The "wonk gap" is here to stay, at least for a generation. The Republican Party has committed itself to a lot of ideas that repel smart people. Smart people can of course be religious or believe in American exceptionalism, but the Right has in my lifetime not *just* been committed to American exceptionalism and to Christianity but to the idea that it is *immoral to question or debate those views*, and *no* smart person could believe that.
The cultural Left is doing some damage to its credibility with some norms that insult people's intelligence, but the Right is in a really, really deep hole with smart millennials and Gen Z-ers, and all the issues with "wokeness" aren't nearly enough to help them climb out. No matter how angry I get at public employee unions or universities or the Sierra Club, I won't forget which ideological faction is more hospitable to the kind of person I am, and which spent my entire childhood trying to exclude people like me from civil society.
In their revenge fantasies, they get to prosecute liberals for treason, execute gay people for “suspected pedophelia”, deport all immigrants, and give cops absolute power to do whatever they want.
They don’t have plans, because planning requires thought.
Aaron, I'm unfortunately dumber for having read your little treatise here. Respectfully, can you please give me one (1) example of ANY of the assumptions you have blithely made here in your comment? No. No, you can't. However I can EASILY point to the hyper-partisan response to "January 6" where we have *hundreds* of ACTUAL EXAMPLES of the LEFT "get[ting] to prosecute [conservatives] for treason." (without due process, by the way..)
This country needs a Great Divorce. These are fundamental issues, and yours and mine will never agree on anything. We devoutly serve two opposite, mutually exclusive Gods.
The sentences seem kinda light to me... and even the charges, like PICKETING??? Really? seems alot worse than picketing the way they broke down the doors!!🤯 i don't feel reassured by this list! Thump was able to get alot of his supporters in key places so he is still "insulated" from prosecution. God, I sure hope not! If Thump skirts these treasonist acts I worry what will happen! He should be in jail already! Anyone else did what he did they WOULD be! I do not get what people like about Thump because he is a despicable human, IF he is human...
And, interestingly (or not) you somehow still failed to provide any examples of the OPs assumptions in their comments. This will undoubtedly prove difficult, since there simply are none.
Brilliant. Now, if you can use slightly more intellectual terms, (if this is actually possible) please provide an unbiased source or two to possibly help bolster your point.
"Mental poop." Yes. These practitioners of dialogue are the glittering jewels of colossal ignorance we are dealing with.
How about you provide a source or two showing tHe hUnDrEEds Of exMpLeS of THE LEFT get[ting] to prosecute [conservatives] for treason." (without due process".
That's the whole Hispanic voting bloc (and probably Black vote too!) right there... They'd vote Republican if Republicans could just bring themselves to cooling it about the racism/pointlessly cruel anti-immigration stuff.
My bet is Hispanic voters aren't interested in open borders either, they'd be happy to go along a firm/conservative/conventional anti-immigration approach but it's a bit hard for them to countenance outright cruelty to people from the "old country"...
NB: I am Not Hispanic, not even American so happy to be corrected about the above but that's my gut feel read of the shift seen recently.
"They'd vote Republican if Republicans could just bring themselves to cooling it about the racism/pointlessly cruel anti-immigration stuff."
And if a pig grew wings it could fly. This is much like talking if Trump could just stop being a deranged narcissist for five seconds then he would have won in 2020, these things are key components of who they are and it's not changing anytime soon
Well, thank God for that coz I want them to lose... :)
But the truth is that the conservative message is fundamentally attractive b/c most people are rather conservative (small c).
Our economic ideas may generally be more popular (though not by that much) but our cultural ones aren't. We won on gay marriage/accepting gays. We're losing on trans. We're losing on racism as we insist it's not just a personal failing but systematic issues. People are perfectly willing to concede racism is bad and people shouldn't do racism. OTOH, people don't seem to want to be made responsible, in however small doses, for past crimes or present institutional injustices. As we push harder on this (because it's technically correct), we lose.
Thank God the Republicans are unhinged. We'd never beat them otherwise.
Your "economic ideas" depend on the ignorance of the masses. What part of "equilibrium" is so confusing to you? What is it about "incentive" that you can't get your mind around? Why do you feel the need to consistantly peddle the idea of "free lunch" to anyone stupid enough to believe it? Your "economic ideas" are pure evil, if evil can be defined as exploitation and leverage of others' good natures and lack of understanding.
Well, that would take longer than a response in a thread but you couldn't be more wrong. Some extreme left may deny incentives as currently understood (pointing out to our cooperative nature) but most mainstream liberals don't.
We simply think there's a balance between cooperation/public goods and competition or private markets. And no one believes in a "free lunch" per se, except when it comes to stimulating the economy in period of crisis...
I don't expect you to be convinced by 3 sentences but I find it a bit strange that you would follow Noah Smith if you didn't broadly agree with the quick takes above? Can you describe your own POV for a longer reply?
If you replace “Republican” with “Democrat” there are many on the Right who would have a similar posture to what you just wrote but towards the Left.
There is a growing conviction on the Right that Leftist thought is assuming characteristics of a religion. To debate certain Leftist precepts is tantamount to heresy.
This is especially evident in academia where conservative scholars are usually hounded at campuses or disruptively “protested” (to put it charitably).
There are a great many smart people in the GOP or that trend Republican. They just may not be considered smart by those who hold a very different worldview.
I know plenty of smart conservatives personally. Many are VCs in CA. They have valid economic concerns about inflation, believe the private sector will have the best answers for how to handle climate change, and have legit concerns about the downstream effects of an overly generous welfare state.
I don't agree with all of their positions, but at least I know they are arguing in good faith.
None of them think, for example, that the TX anti-abortion law that allows random people to sue you for helping someone get an abortion. None of them think Desantis suing Disney is useful. None of them are worried about gay teachers "grooming" students.
As for schools, if I went to a right wing university and decided I am going to do a speech on why Critical Race Theory is Good Actually, I am guessing I might get the same reception as a right winger doing a talk on some topic considered bad at Berkeley. We can admit both are bad, but also recognize that the right certainly doesn't have clean hands in this debate.
The Right’s economic plan is what the Kochs, Adelmans, and that up-and-comer Thiel want, which amounts to lobbying mostly for their very proximate business concerns (lower taxes, relaxed SEC and finance rules, etc.) and some pet economic policy fetishes (scuttling public transit or universal health care, various ‘libertarian’ stances like anti-labor and anti-credentialism, etc.). Not that the rank-and-file are paying much attention, where all roads lead back to cultural and racial grievance and authoritarian romanticism. Which, as it happens, does not lend itself to the wonk approach—ahistoricism is an intellectual dead end (hard to marshal facts and win Nobel Prizes in service of the Lost Cause and other historical mythology) and it’s hard to apply wonkish economic or other data-driven arguments against “Wokeism” and related boogeymen of current Right discourse.
I heartily agree. The Republican party is pretty much owned by plutocratic big business. And the desires of big business haven't changed since their ascension in the 80's: low taxes, ending the welfare state, corporate privilege, deregulation. Their elected officials vote for these things without having campaigned on them: the successful campaigns are based on social policies of creating, identifying, and persecuting enemies for the electorate, rather than any explicit economic public policy. Big business couldn't give a fig about those social policies except to gull the rubes.
"The Republican party is pretty much owned by plutocratic big business. "
This is 'pretty much' nonsense. Most of the bankrolling comes from a very small number of individuals and not big business. Most of the large tech companies other than Oracle are led by Democratic or Libertarian leaning individuals. Mainstream corporate America is also a mixed bag. I spent my working career in the pharma industry and things were pretty much split down the middle.
A number of people in the hedge fund and private equity finance group will support whoever preserves the carried interest loophole in the tax code.
Finance, Tech, Healthcare are almost all left leaning. Even some sectors of energy are more centrist than right leaning. Pretty much anyone who employs a lot of white collar workers lands at either centrist or even center-left.
I don't think this was true 20 years ago, but outside of maybe Peter Theil and a few oddballs, I can't think of many working executives who *run* companies that lean R.
Not at all. Individuals like the Kochs own and control their big business and solicit funding for their projects not just from other individual business owners but from corporations themselves. See: When Political Mega-Donors Join Forces
The "libertarian" aspects of these individuals is basically that government shouldn't interfere with the rich and their corporations. They don't care about the liberties of ordinary people. Propagandists might tell you otherwise, but actions speak louder than words.
One data point does not make an argument. Koch Industries is privately held and they can advocate for whatever issues they want and not be beholden to shareholders. Look at what happened to Disney when they didn't take any action against the Florida legislation. The employees raised a big stink and the company weighed in but too late.
The actions of individuals are far different from the actions of a business as the latter is quite limited and has to be careful as public sentiment can turn on a dime (look at the outrage against the CEO of Goya Foods who came out strong for Trump in the last election).
Yes there are a lot of political mega-donors but they are on both the left and right of the political spectrum.
It can make an argument when it is dominant, and Koch is dominant in the Republican party.
Nor is Koch affected by consumer reactions: most of his business is far away from final consumers, and part that are close to them are enormous and diversified. Businesses sush as the Murdochs (Fox, etc.) are hardly limited in their support of Republicans: it is their brand.
Yes there are a lot of political mega-donors on both the left and right of the political spectrum, but the vast majority of such funding goes to the right, as the article I linked shows.
The differentiation of ‘big business’ from deep-pocketed Right donor individuals is noteworthy and valid. Indeed, most conservatives think ‘big business’ is a significant component of a world conspiring against the herrenvolk. A significant portion of conservative bedwetting over wokeism is devoted to how big business has arbitrarily embraced and forces wokeness on employees and customers and shareholders, and how economic ‘elites’ gravitate to this or that non-conservative policy/product/value/idea.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!! WOW! Welcome to the 21 century! Where companies like "Google," "Amazon," "Facebook," "Twitter," "Blackrock," (10 TRILLION in assets, by the way..) are apparently not considered "Big Business...!" Name one ATOM of any of these monolithic, mega-oligarchs that is... "Republican," much less "Conservative!"
When was the last time you had an original thought?
Great, you found the one thing. Also union opposition is only vaguely conservative, as it's more libertarian (read Reagan/Friedman coded) which we all agree is losing status lately.
Do you really think there is only one thing? You can't be that ignorant.
Union opposition by business long predates anything resembling modern libertarianism. It's not libertarian in the least: it is a simple matter of conflicting class interests. Sometimes libertarian-framed arguments are made against unions, but they somehow never notice that those same arguments would apply equally well against special privileges for corporations.
LOL! If the Right’s economic plan is what the Kochs wanted, I'd vote Republican a heck of a lot more often. The Koch brothers were famously pro-free trade and pro-immigration.
It actually quite thoroughly does -- there's no way anyone with a drip of intellectual honesty can claim that the American "right" for the past six years has been pursuing anything resembling a pro-free trade, pro-immigration agenda.
You think Scott is right coded? I see him as left who does not like what the SJ left became. He even has said so himself I think. He is only right coded to those elements of the left that see any objection to their positions, however well founded and good faith, as right coded.
I think that deserves a bit more explanation than a YKINMKBYKIOK type of answer.
Scott is very clearly left leaning on most topics. Yes, he dislikes SJW stuff and woke excesses but he's hardly alone and I'd thought you would too, maybe just a bit less sensitive to it because you're more adept at navigating social mores (pure speculation on my side here).
Even his opposition to "classism"/credentialism is hardly right coded. It's simply noting that, in the absence of shared prosperity and/or strong growth, the left is turning a "divide the stagnant pie" into an exercise in favoritism. I have had the same concern, though it didn't occur to me to put it into an elite/educated class vs. uneducated/working class framework. But that's a pretty potent explanation and it matches well the educational divide we're seeing in voting patterns...
No. I'm not "trolling." You clearly don't understand the meaning of the word, in the parlance of our time. "Trolling," as is commonly understood, means being deliberately provocative for no other reason than to stir up trouble and discontent. That's not even close to what I am doing. I have very serious, intellectually honest grievances with what is being said. If the heat is too high, then just get out, unless you prefer to censor those you take issue with. I daresay @Noah is more than willing to allow for free discussion and debate on his platform. And I have not resorted to name calling ("cuckoo") or potty language (poop) like other participants in this forum. So grow the heck up and start arguing like a man. (Or whatever it is you identify as)
There is no coherent way to fit Scott under a general label of "conservative." He's certainly not socially conservative, as a practitioner of polyamory and supporter of many things your standard conservative would find abhorrent, and he's something of a bleeding heart libertarian on economics I think. I doubt he's ever voted for a Republican.
If all "conservative" means is "fights back against the left flank of the American left" then that's a pretty useless label to throw around.
Scott doesn't even talk about SJ excesses very much anymore, he cares more about prediction markets and AI risk. He's also described himself as a quasi-libertarian.
Edit: he also cares about weird libertarian experiments like charter cities in developing countries. I guess entertaining the question "what if you built a planned city in Honduras, but made it so Sweden's laws applied there, would the result be as wealthy as Sweden" can be seen as "right-coded", because it's neocolonialist in some fashion.
Maybe I'm weird but "let's export Swedish/Nordic model" hardly strike me as right coded given how much the Right is using Denmark or Sweden as evil socialist punchbags?!
I stopped reading him because in my view he's sometimes interesting but mostly a not as smart as he thinks he is (but not the idiot or plutocratic American style) libertarian. So he's not a 2020s Republican for sure. But I definitely agree he's conservative (given we're classifying him as only one of American conservative or American liberal).
As always, a great read! I think the premise of your question, “What is the Right’s economic plan?” derives from a Left-coded mindset. For many on the Right, there is no economic plan because they are philosophically skeptical of national projects or national economic plans. I think the question has some cache in center-Right circles among those who amalgamate what they feel are the best aspects of Leftist thinking into a Rightist framework. However, the mainstream of the GOP has shifted from center-Right to definitive-Right. This “new” Right is generally leery of national projects of any kind, to include, increasingly the military(!). I think the current mainstream Right in America would disavow Federal economic plans and opt for a State-centric economic model. The center of gravity for the conservative movement has shifted Right-ward with an increasing emphasis on the primacy of State and Local vs. Federal government. The mainstream GOP favors a Calhoun-style “States Rights” philosophy. To stereotype, the present Rightist ideal is for a national citizenry that fits a pastoralist-burgher-frontiers/militiaman mold. Under this ideal, Federal action intrudes upon the rightful sovereignty of local governmental authorities and private citizens.
You can observe the passive manifestation of this mindset in Trump’s 2020 response to COVID, wherein he largely delegated public health decisions to the state governors. On the active side, the Rightwing mentality manifests itself in Gov. DeSantis’ actions in Florida where the State government reveals an activist nature.
Additionally, I think the Right’s main axis of intellectual effort right now aims towards the Culture Wars by which it seeks to establish the primacy of its ideal citizenry. Economic issues are important to the Right but only insofar as they affect the idealized pastoralist-burgher class I mentioned. This is where the Right’s intellectual ferment rests.
This might be what they think, who knows? Not that it makes any sense whatsoever.
Why would no federal government and all state government be the best model? Why not then go all the way and have no government anywhere, or why not abolish states and let cities rule, or counties?
They are patriotic Americans but don't believe in the government of the same institution. <insert laughter here>
None of these "ideas" are worth 5 seconds of thought. It's just empty slogans that doesn't hold water. I'm all for a more adult discussion where nonsense is ignored.
The problem is you leverage Leftist presuppositions to arrive at your conclusion. For example, your observation:
“They are patriotic Americans but don’t believe in the government of the same institution. <insert laughter here>” First off, it is a very Leftist way of thinking to conflate love of country with love of that country’s government. Second, you are being disingenuous with this. The mainstream Right does not advocate for the elimination of the Federal government. It holds that the Federal government has a rightful place in American society. Rather, it argues that the Federal government has assumed a function that exceeds its original mandate as envisioned at the nation’s founding. The mainstream Right would thus like to scale back Federal authorities. You critique an argument that the mainstream Right does not make.
Also, scorn is not an argument. What is your point here? That you find their views funny—that they do not make sense to you? To genuinely argue with the Right (and persuade them I might add), you need to start with their own presuppositions and ideals and demonstrate logically that their policy prescriptions make no sense within the perspective of their own beliefs. You need to demonstrate the internal incoherence of their worldview. You cannot do that by starting with a Leftist perspective.
You can laugh at conservatives all you want. My initial point is that the Left asks the wrong questions. Until it understands the ideal that the “new” Right strives for, the Left will not truly understand its political opposition. Hence, the Right pummels Left in the present Culture War. For many on the mainstream and center Left, cultural concerns might be a side issue, but for the mainstream “new” Right, the Culture War IS the issue.
If you assume the Right strives for the establishment of national citizenry that fits the pastoralist-burgher-frontiers/militiaman mold, a lot of what they do starts to make sense. If you are on the Left, you need to start thinking how to engage the Right within this framework of belief.
We do all agree we need a Federal Government (or so you say).
We do all agree the Federal Government should only do what it does best. ( Duh!).
So I do laugh at the Right because they keep on responding with meaningless slogans such as "Freedom", " Less regulation", "exceeds its original mandate as envisioned at the nation’s founding". None of those are meaningful responses to how we should for instance deal with Covid. The right is waging a culture war by responding on how to implement actual issues with these slogans.
And who on earth cares what the nations founders thought hundreds of years ago? What do the actual voters want TODAY is the appropriate question.
I don't care if they think we have too much "gubmint", please come back with a real response on how to implement the issue at hand instead. And as Noah pointed out the right has NO answers to any question. Whatsoever.
If I look at the Trump admin the only policy I could identify was graft.
I will have to content myself with a parting response. You have this characterization of the Right in your mind that prevents you from entertaining the possibility, if only theoretically, that there can be a gradation of Federal authority. You dwell on this false choice that if you object to an expansive government then you are against it entirely.
Behind the sloganeering (which by the way is not unique to the Right) is a desire to curb Federal powers. Some proposals involve dismantling whole departments such as Education, Corps of Engineers, etc…Others may involve curtailing the authorities of certain bureaus or allowing expedited firing of Federal employees.
Your “I don’t care” attitude is your prerogative. My point is simply that there are many on the Right who do care about about America’s founding and the intended structure of the government. This is because they reason it was crafted with a wisdom based on timeless insights found in the “Western Corpus”. They believe it should be carried on, or conserved—hence conservatism.
You are missing the argument at the presuppositional level and hence are not really arguing with the Right but just AT them. In which case they would likely reply to your outbursts in a similar vein. They see the Left as embittered and obsessed with advancing the destruction of the social fabric of the nation. Thus for them, the Culture War will be paramount.
P.S. You are stretching Noah’s argument beyond what he actually writes. He did not say the Right has no answers to any questions, he merely observed that in his assessment he does not see an economic policy from the Right.
IMO this is almost entirely back fit onto the grievance politics that wins them elections. If DeSantis could be president and the GOP could abolish the filibuster the right base would LOVE the federal government to go activist reactionary.
Matt L, with respect I think the framing of your comment indicates, in Noah’s parlance, a ‘Left-coded’ mindset.
What are the presuppositions that undergird Rightist thought in the US? What is the ideal that the Right is striving for?
I see many of the comments here are dismissive of the Right. I think a lot of commentators have been affected by a Left anchoring effect. Thus, ideas which are common on the Right seem, by perspective, to be extreme to many Leftists.
The Right will argue that the GOP is simply restoring institutional checks into the system after the Left has pushed the envelope on a lot of matters.
I hear what you're saying but I disagree. There is definitely an intellectual historical thread of conservative thinkers that bends in the sort of anarcho-libertarian direction you outline. There is also a long thread in American history of nostalgic sanctification of a mythical pastoralist/frontier archetype of the past. But those aren't what drive right-coded voters, and never has been.
The modern clustering of political orientations really only dates to Reagan. But to give a few imperfect examples, frontier settlers had no problem with a strong federal government killing or displacing the indigenous Americans. Nor with that government subsidizing business and infrastructure to help develop the land. Segregationist democrats were perfectly happy to back federal power as long as it didn't interfere in their own communities with the oppressive social structures they wanted to maintain (a version of patriarchal Christianity, apartheid, etc). They largely supported the New Deal after changes were made to mostly exclude Black Americans. Modern Republicans are a minoritarian party and can't win the kind of majorities federally to enact their radical reforms, but they are perfectly happy to newspeak their judges as combating judicial activism while nationally enforcing many of their reactionary beliefs.
There isn't a unifying thread here other than culturally conservative voters shifting their political beliefs to maximize the electoral power of factions that share their conservative cultural beliefs.
Matt L, I understand your disagreement but I would urge you to re-consider the Right of today versus that of the Reagan, George H. W. and George W. Bush years. The mainstream has changed. It still lionizes Reagan but its present intelligentsia would concede that Reaganism is dead. Hence, my point about the “new” Right. Conservative voters are shifting their political beliefs to protect values they hold closer than political policy. What the Left sees as “Reactionary” the Right considers to be “Restorative.” The American Right in particular sees itself as the defender of the “Western Patrimony” or “Western/Classical” heritage. For the mainstream “new” Right politics must be about protecting “Western Civilization” as they see it. National economic policy is just not as important to the new Right because the movement believes more fundamental considerations are at stake. They see the Left-Right divide as a civilizational struggle.
The Left looks at what it feels is the Right’s sanitized/idealized view of a past America that never existed and then concludes that the Right is deluded, or racist, sexist, etc…However, this misses the essence of conservativism whose main philosophy is in its name—conservation. That is, the main axis of conservative effort is not to keep the past in a kind of stasis, but rather to take the refined and estimable parts of a nation’s heritage (in the GOP’s case, the American heritage) and preserve and advance it into future generations. That is how the Right sees itself. You need to engage with it within the framework of its worldview or else you will fail to persuade.
My challenge to most of the commenters on this thread (which seems to be primarily Left-oriented individuals) is to ask yourself, “If I held the same presuppositions or ideals of the Right, would I be doing anything differently?” I submit that the Right is taking its beliefs to their logical ends and these manifest in their electoral strategies and slates of candidates who win primaries and elected office. You can critique the Right using Leftist arguments but you will only ever talk past them until you can demonstrate the internal incoherence of the Right’s worldview. It has to start with understanding the Right’s thinking versus dismissing it.
This is the core of my disagreement with right coded thinking. I fundamentally do not recognize as legitimate faith-based thinking or logic built upon appeals to authority. Many Abrahamic theologians have spent a lifetime drawing logical conclusions built upon unquestioned acceptance as truth strings of tribal myths from the eastern Mediterranean desert 1-3k years ago. No matter how complex or internally consistent that logic may be, it's still all make believe. How do you engage with a fable?
The rebranding of colonialism or white supremacy as Western patrimony is the same thing. Appeal to the authority of dead Europeans or some vague cultural heritage to provide a faith based vehicle for asserting as true prior conservative beliefs. Then try to force others to debate within that fantasy framing. I understand. I just won't engage within that fantasy world because it has nothing to do with the real world and is constructed to delegitimize reality based thinking.
Matt L, at last I think we arrive at the heart of the matter. The presuppositional undergirding of the political philosophies at work.
Much, but not all of the Right bases its thinking on the presupposition that the Judeo-Christian worldview correctly reflects reality. They therefore construct their political beliefs on top of this foundation and thus are so driven in their defense of Western Civilization as classically understood. At heart this is a clash of worldviews.
With this in mind, I would argue that your rejection of faith based views is really adopting one authority (your own) as arbiter of truth in lieu of God. You have simply changed the authority to whom you appeal.
I think the Judeo-Christian argument would be that in rejecting God as the definer of reality, you have dispensed with reality-based thinking because your reality is atomized now to the individual who must define truth.
Anyways, this is a much longer and deeper debate than that of basic economic policy.
I don't think telling those of us that like Scott Alexander and Bari Weiss that we're really Republican is a good idea if you want Democrat solidarity, since most of us are not Republican, and have voted D for a long time, but have been feeling hated by this party for quite a while.
But it does open the door to the idea that maybe the Dems have fully abandoned us, which is disturbing, but now that you've broken the seal maybe it's not the worst thing if centrism is really my goal. Maybe trying to pull the Rs to the left from the center is a less thankless task than pulling the Ds to the right?
☝️ I'd love ranked choice and multi member districts and no senate. But given what we've got, Bari 1000% shouldn't be in the left party. Scott should be in the (reducing to one dimension) centrist wing of the right path. The fact that folks who would aline themselves with those two might be insulted to be called conservative or Republican is a MAJOR problem IMO.
Their only plan, if you can call it that, is some version of “own the libs”. Trump, the Sequel, will raise taxes on people he doesn’t like: Doctors, The Tech Sector, anyone else in the non business owner parts of the Upper Middle Class.
In other words, tax liberals into oblivion and give the money to people who go to his rallys. Might as well call it the “steal the nerds’ lunch money” plan.
Their whole thing now is revenge, since what remains of polite society has rejected them. And they’re determined to get it.
My personal plan is to stay in CA where they can't do as much damage.
In general, what happens is you have a deep blue states that are safe havens for people the hard right doesn't like, and you hope we retain enough of the senate/house to create enough gridlock at the national level such that you mitigate the damage.
But you can't really work with most of them. You have to beat em. Which means the D side has to have a more viable plan than scolding people on twitter.
Hello, welcome to the 21st century. California has a below average murder rate. The highest five are Louisiana, Missouri, Mississippi, Arkansas, and South Carolina.
I think you're ignoring the 800-lb gorilla in the room: conservative media.
Conservative media helped drive out the intellectuals and attract the working class by cranking the culture war coverage to 11 for 30-40 straight years.
The one big bright idea that the few remaining stragglers have had in the last decade was to turn Trumpism into an actual ideology, which Trump himself promptly ignored. Instead, because the entire movement was based on a cult of personality, the victors who emerged from the scrum were mostly (1) whichever shameless aspiring-Lindsey-Graham managed to curry enough favor with Trump, and (2) the NatCons and various religious integralists who managed to parlay the fashionableness of various elements of Trumpism that overlapped with their own ideologies into permanent profile boosts for themselves.
At the end of the day, I'm skeptical that any effort to rebuild the right's policy competency is going to be able to rise above their noise machine without being fundamentally compromised by it. The NatCons and integralists, for instance, are only popular because the noise machine convinced a generation of conservatives that the native-born and religious traditionalists, respectively, were being persecuted. Without that juice, they're just where they were 20 years ago: wierdos in forgotten corners of the think-tank world writing ideological fanfic about policies that will never happen. _With_ the juice, though, they're still beholden to the juice machine: if they don't zig along with the latest moral panic, people go back to ignoring them.
Remove conservative media from the equation, and I don't think it's hard for conservative intellectuals to reassert a Reagan-style policy renaissance in the party. Reformicons like Will Hurd would have a decent shot at basically stealing every center-right policy idea that moderate Democrats have been trying to sell culture-war-obsessed red states on for the past 20 years -- housing reform, antitrust, pharmaceutical pricing, etc. -- and winning a landslide election, especially among minorities, all with some inspiring, homespun narrative about how they're helping the party grow from the ugliness of the Trump years.
But back in the real world, it's an uphill battle for him. And even if we charitably stipulated that Bari Weiss is merely cosplaying virulent culture-war Trumpism in order to make inroads for her true calling as a wonk, she'd be excommunicated the minute she tried to shed the costume. Sure, maybe the wonks-in-hiding may truly have some minute and growing influence within the GOP, but given the current fundamentals, it'll take _decades_ for them to beat out the last vestiges of the Dixiecrats who put the party on its long road to the hell of Trumpism, and actually shine on a renaissance platform.
If you think at the moment the right in America has any policy idea other than owning the libs, you’re naive. A smaller faction of the left, call them the social justice warriors, similarly want to punish anyone who disagrees with them. I don’t think you can understand US politics if you don’t buy into those two points.
It was the Republican Party’s ideologically-driven Reagan Revolution in economic policy, essentially the aptly named, “Trickle Down Economics” and deregulation, that economically eviscerated the middle class and America’s heartland over the last 40+ years. America’s middle class lost its best jobs, its housing security, its agency, and its dignity.
I hear from Never-Trumper Republicans all the tie about wanting to reclaim the party and restore its values. But what I almost never hear is any stock-taking about how this “revolution” led to Trump and the authoritarian surge in our country. And I don’t see much of any rock-taking in this essay either.
If we simply go back to the Republican-led policies of the past, we will end-up right back here with an equally, massively disaffected middle and working class happy to abandon our democratic future to get back at the elites who have so abused and taken advantage of them. So, when you ask where is the Republican economic plan, first ask, “Have Republicans learned the lesson of Trump and are they prepared to re-examine and recast much of their economic assumptions and put country ahead of ideology?”
As FDR prophesied: “If American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot of our citizens, fascism will grow in strength in our land.”
It’s time to put “bettering the lot of our citizens” back into our prime directive.
Scott would absolutely deny being a conservative. I don't think that tag fits him, either.
As the GOP compresses itself further, it will squeeze out the last bits of intellectualism remaining and we'll have a bereft and empty-headed Congress and, quite possibly, presidency. Happy 2022-24, everyone.
Scott has called himself a "small-c conservative" before, and seems in favor of being libertarian-ish. I think Meditations on Moloch describes perfectly the limits of libertarianism.
I don't really see Trumpist economic policy being that different from Reagan's. The trade war on China is in some ways comparable to Reagan's trade war against Japan, for example.
The thing is that we don't really live in a world where the economy is everything anymore. Every company is a mini fiefdom with not just economic but increasingly political or even intelligence power, and every consumer can treat his or her cash as ballots for or against an agenda. The redistribution of dignity/respect/vanity/hubris is much more important than the redistribution of wealth in a world where most mouths are already fed. No amount of Big Macs/Pradas/yachts can bribe Putin from his aggression in Ukraine, and no amount of welfare can convince a Republican voter to support critical race theory, just because you can't kill or starve me if I don't convert to your belief system...
What does it mean to have an economic plan when your economic plan has already won? As far as I can tell, the Reganite plan reigns right now and those who believe in it don't have much to do but defend it against those trying to chip away at it. There are various small optimizations that could be attempted, but like further lowering taxes, they have diminishing returns at this point. The only big idea economic targets that remain for the right are the New Deal era entitlement programs and they've correctly decided they don't have the support necessary to dismantle them at this time.
Our political system seems to have a bias against candidates having a platform to do nothing. Maybe the current antics on the right can be explained as an attempt to get around that fact.
IMO the best framework for thinking about this is Picketty's one from his 2nd book: Brahmin left and merchant right. It's an international shift. College education has gone from 5% to 30-40%. Over that time, parties in the left went from being dominated by working class and oppressed minority voters to being dominated by the new middle to upper class college educated voters.
The oligarchic class still mostly dominates the economic policies of the parties of the right. But now the Brahmin left dominates the economic policies of the parties of the left. They might not be the aristocrats, but they're gentry and don't want government taking their money and giving it to the rabble either. So we get the shift on the right to a focus on nationalism, jingoism, anti-intellectualism, and grievance politics against the condescension of the cosmopolitan, elitist Brahmin left.
There almost definitionally can't be a coherent economic ideology on that kind of right.
The "wonk gap" is here to stay, at least for a generation. The Republican Party has committed itself to a lot of ideas that repel smart people. Smart people can of course be religious or believe in American exceptionalism, but the Right has in my lifetime not *just* been committed to American exceptionalism and to Christianity but to the idea that it is *immoral to question or debate those views*, and *no* smart person could believe that.
The cultural Left is doing some damage to its credibility with some norms that insult people's intelligence, but the Right is in a really, really deep hole with smart millennials and Gen Z-ers, and all the issues with "wokeness" aren't nearly enough to help them climb out. No matter how angry I get at public employee unions or universities or the Sierra Club, I won't forget which ideological faction is more hospitable to the kind of person I am, and which spent my entire childhood trying to exclude people like me from civil society.
In their revenge fantasies, they get to prosecute liberals for treason, execute gay people for “suspected pedophelia”, deport all immigrants, and give cops absolute power to do whatever they want.
They don’t have plans, because planning requires thought.
Aaron, I'm unfortunately dumber for having read your little treatise here. Respectfully, can you please give me one (1) example of ANY of the assumptions you have blithely made here in your comment? No. No, you can't. However I can EASILY point to the hyper-partisan response to "January 6" where we have *hundreds* of ACTUAL EXAMPLES of the LEFT "get[ting] to prosecute [conservatives] for treason." (without due process, by the way..)
This country needs a Great Divorce. These are fundamental issues, and yours and mine will never agree on anything. We devoutly serve two opposite, mutually exclusive Gods.
The January 6th people have been prosecuted with due process. Not for treason (oddly enough) but for reasons you can clearly read here:
https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/capitol-breach-cases
Now if you have some real comments and not just mental poop then feel free to respond.
The sentences seem kinda light to me... and even the charges, like PICKETING??? Really? seems alot worse than picketing the way they broke down the doors!!🤯 i don't feel reassured by this list! Thump was able to get alot of his supporters in key places so he is still "insulated" from prosecution. God, I sure hope not! If Thump skirts these treasonist acts I worry what will happen! He should be in jail already! Anyone else did what he did they WOULD be! I do not get what people like about Thump because he is a despicable human, IF he is human...
And, interestingly (or not) you somehow still failed to provide any examples of the OPs assumptions in their comments. This will undoubtedly prove difficult, since there simply are none.
Brilliant. Now, if you can use slightly more intellectual terms, (if this is actually possible) please provide an unbiased source or two to possibly help bolster your point.
"Mental poop." Yes. These practitioners of dialogue are the glittering jewels of colossal ignorance we are dealing with.
An unbiased source or two, for what? Your comment is somewhat unclear ...
Do you think every person in the US should be tried by 3 courts and be proven guilty by 2 out of 3?
How about you provide a source or two showing tHe hUnDrEEds Of exMpLeS of THE LEFT get[ting] to prosecute [conservatives] for treason." (without due process".
Making popcorn now.
That's the whole Hispanic voting bloc (and probably Black vote too!) right there... They'd vote Republican if Republicans could just bring themselves to cooling it about the racism/pointlessly cruel anti-immigration stuff.
My bet is Hispanic voters aren't interested in open borders either, they'd be happy to go along a firm/conservative/conventional anti-immigration approach but it's a bit hard for them to countenance outright cruelty to people from the "old country"...
NB: I am Not Hispanic, not even American so happy to be corrected about the above but that's my gut feel read of the shift seen recently.
"They'd vote Republican if Republicans could just bring themselves to cooling it about the racism/pointlessly cruel anti-immigration stuff."
And if a pig grew wings it could fly. This is much like talking if Trump could just stop being a deranged narcissist for five seconds then he would have won in 2020, these things are key components of who they are and it's not changing anytime soon
Well, thank God for that coz I want them to lose... :)
But the truth is that the conservative message is fundamentally attractive b/c most people are rather conservative (small c).
Our economic ideas may generally be more popular (though not by that much) but our cultural ones aren't. We won on gay marriage/accepting gays. We're losing on trans. We're losing on racism as we insist it's not just a personal failing but systematic issues. People are perfectly willing to concede racism is bad and people shouldn't do racism. OTOH, people don't seem to want to be made responsible, in however small doses, for past crimes or present institutional injustices. As we push harder on this (because it's technically correct), we lose.
Thank God the Republicans are unhinged. We'd never beat them otherwise.
Your "economic ideas" depend on the ignorance of the masses. What part of "equilibrium" is so confusing to you? What is it about "incentive" that you can't get your mind around? Why do you feel the need to consistantly peddle the idea of "free lunch" to anyone stupid enough to believe it? Your "economic ideas" are pure evil, if evil can be defined as exploitation and leverage of others' good natures and lack of understanding.
Well, that would take longer than a response in a thread but you couldn't be more wrong. Some extreme left may deny incentives as currently understood (pointing out to our cooperative nature) but most mainstream liberals don't.
We simply think there's a balance between cooperation/public goods and competition or private markets. And no one believes in a "free lunch" per se, except when it comes to stimulating the economy in period of crisis...
I don't expect you to be convinced by 3 sentences but I find it a bit strange that you would follow Noah Smith if you didn't broadly agree with the quick takes above? Can you describe your own POV for a longer reply?
Eli,
If you replace “Republican” with “Democrat” there are many on the Right who would have a similar posture to what you just wrote but towards the Left.
There is a growing conviction on the Right that Leftist thought is assuming characteristics of a religion. To debate certain Leftist precepts is tantamount to heresy.
This is especially evident in academia where conservative scholars are usually hounded at campuses or disruptively “protested” (to put it charitably).
There are a great many smart people in the GOP or that trend Republican. They just may not be considered smart by those who hold a very different worldview.
I know plenty of smart conservatives personally. Many are VCs in CA. They have valid economic concerns about inflation, believe the private sector will have the best answers for how to handle climate change, and have legit concerns about the downstream effects of an overly generous welfare state.
I don't agree with all of their positions, but at least I know they are arguing in good faith.
None of them think, for example, that the TX anti-abortion law that allows random people to sue you for helping someone get an abortion. None of them think Desantis suing Disney is useful. None of them are worried about gay teachers "grooming" students.
As for schools, if I went to a right wing university and decided I am going to do a speech on why Critical Race Theory is Good Actually, I am guessing I might get the same reception as a right winger doing a talk on some topic considered bad at Berkeley. We can admit both are bad, but also recognize that the right certainly doesn't have clean hands in this debate.
Well, yeah. The right always projects what it is on the left. The isn't new, any more than them stealing our jargon is.
The Right’s economic plan is what the Kochs, Adelmans, and that up-and-comer Thiel want, which amounts to lobbying mostly for their very proximate business concerns (lower taxes, relaxed SEC and finance rules, etc.) and some pet economic policy fetishes (scuttling public transit or universal health care, various ‘libertarian’ stances like anti-labor and anti-credentialism, etc.). Not that the rank-and-file are paying much attention, where all roads lead back to cultural and racial grievance and authoritarian romanticism. Which, as it happens, does not lend itself to the wonk approach—ahistoricism is an intellectual dead end (hard to marshal facts and win Nobel Prizes in service of the Lost Cause and other historical mythology) and it’s hard to apply wonkish economic or other data-driven arguments against “Wokeism” and related boogeymen of current Right discourse.
I heartily agree. The Republican party is pretty much owned by plutocratic big business. And the desires of big business haven't changed since their ascension in the 80's: low taxes, ending the welfare state, corporate privilege, deregulation. Their elected officials vote for these things without having campaigned on them: the successful campaigns are based on social policies of creating, identifying, and persecuting enemies for the electorate, rather than any explicit economic public policy. Big business couldn't give a fig about those social policies except to gull the rubes.
"The Republican party is pretty much owned by plutocratic big business. "
This is 'pretty much' nonsense. Most of the bankrolling comes from a very small number of individuals and not big business. Most of the large tech companies other than Oracle are led by Democratic or Libertarian leaning individuals. Mainstream corporate America is also a mixed bag. I spent my working career in the pharma industry and things were pretty much split down the middle.
A number of people in the hedge fund and private equity finance group will support whoever preserves the carried interest loophole in the tax code.
Finance, Tech, Healthcare are almost all left leaning. Even some sectors of energy are more centrist than right leaning. Pretty much anyone who employs a lot of white collar workers lands at either centrist or even center-left.
I don't think this was true 20 years ago, but outside of maybe Peter Theil and a few oddballs, I can't think of many working executives who *run* companies that lean R.
Everybody else has heard of Mike Lindell. Have you been stopping up your ears?
Not at all. Individuals like the Kochs own and control their big business and solicit funding for their projects not just from other individual business owners but from corporations themselves. See: When Political Mega-Donors Join Forces
(https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/ahertel/files/donorconsortia-named.pdf). The Kochs were behind the Tea Party, and have successfully completed control of the Republican Party at large through strategies of primarying candidates who won't hew to Koch political themes.
The "libertarian" aspects of these individuals is basically that government shouldn't interfere with the rich and their corporations. They don't care about the liberties of ordinary people. Propagandists might tell you otherwise, but actions speak louder than words.
One data point does not make an argument. Koch Industries is privately held and they can advocate for whatever issues they want and not be beholden to shareholders. Look at what happened to Disney when they didn't take any action against the Florida legislation. The employees raised a big stink and the company weighed in but too late.
The actions of individuals are far different from the actions of a business as the latter is quite limited and has to be careful as public sentiment can turn on a dime (look at the outrage against the CEO of Goya Foods who came out strong for Trump in the last election).
Yes there are a lot of political mega-donors but they are on both the left and right of the political spectrum.
It can make an argument when it is dominant, and Koch is dominant in the Republican party.
Nor is Koch affected by consumer reactions: most of his business is far away from final consumers, and part that are close to them are enormous and diversified. Businesses sush as the Murdochs (Fox, etc.) are hardly limited in their support of Republicans: it is their brand.
Yes there are a lot of political mega-donors on both the left and right of the political spectrum, but the vast majority of such funding goes to the right, as the article I linked shows.
The differentiation of ‘big business’ from deep-pocketed Right donor individuals is noteworthy and valid. Indeed, most conservatives think ‘big business’ is a significant component of a world conspiring against the herrenvolk. A significant portion of conservative bedwetting over wokeism is devoted to how big business has arbitrarily embraced and forces wokeness on employees and customers and shareholders, and how economic ‘elites’ gravitate to this or that non-conservative policy/product/value/idea.
Perhaps modern conservatism is specially the ideology of "businesses with a well defined owner" (versus businesses with CEOs and shareholders)?
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!! WOW! Welcome to the 21 century! Where companies like "Google," "Amazon," "Facebook," "Twitter," "Blackrock," (10 TRILLION in assets, by the way..) are apparently not considered "Big Business...!" Name one ATOM of any of these monolithic, mega-oligarchs that is... "Republican," much less "Conservative!"
When was the last time you had an original thought?
Not considered big business? What in your fervid brain gave you that idea?
Here's an obvious "atom" they share that is conservative: opposition to unions.
Great, you found the one thing. Also union opposition is only vaguely conservative, as it's more libertarian (read Reagan/Friedman coded) which we all agree is losing status lately.
Do you really think there is only one thing? You can't be that ignorant.
Union opposition by business long predates anything resembling modern libertarianism. It's not libertarian in the least: it is a simple matter of conflicting class interests. Sometimes libertarian-framed arguments are made against unions, but they somehow never notice that those same arguments would apply equally well against special privileges for corporations.
LOL! If the Right’s economic plan is what the Kochs wanted, I'd vote Republican a heck of a lot more often. The Koch brothers were famously pro-free trade and pro-immigration.
Of course, identifying your biases does nothing to identify the right's economic plan or dispute Steven Lee's idea.
It actually quite thoroughly does -- there's no way anyone with a drip of intellectual honesty can claim that the American "right" for the past six years has been pursuing anything resembling a pro-free trade, pro-immigration agenda.
You think Scott is right coded? I see him as left who does not like what the SJ left became. He even has said so himself I think. He is only right coded to those elements of the left that see any objection to their positions, however well founded and good faith, as right coded.
Yes, I think most people will tend to see him that way! And that's ok.
I think that deserves a bit more explanation than a YKINMKBYKIOK type of answer.
Scott is very clearly left leaning on most topics. Yes, he dislikes SJW stuff and woke excesses but he's hardly alone and I'd thought you would too, maybe just a bit less sensitive to it because you're more adept at navigating social mores (pure speculation on my side here).
Even his opposition to "classism"/credentialism is hardly right coded. It's simply noting that, in the absence of shared prosperity and/or strong growth, the left is turning a "divide the stagnant pie" into an exercise in favoritism. I have had the same concern, though it didn't occur to me to put it into an elite/educated class vs. uneducated/working class framework. But that's a pretty potent explanation and it matches well the educational divide we're seeing in voting patterns...
I mean, he said he supported Elizabeth Warren in the primary - that's not just people seeing him as left-coded.
@Noah, this "Mike Sulhoff" guy is trolling your comments section very aggressively.
He's doing his best to show just how cuckoo the right is. And succeeding.
No. I'm not "trolling." You clearly don't understand the meaning of the word, in the parlance of our time. "Trolling," as is commonly understood, means being deliberately provocative for no other reason than to stir up trouble and discontent. That's not even close to what I am doing. I have very serious, intellectually honest grievances with what is being said. If the heat is too high, then just get out, unless you prefer to censor those you take issue with. I daresay @Noah is more than willing to allow for free discussion and debate on his platform. And I have not resorted to name calling ("cuckoo") or potty language (poop) like other participants in this forum. So grow the heck up and start arguing like a man. (Or whatever it is you identify as)
Literally every one of your comments were deliberately provocative.
And none of them contained an argument or counter argument.
So why do you think no one takes you seriously?
So, adding condescending and offensive to the list, huh?
A living proof that Dunning-Kruger were correct, even if they were wrong.
Squirrels and nuts...
There is no coherent way to fit Scott under a general label of "conservative." He's certainly not socially conservative, as a practitioner of polyamory and supporter of many things your standard conservative would find abhorrent, and he's something of a bleeding heart libertarian on economics I think. I doubt he's ever voted for a Republican.
If all "conservative" means is "fights back against the left flank of the American left" then that's a pretty useless label to throw around.
Scott doesn't even talk about SJ excesses very much anymore, he cares more about prediction markets and AI risk. He's also described himself as a quasi-libertarian.
Edit: he also cares about weird libertarian experiments like charter cities in developing countries. I guess entertaining the question "what if you built a planned city in Honduras, but made it so Sweden's laws applied there, would the result be as wealthy as Sweden" can be seen as "right-coded", because it's neocolonialist in some fashion.
Maybe I'm weird but "let's export Swedish/Nordic model" hardly strike me as right coded given how much the Right is using Denmark or Sweden as evil socialist punchbags?!
"the Right is using [...] Sweden as evil socialist punchbags"
Well, until COVID maybe. ;-)
I stopped reading him because in my view he's sometimes interesting but mostly a not as smart as he thinks he is (but not the idiot or plutocratic American style) libertarian. So he's not a 2020s Republican for sure. But I definitely agree he's conservative (given we're classifying him as only one of American conservative or American liberal).
Noah,
As always, a great read! I think the premise of your question, “What is the Right’s economic plan?” derives from a Left-coded mindset. For many on the Right, there is no economic plan because they are philosophically skeptical of national projects or national economic plans. I think the question has some cache in center-Right circles among those who amalgamate what they feel are the best aspects of Leftist thinking into a Rightist framework. However, the mainstream of the GOP has shifted from center-Right to definitive-Right. This “new” Right is generally leery of national projects of any kind, to include, increasingly the military(!). I think the current mainstream Right in America would disavow Federal economic plans and opt for a State-centric economic model. The center of gravity for the conservative movement has shifted Right-ward with an increasing emphasis on the primacy of State and Local vs. Federal government. The mainstream GOP favors a Calhoun-style “States Rights” philosophy. To stereotype, the present Rightist ideal is for a national citizenry that fits a pastoralist-burgher-frontiers/militiaman mold. Under this ideal, Federal action intrudes upon the rightful sovereignty of local governmental authorities and private citizens.
You can observe the passive manifestation of this mindset in Trump’s 2020 response to COVID, wherein he largely delegated public health decisions to the state governors. On the active side, the Rightwing mentality manifests itself in Gov. DeSantis’ actions in Florida where the State government reveals an activist nature.
Additionally, I think the Right’s main axis of intellectual effort right now aims towards the Culture Wars by which it seeks to establish the primacy of its ideal citizenry. Economic issues are important to the Right but only insofar as they affect the idealized pastoralist-burgher class I mentioned. This is where the Right’s intellectual ferment rests.
This is the most thoughtful, respectful and intellectually honest coment on this thread. I would listen to more at your feet.
This might be what they think, who knows? Not that it makes any sense whatsoever.
Why would no federal government and all state government be the best model? Why not then go all the way and have no government anywhere, or why not abolish states and let cities rule, or counties?
They are patriotic Americans but don't believe in the government of the same institution. <insert laughter here>
None of these "ideas" are worth 5 seconds of thought. It's just empty slogans that doesn't hold water. I'm all for a more adult discussion where nonsense is ignored.
Sineira,
The problem is you leverage Leftist presuppositions to arrive at your conclusion. For example, your observation:
“They are patriotic Americans but don’t believe in the government of the same institution. <insert laughter here>” First off, it is a very Leftist way of thinking to conflate love of country with love of that country’s government. Second, you are being disingenuous with this. The mainstream Right does not advocate for the elimination of the Federal government. It holds that the Federal government has a rightful place in American society. Rather, it argues that the Federal government has assumed a function that exceeds its original mandate as envisioned at the nation’s founding. The mainstream Right would thus like to scale back Federal authorities. You critique an argument that the mainstream Right does not make.
Also, scorn is not an argument. What is your point here? That you find their views funny—that they do not make sense to you? To genuinely argue with the Right (and persuade them I might add), you need to start with their own presuppositions and ideals and demonstrate logically that their policy prescriptions make no sense within the perspective of their own beliefs. You need to demonstrate the internal incoherence of their worldview. You cannot do that by starting with a Leftist perspective.
You can laugh at conservatives all you want. My initial point is that the Left asks the wrong questions. Until it understands the ideal that the “new” Right strives for, the Left will not truly understand its political opposition. Hence, the Right pummels Left in the present Culture War. For many on the mainstream and center Left, cultural concerns might be a side issue, but for the mainstream “new” Right, the Culture War IS the issue.
If you assume the Right strives for the establishment of national citizenry that fits the pastoralist-burgher-frontiers/militiaman mold, a lot of what they do starts to make sense. If you are on the Left, you need to start thinking how to engage the Right within this framework of belief.
Honestly, all this is nonsense.
We do all agree we need a Federal Government (or so you say).
We do all agree the Federal Government should only do what it does best. ( Duh!).
So I do laugh at the Right because they keep on responding with meaningless slogans such as "Freedom", " Less regulation", "exceeds its original mandate as envisioned at the nation’s founding". None of those are meaningful responses to how we should for instance deal with Covid. The right is waging a culture war by responding on how to implement actual issues with these slogans.
And who on earth cares what the nations founders thought hundreds of years ago? What do the actual voters want TODAY is the appropriate question.
I don't care if they think we have too much "gubmint", please come back with a real response on how to implement the issue at hand instead. And as Noah pointed out the right has NO answers to any question. Whatsoever.
If I look at the Trump admin the only policy I could identify was graft.
Sineira,
I will have to content myself with a parting response. You have this characterization of the Right in your mind that prevents you from entertaining the possibility, if only theoretically, that there can be a gradation of Federal authority. You dwell on this false choice that if you object to an expansive government then you are against it entirely.
Behind the sloganeering (which by the way is not unique to the Right) is a desire to curb Federal powers. Some proposals involve dismantling whole departments such as Education, Corps of Engineers, etc…Others may involve curtailing the authorities of certain bureaus or allowing expedited firing of Federal employees.
Your “I don’t care” attitude is your prerogative. My point is simply that there are many on the Right who do care about about America’s founding and the intended structure of the government. This is because they reason it was crafted with a wisdom based on timeless insights found in the “Western Corpus”. They believe it should be carried on, or conserved—hence conservatism.
You are missing the argument at the presuppositional level and hence are not really arguing with the Right but just AT them. In which case they would likely reply to your outbursts in a similar vein. They see the Left as embittered and obsessed with advancing the destruction of the social fabric of the nation. Thus for them, the Culture War will be paramount.
P.S. You are stretching Noah’s argument beyond what he actually writes. He did not say the Right has no answers to any questions, he merely observed that in his assessment he does not see an economic policy from the Right.
IMO this is almost entirely back fit onto the grievance politics that wins them elections. If DeSantis could be president and the GOP could abolish the filibuster the right base would LOVE the federal government to go activist reactionary.
Matt L, with respect I think the framing of your comment indicates, in Noah’s parlance, a ‘Left-coded’ mindset.
What are the presuppositions that undergird Rightist thought in the US? What is the ideal that the Right is striving for?
I see many of the comments here are dismissive of the Right. I think a lot of commentators have been affected by a Left anchoring effect. Thus, ideas which are common on the Right seem, by perspective, to be extreme to many Leftists.
The Right will argue that the GOP is simply restoring institutional checks into the system after the Left has pushed the envelope on a lot of matters.
I hear what you're saying but I disagree. There is definitely an intellectual historical thread of conservative thinkers that bends in the sort of anarcho-libertarian direction you outline. There is also a long thread in American history of nostalgic sanctification of a mythical pastoralist/frontier archetype of the past. But those aren't what drive right-coded voters, and never has been.
The modern clustering of political orientations really only dates to Reagan. But to give a few imperfect examples, frontier settlers had no problem with a strong federal government killing or displacing the indigenous Americans. Nor with that government subsidizing business and infrastructure to help develop the land. Segregationist democrats were perfectly happy to back federal power as long as it didn't interfere in their own communities with the oppressive social structures they wanted to maintain (a version of patriarchal Christianity, apartheid, etc). They largely supported the New Deal after changes were made to mostly exclude Black Americans. Modern Republicans are a minoritarian party and can't win the kind of majorities federally to enact their radical reforms, but they are perfectly happy to newspeak their judges as combating judicial activism while nationally enforcing many of their reactionary beliefs.
There isn't a unifying thread here other than culturally conservative voters shifting their political beliefs to maximize the electoral power of factions that share their conservative cultural beliefs.
Matt L, I understand your disagreement but I would urge you to re-consider the Right of today versus that of the Reagan, George H. W. and George W. Bush years. The mainstream has changed. It still lionizes Reagan but its present intelligentsia would concede that Reaganism is dead. Hence, my point about the “new” Right. Conservative voters are shifting their political beliefs to protect values they hold closer than political policy. What the Left sees as “Reactionary” the Right considers to be “Restorative.” The American Right in particular sees itself as the defender of the “Western Patrimony” or “Western/Classical” heritage. For the mainstream “new” Right politics must be about protecting “Western Civilization” as they see it. National economic policy is just not as important to the new Right because the movement believes more fundamental considerations are at stake. They see the Left-Right divide as a civilizational struggle.
The Left looks at what it feels is the Right’s sanitized/idealized view of a past America that never existed and then concludes that the Right is deluded, or racist, sexist, etc…However, this misses the essence of conservativism whose main philosophy is in its name—conservation. That is, the main axis of conservative effort is not to keep the past in a kind of stasis, but rather to take the refined and estimable parts of a nation’s heritage (in the GOP’s case, the American heritage) and preserve and advance it into future generations. That is how the Right sees itself. You need to engage with it within the framework of its worldview or else you will fail to persuade.
My challenge to most of the commenters on this thread (which seems to be primarily Left-oriented individuals) is to ask yourself, “If I held the same presuppositions or ideals of the Right, would I be doing anything differently?” I submit that the Right is taking its beliefs to their logical ends and these manifest in their electoral strategies and slates of candidates who win primaries and elected office. You can critique the Right using Leftist arguments but you will only ever talk past them until you can demonstrate the internal incoherence of the Right’s worldview. It has to start with understanding the Right’s thinking versus dismissing it.
This is the core of my disagreement with right coded thinking. I fundamentally do not recognize as legitimate faith-based thinking or logic built upon appeals to authority. Many Abrahamic theologians have spent a lifetime drawing logical conclusions built upon unquestioned acceptance as truth strings of tribal myths from the eastern Mediterranean desert 1-3k years ago. No matter how complex or internally consistent that logic may be, it's still all make believe. How do you engage with a fable?
The rebranding of colonialism or white supremacy as Western patrimony is the same thing. Appeal to the authority of dead Europeans or some vague cultural heritage to provide a faith based vehicle for asserting as true prior conservative beliefs. Then try to force others to debate within that fantasy framing. I understand. I just won't engage within that fantasy world because it has nothing to do with the real world and is constructed to delegitimize reality based thinking.
Matt L, at last I think we arrive at the heart of the matter. The presuppositional undergirding of the political philosophies at work.
Much, but not all of the Right bases its thinking on the presupposition that the Judeo-Christian worldview correctly reflects reality. They therefore construct their political beliefs on top of this foundation and thus are so driven in their defense of Western Civilization as classically understood. At heart this is a clash of worldviews.
With this in mind, I would argue that your rejection of faith based views is really adopting one authority (your own) as arbiter of truth in lieu of God. You have simply changed the authority to whom you appeal.
I think the Judeo-Christian argument would be that in rejecting God as the definer of reality, you have dispensed with reality-based thinking because your reality is atomized now to the individual who must define truth.
Anyways, this is a much longer and deeper debate than that of basic economic policy.
I don't think telling those of us that like Scott Alexander and Bari Weiss that we're really Republican is a good idea if you want Democrat solidarity, since most of us are not Republican, and have voted D for a long time, but have been feeling hated by this party for quite a while.
But it does open the door to the idea that maybe the Dems have fully abandoned us, which is disturbing, but now that you've broken the seal maybe it's not the worst thing if centrism is really my goal. Maybe trying to pull the Rs to the left from the center is a less thankless task than pulling the Ds to the right?
I think the point is that we *don't* want Democrat solidarity as much as we want a functional political spectrum.
☝️ I'd love ranked choice and multi member districts and no senate. But given what we've got, Bari 1000% shouldn't be in the left party. Scott should be in the (reducing to one dimension) centrist wing of the right path. The fact that folks who would aline themselves with those two might be insulted to be called conservative or Republican is a MAJOR problem IMO.
Their only plan, if you can call it that, is some version of “own the libs”. Trump, the Sequel, will raise taxes on people he doesn’t like: Doctors, The Tech Sector, anyone else in the non business owner parts of the Upper Middle Class.
In other words, tax liberals into oblivion and give the money to people who go to his rallys. Might as well call it the “steal the nerds’ lunch money” plan.
Their whole thing now is revenge, since what remains of polite society has rejected them. And they’re determined to get it.
Agree but one minor problem - they happen to control the majority of state houses so like it or lump it, you have to work with them.
My personal plan is to stay in CA where they can't do as much damage.
In general, what happens is you have a deep blue states that are safe havens for people the hard right doesn't like, and you hope we retain enough of the senate/house to create enough gridlock at the national level such that you mitigate the damage.
But you can't really work with most of them. You have to beat em. Which means the D side has to have a more viable plan than scolding people on twitter.
Yes. Please. For the love of (my) God, stay in California. Enjoy the crime and costs for all of us smart enough to stay away.
Hello, welcome to the 21st century. California has a below average murder rate. The highest five are Louisiana, Missouri, Mississippi, Arkansas, and South Carolina.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_intentional_homicide_rate
To be fair, if all you ever watch is Fox News, you'd think SF looks like Mogadishu.
Does racial resentment count as a plan? That seems to be the only thing I've seen come out of the GOP for the last 6 years
I think you're ignoring the 800-lb gorilla in the room: conservative media.
Conservative media helped drive out the intellectuals and attract the working class by cranking the culture war coverage to 11 for 30-40 straight years.
The one big bright idea that the few remaining stragglers have had in the last decade was to turn Trumpism into an actual ideology, which Trump himself promptly ignored. Instead, because the entire movement was based on a cult of personality, the victors who emerged from the scrum were mostly (1) whichever shameless aspiring-Lindsey-Graham managed to curry enough favor with Trump, and (2) the NatCons and various religious integralists who managed to parlay the fashionableness of various elements of Trumpism that overlapped with their own ideologies into permanent profile boosts for themselves.
At the end of the day, I'm skeptical that any effort to rebuild the right's policy competency is going to be able to rise above their noise machine without being fundamentally compromised by it. The NatCons and integralists, for instance, are only popular because the noise machine convinced a generation of conservatives that the native-born and religious traditionalists, respectively, were being persecuted. Without that juice, they're just where they were 20 years ago: wierdos in forgotten corners of the think-tank world writing ideological fanfic about policies that will never happen. _With_ the juice, though, they're still beholden to the juice machine: if they don't zig along with the latest moral panic, people go back to ignoring them.
Remove conservative media from the equation, and I don't think it's hard for conservative intellectuals to reassert a Reagan-style policy renaissance in the party. Reformicons like Will Hurd would have a decent shot at basically stealing every center-right policy idea that moderate Democrats have been trying to sell culture-war-obsessed red states on for the past 20 years -- housing reform, antitrust, pharmaceutical pricing, etc. -- and winning a landslide election, especially among minorities, all with some inspiring, homespun narrative about how they're helping the party grow from the ugliness of the Trump years.
But back in the real world, it's an uphill battle for him. And even if we charitably stipulated that Bari Weiss is merely cosplaying virulent culture-war Trumpism in order to make inroads for her true calling as a wonk, she'd be excommunicated the minute she tried to shed the costume. Sure, maybe the wonks-in-hiding may truly have some minute and growing influence within the GOP, but given the current fundamentals, it'll take _decades_ for them to beat out the last vestiges of the Dixiecrats who put the party on its long road to the hell of Trumpism, and actually shine on a renaissance platform.
If you think at the moment the right in America has any policy idea other than owning the libs, you’re naive. A smaller faction of the left, call them the social justice warriors, similarly want to punish anyone who disagrees with them. I don’t think you can understand US politics if you don’t buy into those two points.
I'd say the right has still the same plan, lower taxes and smaller government, it's just not a popular position, so they don't discuss it that much
It was the Republican Party’s ideologically-driven Reagan Revolution in economic policy, essentially the aptly named, “Trickle Down Economics” and deregulation, that economically eviscerated the middle class and America’s heartland over the last 40+ years. America’s middle class lost its best jobs, its housing security, its agency, and its dignity.
I hear from Never-Trumper Republicans all the tie about wanting to reclaim the party and restore its values. But what I almost never hear is any stock-taking about how this “revolution” led to Trump and the authoritarian surge in our country. And I don’t see much of any rock-taking in this essay either.
If we simply go back to the Republican-led policies of the past, we will end-up right back here with an equally, massively disaffected middle and working class happy to abandon our democratic future to get back at the elites who have so abused and taken advantage of them. So, when you ask where is the Republican economic plan, first ask, “Have Republicans learned the lesson of Trump and are they prepared to re-examine and recast much of their economic assumptions and put country ahead of ideology?”
As FDR prophesied: “If American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot of our citizens, fascism will grow in strength in our land.”
It’s time to put “bettering the lot of our citizens” back into our prime directive.
Scott would absolutely deny being a conservative. I don't think that tag fits him, either.
As the GOP compresses itself further, it will squeeze out the last bits of intellectualism remaining and we'll have a bereft and empty-headed Congress and, quite possibly, presidency. Happy 2022-24, everyone.
Scott has called himself a "small-c conservative" before, and seems in favor of being libertarian-ish. I think Meditations on Moloch describes perfectly the limits of libertarianism.
I don't really see Trumpist economic policy being that different from Reagan's. The trade war on China is in some ways comparable to Reagan's trade war against Japan, for example.
The thing is that we don't really live in a world where the economy is everything anymore. Every company is a mini fiefdom with not just economic but increasingly political or even intelligence power, and every consumer can treat his or her cash as ballots for or against an agenda. The redistribution of dignity/respect/vanity/hubris is much more important than the redistribution of wealth in a world where most mouths are already fed. No amount of Big Macs/Pradas/yachts can bribe Putin from his aggression in Ukraine, and no amount of welfare can convince a Republican voter to support critical race theory, just because you can't kill or starve me if I don't convert to your belief system...
What does it mean to have an economic plan when your economic plan has already won? As far as I can tell, the Reganite plan reigns right now and those who believe in it don't have much to do but defend it against those trying to chip away at it. There are various small optimizations that could be attempted, but like further lowering taxes, they have diminishing returns at this point. The only big idea economic targets that remain for the right are the New Deal era entitlement programs and they've correctly decided they don't have the support necessary to dismantle them at this time.
Our political system seems to have a bias against candidates having a platform to do nothing. Maybe the current antics on the right can be explained as an attempt to get around that fact.
IMO the best framework for thinking about this is Picketty's one from his 2nd book: Brahmin left and merchant right. It's an international shift. College education has gone from 5% to 30-40%. Over that time, parties in the left went from being dominated by working class and oppressed minority voters to being dominated by the new middle to upper class college educated voters.
The oligarchic class still mostly dominates the economic policies of the parties of the right. But now the Brahmin left dominates the economic policies of the parties of the left. They might not be the aristocrats, but they're gentry and don't want government taking their money and giving it to the rabble either. So we get the shift on the right to a focus on nationalism, jingoism, anti-intellectualism, and grievance politics against the condescension of the cosmopolitan, elitist Brahmin left.
There almost definitionally can't be a coherent economic ideology on that kind of right.
Why does it need to change? The right hasn't had a plan beyond "less taxes on the rich" for decades and it's been working fine for them at the polls.