If you haven’t, you really should read the very interesting exchange at TAP (round 1, round 2) between Matthew Yglesias, Ezra Klein, Mark Schmitt and Jacob Hacker, author of The Great Risk Shift: the Assault on American Jobs, Families, Health Care, and Retirement – and How You Can Fight Back
David Frum: “The great, overwhelming fact of a capitalist economy is risk. Everyone is at constant risk of the loss of his job, or of the destruction of his business by a competitor, or of the crash of his investment portfolio. Risk makes people circumspect. It disciplines them and teaches them self-control. Without a safety net, people won’t try to vault across the big top. Social security, student loans, and other government programs make it far less catastrophic than it used to be for middle-class people to dissolve their families. Without welfare and food stamps, poor people would cling harder to working-class respectability than they do not.”
The thing that makes capitalism good, apparently, is not that it generates wealth more efficiently than other known economic engines. No, the thing that makes capitalism good is that, by forcing people to live precarious lives, it causes them to live in fear of losing everything and therefore to adopt – as fearful people will – a cowed and subservient posture: in a word, they behave ‘conservatively’. Of course, crouching to protect themselves and their loved ones from the eternal lash of risk precisely won’t preserve these workers from risk. But the point isn’t to induce a society-wide conformist crouch by way of making the workers safe and happy. The point is to induce a society-wide conformist crouch. Period. A solid foundation is hereby laid for a desirable social order.
Let’s call this position (what would be an evocative name?) ‘dark satanic millian liberalism’: the ethico-political theory that says laissez faire capitalism is good if and only if under capitalism the masses are forced to work in environments that break their will to want to ‘jump across the big top’, i.e. behave in a self-assertive, celebratorily individualist manner. Ergo, a dark satanic millian liberal will tend to oppose capitalism to the degree that, say, Virginia Postrel turns out to be right about capitalism ushering in a bright new age of individual liberty, in which people try new things for the sheer joy of realizing themselves, etc., etc.
I obviously talk about this old Frum book more than any one person should, but a couple points about it are worth re-emphasizing, once a year or so. David Frum’s Dead Right was published in 1994 and it already hits many of the notes and themes that are being played over and over in this year’s election season: the Republicans are a party of opposition. They find it easy to get hold of the levers of power but don’t know what to do with them except make a mess of things. Frum urges intellectual honesty and maybe a sober period in the wilderness. (These days he’s decided honesty was just a terrible idea, to judge by his cry-baby jeremiads.)
When conservatism’s glittering generalities, “you are overtaxed,” turn into legislative specifics, “you must pay more to send your kid to the state university,” we run into as much trouble in midsession as the liberals do at election time. Twelve years of twisting and struggling to escape this snare have just entangled us ever more deeply in it.
And now it’s another 12 years on and we’re still doing the twist. Well, anyway, it seems to me worth mentioning that the Republicans always seem like they are going to implode over this issue of total incompetence to handle levers of power – just like the fabric of the Republican big tent always seems five minutes away from unraveling – and it hasn’t quite happened yet. (Here’s hoping November is a lovely month for implosions and unravelings.)
The weird thing about Dead Right – and the fact that we’re still dancing the same twist – is that it’s a twist with a twist on that old conservative fusionist dilemma: how to reconcile strong affirmation of economic laissez faire with the strong denial of moral and cultural and societal laissez faire? But that’s not even it. How do you engineer a ‘risk society’ – the very result that Hacker deplores – and market it as a brilliant solution to the old fusionist dilemma? John Kenneth Galbraith declared: “The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.” But there is something to be said for substituting ‘risk for risk’s sake’ for selfishness. Which is just plain weird. Certainly not very conservative.
Anyway, Frum seems to have the distinction of being the only conservative intellectual to seriously attempt to positively defend a major aspect of Republican grand strategy – engineering a ‘risk society’ – while more or less frankly acknowledging that this sort of arrangement isn’t in the economic self-interest of most members of society. It’s such an unlovable public policy position that one really wishes one could flush it out into the light more often.
{ 49 comments }
Ben A 10.29.06 at 12:04 am
It’s not risk for risk’s sake, John. The point Is suspect Frum has in mind is that the policies that diminish risk also create incentives for bad behavior, behavior, that is, which is bad for those who practice it and bad for their fellow citizens. This is part of his point abotu why social conservatives (who, e.g., worry about the rise of illigitemacy) need economic conservatives (who wnat to reduce government programs that make single-parent families more economically viable).
Frum may be wrong on any number of counts. Diminishing the costs of certain ‘bad’ behaviors may do nothing to encourage them. Or it may be that benefits of diminishing the costs of ‘bad’ behavior (or the cruelty of failing to redress those ‘costs’) far outweigh any of the attendent costs in increased ‘bad’ behavior. Or it may be that behaviors Frum considers ‘bad’ are not really problematic at all, and are of a piece with a general expressive individualism we should all support. These would all be fine arguments to make against Frum, or against a Frumian conservative, and would be I think better ones than the one you make here.
Peter 10.29.06 at 12:21 am
that old conservative fusionist dilemma: how to reconcile strong affirmation of economic laissez faire with the strong denial of moral and cultural and societal laissez faire
I don’t think this is an especially great dilemma for conservatives, who almost by definition recognise that social laissez faire (in other words, family breakdown) undermines economic laissez faire by creating the demand for the welfare state while strong families rarely require net subsidies from the taxpayer. Nor are they normally unaware that economic laissez faire supports the traditional family structure for the reasons Frum outlines, while big government that refuses to discriminate (except against the nuclear family) sustains with its handouts lifestyles that are otherwise impossible for everyone except those with parents like Paris Hilton’s to provide the handouts. The only real dilemma is convincing unwordly libertarian ideologues of these obvious realities, at least to the point where they’ll tell people in their columns to vote for conservative candidates.
Peter 10.29.06 at 12:25 am
Indeed, surely your post acknowledges that there is no such dilemma. If objecting to conservatives supporting economic laissez faire in order to undermine social laissez faire is not an acknowledgement that social and economic liberalism are incompatible, I don’t know what is. Don’t liberals likewise oppose the pairing of economic and social liberalism (in their case because they oppose the former and support the latter)?
John Holbo 10.29.06 at 12:36 am
Ben and I have been round about this before so I’ll let it go with my old posts – which he doesn’t buy. As is his right.
What I should have said in this post, which I didn’t really, is that what Hacker is arguing – which I think is right – is that the strategy of the Republican party is to transfer yet more wealth to the very wealthy by transfering risk to the not-so–very-wealthy. It’s very hard to make that argument directly in a way that will appeal to more than about 1% of the population. (Why should they sacrifice their economic self-interest for the sake of the very wealthy?) What’s interesting about Frum’s case, in connection with Hacker’s thesis, are the contortions he engages in to find some way of making the ‘risk society’ sound good, without fudging the economic facts.
To put it another way, that may satisfy ben a: normally the economic case for risk would be some anticipated pay-off. It’s reasonable to make bets if the bet looks to have a juicy pay-off. But the ‘risk society’ Hacker is talking about won’t plausibly work like that. So if you can’t make the case that the risk you are asking people to shoulder is for their ultimate, expected economic benefit, you have to come up with some other reason why it’s good for them to agree to shoulder it. Obviously the REAL reason for the shift is that the very wealthy are experimenting to see how much risk they can actually shift off themselves onto the middle-class, not because they really think they are improving the middle-class hereby, in a moral sense (Frum’s story.) Rather because they’d just plain like to have even more money themselves, thank you very much. And that’s fine, maybe. But it’s hard to see why the middle-class should agree with them about this, once they know the economic score.
Peter 10.29.06 at 12:36 am
Ben A, yes, exactly. It’s not risk for risk’s sake; it’s fiscal conservatism for social conservatism’s sake (and social conservatism for fiscal conservatism’s sake).
Peter 10.29.06 at 12:39 am
And I’m sorry to make so many posts rather than incorporate them into one, but I should add that while the above is indeed circular, it is only in the sense of a virtuous circle. The two are not merely instrumentally valuable as a means of achieving the other – that would be pointless. Both of these are in themselves desirable (to conservatives).
John Holbo 10.29.06 at 12:41 am
Peter, if you can trust people to make wise decisions with their money, why can’t you trust them to make wise decisions about their families? And if you think they are going to make bad decisions about their families, left to their own devices, what is your argument against intervening to save them from their economically bad decisions as well? (If the government can be wiser than the people in matters familial, why not in matters economic?)
Peter 10.29.06 at 12:53 am
To answer your question directly, I thought I made pretty clear that it’s precisely because it isn’t government’s place to determine the consequences of people’s familial decisions that social conservatives agree with fiscal conservatives that a big welfare state whose only discrimination is against the family is a bad idea. I don’t see any consistency, there, even theoretically.
But you’re right to ask the more general point about people’s social choices, because it’s true that there is more to social liberalism than indifference or opposition to traditional family structures: prostitution and drug-abuse for example. Conservatives do tend to want the government to intervene against them, which means they are more in favour of economic freedom than social freedom. But so what? That’s only helplessly inconsistent if you only think of politics in terms of state intervention, as opposed to the consequences of that intervention, the sort of society you want or a thousand other goals that are consistent with supporting differing levels of state intervention in the social and economic realms. As I said, the point of fusionism is persuading libertarian intellectuals that given the choice, small government is preferable to social liberalism. And that choice is indeed one social and economic liberals do have to make, not as they believe because of the two-party system or the left/right spectrum, but because of the constraints of human nature and reality.
Peter 10.29.06 at 12:57 am
The last line of the first paragraph should (obviously) read: “I don’t see any inconsistency, there even theoretically.”
Peter 10.29.06 at 12:58 am
Gord-damnit I deleted the wrong comma: “I don’t see any inconsistency there, even theoretically”.
John Holbo 10.29.06 at 1:10 am
I won’t mandate how this thread proceeds, but I’m actually curious to hear what people have to say about the TAP exchange and Hacker’s ideas. I feel that I’ve personally talked the Frum issue more or less to death in those old threads, so I probably shouldn’t have even brought it up again – to the extent that it proves a distraction from fresher topics.
Peter, the point of conservative fusion may be persuading libertarian intellectuals, as you say; likewise, the point of cold fusion is cheap energy. But so far reality has proven rather recalcitrant and constraining – although not quite in the way you seem to think (I think.) But perhaps we can take it up later, possibly on the terrain of the Hacker discussion. For now, I have a children’s halloween party to attend to.
Peter 10.29.06 at 1:23 am
the very wealthy … they’d just plain like to have even more money themselves, thank you very much. And that’s fine, maybe. But it’s hard to see why the middle-class should agree with them about this, once they know the economic score.
The economic score is that outside a recession the fixed quantity of wealth fallacy is refuted every quarter by GDP growth (and ironically, the surest way to keep a nation’s wealth fixed in the long-term is via redistributive high marginal tax rates).
And I’m not, to put it mildly, one of the top 1%, so I suppose that ignoring the economic score for a moment, it might appear to be in my self-interest to fight with people in higher tax brackets than me for a higher share of tax revenue to be put in my pocket. But I do also recognise a moral distinction in that insofar as people from different tax brackets are in competition for the same fixed amount of money, it’s the higher bracket that earned and created that wealth in the first place. It is in my economic self-interest to rob them directly, but I don’t do that either.
Delicious Pundit 10.29.06 at 1:33 am
I’m a longtime fan of the David Frum post and find no John Holbo concert complete unless he plays it. Some thoughts about the subsequent discussion:
1. Do we even have a big welfare state here in the U.S.? We don’t have health care. We don’t much subsidize tuition. You can throw people off the welfare rolls, now, which wasn’t true when Frum was writing Dead Right. We have a huge problem with Medicare, but I hardly think paying for old people’s health care is “discriminating against the family.” A big part of our taxes go to pay for the defense establishment, which I’m sure we’d all agree contains within it welfare of a very different sort (and which does have health care).
2. I wish y’all would be clearer about what is it in the welfare state we do have that’s so discriminatory against the nuclear family.
3. Maybe it’s because I come at things from the television biz, where we’re trying to plug directly into people’s pleasure centers, but I kind of think that laissez-faire capitalism is at least as family- and mores-destroying as the nanny state. Think child labor. Think sneakers marketed so brilliantly people are killed for them. (The nanny state is also laissez-faire about the guns.) Buy a copy of BIllboard. When Carrier closes its Syracuse plant, that has to be at least as bad for the 2000 families as an AFDC check.
Peter 10.29.06 at 1:46 am
Peter, the point of conservative fusion may be persuading libertarian intellectuals, as you say; likewise, the point of cold fusion is cheap energy. But so far reality has proven rather recalcitrant and constraining
If you’re saying that libertarian intellectuals can be a difficult crowd for social conservatives to win over, you’ll get no argument from me. But this is not because conservatives face a maddening dilemma with their sympathy for free markets and opposition to social liberalism: the answers to this dilemma are straightforward. The dilemma of fusionism is persuading believers in a future fantasyland where voters never demand a welfare state even as they freely make lifestyle choices that are unsustainable without one that the conservative vision rather than the liberal one is closer to their utopia.
Peter 10.29.06 at 1:50 am
I wish y’all would be clearer about what is it in the welfare state we do have that’s so discriminatory against the nuclear family.
In the tax system, the marriage penalty. In the benefits system, subsidies for alternative family structures that do not go to nuclear families.
bob mcmanus 10.29.06 at 2:09 am
Marvin Olasky had his Tragedy of American Compassion published in 1992. Add Frum(1994) to the right-wing discourse of the period, and the idea is that risk amelioration at a national level discourages community formation and local charity.
…
The most successful socialist nations, Germany, Scandanavia, Great Britain, Austria generated their SDP parties out of a core base of independent urban socialist cities and local craft unions. I am not sure how you reorganize and reinvigorate the class struggle on top of a secure national depersonalized safety net. Marx may have won the battle at the First International, but we may have to return to Bakunin to win the war. The liberalism of Keynes and Schumpeter kept control of production in the hands of capital while removing the necessity, at the sustenance level, for the workers to organize.
A trap. I expect the welfare state rug will soon be pulled out from under people who have learned to kiss the hand/state that feeds them instead of biting it.
nick s 10.29.06 at 2:34 am
Frum seems to have the distinction of being the only conservative intellectual to seriously attempt to positively defend a major aspect of Republican grand strategy – engineering a ‘risk society’ – while more or less frankly acknowledging that this sort of arrangement isn’t in the economic self-interest of most members of society.
Including himself and other right-wing pundits, natch. He’s still in work, having taken, to my mind, not much risk at all over the past twelve years. After all, if the pols or the syndicators dump you, there’s always a nice well-funded foundation to keep your bills paid. ‘Risk for thee, but not for me.’
But that’s an old story. On point, I think there are two related forces at work. First a climate in which there appears (to my expat sensibility) a higher proportion of get-rich-quick schemes that, coincidentally, advertise on the AM dial in between diatribes from various right-wing hosts. (And left-wing, for that matter: the snake-oil sellers are equally at home on Air America.)
Get-rich-quick has hit the mainstream, though, with interest-only mortgages and the extension of credit, alongside a tightening of bankruptcy law to favour lenders. In short, I think the actual selling of risk has been done opaquely, in the guise of no-risk schemes that take advantage of wage stagnation.
bob mcmanus 10.29.06 at 3:12 am
Look with no personal offense intended, all I really see with Hacker, Klein is the creation of power centers for liberal technocrats. Thwy want me committed to and dependent on the Democrtic Party.
One word:Katrina. The answer I am supposed to trust is that Clinton ran FEMA well and Bush was terrible so vote for Democrats because the next Democrat will run FEMA well. That is no comfort for the people who thought NOLA was home, and really no security. If I ask Schmitt or Klein if he will guarantee a well-run FEMA in 2026 he can’t. As a liberal, he in principle cannot guarantee that a competent FEMA will be in place, because he is committed to the liberal process, and letting the monsters have a shot. The liberals cannot guarantee the survival of SS or Medicare, and in fact, cannot really reduce risk at all.
…
Katrina did not have to play out the way it did. Republicans understand that there is a wider range of tools than national liberalism, and the diaspora of residents was purposeful. There were hundreds of thousands of hurting people and there were the shipping and oil industries just sitting there, vulnerable and valuable as ever. With a different, more independent mindset and training, NOLA could have been saved. Liberal Democrats couldn’t do shit, and didn’t.
trueliberal 10.29.06 at 4:42 am
Delicious Pundit,
Think sneakers marketed so brilliantly people are killed for them.
You’re blaming Nike commercials, and by extension liberal economic policies for such murders? Really?
That would be WAY down my list of likely culprits. First on my list would be whoever actually did the killing. Second on my list would be the “anti-poverty” policies of the left, which since the Great Society has done absolutely nothing to improve the plight of the underclass in America, and has only served to keep them poor.
rented mule 10.29.06 at 5:38 am
Wow, McManus knocks it out of the park. Bob, I’ve been reading you for three, four years now…usually I think your ideas are…unsound (I think you’ll take that as a compliment). Not here, though. The phenomena you identify was also evident during the ABC docudrama brou-ha-ha. Atrios particularly bad. Saint fucking Sandy Berger and for god’s sake let’s not remember who it was who started the program of extraordinary rendition.
abb1 10.29.06 at 6:18 am
…Hacker is arguing – which I think is right – is that the strategy of the Republican party is to transfer yet more wealth to the very wealthy by transfering risk to the not-so—very-wealthy. It’s very hard to make that argument directly in a way that will appeal to more than about 1% of the population.
It woulda been easy if this was true. I don’t think it is. The very wealthy – the Gates, the Buffetts, the Allens – I don’t think they really care about transferring more wealth to them; or, at least, I don’t think they would like to do it by cheating.
It’s those who are within reach of becoming very wealthy, the wealthy but not yet very wealthy – most of the upper management, most of the business people, some doctors, some lawyers, some top-level professionals. They are the real beneficiaries of this ideology. And that’s millions of people.
And then think of all those unfortunate victims of self-delusion vast majority of whom will never become very wealthy but definitely expect to: middle-management, small businessmen, mid-level professionals – and we are now talking tens of millions, perhaps a hundred million people.
dearieme 10.29.06 at 6:47 am
Investment gurus say something like “you can’t eliminate risk, you can only redistribute it”. I’m not sure that that’s quite right, but for many things it’s probably a pretty good approximation. It rather looks as if a major welfarist effect is simply either to redistribute risk across time (think of the poor souls who aren’t going to get the pension or health-cover they expected in old age) or across generations. With “welfarist” I refer both to the welfare state and its corporate analogues – pension schemes and so on.
bi 10.29.06 at 6:48 am
trueliberal: wow, that was fact-free.
abb1: Some of the very wealthy people do apparently want more wealth, even if it’s by cheating. Remember Enron? And ExxonMobil? (And about Gates, I remember Microsoft itself also ran a FUD campaign against Linux for a while…) Anyway, add to that the connections some of these companies have with the Republican Party, and you have one hell of a strategy.
The key here, I think, is that the only kinds of “risk” these people will support are those that affect the un-wealthy. Some things (e.g. student loans) are portrayed as unessential and thus worthy of risk, while other things are portrayed as fundamental rights (e.g. property rights) and therefore are not to be risked.
abb1 10.29.06 at 7:01 am
Bi, fair enough, they’ll still do cheating; I guess what I was trying to say is that these guys probably won’t rob orphans and widows just to see their personal wealth growing from $100 billion to $150 billions. But maybe I’m just hopelessly naive and idealistic.
harry b 10.29.06 at 7:10 am
Peter — the marriage penalty only affects a very small number of people and pales compared with numerous quirky benefits features that favour marriage (eg the government and large employer practice of providing health benefits to the spouses of employees — how often has that been the main consideration in conversations I’ve had about marrage with non-married people?). The marriage penalty is more right-wing talking point than reality. Encouraging flexible labour markets — now that’s what undermines marriage.
Uncle Kvetch 10.29.06 at 8:07 am
a big welfare state whose only discrimination is against the family is a bad idea
If such a thing actually existed, it would be very bad indeed.
Wow, I guess I’m a conservative after all.
DivGuy 10.29.06 at 8:29 am
Peter: economic laissez faire supports the traditional family structure for the reasons Frum outlines
This is basically economic laissez-faire as authoritarianism. That is, we will effect control over the minutiae of the people’s lives by placing them as constant risk of immediate destruction. If every person believes her next move could bring destruction on herself and her family, she will act more in accordance with the social norms deemed acceptable by society.
Instead of searching to create desired social outcomes by means of helping people, this creates desired social outcomes by causing harm and pain. It’s sick.
Rich Puchalsky 10.29.06 at 9:31 am
Will the libertarians please just for a minute get over their delusion that anyone publishes political pieces in order to appeal to them? As an electoral group, they are negligible. Yes, I am aware of Kos’ “libertarian democrats” bit, which is clearly directed at general Western voters, of which less than a percent probably think of themselves as libertarian.
bob mcmanus: “As a liberal, he in principle cannot guarantee that a competent FEMA will be in place, because he is committed to the liberal process, and letting the monsters have a shot.”
And how exactly are you going to guarantee that the monsters never have a shot, bob? I’d be interested to hear. Please include in your answer the fact that a near majority of the American people appeared to agree with the monsters, at least in 2004.
I’m also interested in this argument that competent government is no good because you can’t guarantee that it will always be there. That’s a familiar argument in the context of Clintonism. People would say that his things like expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit didn’t matter to poor people because they were insufficient, while meanwhile having no idea how to do any better, and no present need for even marginal improvements in their own situation.
John Emerson 10.29.06 at 9:32 am
I haven’t read all the comments, but the fiscal-liberalism / social-conservativism partnership effectively limits freedom to those who have capital. A down side is that it also discourages entrepreneurship — with no safety net it makes more sense to continue to work at the mill rather than to start a small business, and to stay in the mill town rather than to seek your fortune elsewhere.
Effectively, social-conservative capitalism makes the family and the community slaves of the economy. The big decisions are made freely by high-level libertines for reasons of realpolitik and profit (ignoring social-conservative values), but most ordinary people at the local / family level still live according to the old rules, since that is useful for the economy. But if the families and local community are in trouble and need support because of economic shifts, they’re out of luck, because the economy doesn’t need them any more.
abb1 10.29.06 at 9:59 am
Hey, somewhat relevant Dilbert today.
Steve LaBonne 10.29.06 at 10:26 am
The difference between Peter’s construal of Frum’s point:
and John’s paraphrase of the same point
will only appear significant to those who have had predominantly good fortune in their lives, and who get their jollies by pontificating about how other people should live. Since Blake is exactly the man who knew just what to say about this variety of conservatism, I love John’s phrase “dark satanic millian liberalism”. Quite so.
“Compell the poor to live upon a Crust of bread by soft mild arts
Smile when they frown frown when they smile & when a man looks pale
With labour & abstinence say he looks healthy & happy
And when his children Sicken let them die there are enough
Born even too many & our Earth will be overrun
Without these arts If you would make the poor live with temper
With pomp give every crust of bread you give with gracious cunning
Magnify small gifts reduce the man to want a gift & then give with pomp
Say he smiles if you hear him sigh If pale say he is ruddy
Preach temperance say he is overgorgd & drowns his wit
In strong drink tho you know that bread & water are all
He can afford Flatter his wife pity his children till we can
Reduce all to our will as spaniels are taught with art.”
–The Four Zoas, Night 7
bob mcmanus 10.29.06 at 10:39 am
“And how exactly are you going to guarantee that the monsters never have a shot, bob? I’d be interested to hear”
Devolution,”federalism”,urban socialism,syndicalism. I am not promising a rose garden. I don’t have the answers, I too have been brainwashed to love big government. I have a lot of work, a lot of studying to do. But the concentration and accumulation of power is obviously dangerous and liberals just tell me:”Trust us” We can restrain the troglodytes from Washington, if you gives us all your money and political capital.
Here in Dallas, the local hospitals are turning the poor away. Medicaid and other cuts, state won’t help, it is busy cutting taxes. Dallas is not a poor city, lots of industry and finance. But the poor, most residents don’t even know who the mayor is, have no concept of local organization, let alone the idea that they can coerce local industry to cover local health care. The layers and layers of heirarchy have taught them their powerlessness, in fact put laws in the way so that Austin and Washington can prevent independent movement. Dallas barely even has a local media, and the suburban newspapers have been bought by a national chain, like the radio and TV stations.
What is going to be in place after the deluge? A passive subservient unconscious working class and gated cities with private mercenaries.
bob mcmanus 10.29.06 at 10:41 am
My comment is awaiting moderation???
Well,well. All out enemies are to the left, huh.
Helen 10.29.06 at 9:31 pm
a Frumian conservative
I suggest frumious, instead. As in Bandersnatch.
In the tax system, the marriage penalty. In the benefits system, subsidies for alternative family structures that do not go to nuclear families.
Could you explain these two things, please, as your readers aren’t all American? Thanks.
Dan Simon 10.29.06 at 9:38 pm
It’s true that conservative policies often shift risk from those who follow certain social conventions to those who flout those conventions. It’s also true that many (though by no means all) of those who flout those conventions are poor. It doesn’t follow at all, though, that the net effect of conservative policies is necessarily to shift risk from the rich to the poor.
Two obvious counterexamples are the great conservative success stories of the nineties: reforming welfare and toughening the criminal justice system. Both of these policy changes can be viewed (and generally have been, by liberals) as shifts of risk away from the rich and towards the poor. Welfare recipients, after all, are generally poor, as are accused criminals, and wealthy people are more likely to be crime victims and welfare subsidisers (through taxes) than criminals or welfare recipients.
However, there’s also a huge population of non-rich people–including plenty who can legitimately be called, in economic terms, “poor”–who live lives that place them at no greater risk of long-term welfare dependency or arrest on felony charges than the average rich person, and for whom the costs, in taxes and crime victimhood, of an unreformed welfare system and a lenient criminal justice system are proportionately greater than for the average rich person. This population–sometimes referred to as the “middle class”–generated the groundswell of support for reforming welfare and beefing up the criminal justice system.
Some conservative policies, of course, fit Hacker’s characterization reasonably well. But the popularity of conservative policies in general can’t be properly understood strictly in Hacker’s rich-poor terms, without considering those, such as the aforementioned two, whose primary benficiaries are America’s vast middle class.
Bill Clinton understood this–remember “those who work hard and play by the rules”? That’s why he signed the welfare reform bill and promised to put “100,000 new cops on the street”–and why he remained popular throughout his two terms in office, while his party’s Congressional wing collapsed. It’s a pity that liberals in general, and the Democratic Party in particular, have forgotten the lessons he applied so well.
trueliberal 10.29.06 at 10:26 pm
Rich Puchalsky,
Libertarians are not negligible. Far from it. Most who have libertarian tendencies just don’t use the term, “libertarian”.
From The Economist:
Whatever they call themselves, anybody who agrees with those statements are my kind of people.
lurker 10.30.06 at 2:14 am
A bit late, isn’t it, for the revolt of the fairly wealthy? The bourgeois at it again, I see.
abb1 10.30.06 at 3:34 am
…Mr Boaz and Mr Kirby count those who agree that “government is trying to do too many things that should be left to individuals and businesses 
“Individuals” I understand, but why should these many things be left to businesses? How is a business better than a government? Usually it’s worse.
Indeed, “libertarian” is a good word – when it means what it should mean: opposition (to a reasonable degree) to any hierarchy of power. I’m a bit of a libertarian myself.
No Gods. No Masters. Against All Authority.
bi 10.30.06 at 6:19 am
trueliberal, abb1:
To see what the Cato Institute’s survey is worth, just take a look at an earlier effort to find libertarians: the Nolan quiz. Yes, the Cato survey makes many of the same mistakes as the Nolan quiz, and even worsens them — the Nolan quiz reduces one’s politics to just 10 questions, but the Cato survey reduces them to just 3! Think about that for a while…
Though there’s no reason why someone won’t want to push political pieces to pander to people who are maybe-sort-of-perhaps-somewhat-a-bit-of-a libertarian.
Uncle Kvetch 10.30.06 at 8:46 am
Could you explain these two things, please, as your readers aren’t all American? Thanks.
Let’s see. The “marriage penalty” is a popular piece of right-wing rhetoric designed to feed the sense of victimization and resentment among self-described conservatives in the U.S., as nicely exemplified by Peter’s comments above. It’s also pretty much nonsense, since, as the linked article indicates, some married couples pay more income taxes than their single counterparts would, while others pay less, depending on the particulars. Conservatives don’t like to talk about that part, for some reason.
As for the second thing, “subsidies for alternative family structures that do not go to nuclear families”–sorry, I haven’t the foggiest idea what this might entail. Maybe Peter will clue us in.
Slocum 10.30.06 at 9:43 am
Let’s call this position (what would be an evocative name?) ‘dark satanic millian liberalism’
The risk in caricaturing Frum’s position in that way is that you do the same to your own. Seeing no value in personal responsibility and risk but only ‘dark satanic millianism’ is as extreme a caricature of the left as anything the American right offers. Conservatives in the U.S., I suspect, would love to run against opponents staking out that position.
Steve LaBonne 10.30.06 at 9:51 am
I see, so anyone who isn’t in favor of a large segment of the population leading lives highly constrained by precarious economic status is ipso facto “seeing no value in personal responsibility”. I do so love concern trolls…
Slocum 10.30.06 at 9:57 am
It’s also pretty much nonsense, since, as the linked article indicates, some married couples pay more income taxes than their single counterparts would, while others pay less, depending on the particulars.
But it would be quite possible to allow couples to file either as either married or as singles — depending on which would be most advantageous. For two income couples, there is often a substantial penalty as compared to what they would pay if they were unmarried and cohabitating (especially if they earn enough to be hit by the AMT). It does those people no good at all to know that there are other couples who benefit from current tax laws (in fact, it only irritates them more).
Current tax laws benefit ‘traditional’ single-income nuclear families (or where the husband’s income is very much greater than the wife’s) and punish non-traditional couples (especially where husbands and wives have more equal incomes, and especially when they reside in higher-tax blue states). Given that, you’d think it would be Democrats who were especially keen to eliminate the ‘marriage penalty’ for dual-career couples, just as you’d think it would be Democrats who were most in favor of AMT reform — but you’d be wrong.
Uncle Kvetch 10.30.06 at 10:41 am
It does those people no good at all to know that there are other couples who benefit from current tax laws (in fact, it only irritates them more).
It isn’t about some people’s irritation, Slocum. It’s about the charge that Peter made above: i.e., that the US government systematically discriminates against “traditional,” nuclear families, and that the “marriage penalty” is evidence of this. Given that, as I noted, some married couples pay more and others pay less, the accusation is highly suspect. We won’t even go into the myriad other benefits, as mentioned in the piece I linked to, that accrue to married couples but are denied to singles, or to people like myself in long-term domestic relationships that “conservatives” don’t approve of.
Oh, and what Steve Labonne said: “No value in personal responsibility”? Please…there must be straw of a higher quality you could use.
Slocum 10.30.06 at 11:22 am
I see, so anyone who isn’t in favor of a large segment of the population leading lives highly constrained by precarious economic status is ipso facto “seeing no value in personal responsibilityâ€. I do so love concern trolls…
Highly constrained? How much is ‘highly’?
The point is that virtually everybody thinks that people’s lives are, properly, constrained to some degree by, say, a failure to stay in school, or to work hard, or to save money, or even to choose a career carefully. The question is — how much should it be constrained? The difference between Holbo and Frum is really one of degree.
Now, if Holbo were to argue that things are currently tipped to far in the direction of risk, fair enough. But to argue that advocating any level of risk is a form ‘dark satanic millianism’ is dishonest and, IMHO, a poor rhetorical strategy (with respect to U.S. politics, anyway).
Steve LaBonne 10.30.06 at 11:23 am
Speaking of dishonest, that’s how I’d describe your reading of Holbo.
John Emerson 10.30.06 at 1:15 pm
Any tendency to punish economic failure with misery and poverty will catch a random lot: people with problems, lazy and criminal people, mediocre but diligent workers, and excellent workers who happen to be in the wrong trade or in the wrong location. What they will all have in common is lack of wealth and dependency on a paycheck.
Conservatives take satisfaction in the punishment, either from a cold-blooded Social Darwinist point of view, or because “labor discipline” is thus enforced, or by misrepresenting the proportion of loafers and criminals in the group. It’s in the nature of conservatives to respond this way; it more or less defines the ideology (and it doesn’y make much difference that the reasons justifying misery are not necessarily mutually consistent.)
engels 10.30.06 at 6:32 pm
IMHO, a poor rhetorical strategy
Sorry, Slocum, but the “advice from a friendly Republican on what the Dems need to do if they want to have a chance of winning elections” troll template is looking a bit out of date these days.
roy belmont 10.31.06 at 8:49 am
I would prefer that the phrase be “dark satanic millerism” as this would reflect the originating image and its poetic intent more accurately.
It’s significant in more than a few ways that the risks advocated so bravely by those who would see personal responsibility for one’s fortunes taken up by all and sundry are entirely economic or extend from so.
No risk of being beaten in the marketplace for an insulting comment, no risk of being robbed of one’s hard-gathered wealth at the point of a gun or sword. No risk of being eaten by predators during a walk in the park.
Physical risk is unthinkable, base, primitive, taboo, except in certain designated areas and marginal, sanctioned endeavors.
The cutting insult is admired, the cutting blade reviled, by the same crafty fellows who would have us all bear the shames and glories of our respective engagements with the economy, on our own and without complaint.
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