Yes, the Democratic Party Has a Real Ideology: Equality

It's become common, among intelligent, political-science-literate types, to say that the Democratic and Republican Parties are organized in qualitatively different ways. The Republican Party is highly ideological, the thinking goes: it's defined by a monolithic commitment to conservative principles. The Democrats, on the other hand, are commonly described as a coalition, maybe even a loose one, of different interest groups. Paul Krugman's latest blog post is largely in this same tradition, with one major variation; it repeats the "coalition of interest groups" description of the Democrats verbatim, but Krugman describes the Republicans as "an engine designed to harness white resentment on behalf of higher incomes for the donor class"--and, as he notes, "the base never cared about the ideology." It's not very hard to diagnose this particular fault-line in the party right now, since Trump basically represents a rebellion on behalf of the white-resentment-y voters against the donor class-favoring party elites.

But I've always thought that this description of the two parties is wrong. Certainly I think it's wrong as to the Democrats, and it might even be totally backwards. Certainly the common wisdom accurately captures the way the parties seem to behave in practice. But if you look deeper, I'm not sure it's so true. The Democrats do have an ideology. You could call it liberalism if you wanted, but egalitarianism is probably a better name. Liberal egalitarianism is better still, if not so pithy. I like that formulation, though, because I'm using the word "liberal" in its technical or political-theory sense, meaning generally a commitment to expansive individual freedom. I also demote liberalism, in this sense, to the position of modifier, with egalitarianism remaining the noun.

And I like that, because I do think that egalitarianism is the central organizing concept of the Democratic Party.

You Don't Have the Votes

"This is a wonderful moment to be a conservative," declares David Brooks in the opening of his column today. That sounds strange, given the general despair gripping the Republican Party, and in particular the "it would be nice if our party weren't so goddamn crazy" faction of the Republican Party, but his closing paragraph explains what he means:

We’re going to have two parties in this country. One will be a Democratic Party that is moving left. The other will be a Republican Party. Nobody knows what it will be, but it’s exciting to be present at the re-creation.

On the one hand, that sounds about right. I've long thought something along these lines: that the Republican Party as we know it has a clear expiration-date, that eventually it would have to reshape itself, but that I couldn't for the life of me imagine what it would come out the other side looking like. Brooks suggests that Trump represents the destruction of the old party, the "model crisis" in which the old Republican ideas, having grown unworkable over the past few decades, come crashing to the ground. This sets up an opening for a new Republican paradigm, a new model for the party.

But here's the thing: that new Republican Party doesn't have the votes. Not yet, and probably not for a long time. The big problem in American politics right now is that there's a section of the country, no longer large enough to win a general election, as it was back in the 1980s, but still big enough to dominate one party's primaries, which is bitterly committed to a mixture of what we might charitably call white nationalism and conservative Christian traditionalism. Those voters want nothing to do with the new Republican Party Brooks wants. They're angry about America's increasing pluralism, and about the fact that white Christians no longer get to just run everything without serious opposition. Hell, it's worse than that, for them, as this piece about Trump-as-Jefferson-Davis observes: like the South after the Election of 1860, these voters are looking at a bleak future of being consistently outvoted by those who would tear down the social institutions and traditions they hold most dear.

Brooks wants the new Republican Party to be "compassionate," but these voters have, it appears, no compassion for anyone outside their own little group, and precious little of it even within the group.

Brooks wants the new Republican Party to have an "expansive open" nationalism, but these voters are practically defined by the "closed, ethnic nationalism" Brooks decries.

Brooks wants the new Republican Party to be "honest," but these voters feel so threatened by reality that they demand unwavering loyalty from their politicians to ideas they'd have to be either fools or knaves to espouse.

Brooks wants the new Republican Party to focus less on economic theory and more on "sociology," but... well, okay, let's be honest. These voters don't give a damn about homo economicus and the conservative economic theories which have used him as their justification. As for sociology, though, I fear these voters only have interest in "binding a fragmenting society, reweaving family and social connections" in one way, and not one that involves "relating across the diversity of a globalized world."

The basic point is that the people voting for Trump like Trump. They like what Trump stands for, and it's everything Brooks is against. What's more, even those Republicans who aren't voting for Trump are mostly voting for Ted Cruz. Let's run Cruz through the Brooks checklist. Compassionate? Hah. He's one of the least compassionate politicians you'll ever see. Expansive and open in his nationalism? Try "let's see if sand can glow in the dark" and "let's secure Muslim neighborhoods." (Actually, file those under the compassion thing as well.) Honest? Well, I guess Cruz is slightly more honest than Trump, but he's hardly honest. And as for sociology, Cruz is as fanatic about Reagan-style conservative economic theory as anyone on the Republican debate stages. Probably more. So between Trump and Cruz, we're looking at close to 80% of the Republican Party's voters who really don't want the kind of party Brooks wants.

So while I'd sure like to think the Republican Party might rise from its Trump-induced ashes in a form similar to what Brooks describes. But I just don't see where it's going to get the votes. Because the thing is, the people who have been deciding to vote for the Republican Party these last few decades are a lot more like Donald Trump than David Brooks. Perhaps that's because what David Brooks is describing is a lot more like Barack Obama's Democratic Party than it is like the Republicans.

In fact, thinking about it a bit, it sort of seems to me like American politics, particularly in the coming years, is divided in something like three parts. The first divide is between people who think that, e.g., global warming and health care and poverty and race discrimination are the problems with the world (broadly liberal priorities) and those who think that, e.g., godlessness and sexual perversion and invading hordes of Muslim terrorists and racial entitlements are the problems with the world (broadly conservative priorities). The latter form the Trump/Cruz part of the electorate. It's the vast majority of Republicans, but probably not much more than a third of the electorate. Then within the first group there's a division between those with broadly conservative (in a traditional, 1950s sense of the word) ideas about how to solve these problems and those with more aggressively liberal, verging on socialist ideas about how to solve them. That last is the people supporting Bernie, plus those who would support him except for fear that he'd lose the general. So then in the middle, the people who have broadly liberal sensibilities about what the problems are but broadly conservative sensibilities about how to fix them, are people like David Brooks. And Barack Obama, at least as he's manifested as President. (It's tough to know how much more radical he might have been in his approach with fewer political constraints.) Of course, it's really more of a spectrum between Brooks at one end and Bernie on the other, with Obama and Clinton somewhere in the middle.

In a lot of ways, this three-way divide looks a lot like the Socialist/Liberal/Conservative party systems we see in many countries. And it would be really, really nice if we could end up kicking the Trump/Cruz-style conservative faction out altogether, and having something like a socialist party and a liberal party. But those reactionary conservatives aren't going away, not all at once anyway. It'll be many decades yet before we can have a party that includes the Trump/Cruz voters but isn't dominated by them. And in the meanwhile, given that people like Brooks are starting to wake up to the fact that the reactionaries really aren't the kind of people they want to be making common cause with, it's awfully tough to see how we're gonna get two parties out of this electorate in the near future.

David Brooks may think it's a great time to be a conservative, but he's looking at a generation of alliance with either the party of Trump or the party of Obama, Clinton, and *gasp* Sanders.

It's Not About Race, It's About Racism

I try not to watch much Fox News these days. Well, any days. I mean I've never watched any Fox News, except for that one time when Stephen Colbert went on the O'Reilly Factor. But in general I try to keep my exposure level to Fox, and to conservative media in general, to a minimum. That's the kind of thing that gets you rather criticized in some parts, but seeing a few clips of Fox's coverage of the Ferguson situation has reminded me why I have this policy. It... was kind of shocking. And disturbing.

But anyway, one of the themes of the rantings of the people on Fox was that it was wrongful of liberals generally to make Ferguson and the shooting of Michael Brown about race. So here's what I have to say about that: it's not about race. It's not about race at all. Michael Brown's shooting is not outrageous because Michael Brown was black. It's outrageous because a young man was murdered. (Yes, that's conclusory, but as far as I can tell there's no reason to think it was anything other than murder, except that the perpetrator was an on-duty cop and there seem to be people who increasingly think that it's just a logical impossibility for an on-duty cop to commit murder). It's doubly outrageous because the murderer was a member of the government, of law enforcement, sworn to protect the people. Which, you might think is a bit inconsistent with murder. And the outrage is compounded by the fact that this happens a lot. And it pretty clearly doesn't have to: other countries simply don't experience significant numbers of murders by their police officers (and also don't suffer rampant violent crime by the thus-emboldened criminals).

So where does race enter the story? Because essentially all the victims of police murder in this country happen to be black. Or to put it another way, race only enters the equation because racist, violent police officers put it there. Michael Brown's death was an outrage simply because he was human and he was murdered. The point is that he was murdered because he was black, as an awful lot of other people have been. So it's really not about race, and it's certainly not really about his race. It's about racism, and the racism which seems to spawn most of the police violence and brutality in this country. This is also, of course, why you see lots and lots of white people every bit as outraged as any black person about Ferguson (or at least very nearly; I wouldn't want to presume that those of us who don't live under this threat can quite understand just how terrifying it is). The conflict here isn't white against black, it's racists against non-racists. The former are a rather large subset of white people; the latter are a coalition of non-whites and white liberals. And those of us in the not-racist coalition are all equally outraged about Brown's death, and about the conservative indifference to his death (sorry, did I say conservative? I meant racist, it's so easy to get confused these days). We'd be equally outraged at the shooting of a white person by cops, except that, well... that doesn't happen so much.

Any guesses why that might be, Fox contributors?

::crickets::

The Left is More Moderate 'Cause We've Been Winning

Kevin Drum has a post today arguing that there's no great mystery why the Republican Party is so much more beholden to its radical wing than the Democrats are: there are a lot more radical right-wingers than radical left-wingers these days. I think that's basically true, but I have another thought: part of the reason why that's true is that the liberals have been winning. Most notably we've been winning the culture wars. Over the last half-century, American society has been remade in a wildly more progressive, individualistic, liberal direction. We're a long way from perfect application of the ideals of egalitarianism and individual liberty, but as a society we are pretty clearly trying, and committed to trying. And the government's been a big part of that. Sure, there have been a lot of Republican Presidents lately, but almost all of the big stuff they did that liberals dislike was about concentrating the economic resources of the extremely wealthy. That's not a trivial issue, but we're a long way from fighting over segregation or rampant sex discrimination. Notably, since post-Reagan Republicans have embraced deficits just for the hell of it, they're been able to pursue this pro-rich agenda without actually doing too much damage to the anti-poverty parts of the budget; programs have been cut a little at the margins, but the only time a central plank of the social insurance scheme was structurally altered was welfare reform and that, apparently, worked out a lot better than most liberals expected. The point is, someone who thirty or forty or fifty years ago felt the need to demand massive liberal changes both from the political process and from society at large would find that they've received a pretty large chunk of those demands, with more pretty clearly on the way in the near future (on gay rights, Obamacare actually taking effect, maybe immigration reform and some sort of executive action on climate change, etc.)

If, however, you were a conservative those same few decades ago, well, the intervening years have been a horror show. Particularly if you were a social conservative, you are now greeted with the spectacle of all these strange people running around acting like they're your equal. (Women, black people, Hispanics, gays, atheists, etc.) It's now just routine that everyone, not just weirdo free-love hippie types but nearly every ordinary American young adult, has a sex life that would've been considered scandalously promiscuous when you were born. People go around cursing all the time. You get the point: a certain vision of how American society should be structured, one held by a not-insignificant portion of the populace, has pretty much died over the past couple of generations. Which turns yesterday's conservative into today's apocalyptic reactionary, no longer merely making the Burkean argument that we should hesitate to make significant changes but forced to argue that changes which have already taken place are in fact destroying American society. That's a much more radical posture, and I think the frantic sense of doom has been really magnified by the fact that we've got a black President now. Nothing gets people riled up like identity politics, and for a long time now the ascendant American identity has been the liberal one.

I'm honestly not sure what explains the over-the-top hostility found these days among the one group within the Republican coalition that's been making out like bandits over this same time period, namely rich people and financiers. One way to look at it would be that they've transmuted the simple desire to have more money, rooted in nothing more than good old-fashioned rational self-interest a.k.a. greed, into a kind of identity politics, where anyone who doesn't just want to back a truck full of cash (and no small bills, please) up to the gates of their mansion is committing some unforgivable slight. That's a phenomenon in itself, but more broadly I think it's true that the liberal identity has been whupping the conservative identity's ass for generations and that this trend shows every sign of continuing. What more explanation do we need for the perceived radicalism gap?

Evaluating Policy Platforms By Their Relationship to the Status Quo, Right-Wing Racism Edition

Jonathan Chait has a very good post (as most of his are, though I'm not actually sure I agree with him in his recent spats with Matt Yglesias about college football and the impending war in Syria) about how conservatives are wrong that racism is over. The basic point he makes is that, while the conservative stance on racial issues is a lot less horrible than it was 50 years ago when Martin Luther King marched on Washington, it's still a good long way from perfect, in some ways that are genuinely pretty blameworthy even though it's genuinely not as bad as it used to be. It's sort of continuing on his earlier post about Republican voter suppression efforts, saying that while they're legitimately not as bad as Jim Crow disenfranchisement, they're still pretty bad. And while I agree with the substance of his posts, there's something I'd like to add.

No, Conservatism Is Not Individualistic

A number of discussions I've had recently have featured my interlocutor blandly asserting that the Republican Party, and conservative ideology, is individualistic. I would, therefore, just like to take a moment to point out that this is wrong. So that I'm not just making stuff up, I'll even link to a blog post of Kevin Drum's that quotes from a scientific(ish) study about the moral attitudes of liberals and conservatives. (That post is actually about misperceptions of the moral attitudes of ideological groups, but my focus is just on the evidence about the actual attitudes.) The money quote:

 "Liberals endorse the individual-focused moral concerns of compassion and fairness more than conservatives do, and conservatives endorse the group-focused moral concerns of ingroup loyalty, respect for authorities and traditions, and physical/spiritual purity more than liberals do."

The way I'd put it is that liberals value individuals, and therefore, among other things, want group structures to benefit individuals. We want the community to help and take care of the individuals in that community, and the reason we want this is that we care about the individuals. We also want, insofar as it's consistent with the above goal and the welfare of other individuals, to let individuals do whatever they individually want to do. Conservatives, on the other hand, are opposed to the community-helping-individuals thing, at least if the helping is organized through a collective public entity (i.e. the government) rather than through individual private acts (i.e. charity). Basically (and this is painting with a bit of a broad brush) conservatives are okay with individuals helping themselves and individuals helping other individuals (if they want to), but they particularly care about individuals helping the group entity, for the sake of that group entity. Liberals want the group/individual relationship to run the other way. Which of these is more individualistic, do you think? Individuals pressed into service for the good of the group, or group structures created and maintained for the good of individuals? A mix of on-your-own-ism and patriotic-loyalty-ism is not individualism. One might almost call it anti-individualism, since there's very little interest in having public policy concern itself with the interests of the individuals who make up the polity. Or one might just call it conservatism, and admit that that word refers to a philosophy that opposes publicly-coordinated efforts to improve the lives of individuals (poor ones, at least) and favors the firm imposition of community norms and values upon individuals who might like to dissent from those norms.

So the next time you hear someone say that the Republicans are the party of individuals, don't believe them. It's not true.

No, Conservatives Do Not Inherently Distrust Government

In another article I'm reading about the death penalty, I find the following passage (not directly about capital punishment):

"Conservatives have a supremely validated suspicion about government in all of its branches. It is almost an instinct of conservatives to distrust the wisdom of government, and therefore to limit its powers."

People say this a lot. I've seen this idea advanced recently by people arguing that conservatives ought to like Matt Yglesias' new book, The Rent is Too Damn High, since his main argument is that we should relax local land-use regulations. After all, it's deregulation! And we all know that conservatives like deregulation, and individual liberty, and restrictions on Big Government in all its guises. Right?

Well, wrong. Or, at the very least, unsupported. Conservatives like to say that this is what's motivating them, and in popular culture people generally just accept them at their word. Or perhaps they point out that they then behave in hypocritical ways by not supporting various things that are liberty-enhancing or government-limiting, or by supporting things that are liberty-restricting etc. But they don't then question the fundamental, almost definitional claim that "conservative" equates to "distrustful of government."

The Return of Conservatives Who Lie

This is sort of comforting, in an odd sort of way. From Newt Gingrich, when asked if there's anything he wouldn't do to be President:

“Sure, there are lots of things that I wouldn’t do. I wouldn’t lie to the American people. I wouldn’t switch my positions for political reasons. It’s perfectly reasonable to change your position if facts change, if you see new things you didn’t see in the past. Everybody’s done that — Ronald Reagan did it.

“It’s wrong to go around and adopt radically different positions based on your need of any one election. Because then people have to ask themselves, ‘What will you tell me next time?’

He is, of course, lying. His various policy shifts from, say, 2007 to the present day on issues like a health-care mandate or a cap-and-trade scheme to address global warming has absolutely zero to do with seeing new things he didn't see in the past. Both were mainstream, conservative, market-based approaches to pressing national or global problems four years ago. Then Obama won an election, and tried to pass them both through Congress (batting 1-for-2), and now they're both evil socialism!!! So naturally Newt is now against them. That's the exact same move Romney pulled on those issues, and which Gingrich is attacking him for. So what's comforting about this? That he feels the need to lie. The words I quoted above could've been spoken by any liberal: we're all about changing our opinions when the facts change, and in fact frequently use that justification for apparent 'flip-flops' that conservatives try to accuse us of. Now we, admittedly, do a reasonably good job of living up to that ideal, or at least of trying to, something one cannot say of Newt. But at least he feels he needs to pay lip-service to the good, liberal ideal here. It's sort of like the kind of nostalgia one might have over 'compassionate conservativism': not that there actually was anything compassionate about George W. Bush's platform, but he felt he needed to say there was. Today, most Republican candidates go around trying to reassure voters that there isn't a tiny little speck of compassion in their policy positions. That's another area where Gingrich feels the need to lie, referring to his immigration policy (of allowing local citizen-boards to deport illegals on the basis of personal whimsical dislike, which is probably unconstitutional) as 'humane.' It isn't. But it's kind of nice he thinks that a humane immigration policy is still a good thing.

They Don't Realize They're The Same

Republicans say a lot of very silly things; that's nothing new. But apparently Newt Gingrich, who somehow gets to pose as the wise elder statesman of his party despite having always been, as my dad (who remembers Gingrich's first trip to the halls of power) tells me, an unimpressive Republican hack, has just made the following dire prediction: within 60 years, America may have become a "secular atheist country." But that's not all! Because it won't just be any secular atheist country, it will, quite possibly, be a secular atheist country dominated by "radical Islamists."

Ahem.

To me what this demonstrates is not just that Republicans in general, and in this particular instance Newt Gingrich, are not the sharpest tools in the shed. It's that they really refuse to see one basic truth about the Islamic conservatives in the Middle East: they're the same as each other. Republicans in this country favor, relative to the overall political culture here, state support of religion, restrictive laws and customs regarding sexuality, censorship of the press and of literature, militaristic nationalism, the death penalty, etc. They also both tend to be, relative to their culture, scornful of democracy and willing to use violence or the threat thereof to avoid being judged by democracy. Liberals tend to oppose the Republican Party or the Tea Party or Pat Robertson for the same reason for the same reasons that we oppose Hamas, the Taliban, or the Muslim Brotherhood. No, Republicans are not as bad as these groups, not in absolute terms. But they want to move our society in the direction of what the Islamists want their societies to look like. And we don't like that.

Why do Republicans oppose the Islamists? The simplest explanation is competition. After all, while the faction that opposes state support of religion is going to oppose all groups that favor state support of a given religion, the faction backing state support of a given religion ought also oppose all the groups favoring state support of other religions. If we're establishing right-wing Islam, we can't exactly be establishing right-wing Christianity at the same time, even if many of the public policies formed as a result would be similar. Alternately there's just the plain old racist/intolerant explanation, i.e. that most conservative Christians in this country just don't like Arabs. But the point is, they don't seem to get that they are in the same role in the American political culture that the Islamists play in the Mideast's political culture. And so you have Gingrich being scared of those secular, atheist, radical Islamists. Which, last time I checked, don't exist.