Of the conservatives I know, most are into “big ideas” because (1) the ideas are fun and satisfying to think and talk about and (2) ideas are cheap compared to building institutions or investigating how the world works. I’ve noticed that conservatives tend to be really into intellectual narratives, too.
Seems to an issue of human capital for conservative content producers & consumers, especially among social conservatives rather than libertarian types. I think you wrote about how FedSoc is affirmative action for conservative law students, which seems related.
It sounds hyperbolic and hysterical but at this point the Republican Party really is purely an obstructionist movement that is completely devoid of ideas.
The big idea that conservatives have come up with to implement a lot of policy changes is the idea that they are entitled to subvert the corrupt institutions constituting what is in reality a fake American democracy, starting with fake election results. Has there ever been a bigger idea from a former, and quite possibly future, conservative President of the United States than the idea that American Democracy is a great con? We haven't heard that big an idea since the Communists at their peak of American popularity; and coincidentally -- why, my goodness -- it's the same idea. As we have seen, it really is quite practical too. You get to appoint supreme court judges, increase wealth inequality with tax cuts and deregulation, massively increase fossil fuel supply. Stop reading debates between the pinheads, Matt. The real conservative "discussion" takes place in Trump's World.
"... we’re still left with the fact that they didn’t come up with anything that moved the needle on marriage rates."
Ezra Klein has noted one recent policy that led to a measurable effect on marriage durability - the ACA's Medicaid expansion, which correlated to a measurable decline in divorce.
There is a whole remarkable body of recent literature on the positive humanitarian effects of social program expansions. This is particularly true for Medicaid, because the Affordable Care Act represented a very large expansion that different states took up at different times and thereby created some large-scale natural experiments.
Medicaid expansion clearly has a lot of measurable "direct" benefits for people's health and finances - more people utilize care they need, fewer people avoid care for financial reasons, people report better personal health and less financial struggle, etc. And these direct benefits are a big enough deal that there are all sorts of remarkable, positive second-order effects that flow from them. So, for example, Medicaid expansion turns out to correlate to higher birth weights because of better pregnancy care; better test scores because of better childhood health; better statewide credit scores; and even less petty crime (!) which appears to be because of more people getting into rehab. The reduced divorce rate is likely a result of less financial stress and the elimination of old asset tests.
I think all this supports Matt's point in this great piece. Some of the things conservatives ostensibly want could benefit from social program expansions but the GOP has no discernable interest in actually doing this.
Re: supply-side progressivism, it’s a branding exercise. I predict that it won’t catch on, if only because the phrase is too long and awkward. I can’t imagine someone at all charismatic saying it. Unfortunately, big ideas are well-suited for the content mines in that they seem accessible (can’t we all agree on general principles?) and make people feel informed. Someone said something once about nerdtraps and abstraction ladders in reference to wordcels, and it definitely applies to the big ideas folk!
"He had an idea for this framework, compassionate conservatism, which was meant to be less relentlessly statist than orthodox conservative thinking while still reflecting conservative values and a conservative worldview when it came to addressing social issues."
I think a long term view of the modern world starting around the French Revolution is that conservatives have a crucial role to play by doing this exact function-- hammering the left on their worst excesses and using power to put the brakes on change. In so doing they allow society to unfold the longterm liberal project in a smoother fashion.
As a liberal, I'd prefer they keep doing that. But I do think this long trend of egalitarian victory only seems long because the historical era in which modern politics is comprehensible is still relatively short. What they have to do is decide that, if they're going to win democratically, they need to actually turn lots of people into reactionaries via a massive cultural fight. And if they're not going to do that, then they can only ever win via the destruction of democracy.
Matt doesn't mention it, but a major reason why conservatives became so enamored with "big ideas" vs. "technical details of governance" was that this is how they remember Reagan's success.
Reagan in broad strokes
1. reduced regulation on businesses particularly oil and gas producers
2. slashed marginal tax rates
3. raised military spending
Reagan got the Big Things right and was famously detached from policy details delegating that to his cabinet secretaries and under secreataries. And more than this, Reagan is really the only example of successful conservative governance in living memory of party leaders today. So rightties have not been able to get past this. If Trump or either Bushes had had a successful presidency it would be a very different conversation on the right. But they mostly didn't so we're left with the example of St. Ron.
The problem is for conservatives that none of the things Reagan did would or could work today as well as it seemed to before. Once taxes are pretty low, lowing them even further doesn't do much except help rich people enlarge their brokerage accounts. Military spending used to be in production and personnel which had big downstream multiplier effects in communities where bases and/or weapons systems were built. Now the spending is concentrated in a smaller number of contractors in the greater DC area.
I think Oren Cass' crew has the best hope of adapting an actionable policy agenda for a more up to date conservatism but I agree with Matt, Cass' diagnoses are more convincing than his proposed remedies.
This issue seems related to a concern I've had for the past 20 years, which is that political polarization is gutting our ability to choose leaders who are actually competent at governing. Over this period, using one's vote to favor evidence-based policies and managerially-effective leaders has necessarily faded to become secondary or even tertiary considerations (even among people sensible enough to think of such things). When we had a wishy-washy centrist consensus, one could focus on electing competent executives, or at a very minimum on supporting platforms that seemed to offer the more plausible path for addressing major problems the country faced. Now, debates over *the nature* of the problems the country faces have become so heated and divergent, that it has naturally becomes the basis of voting choices. But the result is that competence isn't even in the decision matrix.
It is true that the Right is mostly intellectually bankrupt, mostly because a lot of Republican politicians aren't interested in policy details and half of the Right's intellectuals want to install either a facist or papal dictatorship. But, in Trump era, there have been two great bills authored by Republicans that achieve supposed ends favored by Democrats, that Democrats have refused to engage with: Mitt Romney's original child allowance bill and Marco Rubio's original paid family leave bill. As far as I can tell, there is nothing substantially or philosophically wrong with Romney's original bill, except that, apparently, it was authored by Mitt Romney. There is more to criticize about Rubio's bill, but it is directionally correct: it would be good if we, as a society, offered some amount of paid leave to parents after a birth or adoption. But it is also true that what is paid out by Social Security is, in part, dependent on how long one works. It is not unreasonable for the government to expect someone who did not work for some amount of time to make up the work they missed if they want the full SS payout. Now, with standard assumptions about inflation and productivity growth the balance can probably be less than 1:1. But all these details can be worked out if Congress, including Democrats, actually engaged with these bills. Alas, I'm sure that even Romney and Rubio even support their own bills any more.
It creeps me out to think that there are elected officials in the United States who believe that their job is make the "culture" adhere to their preferences.
It reminds me of the story of Cnut standing at the seashore commanding the waves to cease.
On trade, the big picture goal (yes, the devil is in the details) is not to import less but to export more. The benefits of trade are more choices for American consumers - we got that - and more customers for products made by American workers - not as much as we could. Currently, nine million US jobs are tied to exports, jobs that would be endangered if we got into the retaliatory cycle of increasing tariffs.
The broad topic here is evidence-based public policy. The most useful conservative thinking in this vein is ‘don’t do stuff that doesn’t work.’ Matt Ridley is a good example of this type of conservatism. His argument is that many intellectuals on the left remain ‘creationists’ in the sense that they don’t grasp, or they ignore, that the complexity of social evolution does not imply a planner. As Adam Ferguson noted in 1767 much of human social structure is the result of human action, but not of human design.
This is the argument for starting from a baseline laissez-faire mindset in economics, with a light-touch on regulation. And it’s why it’s easy to point to the repeated failure of over-centralized top-down utopian schemes.
Of course, the conservatism of the political right in the US is just the atavistic version of creationism, where society is thought to be structured by received religious beliefs. This, IMO, is why US conservative don’t have a coherent, rigorous policy vision. They can’t advance to being truly liberal.
We do solve problems by addressing them, so, I think progress does have to come from the progressive left. But, I wish they could get past the blankslateism that doesn’t account for the constraints of human nature. Stuff we know about from evolutionary theory, like the free-rider problem, etc.
“But I think it’s turned out over the past several generations that while standing athwart history yelling “stop!” might be a good election strategy and occasionally block some bad ideas, it cannot reverse the big underlying trends.”
I think this is exactly right. As someone who has worked in conservative policy circles, this recognition is what is driving the attraction to the different varieties of post-liberalism, including the more extreme anti-democratic varieties.
I think the problems with conservative policy, such as it is, are more fundamental. Fusionism is dead, conservatism as a coherent political ideology is in flux with fights in that camp - which are currently being won by a weird type of populist statism.
This is in concert with a realignment of partisanship in this country that is still ongoing. You talke a lot about Bush in this piece, but the reality is that the kinds of Conservatives associated with the populist right don't like Bush at all.
That said, I very much agree that the details matter. And frankly, I don't think Democrats have been very good at this either - being better than Republicans is a pretty low bar.
Of the conservatives I know, most are into “big ideas” because (1) the ideas are fun and satisfying to think and talk about and (2) ideas are cheap compared to building institutions or investigating how the world works. I’ve noticed that conservatives tend to be really into intellectual narratives, too.
Seems to an issue of human capital for conservative content producers & consumers, especially among social conservatives rather than libertarian types. I think you wrote about how FedSoc is affirmative action for conservative law students, which seems related.
It sounds hyperbolic and hysterical but at this point the Republican Party really is purely an obstructionist movement that is completely devoid of ideas.
The big idea that conservatives have come up with to implement a lot of policy changes is the idea that they are entitled to subvert the corrupt institutions constituting what is in reality a fake American democracy, starting with fake election results. Has there ever been a bigger idea from a former, and quite possibly future, conservative President of the United States than the idea that American Democracy is a great con? We haven't heard that big an idea since the Communists at their peak of American popularity; and coincidentally -- why, my goodness -- it's the same idea. As we have seen, it really is quite practical too. You get to appoint supreme court judges, increase wealth inequality with tax cuts and deregulation, massively increase fossil fuel supply. Stop reading debates between the pinheads, Matt. The real conservative "discussion" takes place in Trump's World.
“Frustration because I don’t think debates at this level of abstraction actually resolve anything.”
Exactly!
Data, pilot programs, dull facts, “you can’t get there from here unless you go to Catskill” are the enemy of ideology.
"... we’re still left with the fact that they didn’t come up with anything that moved the needle on marriage rates."
Ezra Klein has noted one recent policy that led to a measurable effect on marriage durability - the ACA's Medicaid expansion, which correlated to a measurable decline in divorce.
There is a whole remarkable body of recent literature on the positive humanitarian effects of social program expansions. This is particularly true for Medicaid, because the Affordable Care Act represented a very large expansion that different states took up at different times and thereby created some large-scale natural experiments.
Medicaid expansion clearly has a lot of measurable "direct" benefits for people's health and finances - more people utilize care they need, fewer people avoid care for financial reasons, people report better personal health and less financial struggle, etc. And these direct benefits are a big enough deal that there are all sorts of remarkable, positive second-order effects that flow from them. So, for example, Medicaid expansion turns out to correlate to higher birth weights because of better pregnancy care; better test scores because of better childhood health; better statewide credit scores; and even less petty crime (!) which appears to be because of more people getting into rehab. The reduced divorce rate is likely a result of less financial stress and the elimination of old asset tests.
I think all this supports Matt's point in this great piece. Some of the things conservatives ostensibly want could benefit from social program expansions but the GOP has no discernable interest in actually doing this.
Re: supply-side progressivism, it’s a branding exercise. I predict that it won’t catch on, if only because the phrase is too long and awkward. I can’t imagine someone at all charismatic saying it. Unfortunately, big ideas are well-suited for the content mines in that they seem accessible (can’t we all agree on general principles?) and make people feel informed. Someone said something once about nerdtraps and abstraction ladders in reference to wordcels, and it definitely applies to the big ideas folk!
Typo?
"He had an idea for this framework, compassionate conservatism, which was meant to be less relentlessly statist than orthodox conservative thinking while still reflecting conservative values and a conservative worldview when it came to addressing social issues."
"statist" -> "anti-statist" or ????
I think a long term view of the modern world starting around the French Revolution is that conservatives have a crucial role to play by doing this exact function-- hammering the left on their worst excesses and using power to put the brakes on change. In so doing they allow society to unfold the longterm liberal project in a smoother fashion.
As a liberal, I'd prefer they keep doing that. But I do think this long trend of egalitarian victory only seems long because the historical era in which modern politics is comprehensible is still relatively short. What they have to do is decide that, if they're going to win democratically, they need to actually turn lots of people into reactionaries via a massive cultural fight. And if they're not going to do that, then they can only ever win via the destruction of democracy.
Matt doesn't mention it, but a major reason why conservatives became so enamored with "big ideas" vs. "technical details of governance" was that this is how they remember Reagan's success.
Reagan in broad strokes
1. reduced regulation on businesses particularly oil and gas producers
2. slashed marginal tax rates
3. raised military spending
Reagan got the Big Things right and was famously detached from policy details delegating that to his cabinet secretaries and under secreataries. And more than this, Reagan is really the only example of successful conservative governance in living memory of party leaders today. So rightties have not been able to get past this. If Trump or either Bushes had had a successful presidency it would be a very different conversation on the right. But they mostly didn't so we're left with the example of St. Ron.
The problem is for conservatives that none of the things Reagan did would or could work today as well as it seemed to before. Once taxes are pretty low, lowing them even further doesn't do much except help rich people enlarge their brokerage accounts. Military spending used to be in production and personnel which had big downstream multiplier effects in communities where bases and/or weapons systems were built. Now the spending is concentrated in a smaller number of contractors in the greater DC area.
I think Oren Cass' crew has the best hope of adapting an actionable policy agenda for a more up to date conservatism but I agree with Matt, Cass' diagnoses are more convincing than his proposed remedies.
This issue seems related to a concern I've had for the past 20 years, which is that political polarization is gutting our ability to choose leaders who are actually competent at governing. Over this period, using one's vote to favor evidence-based policies and managerially-effective leaders has necessarily faded to become secondary or even tertiary considerations (even among people sensible enough to think of such things). When we had a wishy-washy centrist consensus, one could focus on electing competent executives, or at a very minimum on supporting platforms that seemed to offer the more plausible path for addressing major problems the country faced. Now, debates over *the nature* of the problems the country faces have become so heated and divergent, that it has naturally becomes the basis of voting choices. But the result is that competence isn't even in the decision matrix.
It is true that the Right is mostly intellectually bankrupt, mostly because a lot of Republican politicians aren't interested in policy details and half of the Right's intellectuals want to install either a facist or papal dictatorship. But, in Trump era, there have been two great bills authored by Republicans that achieve supposed ends favored by Democrats, that Democrats have refused to engage with: Mitt Romney's original child allowance bill and Marco Rubio's original paid family leave bill. As far as I can tell, there is nothing substantially or philosophically wrong with Romney's original bill, except that, apparently, it was authored by Mitt Romney. There is more to criticize about Rubio's bill, but it is directionally correct: it would be good if we, as a society, offered some amount of paid leave to parents after a birth or adoption. But it is also true that what is paid out by Social Security is, in part, dependent on how long one works. It is not unreasonable for the government to expect someone who did not work for some amount of time to make up the work they missed if they want the full SS payout. Now, with standard assumptions about inflation and productivity growth the balance can probably be less than 1:1. But all these details can be worked out if Congress, including Democrats, actually engaged with these bills. Alas, I'm sure that even Romney and Rubio even support their own bills any more.
It creeps me out to think that there are elected officials in the United States who believe that their job is make the "culture" adhere to their preferences.
It reminds me of the story of Cnut standing at the seashore commanding the waves to cease.
On trade, the big picture goal (yes, the devil is in the details) is not to import less but to export more. The benefits of trade are more choices for American consumers - we got that - and more customers for products made by American workers - not as much as we could. Currently, nine million US jobs are tied to exports, jobs that would be endangered if we got into the retaliatory cycle of increasing tariffs.
The broad topic here is evidence-based public policy. The most useful conservative thinking in this vein is ‘don’t do stuff that doesn’t work.’ Matt Ridley is a good example of this type of conservatism. His argument is that many intellectuals on the left remain ‘creationists’ in the sense that they don’t grasp, or they ignore, that the complexity of social evolution does not imply a planner. As Adam Ferguson noted in 1767 much of human social structure is the result of human action, but not of human design.
This is the argument for starting from a baseline laissez-faire mindset in economics, with a light-touch on regulation. And it’s why it’s easy to point to the repeated failure of over-centralized top-down utopian schemes.
Of course, the conservatism of the political right in the US is just the atavistic version of creationism, where society is thought to be structured by received religious beliefs. This, IMO, is why US conservative don’t have a coherent, rigorous policy vision. They can’t advance to being truly liberal.
We do solve problems by addressing them, so, I think progress does have to come from the progressive left. But, I wish they could get past the blankslateism that doesn’t account for the constraints of human nature. Stuff we know about from evolutionary theory, like the free-rider problem, etc.
“But I think it’s turned out over the past several generations that while standing athwart history yelling “stop!” might be a good election strategy and occasionally block some bad ideas, it cannot reverse the big underlying trends.”
I think this is exactly right. As someone who has worked in conservative policy circles, this recognition is what is driving the attraction to the different varieties of post-liberalism, including the more extreme anti-democratic varieties.
I think the problems with conservative policy, such as it is, are more fundamental. Fusionism is dead, conservatism as a coherent political ideology is in flux with fights in that camp - which are currently being won by a weird type of populist statism.
This is in concert with a realignment of partisanship in this country that is still ongoing. You talke a lot about Bush in this piece, but the reality is that the kinds of Conservatives associated with the populist right don't like Bush at all.
That said, I very much agree that the details matter. And frankly, I don't think Democrats have been very good at this either - being better than Republicans is a pretty low bar.