Rightie mythmaking in action — Steve M. explains.
Category Archives: conservatism
Republicans and the “T” Word
Michael Kinsley says that Fred Thompson may not have what it takes to be the Republican nominee:
The real strategy of Thompson’s plan is a familiar one from past Republican tax plans: Give large breaks to businesses and the wealthy (by, say, abolishing the estate tax), bribe the middle class to go along by offering smaller breaks to them, and don’t worry about paying for it all.
But maintaining your indifference to the size of the bill you are running up requires nerves of steel. You must never waver, never, never express the slightest concern that lost revenue may be a problem, and never, never, never even hint at where you might go to find the money. Thompson followed the script, putting out word that the explosion of economic activity after his tax reform would bring in too much money to even count, yadda, yadda, yadda. Then, unfortunately, he blinked. He revealed that he is a political amateur by making ominous noises about finding some savings through changes in Social Security benefits, which has to mean cuts in Social Security benefits or no money will be saved.
Raise your hand if you would be happy to accept lower Social Security payments in exchange for a simpler tax code.
I thought so.
Kinsley also discusses Mike Huckabee’s “fair tax” proposal:
He has endorsed something called the “fair tax,” which involves repealing all federal revenue sources—the income tax, Social Security tax, estate tax, everything—and replacing them with a 23 percent sales tax on everything except education. The fair tax propaganda says, frankly, that it is intended to be “revenue-neutral.” That is, it would bring in just as much money as the taxes it replaces. No monkey business about explosions of new revenue.
This makes it easy to figure out who would win and who would lose in Huckabee’s so-called “fair” tax. It’s a zero-sum game: Every dollar someone’s taxes go down is a dollar someone else’s go up. What you spend every year is the amount you earn minus the amount you save. On average, Americans save practically nothing, but wealthier people save more. Very poor people actually spend more than they earn, while Bill Gates and Warren Buffett couldn’t spend more than a small fraction of their income if they tried. So, wealthy people are going to see their taxes go down, which means that poor and middle-class people are going to see their taxes go up.
In spite of his soak-the-poor tax plan, the right-wing Club for Growth has gone to the mattresses to defeat Huckabee. Leslie Wayne writes in tomorrow’s New York Times:
As Mike Huckabee rises in the Republican presidential polls, fiscal conservatives have been raising alarms about a series of tax increases he oversaw while governor of Arkansas — new taxes on gasoline, nursing home beds and even pet groomers.
The Club for Growth, a politically influential antitax group, has dubbed Mr. Huckabee Tax Hike Mike and poured money into anti-Huckabee advertisements that were broadcast in early nominating states, with more on the way. Mr. Huckabee “spends money like a drunken sailor,†according to the group’s news releases, and it has sprinkled YouTube and the airways with videos that mock him and his policies.
Frankly, your average drunken sailor is a miser compared to most Republicans.
But the record offers a more complex and nuanced picture. While taxes did rise in the 10 years that Mr. Huckabee was governor, the portrayal of him as a wild-eyed spendthrift is hardly apt. For the most part, Mr. Huckabee’s tax initiatives had wide bipartisan support, with the small number of Republicans in the overwhelmingly Democratic state legislature voting for the tax increases and many maintaining that the state was better for them.
David Lightman writes for McClatchy Newspapers:
In the late 1990s, as the nation’s and Arkansas’ economies boomed, that wasn’t difficult, and Huckabee presided over substantial tax cuts. In 1997 and 1998, state lawmakers approved $97.9 million in income-tax relief, and another $14.1 million in smaller tax breaks.
About 65 of Huckabee’s 90 tax reductions were enacted from 1997 to 1999. The centerpiece was $90.6 million annually in individual income-tax breaks, but most of the cuts were small and highly specialized.
Among them: exempting residential lawn care from the gross receipts tax, a Salvation Army sales-and-use-tax exemption and an exemption for sales of biomass to produce electricity.
Huckabee came to Washington in 1999 and boasted about his record. “The big battle was no longer, ‘Which taxes will we raise and by how much?’ but ‘Which taxes will we cut and by how much?’ ” he told the Heritage Foundation, a conservative research center.
Bill Clinton’s economy made being a tax cutter easy and fun.
But as the economy soured early this decade, Huckabee found himself in the same situation as many other chief executives: Massive spending cuts weren’t enough to balance the budget, so he had to find new revenue.
But as the economy soured early this decade, Huckabee found himself in the same situation as many other chief executives: Massive spending cuts weren’t enough to balance the budget, so he had to find new revenue.
The State Supreme Court handed him another problem when it ruled that Arkansas’ education-funding system wasn’t meeting student’s needs and had to be revamped.
So in 2003, Huckabee had a very different message. In his State of the State speech that year, he warned lawmakers that, “If you deem that all new revenue sources, your proposals or mine, are indeed dead on arrival, then you’ll be saying that teacher pay increases are dead, scholarships are dead, medicine for the elderly is dead, that long sentences are dead and that we’ll have a massive early release of thousands of inmates from the (prison) system.”
Unlike the bleepheads of the Club for Growth, Gov. Huckabee actually had to govern a state. But in GOP Land, facing reality is heresy, and as a candidate Huckabee has to prove he can still be oblivious. Back to Kinsley:
Neither Thompson nor Huckabee has anything useful to say about the real problem, which is the huge gap between revenues and spending that George W. Bush, having inherited a surplus, is leaving behind. Thompson’s willingness to take on Social Security would earn him some points for courage if he were planning to use the money to reduce the deficit or address the entitlements problem. But he wants to pour the money into new tax cuts for business, which is not just a bad idea but an incredibly lazy one. There’s more to running for president than buying a round of drinks at the country club and asking what’s on people’s minds.
At least Huckabee’s revenue neutrality would not make the problem worse. For this, the business wing of the Republican Party is hysterically labeling him a “fiscal liberal.”
A what? For Republicans, the epithet liberal used to mean someone who wanted the government to spend a lot of money that it didn’t have. Then it meant someone who wanted the government to spend what it had, but no more. Now, apparently, you are a “liberal” if you only want the government to spend a few hundred billion dollars a year more than it has.
Actually, the spending debate is now over, or should be. The GOP bluff has been called. Republicans had six years in which they controlled the White House and (for most of that time) both houses of Congress. They could have cut any spending they wanted. They did the opposite. None of the realistic Republican presidential possibilities is discussing spending cuts except in the vaguest terms.
But if you peer into the abyss of debt and say that what this country needs is another tax cut, that makes you a good conservative.
What really makes you a good conservative is to believe you can have something for nothing. All their elaborate theories about supply-side economics and “fair” taxes are fiscal alchemy. If we can just find the right formula, they think, government revenue will appear magically, and fairies will provide the government services we want without our having to pay for them.
Twilight of the Would-Be Gods
Their dreams of empire dropped about their ankles, righties today look gloomily ahead to a non-imperialist future. For example, Don Surber laments,
We need our Tony Blair, our Nicolas Sarkozy.
While Democrats select a presidential candidate, Republicans seek a president. There are a bunch of Jimmy Carters on the other side who are willing to apologize for America’s greatness. Forget about finding the next Reagan. America can settle for another Tony Blair or Nicolas Sarkozy.
It’s not clear to me if the “bunch of Jimmy Carters” are the Dem or GOP candidates. Or, indeed, how the first sentence of that paragraph connects to the rest of it.
Wouldn’t it be delightful to hear Mitt Romney say: “Sept. 11 was not an isolated event, but a tragic prologue, Iraq another act, and many further struggles will be set upon this stage before it’s over. There never has been a time when the power of America was so necessary …”
Wouldn’t it be great to hear Rudy Giuliani say: “There is a myth that though we love freedom, others don’t; that our attachment to freedom is a product of our culture; that freedom, democracy, human rights, the rule of law are American values, or Western values; that Afghan women were content under the lash of the Taliban; that Saddam was somehow beloved by his people; that Milosevic was Serbia’s savior. … ours are not Western values, they are the universal values of the human spirit. “
Surber goes on to lament those and other straw men missing (he says) from the campaigns so far. You don’t want to parse Surber’s prose too closely.
If you consider the subsequent terrorist acts that took place in Bali, Madrid, and London, and the ongoing threat of international terrorism, then certainly the 9/11 attacks were not isolated. But by now anyone whose head is actually screwed on must have realized that the real long-term damage of 9/11 is not the result of the attacks themselves but of our response to them. I fear that historians will look back at 9/11 and call it the day that America began to self-destruct.
There’s a difference between strength and toughness. There’s a difference between courage and swagger. There’s a difference between results and spin. There’s a difference between resolve and stubbornness. There’s a difference between action and ideology. But try to explain any of that to a rightie.
The enormous majority of Americans realize that something has gone horribly wrong with America. A majority realize that the economy is not, in fact, peachy. Although news stories say the situation in Iraq is improving, the fact remains that the invasion itself was a colossal mistake and that no result we could possibly obtain there could come close to being worth the blood and treasure it cost.
Righties depend on that sugar high of vicarious vainglory mixed with loathing of others to give their lives meaning. But most Americans are sick to death of junk politics and policy. They want real leaders, not the strutting tin soldiers righties mistake for leaders.
For years, righties were certain that “movement conservatism” held the answers to everything. Today they are struggling to define what the word conservatism means. For example, Bob “the Reptile” Novak complains in today’s Washington Post that GOP presidential candidate Mike Huckabee is not a real conservative.
Huckabee is campaigning as a conservative, but serious Republicans know that he is a high-tax, protectionist advocate of big government and a strong hand in the Oval Office directing the lives of Americans. Until now, they did not bother to expose the former governor of Arkansas as a false conservative because he seemed an underfunded, unknown nuisance candidate. Now that he has pulled even with Mitt Romney for the Iowa caucuses and might make more progress, the beleaguered Republican Party has a frightening problem. …
…The rise of evangelical Christians as the force that blasted the GOP out of minority status during the past generation always contained an inherent danger: What if these new Republican acolytes supported not merely a conventional conservative but one of their own?
In other words, “real” conservatives were fine with evangelicals as long as they stayed in their place.
Huckabee simply does not fit within normal boundaries of economic conservatism, such as when he criticized President Bush’s veto of a Democratic expansion of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program. Calling global warming a “moral issue” mandating “a biblical duty” to prevent climate change, he has endorsed a cap-and-trade system that is anathema to the free market.
Ah yes. True conservatism means denying the overwhelming scientific evidence that climate change is a problem, and rejecting even the most market-friendly solutions to the problem.
Thanks for clearing that up, Bob.
Memo to Novak: have you heard of George W. Bush? Barely a government program he hasn’t expanded; barely a soul he doesn’t want to heal. Nation-building where there is no nation; borrowing when there is no more money. And all wrapped up in a theological bundle of conservative “compassion”. The main difference between Bush and Huckabee is that Huckabee once actually raised the money he wanted to spend, instead of borrowing it from the Chinese. And Huckabee’s resort to left-liberal criticism of conservatism – that’s it’s heartless and greedy – has been deployed by Bush as well. Heroic Christianism – with its certainty about everything and moral imperative to intervene wherever “evil” strikes – is not compatible with any sense of limited government. It’s pretty amazing to me that it has taken Huckabee to wake some up to this somewhat obvious fact.
George Will discusses Michael Gerson’s new book Heroic Conservatism. Will begins his column thus —
… the health of a political persuasion can be inversely proportional to the amount of time its adherents spend expelling heretics from the one true (and steadily smaller) church. Today’s arguments about conservatism are, however, evidence of healthy introspection.
From there, Will marches on to expel Gerson and others from the church.
Conservatism is a political philosophy concerned with (BEG ITAL)collective(END ITAL) aspirations and actions. But conservatism teaches that benevolent government is not always a benefactor.
Conservatism’s task is to distinguish between what government can and cannot do, and between what it can do but should not.
Will is famous for thinking that one of the things government should do is criminalize abortion.
Gerson’s call for “idealism” is not an informative exhortation: Huey Long and Calvin Coolidge both had ideals. Gerson’s “heroic conservatism” is, however, a variant of what has been called “national greatness conservatism.” The very name suggests that America will be great if it undertakes this or that great exertion abroad. This grates on conservatives who think America is great, not least because it rarely and usually reluctantly conscripts people into vast collective undertakings.
And I would argue that government itself is a vast collective undertaking, which may be why conservatives suck at it. But compare/contrast what Will says here to what Surber says, above. If Surber isn’t stuck in national greatness mode I will eat my mousepad. So who’s the “real” conservative — Will, or Surber?
Libertarianism also seems to be facing an identity crisis. Patrick Ruffini writes,
If it’s possible to be known as a pro-life, pro-war, pro-wiretapping libertarian, then sign me up.
without pausing even for a second to consider that criminalization of abortion, endless war, and warrantless wiretapping are all directly at odds with liberty. Essentially, he wants government that isn’t restricting him but through which he can control others. “Libertarianism is no longer aligned with libertine stances on abortion and gay rights,” says Ruffini. Which begs the question, what the hell is it aligned with? What makes “pro-life, pro-war, pro-wiretapping” libertarianism one iota different from big-government authoritarianism? And does language mean absolutely nothing to righties?
William Buckley told an interviewer that “movement conservatism” peaked in 1980, when Reagan became president. One might infer that it’s been dying a long, slow death since, even as its disciples gained more power. Whatever.
BTW, in this interview, Buckley provided an illuminating definition of conservatism:
Conservatism aims to maintain in working order the loyalties of the community to perceived truths and also to those truths which in their judgment have earned universal recognition.
I’d rather just live in the plain ol’ real world, thanks. But this does tell us a lot about why so many are so keen on labeling themselves “conservative” even if they can’t agree on what it means. They are loyal to an idea of conservatism. They like the sound of “limited government” even as they promote warrantless wiretapping and state control of reproduction. They believe in the “rule of law” even if they don’t practice it. They honor “democracy” even as they don’t trust it.
And I say they’re all sinking into the tar pit of irrelevance, and they don’t realize it.
Boys Will Be Boys, Alas
Another rightie who confuses adolescent posturing with manhood.
Why You Have To Be Brave To Live Here
Stephanie Strom writes for the New York Times:
In the genteel world of bridge, disputes are usually handled quietly and rarely involve issues of national policy. But in a fight reminiscent of the brouhaha over an anti-Bush statement by Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks in 2003, a team of women who represented the United States at the world bridge championships in Shanghai last month is facing sanctions, including a yearlong ban from competition, for a spur-of-the-moment protest.
At issue is a crudely lettered sign, scribbled on the back of a menu, that was held up at an awards dinner and read, “We did not vote for Bush.â€
By e-mail, angry bridge players have accused the women of “treason†and “sedition.â€
Judging by Memeorandum, this is the hottest news item on the blogosphere right now. The wingnuts are spewing about Bush Derangement Syndrome. “Shut up and play cards” is a common suggestion.
The players have been stunned by the reaction to what they saw as a spontaneous gesture, “a moment of levity,†said Gail Greenberg, the team’s nonplaying captain and winner of 11 world championships.
“What we were trying to say, not to Americans but to our friends from other countries, was that we understand that they are questioning and critical of what our country is doing these days, and we want you to know that we, too, are critical,†Ms. Greenberg said, stressing that she was speaking for herself and not her six teammates.
The controversy has gone global, with the French team offering support for its American counterparts.
“By trying to address these issues in a nonviolent, nonthreatening and lighthearted manner,†the French team wrote in by e-mail to the federation’s board and others, “you were doing only what women of the world have always tried to do when opposing the folly of men who have lost their perspective of reality.â€
Jimmie at the Sundries Shack disagrees.
What these ladies should have done is reminded the Bush-haters that they were at a bridge tournament and not a political convention and that good manners prohibit the discussion of politics at a table where it is not welcome. I’m fairly sure that reminding your fellow bridge players of their manners would have solved the problem.
Then you beat the stuffing out of them and taunt them relentlessly from the winners’ podium. Maybe you even stack the losers up in a pyramid and have one of your team point at them and laugh while you take pictures.
I assume that last bit was another attempt at levity. But what this tells me is that wingnuts don’t get out much. These days, for Americans, to go abroad is to be treated with, at the very least, caution. We may look normal on the surface, but at the least provocation we may grow tusks and root up the shrubberies.
But these ladies appear to have run into some outright hostility, and they were trying to diffuse the situation. Any emotionally mature person might have done the same thing, which is why wingnuts don’t understand it.
Did they not notice they were playing cards in Communist China?
China- The same country that harvests prisoner’s body organs- The same country that jails Christians and people of faith- The same country that murdered 30-40 million of its own citizens less than 50 years ago.
Do these pampered loons have any perspective of history?
Standard wingnut moral relativism — whatever we do is OK, because China is worse. But in the real world, people who claim a higher standard had better live up to it or face the snarking.
The bridge lady might have written this on her menu instead:
It is not fair for bridge players to criticize GWB. He exemplifies something essential to playing every hand of bridge.
The dummy.
But what does it say about a nation that allows a dummy to be its head of state for eight years?
Poor Babies
Motoko Rich writes in the New York Times that some conservative authors are suing their publisher, Regnery.
Five authors have sued the parent company of Regnery Publishing, a Washington imprint of conservative books, charging that the company deprives its writers of royalties by selling their books at a steep discount to book clubs and other organizations owned by the same parent company.
In a suit filed in United States District Court in Washington yesterday, the authors Jerome R. Corsi, Bill Gertz, Lt. Col. Robert (Buzz) Patterson, Joel Mowbray and Richard Miniter state that Eagle Publishing, which owns Regnery, “orchestrates and participates in a fraudulent, deceptively concealed and self-dealing scheme to divert book sales away from retail outlets and to wholly owned subsidiary organizations within the Eagle conglomerate.†… In the lawsuit the authors say that Eagle sells or gives away copies of their books to book clubs, newsletters and other organizations owned by Eagle “to avoid or substantially reduce royalty payments to authors.â€
The authors argue that in reducing royalty payments, the publisher is maximizing its profits and the profits of its parent company at their expense.
Jeez, guys, welcome to capitalism. I don’t know what socialist paradise you’ve been living in, but it’s all about the company’s profit in these parts, buckaroos.
(FYI, it’s not at all unusual for a niche publisher to run its own book clubs and other distribution outlets that sell books at deeply discounted rates. Regnery didn’t invent this practice.)
Well, we’re all looking for justice, aren’t we? But if a conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged, what do you call a conservative who’s come face to face with the naked face of vertically integrated capitalism?
Maybe they can form a union.
Lies, Damn Lies, and …
Rudy Giuliani is running a radio ad that is generating much comment and derision. Paul Krugman explains:
“My chance of surviving prostate cancer — and thank God I was cured of it — in the United States? Eighty-two percent,†says Rudy Giuliani in a new radio ad attacking Democratic plans for universal health care. “My chances of surviving prostate cancer in England? Only 44 percent, under socialized medicine.â€
Really?
You see, the actual survival rate in Britain is 74.4 percent. That still looks a bit lower than the U.S. rate, but the difference turns out to be mainly a statistical illusion. The details are technical, but the bottom line is that a man’s chance of dying from prostate cancer is about the same in Britain as it is in America.
Defending Rudy, rightie blogger Don Surber spoke up:
The head of the National Health Service, Alan Johnson, took offense when Rudy Giuliani pointed out that the 5-year survival rate of prostate cancer is superior in the United States to places like England that offer “free†health care.
Rudy is a prostate cancer survivor. Rudy said in the U.S. the survival rate is 82%, 44% in socialized medicine countries.
Johnson waded into this and piped up that he has a 74% survival rate.
So what? It is 99.3% here.
Rudy was not misleading anyone. He was only using old data. New data shows that the billions Americans spend on cancer research is paying off.
Lancet Oncology magazine ran the numbers last month, according to Medscape.
I looked at the Medscape article Surber linked. The numbers he provides are from an analysis “headed by Arduino Verdecchia, PhD, from the National Center for Epidemiology, Health Surveillance, and Promotion, in Rome, Italy, was based on the most recent data available. It involved about 6.7 million patients from 21 countries, who were diagnosed with cancer between 2000 and 2002.” So it’s about five years old.
Medscape also says, “The United Kingdom in particular comes out badly in the tables, showing cancer survival rates that are among the worst in Europe.” So comparisons with the UK are not necessarily indicative of “socialized medicine countries.”
But what about the 99.3 percent survival rate? I spent way too much time this morning cruising around for information, and I am way confused. For example, the Center for Disease Control gives a survival rate of 97% and a mortality rate of 26.5, which to number-challenged me makes no sense. I’m sure one of you will attempt to patiently explain it to me, though.
This is from the American Cancer Society:
The 5-year relative survival rate is the percentage of patients who do not die from prostate cancer within 5 years after the cancer is found. (Men with prostate cancer who die of other causes are not counted.) Of course, patients might live more than 5 years after diagnosis. These 5-year survival rates are based on men with prostate cancer first treated more than 5 years ago.
Overall, 99% of men diagnosed with prostate cancer survive at least 5 years. Ninety one percent of all prostate cancers are found while they are still within the prostate or only in nearby areas. The 5-year relative survival rate for these men is nearly 100%. For the men whose cancer has already spread to distant parts of the body when it is found, about 32% will survive at least 5 years.
There are relative survival rates and age-adjusted survival rates and all kinds of other rates, plus mortality rates that make it seem people are surviving and dying at the same time, and the numbers are all over the map. I hypothesize that all these different sources are basing their numbers on diverse criteria, and comparing one set of stats with another is likely comparing apples to oranges. And I have a headache.
As several truth-squading journalists — notably, The Post’s Michael Dobbs— have pointed out, mortality rates from prostate cancer in Britain and the United States are roughly the same: About 25 men out of 100,000 die of prostate cancer each year in both countries. (That’s the standard way of reporting mortality rates, deaths per 100,000 individuals.)
From there I finally got to Michael Dobbs’s explanation, and it’s very clear and good, and there is a line graph to help those of us who need visuals. The line graph reveals that African American men are way more likely to die from prostate cancer than either white Americans or Brits, which ought to be a concern.
The other point Dobbs explains is that prostate cancer tends to develop very slowly. I gather that nearly everyone survives at least five years from the onset of the disease, with or without treatment. So, because patients in the U.S. are diagnosed much sooner, our diagnosis-to-death stats are much better than Britain’s, even though the actual outcomes aren’t much different from Britain’s.
Back to Krugman:
So Mr. Giuliani’s supposed killer statistic about the defects of “socialized medicine†is entirely false. In fact, there’s very little evidence that Americans get better health care than the British, which is amazing given the fact that Britain spends only 41 percent as much on health care per person as we do.
The 41 percent is a step up; it was a lot less than that in the 1990s.
The figure shows spending for health care per capita in various nations, in 1998. I added “USA” and “UK.” In 1998, the U.S. was spending $4,178 per capita and the UK was spending $1,461 per capita. (From the University of Maine’s “The U.S. Health Care System: The Best in the World, or Just the Most Expensive?” [PDF]). There’s no question that the British NHS has problems, but my understanding is that most of those problem stem from gross underfunding rather than the nature of the system itself.
Krugman, again:
Anyway, comparisons with Britain have absolutely nothing to do with what the Democrats are proposing. In Britain, doctors are government employees; despite what Mr. Giuliani is suggesting, none of the Democratic candidates have proposed to make American doctors work for the government.
To righties, all universal health care proposals are the same. They’re all “socialized medicine” or “Hillarycare.” Since what Senator Clinton proposes now bears little resemblance to what she proposed as First Lady in 1993, it can be argued that even Hillary isn’t pushing “Hillarycare.” But what this shows us is that righties aren’t even looking at the arguments or proposals. Their reactions are pure knee-jerk groupthink, and their opinions are based more on irrational fears and emotions than on facts.
Giuliani’s cancer was treated by way of a therapy called Bradychardia, which involves implanting small, rice-sized radioactive capsules into the prostate gland. The technique was developed [PDF] by a researcher from Copenhagen, Denmark. Denmark, you’ll recall, is both in Europe and has a universal healthcare system. It’s a wonder Giuliani didn’t stalk out of his hospital on principle.
Moreover, Giuliani was unlucky enough to get prostate cancer at a fairly young age. But his experience was not typical. The average age at the time of diagnosis is 70 – which means that the domestic care Giuliani is lauding is being provided under the auspices of Medicare – a federally-run, single-payer insurance system.
Ah-HAH! Take THAT, Don Surber.
Since Mr. Surber cited the Lancet Oncology journal as a source, I poked around on the Lancet site looking for more information. Most of their articles are behind a pricey subscription firewall. But I did come across one that’s available for public view, from the October 2007 issue: “Increasing inequalities in US healthcare need taming.”
Although clinics in the USA offer some of the best anticancer services in the world, the proportion of Americans who cannot access these services is shocking. According to the US Census Bureau, in 2005 46·6 million Americans (including 8·3 million children) were without health insurance, with certain subgroups of the population faring especially poorly. For example, a quarter of people whose household income was less than $25 000 were uninsured—this is not surprising, however, given that the average cost of a single adult insurance policy is $2268. Texas had the highest percentage of uninsured people with 30% of adults aged under 65 years without insurance. From an oncology perspective, uninsured people are less likely to have access to screening or early-detection facilities; are more likely to be diagnosed late with more advanced tumours; are less likely to receive appropriate treatment; and are more likely to die from their cancer. Clearly, to make progress in the war on cancer, access to healthcare is a fundamental requirement that precedes any concerns about specific treatments.
Even for those with insurance, coverage is often less than optimum. A 2006 survey by USA Today, the Kaiser Family Foundation, and Harvard School of Public Health, of 930 adults who had cancer or who had a family member in their household with cancer, showed that insurance plans for nearly a quarter of patients paid less than actually needed; one in ten patients reached the limit of what their insurance would pay for cancer treatment; one in 12 were unable to get a specific type of treatment because of insurance limitations; and one in 14 were unable to pay for basic necessities such as food, heating, or housing because of financial burdens encountered in paying for their treatments. Furthermore, 6% of patients lost their health insurance as a result of having cancer. More than 17 million US adults are underinsured, yet current legislation to ensure appropriate provision is inadequate. For example, although many US states recently mandated that insurers cover screening for cancers of the breast, cervix, prostate, and colon, several states have since passed exceptions to these mandates, thereby allowing health insurance companies a licence to underinsure. …
… Currently, about 2·5 million people are diagnosed with cancer in the USA each year, of which about one in six have no health insurance and will receive inadequate care. Given the wealth of the USA, these figures are frankly unacceptable. In the run up to the 2008 US presidential elections, the time is right to highlight these issues to make them a high political priority, and to finally eliminate this appalling inequality of care.
See also Joe Conason [Update] and The Carpetbagger.
Bob Altemeyer Interview
Check out a Bob Altemeyer interview, podcasted here. If you don’t know who Altemeyer is, learn about him here. The interview takes a few minutes to get past the introductory material, but for connoisseurs of right wing psychology, it’s well worth the wait, to hear one of the world’s experts. Altemeyer covers a fair amount of ground in this 102 minute interview, but of interest to me were his thoughts on authoritarian followers (as opposed to leaders). Some takeaways:
Authoritarian followers:
- Lack critical thinking skills. If they like an argument’s conclusion, it doesn’t matter how stupid or flawed the reasoning was to arrive at it. This is also why logic doesn’t work with them.
- Have highly compartimentalized thinking. This means they often hold opposite or inconsistent views. For example, they may support democracy and freedom of speech, but also believe that rabble rousing leftists should be locked up. They will pull out whatever argument is needed given the current circumstance, seemingly unaware that they expressed the opposite position only minutes ago. They are easily prone to hypocrisy because of this. This comes through as a marked lack of fairness.
Altemeyer claims that his surveys of authoritarianism among college students show that it varies according to the times. Students scored low in the early 1970s, and high in the mid 1980s. The average score has been at a midpoint between these extremes for the last five or ten years. In students, the level of authoritarianism diminishes a bit as the student is exposed to the broader world. By contrast, parenting can increase a person’s level of authoritarianism.
It’s interesting to me, that most right wingers I know, have little interest in traveling outside the United States, desiring the least amount of exposure to people who are different than them. The converse is true for the most liberal people I know – they love foreign travel. And this is precisely what helps an authoritarian become less so.
Where Next for Conservatism?
Gary Kamiya has an excellent article in Salon that asks if American conservatism can heal itself.
American conservatism is at once absolutist and utopian, and reactive and aggrieved. Which state came first is a chicken-and-egg question, but they reinforce each other. Psychologically, conservatives want contradictory things — both pure freedom and an unchanging Golden Age. Pragmatically, they want things that are mutually exclusive — no social contract and an organic, connected community, untrammeled individual rights and a rigid moral code. The inevitable disappointment results in resentment. The reason that the American right always behaves as if it is an angry outsider, even when it controls all three branches of government, is that it is at war not with “liberalism” but with social reality.
When you’re talking about conservatism you’re supposed to clarify whether you are talking about libertarian conservatism, social values conservatism, America First conservatism, or some other critter. In a logical world, the libertarian get government out of my business conservatism ought to clash with social we’ll make you behave or else conservatism, but it’s not at all uncommon to find righties who take a libertarian view on some issues (e.g., taxes) and an authoritarian view on other issues (e.g., abortion; warrantless wiretapping). Untrammeled individual rights for me; a rigid moral code for everyone else.
Kamiya asks if “the conservative movement is foreordained to remain in its current debased form.”
There will always be substantive issues on which conservatives and liberals will have good-faith differences. It would simply be a more mature conservatism.
The history of American conservatism does not inspire much confidence, however. In spite of its moderate roots, it has succeeded mainly via absolutist, reactionary politics. This approach has enormous emotional appeal for Americans for whom the modern world is a source of confusion, anger and fear, or who simply disdain the social contract . And the Republican Party is now entirely in thrall to it. The current crop of GOP candidates hold uniformly hard-right positions, with the exception of the libertarian, no-chance Ron Paul. The leading GOP contender, Rudy Giuliani, is even more of a maniacal hawk than Bush on the Middle East and national security. These are hardly signs that the right is moving to the center.
FYI, Ron Paul is plenty far to the right on a great many issues.
But sooner or later, conservatives will have to change course or see their movement wither away.
The issues that have been winners for conservatives are fading. White resentment of federal civil rights laws is the ur-conservative issue, the engine that drove the right’s rise. Barry Goldwater, by reluctantly voting against the Civil Rights Act, permanently realigned the South and paved the way for Nixon’s “Southern strategy.” More recently, right-wing strategists successfully mobilized resentment over “values” issues like the “three Gs” — gays, God and guns. These issues still mobilize some conservative voters, but they aren’t nearly as effective as they used to be. Studies show that the electorate, especially younger voters, are moving left on these issues.
That’s the best one-paragraph summary of the past 40 years of American politics you’re ever likely to read. White resentment of federal civil rights laws, desegregation, Lyndon Johnson’s anti-poverty programs, and affirmative action were like a big boulder dropped in a lake, sending waves in all directions, and movement conservatism has been riding those waves ever since. “Values” issues like prayer in school and abortion and “security” issues like the communist threat (now the “Islamofacist” threat) made waves also, but IMO white racism truly was “the engine that drove the right’s rise,” as Kamiya says.
But, although racism is still with us, I think the racist wave is dissipating, and white voters don’t respond to the dog whistles the way they used to. And I think that’s because more and more whites are one missed paycheck away from disaster and barely hanging on to middle class status by their fingernails. A person facing potential financial ruin is not so likely to sneer about “entitlements” and “government handouts.” Pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall.
In the end, conservatism will have to decide if it wants to be a real party of governance, moving beyond empty labels to engage with real issues, or if it wants to remain a party of reaction, in permanent rebellion against modernity, proffering emotionally satisfying but incoherent policies. Conservatism claims to be a politics of authenticity, but it is actually a politics of impulse and instinct. It is based on unmediated emotions, erupting from the individual ego — Get big government off my back! Keep those civil rights laws out of my white backyard! Lower my taxes! This is ultimately an infantile or an adolescent politics, a failure to come to terms with a world that does not do exactly what the omnipotent self demands. Does conservatism want to grow up, or stay an angry teenager forever?
Preach it, Brother Gary.
The new conservatism would not be liberal. It would still tilt toward small government and lower taxes, would reject policies aimed at equal outcomes, would oppose affirmative action and unrestricted immigration. That’s why it would be conservative (and, anticipating outrage from liberal Salon readers, why I wouldn’t support it). But it would abandon its facile government bashing and appeals to raw emotion. Above all, it would aim at working to build an America that, despite political differences, would pull together, would feel like a united country. It would take seriously that old saw about one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
It’s hard to imagine the party of Karl Rove and Rush Limbaugh moving to the center. But if Americans turn away from the politics of resentment and fear, the GOP may be forced to follow them.
Just as an example of Why Conservatism Is Screwed, consider Jonah Goldberg’s column in today’s Los Angeles Times. Goldberg is an unoriginal thinker and pedestrian writer who got to be a big shot columnist promoting the virtues of taking care of oneself because he is Lucianne Goldberg’s son. Who needs government handouts when you’ve got nepotism? Anyway, today Goldberg writes,
The problem is that conservatism, even Reagan’s brand, wasn’t as popular as we often remember it. Government spending continued to increase under Reagan, albeit a bit more slowly. Today, the U.S. population is 30% larger but government spending is 84% greater (adjusting for inflation) than it was when Reagan delivered his 1981 inaugural address. That was the speech in which he declared: “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,” and vowed to “curb the size and influence of the federal establishment.”
In 1964, two political psychologists, Lloyd A. Free and Hadley Cantril, famously asserted that Americans were ideologically conservative but operationally liberal. Americans loved Barry Goldwater’s rhetoric about yeoman individualism, but not if it meant taking away their Social Security checks or farm subsidies. “As long as Goldwater could talk ideology alone, he was high, wide and handsome,” they wrote. “But the moment he discussed issues and programs, he was finished.”
The flaw was not necessarily Goldwater’s. As Gary Kamiya wrote in the Salon article linked above,
Conservative ideals are laudable: Who is against freedom, tradition or the preservation of community? The problem is that while they’re beautiful in the abstract, it is difficult to base a coherent governmental policy on ideals alone. Once these principles enter the real world of politics, governance and society, a world that requires compromise and the curtailment of individual freedom for the common good, they are useless as guideposts. If they are taken as moral absolutes, they cancel each other out: The apotheosis of the individual leads to the destruction of community and tradition.
When Kamiya writes “a world that requires compromise and the curtailment of individual freedom for the common good” I believe he’s using the word freedom in the sense of being unrestrained, as opposed to political freedom. But on the Right the word freedom has been drained of all meaning; it is merely ceremonial. We lefties who still care about the Bill of Rights are dismissed as “civil liberties absolutists.”
Goldberg continues,
Liberals have an inherent advantage. As long as they promise incremental, “pragmatic” expansions of the government, voters generally give them a pass. And every new expansion since FDR and the New Deal has created a constituency for continued government largesse. …
… “Liberals sell the welfare state one brick at a time, deflecting inquiries about the size and cost of the palace they’re building,” writes William Voegeli in an illuminating essay, “The Trouble with Limited Government,” in the current issue of the Claremont Review of Books.
Committed conservatives, meanwhile, find themselves at a disadvantage: They advocate smaller government for everybody — when Americans generally (including most Republicans) want smaller government for everybody but themselves.
In Goldberg’s view, people support liberalism because they are greedy. They want largesse. They demand entitlements. But notice that Goldberg defines “smaller government” purely in terms of domestic spending. He famously supports war, war, and more war, and the government spending that goes with war. He has advocated warrantless police strip searches of children. He is OK with criminalizing abortion. “Big government” is fine when it interferes with other people’s personal lives. Goldberg just wants to keep it out of his pocket.
Under all-Republican rule, the federal government got bigger and more intrusive even as it became more corrupt and less competent. I believe that is symptomatic of the inherent incoherence of movement conservatism. Right wingers want to control because they don’t know how to manage. The Bushies in particular seem to think that if they can just get enough control and operate without public scrutiny, they can force events and the world to bend to their will. Then to prove he’s against “big government,” Bush vetoes S-CHIP.
Just call ’em “totalitarians for freedom.”
Update: See also Busy, Busy, Busy.
Shattered
This is partly an addition to moonbat’s “Evangelical Crackup” post and partly something I started to write last week and never finished.
A couple of weeks ago Paul Krugman wrote that the Republican Party is not getting the big donations from Big Corporations that it has in the past. Krugman wrote,
According to data collected by the Center for Responsive Politics, in the current election cycle every one of the top 10 industries making political donations is giving more money to Democrats. Even industries that have in the past been overwhelmingly Republican, like insurance and pharmaceuticals, are now splitting their donations more or less evenly. Oil and gas is the only major industry that the G.O.P. can still call its own.
The Economist says pretty much the same thing:
With all polls predicting a Democratic sweep of House, Senate and presidency in 2008, the smart money is flowing the Democrats’ way.
A Wall Street Journal poll last month showed that only 37 percent of professionals and managers identify themselves as Republicans or leaning that way.
A YouGov/Polimetrix poll for The Economist finds that only 44 percent of those earning more than $150,000 plan to vote Republican. So it is no surprise — though historically astonishing — that the Democrats’ presidential candidates have raised substantially more than Republican ones.
Now, why would this be? The Economist continues:
There are several obvious reasons for this. The shrill voices of religious conservatives have driven away many pragmatic Republicans who feel that banning abortion and gay marriage are not the most pressing issues confronting America. The Bush administration’s incompetence, evident from Iraq to Louisiana, alienates people who know about management.
But the most damaging factor has been the Republicans’ inability to control the federal budget. By slashing taxes without cutting spending, Bush turned the budget surplus of $240 billion he inherited from Bill Clinton into a deficit that bottomed out at over $400 billion, and is still running at $160 billion….
… Belatedly (to put it mildly), the administration has realized that it has lost the mantle of sound economic management to the Democrats. On Oct. 3 Bush picked up his dusty veto pen, using it to cut back spending for the first time in his presidency.
Astonishingly, he chose the wrong issue to wield it on: a proposal to expand a highly popular scheme that subsidized health insurance for poorer children. This from a man who had let Republican pork through by the sty-load.
The Economist has hopes for some of the GOP candidates, notably Giuliani, McCain and Romney, and doesn’t think much of the Dems. However,
Taxes, trade, and health care: These are subjects Main Street wants to know more about. But the religious right does not. Rather than building a pragmatic center-right alternative to Hillary Clinton, the conservative movement is stuck with God, gays and guns.
Methinks the Reagan Coalition is heading for D-I-V-O-R-C-E. The moneyed interests supporting the GOP were happy to cater to the religious Right as long as the Christionistas were swinging elections in their favor. But if Money decides that God is a loser, watch the GOP re-discover the joys of secularism.
Money liked George W. Bush because he promised to cut their taxes. But there’s more to a culture favorable to business and profits than low taxes. I suspect Money is re-learning what some of those things are. It doesn’t need high gas prices, health insurance costs from hell, economic instability among consumers and capital tied up by record debt. The current crop of GOP candidates, for the most part, aren’t promising to do much differently from Bush. They’re promising to do the same stuff, only more competently. Money must be reviewing its options very carefully right now.
Bush’s presidency has made a shambles of real conservatism. Let’s leave aside the issues on which liberals and conservatives can be expected to disagree, like his tax cuts for the rich, expansion of Medicare or his position on immigration, and focus solely on ones that should be above partisan rancor — ones involving the Constitution and all-American values. On issue after Mom-and-apple-pie issue, from authorizing torture to approving illegal wiretapping to launching a self-destructive war, Bush has done incalculable damage to conservative principles — far more, in fact, than any recent Democratic president. And he has been supported every step of the way by Republicans in Congress, who have voted in lockstep for his radical policies. None of the major Republican candidates running for office have repudiated any of Bush’s policies. They simply promise to execute them better.
The Bush presidency has damaged American civil society in many ways, but one of the most lasting may be its destructive effect on conservatism. Even those who do not call themselves conservatives must acknowledge the power and enduring value of core conservative beliefs: belief in individual agency and responsibility, respect for American institutions and traditions, a resolute commitment to freedom, a willingness to take principled moral stands. It is a movement that draws its inspiration from towering figures: Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson, Edmund Burke. It stands for caution in foreign adventures, fiscal sobriety and a profound respect for tradition.
Or at least it used to stand for those things. Today’s conservatism is a caricature of that movement: It embraces pointless wars, runs up a vast debt, and trashes the Constitution. Selling out their principles for power, abandoning deeply seated American values and traditions simply because someone on “their side” demanded that they do so, conservatives have made a deal with the devil that has reduced their movement to an empty, ends-obsessed shell. How did the party of Lincoln end up marching under the banner of Tom DeLay and Rush Limbaugh, Dick Cheney and Ann Coulter?
The House That Reagan Built always was a hammered-together mess of clashing architectural styles. The wonder is that the coalition lasted as long as it has.
The movement has always been intellectually fractured, riven by contradictory beliefs. As George Nash pointed out in his classic “The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America,” from the beginning modern American conservatism has been divided between traditionalists and libertarians. Libertarians regard individual freedom as the highest good, support the free market, and oppose coercive government policies. Traditionalists regard virtue, not freedom, as the highest good, believe in a transcendental moral order and are wary of unfettered individualism. Despite attempts to “fuse” them, the two worldviews are fundamentally incompatible — you either believe in surrendering to God and tradition or you don’t. Time and again, conservative attempts to implement policies that do justice to both the movement’s “freedom” and “virtue” wings have failed.
The relationship between the small-government, libertarian-minded conservatives and the Religious Right always seemed improbable on the surface. Even so, there was a remarkable amount of cross-pollination between the two factions. For example, the late militant Christian whackjob Rousas John Rushdoony preached that God blessed America with “biblical capitalism,” and God’s Capitalism must not be sullied by wordly government regulation. The now-fallen Rev. Ted Haggart’s explained Jesus’ plan for free market capitalism to his flock. And I’ve encountered a remarkable number of self-described libertarians who oppose reproductive rights for women.
The Economist expressed amazement that President Bush chose to be frugal with a bill for children’s health care, but that tells me The Economist doesn’t understand our righties. To them, meanness is a virtue. Whether to the poor, or gays, or women, or undocumented workers, both the small-government and social conservatives can be hard-hearted bastards. They may have diverse ideas about which groups should be kicked while they’re down, but the meanness is always there.
And so is the vainglory. Kamiya continues,
Bush’s “war on terror” is a rerun of the Cold War, with “Islamofascism” replacing communism and Dr. Strangelove at the controls. By attacking Iraq, Bush made up for all those decades of compromise and weakness, all that Neville Chamberlain-like appeasement, that groveling accommodation with evil. This time, we’re nuking the bastards!
Bush’s unprovoked war on Iraq provided a satisfying catharsis for American conservatives, an opportunity to play Winston Churchill and fight the good fight against Evil. But the satisfaction of urging on a Manichaean struggle from one’s armchair should only go so far before reality kicks in. Just as most conservatives during the Cold War realized that attacking the Soviet Union was not in America’s interests, so one would think that today’s conservatives would realize that Bush’s “war on terror” is not only unwinnable, but both unnecessary and counterproductive. By now, it’s obvious to all but myopic ideologues that attacking the Arab world to teach it a lesson was like kicking a vast wasp’s nest while wearing a Speedo. We want to win the “war on terror,” not strike heroic poses while being stung to death. No one disputes the virtue of moral clarity, but without intelligence, moral clarity is useless. Where is it written that conservatives have to be stupid?
Actually, I do dispute the virtue of “moral clarity.” “Moral clarity” all too often is just Bigotry wearing Virtue’s T-shirt.
But this takes us to another aspect of the Reagan coalition. Neocons and others wrapped up in the glory of American exceptionalism and the interests of Israel made common cause with Christian pre-millennialists who are eager to bring on Armageddon. Thus, in the early 1990s Bill Kristol and other leaders of the neocon faction of conservatism adopted the Christian Right’s views on abortion and gays. I suspect this had less to do with sincere moral sensibilities than with a desire to weaken the Democratic Party and liberalism generally. But today, David Kirkpatrick writes in “The Evangelical Crackup,” evangelical congregations are splitting over the Iraq War.
Today, the evangelical journal, has even posed the question of whether evangelicals should “repent†for their swift support of invading Iraq.
“Even in evangelical circles, we are tired of the war, tired of the body bags,†the Rev. David Welsh, who took over late last year as senior pastor of Wichita’s large Central Christian Church, told me. “I think it is to the point where they are saying: ‘O.K., we have done as much good as we can. Now let’s just get out of there.’ â€
Welsh, who favors pressed khaki pants and buttoned-up polo shirts, is a staunch conservative, a committed Republican and, personally, a politics junkie. But he told me he was wary of talking too much about politics or public affairs around the church because his congregation was so divided over the war in Iraq.
In other words, Christian conservatives and neocons are no longer reliable allies. Another aspect of the coalition has crumbled.
Finally, the men who were leaders of the religious Right during the Reagan heyday are growing old, as are their followers. Younger evangelicals don’t see the world the same way their elders did. Kirkpatrick:
Secular sociologists say evangelicals’ changing view of society reflects their changing place in it. Once trailing in education and income, evangelicals have caught up over the last 40 years. “The social-issues arguments are the first manifestation of a rural outlook transposed into a more urban or suburban setting,†John Green, of the Pew Research Center, told me. “Now having been there for a while, that kind of hard-edged politics no longer appeals to them. They still care about abortion and gay marriage, but they are also interested in other, more middle-class arguments.
I don’t believe the influence of conservative Christianity on conservative politics will ever completely disappear, because this influence has been a feature of American politics from the beginning of American politics. But it’s an influence that comes and goes. It was very strong after World War I until the Scopes Trial in 1925. In the 1930s until the 1950s mainstream protestantism, including the larger evangelical denominations, was at least mildly progressive in the context of the times. Until the Reagan years many people outside the Bible Belt saw militant right-wing Christianity as a quaint relic of the past. Now, if I’m not mistaken, the GOP is at the beginning of a shakeout that will result in many re-alignments and dis-alignments. Unless the religious Right can pull off some unexpected political victories in 2008, I believe its influence in the Republican Party will be much subdued in the future.