Greg Anrig on the GOP

He smells a wind from out of the west:

McCain's Problem Isn't His Tactics. It's GOP Ideas.: At long last, the conservative juggernaut is cracking up. From the Reagan era until late 2005 or so, conservatives crushed progressives like me in debates as reliably as the Harlem Globetrotters owned the Washington Generals. The right would eloquently praise the virtues of free markets and the magic of the invisible hand. We would respond by stammering about the importance of regulation and a mixed economy, knowing even as the words came out that our audience was becoming bored.

Conservatives would get knowing laughs by mocking bureaucrats. We would drone on about how everyone can benefit from the experience and expertise of able civil servants. They promised to transform stodgy old Social Security into an exciting investment opportunity that would make everyone wealthy in retirement. We warned about the scheme's "transition costs" while swearing that the existing program would still be around for today's younger workers. They offered tax cuts. We talked amorphously about taxes as the price of a civilized society. After Sept. 11, 2001, they vowed to strike hard at terrorists anywhere and everywhere without worrying about the thumb-twiddlers at the United Nations. We stood up for the thumb-twiddlers.

But now, seemingly all of a sudden, conservatives are the ones who are tongue-tied, as demonstrated by Sen. John McCain's limping, message-free presidential campaign. McCain's ongoing difficulties in exciting voters aren't just a tactical problem; his woes stem largely from his long-standing adherence to a set of ideas that simply haven't worked in practice. The belief system and finely crafted policy pitches that enabled the right to dominate the war of ideas for the past 30 years have produced a relentless succession of governing failures, from Iraq to Katrina to the economy to the environment.

Largely as a consequence, the public's attitude toward government -- Ronald Reagan's bête noire -- has shifted. A recent Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll found that, by a 53-to-42 percent margin, Americans want government to "do more to solve problems"; a dozen years ago, respondents opposed government action by 2 to 1. Meanwhile, Republican constituency groups' long-standing determination to put aside their often significant differences and band together to support GOP candidates is fracturing: The libertarian darling Ron Paul and the evangelical Christian leader James C. Dobson are among the Republican bigwigs who haven't so far endorsed McCain. And the mountains of books and articles by conservative writers attacking liberals and liberalism have begun to be matched by new stacks of tomes exploring what went wrong with conservatism and what is to become of it.

As I listen to leading voices and thinkers on the right pondering the condition of their ideology, it is increasingly clear to me that they face a fundamental dilemma -- one that cannot be resolved anytime soon and that might well leave the conservative movement out to pasture for as long as we progressives have been powerlessly chewing grass. That choice is whether to stick with rhetoric and policies wedded to free markets, limited government and bellicose unilateralism, or to endorse a more robust role for the public sector at home while relying more on diplomacy and international institutions abroad. Either way, conservative Republicans seem destined to have a much harder time winning elections for the foreseeable future. Just ask McCain how much fun he's having.

The single theme that most animated the modern conservative movement was the conviction that government was the problem and market forces the solution. It was a simple, elegant, politically attractive idea, and the right applied it to virtually every major domestic challenge -- retirement security, health care, education, jobs, the environment and so on. Whatever the issue, conservatives proposed substituting market forces for government -- pushing the bureaucrats aside and letting private-sector competition work to everyone's benefit.

So they advocated creating health savings accounts, handing out school vouchers, privatizing Social Security, shifting government functions to private contractors, and curtailing regulations on public health, safety, the environment and more. And, of course, they pushed to cut taxes to further weaken the public sector by "starving the beast." President Bush has followed this playbook more closely than any previous president, including Reagan, notwithstanding today's desperate efforts by the right to distance itself from the deeply unpopular chief executive.

But in practice, those ideas have all failed to deliver...

Comments

[RW]

Exactly so, the entire Movement-Conservative/Republican program has failed to deliver. Which raises an interesting question: Why is Obama wasting time and energy arguing with it; just tie McCain to it and let him sink.

[Delicious Pundit]

When I watch the Olympics and see the McCain ads, which in addition to having great Obama visuals also have a big "MORE GOVERNMENT SPENDING" next to Obama's smiling head, all I can think of is someone unemployed thinking, "damn, maybe we need some more government spending."

[christofay]

Someone pulled Cheney's finger

but he is more of a living large on Federal funding wind than a Western mighty wind

[Commenterlein]

I unfortunately see exactly the hubris and self-congratulation in Anrig's words that led movement conservatives into their pathetic current state.

The conservatives of the 1980s had many good ideas, and a few bad ones. Even in the implementation of the good ones, they over did it.

[Lee A. Arnold]

Some years ago, several of us were already writing in these comment threads about the self-destruction of U.S. conservative/libertarian economic ideology. It was intellectually faulty from the get-go, although reality needed to catch up. They are likely to be in the philosophical doghouse for 20 years or more, although liberals still have no simply-expressed, countervailing theory to offer.

But it should be remembered that although people may vote for their Congress-critters on this issue, economic theory has not had a decisive impact in prior Presidential races, which are uniquely personality contests. And indeed, McCain's attacks on Obama are mostly about that perception. The absolute state of the economy if reflected in a "malaise" is probably more important (Reagan v. Carter, Clinton v. Bush,) but still not everything.

[jamie_2002]

"Liberals" do have a simply expressed countervailing theory to offer:

We're all in this together."

[Whammer]

Liberals have had a marketing problem for roughly 30 years now. It continues to make me crazy that Dems can't make simple arguments to defend their positions. It really doesn't need to be this difficult.

In my view, the problem is that Dems don't think in terms of marketing -- at best, they take Lakoff's stuff about "framing" and try to run with that. But soon they go off the rails.

I like what Andrew Tobias has been doing lately. Not so complicated -- 75% of the US national debt has been generated under Reagan, Bush 1 and Bush 2. 85% of the US debt has been under Republican presidents. That is not complicated, and I think it is fairly persuasive.

There are a huge number of issues where the Democrats have the "high ground", but they can't seem to tell the story or to stay on message. Marketing.........

I had a friend tell me that she was at a 2004 Dem fundraiser with a bunch of high-tech types in the audience -- a huge population of people with a lot of talent and enthusiasm. She was dismayed by the message in that meeting, which was essentially "give us a bunch of money, and we'll get Dems elected". They threw away much of the good will that the audience brought that day. I'm sure that people gave money anyway, because they really didn't want Bush re-elected and didn't know what else to do. But they came nowhere near to tapping the full potential energy of the audience.

I think Obama "get's it" from that standpoint. I hope that's enough.............

[save_the_rustbelt]

The pendulum will swing left for good reasons, the liberals will make mistakes due to their excessive faith in government regulation and control, and then in a decade or so the pendulum will swing back.

I hope Obama, Reid and Pelosi are not the best the Democrats have to offer - very weak team.

[Lee A. Arnold]

I'm not sure liberals do have that excessive faith in government anymore -- that refers to 60's-70's interest-group welfare liberalism. (See Theodore Lowi's book The End of Liberalism.) I don't hear anyone saying they want to go back to that again. But this confusion over the definition may be part of the problem. And if liberals don't get an overall popular theory going, they will lose quite soon again. There has to be a way to express the general need and the economic validity of targeted, narrowly-focused institutions to take care of certain glaring problems, in healthcare for example, while leaving the rest of the economy to be more market-based.

[save_the_rustbelt]

Lee:

Good analysis.

[ckstevenson]

Ron Paul is not a Republican big wig.

[John V]

Lee,

That's a very commendable and much more valid position than the general views I hear from my liberal friends and especially many of the opinions I read on many liberal blogs. Is there a way to do it? I don't know.

Personally in my reading experience, economically literate or competent liberals like you and many others are but a very, very slim portion of the Democratic Party. Your heart may be generally in the same place as most other liberals but your ideas are far more reasonable and within the realm of workable and smarter policy. And even when people like DeLong and Angrig and others are advocating just that, you wouldn't know it by the way they express sometimes and you definitely wouldn't know it by the way Angrig writes in this letter. As I read the letter from non partisan POV which actually leans toward Obama (for foreign policy and social reasons), I'm amazed at how little there actually is in the letter...not to mention that there are some pretty silly assertions and mischaracterizations. And I think the tone of the letter gives the impression that Dems want to be everything that the GOP is not. As you kinda, sorta say in your post, this isn't exactly the best course of action.

"the right applied it to virtually every major domestic challenge -- retirement security, health care, education, jobs, the environment and so on."

A libertarian leaner like me reads that sentence and simply laughs. We don't have privatized SS, we have a very centrally controlled and "unfree" education system and the environment, an ongoing challenge, isn't exactly handled in a "free market" manner. And jobs? A very vague nonsequitir that means absolutely nothing in the context Anrig is talking about.

There's a reason that Clinton was more popular and successful:

He gave his agenda a branding that reflected what you are talking about. He wasn't afraid to say that markets are good, he wasn't afraid to say bureaucracy can be bad. AND he meant it...perhaps not always but he didn't let "bureaucracy good-markets bad" be understood as his general position...and it wasn't. You may find this to be an obvious point but look around and the word "market" has a negative aura on much of the Left...perhaps not among economist types but in general it does. And when economic types on the Left make it a point to criticize market-based policy to appeal to market-hostile leftists, they alienate and turn off market friendly centrists and so on.

Bottom line:

Democratic politics these days doesn't give the impression of being about a better way to let markets work. It sounds and comes across as more of the same anti-market-based and pro-bureaucracy lines.

Yes, I know it's not that simple and, yes, I can decipher a some of the paternal libertarianism, ie behavioral economics, in Obama's speeches and positions (something I find better than technocratic micromanaging) But most people who are not ardent liberals won't.

My advice is for Dems to NOT write silly articles like this one by Angrig and for guys like Delong to CRITICIZE it show that while he may not agree with McCain, he doesn't agree with Angrig. Criticize the GOP...go ahead. They deserve it. But don't make good market-based policy and GOP policy seem synonymous and Dem policy the antithesis. That's part of the problem.

[Anderson]

That's what I come to DeLong for ... political & economic analysis, with Tolkien allusions.

[howard]

john v: i have no idea what you are talking about. could you please provide some actual evidence of democratic polcies not giving the "impression" of being about a better way for markets to work.

because we've had one democratic administration in the past quarter century, and you know what? markets worked great during those 8 years.

so what are you talking about?

[selenesmom]

Didn't realize getting "a better way to let markets work" was the main goal of public policy. A worthy goal, sure, but the supreme goal?

Also, it's not as simple as having a market going around working, and then a regulator or other mechanism selectively gumming up the works. There are some markets which, left to their own devices, would devolve into anarchy. Some actors would incorrectly price risk, others would create crappy stuff and unload that crappy stuff onto them for too much money, and then... oh wait.

There are some things that we do better as a community than as a bunch of ransom individuals. We might choose, as a community, to create and maintain a public school system, a network of national parks, interstate highways, space exploration. Why not a healthcare system of some sort?

If the last few years have demonstrated anything, it's that if you put people who hate government in charge of the government, then the government ceases to function (in large part).

[selenesmom]

Oh heck. "Random individuals" not "ransom"

[jayackroyd]

What really happened is that these bumper sticker positions work fine in opposition. You deride your wonky, fuzzy opponents as weak, goody-two shoes. You express simple, manly positions about magical markets and the military. This resonates, because everybody has bad experiences with government agencies from time to time (although even DMVs have been improved by the internet). And it certainly seems like there's a lot of government waste.

And you'll recall that in this long period of divided government, these bumper sticker slogans still worked fine, because the conservative would simply blame control of one or the other branch of government by the Democrats.

And then the Republicans hit the perfect storm. House, Senate and Presidency. And it turned out that they really didn't actually believe in any of their anti-government, anti-waste, anti-Washington bumper sticker slogans. They believed in pillaging the Treasury and destroying the regulatory apparatus essential for an effective free market economy with imperfect information flows and extant externalities. Oh, and they couldn't govern either--hire people who could do the things their job description called for.

That is, a spectacularly incompetent president was in the White House, with a supine collection of Republican Senators. They proceeded to demonstrate that everything they have said has been a spectacular lie.

[Denis Drew]

My current best abstract take on markets:

What the central planner is unable to do -- at all -- is duplicate the zillions to the zillionth power different rational decisions that need to efficiently operate a market. What the central planner (in the broadest, most general sense of the term) is able to do -- very efficiently -- is to interfere with or substitute any individual decisions that he can be personally aware of -- like deciding what the minimum price per hour of labor should be.

What any one of the millions of individual decision makers are not usually doing -- at all -- is seeking an outcome that the overall consensus of millions of decision makers would see as useful.

Fans of the unfettered free market believe its outcomes are perfectly proportional and that interfering with it is inherently inefficient. Actually, whether 80% of the profit of a fast food enterprise goes to labor and 20% to ownership -- or vice-versa -- has no direct effect on the consumer at all -- only affects what the profit will ultimately buy: perhaps better educated because better paid labor or perhaps more business investment because more profitable; both of which are within the realm of reasonable predictability to central planners.

Ditto for labor upping the price of a burger through minimum wage hike (or collective bargaining) to the highest price consumers are willing to pay (even it means selling fewer burgers for more labor profit per burger). "Natural" utility, if you will, should be seen as the highest price a product or service can command, not the lowest.

If a piece of land is sold at a fire-sale price because the owner is destitute and on the verge of starvation, that price probably wont fully reflect the utility the land might have to the purchaser. Unorganized labor is often in the same fire-sale position, since necessity may force it to accept whatever price will barely sustain it. There is nothing "naturally" efficient about sale of anything below the price which reflects its full utility to the purchaser. (There is something very naturally inefficient about keeping people too poor to reach the natural potential of their personal talents.)

[joshua]

My problem with this article has been mentioned but not focused on. The fact of the matter is that even though republic values say small govenment the republicans in office themselves haven't been small government. Bush himself expanded the governments roll more then any rescent president. You can't really call him a true republican.

Furthermore the only changes the republicans have made is lower taxes to the rich while democrats raze the minimum wage. Guess who gets pinched in that scenario? That's right middle America. Governments roll should be to displine markets when markets misbehave not tell me I have to invest in there Social Security system which lets face it I'll never receive. I'm a republican and I don't like McCain but I'm not sure what Obama is going to do. I like that he has a lot of brain on his side but some time to much brain can be a bad thing. The overall experience I've had with the last 20 years of candidates is that we're voting for the lesser of two evils vs voting for someone who will actually help things.

[Lee A. Arnold]

Joshua, I think you can rest assured that Social Security is one thing you WILL get back.