – has ended and will not be reborn anytime soon. At its best, conservatism has served the vital function of clarifying our shared connection to the past and of giving articulate voice to the shared beliefs Americans have striven to maintain under the most trying circumstances. There remains in our politics a place for an authentic conservatism – a conservatism that seeks not to destroy but to conserve.

[Sam_Stone]

That’s a whole lot of poor thinking. There’s no planet I know of where embracing government-run universal health care is a ‘conservative’ position. Likewise, saying that Obama isn’t a socialist because he ‘saved capitalism’ is also shoddy thinking. I’m not saying Obama IS a socialist - just that saving the capitalist economy, if he did do that, is not evidence against it. Socialists don’t want the free market to fail, because they need it to earn the revenue they seek to redistribute. Socialism is not Communism.

Then he goes all wishy-washy about how we’re all liberal AND conservative. A formulation that gives him enough room to stretch definitions to support a thesis, I guess.

What he’s right about is that ‘conservatism’, defined as a philosophy which seeks to maintain the status quo or return to an earlier social order, is dead. Starting with my generation, modern people are born surrounded by constant change. There’s no ‘normal’ for them to want to maintain.

But that doesn’t mean the struggle between personal Liberty and central planning and control is over. Ayn Rand once said she wasn’t a conservative at all, because she didn’t like the past any more than the present. She said she was a ‘radical for capitalism’. She called it ‘the unknown ideal’.

So the debate is no longer change vs stasis - it’s a debate over which direction we want to travel in as we change.

[BrainGlutton]

[quote=“Sam_Stone, post:106, topic:509508”]

That’s a whole lot of poor thinking. There’s no planet I know of where embracing government-run universal health care is a ‘conservative’ position.

[quote]

:dubious: Plenty of conservative parties in Europe embrace it, and have since Bismarck.

@Sam_Stone

Likewise, saying that Obama isn’t a socialist because he ‘saved capitalism’ is also shoddy thinking.

No, it isn’t. You could, and should, say exactly the same thing about FDR.

@Sam_Stone

I’m not saying Obama IS a socialist - just that saving the capitalist economy, if he did do that, is not evidence against it. Socialists don’t want the free market to fail, because they need it to earn the revenue they seek to redistribute. Socialism is not Communism.

You are thinking of social democrats. Doctrinaire Marxists want and expect capitalism to fail; other socialists do not want it to fail or succeed, they simply want it replaced with a different system.

@Sam_Stone

What he’s right about is that ‘conservatism’, defined as a philosophy which seeks to maintain the status quo or return to an earlier social order, is dead. Starting with my generation, modern people are born surrounded by constant change. There’s no ‘normal’ for them to want to maintain.

Of course there is, just as there was a “normal” in the Eisenhower years.

@Sam_Stone

But that doesn’t mean the struggle between personal Liberty and central planning and control is over.

That is only part of what the modern American conservative movement is and has been about.