State of the Union

Are Americans More ‘Socialist’ Than Europeans?

In Search of a ‘Solidaristic Center-Right’

By Scott Galupo • February 18, 2013, 12:31 PM

I agree with nearly every word of Pete Spiliakos’s post in reaction to Ross Douthat’s (equally thoughtful) take on the marginalization of Catholic social thought in American politics:

Spiliakos writes:

There is a hole in our politics where a center-right politics of limited government solidarity should be. That isn’t because of a lack of policy proposals or the lack of a (latent) public desire for such a center-right politics. This lack in our politics exists because of mistakes by key political elites who keep getting suckered by Obama’s statism into a radical-sounding rhetorical anti-statism that doesn’t even reflect Republican policy. Better options are available. We just need to stop charging furiously every time Obama waves his red flag and build our own positive message. We might find that a prudent and relevant Catholic-influenced Republican politics is more popular than the Republican politics of job creators + tax cuts for high earners + nothing.

I do have to quibble with one point, however. Spiliakos is right that Republicans spout anti-statist rhetoric that’s more extreme than the actual portfolio of policies they’re trying to enact. But it’s not because Obama is “suckering” them. Obama practices a center-left politics that is not substantially different from that of the Clintons. And to the extent that Republicans insist on defining the center-left as “radical,” they must rhetorically push themselves further right in order to offer a truly “conservative” alternative. (As Dan McCarthy observes, this seems to be Sen. Rand Paul’s long-term gameplan. I’m not sure it’s a recipe for success in ’16—and it seems to me that Paul is developing a “populist libertarian” message to soften the hard edges.)

Secondarily, Republicans would, I think, have employed apocalyptic rhetoric about country-destroying socialism and spiteful 47 Percentism even if Hillary Clinton had won the presidency in 2008. The party, and the movement broadly speaking, needed to evade responsibility for the financial crisis and the recession that followed. So it noisily separated itself from the big-spending ways and self-advertised “compassion” of the Bush administration—even as it now grapples with the task of presenting an agenda that affirmatively appeals to middle-class families.

The problem is simple: a pro-family agenda and the apocalyptic anti-statism are divergent paths.

Sooner rather than later, conservatives interested in winning elections again are going to have to choose.

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Posted in Congress, Conservatism, Election, libertarianism, Politics. Tagged Daniel McCarthy, Pete Spiliakos, Rand Paul, Ross Douthat.

14 Responses to In Search of a ‘Solidaristic Center-Right’

icarusr says:

February 18, 2013 at 12:50 pm

I guess what I don’t even understand is the whole “statism” and “antistatism” issue. The party of permanent war and a $700 billion defence budget, and ever more savage drug war and bigger prisons, and torture at home and abroad, and eavesdropping and illegal searches and seizures and reditions, and regulation of contraception – this is supposed to be the party of anti-statism? And Obama’s adoption of the Heritage Foundation/Romney model for health care is statism? Why are Green energy tax credits any more statist than oil drilling or fracking tax credits? How is the extension of the EITC a statist position? Since when specific tax rates for rich people determines whether one is statist or not?

The Republican problem here is not one of Obama’s suckering them into radical positions – naturally, the party of personal responsibility continues to play victim to Big Bad Incompetent Clueless Naive Supermanipulator Obama. It is that instead of policies, even at this late date, they deliver labels and slogans.
Elrond Hubbard says:

February 18, 2013 at 12:59 pm

The Republican party is useless. It started as the American equivalent of a Social Democrat party, and it hasn’t changed.
The only people that are getting ‘suckered’ are you Right-os who believe that the Republicans are conservative, that the American system is a good idea, and that voting and political wonking will change anything.

This pseudo-country Empire is doomed to collapse, and it will be a good thing when it does. Don’t be surprised if your Republican friends are the first against the wall. I won’t cry for them.
icarusr says:

February 18, 2013 at 1:17 pm

Incidentally, you want to know why the Republicans are doomed? Here is your answer, in two separate instances:

“To avoid a March 1 sequester, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) suggested on Fox News Sunday that Congress save money by cutting the Affordable Care Act instead.”

“It’s a mistake for the White House to draft immigration legislation without seeking input from Republican members of Congress,” the statement begins, before going on to call the bill “half-baked and seriously flawed” and declaring that “if actually proposed, the President’s bill would be dead on arrival in Congress.”

This is not negotiating in good faith. This is not negotiating at all. This is not policy. This not a serious political party. It is a constant game of hostage-taking and bullying.
tz says:

February 18, 2013 at 1:22 pm

They could have turned on the Wall Street plutocrats and maybe arrested and tried them for fraud (or at least suggested it).

Somehow having the banana republican party be of, by, and for the corporate cronies.

(I also note for all the libertarian pretense, the Kochs and the like aren’t pushing for enforcing even the most clear and fundamental laws against theft or fraud).

The corporations are the biggest welfare queens – they demand infrastructure and subsidy – paid for by workers and even the poor through things like sales tax or property tax which has to be part of their rents.

The CHURCH needs to be socialist – because it has no guns, but only exhortations. The STATE needs to be libertarian because it has only guns.

But the church? Hungry? go get an EBT card from Obama. Homeless? go get section 8 from Obama. Education? school or grants from Obama. Sick? Obamacare! But don’t vote for him!

The fundamental teaching is often called “a preference for the poor”, but that is because the rich can normally take care of themselves and use their wealth and power to do even criminal acts. Justice must be blind, in that the scales cannot show a rich-poor bias, but by the time a rich and poor man arrive, there is usually already a bias – the rich man has the expensive lawyer, and the poor man doesn’t understand the law. The rich man breaks the poor man’s leg and asks to race – but gives the poor man a crutch?

But the church couldn’t even even question the billionaire bailout bonuses. Too busy telling everyone they shouldn’t be made to pay for contraception (wrapping it in “religious freedom” rhetoric, but they treat every other last freedom with contempt).

It used to be which church you wanted to help. Now we have the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation conducting charity eugenics (genocide, but politely).
cameyer says:

February 18, 2013 at 1:31 pm

‘relevant Catholic-influenced Republican politics is more popular than the Republican politics’. Could you explain what you mean here?
ArizonaBumblebee says:

February 18, 2013 at 1:48 pm

icarusr stole my thunder. The problem for Republicans is not that they espouse limited government, it is that they spout empty, anti-statist pabulum while advocating for laws and policies that will implement an authoritarian, centralized warfare/welfare state with globalist aspirations. Like many millions of voters, I no longer believe these “conservative” politicians speaking with forked tongues.
William Dalton says:

February 18, 2013 at 2:17 pm

“The problem is simple: a pro-family agenda and the apocalyptic anti-statism are divergent paths.”

The well being of the American family depends upon the survival of the state? That wouldn’t even make sense in the context of a government structure not policing American families to replace parental authority and autonomy with state authority and control. It certainly falls flat as analysis of the major problem faced by the Republican Party in the current political realty. The GOP’s greatest godsend in the past decade has been the emergence of Ron Paul, who has consistently backed his “anti-statist” rhetoric with his actions in Congress, and who alone drew crowds of young, non-WASP supporters to Republican gatherings despite the fact he, too, is an old, WASP Republican. It is clear the Democratic Party is the Party of the State, to which idol it turns to resolve every societal problem. Until the election of Ronald Reagan, the post-war GOP tried “Me, too” Republicanism and found it did neither the party nor the nation a service. Under George W. Bush, the Republican Party became State Party #2, and that is what has destroyed its credibility.

The problem with Republicans in Congress today is not their anti-state rhetoric. It is that the rarely live up to that rhetoric. And then, in their tirades against Senator Hagel, they completely betray the anti-statist cause in order the prove their sycophancy to the Empire.

Offering permission to soften “anti-statist” rhetoric will do nothing but serve to enable Republicans in succumbing to their worst instincts.
norman ravitch says:

February 18, 2013 at 3:30 pm

Catholic social thought sought a third way between socialism and capitalism — and they found fascism in Italy, Austria AND ELSEWHERE.
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TomB says:

February 18, 2013 at 7:12 pm

The … “marginalization of Catholic social thought”?! You must be kidding!

Well, maybe at the margins, and maybe in some detailed particulars that aren’t mattering in the real world much, and maybe if you plumb “Catholicism” for its detailed differences with “Christianity” as a whole.

But … the reality that has made the Dems successful—and Obama very possibly historically so consequential given his facility at doing so—is their essential rhetorical incorporation of central Christian tenets into their program. “We are all each others’ keepers” might as well be the very motto not only of Christianity but the Democratic Party too now, with Obama very very smoothly playing this tune at every turn, and doing so very succesfully too given his obvious genuine belief in it. And it’s been an inability to find a way to challenge this that has, where they aren’t panting to apologize for not keeping up, steamrolled the Republicans into looking like flattened greed-heads.

True, one problem with the Dems full-throated adoption of this and the Republicans’ inability to meet it, is that the turning of the Christian perspective/light onto the traditional family never seems to happen, does it? It always seems to get waylaid illuminating the plight of … “the poor,” or illegal aliens, or gay marriage, the travails of LGBT youth in high-schools, or … something else.

But hey, it is the *promise* that matters, and so the Democrats have in a big way found the golden key by incorporating what is after all *the* central organizing principle of Christianity into their rhetoric in this Christian nation.

Up until Clinton was defeated the Republicans were at least successful at keeping this fusion at bay. Clinton was just too patently slick, and his own behavior of course was so offensive to general Christian principles it essentially disqualified him from being that fuser.

But along has come Obama now, with as gentle a mien as can be imagined, and speaking always as an alleged true uniter and not divider, and always with that sort of “we are each others’ keeper” reasoning for what he’s doing, and … forget it. You’re gonna try to demonize *this* guy? With that ever-present smile, and the way he looks playing with his ridiculously photogenic family?

And it’s almost cruel how efficiently this has worked against the Republicans. Above all, of course, the challenge would be not to reject this outright, but to demand a refinement to it. To illustrate that social problems can be addressed in a Christian manner, but must be guided by sober thought as well. And yet there can have been few political parties in American history that have been as allergic to intellectualism as that Bush II bequeathed to us. As … out and out anti-intellectual.

Indeed if anything his legacy was the idea that … the *cruder* the religious motto/credo to be followed the better! And when it came to showing the benefits of using intellect … well what can one say that doesn’t make you wince? Get attacked on 9/11 by a few cave-dwellers and what do you do? Submerge yourself in a potentially endless quagmire across the entire Mideast! And when that quagmire becomes obvious, just … “surge” it and continue doing the same! Have one of your major cities hit by a typhoon and congratulate your appointee for photos of refugees on the road like some picture from Africa! And when a bunch of Wall Street criminals get caught out … bail them out and do nothing to them thereafter.

I.e., essentially say “we reject the idea of thinking as a guide to governance.”
Rambler88 says:

February 19, 2013 at 12:47 am

Conservatives interested in winning elections again are going to have to learn to argue for a pro-family agenda (and everything else) on some better basis than religion. Organized religion is not in good odor–not least because the ongoing mess in the Middle East was purely religious in origin, and because big religion and corporate welfare/warfare are joined at the hip in their co-optation of “conservatism”. The electorate is not going to forget these things in time to give politicized religion a break.

Common sense and fact are the tickets to an electoral breakthrough, not least because they can found a persuasive pro-family position. At the level American politics has sunk to, they could win on novelty value alone. But in order to exploit that opportunity, conservatives need to learn biology as well as physics. Not to mention critical thinking, which, unfortunately, can’t be taught in schools–and apparently can’t be learned in church either.
Adam says:

February 19, 2013 at 10:32 am

A true pro-family agenda needs to have an economic aspect to it that addresses the current imbalance of earnings to productivity. Corporate profits are the highest they’ve been in years and corporate taxes are the lowest as they flaunt every loophole, both foreign and domestic. In the same time frame, earnings are stagnant or dropping for the individual wage earner. Limited government is fine as long as the first best principle of that government is protection of the citizenry. This includes national defense, as well as protection from avarice. We don’t need government in the wealth transference business, but we do need government to manage the playing field in a way that encourages that transference from capital to labor in a more equitable manner. A continuation of the current path ends with a nation of serfs and masters.
NRF says:

February 20, 2013 at 8:33 am

Right on, Adam.

It’s time to make work really pay and idleness NOT pay. Like the elimination of benefits for people who have additional children while they are on taxpayer support, and the elimination of the unearned “Earned” Income Tax Credit, but a steady & substantial rise in the minimum wage.
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