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Time To Play Small Ball?

By Dan McLaughlin Posted in Policy | Redstate Roundtable — Comments (28) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

Dan McLaughlin: One of the criticisms being made against the various permutations of a new GOP agenda being circulated these days is that they are too small-bore, too modest and detail-oriented to compete with the broad "Hope and Change" themes of Barack Obama's campaign. (See Patrick Ruffini's critique).

At the same time, there's a school of thought that says that George W. Bush has run into troubles in his presidency precisely when he was too ambitious, whether in his promotion of democracy in Iraq or his unsuccessful attempts to get Congress and the public behind sweeping reforms of Social Security and immigration policy, macro-initiatives that died a death by a thousand cuts from opponents on all sides. Critics have charged that the GOP under Gingrich and under Bush has abandoned Burkean modesty and incrementalism and bought into the rhetoric of revolution, which it then predictably fails to deliver for many of the same reasons why the Democrats have failed over the years to sell things like radical health care reform and gays in the military.

With Republicans likely to be playing defense on domestic policy over the next few years, I've been wondering if maybe it's time, for tactical reasons, to give more weight to what I think of as temperamental conservatism over ideological conservatism - to argue at every turn for smaller, more modest reforms as opposed to sweeping plans to junk the tax code, abolish Cabinet-level departments, etc. On health care, for example, there remains a lot of public desire for change, but huge apprehension about radical change - and we may well be best situated to oppose a massive plan by Obama if we are offering more modest alternatives.

So, I open the floor: should the GOP agenda seek to reclaim the initiative of broad, bold, visionary, "choice not an echo" change of the Goldwater/Reagan/Gingrich variety? Or should we be positioning our party more as the party of sober adult leadership that knows the limitations of our system?

Thomas Crown: How'd that work out for the Party between 1932 and 1980?

Thomas Crown: Let me add something to that:

Much of the answer to your question depends on your goal and your perception. If your desire is to make a run at winning, and if you believe that there's a potential majority constituency that will vote for conservative governance, then you play long ball. You risk a blowout in either direction -- Goldwater '64, Reagan '80 -- so that you have the chance to govern. If you believe that there's no potential majority constituency for conservative governance (but you believe there's a strong minority in favor of it, or at least of its leavening effects), then there is no chance to win unless you change your message to what the majority wants. You're then either stuck with trying to win for winning's sake (divorcing the GOP from conservatism), or running to hold a strong minority position, but never having the reins of power.

I'm simplifying interesting things like GOTV, donor response, etc., but I'm doing this during part of my nominal lunch break, so there.

The problem with that second state -- you assume that there's no majority market for conservative governance among real, actual voters who actually vote, and don't just say they will -- is that you're not really going to win either way. I think the Democrats are full of horse-poo on most issues, but they internalized Goldwater's dictum pretty well, with an unspoken a priori assumption: [If voters want a Democrat for office and] if you give them a watered-down Republican, they will go with the real Republican every time, because they believe that the Republican is at least being straight with them. Or something. Now, of course, if they want a Republican, you're only going to beat the Republican if you're prepared to be the Republican he's not.

I would posit that this is why the GOP got its rear end handed to it in 2006: It's not about stem cells (an issue that divided the caucus) or spending (something the Democrats do much of, too) or Iraq, or immigration, or any particular issue: It's because the Democrats went into Republican-leaning districts and found Democrats who sounded, and presumably would act, like Republicans, while Republicans were perceived as not acting like Republicans. But that was a win at the margins. They haven't won by being lefties across the board, they've won by supplementing lefties with a lot of nominal righties. There's a reason why Kitten is running as a transcendant figure, rather than the anodyne liberal he is: Nationally, the majority market for liberalism still isn't there. Which in turn means that, for all of the tearful navel-gazing in which the Right has been involved these last two years, the Democrats haven't won and indeed probably won't, at least in the only national referendum we have.

And if they don't win that, as they well realize, they don't win. We don't either, but unless they can get past a veto, they're stuck.

By contrast, the alternative outcome is the Republican situation from 1932 to 1980. Two, count them, two Congresses. Sixteen years of Republican governance at the Presidential level, eight of which were marred by one of the most bizarre, and damaging constitutional events in our history. A casual presumption that the Democrats were the ruling party. The ingrained belief that government was there to solve problems at every level. The New Deal. The Great Society. Irreparable damage to the Federal system, and a judiciary it took two and a half decades to (mostly) clean up. And Republicans ran as mild Democrats to get there. I'm not remotely clear that the loyal opposition either opposed anything, or even slowed anything down.

If the GOP exists merely to advance the GOP, regardless of ideology, the best tack to take is to find what the Democrats are selling, and sell it better. If it exists for some other reason, we do it no service by being Democrats-lite.

Ben Domenech: I think it depends greatly on the definition. If "temperamental conservatism" means Gov. Jindal, then I think it absolutely has a future. But Jindal still packaged his adult leadership, responsible reform message in a way that reached across typical political lines without sacrificing its true conservatism. As the NYTimes points out, this is a reformer who has gone from ethics and governmental reform to anti-stem cell research, pro-voucher, pro-tax cut policies - while hardly a group of issues that avoid headlines, this isn't revolutionary new ground for conservatism.

The packaging and the product has to correspond, and it has to have an appeal that is far beyond Washington's normal detail-focus. I think that the long lists of policy proposals designed to satisfy every interest group always lose to a form of political leadership that is simple, appealing, easy to understand, and has a message that cuts across lines of race and class. It comes down to: here are a few ideas. Here is why they will work, and why our opponents' ideas will not. I tend to think it's not the necessary "boldness" of these ideas that matter, as much as finding the ones that cut across the widest range of the population. Which is why I laugh a little bit, despite Ruffini's cogent analysis, that the first issue on his list is earmark reform. Ah, yes, that's what's holding us back.

I think the answer to your question may be as simple as this: these days, it's bold to be an adult.

Thomas Crown: I don't think we're disagreeing; perhaps I misunderstood Dan's question (and if so, I apologize). I understood the question to be whether we should continue, however presented, with swinging for the fences, or whether, to botch the metaphor beyond all reason, we should try to hold the Democrats to a base at a time.

Dan McLaughlin: What I am not suggesting we consider is let's-propose-a-small-new-entitlement-instead-of-a-big-one thinking. That way definitely leads to Bob Michelsville. What I am suggesting is more in the nature of choosing increments of progress rather than constantly going for the moon... let's take some examples.

HEALTH CARE: Big proposals: Health savings accounts for all. Eliminate preferential tax treatment for employer-provided care. Radical overhaul of Medicare.

Small proposals: allow insurance to be purchased across state lines.

TAXES: Scrap the tax code, kill the IRS. Abolish corporate taxes.

Small proposals: Create an alternative optional simplified tax system.

Down the line, there are more modest ways to get a foothold for conservative ideas. They may be the way to go right now.

Pejman Yousefzadeh: Part of what makes it difficult to answer this question is the fact that a return to moderate, temperate conservatism of the Burkean variety does indeed involve bold and radical change.

It is difficult--if not impossible--to overstate the effect of the advent of the welfare state and the New Deal coalition. Not only did it bring about a massive increase in the size and scope of government, but it also created expectations for a continued increase in government. I have said it before and will say it again: Much of the appeal of Big Government is the fact that a call for governmental "solutions" constitute a Pavlovian response to a whole host of public policy problems. Is crime rampant? Take guns off the streets! Is there a health care crisis? Make the government give us health care! Is there an education crisis? Spend more money! You actually have to think to get to the small-government/free market solution to these problems but you can just press a button and emit a big government answer with no cogitation whatsoever. The appeal of that is enormous.

The same thing, by the way, applies when it comes to originalist jurisprudence and fights against judicial activism. Originalists denounce judicial activism but are themselves called activists for their desire to see a whole host of "living Constitution" decisions reversed. The originalist response gets lost in the noise; if you are going to return the country to a state where originalism is respected, you are going to have to reverse some decisions. Scalia, of course, tries to avoid this fight--though he gets dragged into it--by leaving a lot of precedent alone. But Thomas gets slammed for his willingness to hold nothing sacred.

Bear in mind as well that the politics of "doing something" go over a lot better with the public than the politics of being the next Calvin Coolidge. That, plus the need to take some actual action to return the country to a Burkean state means that in order to be a Burkean, one must be broad, bold and visionary.

Dan McLaughlin: That last sentence, Pejman, has been at the core of conservative disappointment for the last 27 years. I'm not saying we should surrender the idea of dismantling a lot of the Big Government machinery root and branch, but it is extremely hard work politically and ends up leading us into a lot of losing battles.

The Social Security fight continues to weigh heavily on my mind. I still think it was the right thing to do, and was just abysmally mishandled by the White House in general and the communications shop in particular. But I also recognize that a lot of the electorate just wasn't prepared for anything that sounded like radical change to Social Security - and if we want real change, we need to be moving in a long series of increments that will build the functional constituency for each successive step.

Pejman Yousefzadeh: Interestingly enough, I think that a lot of the agenda that you laid out in your previous e-mail coincides very nicely with my belief that in order to be a Burkean and to return the country to a Burkean state, one must be broad, bold and visionary. So I think we agree more than we disagree.

As for the Social Security fight, that should not have been undertaken without a crack at tax reform coming first. That would have been an easier--or at least, more electorally appealing--fight and it would have had more of a chance of building up the appearance of greater political capital at the end of it.

Kevin Holtsberry: I fervently believe that a philosophical commitment to small government is a minority position in this country. Conservatives succeed when they convince voters that Big Government hurts them through higher taxes, wasted money, corruption, substandard service, less choice, etc. It is about effectiveness not ideology. Liberal Democrats have succeeded in convincing far too many Americans that they can get government to solve huge problems while Republicans have raised significant doubts about whether they can be trusted in the areas of competence and integrity.

I think one effective way to stop or slow some of these grandiose liberal plans is to remind people just how incompetent government can be. We need to keep pointing out that these programs always cost more, do less, and have nasty unintended consequences. This makes us the party of realism and of prudence. Universal health care may be well intentioned but it is the height of naivete to believe we can simply mandate it without serious problems.

In this vein, it is easy to imagine smaller proposals as a part of this recognition of the limits of government.

Thomas Crown: We have to convince people that incrementalism works, first. I'm not remotely convinced they know it or believe it. You can blame the social conservatives for a lot, but a lack of voter education is not one of them. By contrast, small government and fiscal conservatives have simply presumed, despite all evidence to the contrary, that everyone basically agrees with them, and that there's no need to teach.

What that leaves us is a polity that believes in big, robust solutions to problems of any kind, and that if we effect a half-measure today, we'll just have to go all the way later, so why not just speed things up? The enormous, disproportionate cost of these huge responses, and the human misery and cost that we have to endure before, during, and after we fix them, is lost on most. Hence the demand for universal health care ("But it'll be different from Canada and Britain!")

The massive, soul-deadening effects of the welfare State, for example, were largely not seen as connected to welfare except at a gut level that most folks won't voice for fear of being called racist; and any attempt to solve the former by fixing the latter ran into enormous opposition that took thirty years, millions of lives, and God alone knows how much money to overcome. And that's about the only successful education effort on government largesse I can think of, made possible in large part by middle class reactions to inner city crime, some (good) stinginess, and decades of work by the conservative movement. The lessons from that have not precisely made it into the population at large.

Robert A. Hahn: We can implement a small-government agenda and appeal to the "expectations for government solutions" segment at the same time. We do it by stealing an idea from Bill Clinton, and taking advantage of the fact that the "problems" people want solutions for are always changing.

Bill Clinton had a new government program every week. But they were nits. He'd learned his lesson about big, sweeping reforms with GaysInTheMilitary and LetMyWifeReformHealthCare. He replaced those with symbolism over substance. "Put 100,000 cops on the street." Sounds good, costs little. And it expired in two years, leaving the cities with the problem of keeping the salaries funded after that. Clinton had lots of programs that were funded to the tune of five or ten million over ten years. "Clinton to spend $10 million on smiles for children." "Clinton to spend $5 million on happiness for the handicapped." It was a headline-a-day, on the cheap.

We could do that, while quietly making other things go away. Our problem has been a one-way "cut government" approach. We want to kill Barney and Big Bird. We never have a $5-million-over-5-years program to talk about at the same time. This allows the media to crucify us as a bunch of Meanies. Instead we could be buying 100,000 ballpoint pens for The Chill'run.