Eric thinks so, but me, I’m not seeing it. Sure, people who call themselves conservatives are more angry right now, but they also seem a lot less thoughtful and well-informed than the conservatism I remember from 10, 20 years ago. A movement once full of stellar intellectual thinkers is now dominated by the likes of Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck. And while this may increase the movement’s strength in some areas, it diminishes it enormously in others. When the answer to every question, before you even ask it, is either “the market” or “the Bible,” how coherent can your agenda really be once you take power? If the only thesis of your movement is that our own government is always and everywhere our enemy, what exactly is that movement going to accomplish? It’s increasingly looking to me like conservatism is more of a twitch than an actual intellectual point of view. Which I find disappointing and a little disturbing, because it didn’t used to be that way.
When Republicans take power again–and they will, sooner or later, just because that’s the nature of our political system–I’m not sure what they’re going to do with all that angry energy, because it doesn’t seem like they have a coherent agenda on more than one or two items.
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Frankly, Dean, neither you or Eric give any kind of examples or argument here. Just your gut feelings. Consider me underwhelmed. Though I have to say, Eric’s lack of any examples leads me to wonder why I would ever visit there again.
The Right’s “ends justify the means” ? Really ? Such as ?
Well, I don’t know about conservatism, but as a libertarian let me say “RAWR!!”
If the only thesis of your movement is that our own government is always and everywhere our enemy, what exactly is that movement going to accomplish?
Limited government, of course.
I worry that free society as a whole doesn’t understand the crucial lesson of the twentieth century: governments can do the most terrible things imaginable.
No one wanted a Hitler or a Stalin or a Mao or a Pol Pot. They happened because people allowed the state to become too powerful in the name of high-minded purposes.
As a Deist I’m with you on the Bible thing, but why not worship the free market? It’s entirely rational. We have a standard of living unimaginable in the days of Adam Smith thanks to markets.
Dave: It isn’t just because of the markets; you can’t sit there and tell me our increased standards of living have nothing to do with little things like universal education, Social Security, Medicare, and a host of government programs. Not to mention, possibly more important, the regulatory apparatus that makes so much of the market even possible, and little things like roads and air traffic control and a ton of other stuff the government does, and has always done during this time of massively increased standards of living.
It is not particularly intellectually deep to automatically answer “the market’ to every question before it’s even asked.
Dead: As for Eric–one of the best known and respected libertarian/classical liberal bloggers out there– you might want to ask him for examples before telling me he has none. In general what I see is a Right that’s increasingly incoherent, inconsistent, and anti-intellectual. As a movement anyway, certainly there are individuals who are not like that but even they seem incoherent on what they want.
For my part, I hope free-market conservatives learn the difference between being blindly “pro-business” and being actually pro-market; recent Republican politicians have been more pro (big) business than pro-market…
We’ve seen that whenever the government actively sticks its fingers into business, it nearly always messes things up, typically by preventing failures that should have happened long ago, by cementing business models in place long beyond their throw-out date with regulations that may have made sense once but have not aged well, or allowing big business to lobby for regulations and tax-code fiddling that erect barriers to entry for other businesses.
Here’s an interesting discussion on pro-business versus pro-market. It isn’t an either-or – it’s actually a four-sided grid…
http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2009/10/business_vs_mar.html
Not that it matters what I think, but it would be good for Conservatives to explain what they are “conserving” and why it’s worthy of being conserved.
Each generation has to relearn the lessons of the past.
IMO, there are many American institutions and societal mores that SHOULD be conserved. But, I’d like to see the right make this argument more often, particularly in a civilized fashion.
I think it’s winnable argument, too.
–HB
… you can’t sit there and tell me…
He didn’t. That’s reducio ad absurdum on your part. You keep banging that same one over and over.
The Market is not a jealous god. In fact, it doesn’t care if you worship it or despise it (see ref. M. Moore).
As foobarista noted, “pro-business” is not “pro-market”. For example, GM and Chrysler are no longer creatures of the market. They will die unless The State chooses to keep them alive.
In general what I see is a Right that’s increasingly incoherent, inconsistent, and anti-intellectual.
incoherent – this is a feature, not a bug. We disagree with each other. Lockstep agreement is for and of the authoritarians.
inconsistent – Trying to eliminate inconsistency leads to insane results, like driving off a cliff in order to not deviate from a straight line. Too much is also a problem. One of the benefits is that it increases memetic processing speeds.
anti-intellectual – I believe both the word and concept “intellectual” have been corrupted. If all the self-proclaimed intellectuals agree, what evidence is there that any of them are actually thinking for themselves? That’s caricature. If it doesn’t apply, let it fly.
I think you meant to say straw man. A reductio ad absurdum would be a type of logical argument.
just a note about:
“universal education, Social Security, Medicare, and a host of government programs”
Universal ed is NOT fed gov, it is State & Local (unless you are referring to rules imposed like No Child & Title Q)
Standard of living prior to SS & Medicare & a host of other gov programs encouraged crazy immigration becuase the SOL for the US was superior. Oddly there are now people who are leaving the US because opportunities under a framework with SS, Medicare & the Host are less favorable in comparison than they ever have been before.
Um – who you talking about here? The folks I know that are getting mobilized against intrusive government intervention into their medical care decisions and the massive debt that’s being accummulated for the next generation are far from ignorant, Bible thumping Rednecks. They’re the folks that have always been too busy working their butts off and raising their families to have any time to notice how dangerous our government has become. They’re awake now.
Dean is just bashing conservatives again. It’s become his favorite pasttime. Note how he is following the basic liberal formula here, implying, if not outright saying, that conservatism is intellectually deficient.
I pay no attention to Dean when he goes on these anti-conservative spins. I assume he’s just trying to continue to build his “oh so reasonable, I’m no conservative” cred.
It’s irritating, that’s all.
Sorry, Dean, but the same goes for you. Are we really expected to defend a concept – “conservatism” – against blanket, vague accusations like that ?
Again, examples, please.
And please, please, please do not go with the tried and true bogeymen – Rush, Hannity, and Beck. I want to see examples of those who are otherwise considered reasoned, rational individuals that you believe have turned incoherent, inconsistent, and anti-intellectual. The fact of the matter is, when I think of those descriptions, I think of people who USED to be alleged conservatives like Charles Johnson at LGF.
I’d also like to see you address maggie’s outstanding take on this.
And if we’re talking about incoherent, inconsistent anti-intellectuals, I assume we’ll have to include Paul Krugman, Markus Moulitsas, James Carville, Bill Maher, Ward Churchill etc…
Yeah, the Left is simply CRAWLING with intellectuals…
As I said, this is just Dean beating on conservatives again. His typical approach is to prop up some pathetic straw men and beat the hell out of them. It’s getting tired and downright pathetic.
Dave: It isn’t just because of the markets; you can’t sit there and tell me our increased standards of living have nothing to do with little things like universal education, Social Security, Medicare, and a host of government programs.
Of course I can. We can only afford those things because of the incredible weath markets have created — or to say the same thing another way, without markets they would be so poorly funded it wouldn’t matter much whether we had them or not.
I don’t say they are bad or unnecessary things, just that they don’t create any wealth (with the possible exception of education, which would do much better under a more market-like voucher/charter system).
I worry that people don’t understand this. The Soviets had all the things you mention. So did pre-reform China. The North Koreans have them now — and millions starved to death in the 1990s.
Regulation is fine and necessary; libertarians don’t dispute the need to prevent monopoly and etc., or the need for public goods like roads and defense. But you have to realize, the more you regulate the more incentive and potential there is for rent-seeking behavior, such as creating huge regulatory barriers to entry in order to stifle competition, or creating absurd laws regarding carbon emissions on the basis of environmentalist-driven pseudo-science while buying up “green” companies which will profit from the laws.
Something that isn’t widely recognized: Canada mostly avoided the financial crisis. They did so not with massive tomes of ultra-complex regulations but with simple, easily-enforced reserve requirements that companies couldn’t lobby their way around.
edited
Up until very recently it was considered simple basic knowledge to understand how markets create wealth, and wealth creates lifestyle.
This bothers the Left though, because they like to think that there is some default level of lifestyle that you “just have” and markets have nothing to do with it. This is the first step towards collectivism, redistribution of wealth and government takeover of markets.
The fact that it appears now to be “un-intellectual” to hold this view shows you how much the “intellectual elite” has abandoned history and common sense.
Now, of course, we see these ideas being turned into policy, and the results will be quite predictable. But the Left will likely not be able to connect the dots and as their own policies continue to destroy the wealth-creation machine, they will continue to blame it all on the markets.
… and it will be called “intellectual” to do so.
This works better on Saturday night:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=876MtdZJ-Lo
One could spend a generation merely identifying the bottom 10% of government every year, and either eliminating it outright or reforming it so that it does its job better. You could spend an entire 4 year presidential term just to get the State Department functional.
It really would take a generation to just pare down the rot. As a nice side effect, what is left would be much better government because it would be more understandable, more effective, and would be auditable because to survive, every program would have had to have passed multiple audits.
There, simple, popular, completely consistent with both social conservative and economic conservative beliefs, and a generational goal. It really isn’t that hard to create a popular conservative platform which can win elections and serve as a practical platform for running the government.
The time for something like that to be unveiled is some time in 2010 as the election is gearing up. Right now is the time to try to slow down the damage that is coming fast and furious from Reid, Pelosi, and Obama.
If the Republicans can find a powerful conservative voice and prepare a coherent, common-sense plan which is easily communicated and resonates with most people’s ideas of what government should be doing, then we would see how much “muscle” conservatism has. All this fretting and posturing about how “intellectual” the movement has become is pretty much the antithesis of common sense conservatism anyway. Real conservatism appeals not because it resonates in the halls of academia and satisfies some people’s need to demonstrate their pseudo-intellectual bonafides, but because it appeals to main street.
There is already an ideology that prides itself on it’s appeal to pseudo-intellectual elites and sneering at Walmart shopping mainstream Americans. It’s called “liberalism.” We don’t need two of those, one of them is dismantling this country fast enough.
The “Contract With America” was a brilliant approach, and while I don’t think it would work to duplicate it (not because it couldn’t work, but because the media and the liberal “intelligentsia” would sneer that it was tried and failed) a new approach with the same fundamental approach but branded differently definitely could work.
… and I think that is probably precisely what Sarah Palin is trying to do. Good for her.
Good to see there are no examples to be given of the incoherent, inconsistent, anti-intellectual nature of conservatism.
“A movement once full of stellar intellectual thinkers is now dominated by the likes of Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck”
Was the movement ever dominated by “stellar intellectual thinkers”? I don’t really recall a time when that was the case. I’m sure there are stellar intellectuals in the movement now, but they don’t tend to be very effective politically, which is what we need at the moment. I suspect your objection to the Limbaughs, etc, is at least as much an objection to style as intellect. Do you think running our government based on the ideas of a leftist intellectual would be preferable to running the government based on the ideas of, say, Glenn Beck? If so, why? If not, then what practical difference does it make whether there are any stellar intellectuals involved? For that matter, why is Beck not a “stellar intellectual thinker”?
You also seem to come from a basic premise that conservatives need to have a plan to “do something” when they take power. Some of us believe restricting government to things it should be involved in, and ending it’s involvement in those it shouldn’t is “doing something”, as is blocking legislation that runs counter to that objective. Do you think we need more laws?
Twitter version:
And now my own lol:
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columns/OpEd-Contributor/Brain-dead-conservatives-Are-conservative-elitists-brain-dead-63481997.html
I started writing a comment in response to this thread, but it ended up becoming so long that i just made it a post.
but the key point I want to make is that conservatism is due for a rebirth, and it will involve the dogmatic application of blunt arguments like CutTaxes or SmallGovt. It will instead require a rethinking of solutions to the modern issues of teh day, by applying the core principles – freedom, opportunity, culture – and be willing to break with orthdoxy of the past if thats where the principles lead them.
There are indeed conservatives who are breaking ground along these lines – for whom RINO might well be a badge of honor, since Republican is no longer Conservative by any remote standard. I’ve got a list of a few right here.
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