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.
Whose Speech Fed Rome Even as the Tiber's Flow
9 hours ago
4 comments:
I recently heard one of the Munk debates put on in Canada, this one between Steve Bannon (formerly of Breitbart.com) and Frum (formerly of National Review), on the proposition: 'Be it resolved: the future of politics is populist, not liberal'. Bannon took the affirmative of the proposition; Frum the negative. Before the debate, the audience (mostly Canadian) was 70%+ percent in favor of the negative, or Frum's position.
By the end of the debate, the audience voted 50+% in favor of Bannon's position.
Bannon basically won the debate, and the support of the audience, by making the following case:
-What we have seen in the past ten years has been the total failure of the so-called 'liberal' agenda. That agenda has not been one of either classic liberalism, nor of conservativism, but might better be described as a common neo-liberal AND conservative agenda, one which might be better described as iatrocracy (my term: rule by experts, or 'managers');
-While that agenda has worked greatly in favor of highly educated professionals (e.g., lawyers, doctors, politicians, bureaucrats, academics, media people, etc.), it has been ruinously expensive, and largely at the expense of, the great mass of what was once the middle class, and which has increasingly become the mass of the idle poor. Examples of such policies included the series of wars the U.S. has entered into, the financial meltdown of 2008-9 and its subsequent 'bailouts', the drastic increase in the cost of higher education (over the course of the last 20 or so years), and the mass of administrative regulations and legislation, which impeded recovery from the Great Recession of 2009.
-As a result of the total failure of the alleged 'experts' to address these several crises, except perhaps to profit from them, at the peoples' expense, the people are taking back their democracy. Of its very nature, a democratic action will be populist. We have the choice, however, of a socialist (and totalitarian) populism, or one which is capitalist and based on the republican belief of the 'rights of Man'.
And although Bannon didn't say it, I will: what has been decried and vilified as 'Alt-Right' is simply the position as stated above.
I have gone out of my way to state this as a preamble to my own thoughts. They are as follows:
While I am not a member of the 'Alt-Right', as I identify more as a paleo-conservative or classic Liberal, But I quite agree with Bannon on all of the above. I also agree with Bannon that our current President has done more to advance classic conservative policies than did Ronald Reagan. And he bids fair to out-do Reagan, if he continues at the rate he has. Those policies have included, but have not been limited to, the appointment of two originalist jurists (so far) to the U.S. Supreme Court, the rescinding of thousands of administrative regulations, and the passage of a tax reform which, while not perfect, has greatly reduced the complexity and confusion of the old tax act.
I believe that a direct result of the President's actions has been the vast improvement of the U.S. economy, which has improved the lives even of the poorest minorities among us.
Yes, I quite agree with you, Darwin, that the current President is a vulgar, reprehensible lout. So what? So was Ulysses S. Grant. I take the same view of our current President as Abraham Lincoln did toward then General Grant: "What else can I do but support him: the man fights!"
This is why I will hold my nose and vote Republican as a straight ticket, both for the mid-terms today, and in 2020. The choices would otherwise appear to be either the same old failed neo-liberal/conservative policies, or the 'new' progressive policies, which to my mind would appear to be bat-guano crazy.
But, and I will repeat what I have said in an earlier comment, I believe that 'to stand athwart, shouting 'Stop!', is a pretty effing stupid thing to do.
Mr. Darwin sees the the factory workers in Arkansas being forced to wear diapers during their shifts because they're not allowed bathroom breaks, and sees the couriers at the Amazon warehouses who routinely collapse from dehydration, and calls this human flourishing, and what's more opposes doing anything to make their lives better. Mr. Darwin, you are an evil man.
Anon,
Thank you for your comment.
I'm afraid you have not fully understood my thinking, however, in that I in fact have no problem with regulations which require employers to allow bathroom breaks and hydration. I also tend to think that in the absence of big government backing big business with the muscle of the state, workers will quickly succeed in forcing businesses to stop such behavior, because they will refuse to work for employers who treat them so badly.
In general, it shines very little light on the truth to pretend that one's opponents favor the worst examples which one might associate with their beliefs. For instance, it would be unfair of me to say that someone who favored some form of socialism must therefore favor everything done in Venezuela, or indeed North Korea. It's similarly untruthful to indulge in believing that someone who thinks that market and price signals are some of our most powerful economic tools for increasing living standards must therefore support the worst examples of employer behavior which can be dug up.
I’m confused (asked as an honest question, I promise, not intended to be snarky!) why you would not include unions as something worthwhile supporting. The church has in this past century supported the idea of workers’ unions, as I understand it? I guess I see collective bargaining power as a necessary balance to the power of corporations. I am, of course, biased, because my family has health insurance, and my husband can earn a living in his profession due to a union.
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