Unlike past Democrat presidential
candidates, Obama is a hardened ideologue. He's not interested in
playing around the edges. He seeks "fundamental change," i.e., to
remake society. And if the Democrats control Congress with
super-majorities led by Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, he will get much
of what he demands. Mark Levin
Maybe
guys like Levin and others at NRO are strawmen–theirs are such absurd
exaggerations of a point of view that they can't be taken seriously.
Nevertheless there seems to be an assumption, even among principled,
sane conservatives (as contrasted with most of those at NRO and The Weekly Standard),
that the Dems will once again over-reach in their agenda to push the
country to the left. I am open to the idea that I have a blindspot
here, but I need somebody to explain to me how Dems have over-reached
in the past. I just don't see it. What did they do back in the day in either the
legislative or executive branches that is not better explained by standard-issue pork-barreling that can be described
as truly egregious over-reaching caused by their Liberal political
ideology. I would like a sane, principled
conservative to explain to me where I'm wrong. But the idea that Democrats are for pork barreling in a way that Republicans are not is just plain ridiculous.
I would argue
that fundamental change that frightens Levin so, if it were to happen, would mean moving the
country
away from an ideological hard right where he sits to a pragmatic center, which is really where Obama would like to sit. The idea
that this country could be moved to the hard left, even if Obama wanted
to do that, is just plain silly. Why? Because there is no far-left or
even a coherent ideological left-liberalism in the American political
sphere, and there is no potent political movement that can drive a
left-liberal agenda. If there are such left ideologues, they have no
political power or meaningful constituency. So the idea that the
Democrats are going to be a party united around a hard-left or even
just a "progressive" agenda, even with a filibuster-proof senate, is to
me ridiculous. The best we can expect from them is a higher level of
competence and pragmatism in solving serious problems all sane
Americans agree can't be solved by market ideology or faith-based
initiatives. To fear that the government is being taken over by
proto-socialists is nonsense.
The
Democrats are not driven by ideology the way the GOP is. Because
conservatives, especially hard-right social conservatives, tend to be
so ideologically driven, they assume Liberals are. They project onto
Liberal Democrats their worst fears rather than see them for what they
really are. Liberals are better understood as a kind of temperament or
the sensibility of those who have made
an adjustment to life in post-traditional world. Because social
conservatives have not made this transition, they think there is
something profoundly wrong with Liberals, something ungrounded and
decadent.
A social conservative is by definition grounded in traditional mores
and values, but as I've argued here several times over the years,
unless you've adopted a lifestyle along that modeled by the Amish or
Hasids, you simply are not living in a social world that is grounded in
traditional values. (I love Wendell Berry, but I simply don't buy that he's pointing us to a plausibly realizable alternative tradtionalist/agrarian future.) For most social conservatives traditional values are at most a veneer that coats
the deeper cultural reality which is dominated by the
consumer/technocratic values of free-market capitalism. That's the real
world we're all living in for better or worse, and so whatever the
benefits we all derive from free-market capitalism–and there are
many–it's also clear nothing has been more destructive of traditional
values and mores. You can't live in a consumer/technocratic society and have traditional values at the same time. Many think they are doing that, but they are the ones who are really ungrounded, and that's why social
conservatives seem often to be so in their own surreal bubble world. This is the formula that I've argued elsewhere leads to zombie traditionalism.
But if Liberals are simply more comfortable in a rapidly changing
world than Conservatives are, they are not the cause of these
changes–they simply have adapted to forces released by capitalism and
technological innovation more easily. You can argue, perhaps, that they
adapt too easily and uncritically, and I'd be sympathetic to that
argument, but the point I'm making here is that because they have been
more adaptive, they are less ideologically-driven. They are simply
driven by normal, sometimes craven, self interest and sometimes by a kind of decency that
recognizes that we all have a responsibility to those who have gotten
the short end of the stick through no fault of their own. There is
hardly anything socialist or utopian about such a sensibility. It's
just common sense and common decency.
To think that these problems could be handled by the market or local communities
is to admit you are not living in the real world as consumer capitalism
has shaped it. Don't get me wrong–as a subsidiarist, I'd prefer
problems to be handled more humanly in face-to-face relationships,
but we're no long living in a world where that approach can adequately
meet the massive need. If there are reasonable differences between liberals and conservatives, it's not a matter of whether the state has a role in mitigating the pain capitalism causes, but the extent of the state's role. Debates about universality and means testing are legitimate, but should be evaluated not on some basis of ideology, but on what makes practical sense. And in my judgment, Democrats, because they are less ideologically driven, are more likely to develop practical solutions.
The idea that Democrats like Obama are leftist is also belied by
the fact that Democrats' self interest in the last thirty years has
become more aligned with corporate power than with the needs of the
people who typically vote for them. They appeal to them at election
time, but pretty much disregard them when making policy. They do this
because there is no real grass-roots organized left to force them to
align with the interests of the typical Democratic voter. Politicians
are like moths attracted to the brightest light, and the stronger light
at this time beams from corporate interests. Dems know which side their
bread is buttered on, and since there is no organized left that beams a
light even remotely capable of attracting them, Dems just naturally
gravitate to the stronger energy source.
There is, of course, the
clean-burning flame of principle to attract them, but acting out of
principle requires a level of thoughtfulness and honesty most
politicians have no familiarity with. It's just not in their
programming. And besides, there just isn't a set of principles that
governs Liberalism–again, it's really more of a adaptive sensibility.
That's what drives principled liberals (e.g., Greenwald) and principled conservatives (e.g., Larison, Deneen)
crazy about Dem politicians–they pretty much don't operate according
to
principle. They are always playing the game, and they're not even good
at it–they have generally been outplayed by the GOP.
For
this reason, the Democrats deserve the contempt
that has been heaped upon them from both the left and the right. The best you can say about them is that
ideology won't get in the way as it has for Republicans, and the worst
we're going to get is another four or eight years of Clinton
right-center pragmatism, and what sane American wouldn't take that over
more of the last eight years? As contemptible as Clinton was, he was
competent, knowledgeable, and not crazed by ideology. I'll take that
any day over the kind of ideological hubris of the neocons and the
Manicheeism of the hard-right social conservatives
So I just don't get why sane, intelligent conservatives feel
justified in thinking that political Liberalism poses some kind of toxic threat
to the body politic. The body politic is already profoundly ill, but
that's because the underlying culture is. I think political Liberalism
is a specter in conservative's imaginations that has no existence in
the real world. Someone prove me wrong, but I think social
conservatives' real problem is not with political liberalism but is rooted in an aversion to anything-goes cultural liberalism. I tend to agree with conservatives about the spiritual bankruptcy cultural liberalism. American cultural Liberalism is at
its heart a kind of easy-going nihilism–but the remedies for that are not political in the legislative sense, and for this reason cultural Liberalism needs
to be de-linked from political liberalism.
Political liberalism, as
I've been arguing here, is fundamentally
practical and reactive. You don't have to be a cultural liberal to be a
political liberal. And here's what people like Levin just don't get:
There's a difference between the kind of hard-left socialism that sees
capitalism as the enemy, and the kind of practical liberalism that
accepts the world that capitalism has created and seeks to mitigate its
most destructive social effects.
I'm open to counterarguments
that I'm wrong on this, because I'm not sure I'm
right, but I think that social conservatives mistakenly blame Democrats
for the cultural consequences of capitalism and the technological
society it has created, and so they wrongly seek to defeat them in the political sphere as if that would change anything. They simply don't get that you can't have both
a traditional society and a capitalist consumer/techno society at the
same time. So because it's un-American to blame capitalism for the
destruction of their world, social conservatives blame Liberal
Democrats. Why? Because Liberals have adjusted to life in a
post-traditional world more easily than conservatives have,
conservatives have come to think that political Liberals must be
responsible for having engineered the destruction of their
traditional-values world.
Conservatism
is incoherent to the degree that it doesn't grasp that cultural
liberalism is in turn rooted in economic liberalism, aka free-market
capitalism, and that a good chunk of the Republican party, especially
in its corporate Libertarian wing, is committed to both economic and
cultural liberalism. There is nothing, in fact, more self-defeating for
social conservatives than their alliance with the Libertarian
free-market and neocon power wings of the Republican party. But it's a
rare social conservative that seems to understand that.
So for
me the idea that the Dems, whether liberal or otherwise, represent a
form of creeping socialism is laughable. The Dems, insofar as they care
about anything outside their own desire to maintain power and
prerogatives, have been more realistic and practical about the damaging
and destabilizing effects of market capitalism. And in that, at least,
they have played a role in softening its harsher effects. Capitalism's
survival depends on the kind of adjustments and controls first
instituted during the New Deal in this country. It's a basic lesson
Republicans and hardcore Libertarians resist learning, and it looks
like the implosion of the economy will force them to learn it again the
hard way.
And the corporate Libertarian conservatives, while they are ok with the socially destructive
consequences of capitalism, don't care about who it hurts so long as it
isn't them. They're the ones who are always shouting "Socialism" when
the government plays a role to mitigate some of those destructive
effects. So if I'm being unfair here, someone tell me where I'm wrong.
If you do, you will probably revisit some of the programs of the Great
Society or New Deal. Go for it, because while I'm open to
arguments that some of these programs
were misconceived or ineffective, I don't think a strong case can be
made that Liberal policy was designed to do anything more than to ameliorate
the harsher consequences of market capitalism for those most vulnerable
to suffer from them. I acknowledge that dependency was often an
unintended consequence of design flaws in some of these programs, but then it's
a matter of fixing the flaw, not of dismantling the whole framework.
But
these were not utopian socialist programs; they were designed to meet
specific, real-world, real-people needs. I mean honestly,
which one of the major
New Deal/Great Society programs can anyone sanely argue was not a
necessary response to a serious problem created by free-market
capitalism? If someone really thinks they were a bad idea, what
solutions would they have offered instead? Which could have been
handled better by the private sector or by volunteerism? What
traditional institutions have the capability or massive resources
required to deal with the huge dislocations and upheavals caused by
capitalism and technological change over the last century and a half?
I'm really interested to know.
So when conservatives start
talking about Liberals over-reaching, I'm sorry, but it just sounds
silly to me. Dems are just as venal, vain, corruptible and pandering to
their local constituencies as Republicans, but conservatives really
don't have to worry about Liberals hijacking the the country to the
left. Liberal pols' one virtue is a kind cynical pragmatism (Pelosi and
Reid are exemplars in that respect), and because of it, they are
unlikely to bring into the corridors of power the ideological hubris
that we have seen these past eight years.
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