Kain and Conservatism
Erik Kain declared recently that he isn’t a conservative. As he explains, this doesn’t mean that he’s changed that many of his views from when he called himself a conservative. Nor is it a more narrowly political issue of changing his voting preference. As Erik writes:
It’s not my politics so much that have undergone a change lately (though they have as well), but my thoughts on who I should and should not align myself with, and why this is important.
I understand what Erik wants to do here, but it seems to me that it has been quite clear where he has stood and what side he has picked in all the many debates over the years. It was no secret that he was basically sympathetic to the health care legislation, to which I was opposed, and he was furiously hostile to the Arizona immigration law, which I find basically unobjectionable. The label he chose for himself was essentially irrelevant in both of those debates, and there was no danger that he would be confused with the people aligned on the other side of the argument.
I’m sorry to say that I find Erik’s post to be very close to the flip side of the argument that mainstream conservatives have deployed against dissident conservatives for years, which is that we associate with the wrong kinds of people, tolerate “liberal” arguments, and generally fail to be good team players when it comes to organizing for electoral politics and reinforcing absurd ideological claims. In other words, we are too close or insufficiently hostile to the other “side.” From what I can gather, Erik is telling everyone that he isn’t a conservative so as not to be mistaken for “one of them,” which is almost as depressing to watch as it is when a thoughtful person feels compelled to jump through a series of ideological hoops to prove that he is “one of us.”
I had to grimace a little when I read Erik talking about his cultural affinities. The point is not that I object to most of his cultural affinities. When I’m in my car on long road trips, I listen to NPR, too, and I have several friends to the left of Russ Feingold (as well as friends who are dyed-in-the-wool Republicans). I’m sure I could rattle off a list of other such “heterodox” behaviors, but I had thought that Erik agreed that these affinities have or ought to have no bearing on political coalitions. All of this reminds me of the ridiculous political categorizing that people wanted to impose on everyday habits during the debate over “crunchy” conservatism, as if eating organic vegetables or shopping at a co-op were proof of left-wing convictions. Erik continues:
I still believe in the importance of decentralized power structures, checks and balances, and in not placing too much faith in the state – but again, these are positions that are perfectly acceptable on the left in ways that my belief in gay marriage or higher taxes or non-interventionist foreign policy are simply not acceptable on the right.
Perhaps that’s true within the confines of conservative movement institutions and in many conservative media outlets and magazines, but it isn’t true of “the right” as a whole, and this exaggerates how acceptable decentralism really is on the left. There is sympathy for it in some circles, but is it “perfectly acceptable”? It probably depends on what’s being decentralized.
As far as the major parties are concerned, a “pox on both your houses” attitude is generally a very healthy one, and it is frankly one that we need more people to embrace. The last thing we need is more people accepting the two major parties as the inevitable political coalitions that must always exist. There are already too many people who give in to the idea that you have to become a reliable team player for one side or the other. That finally brings me to the first part of Erik’s post, in which he wrote:
When I think about the GOP retaking Congress I get cold sweats and flashbacks of 2000-2008. Ditto that for the prospect of say, Newt Gingrich sitting in The Oval Office. The only Republicans who are at all honest – like Gary Johnson who has really good civil liberties bona fides – would A) never win and B) are really way too economically conservative for me. So yeah, Republicans taking back Congress in a couple months is just bad news as far as I’m concerned.
There is no reason to worry that Gingrich might become President. He would probably not win the nomination, and he could never win a general election. There is such a thing as likeability, and Gingrich doesn’t have any outside the camp of true believers. As a rationale for giving up the label conservative, this paragraph isn’t a good short answer. Honestly, I don’t see what Republican chances in the midterms have to do with anything here. For one thing, I don’t respect the Republican Party enough to let it have any hold on how I define myself. In fact, the more their partisans keep profaning the name of a humane political persuasion, the less inclined I am to let them have it to themselves.
As I have said before, I don’t think the GOP will win the House, but if that did happen it would primarily be bad news for the Republican Party and the conservative movement. If that seems a little too counterintuitive for you, let me explain. Should the GOP somehow win the House, they will not have earned it and they will not deserve it, and they will proceed to destroy themselves in very short order. Arguably, there was nothing worse for the American right than to be given the free gift of winning the 2002 midterms, because this win encouraged them to pursue the policies that proved to be their undoing, and a similar win in 2010 would have the same effect of enabling Republicans’ most destructively self-indulgent impulses. As one horrified by the prospect of Republicans in power, Erik should look forward to this.
After all, even if the Republicans won the House there would not be much that they could do once in office, except waste their time as they did in the ’90s hauling executive branch officials before committees to testify on this or that outrage of the week. They would likely be stymied by the Democratic majority in the Senate on any major legislation, and Obama would veto just about anything they passed if it somehow got to his desk. At the same time, Obama would make them into a much more effective foil for his arguments once they had some hold on power, and out of frustration they would become increasingly obsessed with “getting” Obama and become even less interested in representing the interests of their constituents.
Update: Erik has a long response that is worth reading, and I do appreciate the kind remarks he has for the work here at Eunomia. He clarifies several points, and he has persuaded me that I didn’t really understand him the first time around. Here’s Erik:
Nor am I trying to say that we should not associate with conservatives or not tolerate them or any of that. Daniel writes, “From what I can gather, Erik is telling everyone that he isn’t a conservative so as not to be mistaken for “one of them,” which is almost as depressing to watch as it is when a thoughtful person feels compelled to jump through a series of ideological hoops to prove that he is “one of us.”” I can see how I might come across this way, but it was not my intent. My intent was simply to say, look – this isn’t me. It isn’t honest of me anymore to call myself this. It doesn’t sit right with me.
[...] Larison: I’m sorry to say that I find Erik’s post to be very close to the flip side of the argument [...]
“…this exaggerates how acceptable decentralism really is on the left. There is sympathy for it in some circles, but is it “perfectly acceptable”?”
I think it is. What you tend to see from a lot of lefty bloggers is not an overarching belief in the need for government intervention in daily life, but rather government only stepping in when the alternative would be (or is, now) worse for the well-being- and often the practical liberty- of the people.
This tends to coalesce around two methods of government intervention: Direct (e.g. single-payer health care, any type of critical infrastructure) or indirect through regulation (e.g. can somebody get the MMS people to do their jobs on the oil rigs, please?). There might be disagreements between left and right on what is strictly necessary, but the logic of current left-wingers in these cases is that lives are at stake, and in many cases it’s less costly to the country if the government intervenes rather than lets companies do as they will. They focus on issues where something absolutely needs to change, and simply view the government as the one entity guaranteed to be able to make the change happen.
More over, lefties today nearly always show awareness of the fact that the theory of government intervention to make lives better and the practical application do not match up, or even close to it. This seems to be what a lot of people look at when they scoff at liberal thinking- aspects of old-school liberalism like the beer regulation Kain wrote about not too long ago that made no sense at all. But the idea of government knowing what’s best is definitely not part of current lefty theory; you don’t read anything like that even from people like Digby or Glenn Greenwald, and you are more likely to see government bashing from them over issues like privacy and war than anything positive.
Postwar liberalism may have been dictated by a belief in the positive power of the government, but the basic strain now is simply an absolute lack of faith in the corporations that impact or potentially impact everyone’s lives to do anything but work to increase profits, at the expense of whoever needs to get screwed for them to do it. And the push from liberals, in turn, is to set up government where it’s needed to protect the average American (or, in some cases, citizen of the world) from environmental, political, or workplace abuse at the hands of those companies. They want people to have the ability to work and live, free from concern that they’re being poisoned by factories with broken safety mechanisms or that their entire financial future could go up in smoke with a single major illness or injury, and are much more concerned with government being effective (ie. actually enforcing smart regulations) than being large. And they don’t really want more than that.
Mr. Kain was never a conservative. He is a big government libertarian. He wants the government to exist to enable whatever he wants to do with his life. If he wants to be hedonistic, then Mr. Kain believes it is the government’s job to mitigate the negative impact. If Mr. Kain wants to be a writer or sit at home all day, he believes it is the government’s job to make it happen.
At a time when bloggers at Balloon Juice are promoting nationalized education standard, the end of local school boards, and the returen of forced busing, it is hard to believe that Mr. Kain believes in decentralized power. I guess in Mr. Kain’s world decentralized means that gays or elite white progressives have total control where they live but liberal government means that the federal government will stp when then those same liberals do not get their way (See California where progressives either get the results in the elections or run to court to get the result that they want).
My guess is that Mr. Kain is excited in being in the patron class was the U.S. becomes a third world country and never thinks about the coming peon class.
“much more concerned with government being effective (ie. actually enforcing smart regulations) than being large.”
That may be true, but I think it’s still the case that liberals look to government to solve problems with little regard as to whether government intervention is appropriate or wise. Ever-expanding government may no longer be an acknowledged ideal with the left. It is still the end result of their natural impulses.
Mike
Mike: “That may be true, but I think it’s still the case that liberals look to government to solve problems with little regard as to whether government intervention is appropriate or wise.”
If liberals looked to government without regard to the wisdom of doing so, then it would necessarily not be true that they’re more concerned with an effective government over a large one. Their ideas of “appropriate or wise” may vary from yours, but the specific change in what liberals strive for between the postwar period and now is that they’re targeting issues where they specifically think government intervention is, for strongly logical, defensible reasons, better than the alternative.
The debate over financial stimulus is a good example. Unlike the health care system, which needs drastic changes regardless of anyone’s preferred methods, a lot of people don’t think more stimulus would help, that the increased debt would irreparably harm the country. Krugman et al. disagree with this in the most strident terms. But as much as Krugman beats the drum for more stimulus, more, more, he always has numbers and historical evidence to either back up his claims that it’s for the best or knock down those opposed to him. (It’s not always apparent in his space-limited NYT columns, but it’s a constant aspect of his blog.) There’s never a point at which “government > not government” as a general belief enters the rhetoric, even peripherally. It’s, “Government has to do this because it’s the only entity that can.”
“Ever-expanding government may no longer be an acknowledged ideal with the left. It is still the end result of their natural impulses.”
I think we need to draw a line between “expanded” and “ever-expanding”. The former is certainly true; the question there is at what point does government expansion (or contraction) begin to harm the basic ability of people to live. And “ever-expanding” probably used to be true. But there’s no real way to tell whether it would happen again unless liberals were able to win and get policies locked in place supporting their current notions of where government action is needed, so they could potentially focus on issues where the usefulness of government’s fingerprint is much more arguable. Given the current political landscape, I find it difficult to believe we’ll have an answer to that question anytime soon.
Indeed the notion that people on the left are automatically enamored of “ever-expanding government” is a clichéd accusation of right-wing bloggers, and unworthy of someone of Daniel’s intellect and temperament. In fact, my impression of plenty on the left is that they’re particularly suspicious of governmental intervention and control over individuals. Free speech, opposition to censorship, opposition to drug laws, etc., are pretty common themes on the left. Where I think liberals differ from at least movement conservatives is that the former dislikes regulation of individual people but feels that GROUPS of people require regulation (since the propensity for human evil is mainly an issue when they get together in the form of businesses, labor unions, religious groups, militaries, governments, etc.). Movement conservatives seem to feel the opposite to the extent that they are eager to increase the freedoms extended to these very groups (except for labor unions anyway) but want to diminish the freedoms of individual citizens in the way of speech laws, drug laws, abortion laws, anti-Gay laws, etc.
I guess I should add that in the US anyway, when discriminatory laws have been enacted against groups of people, this has usually been done by local elites (e.g., Arizona’s immigration law, California’s anti-Gay marriage law, Jim Crow laws including poll taxes, etc.). I expect this is true in other countries as well (certainly the case in South Asia, where I’ve spent some time). When relief has come in from such conduct, it was often done by the federal government (e.g., Eisenhower and Little Rock). I suspect this informs the traditional favoring of federal action within the American left as much as any argument based on large scale economic interventions along the lines of Social Security, the WPA and so on.
Pac: The anti-gay marriage law was added as an amendment to the state constitution via referendum. This does not change the logic of taking the issue to court; it simply changes the basis from fighting discrimination at the hands of the few and powerful to fighting tyranny of the majority. But it’s not an example of elite overreach.
Speaking of the courts, that has actually been where many discriminatory policies were struck down, rather than the lawmaking process. That is, I would think, why conservatives tend to be the ones railing against judicial activism; the most famous examples of the courts going against established law are liberal victories (Brown, Roe v. Wade), which helps mask the fact movement conservatives have said activism working in their favor as well (see: Roberts court removing limitations on corporate money in political campaigns).
Certainly Congress and the President have roles to play- the most recent example that comes to mind is the law passed against forced arbitration after the Jamie Leigh Jones rape case. But given that liberal social issues have generally been ignored, slow-walked (DADT), or slowly walked back (abortion rights, one of the first bargaining chips tossed off in the health care debate), it’s fair to say that most liberals aren’t putting much faith in the federal lawmaking bodies to help them with social issues, even if they believe federal law is in theory the best or only answer.
[...] asked why I didn’t post it here and that’s my answer. You can read Larison’s post here, and my response [...]
Long time lurker – first time poster.
I think your point, Mr. McBang, regarding liberalism distrusting corporations more than they loooooove big government is exactly right. The false choice opponents of HCR presented was between you, your family and your doctor versus the government making health care decisions. In reality, it is between you, your family and your doctor versus the insurance corporations. My sister in law has dealt with a husband’s cancer, and daughter’s diabetes and another daughter’s need for multiple serious surgeries. The time she has spent arguing with insurance companies, to get them to provide services that they agreed to and that they were paid for – well, she could have used those manhours to build a space elevator to the moon. It is hard to argue that the present system represents the finest of the free market, or that it would change in the basence of major government intervention. The completely rational (in my opinion) lack of trust in the behavior of corporations led many to argue for a single-payer system.
I like living in a society where we provide public education to all. Where there are public universities that provide higher education at lower cost than private institutions. I would like to live in a society where a serious illness, or even a routine one, is addressed.
And I do not come to these attitudes lightly. In my high school and college days (when dinosaurs walked the Earth) I was a hard core libertarian, even going so far as subscribing to the Objectivist newsletter. Long story short – the free market does not take care of itself, with the feds only role being to monitor fraud. Too many instances of the Rupert Pupkin philosophy (“Better to be King for a day, than schmuck for a lifetime”) to still believe in that.
By the way – I find the posts here – and the quality and tenor of the comments, to be excellent. While I do not always agree with what is said here, I find the arguments to be cojent and thoughtful.
In my experience, contemporary liberals — as opposed to the ghosts of utopian 1960s liberals that conservatives are forever tilting against — are pragmatists.
I am a Gen X liberal (who flirted with conservatism in college), and resident of NYC (transplanted here from a Southern-ish state 10 years ago). I would define pretty much all of my friends as liberal pragmatists.
We don’t love government because we are blind statists — we find that caricature laughable, and obviously concocted by people who don’t know any real liberals. We just think government is necessary to hold back the worst excesses of corporate power, and that it’s the most useful (but not perfect) instrument for providing some (but not all) important services.
And as liberals have become more pragmatic, conservatives, for the most part, have become more ideological.
I see a great deal of utopianism on the right these days, focused sometimes on “free markets”, sometimes on (usually evangelical, but sometimes Catholic or Orthodox or Mormon) Christianity, sometimes on American military power, and sometimes on a toxic combination of the above.
P.S. I very much agree with what Pacific Moderate said (@ 3:01pm). I usually get the sense that conservatives’ dislike of the federal government isn’t really about defending individual liberty — it’s about strengthening state and local government power. “State’s rights” has nearly always been code for “local authoritarianism”. That’s what it meant in 1860, and that’s what it meant in 1960. And when I see conservatives agitating to give state legislatures the power to once again select senators, it seems that’s what it means in 2010.
[...] his response to E.D., Larison makes this point about a possible House [...]
Picking out the “most destructively self-indulgent impulses” of Republicans is like trying to pick out which part of white rice is the whitest.
The essence of conservatism is destructive, self-indulgent impulses. That’s how you cut taxes in war time, start a war without a plan or purpose, sell arms to Iran, impeach a president for consensual sex, say tax cuts pay for themselves and use a single page graphic as ‘proof’ of the concept.
Without destructive, self indulgence, conservatism doesn’t even exist.
MDC,
What part of going in front of the Supreme Court and arguing that it was OK for the University of Michigan to have separate and unequal admission standards for whites and blacks demonstrates that liberals are only about standing up to corporate power.
Liberals want a large, well funded, and invasive federal, state, and local government so that the government can conduct social engineering. And when progressives talk about social engineering, they are really talking about being the engineers but not the subjects of the engineering.
Look….the problem Kain and Friedersdorf and all the young conservatives have…..is that they are wrestling Beck and Palin and Levin for control of the base while they should be going direct to the base.
The base is like a riderless horse that has got its head down in a grain bin of delicious populism. The young conservatives are trying mightily to pull the horses head up, because they know the horse will eat itself to death. Palin, Levin, Beck, Gingrich et all are telling the horse it has every right to eat the grain….because they are making money.
The grain will kill the horse, but they don’t care.
And there is no way Conor and Daniel can wrest control of the horse away from Beck and Palin.
and some of the myriad reasons the grain will eventually kill the horse…..the demographic timer, 94% of scientists are not-republican, 70% of post-baccs vote democratic, youth and minorities are 70% + liberal…..the truth is the only thing that will save the horse.
good luck with that.
@Spiffy: You’re right, instead of saying “when discriminatory laws have been enacted against groups of people, this has usually been done by local elites” I should have just said “…this has usually been done by local majorities”.