Rumpsy-Dumpsy
Who is the intended audience for this kind of argument? Who is it attempting to persuade? People who have basically given up on a majority Republicans — that is, the “conservative rump” — are in a poor position to influence them. ~Jim Antle
To return to the Specter business one more time, a few words in defense of this “rump” remark. It seems to me that when you have a leading conservative Senator, in this case Jim DeMint, expressing a desire to have 30 true believers in the Senate rather than 60 compromised members, you are faced with a situation in which the conservatives who are most hostile to Specter and happiest to see him go are exulting in their status as a political rump and are expressing their hope to be reduced still more to an adamantine core. I suppose that is their prerogative, but when people begin acting like the rump of a once-influential movement it is not exactly unfair to use the name.
Certainly, those most interested in rebuilding a winning electoral coalition of the right should attempt to persuade the majority of the right that seems to think there is nothing that cannot be solved with redoubled conviction and indifference to every past failure except excessive spending. For my part, I’ll acknowledge that my arguments are not always made in the most, er, irenic way, and I will admit that the strong certainty that dissident conservatives have in our views on where movement conservatives have gone wrong tends to clash violently with their equally strong certainty that the movement hasn’t gone wrong at all. At some point, though, assumptions and opinions have to be tested against empirical evidence, and one argument will be more in agreement with the evidence than the other, and it is at that point that tone and choice of words become secondary and the substance of the arguments has to be reckoned with. Movement conservatives and party regulars have been making a series of bets in the last few months that die-hard fiscal austerity is not just the right thing to do, but it is also the winning approach, and on at least two major occasions this approach has backfired spectacularly.
Most everyone agrees that, as part of the generally confused Tedisco campaign, Tedisco’s indecision on the stimulus bill badly damaged him, but few have dug deeper and wondered why Tedisco was unsure how to respond to the legislation at first. If the approach of die-hard opposition was such a clear winner–and in NY-20 it ought to have been even more obviously advantageous given the traditional Republican leaning of the district–Tedisco ought to have reached this conclusion quickly. Instead, he had to balance his knowledge that the voters in the district were responding favorably to the idea of the legislation, however vaguely or poorly they understood its provisions, with the national party message that ended up dragging him down. If the all-in bet against the stimulus had been the right move electorally, Tedisco need never have wavered. In Pennsylvania, the stimulus bill was again at the center: it was the last straw for conservatives, and disagreement over the bill evidently made it impossible for Specter to stay in the party, and so to keep the bet on fiscal austerity going conservatives decided in effect to throw away a Senate seat. Of course, it is possible to take this approach and say that the principle of fiscal austerity (during one of the worst postwar recessions, no less) is more important than election outcomes, but one cannot at the same time say that principle of fiscal austerity is the means to winning back the majority.
Persuasion becomes virtually impossible when the target audience doesn’t see the need for even having the discussion. There may not be enough of an effort by critics of the mainstream from “reform” and dissident conservative perspectives to appeal to the persuadable, but one of the reasons why “the conservative rump” is in its current predicament is that it long ago stopped making any effort at persuasion in relating to the rest of the country, insisted on reiterating its greatest hits and expecting the country to follow. Persuadable, non-ideological voters were lost for lack of seriously trying to secure them as reliable supporters. Suburban voters were driven away by the combination of Iraq, general incompetence and perceived ideological rigidity. In addition to being an awful propaganda line for the war, “stay the course” became a large part of the GOP’s unimaginative electoral strategy as well. Nowadays, if they acknowledge mistakes at all, mainstream conservatives are keen to pin responsibility on anyone but themselves while tarring anyone who points out the obvious errors of the last decade as treacherous or some crypto-liberal eager to score points with the media. Some of these people may exist, but the presumption that every critical voice falls into this category is evidence of intellectual exhaustion and insecurity.
Demographic and cultural changes have been working against conservatives for years, but there was no coherent or defensible attempt to counter this with an expansion of the coalition. Heavy-handed, clumsy handling of immigration legislation in the final Bush years was a perfect example of how not to expand a political coalition, and whatever short-term gain Medicare Part D managed to provide it sabotaged every GOP effort to regain credibility on fiscal matters. Disastrously, these badly misguided attempts to add to the coalition have been taken as proof that no addition was needed and everything had been fine as it was before. According the weird tribal rules that “no one should speak against the family,” those who do offer some ideas and proposals are distrusted because they are deemed unreliable…because they offer ideas and proposals. After 12 years defined mostly by failure, accommodating partisan goals and being good team players, mainstream conservatives seem even more intent on whittling down the number of those who count as “real” members of “the team.” After a decade of ruining conservatism in the name of “getting with the program,” there is now a new program we are all supposed to endorse despite its exceptionally bad timing, its misunderstanding of the political landscape and its misdiagnosis of past electoral defeats. Of course, those on the right rude enough to point these things out are clearly in the employ of George Soros, or so we would be reliably informed whenever anyone in the mainstream deigns to engage with these arguments.
Conservatives’ fairly tenuous hold on power in Washington was masked by the post-9/11 rallying to the GOP and the advantages provided by redistricting and gerrymandering after 2000. People laughed at Ruy Teixeira for talking about an emerging Democratic majority in 2002, when such a majority seemed more of a fantasy than ever before, but instead of responding pre-emptively to the long-term demographic and political danger to the right that stared them in the face the GOP pushed for the “pre-emptive” invasion of another country and its leadership kept trying to force its members to accept the inevitability of mass immigration. Both blew up in their faces, as the war lost the GOP most of the country and immigration demoralized and alienated huge numbers of conservatives. Most of the “reform” conservatives were on the wrong side of both questions, of course, while the dissidents were right about both, which I suppose makes the more recent complaints from “reformers” about the GOP’s electoral woes and deficit of ideas harder to take. Even so, there is more worthwhile thinking going on at these two conservative margins than in the whole of the mainstream at the moment, and unless mainstream conservatives want to remain a rump they ought to pay more attention to what the critics are saying rather than the way in which they are saying it.
“…and indifference to every past failure except excessive spending. ” Only in the last few months (TARP), and mostly under a Democratic president. When Bush and a GOP Congress were dishing out vast sums of money, the furor on the rump was much quieter.
“Movement conservatives and party regulars have been making a series of bets in the last few months that die-hard fiscal austerity is not just the right thing to do, …”
Again, not really. They are opposing Democratic spending. It’s like somebody discovers that Violence is Wrong when somebody else has the baseball bat with nails sticking out of it.
Fair enough, but they are publicly claiming that they think it is the right thing to do, whether or not they have credibility or a record to back up this claim.
Well, I just posted a comment regarding the demographics on the old Specter thread. Had I read your post first I could have saved myself the trouble, as I you made my points better and with a more—-as you say….irenic tone.
“For my part, I’ll acknowledge that my arguments are not always made in the most, er, irenic way, and I will admit that the strong certainty that dissident conservatives have in our views on where movement conservatives have gone wrong tends to clash violently with their equally strong certainty that the movement hasn’t gone wrong at all.”
No no no.
For a mainstream conservative like me, the point is that in spite of the myriad and manifold ways the movement has gone wrong over the last decade or so, it still represents, in alliance with the GOP the best vehicle for civilization, limited government, and prosperity right now in the year of Our Lord two thousand and nine.
The difference is subtle but crucially important.
Ugh Daniel, I give up. Here is where we agree. I agree that spending did not necessarily cost the GOP elections although it didn’t gain the GOP anything, and it didn’t help with the base. Nor will promising to control spending necessarily win elections. Rhetoric against spending is supported in general but seldom in the particulars. The conservative movement is prickly about criticism even from the right and sometimes doesn’t even get the difference. The conservative movement is not introspective or thoughtful. Etc.
But your message is mixed and confusing. Maybe being hard core against the stimulus would have hurt Tedisco. Although waffling likely hurt him just as much or more. But opposing the stimulus was clearly the right thing to do. Votes be damned. Is there any situation in which it would even be conceivably OK to support Keynesian monopoly money creation? What was his alternative? To support the porkulus bill? Perhaps it would be practical to oppose it quietly instead of leading with it, but any suggestion that Tedisco should have bit the bullet and supported it differs not a whit from the advice he would get from the moderate Frum wing. I also find your use of the pejorative “fiscal austerity†curious. Wouldn’t that also be known as living within our means?
“unless mainstream conservatives want to remain a rump they ought to pay more attention to what the critics are saying rather than the way in which they are saying it.â€
But the way in which it is said matters a lot. If I read your paragraph on Tedisco and didn’t know anything about you, I would be unable to determine that you were doing anything other than counseling moderation and that you represented the Frum moderation wing. As it stands, I have no idea what exactly you would have counseled Tedisco to do. If we both admit that the conservative movement has a tin ear to criticism and lacks nuance and flexibility regarding its core beliefs, then can we blame them that they confuse paleo/alt right, reform, and moderate critiques? It seems to me both our responsibility to the intended audience and in our best interests to make it clear where our criticisms are coming from and make them distinguishable from Frum et al.
I suspect on matters of policy I agree with you more than I do RSM, but I am more in sympathy with his spirit. The porkulus bill was an abomination. It should have been opposed with every fiber of the GOP and conservative movement’s being. If that message is unpopular and cost votes then so be it. We need to make the case and try to make it popular. We need to shout it from the rooftop. There may be ways to make that case other than the mantra repetition that comes off as disingenuous anyway usually used by the mainstream right. But that is a matter of message, not content. (At least on spending.)
Oops … with paragraphs
Ugh Daniel, I give up. Here is where we agree. I agree that spending did not necessarily cost the GOP elections although it didn’t gain the GOP anything, and it didn’t help with the base. Nor will promising to control spending necessarily win elections. Rhetoric against spending is supported in general but seldom in the particulars. The conservative movement is prickly about criticism even from the right and sometimes doesn’t even get the difference. The conservative movement is not introspective or thoughtful. Etc.
But your message is mixed and confusing. Maybe being hard core against the stimulus would have hurt Tedisco. Although waffling likely hurt him just as much or more. But opposing the stimulus was clearly the right thing to do. Votes be damned. Is there any situation in which it would even be conceivably OK to support Keynesian monopoly money creation? What was his alternative? To support the porkulus bill? Perhaps it would be practical to oppose it quietly instead of leading with it, but any suggestion that Tedisco should have bit the bullet and supported it differs not a whit from the advice he would get from the moderate Frum wing. I also find your use of the pejorative “fiscal austerity†curious. Wouldn’t that also be known as living within our means?
“unless mainstream conservatives want to remain a rump they ought to pay more attention to what the critics are saying rather than the way in which they are saying it.â€
But the way in which it is said matters a lot. If I read your paragraph on Tedisco and didn’t know anything about you, I would be unable to determine that you were doing anything other than counseling moderation and that you represented the Frum moderation wing. As it stands, I have no idea what exactly you would have counseled Tedisco to do. If we both admit that the conservative movement has a tin ear to criticism and lacks nuance and flexibility regarding its core beliefs, then can we blame them that they confuse paleo/alt right, reform, and moderate critiques? It seems to me both our responsibility to the intended audience and in our best interests to make it clear where our criticisms are coming from and make them distinguishable from Frum et al.
I suspect on matters of policy I agree with you more than I do RSM, but I am more in sympathy with his spirit. The porkulus bill was an abomination. It should have been opposed with every fiber of the GOP and conservative movement’s being. If that message is unpopular and cost votes then so be it. We need to make the case and try to make it popular. We need to shout it from the rooftop. There may be ways to make that case other than the mantra repetition that comes off as disingenuous anyway usually used by the mainstream right. But that is a matter of message, not content. (At least on spending.)
Observations from fly-over country:
Dems, libs & the media are cheering on the so-called ‘reformers’ jihad against social conservatives. When your putative political opponents like what you’re doing, you might want to take another look.
One significant factor in us getting to this point has been the non-stop, now decades long and unanswered Dem/Lib/Media smear of social conservatives. While so-called “Republican moderates” are willing to have social conservatives vote for them, they rarely (if ever) defend them and do as little as possible on their issues.
Can you imagine the Dems ever acting embarrassed of any constituency of theirs? What political party worthy of support spends its time attacking its own voters?
The purge is coming from the left, not the right. The Republican Party pushed Specter over the finish line in 2004; Specter wasn’t simply tolerated, he was indulged (as are the ladies from Maine). The loudest voices for ‘purge’ are from the David Frum / Kathleen Parker wing, people who say social conservatives should “sit down, shut up, forget about the things you care about and don’t forget to vote Republican in November” while they go chasing after so called moderates.
What I am trying to do is counsel intelligence, or at least intellectual honesty. If the GOP wants to go down in flames saying, “Here I stand, I can do no other,” that would be a politically suicidal but rather impressive thing. You keep saying, votes be damned, and I’m telling you that the votes will be damned if the GOP keeps pursuing this line. If that’s all right with you, then at least I understand that position. The Republican position is that they can prevail electorally by pursuing an obviously unpopular course of action, and I find this delusional. It is almost identical to the behavior we saw surrounding the “surge”: there continued to be this belief in some quarters on the right that the “surge” had eliminated Iraq as a liability,. when it had had no electoral significance at all.
My point, I suppose, is that you can’t gravely intone that Obama is going to wreck the economy, add massive amounts of debt and prolong the recession while simultaneously putting forward nothing more imaginative than austerity in a recession and making every wrong political move that makes Obama’s agenda more likely to become a reality. I welcomed the GOP defeat in 2006 because I thought it might smack some sense into them. I was wrong about that. I was less enthusiastic about their defeat in ’08, and voted for their Congressional candidates back home, because all of the advantages and power were on the other side. Their failure to adapt and learn from the earlier defeat, though, ensured that it didn’t matter that they had my vote for Congressional candidates more or less by default at that point.
Even so, I expected some learning to take place after the second drubbing. It didn’t happen. If anything, on the foreign policy issues that have done so much to hurt the GOP, they are even more adamant that they were right. They have managed to come around to a better position on fiscal matters than they used to have at the moment that it will do them the least good, while persisting in foreign policy errors whose repudiation might help them. I can call this many things, but I cannot call it politically smart.
In his item on Ross’ column, Richard said something to the effect that he doesn’t care if the next ten elections are lost, and that’s fine if you don’t really care. However, if you don’t really care about that, don’t complain in the next breath, as Richard sometimes does, about academic-minded, high-church conservatives who are interested in cultural renewal and intellectual life more than “the grasping and the holding on,” as Francis Urquhart would say. It seems to me that we run the risk of being just as oblivious to the public mood and in danger of expecting the rightness of ours view to overcome political reality if we take that line.
There has rarely been a more opportune time for our immigration, trade and national sovereignty arguments, but it seems to me that we are wasting a lot of energy fighting for fiscal and economic policies that have never been terribly popular and are unusually unpopular at the moment.
Look, I backed Ron Paul and voted for Baldwin, so I have no sympathy for any welfarist agenda, be it “reform” conservative or anything else, and I assume everyone knows that about me by now. I was frankly much more vehement in my denunciation of the TARP because it was far worse in pretty much every respect, and I had no time for the people saying that it was necessary. That was the time for courage and principle, and not nearly enough people on the right made the stand when it was needed. The greatest economic blunders that have been made in the last few months have been made by Treasury and the Fed and, only as a distant third, Congress, yet the focus of most of the outrage is on spending bills passed this year.
I am also willing to acknowledge reality, which Paul backers and Baldwin voters know better than anyone else, and this tells me that next to no one will vote for a fiscal and economic policy of the kind that would be remotely satisfying to any of us. Are we going to be more likely to have such a fiscal and economic policy in the future if, during a major recession and after two major electoral defeats, the GOP decides that now is the time for bold stands on principle? I tend to doubt it. Part of that is my characteristic pessimism talking, but part of it is just an assessment of the public mood.
What bothers me, and what makes me keep coming back to the fight over the stimulus bill and its consequences, is that there is a simply false belief that what I call fiscal austerity is the path to electoral recovery. As you know, I generally argue that conservatives should look to tend their own gardens and do the necessary drudge work of building up the culture they want at home, so I usually put no great store by national election victories.
I talk about these things because I enjoy discussing them, and I think my readers want to know what I think about them, but I don’t think they have done much for conserving anything we care about. They have won us very little over the last 30 years, and they are likely to win us even less in the years ahead, but if I am going to comment on political events, the political landscape and elections I have to describe and interpret what I see honestly.
I have said time and time again that I think the remedies the “reform” conservatives propose will not work and are often terrible as a matter of policy. Just recently, Frum was babbling about the need to be more inclusive of pro-choicers, which is so far from being the GOP’s problem that it isn’t even funny. That said, when “reform” conservatives look at the political landscape they are seeing something much closer to what I see, and I can’t pretend that I see something different just because I oppose their agenda in almost every respect.
I use the phrase fiscal austerity because I think that describes what the GOP, at its most coherent moments in the last few months, has been offering. There were alternative ideas that Tedisco could have taken up and promoted. Frum happens to have been a prominent booster of the payroll tax holiday idea, but that doesn’t automatically make it a bad idea. So that would have been and was one of my suggestions for what the GOP could have been doing. Instead, they demonized Scott Murphy as a fat-cat corporate type who gave out bonuses to his employees, and tried to beat the dead horse of 9/11 outrage. They had no alternative economic message, except that Tedisco was somehow going to “create jobs”–little wonder that he failed.
“In his item on Ross’ column, Richard said something to the effect that he doesn’t care if the next ten elections are lost, and that’s fine if you don’t really care.”
Well I for one do care.
“I use the phrase fiscal austerity because I think that describes what the GOP, at its most coherent moments in the last few months, has been offering.”
No no. Opposition to the stimulus package could be austerity in different circumstances, but not here. In fact I would have a very different opinion about it if there was any chance that it could actually stimulate something.
The GOP and mainstream conservatives are not about austerity. They are about civilization, limited government and prosperity. I believe (and I’d venture Stacy McCain believes too) that properly organized these people make a majority, either now or very soon.
The people who believe in civilization, limited government and prosperity are with us. For the people who are not with us, there’s a substantial number of them who want to believe in these things, or pretend to believe in these things, who are really working other agendas instead. Fine, let’s get the other agendas out in the open and work on them. As I see it, there’s nothing so dark or sacred that we it can’t suffer some public daylight.
“I was frankly much more vehement in my denunciation of the TARP because it was far worse in pretty much every respect, and I had no time for the people saying that it was necessary.”
This in an important particular we’ve talked about here, but only parenthetically. Did you write anything specifically about this at the time it was proposed (or since)?
“The people who believe in civilization, limited government and prosperity are with us.”
Language like this is a sign of what has gotten conservatives into such bad straights to begin with. Defining one side as “believers in civilization” and the other side as, I guess, “barbarians” does not exactly encourage any self-reflection or critical thinking about one’s own beliefs.
Mike