In which I find myself seeing eye to eye with George W. Bush’s former speechwriter

I’ve long believed that people’s political views are more an expression of temperament than reasoned thought.  We’re all a blend of liberal and conservative flavors and how liberal and how conservative we are depends on how much of each got poured into us at birth and what life has added to the mix or drained from it since.  I’ve got enough conservative in me to make me worry about what I’ll be like when I’m old and cranky.

Older and crankier.

David Frum, former speechwriter for George W. Bush speechwriter and now conservative blogger at the Daily Beast, has a good helping of liberal in him for as stanch a Republican as he insists he still is.  The story goes that he let this side of himself show once too often and it got him frog-marched from the American Enterprise Institute. Frum himself denies that’s what happened.  It was a simple salary dispute. He wanted one and AEI decided they did want to pay it.  Whatever the case, it seems since he’s been blogging he’s felt freer to let his freak flag fly and while it’s more often the case that when I read his stuff I’m not out and out appalled, from time to time, and those times aren’t rare, I find myself nodding in agreement and even occasionally shouting out, “Yes! David! My man!”

Now, here’s the thing.  Having a liberal streak doesn’t mean you necessarily endorse liberal policies.  Nor does having a conservative streak mean you necessarily endorse conservative ones.  It’s simply that you can see the other side’s point.  But there’s more to it.  It also means that you can see how a liberal policy can lead to a conservative goal or vice versa.  An example of the former is same-sex marriage.  Andrew Sullivan makes this argument forcefully and often.  An example of the latter is Obamacare.  It works like this.

The vast majority of us share two broad goals, defending the status quo and expanding opportunity, the status quo being a generally well-ordered, safe, and comfortable society, in which we’re reasonably free to shoot our mouths off, go where we want, and spend what money we have as we see fit, and expanding opportunity means giving ourselves and our fellow citizens more of stake in maintaining the status quo by letting more of us share in more of the benefits of living in this well-ordered, safe, and comfortable society, although that often requires changing the status quo.

Simply put, conservatives are more inclined to defend the status quo, even if that means denying some people some opportunity, while liberals tend to want to increase opportunity even if that means disrupting some aspect of the status quo if not the whole of it.  The point is that the interests of conservatives and liberals are often the same.

So, yes, Obamacare preserves the health insurance industry and gives insurance companies a huge infusion of cash, but everybody’s insured, so everybody shares in the order, safety, comfort, and freedom provided by the status quo, which gives everybody a stake in preserving the status quo.

You can see where this is going, right?  Most self-styled conservatives these days can’t.  Many progressives can and they don’t like it.

The object of liberalism is to create more conservatives.

It should be obvious to conservatives that the fewer people with a stake in preserving the status quo the more people you'll have with reason to disrupt it. It is obvious to some conservatives. It just used to be obvious to most conservatives. In order to give more people a stake in defending the status quo, increase people's opportunities to enjoy the benefits of the status quo.

Conservatives used to see the good in spreading the wealth---in redistribution. Although Republicans have always been fond of their millionaires, they used to be almost as fond of the middle and working class. The object of economic progress wasn’t just to create and coddle millionaires. The object was to give more people the same stake in maintaining the status quo that millionaires have.  Conservatives, generally, think---or thought---this was best done on the local level and by encouraging private enterprise. But it's why there are conservatives who support expanding civil rights, strong public schools, and even--- a shocker---progressive taxation. (That's where the 47 percent comes in, Mitt.) The point is that sometimes the best way to be a good conservative is to be liberal, and once upon a time most conservatives understood that.

Here's how liberalism and conservatism are mixed up in me.  As a straight, white, middle class American male, I have always benefited from the status quo.  But being a kind, decent-hearted, well-meaning, and generous guy, I want everybody to have what I have; however, being a selfish, self-protective, and greedy guy too, I figure that the more people who have what I have, the more people I'll have on my side if somebody tries to take it all away.

At the moment, the people who are trying to take it away are rich Right Wing corporatists and their political henchmen like Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan.  Seeing this doesn't make me a liberal. You don't have to be a liberal to see that Romney and Ryan are threats to the status quo.

Defending the status quo by default means defending established privilege and more and more over the course of the last several generations the conservatism of the Republican Party has degenerated into an angry defense of privilege alone.  Any and all privilege.  White privilege. Male privilege. The privileges that come from having been born straight, Christian, and a citizen.  The privileges that come from being rich.  Especially the privileges that come from being rich.  The corporatist Right and the Religious Right and the Tea Party Right are united in a common defense of their privileges and don’t give a damn about expanding opportunity.  In fact, they look at expanded opportunities as a form of theft.  They see life as a zero-sum endeavor.

“Whenever you get something, I lose something.  However your opportunity expands, mine contracts.  Whatever you have, you’ve taken from me.”

The corporatists, the Christianists, and the Tea Party types have as their common goal a taking back of America, by which they mean a taking away of opportunity from those they perceive as having robbed them of their privileges.

This isn’t conservative.  It’s reactionary.  It’s destructive.  And it’s just plain mean.

David Frum sees that and it bothers him. In fact, it infuriates him.  And it’s the basis for my finding myself in agreement with him from time to time.

It’s why, from time to time, he can sound like a liberal…because he is being liberal.

Take for example his set of tweets last week on why he thinks Romney is losing, which includes this:

(4) How do you message: I'm doing away w[ith] Medicaid over the next 10 yrs, Medicare after that, to finance a cut in the top rate of tax to 28%?

And ends with:

(10) But voters do care about the q[uestion]: what will this presidency do for me? And "dick you over" is not a winning answer

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

______________________

Neither my liberalism nor Frum’s conservatism are all that adulterated, so although I often find myself nodding in agreement, it’s usually the case that I see his point not that we’re seeing eye to eye.  But one thing we do see eye to eye on, it turns out, is Charles Dickens’ novel Hard Times.

Couple weeks back, in my post Shake every hand, kiss every baby, I mentioned, more or less in passing, how the “self-made” entrepreneurs who paraded up on the stage at the Republican Convention to congratulate themselves on their self-reliance and go-getterism and whine about how the President doesn’t appreciate their wonderfulness reminded me of Josiah Bounderby, the mill owner and banker in Hard Times who likes to boast about how he worked his way up from rags to riches all on his own while leaving out the part of his life story in which his mother beggared herself scrimping and saving to put him through school and give him his start in business.

Frum was reminded of Bounderby too and he’s devoted a whole post to the comparison and to Hard Times which he calls “a brilliant anticipation of this summer's debate over ‘you didn't build that’” and “reply to the still-recurring fantasy of ‘Going Galt’.”

Comments

[Weldon Berger]

Obamacare doesn't insure everyone and won't even when fully implemented in 2020, and the people who will be covered under its provisions won't be covered equally well. While it may fulfill your requirement of having enough people on your side to preserve it, it ought also to engage your kind, decent-hearted, well-meaning and generous streak in a concerted effort to replace it with something that will cover everybody in equal measure.

[Mark]

Weldon, in a perfect world we would have a single-payer system (or, in my perfect world, a health-care system operated by the government with federal employees as doctors, nurses and others). In this world, there are enough people who believe a decent health care system will harm them financially that it's unlikely we will see a significant upgrade in the ACA anytime soon.

[Weldon Berger]

In a perfect world, Mark, we’ll never be sick, we won’t get any older and we’ll never die, to borrow a heavily mustachioed turn of phrase. In this world, a major impediment to a health care system with universal access and without class-based tiers of service is the infuriating, passive-voice liberal insistence that it can't happen and anyway, what we got is pretty good. But it isn't. People will still die for lack of care, people will still drown in medical debt and poor people will still get care, when they can get it, that is generally inferior to what's available to the well-off among us. What I want to hear from liberals, or whatever, is "This thing is better than nothing but it still absolutely sucks and we will deservedly burn in hell if we don't do everything within our power to fix it."

[Lance Mannion]

For the record, I'm on record as being all out in favor of single payer. And as wishing we could have at least gotten a public option. And not because I'm a decent and generous guy, but because either would have given more people more of a share in the benefits more immediately and so put them on my side. But my point here isn't whether or not we could have gotten something better. I agree with Mark. It wasn't going to happen. Evan Bayh and Joe Lieberman made sure of that. And it isn't whether or not Obamacare as it is is all that good in and of itself. It's sure helping my family already, but I still wish we had single payer. My point is that as it is Obamacare is an example of a conservative means to furthering a liberal end. It protects the status quo while giving more people more opportunity to share in the benefits of the status quo.

That the status quo could use some shaking up and how to bring that about are subjects for another post. (But not necessarily for another comment thread, so, please, carry on.)

[paintedjaguar]

"Obamacare is an example of a conservative means to furthering a liberal end"

I think you have it exactly wrong, Lance. Obamacare is a means to blocking any prospect of real reform, likely for decades to come. It's divide and rule, doling out some benefits to selected groups to gain support for prolonging the insane cruelty and waste of the status quo.

The partisan cheerleading in favor of this makes me ill, nothing more so than the Big Lie about universal coverage, which you have repeated in this post. Surely you know better, so why are you doing that?

I also think you're off about the nature of conservatism. It isn't necessarily working to preserve the status quo -- the politics of the last several decades should have relieved you of that notion. What conservatives conserve is heirarchy and unequal rewards.

[Lance Mannion]

paintedjaguar, I try to be very careful not to refer to the Republican Party in its current state as a conservative party. It is a party of Right Wing reactionaries, an alliance of, as I say in the post, the corporatist Right, the Religious Right, and the Tea Party Right. They aren't defending the status quo. They want to disrupt and replace it with their dream of a Right Wing, Christian, White, Patriarchal, and authoritarian America that never was. Hardly conservative.

As for Obamacare not serving any liberal ends, you'll have to ask the people of the People's Republic of Massachusetts how come its model Romneycare passed their overwhelming Democratic state legislature nearly unanimously and why it enjoys such popularity.

[Mark]

As the saying goes, the perfect is the enemy of the good. If you constantly reject a progressive step because it doesn't go far enough, you will end up taking no steps at all. At least most of the time. I think in some circumstances there can be enough of a public sense that change is needed that even the obstructionists can't prevent it. But that time isn't now. There simply isn't enough support for true universal coverage or a single-payer system. Surely you can't deny this, when so many older voters support the obstructionists who actually intend them harm. People I know and love would vote for them, despite the fact that their policies harm not only themselves, but also the ones that they love.

There is a classic case that involves politics in Georgia, back in the late 60's. Lester Maddox was the Democratic nominee running against Republican Bo Callaway. A lot of Democrats wrote in another candidate, and the result was that Georgia did not get a conservative Republican, but instead got a backwards-riding bicyclist who met potential black customers at his restaurant with a pistol.

[Weldon Berger]

Mark, the crappy is at least as much the enemy of the good as is the perfect.

Lance, that's great that you're benefiting from the ACA. Many millions of people aren't and won't. That's essentially the political point of the plan: to help enough people enough that the urgency of helping the rest is dulled.

[Kevin Wolf]

Lance, your image of the Unholy Trinity of the current GOP (corporate, religious, and Tea Party) is right on the money. An excellent post.

[paintedjaguar]

C'mon Mark. Lefties didn't oppose Obamacare just because it doesn't go far enough (although it doesn't). They did so because it also goes in bad directions. Here's another saying for you: "Beware of Greeks bearing gifts."

Has everyone somehow forgotten how we wound up with such a Frankenstein dog's breakfast to begin with? It was exactly by multiple iterations of the same conservative means, half-a-loaf strategy that Lance is praising here. As Lance implies, even Medicare, for all the good it's done, also enabled a large conservative contingent opposing further progress. I could go on at length about the meat of this post, but Obamacare is such a horrible example that I couldn't help getting sidetracked. Sorry.

[Lance Mannion]

paintedjaguar, I didn't praise anything. I'm describing a process. You don't like the process. I don't either. The difference between us is that I may be more resigned to it.

[Lance Mannion]

Also, and I probably should have emphasized this more, the object of liberalism is to give more people the opportunity to share in the benefits of the status quo even if that requires changing the status quo.

Ideally, when liberals succeed the new status quo is a more liberal society. That's certainly what happened with Medicare.

[paintedjaguar]

OK. And I don't pretend to know how to get out of the trap we're in. It may be impossible under the current US constitution and economic system. But some things are evident: Compromise on fundamental principles is a losing long-term strategy. And you were spot on in saying that successful liberalism creates more conservatives. The corollary is that even successful but partial solutions (ie Medicare) often stall out instead of expanding in scope.

By the way, in spite of the way people talk, Medicare itself is NOT a universal system, even for covered age groups. Nor is Social Security. This seems to be a typical side-effect of including conservative ideas to make liberal goals go down easier. This is just a cost of doing business of course -- unless YOU are the one who falls through the cracks.

[S McCoy]

Nice discussion Lance. 

I have to agree with what PJ says, the healthcare reform we got does more to preserve and protect Dem interests than change the status quo.  Ironically, it's conservatives who have proposed many more ideas (regardless whether you think they're any good), just as they have in the areas of education, tort law, the tax code, Social Security and others. 

On the other hand, I strongly disagree with your assertion that conservatives want to protect the rich and deny opportunities for the less well off. We truly believe that it's Not a zero sum game, and that the best way to help the entire population is to promote economic growth....raising taxes, nationalizing industries and building regulatory bureaucracies is no way to help the poor. 

Give us as small a government as possible - but still big enough to perform critical duties - and build a moral culture where people WANT TO care for one another, and then leave us alone. I realize past Republican administrations haven't done a good job executing this conservative philosophy, but one can still be an idealist, right?