Manufactured Outrage

I write this entry in response to a blog written by Benjamin Gorman, a friend of mine from school. In it, he gives his perspectives of the republican party as the "party of no," and speaks to their facility as a minority party, but asserts the GOP to be a terrible majority party, both in practice and in the nature of the political philosophy of conservatism.
I'd like to start first by clarifying a few definitions and to lay out my own worldview. Though I write in contrast to a decidedly leftist blog, I would not characterize myself as a strict conservative in any sense. Rather, I regard myself as a conservative liberal, though in this day and age that sounds to be an oxymoron. Gorman cites an apt quote from William F. Buckley, Jr., wherein he states that conservatism entails standing "athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it." As I see a couple of ideas behind conservatism, I think this is perhaps the one closest to my own degree of conservatism; that is to say, I strongly oppose radicalism. I believe in small and incremental changes, and I believe in continuity being preserved as best it can so long as it does not impinge upon liberty. As to my liberalism, in the economic sense, most of the world regards liberalism as being about freedom, and hence, free markets. Along with my belief in social freedoms, it is in this regard that I am a liberal. Thus, a conservative liberal: making small steps, broadly distributed with local control, moving in the direction of greater liberty and freedom.

As a corollary to the above, I see liberalism and progressivism as being diametrically opposed, particularly in the economic sense. While I am a liberal, I am not at all a progressive. I see progressivism as a flawed political ideology based on two major false assumptions upon which so much of it seems to be based. The first is that with good ideas and a strong government, we can accomplish anything; progressivism seems to hold that any problem can be legislated away. Poor people? Launch a war on poverty! Childhood obesity? Get the first lady on it! Illiteracy? Flood the schools with money while simultaneously reducing standards! Too hot outside? Carbon tax! While I think there is no question that governments can and do accomplish many great things, the left seems to feel that there is no limit to what a strong central government can do. Thomas Sowell calls this view the Unconstrained Vision, in contrast with the Constrained Vision of those on the right. The left regards humans as being nearly infinitely malleable, and the right tends to believe that there are certain restraints on what can be achieved. Depending on where you stand, you either see this as an "optimist vs. pessimist" dichotomy, or an "idealist vs. realist" dichotomy. But there's a subtle point that I see emerging in this distinction: the left relies more heavily on logic, while the right relies more heavily on process.

It's for this reason that despite my views on the legality of abortion, or the recognition of gay marriage, or the need I see in changing our drug policies, I tend to regard myself as a conservative. My vision of the world is constrained, and I favor process over logic. Perhaps the most important reason for this is that I am a scientist and an engineer, by training and by work function (if not by job title). And in science—and especially the history of science—it's far too easy to see how seemingly sound logic leads one to really bad ideas. In the end, what matters is data, and data is a function of the process of science, not logic. While one might be inclined to say that data is meaningless unless interpreted by logic, I'd say that far too often, over-reliance on logic ends up throwing process by the wayside. In so doing, the great flaw of logic rears its ugly head: garbage in, garbage out.

Coming back to Gorman's analysis of presidents, I'd say that breaking down by party doesn't mean much for me; not only have the parties changed drastically over the last century, but G.W. Bush was not a conservative at all, in my book. The breakdown by wars is particularly problematic. Truman started Korea, and Ike ended it, just like Tricky Dick ended the Vietnam War for which the bulk of the responsibility falls on Johnson. And I'm not convinced Nixon ending that war was the best move. And if Bush Sr. loses credit for Desert Storm due to Clinton's inability to keep a reign on Saddam and W's decision to return in 2003, then I think that Wilson should likewise lose credit for WWI, as his failure in negotiations to bring about the balance that the Germans sought and give them a more favorable position to negotiate at Versailles. And more to the point, Wilson and FDR didn't "start" either of those wars—the Germans and the Japanese and the Austro-Hungarians/Serbians did.

But what I can say is that FDR and LBJ are certainly two examples of true progressives. They saw themselves at the helm of the nation, and able to steer us to great new waters by implementing heavy-handed centrally-directed policies. I would say that of the policies he names as successes belonging to these two—the New Deal, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, The Great Society, and Desegregation—only desegregation can truly be called a success. And it is important to note that desegregation is a liberal policy, not a progressive policy; the original problem in Jim Crow falls on Plessy v. Ferguson, where the government imposed upon businesses that were on their own desegregated, a mandate that required them to institute a policy of segregation. While some see this as a matter of the Big Federal government against the Little State government, it's important to keep clear that in this instance—as with slavery—the strength of the Federal government was used not to consolidate power to itself, but to distribute power more broadly by granting right to the people to protect them from the state.

But every one of the rest of these strikes me as a colossal failure. And it seems to me that they can only be regarded as successes if one ignores the data and the process in favor of the logic of the idea. The simple truth is in the historical record: Hoover exacerbated a market correction that was about to fix itself, and FDR's New Deal stepped in with yet more misguided government intervention that forced a double dip depression. In truth, the true depression—meaning an end to scarcity, not just unemployment; the rationing of wartime was necessary but cannot honestly be called a recovery—did not truly happen until after FDR was dead, and a resumption of market forces came in the wake of WWII. It was only then that prosperity flourished in the US again. As for Johnson's Great Society, the stats from the era show that poverty got worse, not better, especially in the explosion of the greatest cause of poverty of today, the single, unwed mother. As the welfare reform of the 1990s is acknowledged as a success, the corollary is that the state of welfare prior to its implementation was, at least in relative terms, a failure. And Social Security is nothing like secure—it's already going into the red this year, well ahead of schedule. Medicare and Medicaid are likewise sinking ships, vast entitlements that are designed in a money-pyramid scheme wherein elder recipients receive more than they put in, and only a rapidly growing population can hope to sustain it. More to the point, while things not covered by Medicare—such as Lasik and rhinoplasty—are coming down in price (like computers and flat screen TVs and music players all do), the decoupling of medical services and market mechanisms brought about by things like Medicare have created the health care crisis as we know it. The crisis only remains because the market is powerless to fix it under the schemes of government regulations.

I might be willing to call EMTALA a progressive success if anyone had thought to fund the services required.

Coming back to the republican party, it strikes me as simple to answer why republicans in federal positions fail as conservatives. In truth, the reason is not much different than the reason that Gandalf refuses to accept the One Ring from Frodo—the power is a corrupting influence. A US senator acting according to strong conservative principles is required to actively work to reduce his power, while his progressive counterparts meet their obligations by usurpation of yet more strength and control. The only check that the people have against self-aggrandizing federal legislators bent on increasing their power without bounds is to identify those who betray their principles and vote them out of office. Of course, this is dubbed demagoguery or derided as populism by the political class. It would be amusing to see the same forces that appeal to democracy denigrating the will of the people when it fails to align with their interests if it weren't so effectively destructive to the republic.

When challenged to point to a conservative victory, I'd point to Reagan's work in deregulation that reversed a long spell of rapidly increasing inflation, and which reversed growing unemployment (though it took time to begin; Obama has several months before his plans can be compared to the results that Reagan produced). And as conservatism is at the heart of the matter, rather than the Republican Party, I'll note the value of the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978 which lead to the complete dismantling of the CAB by 1985, and which ultimately brought about cheaper airfares and more widely accessible air travel.

Indeed, when I think about the things that make life in America great, they tend to be the ways in which the government stays out of the lives of individuals and allows them a stronger degree of self-determination, as was the case in the 13^th Amendment, the CRA (for at least 9 of the 10 titles), and the deregulation of industries that brought about the economic expansion of most of my remembered lifetime.

Social Security, on the other hand, forces me to pay huge sums of money into a "retirement account" that's guaranteed to go bankrupt, that produces no return on investment, and which funds higher pay-outs to a past generation that didn't pay in nearly as much as they now feel they deserve from the fund. As a member of the "Baby Bust" generation that falls between the Boomers and the Centennials, I and my fellow Xers are virtually guaranteed to take the largest brunt of the ultimate reform, as we will be the smallest demographic to punish as Boomers fade from the SSI roles and Centennials manage to reduce their pay-in for a system that will be evidently doomed for failure as they grow older. So I've got that going for me. As an added bonus, the money I've paid in to date is enough to erase my car loans and my student loans and leave a healthy chuck left over for seed money to save for a down payment on a house. But I'm not allowed to touch that money to pay off my debts, so I'm instead effectively left to pay interest on my Social Security withholdings, which are, effectively, the only reason I still have debt from college. Oh, and I almost forgot—it's incredibly regressive as a tax, as I'm left paying SSI taxes on 100% of my earnings, whereas Obama, Bush, Limbaugh, and Kerry are only paying SSI taxes on a teeny-tiny fraction of their earnings.

When I look at the results of the policies of progressives as opposed to applying arm chair logic with false assumptions to the concepts, I'm left with the manifest fact that the policies are all abject failures.

But then we have the Zadroga Act, recently defeated. Is this what we want to see from progressivism? Perhaps it has some value, but I'm having some trouble really parsing through the details. For starters, no online version of the bill I can locate specifies the nature of the funding mechanism; hence I can't really determine if this is a tax loophole or a tax hike on foreign businesses that hire Americans, because the text that I've found does not use the word "tax" in any form (by all means, if anyone can find me a copy that details the "tax loophole" to be closed, please link it). On another level, what I've read of the bill seems to imply that a person working in July of 2002 at the dump to which debris from the towers was transported, if he were to throw his back by using improper lifting techniques in July 2002, it seems he is counted as a first responder by my reading. Meanwhile, there's no special fund for the guy who runs into a burning building in Memphis to save a little girl. I think there are some legitimate concerns on the degree of accountability, and I think that taking this at face value as being solely about aiding first-responder heroes seems almost as naïve as assuming the PATRIOT Act was about patriotism alone.

But the question on why the democrats did what they did to sink this bill will be easily answered: will the democrats take this up again between the resumption of congress at the end of August and the November election and muscle it through with their control of both houses plus the White House, or will they dedicate their efforts to using this as a bludgeon to beat over the heads of their republican challengers this election while doing nothing to get it passed before November? When the latter occurs, we'll all know the truth behind their current crocodile tears.