1. Will Marshall of the Progressive Policy Institute writes,
To win in 2020, Democrats should resist the urge to turn the House into the new headquarters of the anti-Trump resistance or to initiate battles over legislative priorities favored by party liberals that have no hope of passage.
My own sense is that we will not see much moderation in the Trump era. Neither Mr. Trump’s non-college-educated male supporters nor his college-educated female antagonists are likely to respond to an appeal to moderation.
2. Brink Lindsey and Niskanen Center co-authors write,
A moderate is one who is grateful for both liberalism and conservatism, and hopes for — and tries through their own work to move toward — the best version of each, in part in service to improvement in the other.
Their manifesto runs to 18 pages, including footnotes, and it is not consistent in tone. Notwithstanding the sentence quoted above, there is quite a bit of straw-manning in the earlier sections, including using epithets like “market fundamentalism” and “democratic fundamentalism.”
David Brooks read the Niskanen manifesto and gave it the sort of review that Lincoln Steffens once gave to the Soviets. Brooks writes,
I felt liberated to see the world in fresh new ways, and not only in the ways I’ve always seen them or the way people with my label are supposed to see them. I began to feel at home.
The way it looks to me, the Niskanen Center occupies a sort of John McCain place in the media firmament. That is, the NYT will give it points for moderation whenever it breaks with conservatives. For example, it’s fine for the Niskanen Center to attack climate denialists.
But suppose the Niskanen Center came out with a plan for a sustainable long-term budget and attacked those who are in denial about the projected deficits in our entitlement programs. If that wins plaudits from the NYT, then I might begin to feel at home.
‘
a plan for a sustainable long-term budget
Does anyone have a workable plan for that? Any plan I can imagine looks like massive cuts in social security, Medicare, and military spending without corresponding tax cuts (because deficits) causing Depression-like levels of demand destruction. Throw in a couple hundred thousand newly-unemployed soldiers with no marketable skills and you have a pretty good recipe for a failed state.
Would the Niskanen Center actually do such a thing, for the very reason you describe?
Many of “Trump’s non-college-educated male supporters” voted for Obama. They are not some monolithic block. And many more voted Democratic in the midterms than in 2016. The notion that they are not moderate is completely unfounded. Pew does breakouts post-election breakouts and the breakouts. Here is what Pew reported . (Democrat/Republican – non-college whites):
2018: 39/60
2016: 28/67
2012: 36/61
2008: 40/58
I’m old enough to remember when the so-called private sector didn’t factor how government benefits for its full time employees were an essential aspect of its business plans involving in how little it could pay its employees. The question that needs to be answered is what is the role of a government like ours when what we call the private sector doesn’t actually pay the costs the market requires of it.
What would a “moderate” say?
When was that?
It’s really hard to make a principled case for moderation because what is moderate, centrist, bipartisan, etc. changes with the daily shifts of the Overton window. If you are all about compromise, then how do I know whether you are reliable, what you really stand for, where you’ll bend or where you’ll draw the line? How do I know when you are blowing smoke with some of your firm claims and promises, knowing that later you’ll have the cover and plausible deniability of “being willing to meet in the middle” when in fact you never “gave in” and were always just lying and wanting to achieve the ‘compromise’ policy all along?
As for Brooks, he was so over the top and ecstatic about that thoroughly dull and uninspiring Niskanen document that the honestly most charitable interpretation of his Op-ed is that the jarring lines constitute some kind of Straussian signal that he’s really poking fun at them. And they deserve it. Consider this:
Who can remember all the way back to three years ago to the run-up to the 2016 election, and to Trump’s rise, securing of the GOP candidacy, and eventual victory. Were all those people voting for Trump because of they were upset that the establishment figures weren’t “delivering effective governance”? Were they all convinced that Trump could deliver “effective governance” better than any of those other establishment figures? Um, no. That’s not what happened, and that’s not what people were thinking or complaining about.
Instead, most of them were extremely frustrated at the establishment conformity to the elite consensus that was so stiflingly uniform that no one would vigorously articulate support for what they wanted except for a brash showman outsider.
They have learned the wrong lesson from that experience. This is the “normative political science” version of the “normative economics” analysis of the GFC, in which the narrative one tells always conveniently ends up implicating policies that happen to align with one’s political preferences.
Handle,
It occurs to me that it would be interesting to understand the coordination mechanisms behind the stiflingly uniform elite consensus. I would argue that the consensus is mostly self-imposed in a decentralized way.
Could you elaborate on your model?
Decentralized and self imposed consensus would have difficulty abruptly changing its line. Sometimes we see such difficulty, but mostly we don’t.
The climate gate emails involve some mighty centralized uniform elite consensus, and previous abrupt changes in the description of speciation and evolution would seem to require highly centralized decision making.
Huge schools of fish are able to swerve quite abruptly. There are any number of videos of that in National Geographic and so on. However, fish definitely have no centralized email servers, and communication is overwhelmingly very local by visual feedback from what your neighbors are doing. There are rather simple mathematical models of this process that closely reproduce observed behavior, used in games, movie special effects and such.
previous abrupt changes in the description of speciation and evolution
What would those be?
Political moderate is a term and position that is going extinct. “Political moderate” is supposed to be about a workable compromise that exists between two binaries. It worked and was a useful construct when our two parties represented a big tent of diverse interests. It does not work with our present political parties, which have grown increasingly insular, are much less politically diverse, and no longer tolerate heretics and apostates, to say nothing of heterodox views. Factions inside the two parties cannot even compromise with the other party factions.
So there are no “moderate” positions anymore and therefore no more moderates – those that are left will endure only through nostalgia. What remains are two distant binaries, but the world is not binary in reality.
The death of moderates and a much less diverse partisanship means there are plenty of positions outside the narrow liberal/conservative spectrum – mostly they are simply heterodox and ignored by a media establishment which is in thrall to the partisan horse-race.
Notice, for example, how neither party actually has an immigration policy. They have talking points and platitudes.
Same thing with so many other policy areas. Just try to examine partisan positions and determine what first principles are either at stake or being addressed.
I guess I give the Niskanen guys credit for trying a different approach, but if your efforts end up making David Brooks feel warm then you might need to start over.
Serious question: what’s so different or new about it? How much trouble would, say, Emmanuel Macron, or your typical Davos-attending technocrat have with:
1. Government regulations, e.g., of the environment and financial markets, are necessary and often beneficial, and should not be heavily constrained by constitutional jurisprudence. “Bad Constraints”
2. On the other hand, in favor of other kinds of ‘deliberative constraints’ on common democratic failure modes like rent-seeking and rule by obscured, unaccountable bureaucratic accretion and intractable diffusion of responsibility, i.e., ‘kludgeocracy’. These are the “Good Constraints”
3. Openness to, or at least settled tolerance of, large levels of redistribution, morally justified by both the inherited disadvantages from past injustices, and as compensating, socially-stabilizing buffers for the fallout of the churn of global markets
4. Governments have serious information, coordination, and agency problems, and shouldn’t do things where the risks of severe occurrences of those problems is high.
5. Carbon taxes as preferable to command-and-control energy regulation
6. Regulatory adaptability to accommodate innovation while being fair to regulated legacy providers.
7. Opposition to zoning, and mobility-impairing occupational licensing and non-portable welfare benefits.
8. Universal Basic Income as a welfare / redistribution mechanism.
9. Open-ish Borders
10. War Taxes (Now there’s an idea with a long history, even LBJ did it)
11. Fiscally conservative pension reform (Uh oh, Macron got in trouble for that one!)
12. Universal Catastrophic Coverage (Ok, Macron et al would object anything short of nationalized medicine didn’t go far enough.)
My impression of that manifesto is that they are painting a kind of extreme caricature of ‘right-wing’ opposition as being extremely and dogmatically anti-state to the point of inhumane irrationality, and posing as a reasonable alternative. But we already have a thoroughly politically entrenched mixed economy with huge amounts of redistribution where big social programs and a open-ish market economy co-exist.
I think they’d rather fight the right, or they view it as necessary to sell their program to the left?
Could ” the Niskanen Center [come] out with a plan for a sustainable long-term budget “?
Sure – like Dan Mitchell of CATO — grow gov’t spending less than GDP growth. That’s not a cut, not even a freeze, it’s just slower growth.
But there’s too much pork to throw around and too many political “friends” who “need” some of that gov’t cash in order to do the good things.
The sooner Congress starts taxing the “excess endowments” of Universities, as well as the excess expenditures, the sooner there will be a reduction in spending growth. The Universities are the most important, tho not only, cultural influence. And they secretly discriminate against hiring Reps. That shouldn’t be allowed, but is.
Venezuela shows that, no matter how rich a country is, it can spend to much and punish production too much … and become poor. Thru socialism, real socialism, like actually practiced in practice.