Conservative Cultural Engineering

by Henry Farrell on October 18, 2004

“Lexington” of the _Economist_ can sometimes be pretty weird, but his most recent column is more than weird – it’s somewhere out there in the “Gamma Quadrant”:http://www.google.com/search?as_q=gamma+quadrant&num=10&hl=en&btnG=Google+Search&as_epq=&as_oq=&as_eq=&lr=&as_ft=i&as_filetype=&as_qdr=all&as_nlo=&as_nhi=&as_occt=any&as_dt=i&as_sitesearch=www.j-bradford-delong.net&safe=images.

His argument is pretty straightforward on its face- that the Democrats are on the losing side of history. They’re out of ideas, badly organized, and liable to be permanently marginalized by the Republicans if they get back in. Lexington does have a point about the Democrats’ idea deficit (although he carefully avoids commenting on whether the “fertile” swell of Republican ideas is actually producing anything in the way of common sense policy reform). His argument on the differences between Republican and Democratic organizations is far harder to buy – while there clearly is a difference in organizational styles, he doesn’t provide any real arguments why the Democrats’s looser form of organization and cooperation with 527s is a bad idea apart from the vague notion that it’s turning the Democrats into a loose coalition of single issue groups. This is plain wrong – the successful 527s’ “single issue” is dislodging Republicans from power. Lexington’s real gripe, which he doesn’t clearly articulate, is that these groups are moving the Democrats a little bit towards the left by changing the sources of party funding. But his real weirdness is in his argument about the Republican master strategy of transforming the Democrats into a permanent minority.

bq. The second reason why the Republicans have more to gain from a victory in November is that they think they can use a second Bush term to turn themselves into America’s de facto ruling party. Grover Norquist, the head of Americans for Tax Reform, may be exaggerating when he says that “the Democratic Party is toast” if Mr Bush wins. But the Republicans have put emasculating the Democrats at the very heart of their second-term agenda. They plan to reduce its footsoldiers by contracting out hundreds of thousands of federal jobs, to reduce its income through tort reform (which may slim down the lawyers’ wallets) and right-to-work laws (which will allow workers to opt out of union dues). And they plan to boost the number of people who own shares—and hence a stake in the success of the capitalist system—by beginning to privatise Social Security.

bq. The Republican aim is to do to the Democrats what Mr Blair has so successfully done to the Tories in Britain: marginalise them so completely that they degenerate into a parody of a political party.

Lexington has been inhaling too much of Norquist’s fairy dust. Surely he’s right that Republicans would dearly love to privatize social security, slim down the federal government by contracting out hundreds of thousands of federal jobs &c&c. They may even try to do it. But the notion that this would in any sense be popular, let alone that it would create a permanent new class of private-enterprise loving shareholding Republican-voting citizens is ridiculous. If they try to shove this agenda through, they’re going to meet extraordinary popular resistance. Assuming that Lexington is right, the Republicans (or some among them) would like to engage in cultural engineering on a massive scale – creating a new class of conservative voters. There’s a precedent for this, and it isn’t what Labour did to the Conservatives in the 1990’s – it’s what the Conservatives tried to do to Labour in the 1980’s. By crushing unions, privatizing state industry, trying to shift the North England economy from manufacturing to retail commerce, introducing market reforms to the welfare state, and flogging off public housing, the British Conservatives systematically tried to create a new class of Tory voters that would permanently marginalize Labour. The result was the transformation of the Conservatives into a near-permanent minority – thirteen years later, British voters still don’t trust the Conservative party anywhere near the public services. There’s “plenty to worry about”:http://yglesias.typepad.com/matthew/2004/10/threats.html if GWB gets a second term – but it simply isn’t credible that the Republicans are going to be successful in creating a permanent majority through social engineering.

{ 23 comments }

1

Buck 10.18.04 at 5:28 pm

I read Lexington and had a similar, “What planet are you on?” kind of reaction. I don’t dispute the relative organization of Repubs vs Democrats, but the comparison to British politics is laughable. The description of what the Republicans were planning on doing smacked so much of their own talking points it was very offputting as well.

Perhaps it’s my own polarization the last couple of years, but I’m not enjoying The Economist as much as I used to — there’s been a higher percentage of articles that make my eyes roll. It’s a shame, since I’ve been reading it faithfully for ten plus years. There’s no comparison to the other major news weeklies, particularly on covering other countries.

2

Patrick 10.18.04 at 5:29 pm

This is precisely the analogy I’ve been arguing with some of my friends about for the last year. I have very few politically-engaged conservative friends (most are Fox News conservatives) and quite a few politically-engaged liberal friends.

Several of my conservative friends have attempted to “save” me from my liberal beliefs (as I work at a university and have a graduate education I am one of those dreaded “college intellectuals”) by making a Pascalian arugment that “when Bush wins again everything will be changed and it would be better for you to get on board now even if you don’t like him than to be counted in opposition for decades to come.”

I always counter their Fox talking points about expanding the investor class and starving the government by saying “Look how well it worked for Thatcher and the Tories in Britain. A decade’s worth of class warfare from the top down and cultural experimentation has left the Conservatives geriatric and irrelevant. Even with Tony Blair in hot water over Iraq they still can’t get any traction. What makes you think it will work here?”

There’s never a good answer to that last question because there aren’t any talking points on it.

That being said I do really enjoy watching Blair and Howard trade barbs during CSPAN’s replay of “Prime Minister’s Questions” each week.

3

Matthew Yglesias 10.18.04 at 5:36 pm

I have to say that I find the notion that non-shareholders lack “a stake in the success of the capitalist system.” You wouldn’t think The Economist would be offering up the Marxist line that non-owners fail to benefit from the operation of a market economy. The presumption, meanwhile, that the Democratic Party would bring about the end of capitalism and that, therefore, its electoral fortunes are tied to individuals’ propensity to become socialists seems rather out-of-touch with Democratic policy proposals and the fact that the capitalist system appears to have survived just fine under the Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, and Clinton administrations to say nothing of the Democrats long congresional dominance from 1933-1993.

4

harry 10.18.04 at 6:12 pm

Wait a minute. Thatcher’s reforms have been a terrific success. Not, it is true, for her party, which now seems doomed to irrelevance (but, of course, vampires are good at rising from graves). But it did destroy the old Labour movement, and scuppered the prospects for a social democratic resurgance for…well, a long time. I agree the anaolgy is odd, and like buck I would find it hard to read the Economist if there were anything else to touch it. But Thatcher’s ideas and policies have ruled Britain for the last 20 years, and I think they will for the next 10 at least. Pretty impressive. And something the Republicans might aspire to: who cares about losing your party if you win the war?

5

Matt 10.18.04 at 6:13 pm

It’s the alternate reality thing again. If you wish for something– really, really, really wish for it– facts don’t matter.

6

Nasi Lemak 10.18.04 at 6:54 pm

It may *seem* like Thatcher’s policies were a success, in the wiping-out-socialism sense. But the alternate history is just unclear; certainly there is little evidence that Thatcher’s reforms had a causal impact on reducing (“Old-“) Labour’s support, or on changing British attitudes about the things about which she cared. I think the most you can say is that it may be the case that her industrial policy assisted in the collapse of the organised working class, but the popular-capitalism policies really didn’t create anything to replace them.

7

Sean Hurley 10.18.04 at 7:47 pm

It is going to be v. hard — even with gerrymandering, a lock on the courts, etc… etc… — for Republicans to maintain a stranglehold if the comfortable middle class keeps losing their jobs and the uncomfortable lower middle class keeps losing their sons.

8

harry 10.18.04 at 7:56 pm

bq. It may seem like Thatcher’s policies were a success, in the wiping-out-socialism sense. But the alternate history is just unclear..

Yes, as soon as I pressed Post I realised I had overstated rather. But I was thinking less of attitudes to the things she cared about than institutional reforms. Privatisation is un-roll-back-able. There is an ethos-change, too, though its hard to prove that; and that change makes it harder to establish a forceful and serious social-democratic alternative. Not that there aren’t other indepenendent barriers. And, of course, maybe something like what happened would have happened anyway (or is that what you were saying in the comment about alternate history?).

9

Giles 10.18.04 at 8:39 pm

“This is plain wrong – the successful 527s’ “single issue” is dislodging Republicans from power.”

Doesnt that prove how “They’re out of ideas,”.

By the way didnt Lexington write and article saying that there would be some inevitable spitl between the libertarian and reglisou republicans at some time after the election? and doesnt that issue somewhat mirror the euroscpetic vs europhile arguments that split the conservatives?

I think that some people are reading Lexinton piece by piece as opposed to sequentially. He’s not predicting a thousand year riech, but rather pointing out that without a unifying ideology the Democrats could be out of effective power for a long time given how seldom the majority in the senate and congress change.

10

Patrick 10.18.04 at 9:06 pm

I think Harry makes a good point about wider transformation versus political transformation, something I didn’t consider in my earlier comment.

Drawing this back to a contemporary American political analogy, how might that play out? If we get another four years of Bush and his Grovertastic domestic policies, how might that play out down the road for the Democrats?

If the administration is allowed to railroad through more privatization legislation, particularly getting their filthy paws on Social Security, then I think we’ll see a reverse image of what happened in Britain: Whereas Thatcher’s policies allowed Blair to wrest Labour away from “Old Labour” and take it in a more centrist, market-friendly direction, I think we’ll see a demand for a Democratic Party (or a more New Deal-minded third party) that returns to its New Deal past.

I just don’t see how enabling everyone and their dog to suddenly become part of the “investor class” with their retirements hanging in the balance of the market is going to end well. With our economy creaking along on a bottomless sea of credit, no solution in sight for increasing our refining capacity, and the government not lifting a finger to offer tax incentives to corporations who are outsourcing America, just how good of an investment is the market going to be for peoples’ retirements? Not a good one, in my opinion.

If privatization continues and the bottom falls out of the market, there will be hell to pay for the Republicans and the Clintonian market-friendly Democrats. A New-New Deal, anyone?

11

la 10.18.04 at 9:37 pm

What Patrick said. Spot on and I see it coming like a freight train, as Betty said, “fasten your seatbelts.”

12

praktike 10.18.04 at 10:20 pm

The ability for one party to “dominate” is long past. With sophisticated polling and messaging techniques, the median voter theorem has become a reality. If Republicans “defund” the Democrats, the Democrats will find some alternate source of power. It’s pretty much a zero sum game at this point.

13

Tobias 10.18.04 at 11:30 pm

I suppose much of the confusion about the Economist’s position with respect to Bush and the GOP can be understood with these readership figures (media info for the online economist.com)
• Average household income US$136,000 (I think print is 154,000 USD)
• One in eight is a dollar millionaire
• Average age 38 years

56% of these readers live in North America. Any other questions?

http://ads.economist.com/web/images/03ReadersSurvey.pdf

14

Gary Farber 10.19.04 at 12:07 am

I’m much more pessimistic. I see no reason not to think that if Bush does get back into office, whether with a blow-out popular vote and Electoral College, or in something as by-hook-or-crook as 2000, he won’t proceed precisely as he did in 2001: to steam-roller almost all opposition, ram through extremist bills of every imaginable type (this assumes the Republicans retain control of House and Senate, to be sure) as rapidly as possible, and simply put the thumb down and ignore the screaming and squawking of the rest of us precisely as he’s been doing for four years.

Why would things change if we (Democrats) don’t get control of at least one body of Congress?

Would this genuinely kill long-term chances of Democratic power? No, not necessarily. But they could successfully diminish it Just Enough to keep the Presidency in their hands for yet another term or two or possibly three. And who the hell knows how wrecked the system will be then?

What does it matter that perhaps a majority of the country will object, if we don’t have our hands on the levers of power. What did it matter to Thatcher during her reign?

Apres Thatcher and Bush, le deluge, but small comfort to having to live through it, innit?

15

harry 10.19.04 at 12:08 am

I am absolutely mortified to learn that I am above the median age for an Economist reader. In fact, discovering that casts doubt, for me, on the figures.

I am way below the median income. Bugger.

16

roger 10.19.04 at 2:45 am

Projections like Lexington’s bracket, like some mad Husserlian, the economic reality that Bush has created: not only deficits that will continue to increase, but a dependence on Chinese and Japanese banks to buy dollars that is, in the long run, unsustainable, and a geopolitics that almost guarantees gas shortages soon. Rather than Thatcher, Bush looks much more like a faith based Lyndon Johnson — whose econonmic, social and foreign policies reverberated, with party destroying resonance, ten years after he was gone.
Except for one thing — Johnson, on the positive side, did push through Civil Rights bills. Bush. a moral cretin, has done nothing to parallel that feat.

17

Keith M Ellis 10.19.04 at 3:22 am

I think that Ruy Teixeira’s and John Judis’s point of view about political trends in the US is far more persuasive than Lexington’s. For demographic reasons alone, it’s far more likely the Republicans will be marginalized than the Democrats.

But let’s just look at the political trends. On cultural issues, liberalism long ago won the day and the cultural conservatives are taking what isolated victories they can and otherwise cocooning themselves. The trend is not toward conservatism.

On economic issues, the long term trend has been conservative but at this point the two parties are not terribly far apart anymore. If anything, the neoliberal cautious embrace of markets is closer to majority American sentiment than is the big corporatism of the Republicans. True, Americans dislike taxation, but that’s nothing new.

I think Lexington has this exactly backwards. In truth, either a Bush win or a Bush defeat probably means long-term bad news for the Republicans. if Bush wins, he will not be able to avoid the fallout of his various failed policies and of the continuing investigations and tell-alls of his administration. The bloom is long off the rose, it’s only going to get worse. Bush is doing a damn good job of marginalizing the Republicans in the long-term, not helping them. If Bush loses, on the other hand, it will be the second one-term Republican President in a row and can’t be seen as anything other than a repudiation of the Bush admin and the party that supported him. Really, the GOP probably has a better chance at disentangling themselves from the disaster that is BushCo if Bush loses than if he wins. Either way, though, things don’t look good in the long term for the Republicans.

18

rps 10.19.04 at 3:40 am

If anything, the Republicans will create a new underclass which will vote Democratic. They also have the problem that their main constituency, white people, aren’t making babies, and will soon become a minority, while many Republicans are still campaigning on divisive English-first and anti-immigration policies.

19

Don Quijote 10.19.04 at 4:10 am

So basically, you’re an underachiever. ;)

20

joel turnipseed 10.19.04 at 6:54 am

hmmm… thinking back to last time in history there was a large, disillusioned underclass, major world financial crisis, failed wars, and uncertainty over empire stretched to its limits: what year shall we tag it? 1933? 1973? That’s pretty fucking promising. Buckle yer seatbelts folks: I don’t care if Kerry OR Bush wins (I care, actually, and proudly don my Veterans for Kerry button everywhere I go), we’re headed for some turbulence (note especially comments on dependence on both foreign oil and capital for US economy, not to mention looming healthcare/social security crises–which we’ll share w/Europe)–and that underclass may just as well vote w/the brownshirts: if you haven’t noticed, many of them already are.

21

Martin Wisse 10.19.04 at 7:10 am

Actually, I think Lexington is right in that the Republican party is busy trying to create a one party state in the US, not so much on that this is a good idea…

The most troubling aspect about this attempt is that whether or not the Republicans are successful, the damage done to US democracy will have happened.

Furthermore, there’s a real risk this attempt will suck the Democratic Party in the same direction, as the Tories did to Labour.

22

dave heasman 10.19.04 at 9:02 am

“Thatcher’s ideas and policies have ruled Britain for the last 20 years, and I think they will for the next 10 at least. Pretty impressive. And something the Republicans might aspire to: who cares about losing your party if you win the war?”

But if you lose your party, you lose a voice on the distribution of pork. This is practically the raison d’etre of both US political parties, isn’t it?

23

John Quiggin 10.19.04 at 11:40 am

“Privatisation is un-roll-back-able. ”

Not entirely. Railtrack has been effectively renationalised and there is strong public support for a complete renationalisation of railways. Welsh Water moved to a kind of halfway house and this was also the fallback position for British Energy if it hadn’t managed to settle with its creditors.

In all these cases there was a figleaf to hide the reality, but it’s now apparent that renationalisation of one kind or another is the likely outcome where privatisation fails – and over time it will fail in most natural monopoly infrastructure services.

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