Ahistorical conservatism

Kavin D. Williamson, National Review:

Whatever kind of conservatism is arguing that we should invest the president with sole, secret, unreviewable authority to order the assassination of U.S. citizens because the alternative is unworkable (!) in the considered view of John Tabin, because war exists (!) — I am not that kind of conservative, I suppose. I propose we call that school of thought ahistorical, morally illiterate conservatism.


We’ve had wars for a long time without authorizing the premeditated extrajudicial killing of U.S. citizens. Treason is a crime. You get charged with it, dragged into court, tried by a jury of your peers, etc. The penalty for treason is not assassination without trial, and there is nothing in our Constitution or tradition to suggest that it is. This seems to me a deeply foolish and ill-considered argument.

It’s also worth noting that al-Awlaki mostly is accused of being a propagandist — giving sermons, writing articles, and otherwise behaving as “the bin Laden of the Internet,” as he is known. You want to try him for treason or inciting terrorist violence, I’m content to see him hang. If our covert-ops guys light up some al-Qaeda redoubt in the mountains and al-Awlaki bites the dust, no tears from me. But those are very different things from having the U.S. government draw up a list of its own citizens to be targeted for assassination. The fact that the Obama administration went out of its way to make this fact public tells us something interesting, too: It is making a specific political point, and establishing a specific precedent. It is crossing an old and important line, and conservatives should never let the rule of unintended consequences be very far from our minds

On an entirely different topic, David Boaz, Cato:

Charles Krauthammer calls same-sex marriage “the most radical redefinition of marriage in human history.” Really? Some might say that ending “till death do us part” was more radical. And maybe ending the requirement that the bride promise to “love, honor, and obey.” And how about the end of polygamy? Polygamy was probably the most common marital system in the broad sweep of human history, but now it is virtually unknown in the Western world; indeed, ahistorical conservatives warn that allowing two people of the same sex to make a vow of marriage could lead to polygamy.

Link blag

David Frum wonders if conservatives can govern.

Dish reader draws a lesson from Fort Hood. Another differs. American Muslim reaction here.

Library Grape: Catholic diocese channels Christ's love, threatens to stop feeding the poor if gays marry.

TMV: Can we please just tax the churches already?

Politico: The Republican National Committee's health insurance plan offers coverage for "a fundamental assault on innocent human life".

TPM has a Lou Dobbs slideshow retrospective. Krugman writes: "Until now it really has seemed as if there was nothing, nothing at all, that someone on the right could say and do that would make them unacceptable in polite company. Now it at least seems that there is a line somewhere."

Fallows: more than a hundred TSA agents have gone undercover...cleverly disguised as TSA agents! (he follows up)

Police arrest twenty-five dangerous deviants in Chicago.

Headline to appreciate: "Irish priest kidnapped in Philippines released by MILF"

Unlike every other document on the Web, this page is in final form and completely finished. *grin*

Math is beautiful.

This guy can juggle. So can this one.

Soldiers and their dogs.

Comparing Western Europe

Over at the League, Koz commented:

Liberalism should be seen as an unmitigated failure by anyone under 30.

To the extent that it isn’t, part of the reason is that American prosperity seems to them as a fact of nature. For anybody with any historical consciousness of the modern industrial state for the last thirty years or so, the rules are pretty simple: low taxes/free markets = prosperity, bloated welfare state = corrupt dependence on the state.

That's some pretty run-of-the-mill conservative boilerplate, which I think misses half the story. Hopefully my response is more interesting...

Koz, I deplore welfare and love myself some low tax rates and free markets as much as the next libertarian--but you should note that Western Europe's welfare states are doing quite well, in no small part because their governments (parliamentary: executive makes policy, legislature approves) and tax systems (consumption tax: VAT) are more efficient than the American model.

You ought to check out Bruce Bartlett's The New American Economy; he offers some good clear-headed explanations of the economic side of things.

My own thesis, in a nutshell, is that the better governance and taxation in Europe is what makes their welfare states politically palatable and attractive to their peoples. Whereas America's bad governance and absurd tax system are what make higher rates and more welfare politically unpalatable and unattractive to Americans.

I believe that if America kept its relatively-low welfare and tax rates but improved its governance and tax system, it would be better off.

And I believe that if Europe kept its good governance and tax system but reduced its welfare state and taxation rates, it would be better off.

Alas, the politics don't seem conducive to either outcome, because good governance/taxation seems to make people tolerant of the welfare state, whereas maintaining enough popular outrage against state expansion seems to depend on having inefficient governance/taxation like America's.

Empire is like the welfare state

Andrew Sullivan reminds us of a conservative insight: the solution can be worse than the problem.

"Tackling The Tough Issues"

Andrew notes:

From NRO:

Is it time to turn back the clock on female suffrage? John Derbyshire explores.

The Atlantic published a similar story:

Ought Women to Learn the Alphabet?

That was from February.  1859.  When did conservatives stop standing athwart history yelling "Stop!" to standing athwart history yelling "Rewind!"?

Ladies and gentlemen—or as they'd have it, just the gentlemen..... today's conservatism.

Miscarriage of judgement

Conor Friedersdorf on Glenn Beck and his defenders.

Ich bin ein Berliner

BBC:

Chancellor Angela Merkel has been returned to power in Germany, exit polls suggest, after her conservative [CDU/CSU] bloc won more than 33% of the vote.

Mrs Merkel's bloc now looks set to form a centre-right alliance with her preferred partner, the pro-reform FDP [libertarian].

If you need an introduction to Germany's parties, check out 538's. The entry on the FDP is amusing.

Yglesias editorializes:

Angela Merkel wound up winning a strange kind of election victory, the kind where your party gets less support than it got before. Still, the CDU’s support only went down a little while the Social Democrats’ support collapsed and the liberal (in a European sense) Free Democrats gained a lot. The Greens and the Left Party also picked up support. The result is going to be some controversial free market reforms for Germany (I think the evidence suggests that most Germans actually don’t want the kind of reforms that this election result will lead to) and a real moment of crisis for the SPD that needs to really rethink some things:


I note that following on the European Parliament election results and some other national results, there seems to be a continent-wide crisis of social democracy. In a great many countries, social democrats are really getting squeezed by rising far-left parties and the fact that Europe’s center-right parties tend to be inconveniently non-crazy.

Movement conservatives vs. pragmatists

A battle is joined.

Why McCain lost

Conservatives still blame McCain for being too independent and not conservative enough. Here's something they ought to come to terms with:

Richard Johnston and Emily Thorson analyze polling data from the 2008 election and find a close link between declines in support for John McCain and declines in approval for -- who else? -- Sarah Palin:

John McCain’s August 29 announcement of Palin as his running mate surprised the Republican establishment, the media, and especially voters. She made a strong first impression: she enjoyed high approval ratings after her acceptance speech, and the percentage of voters saying that they intended to vote Republican skyrocketed. But within days of the speech, her ratings began a precipitous slide from which she—and the McCain campaign—never recovered. Throughout the rest of the campaign, vote intentions were closely tied to Palin’s approval ratings: each major Palin approval drop was followed, within a day or two, by a drop in McCain vote intention. No other factor moved McCain support with such precision. 

However, conservatives have a well-earned reputation for ignoring reality, especially in recent years. So don't hold your breath.

This elephant doesn't forget

(meme) A conservative who remembers the past eight years? An endangered species if I ever saw one.

Science and liberalism

Andrew discusses here and blames Republicanism.

I think that's part of it—"conservative" has come to mean "traditional", which offends the progress-oriented scientific mind.

And though "liberal" has come to mean leftist/progressive in low-brow political discourse, learned folks are acquainted with the classical liberalism product of the Enlightenment, back when reason prevailed, and consider themselves liberal in that sense. I know I do, but it can be misleading so I tend to stick with the new 'libertarian' construct.

Scientists are elites, and libertarianism is more popular in high-brow circles. I suspect a nontrivial number answering "neither" when asked to choose between conservative and liberal are actually libertarian. Others are probably generic moderates/centrists or "fiscally conservative, socially liberal".

Anyhow, it shouldn't surprise anyone that scientists have non-traditional, socially non-conservative views.

Derb's agenda

The Dish quotes this list of John Derbyshire's favored policies from an interview with the Economist:

Abandonment of "nation-building" exercises. Abolition of the federal Department of Education. A 1924-style immigration freeze. Repeal of No Child Left Behind. End of all federal subsidies to "community groups". End of all federal subsidies to arts and culture. End of all foreign-aid programmes that are not plainly and obviously bribes for pro-American behaviour. Restart construction of neutron bombs. Full-bore federal-subsidised research on missile defense. Withdrawal from the UN, followed by razing of all UN structures on American soil and sowing the ground with salt. How many d'you want?

An immigration freeze? Crazy wrong-headed. The more open borders are, the better.

I don't know of a compelling case for neutron bombs or any other new nuclear weapons. The fewer, the better--every one is a potential point of failure. I suspect the U.S. would be safest with on the order of 100 active nukes...perhaps a bit more counting sub-based nukes, which I'm more partial to. I don't see how missile defense is a worthwhile investment--the Star Wars days are over, and ballistic missiles have become an exotic threat, low on our list of things to worry about.

For all its faults, the UN is in the business of promoting peace, and I'm not sure how withdrawing would be a net plus. The US exercises its veto muscle quite often; if it were to withdraw, how would this improve international outcomes?

I'm certainly gung-ho about abolishing the federal Department of Education. To the extent that the state needs to subsidize education, do so with a universal voucher system.

Indeed I'm all for ending many areas of federal aid and subsidy--foreign aid and arts&culture among them, though the later is probably last on my list of things to worry about. Agricultural subsidies are among the nastiest, IMO, from both an economic and health standpoint. Damn Iowa and its early corn primaries.

Public health insurance, antitrust, and price controls

NYT:

..critics argue that with low administrative costs and no need to produce profits, a public plan will start with an unfair pricing advantage. They say that if a public plan is allowed to pay doctors and hospitals at levels comparable to Medicare’s, which are substantially below commercial insurance rates, it could set premiums so low it would quickly consume the market.

The first sentence describes the whole point of having a new non-profit plan compete with for-profit HMOs and PPOs. They're afraid of this competition, which is understandable, but cry me a river. As a general rule, private industry is supposed to be more efficient than government programs, and if they can't compete on an even playing field then they're doing something wrong.

But how even is the playing field? If the public plan were to be subsidized by taxpayers and not self-sufficient, that would obviously be uneven.

The second sentence is also of concern. Allowing any plans—be they public or private—to fix costs and underpay at low Medicare levels will amount to an effective government price control on the industry.

Private insurers are not allowed to collude and use their combined negotiating power to underpay for medical procedures because of antitrust law. But here we have the specter of a government-run public plan coming in and sidestepping antitrust regulations, with the express goal of satisfying public demand for more and cheaper care.

Such a market distortion is unfair to health providers (i.e. hospitals and clinics) who were previously competing on a freer market. In reducing compensation, it will undoubtedly reduce the quality of care, and it may also reduce availability as providing health services becomes less competitive with other industries that are not price controlled by the government.

For general information on the consequences of such price controls, see here...

Governments have been trying to set maximum or minimum prices since ancient times. The Old Testament prohibited interest on loans to fellow Israelites; medieval governments fixed the maximum price of bread; and in recent years, governments in the United States have fixed the price of gasoline, the rent on apartments in New York City, and the wage of unskilled labor, to name a few. At times, governments go beyond fixing specific prices and try to control the general level of prices, as was done in the United States during both world wars and the Korean War, and by the Nixon administration from 1971 to 1973.

The appeal of price controls is understandable. Even though they fail to protect many consumers and hurt others, controls hold out the promise of protecting groups that are particularly hard-pressed to meet price increases. Thus, the prohibition against usury—charging high interest on loans—was intended to protect someone forced to borrow out of desperation; the maximum price for bread was supposed to protect the poor, who depended on bread to survive; and rent controls were supposed to protect those who were renting when the demand for apartments exceeded the supply, and landlords were preparing to “gouge” their tenants.

Despite the frequent use of price controls, however, and despite their appeal, economists are generally opposed to them, except perhaps for very brief periods during emergencies.

[..] The study of price controls teaches important lessons about free competitive markets. By examining cases in which controls have prevented the price mechanism from working, we gain a better appreciation of its usual elegance and efficiency. This does not mean that there are no circumstances in which temporary controls may be effective. But a fair reading of economic history shows just how rare those circumstances are.

And here.

Yglesias recently wrote a post in which he dismissed opposition to price controls by Blue Dogs as not good for deficit reduction, thus "not fiscally conservative", thus incompatible with being a Blue Dog. In this he ignores that economic conservatives are against price controls for very good reasons, e.g. preserving the quality of goods you get from a free market. If all we cared about was spending less, we'd propose a socialist system like Britain's, which spends less than half the amount per capita. Obviously their quality of care isn't as good. (And what makes Canada's better than Britain's is its location).

Another point aired in the NYT piece:

Insurance industry lobbyists are skeptical that the government can fairly referee a contest between its own insurance plan and private offerings. In an era of serial federal bailouts, they aks, would the government really let its own insurance plan fail?

This is important, becaue any situation in which the government plan is not allowed to fail would be unfair competition. Private HMOs, being normal companies, are subject to failure. (Capitalism's "creative destruction".)

If we start out with a public option that is unsubsidized, but it can't meet its sobligations at competitive rates, the odds are Congress will intervene to "save" it as a public good, i.e. find some way to subsidize it.

In sum, this is why I'm against public options for healthcare and anything else: it's very difficult to set up fair competition and ensure it remains fair.

For many leftists, however, that's the point: they're uninterested in fair competition, and would prefer a single-payer system with no competition that sets prices by fiat. Their goal is to provide equal coverage for all, with scant regard for the consequences to quality of coverage and for-profit incentives of R&D that heretofore have advanced modern medicine in the U.S. very quickly compared to states with public healthcare.

Decline of the conservative intellectual

Richard Posner writes:

it is notable that the policies of the new conservatism are powered largely by emotion and religion and have for the most part weak intellectual groundings. That the policies are weak in conception, have largely failed in execution, and are political flops is therefore unsurprising. The major blows to conservatism, culminating in the election and programs of Obama, have been fourfold: the failure of military force to achieve U.S. foreign policy objectives; the inanity of trying to substitute will for intellect, as in the denial of global warming, the use of religious criteria in the selection of public officials, the neglect of management and expertise in government; a continued preoccupation with abortion; and fiscal incontinence in the form of massive budget deficits, the Medicare drug plan, excessive foreign borrowing, and asset-price inflation.

By the fall of 2008, the face of the Republican Party had become Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber. Conservative intellectuals had no party.

(from Nate Silver)

My takeaway: lambasting academia, intellectualism—and dare I say, non-economic reality—as having a liberal bias has become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Quote of the day III

Via TMV:

In an appearance Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press, Joe Scarborough offered Ronald Reagan as a model of temperamental moderation, saying, “We need to be conservative, but like Reagan. … We can’t scare little kids.” On his own MSNBC program the next day, he emphasized again, “They’ve got to drop the hate.”

“If you know you’re right, then why be angry?” Scarborough asked calmly. “I do a radio show, and a lot of callers that call in expect me to scream and yell and say I hate President Obama. Being against his policies, for some reason with a lot of people in the base that’s not enough. They want you to hate the man.”

….“If you’re mature enough,” Scarborough continued,” you realize Barack Obama doesn’t hate America, I don’t hate America — we just have different views of how to make America a better place And if you look at history over 250 years, that’s worked out pretty well.”

David Souter to retire

He's 69 years old and was nominated by George H. W. Bush 19 years ago.

His retirement should come as bittersweet to rightwingers who expected him to be more conservative:

At the time of Souter's appointment, John Sununu assured President Bush and conservatives that Souter would be a "home run" for conservatism In his testimony before the Senate, Souter espoused the concepts of originalism (as Bork had) and was thus thought by conservatives to be a strict constructionist on Constitutional matters. However, as a state's attorney and state Supreme Court judge, he had never been tested on matters of federal law.

Initially, from 1990 to 1993, Souter tended to be a conservative-leaning Justice, although not as conservative as Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, or William Rehnquist. In Souter's first year, Souter and Scalia voted alike close to 85 percent of the time; Souter voted with Kennedy and O'Connor about 97 percent of the time. The symbolic turning point came in two cases in 1992, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, in which the Court reaffirmed the essential holding in Roe v. Wade, and Lee v. Weisman, in which Souter voted against allowing prayer at a high school graduation ceremony. In Planned Parenthood v. Casey, Anthony Kennedy considered overturning Roe and upholding all the restrictions at issue in Casey. Souter considered upholding all the restrictions but still was uneasy about overturning Roe. After consulting with O'Connor, however, the three (who came to be known as the "troika") developed a joint opinion that upheld all the restrictions in the Casey case except for the mandatory notification of a husband while asserting the essential holding of Roe, that a right to an abortion is protected by the Constitution.
After the appointment of Clarence Thomas, Souter moved to the middle. By the late 1990s, Souter began to align himself more with Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg on rulings, although as of 1995, he sided on more occasions with the most liberal justice, John Paul Stevens, than either Breyer and Ginsburg, both Clinton appointees. O'Connor began to move to the center. On the abortion issue, Souter began to vote to override restrictions he believed in back in 1992. On death penalty cases, worker rights cases, criminal rights cases, and other issues, Souter began voting with the liberals in the court. So while appointed by a Republican president and thus expected to be conservative, Souter is now considered part of the liberal wing of the Court.

Predictions are that Obama is likely to appoint a woman to replace him.

Quote of the day II

I’m sick to frigging death of people – self-identifiedly conservative or otherwise – whose reaction to the ongoing revelation of what our government and its representatives did post-9/11 is to say,

Oh, well, I’m really opposed to torture, and clearly there were some cases where a few bad apples crossed the line, but we were just trying to do our best, and national security is really important, and these people are pretty awful people after all, so despite the fact that I’m really opposed to torture I’m still okay with what our government did.

NEWSFLASH: If you’re okay with all or most of what our government did, you’re not opposed to torture. Really. It’s that simple. At this point, being head-splittingly outraged by the post-9/11 actions of our government and its representatives is a necessary condition on being an opponent of torture. So tell yourself what you will, but if the outrage isn’t there then you’re no more opposed to torture than Lois Lane was not in love with Superman. She was, but she didn’t know it. Same goes for you, only in this case you’re acting as an apologist for crimes of war. And the only thing worse than an apologist for crimes of war is an apologist for crimes of war who’s also self-deceived.

–John Schwenkler

Quote of the day

"Neocons are more intelligent than most conservatives but much more evil." —rhino369

Link blag

Daily Beast: What's in the torture memos?

Cato: Obama and The Interrogation Memos: The Right Decision...

Critics, such as the one featured in this Politico article, fail to comprehend terrorism as a strategy. Thus, they are locked into counterproductive policies like secrecy and torture.

Let’s start with the strategic logic of terrorism: By goading strong powers into overreaction and error, terrorism weakens those powers and strengthens itself. Among other things, overreaction and misdirection on the part of the strong power draw sympathy and support to terrorists as it confirms the terrorist narrative that they are in a struggle against evil powers.

(more)

Yglesias and Frum marvel at conservative paranoia.

Raising the drinking age to 21 didn't save lives.

Ordinary E.D. Kain examines what the Iraq war is and isn't.

Politico: Sarah Palin offers bipartisan fundraising appeal.

Yglesias: D.C. should allow taller buildings

2006 NYT: North Korean Defectors Take a Crash Course in Coping

Radley wonders why lefties don't volunteer to pay more taxes

David Friedman has a very simple idea for getting smaller government in the U.S.

Reason: Government is to blame for the housing crisis.

Daily Beast: After gay marriage... comes gay divorce. The humanity of the story is comforting, in a way. But it's also a reminder that we need to repeal DOMA for this to work.

Conservatism, then and now

National Review in 1957:

"The axiom on which many of the arguments supporting the original version of the Civil Rights bill were based was Universal Suffrage. Everyone in America is entitled to the vote, period. No right is prior to that, no obligation subordinate to it; from this premise all else proceeds.

That, of course, is demagogy. Twenty-year-olds do not generally have the vote, and it is not seriously argued that the difference between 20 and 21-year-olds is the difference between slavery and freedom. The residents of the District of Columbia do not vote: and the population of D.C. increases by geometric proportion. Millions who have the vote do not care to exercise it; millions who have it do not know how to exercise it and do not care to learn. The great majority of the Negroes of the South who do not vote do not care to vote, and would not know for what to vote if they could."

And today:

"One still sometimes hears people make the allegedly “conservative” case for same-sex marriage that it will reduce promiscuity and encourage commitment among homosexuals. This prospect seems improbable, and in any case these do not strike us as important governmental goals...

Both as a social institution and as a public policy, marriage exists to foster connections between heterosexual sex and the rearing of children within stable households. It is a non-coercive way to channel (heterosexual) desire into civilized patterns of living. State recognition of the marital relationship does not imply devaluation of any other type of relationship, whether friendship or brotherhood. State recognition of those other types of relationships is unnecessary. So too is the governmental recognition of same-sex sexual relationships, committed or otherwise, in a deep sense pointless."

Or as Andrew's reader sums it up:

National Review in 1957: Blacks shouldn't be allowed to vote, of course, because 10-year olds aren't allowed to vote. And besides, it wouldn't do them any good to vote anyway.

National Review in 2009: Gays shouldn't be allowed to marry, of course, because brothers aren't allowed to marry. And besides, it wouldn't do them any good to marry anyway.

Andrew concludes:

I wonder how deeply National Review's editors considered the final sentence of their repellent editorial:

If worse comes to worst, and the federal courts sweep aside the marriage laws that most Americans still want, then decades from now traditionalists should be ready to brandish that footnote and explain to generations yet unborn: That is why we resisted.

Does Rich Lowry believe his magazine's position from 1957 should be held up similarly today as a prophetic warning? Was Barack Obama's election the awful consequence of giving the Negroes the vote they didn't know what to do with?

Maybe that was indeed why they "resisted." And maybe gay really is the new black.

I think the pattern in these quotes is a useful reminder of why I'll always be libertarian —or at least "socially liberal"— instead of conservative. National Review was founded in 1955, but had it existed 45 years earlier I bet you could have found essays against women having the right to vote. (Like this recent one, only more pointed and eloquent because the cause wasn't lost)

In a 1975 interview with Reason magazine, Ronald Reagan said:

"I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism. I think conservatism is really a misnomer, just as liberalism is a misnomer for the liberals . . . The basis of conservatism is a desire for less government interference or less centralized authority or more individual freedom"

This was arguably true once, only to be killed off by Karl Rove, George W. Bush, and his defenders. But even in Reagan's time that desire for individual freedom had limits. Conservatives are ever wary of expanding individual freedom to new, previously discriminated-against individuals.

At worst, preserving the status quo becomes a sort of moral fanaticism.

Robert Stacy McCain recently wrote in the American Spectator that opposing same-sex marriage is a hill conservatives should fight and die on. He opens by discussing a quote from William F. Buckley Jr., who founded National Review in 1955:

Back in the 1970s, [Buckley]. was invited to debate feminist author Germaine Greer at the Oxford Union, but found that he and Greer were unable to agree on the wording of the resolution to be debated. After a long exchange of trans-Atlantic telegrams, Buckley in exasperation cabled his final proposal: "Resolved: Give 'em an inch, they'll take a mile."

In that simple phrase, Buckley summed up a basic truth about the conservative instinct. Over and over, we find ourselves fighting what is essentially a defensive battle against the forces of organized radicalism who insist that "social justice" requires that we grant their latest demand.

So in being for same-sex marriage, am I abetting a group of organized radicals? Interesting. But Buckley also acknowledged in 2004 that:

"Conservatives pride themselves on resisting change, which is as it should be. But intelligent deference to tradition and stability can evolve into intellectual sloth and moral fanaticism, as when conservatives simply decline to look up from dogma because the effort to raise their heads and reconsider is too great."

He was writing about legalizing weed, but I think the point broadly applicable. Sadly it seems many conservatives have now delved head first into fanaticism "against the coming storm".

Update: Wilkinson has a good rebuttal of Stacy's post.