New Conservative Intellectuals

Drake Bennett's article from this past Sunday made some waves yesterday. In it he outlines a few of the voices he sees as being able to pull conservatism out of the muck. Specifically he notes Luigi Zingales, W. Bradford Wilcox, Megan McArdle and Reihan Salam. Rick Moran has already provided a brilliant summarization of the article with his own commentary about each (save for Wilcox), and I am not going to bother you with a rehashed version of what's already been done. What I would like to do, however, is respond to Moran's commentary, specifically regarding Zingales and Salam.

Before I get into my looks at those two, however, I should mention that Megan McArdle is one of the best voices on the web, and that anybody not already reading everything she writes, whether you might agree with it or not, is sorely missing out on one of the most important minds available.

LUIGI ZINGALES

First, from the original article:

Luigi Zingales says it’s time for conservatives to fall out of love with businesses, and fall back in love with the free market. In an argument that’s begun to catch the ear of a few conservative thinkers, Zingales suggests that it’s often business itself, rather than the government, that the market needs protection from.

“I’m very strongly pro-market and very strongly against business,” says the Italian-born economist, a professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

Separating the support of free markets from the long Republican alliance with business isn’t easy, says Zingales, but it’s important. As he and colleague Raghuram Rajan laid out in their 2003 book, “Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists,” powerful companies, given the chance, work hand-in-glove with government officials to craft laws and regulations that protect them while limiting competition and transparency.

Given the arguments Zingales makes, it would perhaps be far more appropriate for him to have called his book "Saving Capitalism from the Corporatists," but hey, he's got books to sell, and his title attracts far more attention. The argument is simple, and often made, as Moran points out. And that argument, as I would hope more and more on the liberal left might begin to comprehend, is that we have indeed NOT been operating as a Capitalist society for some time. Respectively, the failure of our economy at the moment has not signified a failure of Capitalism, but rather a failure of the Corporatist culture that has susbsumed the title of Capitalism as of late. Moran outlines it simply:

Four years ago I would have wondered what Zingales was smoking in order to call himself a conservative and not support business. But the Democratic takeover of congress should have convinced anyone on the right that big business cared little about markets and more about being able to control government for their individual aggrandizement. The latest example: Wal-Mart hopping aboard the Obamacare train before it left the station. By supporting the public option and the insurance mandate for companies to supply health insurance to their workers, Wal-Mart gets to influence the final package so that it is tailored more to their needs.

We also see the dangerous big-business influence of Corporatism in the recent developments being recognized surrounding Goldman-Sachs, who after being bailed out is experiencing record profits after helping to craft legislation, and to place its former employees high within the ranks of the Federal government. Such is the nature of Corporatism that a business like Goldman, big enough to affect the nature of the market itself, finds itself able to profit from bubbles they have the ability to lend a hand in creating (upcoming Carbon Credits) and those that they have the necessary talent on hand to foresee ending (housing bubble).

Zingales' message is one that many Libertarians have been touting for years, not to mention one they have continually been ridiculed as crackpots for, as our false economy's "super bubble" had been booming for the past three decades. After all, what could be wrong when everything was moving along so well? His message is one that ought to attract the anti-big-business crowd from the Left, and one that Republican conservatives need to begin heeding. There is a difference between the true morality of Capitalism, and the awful cronyism of corporatism, and now is the time, more than ever, for us to be represented by people who understand this.

REIHAN SALAM

I will preface what is going to ultimately turn into a major disagreement with Salam and Moran by first saying that I enjoy Salam's writing. He is cognizant of, and more willing than most to publicly acknowedge, the Libertarian spirit of the Right. This was evident in what I referred to previously as his eulogy of Mark Sanford. That said, let the games begin. Again, first from the orignal article:

If big government is necessary, Salam asks, and can even help create a society more agreeable to conservatives, then what should it be doing? Drawing in part on the work of scholars such as Wilcox, Salam and Douthat craft a vision of a government that is activist in a different way, putting priority on stability and responsibility, along with opportunity. They push for child-care subsidies, market-friendly healthcare reform, more affordable housing, and for wage subsidies to boost the incomes of poor young men and make them more eligible for marriage and stable fatherhood.

“The idea is, let’s actually reduce the scope of government in some areas, where it’s kind of pernicious, but let’s increase its role in some areas, insofar as increasing the role can actually increase freedom,” Salam says.

Under the Obama administration, Salam has continued to press the case for big-government conservativism in articles and as a blogger for both the National Review and the online Daily Beast.

Moran, ever the proponent of moderate big-government conservatism, obviously agrees:

Salam was an early Sarah Palin supporter which should give anyone pause about accusing him of being anything other than a pragmatic conservative. His argument is the same I have been making for many months on this site; the road back for conservatism is not through the ideological terrorists who have set themselves up as arbiters of conservative dogma, condemning those they determine to have strayed from their extraordinarily narrow minded and confining definition of conservatism.

Rather, it is through advocating the reasoned and pragmatic application of conservative principles to government as it exists today that will bring the right out of the darkness.

The basic thing wrong with Salam's look at the government comes in the first few words of the first quote: "If big government is necessary." Salam, like Moran, presupposes that there is literally no way for the United States to exist without Big Government. Both of them simply shrug their shoulders and move on to say, well, if we must be saddled with this elephant, let's see how many little sticks we can poke it with to nudge it in a little bit better direction, never realizing that such small sidesteps cannot possibly deter the beast's course as it heads for the autocracy cliff.

Moran goes so far as to refer to voices calling for wide-scale reduction in government as ideological terrorists. Moran has identified these voices for us in the past. He singles out Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Ann Coulter in the punditry. One assumes there is no question in his mind about the likes of Ron Paul and Lew Rockwell.

It is my opinion that the voices that are going to affect the greatest change in the conservative intellectual spectrum are those voices that can best define their core values and proceed to spread their message. In that respect, Salam is a good writer that makes good points, but has he established a strong core message? It seems like he is trying to straddle a line that the likes of Christopher Buckley, David Brooks and Peggy Noonan have found themselves roundly criticized for straddling, that of the intellectual elite.

Utlimately the intellectual leaders of the conservative movement must be able to stand tall and proud of their intellectual arguments. I see it in McArdle. I see it in Zingales. Because he is a fantastic writer, I hope for it from Salam. I just don't know if he recognizes what I think I see coming: a tideswell of support by the grass-roots for a smaller federal government. Those of us in that tideswell do not agree that Big Government is a constant. We believe that it is a blockade to our freedoms and a hindrance to our liberty. We find the current state of affairs unacceptable. We recognize we cannot prod the elephant with sticks. It must be attacked with spears to force a change in course, and if necessary, shot down in its path.

RIP Mark Sanford

I have written briefly about Mark Sanford twice before, once in Feburary and once in May. Slowly but surely he was growing on me. His challenge of the federal government in attempting to flat out refuse acceptance of any stimulus funds for his state made me smile from ear to ear. Then when forced to accept the funds, his challenge to utilize the funds to pay down state debt rather than spend, spend, spend was the political highlight of the aftermath of the nuclear financial explosion that was the passing of that bill.

Here was a man, I felt, that was going to be able to be a figurehead of Libertarian values moving forward over the next four years. Given his personality, I wasn't sure how, if at all, he would be able to handle the national stage, and so I had been biding my time in really getting behind him, though have often received emails from members of DraftSanford2012 dutifully keeping me apprised of his actions.

What attracted me to Sanford was his level of commitment to his personal and political values and his staunch refusal to act politically in any manner that was not in the long term best interests of the people of his state. I fought to remain quiet over the last week amid stories of his disappearance, and was ultimately left saddened and discouraged yesterday upon the announcement of his affair, effectively his political death.

As we conservatives and libertarians hold ourselves to a higher level of personal responsibility than do liberals (see Kennedy, Edward and Clinton, William), it is only fitting that we now cast this man out as a possible representative of our values. There will be no apology made, no eloquently spun explanation of how he is only human, on behalf of Mark Sanford's repugnant weakness, merely only the hope that he finds a way to come to terms with his struggles and to live out a decent personal life from this point on.

Politically speaking, we are left to carry on the mantle of conservatism and libertarianism for the time being without a potential star. Reihan Salam eulogizes:

Back in 2002, when he was first elected governor, Sanford was the darling of D.C. libertarians. As one of Newt Gingrich's foot soldiers in the House of Representatives, he acquired a reputation as a budget-cutting cheapskate who, with his friend and ally Ron Paul, constantly railed against pork-barrel spending and the overweening power of the federal Leviathan. Despite his small fortune, Sanford slept in his congressional office. And his tightfistedness extended to the running of his first gubernatorial campaign, when he reportedly hunted for loose change and haggled over office supplies. His enthusiasm for school choice and firearm ownership also won him kudos from the right wing. But Sanford's total inability to play nice with the legislature stymied his most ambitious efforts, including a long-term plan to roll back South Carolina's state income tax.

All the same, Sanford's libertarian bona fides were real. In March, Michael Brendan Dougherty wrote a fascinating profile of Sanford that, on close examination, could have killed his presidential ambitions then and there. Sanford railed against the Federal Reserve; when asked about Michael Phelps’ arrest on drug charges, the governor rolled his eyes. And he seemed to be launching a critique of the Bush Doctrine when he told Dougherty, "I don't believe in preemptive war," a categorical statement he later inched away from in a rare bout of political cowardice. For me, though, the most telling part of the profile came at the end, when Dougherty noted Sanford's total lack of interest in University of South Carolina basketball and his inability to use basic sports metaphors. Given the macho cast of American conservatism, this might have proved a fatal flaw. His recent public weeping won't help matters.

As Sanford slinks away from the public eye, antiwar libertarians have lost their best hope of building a national movement. The 2008 uprising of Birchers, hippies, and raw-milk enthusiasts that fueled Ron Paul's quixotic bid for the White House was looking for a leader, and Sanford seemed to fit the bill. Now he'll instead spend his days doing who knows what—he'll write a book or play golf or maybe smoke a bowl while cradled in the arms of some dark-eyed South American siren. Which, when you think about it, doesn't sound that bad.

Young Cons: Conservative Rap

A couple of strapping young conservatives cut this phat beat to tell the how they hang, or something like that. It has made me hate rap just a little bit more, so thanks boys.

Some favorite quotes:

2:40- "Don't matter if you're gay, straight, christian or muslim. There's one thing we all hate called socialism."

Apparently those four groups hate socialism.

2:52- "Superman, not socialism, waterboard that terrorism."

I lost bladder control for a moment when they dropped that bomb.

And without further delay, here they are!

via BoingBoing

The Cancer of Intellectual Elitism

In the past few days, conservative "intellectual elites" Christopher Buckley and David Brooks, who entirely abandoned the Republican Party during the last election in favor of fellow "intellectual elite" Barack Obama, have begun expressing buyer's remorse over the decision. Peggy Noonan has yet to recant, but we can bet that it's only a matter of time until she begins to grace us all with some self-flagellating prose as well.

The overriding reason for the abandonment of these conservative "intellectual elites" turning on their party in support of the far-far left Barack Obama, was that they could not stand the populist reaction to Sarah Palin. Such was the case as well with many Libertarians who, almost by default, also view themselves as intellectual elites. I know this because I consider myself a Libertarian, and in doing so, consider myself as understanding things better than either Republicans or Democrats do. It takes a hell of an ego to take that stance and I will admit that I certainly have that, or I wouldn't venture into these writings with the belief that I have the chance to provide some direction. However, unlike many Libertarians, and unlike the conservative "intellectual elite" I was not foolish enough to believe that just because Sarah Palin was a populist candidate, she was inherently stupid or unqualified.

Quite to the contrary, and perhaps this is where my self-imposed grounding in Objectivism kicks in, I viewed Sarah Palin as perhaps the most qualified of any of the four candidates, recognizing her as a self-made woman, who had achieved her success by adopting a moral code, and living it out as strictly as possible. I saw her gaffes in interviews as being those of a general unpreparedness that was unlikely to have been her fault given the whirlwind environment in which she was brought into the game, coupled with a press that was unfairly eager to demolish her reputation as completely as possible. It seemed all the while to me that she was actually far more intelligent than the McCain campaign allowed her to be.

This is what Christopher Buckley, David Brooks and Peggy Noonan could not bring themselves to see. In their respective desires to believe that the President of the United States must inherently be one of the "intellectual elite," they jumped onto the Barack Obama tidal wave in what, ironically, reduced them to supporting the populist candidate in order to feel better about themselves.

But what exactly is the "intellectual elite?" Apparently, as we have just seen, one must have an Ivy League degree and write books and philosophize broadly without ever digging in and actually accomplishing anything.

But what of the rest of us?

I, for instance, shunned that path in life. I could have attended Harvard or Princeton or Georgetown for Law. I passed a practice bar exam in eighth grade that I took just to see if I could. I'm sure it upset my aunt who went on to fail it for the third time. But I could not see myself doing something as disingenuous as practicing law or going into politics. Instead I went into engineering, civil/architectural engineering at the Illinois Institute of Technology to be exact. I'll receive a masters in construction management later this year. I've read quite a few books on a myriad of subjects, and, while they may not be leatherbound, my apartment does at times smell of rich mahogany. I could easily consider myself one of the "intellectual elite."

But I do not.

As the conservative "intellectual elite" in Brooks, Buckley and Noonan have shown, they are all-too willing to believe that other "intellectual elite" are too smart to do what conservatives consider the wrong things. Such was their rationalization in supporting Obama. He was too smart to actually act on his socialistic leanings. Now they are finding out what the rest of us saw plainly.

Neither are Libertarians exempt, being, as I previously mentioned, some of the most "intellectually elite." We see it now in the idea discussed at in several different articles at Positive Liberty and by Will Wilkinson and others of what they are calling "Liberaltarianism." I've read as much about it as I could find, in that it seems to be Libertarian intellectuals and Liberal intellectuals reaching out to each other to find some kind of common ground. Forgive me if this sounds like an attempt, a-la Brooks & Co., just to find a bigger group of intellectual friends to be comfortable with. Or, as RollingDoughnut puts it:

Okay, count me out anyway, because "liberaltarianism" is little more than progressives attempting to sell economic errors to libertarians because we allegedly agree on social issues.

The idea of either Conservatives or Libertarians reaching out to the Left on an intellectual level is not a bad idea. We need to do this at some level. We cannot expect them to just see the light one day. We need to educate them as to why we believe the things we do, particularly about free markets, liberty and mutual respect.

But we must also realize of ourselves that this idea of intellectual elitism is a cancer among us all. Our "intellectual elite" cannot continue to shun populist candidates simply because they are populist candidates, without first understanding whether or not that candidate might also be an intellectual in their own right. As Ace puts it in the case of Sarah Palin:

Actually, now that I think of it, is it possible that the so-called elites were partly turned off to Sarah Palin not merely because she was NQOCD (Not quite our class, dear), but because she vigorously attacked a man the so-called elites were warm to precisely because he was of part of the Harvard-Princeton axis about which the world turns?

It undermines Conservatism and it undermines Libertarianism for our more recognized intellectuals to jump ship simply to cozy up to other intellectuals. When you abandon your principles just to be part of the group, you've abandoned any semblance of intellectualism you may ever have had.