PUBLICK OCCURRENCES, BOTH FOREIGN AND DOMESTICK

Warning: Explicit partisanship follows.
If you don't like it, come back later when I'll return
to subjects like baseball and the weather.
For those of you who need to catch up, this post is a reply to this one by Frank at Non-Fat Latte Liberal which was a reply to this which was a reply to this. Got that? It's about all the intro I can give you; it would take too long to recap. Now to the ugliness.

I. DOMESTIC POLICY

Frank, or as I'll call him, NFLL, writes:

My main claim is that there is a tectonic shift in the platforms of the two parties, and I know where they're going.

That's quite presumptuous. If he's so certain, he'd better be working on a book instead of just throwing the ideas at a weblog.

First Bill claims that Big Government Conservatism is Conservatism. Bill fails to mention why. It is most definitely socially Conservative. But economically?

I said it is a variety of conservatism, not that it is Conservatism™. He points out, as I might have given more time, that the most popular Google results for a search on "national greatness conservatism" are in fact critical of the idea. He takes this as an argument that this brand is not real "conservatism." This debate is sometimes obscured by semantics. Allow us to define libertarianism as being primarily anti-state (economically), whereas conservatism is primarily pro-tradition. I say there's a reasonable argument that national greatness conservatism is conservative enough to be called such, but not conservative enough to become right-wing orthodoxy.

Big government is the siren song of politics, and those in power hear it much more keenly than those in the minority. Bush's "National Greatness Conservatism" is the first step on a slippery slope.

He's right about the "siren song of politics," but he doesn't actually demonstrate that it will necessarily keep going this way, he simply asserts it is so. To the contrary, after some thought, I think "big-government conservatism" is nearing exhaustion.

In short, it's a dated idea. It was a reaction to the relative meaninglessness of the Clinton years, viz. peace and prosperity lead to toward decadence, so let's instead reassert our "confidence and sureness of purpose," in the words of chief proponent David Brooks. No more global Communist threat? Well, let's go to Mars! Then 9/11 happened. If we wanted a purpose, well, great — we got one all right.

Even Brooks has not advanced the "national greatness" argument in awhile. (He's too busy writing columns about decaf coffee for the New York Times.)

More to the point of exhaustion, I'd wager deficits have tempered the public's appetite for big tax cuts: We've already got them and Bush seeks only to renew the ones from his first term. Nor will people be interested in creating new government programs. I don't quite buy Grover Norquist's "starve-the-beast" theory, which says deficits will lead to large cuts. I wish. Just yesterday a number of moderate Republican Senators "jumped on the Democrats' no-Medicaid-cuts bandwagon," as Ian at the OC observes, which scuttled Bush's attempt at deficit reduction.

The government may not shrink as much as I'd like, but it probably won't get much bigger.

II. FOREIGN POLICY

Let's go back to NFLL:

"Ambitious" foreign policy, as Bill tactfully puts it, is, I claim, liberal foreign policy. Not to say that the Dem's have embraced it (but they will have to). But it comes from the liberal tradition.

Well, if Democrats can claim fiscal conservatism, as they clearly aim to, then Republicans can adopt an a policy from the "liberal tradition." (By which I assume he means promoting democracy abroad.) It's not so simple, though. If you asked Jon Chait or Peter Beinart at the New Republic if this was liberal, they would say yes. If you asked Gail Collins and her cohorts at the New York Times, they would either disagree or change the subject.

NFLL is too sanguine in asserting that Democrats will come around to embrace an interventionist foreign policy that relies on revolving coalitions (so-called "unilateralism") rather than first pass the UN's "global test." It's always possible another Clinton will come along (wait a second...) whom Democrats would follow into war similarly, but even if the rank-and-file agreed, the left would still kick and scream and stage die-ins at the White House. Republicans don't have this kind of pressure from within their tent (Pat Buchanan is a marginal figure in mainstream conservative foreign policy; his fellow paleocons at the Washington Times and Human Events are pro-war all the way).

Beinart, who is apparently getting an exorbitant amount of money to write a book making the case for hawkish liberalism, has his work cut out for him. His problem is that this foreign policy in the "liberal tradition" is rather unpopular among those who call themselves "liberals." Just read an issue of The American Prospect. Or the Washington Monthly. Or The Nation. Or the New York Times.

Anyway, I don't completely agree that this is only in the "liberal tradition." Yes, we want other countries to enjoy the benefits of freedom and democracy, but we have gone out of our way to make that so in two countries so far because of our own self-interest. Tyrannies are breeding grounds for hatred and spawn terrorist movements; ending tyranny undercuts those movements. Also, Democracies tend not to go to war against each other. Pre-emptive war is a defensive measure, albeit in a roundabout way.

III. THE BIG TENT

Yet one scenario in particular makes NFLL's argument compelling — the much-discussed potential breakup of the conservative-libertarian "marriage." Widely-read blogger Pejman Yousefzadeh (somewhere along the upper spine of the Long Tail) made the argument for keeping the marriage together in a recent essay for TechCentralStation. I agree with him, and I believe there are a lot of us out there.

The marriage has been strained by the Iraq war (and even Afghanistan, in some quarters) and a few predictable disagreements such as gay marriage. But are libertarians ready to side with a left that supports racial preferences in hiring and academia, "progressive" taxation, the status quo for Social Security, or greater federal control of health care? Bush is far from pure on some issues, such as federal involvement in primary education, but he's much closer on these things than the Democratic congressional leadership.

It seems more plausible to consider that libertarians have already split on this issue. One can be a left-leaning libertarian or a right-leaning libertarian, and this distinction existed for a long time before 9/11. Those of us to the right believe libertarians should support the current Republican foreign policy because, essentially, if we agree that the United States is the best current example of liberty under a constitutional republican framework, we should support giving others the chance to exercise the same freedom, even (and sometimes especially) when it means fighting a war that will incur casualties (and resentment in some otherwise-friendly corners) to do so.

A number of writers based at QandO.net have lately been popularizing the word "neolibertarian" to describe non-purist libertarians (like me) who are pragmatic on domestic issues and hawkish on foreign policy. Here's an attempt to outline the foreign and domestic general principles of neolibertarianism:

When given a set of policy choices [on domestic matters],

• The choice that maximizes personal liberty is the best choice.


• The policy choice that offers the least amount of necessary government intervention or regulation is the best choice.


• The policy choice that provides rational, market-based incentives is the best choice.

In foreign policy, neolibertartianism would be characterized by,

• A policy of diplomacy that promotes consensual government and human rights and opposes dictatorship.


• A policy of using US military force solely at the discretion of the US, but only in circumstances where American interests are directly affected.

This is basically silent on social issues (how we mediate conflicting personal liberties) but it's a good start. I don't have a crystal ball, and I don't know if the Republicans will move in this direction, but I think there's a reasonable chance.

There is a lot that I didn't get to in this post, and may be subject for more excruciating polemics along the lines of this one. I'll close out with this: Frank interprets liberals too charitably. He thinks New Republic liberals are par for the course, but the New York Times editorial page is much more representative of modern liberalism. If he thinks I've left alone something particularly relevant, I'm sure he'll keep this going.

---

posted by WWB at 1:18 PM |