Why I Am Not A Conservative

A major topic of this blog since its inception has been the vacuous, uninformed nature of right-wing political discourse. I bemoan this fact because I believe in a robust dialogue, and as a temperament I believe conservatism has much to offer our politics. But what passes for conservatism these days is, in my opinion, a mostly content-free ideology. It’s nice to have this confirmed on my own blog.

A reader named Karl Keller has been commenting, quite passionately, on a few recent posts. I don’t know who Karl Keller is or anything about him, but since I want to take my readers’ dissents seriously, I thought his comments deserve a detailed response, which I try to make after the jump.

On Saturday, Mr. Keller commented on my post “Can the Party of ‘No’ Keep It Up?” with the following:

The Republicans as a “party of no” is a misleading and,indeed, mendacious caricature and you, and everyone else on your side of the political spectrum, knows it.

Although perhaps because you repeat it often enough in your own heads, maybe you really DO believe it.

How about some facts instead? Paul Ryan, Republican Congressman from Wisconsin, has introduce a detailed plan called A Road Map for American. See: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703808904575025080017959478.html

It may be negation of YOUR ideas, but it is not, in any way, an absence of ideas.

Even the President acknowledged Ryan’s ideas in his recent Q&A at the Republican Retreat. Of course, he HAD to…because Obama got virtually nothing done in his first year with just his Democrat allies, and now needs Republicans to get stuff through.

So really, do us all a favor. Give up this “party of no” myth. It’s wrong. It’s idiotic. It’s misleading. It’s disingenuous. It’s intellectually bankrupt.

This is rich.

First, I think it’s clear from my post that the term “Party of ‘No’” in this case refers to the Republicans’ rejectionist strategy of voting, in lockstep, against every piece of major legislation President Obama has offered. This has nothing to do with “ideas”—which are mentioned exactly zero times in my post—and to argue that I’m making any argument about the merits of GOP plans is, to use a term of Mr. Keller’s correctly (more on that later), a straw man.  Calling the GOP the “Party of ‘No’” is, rather, a fact that is literally true in this case. For clarity’s sake, I even included an internal quotation mark. I don’t think there’s anything “misleading” and certainly not “mendacious,” ”wrong,” “idiotic,” “disingenuous” or ”intellectually bankrupt” about labeling a political party that votes “no” time and time again the “Party of ‘No.’”

As for the substance of the comment, such as it is: yes, Paul Ryan’s op-ed in the GOP-friendly Wall Street Journal is full of ideas. Those ideas are aimed at reducing the deficit—a major concern, to be sure, but not what I was writing about, so it’s a bit of a non sequitur to bring up.  To Ryan’s credit, the Congressional Budget Office agrees that his plan would eliminate the long-term deficit. But means matter, and Ryan’s are extreme. Mr. Keller may find Ryan’s methods to be compelling; I do not. (See Ezra Klein for much more on this.)

Regardless of our political views, Paul Ryan’s proposal is not a “negation” of my (unexpressed) ideas any more than the President’s plans are a “negation” of Ryan’s. They are simply competing plans. At the House Republican retreat, the President acknowledged the mere existence of Ryan’s plan—and this was considered a victory by Republicans. Talk about a low bar of success! The difference between Ryan’s plan and that of the Democrats, of course, is that Ryan’s has no chance. While they no longer have a supermajority in the Senate, the Democrats still have huge majorities in both houses of Congress. Which means, pace Mr. Keller, that they don’t always “need Republicans to get stuff through.” They need one Republican Senator to achieve cloture, but for health care reform to pass through reconciliation, where it seems to be headed, Obama is grappling with the internal politics of his own party. The Republicans are effectively irrelevant, which I’d guess is what bothers my commenter so.

Unlike God, however, grievances don’t rest on the seventh day, and so on Sunday Mr. Keller returned, to an earlier post, to vent further frustrations regarding my alleged “intellectual bankruptcy.” Writing about the fallout from Scott Brown’s election in Massachusetts, I argued that the Senate GOP had offered no good-faith compromises on HCR. Mr. Keller began:

Wow.

First you say

The GOP can claim to have offered alternative legislation, but look at Jim DeMint’s proposals and try to tell me with a straight face that they would solve any problems. You can’t.

Uh, this just in. Jim DeMint isn’t the ONLY Senator or Congressman who has provided alternatives. You, like the President, think erecting straw man arguments like this constitutes a sufficient response.

While I’m pretty sure Mr. Keller doesn’t know what the term “straw man” means, he has a small point here. I mentioned Jim DeMint’s health care proposal because it was the highest-profile plan offered by a Republican in the Senate, where HCR was halted in its tracks. Thus, DeMint’s ridiculous plan seemed the relevant example. But in a literal sense, “Jim DeMint isn’t the ONLY Senator or Congressman who has provided alternatives” is a true statement. Here, for example, is House Republican Conference Chairman Mike Pence’s word-for-word response, in its entirety, to Chris Matthews’ question “What compromise would you say ‘yes’ to on health care? What compromise? Tell me the package; give me the main details.”

“Well, look, you know, I was, uh, yeah, yeah, look, uh” Pence stammered, before finally saying that Republicans support allowing Americans to buy insurance across state lines (which is a GOP proposal in the first place).

Again, thank you, Republican, for proving my point. I don’t think this needs pointing out, but here goes: Pence’s is not a good-faith compromise. In fact, it’s not a compromise at all. It is a reiteration of the GOP’s proposed plan (which is a dumb plan, by the way) with no concessions to the other side. So I do think it “constitutes a sufficient response” to GOP recalcitrance to point out that they have yet to offer any workable compromises on health care. (This is, of course, exactly their strategy to kill it.) Do I need to explain what a compromise is? Here’s the dictionary definition: “a settlement of differences by mutual concessions; an agreement reached by adjustment of conflicting or opposing claims, principles, etc., by reciprocal modification of demands.” The Republican “position” on health care reform is the legislative equivalent of a whining child.

Speaking of compromise, Mr. Keller later tries to take me to task for half-seriously calling for the dissolution of the Senate. He begins by quoting me:

There are many people, myself included, who believe that America might be better off if the Senate were simply abolished. If wishes were horses…

Unbelievable. Have you ever actually studied our constitutional government and why a bi-cameral legislative structure was established in the first place? And why the Founders, particularly the brilliant John Adams, were so adamant about putting in place two legislative bodies?

To PREVENT crazy insane legislation from being passes without deliberative discussion and broad consensus. The Founders WANTED a creaky, inefficient government. Because an efficient and smooth functioning government is potentially a DESPOTIC government.

It never ceases to amaze me how little the left knows about how things are supposed to work.

Now I think I know what Karl Keller is: a sixth-grader. Because I learned in the seventh grade about the Connecticut Compromise that lead to a bicameral Congress. I also learned then, when I was 12 years old, that the Connecticut Compromise had little basis in political theory—it was a compromise between states of large and small populations to get the Constitution passed. That’s why it’s called a Compromise. The Founders who supported a bicameral plan designed the Senate not to prevent despotism, but rather, as Richard N. Rosenfeld writes, “to protect wealth and aristocracy from the demands of a democratic majority.”

James Madison, Father of the Constitution, may not have been, in Mr. Keller’s eyes, as “brilliant” as John Adams (who, it should be noted, wasn’t even a delegate to the Constitutional Convention), but here’s what he wrote of the Senate: “[I]t is superfluous to try, by the standard of theory, a part of the Constitution which is allowed on all hands to be the result, not of theory, but ‘of a spirit of amity, and that mutual deference and concession which the peculiarity of our political situation rendered indispensable.’” That quote is from a little-read political tract called the Federalist Papers (No. 62 in this case), and for clarity here’s a translation to modern English: We don’t want to create a Senate, but we have to, as a political compromise.

Compromise. Something the Right hates, as I’ve tried to point out over and over in this space. Another thing the Right hates is change, because it is uncomfortable and foreign. In mentioning that maybe the Senate is a useless, indeed destructive, institution, I obviously struck a nerve with Mr. Keller’s political sensibilities: the nature of American government as it is now is to the Right inviolable. This is why conservatives believes our health care system is fine as it is, and why even the mention of getting rid of the Senate strikes Mr. Keller as blasphemy. (He makes no effort to engage my actual point, which was about abuse of the filibuster.) As a practical matter, I don’t think eliminating the Senate is possible, but discussing such a proposition is not “unbelievable,” as Mr. Keller would have it. There is nothing fixed about American democracy, which is what makes it great. Indeed, the Senate Mr. Keller so cherishes would seem awfully foreign to his straw men Founders. Until the passage of the 17th Amendment in 1913, which is to say for more than half of America’s history, Senators were elected by state legislatures. In other words: things change.

But according to Mr. Keller, I know little about “how things are supposed to work.” There we have it. One of the fundamental animating impulses of modern American conservatism is its certainty in the way things are and ought to be. Certainty betrays entitlement, which may be why conservatism appeals to old white men. It seems pedantic to note that among the practices “supposed to work” in the 18th century were slavery and the subjugation of women; dealing with the dogmatic often requires a retreat to simple terms. But I digress.

What happened to conservatism to curdle it so? I don’t have a good answer to that question. The bitter pill of 2006 and 2008 seems to have had little effect on the GOP’s bluster. Republicans continue to act as if they never lost. But here’s what I wish: I wish for an intelligent conservatism that can argue policy on its merits, that understands its history and the contradictions therein, that does not retreat to sloganeering to make cheap points—a conservatism that knows and does not fear subtlety. The cynical tautologies of Mr. Keller serve nothing but the basest of our politics.