The Conservative Consensus

by digby

As I read about all the intermural jockeying for power and the discussions of a progressive agenda for the next congress, I can’t help but feel a little bit overwhelmed by the challenge we are going to face in the next few years.

Jonathan Cohn spells it out:

No, Bush hasn’t enacted a conservative version of the New Deal. But, even though some of his most grandiose proposals failed, he has still managed to leave a lasting mark on economic policy–and, through it, the economy. His tax cuts have shifted wealth in this country from the poor and middle-class to the rich. At the same time, they have destroyed the balanced budgets of the Clinton era, creating large liabilities that future governments will have to pay off. If you don’t think that’s a large impact, ask Bill Clinton himself: The large deficits he inherited forced him to shelve many of his early economic plans in 1993. Even if a Democrat is elected president in 2008, he will similarly spend much of his early time in office cleaning up this fiscal mess.

Less high-profile, but no less important, have been the administration’s actions on regulation. Substantially more skeptical of regulation–and regulators–than the Clinton administration, the Bush administration has gutted agencies like the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, rejecting proposed new rules on everything from ergonomics standards to tuberculosis protections that were already in the pipeline, while failing to propose new ones. This, too, is the kind of shift that a new president, let alone a new Congress, will find difficult to undo quickly. The regulatory process takes time. And seeing proposed changes through to completion requires sustained political will, particularly when the changes rankle well-connected business groups (as they so often do).

The Bush administration’s impact on the judiciary could be even longer-lasting. The conservatives Bush has appointed to the Supreme Court–where they enjoy lifetime tenure–could easily tip the balance on issues like abortion, privacy, and the limits of executive authority, the latter two being of particular concern given the war on terror. And, speaking of war, look at what the administration has done on foreign policy: It has toppled regimes in two countries, set off a civil war in one of them, committed a large chunk of our Armed Forces to action, and basically redefined the premises of U.S. foreign policy.

These and other such changes will affect Americans–and, in some respects, the entire world–for years to come. And while the voters rejected Bush’s divisive political strategy, it was exactly that strategy–much like FDR’s–that likely made these changes feasible. Imagine that Bush had governed as an accommodator rather than an agitator, as he promised to do as a candidate in 2000. Would he be more popular now? Probably. But would the rich still have their fabulous tax breaks? Would former industry lobbyists be running around the bureaucracy, destroying regulatory agencies from the inside out? Would U.S. troops still be in Baghdad? Probably not.

As Cohn says elsewhere in the piece, “[f]or the last few years, we’ve been in a conservative political period that arguably extended all the way back to the late 1960s, when Kevin Phillips wrote of an “emerging Republican majority.”

This is the fundamental problem we face and I don’t think we have all quite grasped the enormity of that because the Republicans ran and governed during the last 40 years as if the liberals were in control and they were the angry insurgents trying to knock them off. Everyone during this period, including the Democrats, fell for it and believed that underneath it all a liberal consensus existed. But to a remarkable extent, we have had a conservative consensus for some time.

Let’s look at economics. A reader sent me this excerpt from The Economist View‘s Tim Duy, talking about Hayek, in which he excerpts some choice quotes from The Road to Serfdom and explains that even the free market God of the right understood that government was necessary to mitigate at least some of the risk of a dynamic capitalist society. Here’s what I found most interesting about this post, however:

Speaking of Keynes, Robert Skidelsky’s masterful biography includes Keynes’s thoughts on Hayek:

Keynes’s response was unexpected. Hayek’s was a “grand book,” he wrote, and “we all have the greatest reason to be grateful to you for saying so well what needs so much to be said.Morally and philosophically I find myself in agreement with virtually the whole of it; and not only in agreement, but in deeply moved agreement.”

Keynes did note, however, that Hayek, by admitting to the need for government to serve a social function, recognized that there was in fact need for a middle ground, but could not determine where to draw it.

The difference between the intellectuals, you see, isn’t really so stark. But for the last 40 years that line has been drawn far over to the right as a function of politics rather than real economic philosophy. The public economic debate has been turned into a simplistic argument over who can provide the best tax cuts and the least regulation because that’s the candy the southern strategy Republicans sold to their conservative base as the best way to defund a government which they claim always spent hard-earned tax dollars on the “wrong” people. (You know what I’m talking about…)

But it didn’t stop with them. I think I wrote before about an earnest young woman I worked with a few years back who was a compassionate liberal, voted for Democrats and even contributed time and money to the cause. One day she came into my office and breathlessly told me, “Finally, I saw someone last night on TV who knows what he’s talking about. Maybe you’ve heard of him. He’s an economist and his name is Milton Friedman.” To her, Friedman “made sense” because he reaffirmed what she’d been hearing since she was old enough to vaguely pay attention, not because she agreed with his laissez-faire theories. She didn’t even know that’s what they were. It just sounded so reasonable to her (and as Dr. Atrios pointed out here, that little bit of freshman economics can be a dangerous thing.)

The Republicans may have finally jumped the shark, after failing so dramatically at governance, but they have inculcated their thinking so thoroughly into people’s minds that many people don’t even know it. The way most people think about government, and the vocabulary they all use, comes from the Republican playbook. It’s going to take a huge effort to get people thinking about it in new ways. (There are a lot of smart people working on that, thank goodness.)

But right now, we are stuck in the same old groove:

Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid said reviving several popular business and middle-class tax breaks that expired at the end of 2005 will be at the top of his party’s agenda when Congress returns next week for a postelection session.

It’s not that I don’t want to see middle class families and small businesses have some more money in their pockets. I do. I haven’t looked at the economic implication of these tax reductions and maybe they even make sense. But I’m pretty sure this is simple politics (and undoubtedly good politics) in which the Democrats prove their tax-cutting bonafides to the constituency both parties need — the middle class. In today’s political climate, you aren’t delivering, if you aren’t delivering “tax relief.”

That’s as true blue Republican as you can get. And at some point Democrats are going to have to start rolling this back and making the case that delivering for the middle class means providing the safety net and provision for the less fortunate that allows average Americans the freedom to take risks and fuel our dynamic economy — like taking new jobs or starting a new business. Tax cuts are like candy — they taste good, but the individual middle class worker and her family doesn’t get nearly the nutritious bang for the buck that the safety net and government programs do. Liberals and progressives need to start changing the political dialog in ways that talk about risk management and security and fair trade and wage growth — things we really believe in and which can make an affirmative, lasting difference in people’s lives.

There are so many great economists in the blogosphere who are much smarter than I am about these things and who can speak in great detail about policy, so I will leave them to it. But before we get to that I think we are going to have to start thinking about how to make our argument in new terms and talk to people about their relationship to their government in new ways.

My first suggestion for this new vocabulary isn’t really mine, but a reader’s from some time back who pointed out my use of the term “tax burden” was an example of unthinking adoption of conservative rhetoric. He was right. He suggested that we start talking about it as “paying the bills” something that everyone understands. I think that makes sense. You can’t blow smoke in people’s faces by trying to tell them that taxes are “good.” That’s dreaming. But everyone knows that we have to pay the bills and our bill for the services we get — national defense, social security for the disabled and elderly, medical research, roads and bridges,air traffic control, clean air and water, veterans benefits and on and on and on aren’t free. It’s a bill that has to be paid for both the individual and common good. We need the insurance it provides, the pension, the health care (universal someday, old age right now) the health and safety, the security. And there is no free lunch on that stuff, it’s the price we pay to live in a first world, thriving democracy in the 21st century. If you don’t want to pay those bills, move to a third world country and see what not having to pay them gets an average person.

Right now, we are going to have to deal with some rich kids who stole the car, blew the inheritance and ran up a bunch of debt and we are going to have to make them pay it back. Their bills are going to be high for a while. They have plenty of money. They won’t suffer much, even though they should.

The conservative consensus says that low taxes, limited government, individual rights, strong national defense and family values equals a better life. Many people, including many liberals, have absorbed that message into their worldview and it’s going to take some work to unravel it. It won’t happen through issue advocacy. People already favor all the government programs they depend on (and some they that don’t even exist, yet.) But they have been disconnected from government itself — their ownership of it and their obligation to keep it working. Until we successfully challenge the conservative consensus with new language and new ways of thinking about government and politics, it’s going to remain in place. And it’s going to be very difficult to successfully advance the progressive agenda until that changes.

Update: As DB reminds me in the comments, here’s the post I wrote about Bill Sher’s book on this very topic.

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