Category Archives: Three-Axes Model

The Neocon Servile Mind

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David Brooks writes,

The conservatism that [Irving] Kristol was referring to is neoconservatism. Neocons came in for a lot of criticism during the Iraq war, but neoconservatism was primarily a domestic policy movement. Conservatism was at its peak when the neocons were dominant and nearly every problem with the Republican Party today could be cured by a neocon revival.

Kristol and others argued that the G.O.P. floundered because it never accepted the welfare state. “The idea of a welfare state is in itself perfectly consistent with conservative political philosophy,” he argued. In a capitalist society, people need government aid. “They need such assistance; they demand it; they will get it. The only interesting political question is: How will they get it.”

I am reading The Servile Mind, by Kenneth Minogue, which takes the opposite point of view. Minogue argues that the welfare state substitutes political agency for moral agency. As citizens, we lose our moral compass and instead pick up a political one.

I find the book rather heavy going, but I probably will review it somewhere down the road. If you are looking for someone who concedes nothing to the oppressor-oppressed axis and instead views it as undermining Western values completely, then Minogue is your champion.

Back to the squishier conservatives, Reihan Salam lauds Brooks and Irving Kristol.

the right response to programs that really do undermine self-reliance and individual liberty may well be to eliminate or consolidate or devolve them. But it is important to acknowledge that not all programs undermine self-reliance and individual liberty, e.g., wage subsidies are designed to entice low-wage workers into the labor market, a crucial first step if these workers are eventually to climb the economic ladder to self-sufficiency. Wage subsidies are a paradigmatic example of a conservative welfare state initiative, and when well-designed they can do a great deal to strengthen the social foundation of a free enterprise economy by making it more inclusive.

Read the whole thing.

A Provocative Claim

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From “Dalrock.”

Child support crowds out marriage, and even in cases where weddings still technically occur the option for the wife to unilaterally convert the family from a marriage based family to a child support based family always exists. This is part of the threatpoint designed to empower wives and dis-empower husbands. Men simply don’t have the option to choose the marriage based model over the child support model.

Incidentally, I have downloaded Robert George’s Conscience and its Enemies. He takes the conservative point of view on family issues, and I admit that I am not yet persuaded. However, it may be worth writing a longer review. Robby and I happened to overlap a bit at Swarthmore. He now teaches at Princeton. These days, he would get my vote for number one on the list of Professors Who Are Unlikely to Receive a Standing Ovation–at either place. Let’s just say that Swarthmoreans are all about the oppressor-oppressed axis, not so much about civilization-barbarism. I’m guessing Princetonians are similar.

Basically, I am just another liberal Painglossian when to comes to trends in family law. That is, I have never thought that child support laws were anything but good. I never thought that loosening divorce laws was a mistake. I am on the pro-choice side on the abortion issue. etc.

While one blog post is not going to change my mind, “Dalrock” leads one to consider the question that economists ask about well-intended policy: but then what? what happens in the long run?

Suppose you make it easier for a woman to divorce a man and to obtain child support. Then what?

Then men will prefer not to get married. Staying unmarried makes it harder for the woman to break up the relationship and still receive child support.

I am not sure that these are top-of-mind issues among young people. Of course, my contacts with young people are pretty much limited to the affluent children of Vickies. What these young people say is top-of-mind is that they really, really, don’t want to go through divorce. Compared to my generation, they seem to regard marriage as belonging to a later stage in life. My line is that for our generation, getting married was like starting a new business–a moment of promise and hope. Today, it’s like going IPO–a moment of affirmation and triumph.

Sentences to Ponder

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Charles Hill wrote,

To understand the current Islamist assault on world order, it is necessary to recognize that every major war of the modern age has been an ideologically driven attempt — no two alike — to overthrow and replace the Westphalian international state system.

The quote is from page 49 of Trial of 1000 Years: World Order and Islamism, cited by Roger Kimball.

I have not read the book, but I would be curious how Hill fits World War I into this framework. Instead, this might be an example of over-reaching along the conservative civilization-vs.-barbarism axis.

Pratap Bhanu Mehta writes,

Let us take at face value the claim that the protections of US citizens against surveillance were violated only incidentally. Let us also accept that states will privilege their own citizens over others. Implicit in the debate is a premise few seem to have questioned: that it is justified for the US to violate the privacy rights of citizens of other countries without just cause. It has rendered meaningless whatever domestic protections citizens of other nations may enjoy against their own democratic governments. Why should an Indian citizen fight unregulated surveillance at home when the US can carry it out anyway?

Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

I wish more people took David Brin’s approach to thinking about surveillance. We do not necessarily have to see surveillance as a tool of coercion or as oppression. But once people put it one of those axes, it is hard to get them to reconsider.

Notes from a Civilization-Barbarism Symposium

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I heard a number of former Bradley Prize winners speak at a symposium Wednesday morning. That evening, there was an awards reception, at which this year’s winners were announced. Yuval Levin said,

Conservatives tend to begin from gratitude for what is good and what works in our society and then strive to build on it, while liberals tend to begin from outrage at what is bad and broken and seek to uproot it.

You need both, because some of what is good about our world is irreplaceable and has to be guarded, while some of what is bad is unacceptable and has to be changed. We should never forget that the people who oppose our various endeavors and argue for another way are well intentioned too, even when they’re wrong, and that they’re not always wrong.

…That’s not to say that conservatives are never outraged, of course. We’ve had a lot of reason to be outraged lately. But it tends to be when we think the legacy and promise we cherish are threatened, rather than when some burning ambition is frustrated.

Overall, I think that he spoke to the civilization-barbarism axis, as one would expect. He also tended toward Thomas Sowell’s “conflict of visions” analysis of the difference between liberals and conservatives.

The Bradley folks are conservatives, not libertarians. In the hallway conversations at the morning symposium, I heard lots of support for government snooping. (Speaking of the snooping program, David Brooks certainly took the conservative line, didn’t he? I think others have pointed out that Brooks is more concerned about the lack of checks and balances against Edward Snowden than about the lack of checks and balances against the intelligence agencies.)

One of the panels at the Bradley symposium addressed the topic of threats to freedom (other than economic policy, which was the subject of a separate panel). A couple of panelists cited Charles Murray’s “coming apart” thesis. Heather MacDonald thought that perhaps too much individual freedom was leading the lower classes into behaviors that lead to dependency. Later, after Robby George voiced similar concerns in response to a luncheon speech by Charles Krauthammer, Krauthammer replied that the Constitution was not designed to require virtuous citizens. On the contrary, it is meant to be robust to human failings. While I appreciate both sides, I think that in the end I come down on the side that a culture of virtue matters more than the Constitution. I think where I would differ from Murray/MacDonald/George is on where the cultural problem lies. I think it lies not with the lower classes but instead with certain parts of the elite. Another panelist, Brad Smith, spoke of the need for conservatives to regain control over the K-12 curriculum. I think that is closer to being on track, and if that is the case, then lamenting the breakdown of the traditional family is barking up the wrong tree.

MacDonald also cited the atmosphere of censorship in academia. Topics on which there is not freedom of speech include gender differences and IQ. But note that, again, this is a problem among the elite.

Krauthammer offered an optimistic take on the electoral prospects of conservatives. Among his reasons:

1. Polls show more conservatives than liberals.

2. The 2012 election was idiosyncratic. Romney lost on the issue of “who cares more about people like you?” in which Obama swamped Romney in exit polls by 60 percentage points. (Krauthammer did not give figures, but one can imagine something like 75 Obama, 15 Romney, 15 undecided)

3. The current scandals hurt Democrats, because they are the party of government.

4. The key issue of our times is the crisis of the welfare state, an issue on which conservatives are better positioned than liberals.

The immigration issue came up in the earlier panel on the economy. Victor Davis Hanson carried the ball for the restrictionist civilization-vs.-barbarism team. Gary Becker proposed using tariffs rather than quotas (although he did not use that terminology). I used that term in my essay ten years ago, and in fact you should read that essay to see how little the issue has changed during the interim.

Comments on NSA Snooping

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1. Anyone who desires or expects government agencies to relinquish the use of information-gathering should read David Brin’s The Transparent Society. Indeed, that book is a must-read for anyone who cares enough about the issue to pay attention to recent news reports.

2. I also claim that a must-read is my own article, The Constitution of Surveillance, written nine years ago.

3. I hope people are putting the NSA program in context with the Boston Marathon bombing. Here you go to all this effort to use Big Data to find terrorists, and when you are handed hard, actionable intelligence from the Russians you muff it.

4. I bet you will not find politicians putting the NSA program in context with Chinese cyber-spying, and explaining why ours is good and their is bad. I don’t think politicians are capable of doing the hair-splitting, so I think what they are left with is “What we do is good because we are good, and what they do is bad because they are bad.”

5. The issue is an uncomfortable one for libertarians, because I think that most people believe that the government is snooping in their interest. The majority may even be right about that. I myself have less of a problem with the snooping per se than with the secrecy of the programs. In my view, it is the secrecy, along with an absence of strong institutional checks, that is bound to lead to abuse. Also, see point (3).

6. The issue is an uncomfortable one for progressives, because their impulse is to treat the Obama Administration differently than they would have treated the Bush-Cheney Administration.

7. The issue is an uncomfortable one for conservatives, because it turns them into strange bedfellows. The civilization-barbarism axis clearly argues in favor of government snooping to defend citizens against barbarians, so conservatives feel inclined to betray libertarians and instead offer aid and comfort to President Obama.

8. How does snooping technology relate to the idea of competing private security agencies? Isn’t snooping technology going to be a vital tool for security agencies? What if a rogue private security agency conducts snooping in a way that customers of other agencies see as abusive? What if there are such significant economies of scale in snooping that it is a natural monopoly? David Friedman probably has thought about this.

Maybe the key point is (5). Government officials will argue that what they do must remain secret. They cherish secrecy. They claim that it is for our own good that we do not know what they do. I would say that such claims are often made and rarely true.

Obviously, a lot of other people have written about this. I recommend David Strom’s post (he is the St. Louis technology consultant, not the North Carolina libertarian) for its useful links.

Reform Conservatism

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Ross Douthat defines it.

The core economic challenge facing the American experiment is not income inequality per se, but rather stratification and stagnation — weak mobility from the bottom of the income ladder and wage stagnation for the middle class. These challenges are bound up in a growing social crisis — a retreat from marriage, a weakening of religious and communal ties, a decline in workforce participation — that cannot be solved in Washington D.C. But economic and social policy can make a difference nonetheless, making family life more affordable, upward mobility more likely, and employment easier to find.

Let’s evaluate this along the three-axes model. Even though Douthat shows concern for low-skilled workers, he views the problem in terms of the civilization-barbarism axis rather than the oppressor-oppressed axis. On the freedom-coercion axis, although Douthat throws libertarians a bone by saying that the problems cannot be solved in Washington, he thinks that Washington “can make a difference nonetheless.”

Pointer from Reihan Salam. Indeed, the paragraph above sounds like a reprise of Douthat and Salam’s Grand New Party. Not that there is anything wrong with that.

Read the entire post. If we think in terms of the current institutional structure, I would be willing to sign on to Douthat’s agenda. (One difference is that I would be more favorably disposed to easing up on immigration for low-skilled workers. I think it is at least as likely that low-skilled immigrants are complements for low-skilled domestic workers as it is that they are substitutes. And in general I do not think that protectionist measures can do much for low-skilled workers: protect them from labor at home and they still can face competition from labor abroad, from capital, and from consumer substitution away from artificially high-cost goods and services.)

However, I think that for libertarians, attempting policy reforms within the current institutional structure is an exercise that uses up a lot of energy without moving the ball very far, if at all. I think that any significant motion in a libertarian direction will have to come from an evolution toward competitive government. We need to restructure government services so that there is less centralization, less bundling, and less protection from private competition.

Of course, that is nothing but a reprise of the widely-unread Unchecked and Unbalanced.

David Boaz on Libertarianism

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He lists the top ten ways that he tries to explain it.

the number 1 way to talk about libertarianism — or at least a sentence I found effective when I was talking about Libertarianism: A Primer on talk shows: “Libertarianism is the idea that adult individuals have the right and the responsibility to make the important decisions about their lives.” Every word is important there: We’re talking about individuals. We’re talking about adults; the question of children’s rights is far more complex. Responsibility is just as important as rights.

The objection from progressives is that this ignores a lot of harm in the world–the harm that people do to themselves, the harm of market failures, and the harm of oppression. To meet this objection, I would say that I believe that humans make mistakes in the context of government that do more harm than the mistakes that they make when pursuing their individual interests in the context of the market.

The objection from conservatives is that this ignores the need for collective action to suppress barbarism, both as an external threat and as an individual tendency. To meet this objection, I would say that I believe that government enforcement of civilized values is more often than not an oxymoron.