Reading Room to Grow allows me to clarify my goals in Setting National Economic Priorities. In the opening essay, Peter Wehner writes,
Americans do not have a sense that conservatives offer them a better shot at success and security than liberals. For that to change, conservatives in American politics need to understand constituents’ concerns, speak to those aspirations and worries, and help people see how applying conservative principles and deploying conservative policies could help make their lives better.
I am at once more idealistic and more cynical than this. I am idealistic in that I would just spell out the policies I would most like to see given what I judge to be the political constraints, without worrying about how the policies come across to ordinary people. I am cynical in that I do not think that voters respond to policy proposals.
Moral individualism mixed with economic collectivism feels like freedom only because it liberates people from responsibility in both arenas. But real freedom is possible only with real responsibility. And real responsibility is possible only when you depend upon, and are depended upon by, people you know. It is, in other words, possible only in precisely that space between the individual and the state that the Left has long sought to collapse.
…the conservative approach to public policy… involves three steps: experimentation (allowing service providers to try different ways of solving a problem), evaluation (enabling recipients or consumers of those services to decide which approaches work for them and which do not), and evolution (keeping those that work and dumping those that fail).
Levin sounds like a cross between Edmund Burke and, well, me. I consider it to be moral philosophy properly done. What passes for moral philosophy on the left, in contrast, comes across to me as a set of gestures and postures. Tom Lehrer summed it up years ago in The Folk Song Army.
We are the Folk Song Army.
Everyone of us cares.
We all hate poverty, war, and injustice,
Unlike the rest of you squares.
I once got asked to leave a dinner party for singing ‘The Folk Song Army.’
Don’t really have anything more valuable to contribute; just putting that out there.
According to Jim Manzi, “findings” are surprisingly unreliable when they do not derive from experiments that satisfy strict criteria. The experiments in living that result from letting a hundred flowers bloom are far from satisfying them. Yet when people draw conclusions from observing these experiments this is, in a certain literature, described very optimistically as learning, discovery, adaptation and seeing what works.
If one accepts Manzi’s observation, how reconcile it with the line of thinking sketched in Levin’s second quoted paragraph?
The voting public aren’t moved by policies – they are moved by (promised) outcomes. Nuanced, counter-intuitive policies are easy to soundbite into non-existence.
Coming up with sound policies is good – but it has to be backed by populist rhetoric or its simply an exercise in futility.