Adapt, Or Become Irrelevant

Jonathan Chait has written a superb piece for The New Republic on the emergence of what he calls “Republican nihilism.”

Here are two paragraphs from the beginning of the article:

In the days following the 2008 election, some Republicans predicted that the party would retool itself in response to reality–not just political reality but the actuality of policy challenges. “Republicans,” wrote conservative Ramesh Ponnuru in Time, “will have to devise an agenda that speaks to a country where more people feel the bite of payroll taxes than income taxes, where health-care costs eat up raises even in good times, where the length of the daily commute is a bigger irritant than are earmarks.” Nothing like that rethinking has happened or will happen.

Whatever the merits of President Obama’s agenda, it is clearly a response to objectively large problems facing the country. The administration has selected three main issues as the focus of its domestic agenda: the economic crisis, climate change, and health care reform. The issues themselves offer a stark contrast with Bush’s 2005 crusade to reshape Social Security. While sold as a response to the program’s long-term deficit, the privatization campaign was actually motivated by ideological opposition to Social Security’s redistributive role. (Bush refused Democratic offers to negotiate a fix to the program’s solvency without altering its social-insurance character.) By contrast, it is impossible to dismiss the problems Obama has chosen to address. In all three areas, the Republican Party has adopted a stance of total opposition, not merely because it disagrees with aspects of Obama’s solutions, but because it cannot come to grips with the very nature of the problems of modern American politics.

Chait then spends the next five pages or so examining this premise in the context of the three major policy areas on which Pres. Obama ran his campaign: the economic crisis, climate change, and health care reform.

I will excerpt a part of the section on the economy:

The root cause of the collapse, as we all know by now, is that financial firms have grown so large and interconnected that the risks they incur can bring down the rest of the economy, forcing the government to intervene. After some initial support, the Republican response has been to denounce the financial bailout, without making any case that failing to save the financial system would have prevented a far deeper disaster.

… In the most simple and pure market model, a business must be allowed to fail in order for capitalism to function. Once the government begins propping up failed firms, we have embarked upon the road to serfdom and there is no turning back.

As a general principle, this is eminently sensible. Yet it cannot accommodate the reality of a financial industry that, left to its own devices, can bring the rest of the economy down with it. David Frum, the former Bush speechwriter turned conservative apostate, recently recounted his attempt to persuade a group of young conservatives that they had to bend their principles in the face of economic calamity. As Frum recalls it, one of the conservative interlocutors replied, “Maybe it was a good thing we weren’t in power then–because our principles don’t allow us to respond to a crisis like this.”

Chait’s overarching point is that Republicans only have one arrow in their quiver — the ideology of small government — and when faced with a problem that can’t be solved with a small government approach, they can’t adapt.

Chait gives a fascinating example of this, toward the end of his piece:

Conservatism can succeed at maximizing human welfare when faced with government failure or some other circumstance that naturally lends itself to ideologically congenial tools, like inflation in the 1970s. But conservatism is plagued by blindness in the face of even textbook cases of market failure.

In the graphic below, some of The New Republic’s staff have compiled a brief history of conservative opposition to social reform over the last century. …

One of those items is a diatribe against the passage of Medicare delivered by Ronald Reagan in 1961. Earlier this year, National Review Online editor-at-large Jonah Goldberg called Reagan’s address “still fresh today.” This is a strange description for even as committed a right-winger as Goldberg. In his speech, Reagan predicted that Medicare would lead to the government dictating how doctors might practice and where they’d live, and that, if it came into law, “[Y]ou and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it once was like in America when men were free.”

Almost certainly, Goldberg did not mean to praise this as a prescient warning of how Medicare would unfold. The title he chose, “The Gipper on Socialized Medicine,” suggests that he viewed the speech as a prescient warning about the next step in health care reform. But this is how conservatism tends to operate: In the right-wing mind, the world we live in at any given moment can be described as the free market, the American way of life, perhaps not a perfect world but a cherished and fundamentally free one. The next advance of liberalism will always bring socialism, tyranny, a crushing burden on industry, and other horrors. The previous liberal advances that they or their predecessors greeted with such hysteria are eventually incorporated into the landscape of the free American way of life.

Everything that the 1960s right said about Medicare, the contemporary right no longer believes, while fervently believing it will all hold true of health care reform. Similarly, the hysteria of the 1970s right about clean-air regulation no longer plagues the contemporary right, but it grips conservatives when it comes to greenhouse-gas regulation. (Charles Krauthammer: Cap-and-trade “will destroy what’s left of the industrial Midwest.”) And so it goes.