I lost half of yesterday afternoon obsessing over early election returns, the evening hours brooding about the GOP defeat, and much of this morning so far catching up on post-mortems. I’m providing my own (perhaps overly) bleak outlook here with the proviso that I intend to spend the rest of the day—and my life—trying to look ahead to happier things.
Scouring Twitter for solace among fellow conservatives, someone mentioned this election wasn’t about Americans choosing the wrong guy but about conservatives failing to articulate their principles. I have to disagree. Conservatives articulated their principles forcefully in opposing Obamacare, for example. They were right to do so given the conservative principles about liberty and the role of government. Conservatives don’t follow those principles always or in the same way, but I’ll get to that in a minute. The law has the rare distinction of exceeding Congress’s authority under the Commerce Clause, as the Supreme Court held. Although it was upheld as a tax, it is technically unconstitutional under the Origination Clause, which requires all tax measures to originate in the House. It’s a long shot SCOTUS will reach that issue in the case currently pending, though. The point surely would have been argued had the Court ever indicated it was considering taking the tax argument seriously. I don’t mean to re-litigate Obamacare. The point is that there were (and still are) real problems with it in principle. A majority of Americans agreed and even still agree. But what happened when conservatives took up the principled position? When they maintained that position? They were tarred as obstructionists.
The reason the GOP’s principles were considered obstructionist stems from the fact that they supported an individual mandate in the 90s. So they did. The GOP is institutionally conservative, after all, and sometimes that cuts both ways when it motivates them toward protectionist and anti-competitive policies and to kowtow to big business. But conservatism and the GOP are also chastened by their countervailing commitment to liberty. Is that hypocritical? It may be somewhat schizophrenic, sure. Any ideology that tries to achieve a balance of liberty and security necessarily must be. Ideologies that don’t deal with these difficult balancing acts are called the Libertarian Party, the Green Party, etc., and they don’t cause the major parties any concern whatsoever. But there are principled ways to find middle ground and have a meaningful place in policy-making, and the GOP proposed some as alternatives to the conservative/progressive ideas that Obamacare espoused. They were rejected as not ambitious enough, and the Democrats were satisfied to tar the GOP as obstructionists to the extent they professed a commitment to inflexible principles, and as flip-floppers to the extent they proposed more nuanced views. The Democrats don’t want a GOP that moves to the center. They want a GOP that will just leave them alone like the other principled fringe parties do.
This election season has had me writing about politics and the election much more than I’m comfortable doing. I’m obviously partisan, but I understand and appreciate nuances. I believe conservatism allows for nuance within a principled framework. As much as I’ve tried, though, I can’t find any legible framework of principles in modern liberalism—the liberalism whose heredity is in the protectionist conservatism of the mislabeled “progressive” movement under Teddy Roosevelt, Taft, and Wilson, and then dusted off and mislabeled again as “liberalism” under FDR. Musings on modern political ideologies seem to me like notes from Babel.
That form of conservatism/progressivism/liberalism is anything but liberal. In fact, the more I study that train of political thought the more I confirm that its very essence is the rejection of principles, and most importantly, principles of liberty. It is Hegelianism in the form of political ideology. It is the truth of an ever-changing History: truth as action, truth as will, truth as power. As an objectivist, as one who believes in universal truth, it simply is not within my constitution to understand modern “liberalism,” let alone to be a “liberal.” And so the sting in losing elections to a modern liberal like Obama has less to do with what he will accomplish. Although I was fooled four years ago by people who insisted he would “govern from the center,” I tend to believe that the House will act as a firewall against his doing to much more illiberal damage. No, my fear is not about the policies that will be enacted in the next four years. It is about the extent to which his existentialist political philosophy will change how we understand society, individual, government, and their relation to one another. What is a “right” if we reject the founders’ concept of negative liberty? Who owes the corresponding duty? I’ve asked that question on these pages a number of times, and despite the number of smart liberals here, I’ve never gotten a cogent answer. I’ve found common ground that the “idea” of liberty carries some emotional weight, some psychic significance. But there is no intellectual machinery offered by modern liberalism to guide us in questions about when it must yield to some other value. When truth is merely defined by History, there is never a need to answer those questions. Times change, and so does truth. Is there any wonder why conservatives resist change when those are the stakes?
This reelection, I fear, goes some length to making this all a moot point. Obamacare is in, and the consensus seems to be that it makes health care a “right.” (Actually, it’s only health coverage, quite different from care, but that’s another story.) This is further precedent that we get rights when the Government says so and that’s that. A better answer about the nature of rights can neither be expected nor given. The rub is that we also cannot now expect or demand a better answer when the government deprives us of rights, either. We prostituted that principle in exchange for the “right” to government entitlements. The modern liberal America is actually strikingly illiberal: The government giveth and the government taketh away on its say so. If liberty is not a fixed, objective concept, it has no protection to offer us. The Declaration of Independence ushered in a liberal nation that, by degrees, ceased to exist sometime during this modern conservative/progressive era that began in earnest a century ago.
So perhaps conservatives and classical liberals will attempt to regroup and define and refine their principles for the next contest. But in addition to the attacks they will receive on top of being “divisive” and “hypocritical,” they will also have to hear that they’ve already lost this fight. This is a nation we liberal conservatives no longer recognize because it is indeed not the same nation. Liberal democracy is something of a misnomer because democracy eventually devours liberalism. The aspect of conservatism that sought to stave off that eclipse has failed, and for me, that is the bitterest part of the defeat.
In the meanwhile, I will pray for the health of our aging justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Anthony Kennedy. With them and the other constitutional conservatives on the Court, and scarcely anywhere else, our founding principles still live.
Oh, pish. The only reason the mandate exists is because conservatives did everything possible to stop a public option and succeeded, thus achieving an outcome that is inferior both from an economically left-wing perspective (it’s a giveaway to corporations, as it requires people to buy health insurance without making it competitively priced) and a liberty/choice perspective.
If you’ve got a public option, you don’t have to require private companies to cover pre-existing conditions; the public option can cover them. You don’t have to require people to buy health insurance, because that’s only needed to deal with the results of requiring the companies to cover pre-existing conditions. You have an insurance option that’s reasonably priced. It’s what Obama advocated in the primary, and what he supported at the start, and what the Republicans wouldn’t tolerate. They preferred the mandate because it’s easier to demagogue against.
Don’t shoot yourself in the foot and turn around and blame it on the Dems.
Case in point. According to you, the GOP was obstructionist wrt stopping single payer. in reality they didn’t even have the power to stop it. The fact is, we didn’t get single payer because Americans didn’t want single-payer. http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2009062408/why-not-single-payer. Turns out, they didn’t want Obamacare at all, but Dems were still able to get the bill through. Now it can marinate and soften Americans’ predisposition against big government, liberty-infringing programs. Before long, single payer will be back on the table after History has changed the meaning of liberty.
The agenda here is to change truth as much as it is to change policy. That’s the real problem, in my view.
(edited for clarity. -tk)
“The only reason the mandate exists is because conservatives did everything possible to stop a public option and succeeded”
…like what?
I keep hearing about how the public option was “politically impossible”. Nobody ever has an example of how anything like it was actually rejected. It’s just “well we knew the Republicans would block it so we didn’t even bring it up, THOSE REPUBLICAN BASTARDS!”
…they did bring it up. The Republicans made perfectly clear they would never support it. Obama watered things down and brought in the mandate because he wanted to get a couple Republican senators to back it because it he was being all bipartisan. And then the Republicans howled about tyranny.
But it didn’t matter what the Republicans would or wouldn’t support, because they didn’t have the votes to make a difference.
Baucus got bribed by the insurance companies. As Usual.
*shrugs*Dems don’t have enough liberals. As Usual.
I loved, loved, loved this post Tim. Of all the Pro-Romney and/or Anti-Obama post-morts I have seen today, this one is head and shoulders above.
Many thanks, Tod. That means a great deal coming from you.
Incidentally, I started Notes From Babel, the predecessor to this blog, in the days after Obama’s 2008 election. So at least my blogging mission statement is still intact.
May it stay so, for many, many elections into the future 🙂
Nice shot. Left myself open on that one.
It was already clear that the federal government giveth and taketh away when President Washington led an army to smash tax revolters fighting a tax raised by the Feds to pay for expenses other states had run up.
There’s a lot I could say about this post, but I’ll just make this one observation: I find it more than a little ironic that after 30 years of doing everything in their power to turn “liberal” into a swear-word, now all of a sudden, cons and libertarians seem to be doing everything in their power to reclaim it as their own. Weird.
This is an excellent post, I don’t agree with it but it’s thought provoking.
For my own edification if you wouldn’t mind clarifying for me Tim: When the dust cleared in 2008 and the GOP was looking down the barrel of the House, and 59* seat Senate and Presidency what was the health care reform that they offered? How many votes in the Senate and House did they offer to Obama in exchange for him taking up their proposal? When did Obama formally reject their offer of support and their suggestions? Is there some reason why some very prominent GOP leaders are on record saying that the plan was to oppose Obama, no matter what he proposed, from the get go?
*Frankin, you’ll recall, was tied up by the MN state GOP for most of that year on procedural and legal challenges to his win.
Okay, North, you cleared the bar!
A McSnarksnark Snarkity-Snark award for you!
Oh sweet triumph, ecstasy and bliss! It’s more beautiful than I ever imagined and… hey! The pointy teeth are just foil and underneath it’s chocolate! Now I love it more than ever!
I’d like to thank the Snark-Academy and the Snarkity-electorate and of course the noble clan McSnarksnark for this honor!
I’m focusing on this passage because it jumped out at me in its original form, and here rewritten. I think you make two important errors. First you underestimate the stability (and coherence) of the alternative vision of rights (and liberty) on offer. Second, you overestimate the extent to which this perspective is rooted in the idea that these rights exist because “the government says so and that’s that”.
You are correct that the family of rights under consideration is a post Declaration of Independence invention, a perspective on rights that’s coalesced most clearly since the Great Depression – a marrying of negative and positive rights, the traditional ideas of civil and political rights (with a longer history in America) and an emerging recognition of their indispensable corollaries: economic and social rights.
“What is a ‘right’ if we reject the founders’ concept of negative liberty?”
This alternative perspective on rights is emphatically not a rejection of negative rights. Economic and social rights are an elaboration upon civil and political rights – culminating in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the UDHR’s international human rights regime progeny. This alternative account of rights and liberty has its foundations in the same place as prior accounts, to quote the UDHR, the “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family”.
As to who owes the corresponding duty, the state is ultimately answerable for ensuring rights are realized. The state may realize these rights in any number of ways (witness the numerous methods for health care provision across the developed world). But according to this account of rights, this set of rights must be realized and they are just as important to the well-being of the populace as the rights you privilege (freedom of conscience, freedom of association, etc.).
The word conservative has also come to mean next to nothing coherent, particularly from the standpoint of its normal (non-political) definition, so I can’t get too worried about any lack of well-defined ideology for the term ‘liberal’ – esp. since it was long ago distorted into an insult meaning pretty much whatever the ‘conservative’ pundit using it wanted it to mean.
As to healthcare, I can’t see how it isn’t a right flowing from ‘life, liberty and pursuit of happiness’. Because if you have cancer, kidney disease, MS, etc. and are denied care, all 3 of those are null and void.
This is a nation we liberal conservatives no longer recognize because it is indeed not the same nation.
How old are you Tim? I took you for late thirties-ish.
Yes, 37 this month, so officially late thirties-ish.
hoooo boy. Sometimes the schaden just freudes itself.
Liberalism: A Post-Mortem haebvnfv