Is the GOP kaput?

Yes and no.

Looking at it from just this year's election perspective, we can see two seemingly contradictory trends. One is in the presidential race, where McCain has a moderate but distinctive advantage, even against Hillary Clinton, the stronger of the two remaining Democratic contenders. The other is in the Congressional elections, where the Republicans are still in real trouble, as much trouble as they were in back in 2006.

The root of the trouble remains what is was then: no political party has so swiftly abandoned what it purported to represent after achieving such dominance. This development certainly alienated the conservative base, a trend already visible as far back as the 1998 elections. But the party's fecklessness with regard to spending and reorientation towards big guvmint has also alienated right-leaning independent voters and conservative Democrats. Even without being conservative purists, they find less and less reason to vote Republican. It's hard to find a comparable example of a party squandering its natural advantages so completely, so quickly.

It may be past time for what remains of the conservative movement to abandon the baggage of traditional conservatism. It once had a reason and a role. But it's becoming clearer every day that the rhetoric of traditional Anglo-American conservatism - appealing to traditional moral and political authority, patriotism, and religion, while opposing the growth of government - is incoherent, at least under modern conditions.

It leads to weird paradoxes, like the revival of respect for governmental and presidential authority under Reagan, who was opposed to the ambitions and pretensions of modern government; or the abuse of governmental authority by Bush, even while he still uses the rhetoric of conservatism. The ultimate upshot is that such a contradiction has to be solved and has been, by moving in a Nixonian direction - traditional authority, patriotism, and morality tied to massive growth of government. The parallel move of conservative and moderate Democrats to the Republican party means the party has a whole new constituency to serve and a new type of right-leaning populist politician. The most striking sign is the rise of Mike Huckabee, the Christian minister and nanny-statist, who came in second overall in the Republican primaries. Such a politician would have been unthinkable in the GOP even as recently as 15 years ago.

A new sort of coalition is needed, perhaps taking a page from "liberal" parties in other countries, using "liberal" for once in its real meaning: smaller government, market-oriented, and individualist - without the traditionalist, moralistic, and populist baggage. The pieces of such a coalition are at hand. But we don't yet have politicians to lead it. Voters thinking that Obama fits the bill are deluding themselves. He's the most left-leaning presidential candidate in American history, although he lacks much political definition. His politics are a throwback. Even Hillary Clinton, as left as she is, is not such an antique. From the present wreckage of the GOP, such a beginning can be made by liberal Republicans and center-right independents. But it will take a lot more to regroup and reassert the limited government message. (May 29)

POSTSCRIPT: Kimberley Strassel has made a similar argument over at the Wall Street Journal: McCain needs to run against Congress. It's not just that it's controlled right now by the Democrats and has the lowest poll ratings ever recorded. The Congressional Republicans need the wake-up call as well. McCain has contributed in his own way to the present debacle, above all with the ridiculous and unconstitutional McCain-Feingold political speech and finance restrictions.* But he does have significant credibility on spending and not falling into the braindead partisan lockstep that led to the Republican losses in 2006. (May 30)

POST-POSTSCRIPT: Jon Henke of the fascinating Web site, The Next Right, concludes about the Republicans in a way very similar to my distinction among liberal, conservative, and big-government-populist (miracles not math!) Republicans. He correctly points to the rise and fall of the third group, the marginalization of the second, and the surprise resurgence of the first. Henke's been guest-blogging over at Megan McArdle's joint. Maybe someone out there is paying attention to me, and I'm not just bloviating into the silence of cyberspace :) (June 1)
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* Ironically, McCain himself has opted out of public campaign financing, because of its onerous restrictions.

The New Deal reconsidered: Reforming the welfare state

A few postings ago, I alluded to the approaching crisis of the welfare state. If it is to survive in some form and not bankrupt the federal government and create the largest economic and political crisis since the Great Depression, we need to start now to negotiate the critical choices. The Republicans had their chance to get the ball rolling in the 1990s, but (welfare reform apart) threw away their opportunity, then headed off in a very different direction after 1998. The result was a strange parody of liberalism, the Republicans' attempt to create their own version of vote-buying on a national scale with two new middle-class entitlements, in education and health care. A latter-day version of Nixonism, it worked for a few years, but has now lost credibility and heightened the federal government's burden.

It's not as if the problem is new. A spate of books published in the 90s (books by Jonathan Rauch, David Frum, Robert Samuelson, and Alice Rivlin) and, more recently, histories (like those of Goldberg and Shlaes) and policy briefs (like Bruce Bartlett, George Shultz, Charles Murray, and Cass Sunstein's) have mapped out the problem from different points of view. Previous crisis points, in the late 30s and late 70s, have periodically reminded Americans of the question: what to do about this behemoth born in the 1930s and periodically threatening to devour us with its ravenous demands for money and authority?

But the political context is different now. The imperial presidency is a greatly shrunken institution. Keynesian theories of inadequate demand, the business cycle, and "fine-tuning" have been discredited and replaced by newer versions of classical, neoclassical, and monetarist theories. We live today with a government that is fat but weak, unable to say no, tied down by an army of pressure groups jockeying to grab a piece of government power and impose narrow agendas at the expense of everyone else, proliferating and inconsistent laws, and politically-driven litigation. We lack powerful parties or executive leaders who can decisively steer or shape it. The last president to try was Reagan, with only modest success. Equilibrium, as in Clinton's second term, is only the accidental product of partisan stalemate.

Too much of the politics of the West, especially in Europe, but here as well, takes this behemoth for granted as an eternal presence that has always been with us. But it is not so. The welfare state in Europe dates from the 1880s; in the US, at the federal level, from the 1930s, although its seeds were planted earlier. From the start, observers could see the contradiction between claiming to represent the public good, while in actuality helping self-serving interest groups at the larger public expense. After the totalitarian era passed, the war ended, and the New Deal coalition broke down, the danger of greedy interest groups became all the stronger. Added to this were new, long-term dangers, especially the demographic danger, as the postwar Baby Boom gave way to bust, of not being able to afford the extravagant promises. Something less all-encompassing, yet still noxious, the fantasy of "fine-tuning" the economy through a mix of taxation, monetary policy, and subsidy led to stagflation - and later, in the 1990s and '00s, to a surge of asset bubbles and exploding public sector costs, especially in health care and education.

Reforming the welfare state to the degree that will be necessary in the next 10 to 15 years will require leaders nearly as powerful as those who originally created it. The once-powerful parties and presidency have lost their authority, but the large, intrusive, and expensive government they created is still with us. Every governmental transfer program creates a class of beneficiaries and intermediaries who immediately become vested interest groups. Without strong political parties or presidents to keep them in check, these groups become the real controllers (or at least veto powers) of politics. And these veto powers in turn have made it almost impossible for liberals to later change the programs or conservatives to later dismantle them. Our politics needs serious reform as well, to free our electoral system from its current nightmare of suppressed free speech and media tyranny.

It's all about you and me. The welfare state is sometimes confused with "helping the poor," but at the federal level, this is not its main role. For that, I'll direct you over here instead. Briefly, the negative income tax for the working and able-bodied poor would be better than the current system. While the 1996 welfare reform was a remarkable success, more could be done in that direction. But the federal spending on the poor is a fraction of federal spending on the middle and working classes. That's what "welfare state" means here.

The middle class welfare state consists of four functions. The first two are mainly "entitlements," meaning that citizens can receive their benefits by meeting certain eligibility requirements and nothing else. The original programs were passed earlier, but their present form (with automatic spending and without discretionary choices by Congress) dates to the Nixon years.

Social insurance - that is, Social Security and Medicare. The former will need reform by the end of the next decade to avoid bankruptcy; the latter is in even more dire shape and will need it sooner. The minimal reforms needed are not drastic: they include a mix of changing eligibility requirements and means testing (concentrating full benefits on beneficiaries with lower incomes). To go beyond that is less a necessity and more ideological preference, but larger redesigns are worth discussing. The main favor we can do for future generations is, to the extent possible, make these programs self-financing through forced saving, rather than transferring from present taxpayers to present retirees, which is what they do now. These programs are an incredibly bad deal for younger workers and immigrants.

The subsidy-loan guarantee state, which has caused growing mischief of all sorts and has few justifications in a society as wealthy as ours. It covers everything from pushing home ownership on people who can't afford it to exploding higher education costs to destructive ethanol subsidies. The federal government's role as lender of last resort and backer of otherwise private-sector loans opens it up to dangerous vulnerabilities, as well as encouraging what economists call "moral hazard" - beneficiaries taking excessive risks because they know someone will bail them out.

The regulatory-litigation state, which was originally more modest and with strong justification, for example, in the financial sector.* This federal function has become more and more twisted over the years by judicial passivity in the face of an aggressive trial bar. Tort reform is one answer here, including requiring judges to take a more active role and not defer to the lawyers. The role of Congress and regulatory agencies has been twisted in a different way, by the formation of the "iron triangle" of interest groups, the media, and politicians. Only stronger political parties and presidents not in thrall to the news media can enable positive change here.

The pork barrel state, perhaps the most characteristic feature of the welfare state in its mature phase. This is the system of special favors, earmarks, and patronage pioneered mainly by Democrats, but recently imitated and taken to new levels by Republicans. This development is often misunderstood as a result of private parties (interest groups, corporations, etc.) "buying" politicians. In fact, it's the politicians who typically take the initiative in creating these relationships in the first place. Remember: each such special favor granted to this group or that, makes a vested interest out of that group. Subsequent politicians are only occasionally able to buck these groups, once they're created.**

The tragedy of modern America is that the ideas and tools needed for this reform are not missing. Voters are in many ways well ahead of the politicians, their obnoxious handlers and advisors, and the news media complex they've enslaved themselves to (our age's equivalent of court scribblers and flunkies). Voters have seen through - very through - the politicians' empty promises. We lack education and wisdom, even as we drown in a torrent of often irrelevant or twisted "information." Real history and real intellectuals are what's needed to bring out Americans' latent skepticism about government and politicians and turn it into real understanding and real change. Not only do we need to abandon false ideals like equality of condition, but even half-truths like equality of opportunity. While it's an improvement, no modern society can guarantee the latter (much less the former) and remain modern. What is reasonable to expect is freedom of opportunity, and it is here that modern liberalism has left a positive mark, in lifting inherited and often arbitrary prejudices about what people in stigmatized groups are capable of. Traditionally, what such people suffered from was not exploitation, but barriers to full participation in society, and we should be grateful for what liberalism, in its heyday, was able to accomplish here. If the much-abused phrase "social justice" means anything, it means that.

Some final thoughts. The federal budget today is largely entitlements (more than two-thirds), which continue to grow in absolute terms and in proportion to the whole. There's still a lot of confusion about this, as well as mythology about the size of the military budget, which is smaller as a proportional of national income than it has been since 1940.

The main damage done by Bush is this: while early on, it was recession and tax cuts that led to renewed deficits, and the deficit situation improved once the economy started to expand again in 2002, the problem has more recently morphed into a structural spending-driven condition and will become steadily worse in the coming decade. Apart from Reagan and the Fed's singular achievement of taming inflation, the most important achievement of the 20-year period from 1979 to 1999 was what did not happen: no major new domestic spending commitments; a large step up in military spending, followed by an even larger drop after 1986; and very favorable conditions from 1994 to 2000, with a conservative Congress and a president unable and ultimately unwilling to push for more. The real disaster after 2000 was the almost total disappearance of influential conservatives at the national level, and partisan lock-step between Congress and the White House on spending. Even now, not many people have really absorbed the enormity of what went wrong under Bush - Republicans often don't get it, and everyone else is still talking about Bush as "right-wing" or "conservative." This mind-set has to end if we are to see clearly what went wrong and why, where we're headed, and what needs to be done.

Politically, it means that, while few conservatives are available, we will have to make do with liberal Republicans and conservative and moderate Democrats. They're the few at the national level who might see what's gone wrong and galvanize the public's skepticism about government. Obama and Clinton have little credibility here. McCain does have some personal credibility - but his party, no longer.
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* A benefit of the New Deal was the creation of a truly national banking and financial regulatory system, as Hamilton foresaw would be needed and Jefferson resisted.

** To get a sense of the pretense and folly of "progressive" politics these days, here's an example of what it really means. And let's not forget Massachusetts, which long ago moved from nuts-and-bolts government to bloated "big thinking" (or "big digging").

William F. Buckley, Jr.: An appreciation

Where to start? A giant of the postwar world, one of the founders of modern conservatism, and a leading light who remade American politics, died just over a month ago. Many tributes have appeared, and his positive influence is everywhere you look.

When World War Two ended, American conservatism seemed to be finished. Although opposition to the increasingly statist bent of liberalism came from many and often conflicting points of view (individualism, religion, nativism, etc.), the two large forms of opposition were isolationism (opposition to American entry into the war - although that was not in any way purely a cause of the Right) and hostility to the dramatic expansion and pretensions of the federal government. Both oppositions appeared discredited, although disillusionment with the New Deal and federal intervention in general was widespread by the time of the 1940 election. And a significant part of the Republican party - its East Coast, Anglophile wing, led by Wendell Wilkie - did support intervention, in fact preventing foreign policy from becoming a major partisan issue in the 1940 and 1944 elections and marginalizing isolationism to a great degree. Nonetheless, while much of the New Deal had been repudiated after the 1938 midterm elections, everyone in 1940 knew what the great question was: to intervene or not, how fast and how deep. Of course, the Germans' undeclared submarine war of 1940-41 and the attack on Pearl Harbor at the end of 1941 rendered that debate moot. The US did intervene in World War Two, on the Allied side, and few regretted it afterwards, in spite of the immense cost and the dubiousness of having the Soviet Union as an ally.

Other factors were at work in the fragmented state of the American right in 1945. It had some of the same components familiar today. There were conservatives, people who deferred to tradition because it was tradition. The fact that the American political tradition was largely a liberal one (with one major exception) created something of a paradox.* That tradition was one of limited government, one overturned by the socialist-tinged "new" or "reform" liberalism of the Progressive and New Deal eras. (The change was large enough that it is questionable whether the adjective "liberal" should be used at all.) Classical liberals (later called libertarians) never bought into tradition-for-tradition's-sake and based their views on straightforward, historically informed ideas (abundantly confirmed by recent experience in the world wars and totalitarian dictatorships) about the negative effect on human liberty and prosperity by too-large and too-powerful a government. Some went further and re-developed the familiar 18th-century theories of natural rights and consensual government in terms understandable to a 20th century audience. To that they added a more modern and deeper appreciation of the limits of social knowledge and the impossibility of social planning.

A striking fact astute readers might notice is that I make no mention of the "religious right" in this potted history. That's because, after the liberal-fundamentalist battles of the late 19th and early 20s centuries, the fundamentalists retreated to their own, anti-political, subculture. To the extend that they were political, they largely voted Democratic, because they were largely southern or urban-ethnic Catholic - and in those days, virtually all white southern and Catholic voters voted Democratic. The "religious right" as we now know it, an alliance between conservative Catholics and conservative Protestants, was 30+ years in the future at the end of the war. In 1945, a few feeble attempts at ecumenism apart, the relation between Protestants and Catholics was one of mutual suspicion, laced with ignorance and prejudice - although the war itself had had a strong positive impact on this state of affairs. The full scope of this impact is in large part the complete transformation of religious and ethnic identity in America in the postwar era. This transformation made black civil rights easier to swallow (for whites), gave rise to a new level of interreligious understanding, and made Buckley's type of "big tent" conservatism possible. All of these were out of reach and almost unthinkable before 1945. In his relationship with American Jews, Buckley's approach was even more radical, given the level of anti-Jewish prejudice still prevalent in 1945. By the late 1950s, his nascent movement and its allies counted a significant number of Jewish thinkers, many of them refugees from Europe and carrying first-hand experience of life under the totalitarian dictatorships. Well before the Republican party, under Nixon, fully embraced support of Israel, Buckley adopted such support as a matter of course, because he understood the basic issues at stake. When the Soviet Jewry movement started in the mid-1960s, Buckley and his followers were among its early non-Jewish allies and supporters.

Buckley was a wealthy liberal Catholic, a man from a social background (including a father who was an American ambassador) that, on the surface, seemed conventionally WASP. It was his quirky Catholicism that initially made the difference. It made him have to think - really think - about political issues in a deeper way than most people have to, people who take their political views without much thought from their parents, teachers, and peers. This led him initially to oppose modern American liberalism from a traditionalist point of view, but also made him open to libertarian approaches. From these experiences, he formed a clear conception of how to rebuild the American right around a few simple and broadly appealing stands that any rational person could assent to, without regard to ethnic or religious background: opposition to the growth of government at home and opposition to the dominant form of collectivist tyranny abroad, communism. Buckley and his allies founded National Review, still the flagship of American conservatism, and began a campaign that stretched from the early 1950s to the late 70s to absorb all opposition to modern liberalism in this way. By doing this, Buckley sidestepped the leftover isolationist-interventionist debate and ended the American right's parochialism. By the late 1950s, all sorts of people, many Protestant, but a large minority of Catholics, and a surprising number of Jewish thinkers had been pulled into Buckley's movement, so much so that by the 1960s, the movement had become a broad political tendency in its own right and no longer a "movement." Buckley concentrated on the crucial common ground, dispensed with the provinciality and ethnocentrism of the prewar right, and even proved ecumenical enough to accept individualist and libertarian followers. (They often rejected him anyway, but that was their doing, not Buckley's.) Buckley even flirted with libertarianism himself, in his 1965 run for Mayor of New York and his famous, offshore 1960s pot parties on his yacht.

The era of Buckley's and conservatism's success was the late 70s and 1980s. In the 1960s, American liberals had obtained a blank check, under Kennedy and Johnson, and led themselves and the country, both domestically and internationally, into a gratuitous mess: instead of triumphing, liberalism went haywire and, after 1965, began a free-fall from which it has never recovered. The fact that the president who brought the Kennedy-Johnson tendencies to their logical conclusion - Richard Nixon - was a Republican seemed at first to set back the conservative cause. But Nixon was not a conservative. He was nominated in 1968 in part because he wasn't Goldwater and couldn't be tarred as a "crazy radical." The Watergate crisis (and the war that led to that crisis) were largely, and correctly, perceived as failures of the new, expensive, obtrusive, and frequently dysfunctional expanded government introduced by liberals. Nixon went along with it ("we are all Keynesians now," he famous said in 1972) and did big government a few times better - wage and price controls, entitlements and affirmative action as we now know them, and so on. His fall opened up a singular opportunity for conservatives, one taken by Reagan. The rest is history: a halt in the growth of domestic spending in the 1980s and 1990s, the successful and peaceful end of the Cold War, the end of "stagflation" and a generation-long success of low-inflation economic expansion and moderating the growth of the federal government. It was a stunning achievement, especially for a political movement - conservatism - that never gained majority acceptance. Buckley's approach saw to it that what we now call "identity politics" would not wreck his coalition and that, even when not having a strong influence over the Presidency, conservative ideas and policies shaped by those ideas would have their continued impact. Certainly, the rise of Clinton in 1992 was a direct response - "neoliberalism" - to the prior failure of liberalism and the success of conservatism. Clinton went on, chastened by the 1994 mid-term elections, to become the most conservative Democrat since - well, Grover Cleveland.

Buckley, like his movement, spent more recent years in ill-health. Certainly, the decline of conservatism after 1994 troubled him. Even more troubling was the return of "Nixonism," in the form of Bush Jr. and Karl Rove. This tendency started at the end of the 90s with a grand throwing-up-of-the-hands by conservatives, a giving-up on ever implementing a conservative program. Being the majority party in Congress put them into the position of actually having to decide whether to go ahead with serious reform, and they couldn't do it. (Many thought conservative reform politically impossible.) Another disturbing trend was the return of authoritarian, big-government populism, as signaled by Perot in 1992 and 1996, with its powerful tendency to split the right-leaning vote. (Indeed, Perot made Clinton's election and re-election possible.) To capture these voters for the Republican party meant dropping much, if not all, of conservatism as Buckley and others had defined it. The prize was permanently incorporating white southern and Catholic voters into the Republican coalition. The price: alienating everyone else - and proving multiple times over that big government fails for an inherent reason, not just when it's done by liberals. It also led, on an intellectual level, to nasty disputes between conservatives and libertarians on one side and neoconservatives on the other, those disaffected liberals who dropped out of the Democratic party in the 1970s and 80s. The opposition of many conservatives and libertarians to the Iraq war sharpened the nastiness.

Buckely's synthesis of traditionalism and "classical" liberalism (to use the L-word in its original and best sense) seemed unstable and incoherent to many. But it has proved enduring, like his very Catholic mix of faith and philosophical reason. It is both seriously intellectual, answering to that part of us that is consciously rational, and attractive because it recognizes the limits of individual reason. It combines with a classical liberal understanding of government a solid understanding of the limits of politics. Conservatives view society as more important than government, culture as more important than politics, and custom as more important than law. Buckley made his own contribution to culture as a prolific author and as host of public television's Firing Line for more than 30 years.**

He will be missed.
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* That exception was the semi-medieval views that had taken hold in the antebellum South regarding slavery, which then influenced the dominant American thinking about race from the end of Reconstruction, in the 1870s, until the 1950s.

** When Binah was a youngster, he was confused by Buckley's sometimes notoriously Latin-inflected discussions on Firing Line, reflecting Buckley's high-level Catholic education. Latin came later to Binah and, with it, some understanding of what Buckley was talking about. Buckley himself adopted a less erudite and more straightforward style in later years.