Great dialogue on future of the GOP and conservative movement from Slate. I broke it into two parts.
http://www.slate.com/id/2203800/entry/2203801/From: Jim Manzi
To: Tucker Carlson, Ross Douthat, Douglas Kmiec, Kathleen Parker, Christine Todd Whitman
Subject: A Return to Reaganism Won't Be Enough
Posted Wednesday, Nov. 5, 2008, at 9:04 AM ET
Tucker, Ross, Douglas, Kathleen, and Christine,
What should the GOP, and the conservative movement more generally, be concentrating on for the next few years? Developing, demonstrating, and communicating solutions to the current problems of the middle class.
Most conservatives who propose a return to "Reagan conservatism" don't understand either the motivations or structure of the Reagan economic revolution. The 1970s were a period of economic crisis for America as it emerged from global supremacy to a new world of real economic competition. The Reagan economic strategy for meeting this challenge was sound money plus deregulation, broadly defined. It succeeded, but it exacerbated a number of pre-existing trends that began or accelerated in the '70s that tended to increase inequality.
International competition is now vastly more severe than it was 30 years ago. The economic rise of the Asian heartland is the fundamental geostrategic fact of the current era. In aggregate, America is rich and economically successful but increasingly unequal, with a stagnating middle class. If we give up the market-based reforms that allow us to prosper, we will lose by eventually allowing international competitors to defeat us. But if we let inequality grow unchecked, we will lose by eventually hollowing out the middle class and threatening social cohesion. This rock-and-a-hard-place problem, not some happy talk about the end of history, is what "globalization" means for the United States.
Seen in this light, the challenge in front of conservatives is clear: How do we continue to increase the market orientation of the American economy while helping more Americans to participate in it more equally?
Here are two ideas among many.
First, improve K-12 schools. U.S. public schools are in desperate need of improvement and have been for decades. We do not prepare the average American child to succeed versus international competition. Schools can do only so much to fix this—in a nation where 37 percent of births are out-of-wedlock, many children will be left behind—but it would be a great start if the average school didn't go out of its way to make kids lazy and stupid.
No amount of money or number of "programs" will create anything more than marginal improvements, because public schools are organized to serve teachers and administrators rather than students and families. We need, at least initially, competition for students among public schools in which funding moves with students and in which schools are far freer to change how they operate. As we have seen in the private economy, only markets will force the unpleasant restructuring necessary to unleash potential. Conservatives have long had this goal but are unprepared to win the fight. Achieving it would be at least a decade-long project.
The role of the federal government could be limited but crucial. Suppose it established a comprehensive national exam by grade level to be administered by all schools and universities that receive any federal money and required each school to publish all results, along with other detailed data about school budgets, performance, and so forth each year. Secondary, profit-driven information providers, analogous to credit-rating agencies and equity analysts, would arise to inform decision-making. The federal role would be very much like that of the Securities and Exchange Commission for equity markets: to ensure that each school published accurate, timely, and detailed data. This would not only improve schools in the aggregate but also serve to provide a more realistic path of economic advancement to anybody with a reasonably responsible family and help to acculturate more Americans to a market economy. This would also become a model for other reform of entitlement programs, from retirement accounts to medial care.
Second, reconsider immigration policy. What if, once we had control of our southern border, we came to view the goal of immigration policy as recruiting instead of law enforcement? Once we established a target number of immigrants per year, we could set up recruiting offices looking for the best possible talent everywhere from Beijing to Helsinki. It would be great for America as a whole to have, say, 500,000 very smart, motivated people move here each year with the intention of becoming citizens. It would also do wonders for equality if they were not almost all desperately poor, unskilled, and competing with already low-wage workers.
Other examples of policies that can raise competitiveness and lower inequality, ranging from reduced small-business regulation to allowing individuals tax deductibility for private health care purchases to automatic (with an opt-out) enrollment for 401(k) plans, become obvious once you start to look for them. What they tend to have in common is a focus on building human capital and effective market institutions. That is, they build the key resources of the new economy.
The conservative movement has become excessively dogmatic and detached from realities on the ground. It needs to become more empirical and practical—which strike me as traditionally conservative attitudes.
From: Douglas W. Kmiec
To: Tucker Carlson, Ross Douthat, Jim Manzi, Kathleen Parker, and Christine Todd Whitman
Subject: The Not-So-Grand, Really-Old-Idea Party
Posted Wednesday, Nov. 5, 2008, at 10:22 AM ET
Tucker, Ross, Jim, Kathleen, and Christine,
Ronald Reagan attracted me to his side in 1980 with five words: "family, work, neighborhood, peace, and freedom." It was Barack Obama who spoke in those timeless terms in this election, and he received his just reward Tuesday evening. What's more, he spoke about them by using well-considered, new ideas—for example, universal health insurance, as well as a national commitment (and not just an anemic executive order) for faith-based and often neighborhood social-service delivery.
How might Republicans catch up? With respect to family, it has been a good many years since the Supreme Court approved vouchers, yet Republicans have yet to pursue the opportunity. A nationwide voucher effort for math and science, or a voucher for full tuition, for low-achieving children would have plenty of social-science research and support behind it. It would also put families back in charge of the upbringing of their children.
The right to life remains a highly important and sensitive topic. Republicans have been trying to sell themselves for so long on the basis of judicial appointments and the supposed "fifth vote" to overturn Roe, sometimes you wonder if they realize how selecting judges on that basis disserves the rule of law. It also keeps Republicans perennially looking like the gang that can't shoot straight—given the number of "fifth votes" they've already appointed to the court, from Sandra Day O'Connor to Anthony Kennedy to David Souter.
The Democrats had a brilliant strategy on abortion this year: Don't play the futile court speculation game. Instead, Obama's team promoted life in ways that don't depend upon a Supreme Court vacancy and cooperating nominee. Specifically, Obama had the Dems commit to promote life with enhanced social and economic assistance. This idea had traction—the Catholic vote literally switched from Republican to Democrat, going (in preliminary numbers) 55-45 for Obama nationwide, which is amazing given the amount of outright lies and falsehoods the GOP was purveying about the president-elect on this issue. (Not to mention the co-conspiring clergy the Republicans captured, who were literally preaching that voters would go to hell for voting for Barack.) The Republicans became the party of fear and damnation rather than solution or respect for life. As a consequence, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, and Virginia are in the Democratic, not the Republican, column.
It's admittedly hard to untie the abortion knot, but here's a thought: Republicans could have moved a constitutional amendment that would presume life to begin at conception, while further providing that no government, federal or state, is competent to legislate on the question absent a supermajority. The effect? Taking the Supreme Court's "activist" thumb off the scale against life while at the same time avoiding the criminalization of a woman's freedom. This is not the ideal Catholic position, but it's closer, and the Catholic Church has less standing to complain about a grant of freedom that could then be fairly influenced by the moral instruction associated with a woman's religious choice.
Of course, respecting the dignity of work requires Republicans to think past the pretense of the unregulated market, which as an ideal has never truly existed. One might expect that Republicans, as the proponents of the benefits of vibrant competition, would not promote antitrust principles that reduce competition by making mergers and consolidation too available. Incentives promoting both employment security and better work/family balance are also worth exploring.
As for peace, it is well past time that the neoconservatives be given a good swift boot out of the Pentagon, if not the town. Then Republicans could give up trying to sell us the stale bill of goods that Iraq is the central front of anything or that the surge is working. Trade, too, remains an opportunity for expanded freedom. Our principles of international trade should match the stronger EU market integration that minimizes impediments to commerce, rather than permit even the most heavy-handed regulation so long as it is facially nondiscriminatory between in-state and out-of-state commerce.
Finally, beyond these somewhat wonkish ideas for policy innovation, Republicans ought to remember occasionally that they are—or at least were—the party of Lincoln, and ought to promote civil and human rights. That is better than dragging one's feet on reasonable ways to break up the systematic racism or gender stereotypes that still inhabit much of our culture.
The GOP also needs to recruit some new blood. Ron Paul was young at heart and amusingly nonconformist, and Sarah Palin was well-dressed, if somewhat goofy in demeanor. Mitt Romney looked, thought, and acted like a president, which is probably why a party that indulges far too much gratuitous intramural sniping over whether Hayek or von Mises is the better thinker eliminated him with embarrassing sniping about his faith.
Given the historic opportunities embodied by the talented and inspiring Barack Obama, it is not clear to me that any GOP candidate could have prevailed. But one thing is obvious even to the man on the street: A campaign without a fresh face or new ideas was more of the same—and if nothing succeeds like success, nothing new succeeds at even less.
Welcome to the wilderness. It is time to think, rather than grouse or govern.
From: Ross Douthat
To: Tucker Carlson, Douglas W. Kmiec, Jim Manzi, Kathleen Parker, and Christine Todd Whitman
Subject: No One To Blame but Ourselves
Posted Wednesday, Nov. 5, 2008, at 11:30 AM ET
Tucker, Doug, Jim, Kathleen, and Christine,
Two years ago, while the Republicans were busy losing the House and the Senate, a young conservative writer named Michael Brendan Dougherty inclined his ear to the sound of right-wing recriminations and observed that "at the end of the day, the arguments all seem to boil down to something similar: If it were more like me, the Republican Party would be better off. It's failing because it's like you."
In the wake of Barack Obama's victory, this will be the pattern of conservative commentary for months and perhaps years to come. Foreign-policy realists will insist neoconservatism doomed the Bush administration to failure. Anti-immigration activists will claim that the Republican Party would have beaten Obama if only it had nominated somebody who actually opposed illegal immigration, instead of just pretending. Small-government conservatives will claim that if the Bush administration had only held the line on domestic spending, everything would have turned out differently. The dwindling band of Rockefeller Republicans will blame the whole thing on social conservatives for being too strident about abortion and gay marriage and turning off moderates; social conservatives, for their part, will argue that John McCain didn't talk enough about abortion and gay marriage. And so on.
I have my own dog in a number of these fights, but it's important to point out that nearly every faction will be able to score some points and lay some blame: A pair of defeats as resounding as '06 and '08 have a thousand fathers, no matter how much every right-winger would like to assign paternity to someone else. Which means that the best thing, by far, for the American right would be for every sect within the conservative temple to spend some time in self-examination before it turns to flinging blame.
Social conservatives, a group in which I count myself, might profitably meditate on how to disentangle our primary political goal—the protection of the unborn—from secondary issues like, say, abstinence-only education and the debate over evolution and intelligent design, which dovetail too easily with caricatures of religious fundamentalism (as Mike Huckabee and Sarah Palin both discovered in the media coverage of their campaigns). Meanwhile, those Republicans who wish that the GOP spend more time talking about, say, capital-gains tax rates and less time talking about abortion should recognize that in this election, the McCain ticket did exactly that, sidestepping the social issues and instead emphasizing a business-friendly tax agenda and (late in the game) Joe the Plumber's case against progressive taxation. This strategy did not exactly reap impressive returns.
Or, again, anti-immigration hawks should ponder the fact that in the long run, the GOP cannot win without Hispanic votes, and recognize that the party's increasingly poor showing in the Southwest has a lot to do with the bile that some conservatives direct at illegal immigrants. But advocates of comprehensive immigration reform should recognize that they lack credibility with many voters who are motivated by concerns for law and order rather than by bigotry; that by nominating John McCain, the most pro-immigration figure among the primary contenders, the GOP gained exactly nothing with Hispanic voters; and that the party will need other ways to win Latinos than simply pandering to their ethnic loyalties.
Likewise, in foreign policy, neoconservatives would do well to draw chastening lessons—about the utility of pre-emptive war, America's capacity for nation-building, and so on—from the debacles of the last four years. But neoconservatism did not give us Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, and it's not as though there was a groundswell of opposition to the invasion of Iraq among non-neocon right-wingers. And the realist community, in particular, might profitably ponder how so many of its members found themselves supporting the invasion of Iraq and then opposing the only strategy—the surge—that's offered any hope of a decent outcome in that country.
There's a great deal of talk about a conservative crackup at the moment, as there always is after a big defeat. And some cracking-up will no doubt take place: Some factions and demographics will leave the right-wing tent, never to return, and others will (I hope!) join up in their place. But I suspect that the conservative coalition won't change all that much, once the dust has settled: There will still be free-marketeers and religious conservatives, idealists and realists, libertarians and law-and-order types. And as long as we're all going to be living together, each faction would do well to give the beams in their own eyes at least as much attention as they give the motes in the eyes of their neighbors.
