While there’s some usefulness in taxonomies such as the ones BrainGlutton provides @28, the underlying principle AFAIAC is that conservatism is that which conservatives support. And despite the handful of things Sam brings up @12 (I’ll add port security and immigration reform to his list), the reality is that there were, really, only a handful of relatively minor instances where conservatives raised their voices in protest of the Bush agenda. On the whole, the universe of conservative pundits and bloggers and think-tankers raised few objections at the time to Bush’s big-spending, big-deficit ways, or his wars, or his efforts to extend the reach of Executive power.
My recollection is that they practically made a hero out of him, right down to his personal qualities, well beyond what was necessary within the context of partisan politics, and well beyond the degree of support we left-of-center types gave Clinton while he was President.
Even now, with Bush’s failures as obvious as they are, and the desire to distance from him as great as it is, it’s tough to find well-known conservatives who are retrospectively criticizing the major pieces of his Presidency. Sam or other individual conservatives might have their particular criticisms, but how many of them are (a) major, and (b) broadly supported by other conservatives?
I can’t get past this glaring contradiction as to whether conservatism supports more or less regulation.
In a more literal sense, “conservative” means “tightly regulated”. In a (broad) political sense, it means, “supportive of the established or traditional social order”. The old rules were generally more restrictive and the authority figures more unquestioned in their authority.
“Power to the people” of course being a well-worn leftist slogan. And while it’s possible to draw a logical thread linking “less government, more freedom” back to the senses of “conservative” (although I want to see a conservative do that rather than tip my hand), it’s rather indirect and facile, so I balk at characterizing that sense as “true” or “deep” conservatism.
Nothing is more deeply woven into the fabric of conservatism than religion, and religion is quite restricitve and authoritative.
Fiscal conservatism is doomed as long as its proponents insist on tax cuts before spending cuts. Conservatives are no better at cutting spending than liberals, but they are addicted to tax cuts that appeal to wealthy donors, at the expense of government programs that appeal to the middle and lower classes.
If the Republican party could put the cart behind the horse and cut spending before cutting taxes, they might become a credible political party again. But when they had the power, they acted like fussy children who insisted on eating their dessert before the finished their vegetables. “Starving the Beast” has been totally discredited, because conservatives has demonstrated they will embrace deficit spending as willingly as liberals.
Until they change this attitude, and put the desire for smaller government ahead of their addiction to tax cuts, they might appeal to the voters again. But I don’t think they will be given that chance any time soon, based on their recent performance.
I always understood that to be the basic idea of “Starving the Beast”; cut taxes, rack up debt, tank the economy so that the government has no choice but to slash spending. Just like Bush’s general policy of appointing to government positions incompetents and people who opposed the government functions in question; the idea is to engineer failure and disaster, then use that to make slashing government acceptable or necessary.
I think you are letting your rhetoric get away from you. I’m middle class, and I like tax cuts more than I want some new (or some of the old) government programs. And I seriously doubt I’m all alone in this, or that most of my fellow American’s wouldn’t love to have their taxes cut…or, conversely, that most American’s are just rubbing their hands together at the thought of having their taxes raised to fund new programs that may or may not have any effect on them.
As long as people don’t want to see their taxes increased, and want to see some kind of sanity in government spending, I believe that fiscal conservatism will be far from doomed. I also don’t think that you can base your concept of what is or isn’t fiscal conservatism on what Bush et al did in their last term, nor what the Congressional Republican’s did when they were in the drivers seat…no more than you can say that the Dem’s and Clinton pushed through a unified, systematic social and fiscal liberal policy. Neither side actually matched their own rhetoric, and in fact neither were really trying too…they both had other fish to fry and were paying lip service to the faithful in their own parties while pushing through an alternative agenda. In the case of Bush et al it was a Neo-Con agenda that had more to do with foreign policy and US power than with either social OR fiscal conservatism.
I agree with you,* so long as spending is cut first.* If conservatives persist in demanding tax cuts on the mere promise of spending cuts, they are engineering their own failure.
And that’s why “fiscal conservatism” won’t work, at least for actual governance. What spending will they cut ? The slogan of “Cut spending” is only appealing to the public as long as you don’t actually try to do it. If you actually get in power, you’ll discover that everyone wants*** the other guy’s*** government spending cut; not the spending that benefits them or that they otherwise favor.
It’s great for the rhetoric of an opposition party though; not being in power, they don’t actually have to try to implement it. But actually slashing government spending would be political suicide.
As much as I would love to see this happen, it won’t. The biggest roadblock is that humorless, uncool, moral majority, religious right types reliably turn out to vote. Groovy funky young people don’t. Until that changes, the republicans will likely lean towards the block of voters that keeps them in their jobs.
There are areas where an opt-in involvement does not work, like protection against fire, infectious disease, criminals and opposing militaries - threats that grow stronger and threaten previously uninvolved bystanders if left to fester. You’d have to be a self-contradictory idiot to favour government intervention in those areas and yet support the removal of government power in those areas. But that does not mean that all government spending is equally justified.
Cutting spending isn’t political suicide if you have a population mature enough to realize that there’s no free lunch.
As someone noted upthread, the label ‘conservative’ has a quality of being a cypher; some people use the label who have no beliefs that could be even remotely described as conservative. When they declare, “I’m conservative”, they might as well be saying, “I’m good”, “I’m moral”, or “I’m strong”.
My concern is that much of the American public is too selfish to face the fact that there’s no free lunch, and will always find labels that comfort them into believing that their demands of government are good things, and everyone else’s are bad. “I’m a conservative, so the government services I use are good. You are a liberal, so you’re just looking for handouts”. This sums up how too damn many voters have looked at the issue of spending cuts in the last few decades. The label could change someday to other than ‘conservative’, but the blind selfishness would still be there.
(E.g., I’m a bachelor with no children, and I am constantly amazed at friends who consider themselves ruthlessly laizzes faire, but are happy demanding that people like me help pay for their kids’ education. FTR, I happen to support public education. But since this is not a conservative stance on the issue, I consider myself less conservative than someone who opposed it. My friends have managed to convince themselves otherwise).
It gets even more absurd when people who are already enjoying a government subsidy declare that they are conservative because they oppose others’ being granted the same subsidy.
A lazy, indulgent, self-deluded population will never make the sacrifices necessary to bring spending under control.
Y’know, on my first read of this thread I had missed this, but it actually captures what has unified these various disparate groups that all call themselves “conservatives” while actually not only having little in common, but having mutually exclusive worldviews: a common enemy - those damn libruls would be sure to do it worse. So long as they can be convinced of that they’ll make the deal with the devils that are those not true conservatives.
All that being a conservative meant - and still does mean to some - is that it isn’t “them”.
And that’s why Bush destroyed the movement. He proved that, no, the libruls wouldn’t be worse, they couldn’t be worse.
Obama may not be satisfying their individual and mutually exclusive conservaive ideals either; but he is, even by many of their own conservative standards, doing better than Bush did. Or at least no worse. Yeah it is a low bar.
Are there any examples of a post-1940s democracy radically reducing its overall level of spending? For example, at the end of the Cold War, did some countries actually see a peace dividend?
To a certain extent I agree with this. When a party wins they have to become pragmatists, and for the most part they do. When they don’t - for instance invading Iraq because of whatever the real reason was - it doesn’t work out well. Members of the party in power not currently in office scream just as loud as the opposition about violation of principles.
However there are some real differences, for instance in the attitude towards climate change and regulation, so even given the required pragmatism there is still more than a dime’s worth of difference between the parties. Bush doing the bailout was an instance of pragmatism overruling ideology. I think it might eventually get him ranked about Hoover.
The big difference is that the left wing Democrats seem far more willing to be inclusive than the hard right religious Republicans. To misquote Dylan “you don’t make no compromises, when God’s on your side.”
But conservative do claim there is a free lunch. Remember the Laffer Curve? Cutting taxes will raise revenue, so you can have all your government stuff and lower taxes too. And we still hear this as if it worked.
If they keep saying that government doesn’t work, and give the impression that most of the budget is devoted to waste and earmarks, no wonder people will be surprised that cutting the budget actually hurts. We’ll see how this plays out in California where the schools are talking about cutting out sports because they can no longer afford it - unless people in the district donate enough to run a team and the players pay their own way. That’s a perfect test of how the libertarian ethic flies.
If people were into cutting spending and reducing the size of government as a virtue, there would be no problem cutting spending before cutting taxes - Og knows we have enough debt to repay. Somehow I don’t see it happening.
Your understanding of the Laffer curve is lacking. Cutting tax rates to optimise for maximum revenue does not create revenue from nothing, it just stops you destroying the existing revenue source with your overzealous taxation. The relevant saying is “Don’t eat your seed corn”, not “There’s no such thing as a free lunch”.
I think California will be an excellent laboratory for conservative principles. The people spoke in no uncertain terms, they do not want a solution that includes tax increases. Arnold has pledged to respect that, by promising to veto any budget that increases taxes. I predict that when the people realize what happens when they get what they asked for, they will be begging for a tax increase. Begging!
I give them two years at the outside; probably much less.
Aah, this is going to be excessively long - into tdlr territory. I realize I started a million little side-discussions (a.k.a. Hijacks) in my post and then Sam Stone added a few more in his. Still this stuff is so interesting to me, so I’ll make this a two-parter.
In the long run I wont be able to put in the time to keep up. Sam - respond to the extent and at the length that you like, I’m not sure I will be able to keep it going though
I agree that the economic and political landscape has changed - taking a lot of policies that were mainstream “progressive” or just mainstream back then off the table - as a result of globalization, and modern economies.
But I would argue that the progressive policy flora actually has changed with the times. What remains is, with your words, the “progressive impulse”. In my view of progressivism that means countering institutionalization of concentrations of money, power and knowledge; preventing, responding to and containing market failures and unwanted externalities; promoting general tolerance.
But I can’t agree to the proposition that neither the identified set and scope of challenges nor the proposed tools to meet them haven’t changed for progressives since the 1970s. I think it is very apparent looking at the Obama administration that they definetely have!
Do we have reason to believe that raising the corporate tax is high or even on the democratic policy agenda at all? My impression was that the corporate tax is the anomaly in the U.S. tax code insofar as that is the tax that is actually higher in the states that in many western european welfare states (and in canada as well apparantly), while the overall tax burden is much lower… If I’m mistaken so be it, but otherwise that does not sound like a likely place where democrats will go look for increased revenue.
Well to start off that discussion in the right way we’d first have to establish whether we both agree on AGW being a real policy challenge that needs to be dealt with. In my previous post I asserted that it is identied as such by progressives and that they have a real and incentives- or markets- based policy to deal with it (i.e. cap & trade). You didn’t respond to that part which I think is a shame since it is an interesting issue of how to deal with a potentially huge human value that is is not naturally commoditized or priced into other commodities on traditional capitalist markets; or with your words an externality. Therefore it is a challenge to free market evangelism and libertarians.
In the states, like I wrote in my last post, the republicans seem to have mostly chosen to reject that policy challenge by denying anthropogenic global warming totally, which I think is dangerous (politically), and somewhat intellectually cowardly since it would seem as that position is taken mainly as a kind of cop out to a hairy scenario that doesn’t fit nicely into ones idelogical framework.
Looking at the right wing intellectuals that contributes to the Corner (that is the National Review onlines collaborative blog, for those who are not up to speed) Andrew Stuttaford and Iain Murray represent this AGW denial position as I recall, while Jim Manzi represents a slightly fresher aproach of acknowledging AGW as a real issue, but questioning whether the estimated costs of Cap & Trade is justified by the estimated (economic) damage of AGW for the next 100 years.
Downpost you seem to imply (if I understand the concept of Pigovian taxes correctly) that you are not on principle opposed to taxes or systems like cap & trade to deal with negative side effects (like AGW) of market activity and that you could see it as part of your future republican partys policy agenda. It would be fun to hear that fleshed out! But how does that reconcile with the Obama- & democrat-bashing on Waxman-Markey?
But granted, either a carbon tax or a cap & trade system may constitute an economic disadvantage in the short run (while it may lead to economic advantages in the near future by giving incentives for a head start in the clean energy industry) for countries that implements it in relation to countries that do not implement it. This is true in the same extent for all countries. That is the reason for the Kyoto treaty where Cap & Trade goals are set for most industrialized nations, thereby levelling the playing field, and allowing solutions to the policy challenge.
Could you see a modern republican party supporting something like Waxman-Markey as long as there is widespread compliance with the Kyoto treaty?
The three biggest parts of the current huge U.S. deficit (from what I recall) are loss of revenue from the Bush tax cuts, general loss of tax revenue from the recession and increased spending on “entitlement” / “safety net” programs as a consequence of people getting unemployed or in other financial trouble b/o the recession.
Arguably (there even seems to be half a consensus excluding the shrinking “blame freddie mac” crowd), the severity of this recession was ultimately caused by banks and insurance companies taking huge risks in the quest for huge profits in the absense of regulations that had previously been removed.
But sure - bad, complicated or excessive regulations can be a competetive disadvantage. Nonexistant regulations may lead to market failures, allow moral hazards inherent in certain markets, or destroy or damage other non-economic values.
So the goal should therefore be good, appropriate and measured regulations that deal with real problems. “More regulations = always bad” is too simplistic for me.
Well I guess I’m talking about the full agenda of what you may call “social conservatives”, and argue that they are made up of the religous right on the one hand with gay rights and abortion as the main issues, and the old dixiecrats southerners on the other hand. Not quite sure what the general outspoken policy issues of the latter are apart from a general suspicion of “entitlement”, affirmative action and the federal government. I would guess these two groups overlap to quite an extent.
I would have made a case for how much of a core constituancy the social conservatives are for the current republican party but many others have already done that upstream, so I won’t bother. If you read a lot of NR I’m sure you would agree that they make up a considerable part of the contributions there as well!
Add the anti-immigration republicans and sum all that up and we have the present shrinking demographic base of the republican party caused by lack of support with minorities and urban people. (Which, put in other words, would be the american mainstream rejecting the culture-war reaction to the modernism and counter-culture of the 60s and 70s, or the pendulum swinging back.)
