The Jester Stole His Thorny Crown
(posted by Jim Henley)
The blogs respond to my post of yesterday. I respond to the blogs responding. That darn Mona says my participation here is “limited.” Limited! I’ll show her!
Mark at Publius Endures, a fine blog you should all read, declares that
. . . if we’re relegated to playing the role of court jester, I’m fine with that…it’s a hell of a lot more fun (and more useful, at that) than playing the role of court sycophant.
Amen! I particularly enjoy pantsing the Lord Chancellor.
TGGP points to an attempted synthesis/critique of Nozick and Rawls that is, without a doubt, long. It part I read suggests that it will argue that people got richer once capitalism got going, therefore, to help the poor the most, we should “turn capitalism loose.” But while we’re near the intersection of Post Hoc and Propter Hoc, we can’t help noticing that the Welfare State is in the same neighborhood. The first world has consisted exclusively of mixed economies since at least the Great Depression, with union agitation and efforts at poor-support programs starting well before that. And while libertarian and conservative economists have been confidently pronouncing the imminent “last throes” of Scandinavia’s social democracies and Canada’s health care system regularly for decades now - someone does it on Cato’s blog every week - these systems keep on keeping on. We ought to be a little humble.
There’s a fairly lengthy comment thread on the Freedom Democrat site. Ka1igu1a tries to soothe Paige, and praises Barack Obama with faint damnation:
And I would call Obama’s record on civil liberties “spotty,” not horrendous.
Just so. His work on getting the law to require Chicago police to videotape interrogations would count as a career achievement for any self-respecting state legislator. ka1igu1a also engages in some of the Ron Paul bashing for which I have a weakness.
In a later comment, though, he goes wrong - meaning, of course, he disagrees with me!
However, Henley’s assertion that the Dem Party is becoming more populist ignores the fact the Repub party is becoming more populist too. So too, even the LP party(the LP is no longer a party that can be counted on for advocating open border immigration). However, the populist strain is still not dominant in the Dem party, otherwise John Edwards would be the nominee. Any pandering rhetoric aside, you can’t convince me that either Clinton or Obama are raging populists. Both, in fact, keep getting burned by the actions of their campaigns behind the scenes that belies whatever populist rhetoric they spew out on the campaign trail.
Is GOP anti-immigrant rhetoric a species of economic populism? Sure. But what I meant by economic “populism” in the Dem party is the return of genuine enthusiasm for high marginal tax rates, a national health-insurance plan and such like. That is, the Democratic platform has moved substantially “leftward” on economics. (500 Mutualists clear their throats and limber their typing fingers. Fellas! You know what I mean!)
K continues:
From a purely political perspective, I think there is a significant political re-alignment unfolding, I’m just not sure how it will ultimately play out. The GOP obviously experienced it with the fractioning between supply-siders,cultural and economic populists, neoconservatives, and libertarians when they had the majority.
I don’t think this is very true, because I don’t think the GOP coalition is as divisible as K suggests. It’s too late in the evening for me to pull up the Pew Survey now, or another recent survey on the opinions of Republican voters, but your typical Republican is anti-tax AND nationalistic/militaristic AND culturally conservative at the same time. He worships at a “prosperity gospel” church or thinks maybe he ought to, believes that “freedom requires religion” and values capitalism because he thinks it instills “discipline.” American military strength is part of “the whole armor of God.” Islam is an evil faith that threatens all we hold dear, including capitalism and Christianity, and must be subdued militarily before it conquers America through our own decadence. Your Glenn Reynoldses and Daniel Larisons are outliers, not emblems of a fierce factional incoherence.
The Dem party is heading toward their own fracturing between the progressive managerial class, blue collar populists, left-wing civil liberty activists, the creative class, and group identity classes.
I used to think this too! In practice, though, these groups seem to be able to coexist - they have, after all, been the constituent parts of the Democratic Party since the New Deal. If you add in the environmental movement, you very nearly have something - beginning in the 1970s there was substantial tension between ecologists and trade unionists, and it helped drive the “Reagan Democrat” phenomenon. But particularly at the activist level, trade-unionists and environmentalists have resolved the tension between their programs by simply agreeing to demand that rich people and corporations fund both sets out of higher taxes, and they’ve successfully united to demand environmental strictures on international trade deals.
The truth is, our existing political coalitions “work” pretty well - that is, each can command at least the grudging loyalty of 45+ percent of the population at any given time. Neither can command the loyalty of much more than 52% except in extraordinary circumstances. The fluctuations conform to Nozick’s “Zigzag of Politics,” which has great descriptive power if less normative force.
Then, some crystal-ballin’:
With an Obama or Clinton presidency along with a democratic congressional majority, you will still likely see a hawkish foreign policy, only partial withdrawal for Iraq, new trade deals, only a partial nod to civil liberties, and certainly no redistributionist economic policy. IMHO, I think majority power will end up shackling the Dems with the same coalition fracturing identity crisis that beset the GOP.
I don’t think this is completely wrong. I think there will be more redistributionism than ka1igu1a thinks, depending on how the Senate shapes up. (It’s always possible Dems will dispense with the filibuster as a procedure.) I think it’s possible that a partial Iraqi withdrawal will create the momentum that leads to a full withdrawal, even without Obama or Clinton intending it to. (In my optimistic moments, I hope that Obama might be neo-imperialism’s Gorbachev, the soft apparatchik who intends merely to reform the system but ends up bringing it down despite himself.)
Pithy conclusion! (I kind of don’t have an architecture for this post. Pretend I just built to a rhetorical climax. Have a cigarette. You look fantastic.)
And ka1igu1a, if you read this: I hope you don’t think I was picking on you. You provided a lot of food for thought. And I totally ignored the Mountain West thing, to which I’ll need to return.
April 20th, 2008 at 9:15 pm
That darn Mona says my participation here is “limited.” Limited! I’ll show her!
Now dear Jim, let the good folk at AoTP understand: I wrote that at your blog, and just wanted your blog readers — you know, the substantial readership you’ve built due to you prescience and insight — know that all of UO (including moi, until you evict me) is not leaving them high and dry for new parts.
Now, carry on. Limitedly or otherwise.
April 21st, 2008 at 12:22 am
I don’t know if there are 500 Mutualists. I do know what you mean, though. The problem is, the Democrats who (no doubt sincerely) think they’re being the most “populist” are, no doubt innocently, acting as useful idiots for Big Business. It’s hard not to picture Brer Rabbit squealing “Please don’t fling me in the briar patch!”
Anyway, oddly enough, I just happened to stumble onto this passage not long before I read your post:
“The post World War II American ‘Corporate State’ ap-
pears to this writer to be based upon a profoundly conser-
vative coalition of government, big business, conservative
labor leaders and ‘liberal’ intellectuals. Kaiser Wilhelm I
and Bismark would certainly smile approvingly on con-
temporary American capitalism.”
–E. K. Hunt’, “A Neglected Aspect of the Economic Ideology of the Early New Deal” (Review of Social Economy, Vol. XXIX, No. 2, Sept. 1971). Quoted in Chris R. Tame, “Power, Class and the State,” LA Historical Notes No. 8.
April 21st, 2008 at 1:24 am
Obama’s work getting police videotaped actually got kudos from Steve Sailer, and that’s saying something!
You should actually thank Dain for the Jeffrey Friedman article, he’s the one who pointed it out here. He has actually called into question the empirical case for libertarianism.
April 21st, 2008 at 2:57 am
Not at all Jim; in fact, I appreciate the commentary. However, I do stand by what I wrote.
In terms of the GOP, I maintain the bonding that holds these coalitions together is more aptly characterized by “Van der Waals” rather than the more stable and permanent “covalent” type that you maintain. Grover Norquist and the supply-siders raged war against “Tax Hike Mike.” Former Huckabee spokesman Joe Carter in a recent Reason Magazine article said Huckabee specifically saw the split in the GOP between conservatives and libertarian free marketers. The Neocons haven’t been supply-siders since Reagan left office and were going to make a very public defection to Hillary Clinton(at the time she seemed the likely Dem nominee) if Huckabee had garnered the nomination. In fact, if the GOP had proportional delegate awarding instead of winner take all, you would be witnessing a bitter 3 way race(Mccain,Romeny, and Huckabee) that would mirror what’s going on the Dem side. Throw in Ron Paul and you would have all 4 coalitions still battling it out on the GOP side.
That we are seeing a bitter Dem nomination process this late in the game and would be witnessing a similar coalition splintering contest on the GOP side (if not for it being rigged to specifically prevent this) more than suggests that political re-alignment is in the cards. Political coalitions are not historically static. They do change.
You keep implying that Dem economic redistributionist policy will continue to unite the Dem coalitions. And as I posted on Freedom Democrats, neither Obama nor Clinton are economic redistrubutionists. Obama is being advised by the post-Friedman Chicago school and Hillary would be about as redistributionist as her husband’s presidency was. When it comes to campaigning, ignore the headlines and always look at the fine print.
And contrary to your position, I assert that winning political coalitions that may have “worked” in the past will not likely remain viable going into the future. In any event, winning coalitions these days are won at the margins, which makes, say, the “western libertarian vote” a vote that actually has to be “courted .” Court jesters still, perhaps, but ones that have some say in who their king will be.
April 21st, 2008 at 7:48 am
That we are seeing a bitter Dem nomination process this late in the game says very little about deep divisions in the Democratic coalition and much more about the rules by which the party assigns delegates.
The hope of redistributionist policies — and the absolute certainty that Republicans will not deliver anything in that regard — is a powerful glue at the moment. The failure to deliver might become a similarly powerful force for realignment.
The ‘leftward’ move of both current Dem candidates on health care and withdrawal from Iraq has a lot to do with John Edwards’ presence in the race early on.
April 21st, 2008 at 8:16 am
I don’t know if your typical Republican is really so party-line on all the issues, but at least they piss each other off less than Dems. On the Dem side, we’re seeing the divide between the “elite” and “blue collar” Dems (I use quotes because I think the labels over-simplify a lot of thing, but that is the gist). They fight it out for control of the party. On the GOP side, there’s a deal between the affluent faction and the less affluent cultural faction. Plus, as fundamentalism goes upscale (those megachurch parking lots have a lot of nice cars) they can make inroads into suburbs and thereby diversify the economic profile of the cultural faction of the party.
Sure, the GOP has its fights, but they stick together in power. However much they hate each other, 95% of the time a GOP Congress will (eventually) rally around a GOP President (with perhaps a few token voices of “opposition” who always back down in the end) and 95% of the time they will rally against a Dem President. A Dem Congress, OTOH, is much less cohesive.
April 21st, 2008 at 6:55 pm
TGGP,
Thanks for that new Friedman link. Hadn’t seen that one!
April 22nd, 2008 at 2:17 pm
Thoreau,
Nice overview of the current situation. I eat that stuff up.
Indeed, Obama’s supporters are among the most enthusiastic young graphic designers and techies, what Richard Florida calls the “creative class”. Hillary Clinton has the vote of the transit workers and nurses, Obama of the hipster magazine staff. Though here in the bay area Obama’s support seems to extend to much of the working class too, especially in Oakland.
April 22nd, 2008 at 3:06 pm
Dain,
Back in the 70s Bill and Hillary decided they wanted to reclaim the Democratic Party for the old Humphrey liberalism (under their leadership of course) and push the McGovern Democrats to the margins. Looks like they’ve been pretty successful.