Tomorrow’s Conservatism
It’s dangerous to wade into political waters, especially in this election cycle, and even more so at this particular moment in this election cycle. Nevertheless, four thoughts have been percolating in my head throughout this cycle. Four thoughts that have led me to feel, increasingly, as a conservative in exile of my party, and four thoughts that I think might be able to steer that party back toward a course where it can not only win, but do right by those who would support it.
I wrote this on a flight lasting about two hours. It’s not perfect, nor do I claim it to be. It is likely rife with areas for disagreements to form and for opinions to be contested. Excellent. We should welcome, not bemoan, opportunities for these kinds of discussions. They’re too important to be ignored and too complex for any one person to have all the answers. So, let’s get started:
1.Reagan Is Dead
This is a tough one to write, but the one that must be understood first. I’m a child of the Reagan era, and there’s plenty of good reason to look to the presidency and principles of his administration for inspiration. What there cannot be room for, in a functional conservative movement, is the kind of idol worship that plagues the Republican Party today. Ronald Reagan’s presidency ended 27 years ago, in a different world, facing hugely different problems.
The problem of Reagan idol worship is two-fold in nature. First, this laser-focus on a generation long past prevents conservative principles from being adapted to today’s world. Modern Democrats rarely speak with religious overtones regarding the presidencies of JFK or FDR, because they’re busy adapting the principles of liberalism to a modern world. These may be figures looked to for inspiration, or referenced to provide historical context, but they aren’t invoked with religious fervor at each and every campaign stop by basically every candidate running for any position of importance.
The second problem with Reagan idol worship is that many of those who most loudly proclaim to stand for Reagan’s America would be the first to cast Ronald Reagan out of today’s Republican Party. Look no further than Reagan’s moderate position on gun control as reason enough to be considered a “Republican in Name Only” (RINO), much less his past history as a Democrat and Hollywood union boss. It’s absurd to think this man would be accepted by the Republican Party as it exists today, which stands not to govern, but to obstruct and inflame.
2. No Isn’t Enough
This leads to the second key to success. Rather than yearning for a time long past, and reshaping who can only now be called a historical figure into whatever shape and size proves most beneficial at the moment, conservatism must win in the arena of ideas. Standing in truly blind opposition isn’t governance; it’s an abdication of duty and, frankly, unpatriotic.
Look no further than Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s declaration that the Senate would refuse to even vote on a replacement appointment to the Supreme Court for Antonin Scalia’s seat, despite the fact that the current president has nearly a year left in his four year term.
I can only begin to imagine the outrage had, say, Ruth Bader Ginsburg died at some point in George W Bush’s presidency, and Harry Reid had declared that absolutely no potential replacement sent from the White House would be considered, before a nominee were even announced.
In this election cycle, as for the past eight years, the focus of conservative leadership seems obsessed with simply standing on the “other” side of every possible issue, without a mite of thought given to which battles are fought, or why. Playing defense purely for the sake of playing defense is a clear path to making certain conservatives can never move issues forward on their own terms.
Every “No” is an opportunity for “What about…” to capture the attention, imagination, interest and enthusiasm of the citizenry, scoring not just cheap points in the here and now, but also changing hearts and minds over the long-run.
3. Smart Government, Not Small Government
A platform of pure obstruction isn’t just lazy or bad politics, but also actively leads to more dysfunctional government, something that should be anathema to any conservative. Refusal to pass a budget, or situations like the sequester, aren’t signs of conservative victory; they’re abject failures, leading to vast inefficiencies and misallocation of resources.
NASA recently went years without the legal authority to stop working on a rocket it had long-since cancelled, due to Congress’s failure to pass a budget. “Just keep doing the same thing until we figure it out,” isn’t a policy that applies efficiently to almost any governmental program, yet for nearly a decade, this is the concept on which Congress most often chooses to hang its hat.
Conservatism should be about promoting smart governance, whatever form that may take. In many cases, this may lead to a simple answer: that no, or minimal, involvement by the government is appropriate at all. In many cases, though, effective governance is a requirement, and the abdication of responsibility to fulfill these duties comes at great cost.
We must also recognize that as a prosperous and developed nation, our social compact has evolved. We decided long ago that we, as a people, found the idea of refusing emergency medical treatment based on an inability to pay to be unacceptable. We determined that a basic safety net should be in place for those who are unemployed, and for those either too old or unable to work.
These decisions are part of our social fabric, no different than offering free education to every child. Nor are they any less irrevocable. However, these very areas are the same that take a tremendous financial toll on the tax base, and threaten to bury us in debt over the long-run.
I’ve long been of the belief that an “omnipayer” healthcare system would be a strong alternative to today’s broken structures. In such a system, only catastrophic insurance could be purchased, in a free and nationally open market; health savings accounts would be highly incentivized; and healthcare would no longer be offered as a benefit by employers. The vast majority of healthcare transactions would take place exclusively between a doctor or hospital and a patient, with clear pricing in place, and a Medicaid-style safety net in place to protect those least able to care for themselves.
Healthcare is far from a free market today, and incentive to demand competitive pricing is limited by the fact that the end-user — the patient — is very rarely the actual customer. The type of price discovery, as it is known to economists, that a truly free market would offer could solve many of the problems endemic to today’s system and result in drastically lower healthcare costs.
That said, there’s an argument to be made that such a system could financially devastate those who fall ill or suffer from chronic conditions, and that we, as a people, find that unacceptable. If that’s the case, and healthcare is indeed a market unlike others, then a true, single-payer system is a more pragmatic and efficient alternative than trying to work through the bureaucracy-laden oligopoly of insurers, administrators, and paper-pushers that comprise the majority of our “healthcare” costs today.
4. Pay the Bills
Conservatism should be about having these discussions, determining the boundaries of our social compact, and ensuring that the obligations we’ve agreed to are upheld as efficiently and effectively as possible. Outside of healthcare, conservatism should also actively focus on concepts like means-testing for social security benefits to ensure that the original intent of ensuring the elderly and infirm aren’t left destitute never comes under threat.
Running away from issues like these, or failing to offer substantive alternatives to the status quo, or leaving it to tomorrow’s leaders — out of fear that proposals will prove unpopular with the electorate — is cowardly and disrespectful of a populace that deserves to be treated like adults.
This leads inevitably to the question of taxes. For more than a decade, the difference between Republicans and Democrats has too often been that they both want to spend, and Republicans don’t want to pay the bill. It’s okay to want healthcare for all, or to fix our infrastructure. It stands against conservative principles to want these things and not be willing to pay for them. Debt is not evil, when used judiciously as a tool for growth and investment, but when used unendingly to avoid reality, it presents the same problem faced by someone who simply throws away their credit card statement every month without opening it, writ large.
Simply put, more revenue is needed to operate the government we’ve built. Many levers may be used to help solve this issue.
Lower spending is one,to be sure, and a key reason why conservatism cannot responsibly ignore the “mandatory” spending and defense appropriations that make up such a large portion of the budget.
In other cases, lowering taxes may indeed lead to increased revenue. We’re one of the few countries on the planet to effectively double-tax our companies on profits made overseas. This is why a large chunk of Apple’s overseas profits remain there: bringing them home would mean taking 30% or more off the top. Offering a lower tax rate, or doing away with it entirely, would allow these funds to come home, where they could be reinvested, leading to additional tax revenue being earned in the future.
In many cases, simplifying tax laws and closing loopholes carved out to serve special interests can raise revenues without actually raising any tax rate. In limited cases, it may even — take an appropriate moment to gasp here — be reasonable to consider a modest raise in rates. The tax on gasoline is a good example: the interstate highway fund is dwindling toward zero as the fixed number of cents per gallon levied stays the same while costs in the real world inevitably inflate over time.
5. Details Matter
There used to be a notion that conservatives were the “adults” of our bipartisan spectrum, willing to face up to reality in pursuit of good governance. This compared to the concept of a childlike innocence regarding the costs, hidden and not, of policies favored by liberalism.
This relationship has inverted since the turn of the millennium. Today’s Republican Party is the one displaying childlike ignorance, in thinking that taxes can be cut unendingly without touching any portion of spending too uncomfortable to discuss, in thinking that horrendously inefficient stop-gaps like the sequester can stand in for actual policy, and in thinking that some combination of saying no and closing eyes will lead to the magical departure of all those with differing viewpoints.
Inherent in all of this is an active distrust for the electorate. This cycle seems to confirm that that distrust is merited, when so many are voting in primaries in droves for someone (or someones) who can only accurately be described as a petty moron.
I would argue that the opposite is true: some of those voting for you-know-who are legitimately stupid, racist, bigoted, backwards, or just generally terrible people. Most aren’t. Most are tired of the very status quo described above, have been scared into frenzy by the GOP’s own leadership and media establishment, and are begging for someone, anyone, who will do anything at all, in the name of conservative principles, whether it’s actually conservative or not.
So tired are they of waiting for action or progress in areas they care about that they’ll vote for someone who says literally anything, because it’s better than nothing.
Try treating them like adults. Stop scaring them. Try putting forward actual policy — substantive, clear, not beholden to special interest groups — and see what happens. Some will be implacable; cast them back into the political wilderness, which is just as much their rightful home as it is to those farthest to the left of the political spectrum. Many will come around. Meanwhile, conservatism will finally have something — and not the absence of something — to offer to the great middle of American politics.
The last time that happened, it worked out pretty well. But that’s history. What’s next?
