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Interesting Perspective on Reform and Tactical Voting
October 04th 03:02:34 PM
Tech Central Station has a fascinating article on how tactical voting from Militant Libertarians has slowed the reform process. Here is a highlight:
I should admit to one bias here. I'm 27, living in what we may call the Gulf States of American demography, right in the path of Hurricane Social Security. Before the Democrats showed their terrifyingly united determination to defund the levees of private accounts, I regarded the Democrats with relative equanimity. Now that the Democrats have decided to consign many members of my generation, especially poorer and darker-skinned ones who can't afford the automobiles of 401(k)'s in order to evacuate the Social Security slums, to premature death in suddenly-bankrupt nursing homes amidst the toxic floodwaters of 27% benefit cuts, I can't help but regard them as the enemy of my particular subsection of the electorate.
http://www.techcentralstation.com/100305A.html has a long thought experiment examining voting patterns and their effect on policy outcomes.
It leads to these real world outcomes:
Meanwhile, back in America…
Ruritania, of course, is not a faraway country; it is a stylized model of US politics in the recent past (with an apocryphal Kerry-victory scenario included for variety). The most eminent Clever Libertarian today is überblogger Andrew Sullivan, a Reaganite conservative who endorsed John Kerry last year. Now that a pork-heavy highway bill, a proposal to lavish $200 billion of Katrina relief on (reputedly corrupt) Louisiana and the Gulf States, and Tom DeLay's indictment for ethics violations are provoking a storm of disgust with the GOP among conservatives, Sullivan feels vindicated. Recently Sullivan put it this way:
I became a conservative because I saw in [England] what a terrible, incompetent, soul-destroying thing big government socialism is. It breaks my heart to see much of it now being implemented in America - by Republicans… I'm sick of [this president]. Sick of the naked politicization of everything (Karl Rove over-seeing reconstruction?); sick of the utter refusal to acknowledge that there is a limit to what the federal government can borrow from this and the next generation; sick of the hijacking of the conservative tradition for a vast increase in the power and size of government, with only a feigned attempt at making it more effective… I think Kerry would have made a pretty poor president. But Bush was already clearly on course for disaster (and had already made a basket case of Iraq)… When do we hold a formal wake for the end of conservatism?.... $873 BILLION: That's what the annual federal deficit will be by 2015 on the current Bush course. Merely to balance the budget by then, we'd need a 37 percent tax hike. Or we can cut spending. We should cut spending. The test of today's GOP will be over which path they take in the future. God knows, this president won't make the hard calls. It's up to the Congress. … I think we had… learned by last November that Bush never listens to criticism (except, perhaps, from his wife); that his re-election would confirm him in all the worst judgment calls of his presidency; that his administration was slowly killing off conservatism as we had known it; it was manifestly incompetent and immune to correction; and that the only responsible thing was therefore to back Kerry as the lesser of two evils. (my emphasis)
I should admit to one bias here. I'm 27, living in what we may call the Gulf States of American demography, right in the path of Hurricane Social Security. Before the Democrats showed their terrifyingly united determination to defund the levees of private accounts, I regarded the Democrats with relative equanimity. Now that the Democrats have decided to consign many members of my generation, especially poorer and darker-skinned ones who can't afford the automobiles of 401(k)'s in order to evacuate the Social Security slums, to premature death in suddenly-bankrupt nursing homes amidst the toxic floodwaters of 27% benefit cuts, I can't help but regard them as the enemy of my particular subsection of the electorate.
In view of the Democrats' refusal to avert a foreseeable crisis, I strongly object to Sullivan's use of the word "responsible" in connection with them. But that's partly just me, because of who I am, my place in life. If I were a forty-something rather than a twenty-something, I might have different priorities.
My biases aside, Sullivan has good intentions and his grievances against the GOP are largely justified. But his conclusion that conservatives should have supported Kerry is a nonsequitur. Since Kerry invariably criticized Bush for spending (and taxing) too little-on No Child Left Behind, on Pell Grants, on military equipment, on training, on unemployment benefits, on health care, on you-name-it-a claim that Kerry's election would somehow have made government smaller is, at the least, counter-intuitive.
What's missing from Sullivan's argument is an analysis of politics as a strategic interaction, like my Ruritanian model, that shows how the strategy Sullivan advocates will lead to the results he hopes for. Instead-this is really the only "argument" the Clever Libertarians have-Sullivan offers a casual historical allusion to the 1990s:
History might eventually judge that the 1990s was the high water-mark for a certain kind of conservatism - smaller but more effective government. Ironic it happened under a Democratic president.
Yes, we all love the 1990s. But it doesn't follow that having a Democratic president and a Republican Congress will bring them back.
Instead, it's far more likely that the strange and fortuitous synergy between Clinton and the Contract with America Congress that made the 1990s so nice was a one-off.
First, Bill Clinton was elected without a mandate. Ross Perot handed him the election by splitting the conservative vote. Having won only 43% of the vote, Clinton should have known the public wasn't really behind him -- though it took another punch-in-the-face from voters in 1994 to really wean him of his old liberalism. What the 1990s analogy might argue for is supporting a McCain insurgency, so that the Democrats would recover the White House without a mandate for their agenda. It gives no grounds for thinking that a liberal Democrat president with a majority mandate would benefit the small-government cause.
Second, while the 1990s were great for the people, the economy, and the country, they were frustrating for the Republicans and Democrats, in different ways. For Republicans after 1994, they managed to move policy in a conservative direction, but at the expense of their own popularity vis-à-vis Clinton, who got re-elected, and the Democrats, who kept picking up seats in the late 1990s. Meanwhile, for Democrats, they had their man in the White House, but he governed mostly like an Eisenhower Republican, and presided over the greatest landmark of conservative legislation in fifty years: welfare reform. Democrats still boast about the greatness of the Clinton administration for political gain. But as Howard Fineman has observed:
The purported inevitability of Hillary Rodham Clinton excites some Democrats, but deeply depresses some others, both inside and outside the Beltway.
Her forcefulness and talent-not to mention her well-oiled money machine-bring respect from party insiders and outsiders alike. But there is an undercurrent of unease about the "Back to the Future" quality of another Clinton candidacy. Do we really want to relive the Clinton Years? Under their breath, even many Clinton acolytes tend to say "NO."
In short, Republicans sacrificed partisan interests to ideological interests in the 1990s, and Democrats sacrificed ideological interests to partisan interests. Now the tables have turned. Republicans are selling out small government to increase their vote share, while Democrats have retreated to the old liberal faith even if it means losing. Under those circumstances, the cohabitation of a Democrat president, determined to avoid the fate of Clinton, and a Republican Congress, determined to avoid the fate of Gingrich, would probably have the opposite effect from the 1990s. Kerry would try to push through his big, liberal agenda; passionate populist vice-president John Edwards would keep preaching the plight of the poor; and the corrupt and pork-hungry Congress of Tom DeLay-demoralized by Bush's defeat-would cut deals in hopes of saving their seats. Of course Kerry-Edwards would propose a huge hurricane-relief package to symbolize a new era of big-government kindness, and of course (a few, and enough) Republicans would support it-what better way to look like the Grinch who stole Christmas than to vote against help for flood-ravaged people? And conservative pundits wouldn't have the luxury of protesting something as comparatively benign as hurricane relief. They'd be in a desperate last stand against socialized medicine and a return of the Great Society welfare state.
I commend Sullivan for protesting against big government, but I also think Sullivan and other Clever Libertarians help cause the state of affairs they're protesting against. If Andrew Sullivan and his fellow small-government conservatives had supported Bush, Bush might have won 55-44 instead of 51-48. In that case, Bush wouldn't need to try to expand the Republican base with a big Katrina relief package. Bush would be stronger vis-à-vis the Democrats, and the conservative base would be stronger vis-à-vis Bush.
Instead, John Kerry's 48% is the most that an unreconstructed liberal candidate has received since Jimmy Carter in 1976. If the political class has concluded that the median voter wants a bigger government, that is (though I hate to say it) not an unreasonable interpretation of our votes.
But why am I dumping on Sullivan now? Shouldn't we let bygones be bygones? The reason I bring it up is that clever-libertarian / clever-conservative sophistry seems to be spreading, to the Wall Street Journal among other places. The other day, Brendan Miniter argued for the Democrats as a "penny-wise" alternative (based on an arcane reference to the 1950s). Stephen Moore threatened that "the bill for Katrina may come due next November," i.e. Bush will alienate voters. To their credit, Moore and Miniter are probably being strategic: they're pretending that if the Republicans don't listen to them, they have somewhere else to go, though they probably know they don't. But they might still talk some readers into clever-libertarianism; and if they do get some people to vote Democrat, government will only get bigger.
Voters don't get to be clever. Sure, it sucks. It's humiliating. You feel dirty. But you have to hold your nose and pull the lever for the party that claims to want smaller government, however adrift they might be. Otherwise you just empower the other side.
Posted by Adam Cahn
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