Well, I’m home with a sick kid who is trying to take a nap, so while I’ve got a moment,
1. Peter Lawler says:
I don’t agree with Yuval that “the pursuit of happiness” is replaced by “collective effort.” That does sound kind of socialist or fascist, but the president doesn’t call individuals to do anything much that would get in the way of their private pursuits, their personal choices concerning what happiness is. Enhanced security comes with little self-sacrifice, or not anything more than slightly higher taxes that liberal oligarchs (well, apparently not my favorite left-handed golfer) can easily weasel out of and surrendering your firearms with due compensation.
There is a lot of truth to that. The appeal of Obama’s ideology is less that we will all be in it together in a heroic struggle, than that we will be freed from necessity, family and civil society in order to be who we want. A key part is where Obama says:
The commitments we make to each other — through Medicare, and Medicaid, and Social Security — these things do not sap our initiative; they strengthen us. They do not make us a nation of takers; they free us to take the risks that make this country great.
It is worth remembering that while the fantasy Julia seemed to have zero enduring relationships with anybody or anything other than Obama’s policies, she was also an entrepreneur. So Obama can be pro-business (especially green businesses getting subsidies) and pro-letting us be ourselves (unless maybe you want to own a gun or buy high deductible health insurance that only covers catastrophic costs) without having to worry about anybody else. So it is statist individualism. Just one of the problems is that this statist individualism will come at the cost of those individuals paying higher taxes, having the state decide what health care they get and when, and having the state allocate the capital for the new energy industries that the president imagines will happen if he sufficiently structures the market in their favor. This individualism could become a much more expensive and constricting (to say nothing of lonely) place than you would think from listening to Obama’s words.
2. So why are Republicans (and really conservatives) losing to this guy? Here is maybe the single biggest reason: Walk around any city of over one hundred thousand people. Just stop people going by randomly and ask, “What have the Republicans proposed that would benefit you?” You might be surprised at how many “nothings” and “I don’t knows” you get, but I won’t. Part of it is the lack of an emphasized middle and working-class agenda. But at least as big a part is the failure to ever communicate meaningfully with a large fraction of the population. The next time they hear the Republicans suggest something that will benefit them in language they understand will be the first. So reaching them between elections should be a priority. My personal suggestion would be ninety second to two minute ads on nonconservative media pushing ideas like premium support Medicare vs. IPAB, or family friendly tax reform or Jim Manzi ideas for dealing with climate change. The particular channel for communication you use isn’t important as long as you talk about things that matter in a comprehensible way to people who don’t listen to talk radio or watch Fox News. Just giving the people who don’t consume right-leaning media the notion that Republican have some ideas that will benefit them will be a step forward. Or you can give Karl Rove $300 million to spend in the six months before the next presidential election.
3. My sense is that entitlements as such were not the biggest problem for the Republicans in 2012. When Romney chose Ryan, that first week or so was about Ryan’s Medicare reform plan. Romney actually fought Obama to a draw or better on Medicare during this period. Then came the Republican convention of “you built that” + Ann Romney’s “I love you women” + Mitt Romney’s dad buying Mitt’s mom a rose every day. The Republicans just looked like the party of high earner interest group politics with some really cheesy attempts to build a personal rapport with the rest of us. The forty-seven percent remark wasn’t so much what did Romney in. Romney was behind in the polls before that video even came out. What the video did was validate an impression that Romney’s convention and campaign helped create: that Romney was all about the rich job creators who “built that” and was uninterested(at best) in everybody else. And for a lot of people, this validated a lot of what they thought about the Republican party for years before this election.
4. Peter Lawler is right that some Tea Party Republicans sometimes sound like they are against the very existence of the federal welfare state and this can become a political problem. You had the fellow running for Senate in Alaska who said he thought unemployment insurance is unconstitutional. He lost his Senate race in a Republican-leaning state in a Republican-leaning year. That is pretty obviously a political dead end. I don’t know how much of a role that played in 2012. What is probably more damaging (because more widespread) is the belief among Republican politicians that they have to come across more radical and/or belligerent than they really are in order to win party nominations. You had Romney calling himself severely conservative and Tim Pawlenty talking about how we should “take a 9-iron and smash the window out of big government.” Yeah, Pawlenty really said that. The irony is that, if you look at their voting behavior, Republican presidential primary voters are more likely to reward organizational competence, an ability to talk about issues in detail, and principle (in that order), than belligerence or policy radicalism. Romney got to be the nominee and Santorum finished second. Cain dropped out before the first contest, Bachmann finished last in Iowa then quit, and Gingrich only won two states. It is okay for Republican presidential candidates to sound well informed and emotionally balanced. Despite what your consultants tell you, Republican presidential primary voters (as distinct from poll respondents the year before) actually like that. General election voters too.
January 23rd, 2013 | 2:33 pm
“You had the fellow running for Senate in Alaska who said he thought unemployment insurance is unconstitutional. He lost his Senate race in a Republican-leaning state in a Republican-leaning year.”
Um, he lost to the (Republican, btw) candidate of cronyism, nepotism, and earmarks from here to infinity.
You’ve got lots of examples to pick from to make your case. This one doesn’t make it.
January 23rd, 2013 | 2:38 pm
[...] Well, I’m home with a sick kid who is trying to take a nap, so while I’ve got a moment, 1. Peter Lawler says: I don’t agree with Yuval that “the pursuit Source: Postmodern Conservative [...]
January 23rd, 2013 | 4:18 pm
Brian, maybe Murkowski’s win as a sore loser independent in the general election shows the limits of opposing the existence of the federal welfare state and how this splits even the Republican coalition in a Republican state. That’s how I look at it even though it doesn’t change the partisan balance of power in the Senate.
January 23rd, 2013 | 5:38 pm
[...] Progressive Thoughts » Postmodern Conservative | A First Things … Go to this article [...]
January 23rd, 2013 | 8:08 pm
Pete: I confess I’m somewhat at a loss to respond to your response, as well as your point #2, without resorting to some sort of 47%/nation-of-takers craziness. Oh well. As I’ve said over and over, it’s actually quite liberating to know that the nation is completely and totally financially doomed, and that while the DC GOP clearly isn’t up to the challenge of facing down the greatness that is Barack Obama, MATH will surely do the trick without breaking a sweat.
January 23rd, 2013 | 8:15 pm
Brian, I think that failure is always an option, but I also think that the lesson of the Joe Miller campaign is more “don’t come across like a sworn enemy of unemployment insurance, Social Security, etc” than we are doomed. Though we might be doomed for other reasons.
January 23rd, 2013 | 8:56 pm
“… while the DC GOP clearly isn’t up to the challenge of facing down the greatness that is Barack Obama, MATH will surely do the trick without breaking a sweat.”
So since we’re on the topic of math. A curious question I have is can’t Obama and his administration do the math too? I realize the answer is a complicated one.
For instance, according to Boehner, Obama insisted to him that we don’t have a spending problem. Our deficit, Obama is related as saying, was a product of rapidly increasing medical expenses which was solved with Obamacare. (Queue laugh track).
So our president and his administration are either delusional, pathological liers, and/or abundantly confident that regardless of what immanent disaster may be on the horizon they can always find a way to turn the narrative against the Republicans and somehow place the blame on them.
This last option has the benefit of being supported by the precedent of the Clinton administration who sewed the seeds of both 9/11 and the fiscal collapse (Community Reinvestment Act and Affordable Housing Programs during the Clinton adminstration) and
continues to be celebrated to this day as the exemplary living president.
So while it’s true that MATH will do the trick in some respects, there will still remain some need for someone to make the connection that the factors resulting in said mathematical outputs were the products of x policies under the Obama regime. Put another way, the Republican’s are still going to need to know how to make an effective argument even if it’s “1+1=2″ .
January 23rd, 2013 | 9:03 pm
Pete: For some of us, the fact that a GOP senator/governor would appoint his own daughter to succeed him in “the world’s greatest deliberative body” is a disgrace and embarrassment sufficient to distance ourselves from the party. For others, the fact that Joe Miller can get nominated for the senate and argue that unemployment insurance is unconstitutional (I’ll take your word that that’s an accurate description of his position) is. Clearly this is a massive problem for the GOP. Much greater, I’d say, than any such rifts that might have been present for the Democrat Party in recent times. Besides, the GOP has been the minority party for 80 years now, so they can much less afford such inner turmoil.
Joe Miller has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that we’re 100% doomed–demographics & debt and related inevitabilities ensure our fate–although Murkowski’s victory is ample demonstration that the populace has either no knowledge, or no interest, in even considering altering course to cushion the impending crash at this point.
January 24th, 2013 | 8:22 am
Pseudo: Just look at California. The Dems have absolutely destroyed that state, AND destroyed the state Republican Party as well. Every disaster the Dems have caused gets pinned 100% on the GOP, which these days is a pathetic husk that can’t do a thing. The national Dems are basically California+New York+Chicago+a few other big urban centers. What would make any of them think they are accountable for anything? And they are confident they can pull the same thing off nationally. As I’ve said before, I don’t think they can, but it may be a close run thing, especially with the jackals and vipers in the MSM completely in the tank for them.
January 24th, 2013 | 4:53 pm
So the appointment of Murkowski is reason enough to distance from the Republicans and the defeat of Miller in the general election is reason enough to dismiss everyone else.
Luckily I don’t think the Republicans will adopt a strategy of vote by invitation only or vote for us even thought we despise you because you’ll come crawling to us eventually. They won’t even if it means the state getting a much larger share of GNP and centrally allocating just about all health care spending for the nonwealthy.
Now the lesson I got was that the people of Alaska liked Social Security and Unemployment Insurance more than they resented Lisa Murkowsi. Since I don’t think that either of those programs would have been threatened by Miller’s election, I would have gone the other way, but I can see where the Alaskans were coming from. If Republicans want to be given the power to reform the welfare state in a way that makes it sustainable, they can’t make themselves its enemies. Most serious Republican are reformists, but Miller’s extremism on the issue meant that a hack stayed in the Senate.
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2010/07/alaska-senate-candidate-miller-unemployment-benefits-not-constitutionally-authorized/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter
http://videocafe.crooksandliars.com/david/joe-miller-social-security-and-medicare-are-
January 24th, 2013 | 7:15 pm
“Every disaster the Dems have caused gets pinned 100% on the GOP… And they are confident they can pull the same thing off nationally. As I’ve said before, I don’t think they can, but it may be a close run thing, especially with the jackals and vipers in the MSM completely in the tank for them.”
Well if yesterday’s Bengazi hearing is any indication, if worse comes to worste apparently they can just throw up their hands and protest “what difference does it make?”
The media has progressed from merely biased to self-parody. It’s not clear to me in this environment how one can have an authentic debate about the facts regardless of how mathematical the logic.
I agree the fiscal consequences will occur. Whether conservatives have the resources to argue the reasons in a convincing way, in light of the countervaling cultural forces remains to be seen. But they should start preparing the groundwork now.
January 25th, 2013 | 9:41 am
Pete: Nice strawmen you built there. Bravo, sir. For me, the overt and unapologetic nepotism of Murkowski is indeed worse than the occasional kooky meanderings of a non-professional politician about something that has zero chance of ever becoming law. But then, to me, the GOP is a means to an end, not an end in and of itself. Obviously the GOP establishment will view things differently, but then they’re the sort of folks who want to nominate the likes of Charlie Crist, and who have had zero problem with absolutely destroying the country’s finances, along with other failings.
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