Catching Up with April Posting: Republicans

Is the Republican Party sticking its collective head in the gas oven? Are Republicans swallowing the tailpipe of an idling Lincoln Continental? Is the conservative movement so blinded by its hatred of the left and its own self-righteousness that it is failing to see clearly?

I would say "Yes!" to all of the above. David Frum, former Canadian, former Bush speechwriter, conservative policy wonk was apparently fired by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) for saying something like this. And Ron Radosh, in this reflection on l'affaire Frum, is singing to the same sheet music. Tactically speaking, American political parties must appeal to the broad squishy center of the political spectrum. Frum questioned Republican tactics in the healthcare debate, and he no longer works at AEI, because conservatives don't want to hear that they need to change. If they wanted to change, they wouldn't be conservatives, would they?

Next time you see a stegosaurus in the park, ask him how that refusal to change thing worked out.

(The title of this piece? It's April 4 and this is my fourth post in the month of April. Now I have to go do my daily Bible reading.)

The Conservative Manifesto

I have, somewhere on my bookshelves, a copy of The Communist Manifesto, penned by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and published in 1848. Who can forget the opening lines?

"A specter is haunting Europe - the specter of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this specter: Pope and Czar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police spies.

"Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as communistic by its opponents in power? Where the Opposition that has not hurled back the branding reproach of communism, against the more advanced opposition parties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries."

They don't make manifestoes like that any more, and I don't think the Mount Vernon manifesto is likely to make the kind of impression on our national politics that its sponsors would like. It's pretty tame stuff, in this day and age, to accuse your opposition of ignoring the Constitution, particularly when the right, in the persons of George W. Bush and Antonin Scalia, have found it convenient to re-write that venerable document at need.

By all means, let us have constitutional government. As a first step, rather than trotting out the tired old myth that Congressional powers are limited to the list in Article I, Section 8, how about noting that nothing in Article II gives the President the power to act in the stead of Congress?

A manifesto? I don't think the conservative bloc in this country has the energy to create anything like a manifesto. After all, they keep falling back on the 162-year-old trick of calling upon the specter of communism as a focus for their fears.

If This Consensus Emerges - Watch Out!

This is a nice article about conservative strategy. I don't think that Mr. Guariglia's vision will work, though, because I don't think the social conservatives will tone down their interventionism. Why? Because they are not conservatives. They are authoritarians, maybe totalitarians, with a laundry list of goals labelled "conservative." And that's good, because I don't really want a reprise of the Reagan era.

Back to Basics, Conservative Style

Eric Florack has decided that the founding manifesto of the National Review, written in 1955, is an appropriate statement of the conservative and libertarian principles that should guide the Republican Party. It is certainly clear about its positions, and, in fact, might be a better program than the current melange of anti-tax fanaticism, medieval superstition, worship of greed, and fear of honest negotiation that characterizes the Republican Party in Congress and in the country. That the GOP's leadership is insufficiently conservative may be doubted. That it lacks a coherent program is, however, apparent.

However, like many "movement" conservatives, Mr. Florack forgets that the purpose of a political party is to do exactly what he faults the Republican leadership for doing: to get elected. In fact, a political party's only purpose should be to construct a program that commands the support of a majority of the people, so that it can enact that program when in power. The manifesto opposes bipartisanship, but by opposing everything, and cooperating in nothing, the Republican Party has merely rendered itself irrelevant to the government of the country.

Prospects for Conservatives

The author of an article in Pajamas Media asks "Will things get better for conservatives in 2009?" This is a fine and hopeful question, since he obviously views himself as one of the embattled band of conservatives battered by the Obama election. A couple of things need to be said about the analysis with which he finds hope for the conservative cause in the coming year.

First, we have the conflation of "conservatives" with "Republicans." If, in fact, the Republican Party has been diminished to the hard core of self-described conservatives, those driven by fear of change and hatred of modernity, the answer to the author's question will be a resounding "No!" The only hope for the Republican Party is to expand its constituency, and that, in turn, means abandoning some positions that are dear to the hearts of conservatives. An improvement in the fortunes of the Republicans may actually mean a diminution in the influence of the conservative movement.

Second, the author's imagination doesn't seem to extend to the possibility that the conservative movement, or the Republican Party might actually come up with any positive ideas that could win over voters. His hopes lie in the failure of Mr. Obama's program to promote economic recovery or financial sanity. I don't see how it can be good for the conservatives to root for an extended recession, higher unemployment, and failing financial institutions, just in order to be able to portray the Democrats as failures. Not only would they reinforce their identification as the party of Herbert Hoover, their schadenfreude would repulse many Americans. After all, putting party ahead of country is supposed to be a bad thing. So, in sum, things might get better for conservatives, according to this author, at the cost of extended suffering for the people of the country, and more self-destructive behavior on the part of the Republican Party. What I'm not clear on is just what are these so-called conservatives trying to conserve.

Note: I posted this item to Cafe Third Edition first, although I intended to post it here. I'm happy it's out on Cafe Third Edition, but I wanted those who might visit this site to see it, as well.

Did the Right Do Itself In?

John Hawkins asserts that conservatives are largely to blame for the defeat of their positions, and their candidates, in the November elections. His take is that conservatives didn't stand up and complain soon enough, or effectively enough, when President Bush and the Republican Congress went for non-conservative programs. In fine, he says, liberals are more passionate about their causes than conservatives are about theirs. Conservatives need to take to heart the old slogan: We work harder.

I'll agree with part of that diagnosis. Certainly conservatives were not all fired up for John McCain, and the Republicans in Congress took a beating, too. Hawkins also notes that tax cuts don't play well when about a third of the electorate are already exempt from Federal income taxes. He mentions that sniping at Democratic health care plans is insufficient. These examples make a different, more important point, than lack of conservative verve. As I have often said, "enthusiasm is no substitute for competence."

I think there are lots of passionate conservatives out there. The problem is that their passions blind them to the fact that no one shares their concerns. Take abortion - please. The five people in the United States who think that abortion is a very important issue are as passionate as all hell about it, but very few other people are willing to vote for or against a candidate solely on the basis of his or her views on abortion. Similarly, the people who think that the Second Amendment is the sole bulwark against our government in Washington painting the capitol red and becoming the second Kremlin are really excited about that issue, especially when they're off their meds. But who else cares?

The real problem with the conservative "movement" is that it isn't a movement at all; it's an agglomeration of little groups of people who are very concerned about these niche issues. They're passionate, all right, but they're too much like the man who leapt upon his horse and rode off in all directions. The reason a lot of people miss the old Republican party, the party of Dwight Eisenhower, is that it focussed on issues of real importance and broad interest. Sound fiscal policy, a strong national defense, development of the national infrastructure, and a rational tax policy benefit everyone, even those who don't support those things at a given time. That party was capable of turning into a majority whenever its prime issues gained some salience with the electorate. The current edition is drifting off into membership in the tin-hat league.

Conservative and Liberal Brain Function

On Monday, my local paper, the Colorado Springs Gazette, carried a story from the L.A. Times asserting that a psychological study had found that liberals and conservatives achieved differing results in a simple test of brain function. First, I would urge anyone who has not seen some version of this story to read it, so that you may judge for yourself the importance of it, and so that you can assess whether I'm making too much of it. I could, myself, raise a number of methodological questions. (For example, there isn't a lot of detail about the protocol used to identify the "conservatives" and the "liberals.") But that's not my intent here.

I have said this before, and now that this bit of research has come out, I have the opportunity to say it again: Underlying a lot of the reasoned arguments, and the impassioned concerns, driving the contest between liberals and conservatives in this country (and in others, as well), are deep-seated personal preferences which are not accessible to evidence, to argument, to persuasion of any form. Liberals, very broadly speaking, like change. They expect good things to happen when circumstances change. This bespeaks a certain confidence, even arrogance, about their ability to read the trends and to control their destinies. Conservatives, on the other hand, distrust change. They like the "tried and true". They like systems that inhibit change.

What did the psychological test find? Well, they asked the subjects to press a button whenever they saw a "W" after a sequence of "M"s. MMMMWMMWMMMW. Something like that. Previously identified (and probably somewhat self-identified) liberals made many fewer errors than the conservative subjects. Why? The interpretation is that conservatives readily fall into a mindset in which they anticipate the next letter to be the same as the last, and so they are more likely not to perceive the change. Does that really tell us that conservatives resist change? I'm not sure. But it does seem to find a readier acceptance of the occurence of change among liberals than among conservatives.

By the way, for the rest of this article, I am going to use the term "conservative" in an attitudinal, not in a programmatic sense. I don't believe that everyone who opposes abortion is a conservative, for example. I tend to think that, the law of the land having allowed abortion for over 30 years, the conservative position is to support the status quo. Be that as it may, my use of "conservative" is about resistance to change, reluctance to adopt new ideas or practices, and a tendency to oppose "change for change's sake."

One way to look at the difference between conservative and liberal positions is to consider an analogy from evolutionary biology. (If you prefer, you can just think of this as an example from ecological biology. In that case, you'll probably want to substitute individuals for species, and changes in behavior for speciation events.) I'm talking about the so-called adaptive landscape. Let us visualize a perfectly flat terrain. All species are capable of surviving in this domain with a same degree of ease or difficulty; there are no advantaged species and no part of the terrain advantages one species more than another. But things begin to change. Just as erosion cuts a flat valley floor into ridges and gullies, so the abundance of food species changes the adaptive landscape.

In one area, a particular plant drives out rival vegetation; this becomes low country for those species that lived on the unsuccessful plants, but it becomes a pleasant upland for those which can use the successful species. In another area, a predator finds the climate unfriendly, and the prey begin to thrive and multiply.

In the end, we have a rugged landscape, with peaks on which live well-adapted species which enjoy an abundance of food, water, and whatever other goods are needed for the purpose of life: reproduction, and, on the lower slopes, species struggling against scarcity, competition, and predation, barely able to sustain themselves. (Down in the gullies are the remains of extinct and near-extinct species.)

Similarly, I would argue, conservatives tend to view themselves as in one of two conditions: Either they are living on an adaptive peak, so that any change will be for the worse, or - notably among contemporary religious conservatives, they have left such a peak for the lower slopes (dragged down by illusory progress), and their most desperate need is to struggle back to the top of the hill. Liberals, on the other hand, view themselves as moving toward a new, better, peak, and have little reluctance to abandon their current post, having convinced themselves that it is far enough down the slope to be barely tolerable.

One of the reasons for the impassioned defense put up by the conservatives is, in this view, that they see any move away from the present situation as a perilous descent into a steeper and steeper trough, with only the abyss of destruction at the end of this path. What the liberals discard as discounted through prior use, the conservatives cling to as a symbol of enduring happiness.

One reason I mention the second conservative position is the tendency, throughout history, for conservative thinkers to disguise innovation as a return to old, golden principles. I would note that, for example, a number of bills introduced in Congress which would, in the view of many, destroy the traditional barrier between church and state, are labelled as "restoration acts". One such bill, passed in the Clinton administration, was the "Religious Rights Restoration Act," which, in fact, gave religious practitioners privileges they had never enjoyed before. Putting new wine in old bottles is always more acceptable to conservatives than the admission that they enjoy the new vintage.