Are We Stuck With the Liberal State?
In response to Angelo Codevilla's must-reader at AmSpec, Ross sounds a cautionary note:
One can deny that Barack Obama’s inner circle is wise, but it’s foolish to pretend that they aren’t remarkably intelligent. This pretense, like the notion that two-thirds of Americans are ripe for a revolution against the administrative state, has the unfortunate consequence of making things seem too easy for conservatives.
If that were true, says Ross, "conservatives would be poised for victory after victory, at the ballot box and in the halls of Congress alike. But matters are more complicated than that, and the conservative challenge much more difficult." For Ross, the "two great vices of the Obama-era right" are "premature triumphalism" and "a blithe conviction that 'true conservative' good intentions trump policy substance and deep expertise." Tough stuff, but why would it be true?
Conservative triumphalism might be premature because the liberal state, like its Obama-era advancements, is simply too difficult to undo short of a systemic breakdown of government. And conservative 'blitheness' might be misguided because real experts really do need to craft policies designed to grapple with intense, complex realities.
Granted. But here's what concerns me. Rather than being organized around the challenge of dealing with the external crises manufactured by the real world, much of the expertise concentrated in the liberal state is assembled to study and manage the crises internal to the administrative regime, crises manufactured by the regime itself. The bigger the state, the higher the risk that any internal crisis will become a catastrophic systemic crisis -- that is, a crisis that will badly harm not just the liberal state but the real world that it supposedly supervises. For that reason, I want to argue, policy experts in the liberal state cannot help but confuse their administrative regime with the real world. And, at the same time, ordinary citizens who tolerate, accept, or celebrate the liberal state partake of the same conflation from the opposite, bottom-up direction -- not because they're delusional or long for servitude (necessarily), but because the logic of the liberal state really does cause the reality of the world and the artifice of government to run together. (Nowhere is this more apparent than with taxes.)
So whenever a conservative or a libertarian proposes that we dismember the liberal state, the attack is inevitably, and not ridiculously, interpreted by liberals and progressives as an attempt to pull everyday life limb from limb. Ross is absolutely right that Republicans have relied on just such an interpretation when expedient to do so -- attacking Obama, in the latest instance, for trying to Take Away Your Medicare. Faced with this awkwardness, some paleo or traditional conservatives are tempted to fantasize about the collapse of the whole awful beast, government and reality alike -- peak oil, hyperinflation, and all the rest. But, for most of us, the watchword is Don't Go There. Which is why Ross is also right that the "conservative challenge" is difficult indeed.
Nevertheless...doesn't right now seem like as auspicious a time as there has been since the New Deal for a political transformation? less 'conservative' in any specific sense than anti-statist in the broad sense? One has to start somewhere, and the reason to start has perhaps never been so well dramatized.
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Comments :
Jun '10
Re: Are We Stuck With the Liberal State?
Too many (on the left) mistake freedom of speech for freedom of action. Having great latitude in proposing things is very American. Great latitude in government action is very un-American.
May '10
Re: Are We Stuck With the Liberal State?
If you have been inside the bureaucracy (as I have), you realize how much of the work day is consumed by protecting and enlarging turf rather than substantive issues. Note that the way for a government manager to acquire added prestige, power, and money, is to have more and more subordinates each at higher and higher grades on the General Schedule (e.g., GS-14, etc.). This creates inevitable and inexorable upward pressure on headcounts and identified "problems" that need to be solved.
Pray for weekly 20 inch snowstorms starting this November in the District of Columbia, continuing on for 6 months. The bureaucrats can stay home and collect their pay, we will all still be better off.
Jul '10
Re: Are We Stuck With the Liberal State?
If the Bush Adminstration taught us anything (aside from courage and forthrightness in the face of agression) it is that embracing the liberal state apparatus in pursuit of conservative goals leads inexorably to yet more liberlaism. The machinery of the modern state IS the essence of liberalism. The only conservatism worth supporting is that which starts by reducing and redefining the machinery of government. The most difficult possible task. And the only one worth pursuing.
May '10
Re: Are We Stuck With the Liberal State?
Patrick, I submit that your premise is bunk. Bush (and Kristol, Michael Medved, et al) did not, and do not "embrace the liberal state apparatus". They did and do look at reality and see that you must do the best you can with what you have and cannot eliminate.
Anyone who wants to argue this point seriously first tell me how many departments Reagan eliminated. I am tired of the conservative civil war suggesting that somehow there is any way on God's still-green (until we eliminate all the CO2 from the atmosphere) earth that we can turn a country of 300 million people into an Objectivist Paradise when 200 million of them don't want that.
Obama couldn't turn this into 1970's Sweden even with 60 votes in the Senate, a 60 seat house majority, and the JournoList carrying water for the troops.
When President Daniels has 60 seats int he Senate and 270 House votes, after the NYT and NBC have gone out of business, we can talk about that. Until then, we have to be rational.