One sad thing about the CPAC Conference is that while the various speakers’ criticism of Obama’s “soak the rich” policies are true and persuasive, conservative leaders are missing out on an important recent development that renders much of the old strategy focused on growth, low taxes, and a rousing defense of capitalism less relevant than ever.
Once upon a time, conservatives were middle class, upwardly mobile people that worked hard, saved, made a few bucks, had kids, moved out to the suburbs, voted Republican, and contrasted their own happy and auspicious lives with those of the shiftless, undeserving poor, the “parasites” of the Democratic Party. Working class people too hopped on board, though sometimes uneasily, because they were disgusted with the excesses of the 1960s, jealous over their guns and their churches, and resentful of the simmering racial cold war harming their prospects on factory floors.
Today, however, the first group in that coalition–the group that cares a lot more about money and taxes and economic parasites than it does about flag-burning or abortion–is in economic shambles. Their 401Ks are cut in half. Their homes are upside down and increasingly being foreclosed upon. Their self-confidence which depended upon the sharp contrast of their own lives with those of the idle poor has been undermined by the prospect of years and years of toil simply to get even. Further, their sense that the rules are basically fair and that businesses (and people like them affiliated with businesses) succeed because they deserve to has created a kind of upper-middle-class populist reaction to the various Wall Street bailouts: if their own small businesses must fail, and if their own portfolios get whacked, why does a subset of the economy, a subset that is not particularly notable for building or inventing anything other than impenetrably complex financial instruments, getting tax money and bailouts while the ordinary upper middle class gets the tab. This tale of two groups of rich people is given further salience by the contrast of their own relatively straightforward success through thrift, focus, effort, hard work, and sobriety with the gambling-style activity and loose living of Wall Street in recent years. I’m reminded of the largely middle class reaction against aristocratic decadence in France circa 1789. Recall that it was a bourgeois revolution, not primarily a proletarian one.
Bill Clinton quite intelligently saw that the future of the Democratic Party and its big government ideology required expanding entitlements to the middle class, so that future elections became referenda on health care, scholarship funds, and the like. Even so, his centerpiece health care proposal failed. The middle class constituency I describe above mostly had health care because they were employed, and Republicans took over in 2000 after eight fat years of moderate rule. What Clinton could not do by force of rhetoric, the economic crisis may allow. Suddenly the old rules have left the middle class deeply in debt, immobile, and flirting with despair over the massive and seemingly unfair degradation of their wealth. Further, the big giveaways to Wall Street, banks, and the most irresponsible homeowners have created among many a cynical “get while the getting’s good” view of things. After all, why be a sucker? And, more important, why shouldn’t the rules be changed to help the good people just like them?
Rick Santelli’s impassioned Chicago Tea Party rant was surely enjoyable, but it would probably fall on deaf ears in places like Ft. Myers and Phoenix where people that did play by the rules and still see themselves as sensible and responsible are deeply underwater. Suddenly, they’re poor too and more inclined than ever to take the handouts that they formerly thought would only slow them and their kind down. It’s one thing to be against big government when you are a net loser under such a regime; it’s quite another to ask people to be against big government on principle. For a long time, enough Americans saw the limited government policies of the founders echoed in the pro-capitalism direction of the Republican Party as a winning formula in accord with justice. When that formula has left so many high and dry, the inexorable sprint towards big government solutions is harder to resist than ever, as too is a serious reevaluation of the values on which it was all based.
To accomplish anything of value, conservatism must change its rhetoric, focusing more on the cultural issues that still divide us from the Democrats and the likelihood that this productive class (even with a housing bail out) will become the permanent water-carrier for the big government future, exchanging, in effect, its future and that of its children for a few trinkets and Fool’s Gold.
Subscribe To This Feed
Sadly all too true.
As much as we like to talk about all the foolish subprime homebuyers who bought beyond their means, and all the home flippers who never intended to hold onto the houses for more than a few months, we forget that the majority of home buyers bought responsibly.
Yes, they overpaid, but they overpaid because subprime buyers and the flippers bid up the prices, a process which was encouraged by loose Fed interest rates, wrong-headed government incentives, and the ease of mortgage securitization in a global economy where overseas economies were eager to invest their savings in the U.S.
Should we have seen this? Maybe we should have, but how was the average middle class / upper middle class American supposed to have foreseen it? All he knew was that he needed a place to live and didn’t want to rent the rest of his life. Now he’s underwater on his mortgage and stuck in his house, unable to take a job in a different city without wiping out his savings or ruining his credit.
Obviously Barack’s plans are only going to slow recovery and set us on the road to ruin, but let’s face it, our current situation is screwed up, and we can’t expect the guy in Phoenix paying a $300k mortgage on a $200k house not to be pissed, bewildered, and ready to listen to politicians telling him it can be fixed.
The sad fact is that in areas such as housing, education, and health care we as a society increasingly demand that the lower class have the same access to goods as the middle class. The resulting government actions distort the market by making goods that were once affordable to the middle class unnaffordable, or creating a bubble like we saw in housing. The result is that the middle class then comes looking to the government for support also, and the process of government distortion creeps up the chain further until everything is an entitlement.
Sound drastic? Maybe I’m getting ahead of myself, but we are certainly heading in that direction. If you don’t believe me, check out B.O.’s new budget.
Forget, please, “conservatism.” It has been, operationally, de facto, Godless and therefore irrelevant. Secular conservatism will not defeat secular liberalism because to God both are two atheistic peas-in-a-pod and thus predestined to failure.
As Stonewall Jackson’s Chief of Staff R.L. Dabney said of such a humanistic belief more than 100 years ago:
“[Secular conservatism] is a party which never conserves anything. Its history has been that it demurs to each aggression of the progressive party, and aims to save its credit by a respectable amount of growling, but always acquiesces at last in the innovation. What was the resisted novelty of yesterday is today .one of the accepted principles of conservatism; it is now conservative only in affecting to resist the next innovation, which will tomorrow be forced upon its timidity and will be succeeded by some third revolution; to be denounced and then adopted in its turn. American conservatism is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition. It remains behind it, but never retards it, and always advances near its leader. This pretended salt bath utterly lost its savor: wherewith shall it be salted? Its impotency is not hard, indeed, to explain. It is worthless because it is the conservatism of expediency only, and not of sturdy principle. It intends to risk nothing serious for the sake of the truth.”
Our country is collapsing because we have turned our back on God (Psalm 9:17) and refused to kiss His Son (Psalm 2).
John Lofton, Editor, TheAmericanView.com
Recovering Republican
JLof@aol.com
PS — And never has “Mr Worldly Wiseman” Limbaugh made a bigger ass of himself than with his blasphemous joke about God thinking he was Limbaugh…
Does this mean it would be advisable to put the absolute best economic policies – from the perspective of overall economic growth – on the back-burner, in favor of pro-lower-middle-class policies like socialized health insurance? I have considered that route myself. I have come to no conclusions.
Consider:
Granted, socialized anything will limit growth. However, sometimes socialism is inevitable, so it would be best not to stand athwart, but redirect the engine onto the most economically sound track. Thus we should galvanize the LMC against failure-rewarding socialism (like Medicaid) and toward broad-based socialism.
My main annoyance is that the most broad-based social policy is of course Social Security. It makes sense to insure survivors and to insure against disability, but insuring against old-age seems like the wrong approach. I mean, we all know when we turn 65, right?
I agree that non-economic policies are probably more important – especially immigration, affirmative action, and gun control. It may be most prudent to organize conservative action around those.
Blode,
I don’t know if you read my comment above, but your point about socialized medicine is what I was getting at the end of my post.
I consider myself a free-market beleiver, but a socialized health system is probably better than the mess we have today.
We’ve crafted a system where the rich bankroll a government-run health care system for the poor, eldery, and publicly employed, while anyone in the lower middle class who doesn’t work for a large employer or the government is absolutely screwed as they pay the ridiculous costs that naturally rise out of this sort of government/public/private hybrid clusterf****.
I recently read that the Canadian government covers about 70% of its health care costs, while the U.S. government covers 47% of its health care costs, but our overall costs are much higher, so our government pays more for health care per capita than Canada does, without offering universal coverage. It’s the worst of all worlds.
The only bright side is that most of the world’s innovation and advance in health care comes out of the U.S., and I think other countries with lower costs are getting some free rider effects out of that (especially with prescription drugs). I am not sure the innovation is worth it though when basically about a third of our population, most of them gainfully employed, are out of luck unless they happen to get poor or rich before they get sick.
We might as well get it over with and socialize the system, rather than screwing over the middle class to give the poor free service and the rich the highest quality service.
I don’t agree with this idea that socialized medicine is better than the current, disorderly system. We probably do overspend, avoid efficiencies and the like, but this is driven largely by the employer-provided insurance regime which separates consumers from costs and separates producers from price-sensitive consumers. A better system would be a Grade C health system for the poor and destitute, where various unpleasantness, long waits, and second-tier products and service were provided. Everyone else should have to treat health care like any other commodity. It would be kind of like the VA regime. We’d get public health benefits, avoid the unpleasantness of children and the unlucky having no access to relatively inexpensive health care, but we’d keep markets and innovation as the dominant system and we’d not be giving top-of-the-line health care to the uninsured.
Excellent post. I shared it with my buddies.
Yes, that would be ideal, but the difficulty is in crafting a government-run “grade C” health care system for the poor. Government has a natural tendency to inflate costs, and the public an unwillingness to accept the idea that we are going to intentionally give lower quality treatment to the poor. There is also the problem that lower quality health care can essentially be the same thing as no health care at all if an advanced treatment is needed. This makes it difficult to decide which services can and cannot be rationed or left out.
Having been to a couple VA hospitals, I understand the analogy you are making, but look at what is happening to the program in our current political and cultural climate – money is pouring in. I am not sure it is even such a money saver at this point.
The separation between consumers and payers in corporate insurance programs is certainly a problem, but most plans for dealing with it call for taking out the corporate middle man and substituting direct government subsidies through the tax system. While this may slightly improve the situation, the fact is you still have a massive subsidy occuring, which we know drives prices up.
So your idea is a good one, and I am tempted to go over to your position, but I just don’t see it as feasible in our current society. The question for me is whether the hope of being able to implement such a system is real enough to be the worth the cost of preserving the current horrible system at the expense of the middle class, or should we accept the socialization of medicine and save ourselves the nightmare of a 10-20 year slide to socialized health care that makes the current problems worse and worse each year?
Mr. Roach,
The deeper problem with American conservatism is that it’s been almost completely ineffectual; in that it has lead to the election of public officials who have not been able to reduce the size of our government (in fact the contrary has happened), control our borders, or roll back any of the anti-majoritarian cultural reforms of the LBJ era. The election of Barack Obama only highlights this failure of American conservatism to fundamentally correct the national direction that the Left set out for us in the 60s & 70s.
I don’t believe the crisis will lead the middle class to support an expanded welfare state for two reasons:
1) In terms of absolute numbers, there are not enough high income earners to make a dent in the US deficit. To close the deficit longterm we would have to increase payroll and income taxes on the middle class, not just the wealthy. The middle class will not like this – especially payroll tax hikes.
2) Any expansion of the welfare state is going to benefit primarily NAMs and low intelligence immigrants. If you think the white middle class will see 10% of the money from Obama’s new welfare state go themselves, then I have a pyramid in Giza to sell you.
See California to understand how well low IQ immigration combined with a generous welfare state works at the state level. The white middle class in California gets taxed to death and none of the benefits from the welfare state.
Now imagine how this low IQ immigration plus a supersized Obama welfare state will work at the national level.
If anything, expanding welfare in favor of NAMs will kill whatever support is left for the welfare state among middle whites.
Additionally, quite a few upper middle and upper class whites who were able to flirt with social liberalism when taxes on the rich were relatively low during the go-go 90′s and who were turned off by Bush’s idiocy will lose faith in the Democrats when their taxes go up.
David Manley – I have read your posts now.
I tend to agree about the free-rider effects. Other countries pass cost-containment (price control) measures, not because they are necessarily more anti-market than we are. (America’s commitment to free markets is passionate but inconsistent!) Legislatures have an incentive to contain costs everywhere people desire patent medicines, but with many of the big pharmaceutical companies in the US, it is presumable that their efforts to maximize profits through political action will be most successful here. They reap huge profits off US patients, and add only modest profits when they go international – selling drugs in cost-contained environments must be thought of as something of an afterthought.
Right now the best solution, I think, would be for various American states to go the Canadian route. Congress would probably have to open a few doors – if a state’s taxpayers are already paying American levels for 47% coverage, their bill can’t really go down when they move to Canadian costs for 70% of coverage, unless Congress changes some laws.
Not much chance of that happening by political action, but I can always hope that someone on the Supreme Court will note that health care subsidies are not one of Congress’s Article I Section 8 powers, and thus that health care law is necessarily a state function.
[...] have suggested a revamped Republican party should trend nationalistic, abandoning its ideology of free trade, militarism, and uncritical [...]