Why I Am Still Conservative in Trump's America

Tuesday is election day, and marks two years since an election which did not go at all the way that I expected. I didn't vote for Trump (or Hillary) and I went into the evening feeling sure that Trump would lose. He didn't, and if American politics had been toxic and divisive before, it's been even more so since.

I remain opposed to Trump and to those others cut from his mold who have come to increasing prominence in the GOP over the last two years. Some friends (both progressives and those who were of the right but now consider themselves sufficiently anti-Trump that they think it is necessary to vote in Democrats at all levels in order to purge the party of him) have asked me at times why I would continue to describe myself as a conservative in these times. Some have described the remaining GOP coalition as being made up entirely of "people who think abortion is the only issue to vote on and out-and-out racists".

Abortion and euthanasia are important issues to me, as are other "values voter" issues such as opposing redefinition of gender and family, protecting freedom of religion, etc. However, I'd like to set those aside for a moment and talk about why even setting aside those issues I'd find the Democratic party as it exists now to run mostly contrary to my preferences. The exercise of setting aside some of my most strong political preferences may seem odd, but one of the arguments that I hear often is that it's either impossible to make progress on these issues as this time or else that these life/moral issues would be better served by a "whole life" approach of getting people better jobs and benefits, thus removing their motive to make use of abortion, euthanasia, etc.

The Economy

To my mind one of the more moronic political slogans is "it's the economy, stupid". It may be true that a key swing segment of voters will vote for the party currently holding the presidency if the economy is going well, or the opposing one if it's going badly, but I don't think that the president has much sway over the business cycle. I don't think Bush deserved blame for the 2008 crash, nor Obama blame for the low employment during his presidency. I don't think Trump deserves credit for the record lows in unemployment we're currently experiencing. And if the Democrats get the White House in 2020 and the economy tanks again shortly afterwards, I won't consider it their fault either. I think that when people try to do "analysis" where they look at levels of unemployment or poverty by presidential administration over the last fifty years, they're mostly showing their analytical bankruptcy.

However, I do think that overall economic policies can be more or less conducive to a strong economy and the way that the human person works. If I look at the economic policies most popular among the bright young up-and-comers on the left side of the political spectrum, they are:

- Guaranteed employment or else universal income guarantee separate from employment
- Free college for all
- Tax the rich / eliminate inheritance
- More and stronger unions
- More regulation of companies, busting of monopolies, crack down on banking, etc.

I'm not going to go through each of these individually, as it would take at least one lengthy post to discuss each, but I will attempt to address what I would see as the general themes which these policies exemplify and why I disagree with them.

The first theme is a belief that people will flourish more without having to make choices with the necessity of survival in mind. You shouldn't have to take a lousy job just to make sure you have food on the table. You shouldn't have to think about how you will pay for college before deciding whether to go or what to study. Wages should be collectively negotiated, not based on the market value of the work or the performance of the individual worker but rather on the collective agreement (which to reliably benefit all members of the group the most typically means seniority and jumping through administrative/training hoops.)

I think that this misses a basic aspect of human nature. Our natural tendency is to be self involved, and to seek what seems like the least work and most pleasure in the short term. If people are guaranteed an income separate from doing work that others find valuable enough to pay for, a lot of people will choose not to do the hard work which even in a highly technological society is necessary to make our food, build our cities, manufacture our goods, etc. Even if, at some level, we know that all of this work needs to be done and done well, when the living that we know we need to earn is not dependent on it, we don't tend to work that hard or that well. We see this in the communist regimes of the last centuries. About half the agricultural product of the USSR was produced by the tiny portion of cultivated land which was under private control, while the massive collective farms which were allegedly the full time job of the collectivized peasants were far less productive.

The second theme is the conviction that democratic and regulatory processes are able to administer many areas of the economy much better than market processes. According to this way of thinking, it's fairly easy for people in general or regulators in particular to judge when the market is being over-greedy or wasteful. I think often these urges to regulate result from over simplification, and the proposed fixes are ineffective or actually destructive to the common good.

Self Defense

Another area in which the left tends to prioritize collective action over individual is in defending oneself against threats to life, limb, or property. To this way of thinking, allowing wide access to the weapons that people could use to defend themselves makes it too easy for people who want to hurt others or themselves to get hold of weapons. Thus, it's better to restrict access to weapons to law enforcement, and for people to rely on law enforcement to provide them with any protection they may need. We see the logical extreme of this in countries like Great Britain, where people have on occasion been prosecuted for defending themselves against an intruder in their own homes with something as otherwise inoffensive as a kitchen knife.

I recognize that allowing people the access to such weapons also allows them the choice to misuse them to hurt themselves or others, and that a world in which no firearms were in private hands would be a world in which there were fewer people murdered, but at a basic philosophical level, given the choice between allowing self defense and giving exclusive power of defense to the state, I'd still pick allowing self defense despite these risks.

Town over City

As "the big sort" increasingly results in densely packed urban areas that vote for the left versus more rural areas that vote for the right, the left has increasingly accreted policies that favor dense urban areas and the groups associated with them: renters over owners, urban professionals over families with children, etc. Having grown up in Los Angeles and eventually found my way to semi-small town Ohio, I have the expatriate's dislike for a lot of the urban fixations, including rent control, restrictive zoning, and the massive infrastructure boondoggles needed to get even more people into the dense urban cores of a half dozen cities. To the extent that one of the axes of modern US politics is regional, I favor the "flyover country" axis over the the urban hub axis.

Foreign Policy

In some ways, the US seems caught in the foreign policy contradictions of the late Roman Republic: we're one of the few global powers capable of enforcing order, yet we quickly become discouraged and resentful when it turns out that showing up in some country peripheral to our sphere, knocking over the regime there, and setting up  favored rulers doesn't automatically result in peace and order. The left has been reflexively against our imperial entanglements since the Vietnam war. Originally this was through a mix of wanting to help the Soviet sphere and more idealistic feelings (often somewhat accurate) that the US was stomping on smaller polities. These days it's basically all the latter, mixed with a sort of holdover anti-US sentiment that perhaps results from the former. However, the right has also become increasingly frustrated with our "foreign entanglements" as a new isolationism has taken hold.

The US is certainly not always on the side of the angels in the international sphere, but overall I think it has done more good than bad as a global power, and I think that a US retrenchment would be more likely to result in increased regional wars than in a reduction in them.

Law & Order

There's blame to spread around here, and I almost didn't include it because right now there is deeply rooted in much of the right a reflexive willingness to argue that any police officer that uses deadly force was right regardless of circumstances. I don't agree with this tendency. However, I do still have a much more conservative approach to law and order than a progressive one in the following sense: I deeply believe that we cannot have a thriving polity unless it is a polity of laws. Those laws will at times have to be enforced using force. The laws will have to be enforced even if the people breaking them are mostly disadvantaged in various socio-economic ways.

I think the difference in mentality here is well captured by the point during the Ferguson riots when several of the bright young writers of the left were writing pieces about how rioting was a reasonable reaction to the oppression of the Black community, about how this was a way to strike back against the economic and political elites, because they didn't care about peaceful demonstrations. "What is the optimal level of rioting?" asked Matt Bruenig, writing at Gawker.

I'll never consider burning down people's businesses, cars, or homes to be an acceptable means of agitating for change. Perhaps it's that I'll always be a child of Los Angeles, but I'll always see the forces of spontaneous social order as the Korean immigrant shopkeepers who armed themselves and protected their stores from being looted and burned, while I'll always see the madness of crowds as the mob that pulled innocent truck driver Reginald Denny from his big rig and smashed his head with bricks on live TV.


Economics, self defense, foreign policy, regional priorities, law & order.  All of these issues put me on the right rather than on the left. 

I do in some ways find myself more in agreement with the left (or the center) on immigration.  And I find Trump repulsive in multiple ways.  And yet, given my overall political beliefs, there little to make me want to vote in Democrats either, since almost everything they would do would move the country further from how I think it should work rather than closer.