At least since the election of St. Ronald Reagan, self-styled conservatives have repeatedly revealed themselves to be the biggest frauds or most delusional suckers in American politics. Conservatives ostensibly believe in limited government and individuals who are smart and moral enough to use voluntary associations and free markets to meet the needs of all God’s children. But under Reagan and, more recently, George W. Bush and a Republican Congress that spent like LBJ on a bourbon-fueled bender, they cheered an immense increase not just in federal outlays and borrowing but also in centralization of power in Washington. The “FDR Democrat” Reagan saved entitlements for the old and the relatively wealthy by jacking up payroll taxes on the young and relatively poor. Bush and his congressional playmates created No Child Left Behind, the Medicare prescription-drug plan, the Transportation Security Administration and at least two wars that can only be reckoned tragic wastes of blood and treasure. Q: Is there a crisis in the conservative movement? ☀
conservatism
Say “top 5%” to Murray, and his imagination conjures up everything he dislikes: coastal liberals listening to NPR in their Lexus hybrid SUVs. He sees that image so intensely that no mere number can force him to remember that the top 5% also includes the evangelical Christian assistant coach of a state university football team. It includes the retired general now enriching his pension with directorships and consultancies. It includes for that matter the call screener at the Rush Limbaugh program.
(Murray holds the strange idea that listening to talk radio proves you belong to the American mainstream. But of course listening to talk radio doesn’t prove you are mainstream. It proves you are old.)
Charles Murray’s back-handed treatment of the new American upper class is all the more dismaying because the topic is so very desperately important.
Some of what Murray wishes to say is surely true. It’s surely true that the affluent and influential people who make up the top 5% of the American population know less and care less about their countrymen than the equivalent segment of the population in, say, 1970. Such separation has significant real-world consequences.
It seems that those who call themselves conservatives and liberals today by and large emphasize their rights rather than duties; they show precious little concern for the past, both as a repository for knowledge or as a source of duties; and they tend to speak in the glowing terms of progress. Finally, they all too often lack the humility that the conservative feels deep in his bones. The conservative knows that all good things are at root a gift. This disposition of gratitude fosters humility, and humility is necessary if we are to live responsibly, for humility acknowledges limits and a denial of limits is a key feature of the liberal mind. When we consider all of this in light of our current political climate, it becomes clear that the apparent differences between conservatives and liberals in America today are far less dramatic than we are often tempted to believe. What we have is a variety of liberals, some more radical than others, but a truly conservative position is illusive and, what is more important, probably not desired by most of the electorate; although, there is always a remnant, and this remnant, I believe, would grow if a truly conservative alternative was articulated in a clear and compelling way. Of course, Rush Limbaugh and the folks at Fox News—those standard bearers of “conservatism”—will find this analysis implausible, for their deepest commitments are to the very things that are antithetical to a legitimate and historically informed conservatism. Nevertheless, any attempt to continue using this fine word should include a conscious effort to resist abusing it for the purpose of political gain. It is, after all, a word worth conserving. Conservative in America ☀
To understand what Murray does in Coming Apart, imagine this analogy:
A social scientist visits a Gulf Coast town. He notices that the houses near the water have all been smashed and shattered. The former occupants now live in tents and FEMA trailers. The social scientist writes a report:
The evidence strongly shows that living in houses is better for children and families than living in tents and trailers. The people on the waterfront are irresponsibly subjecting their children to unacceptable conditions.
When he publishes his report, somebody points out: “You know, there was a hurricane here last week.” The social scientist shrugs off the criticism with the reply, “I’m writing about housing, not weather.”
Murray also pretends to consider the possibility that the decline in wages and opportunities for working-class men might be behind the drop in marriage rates within the same group. But he shows that married men work harder and earn more than unmarried men, even within the same social class, and makes the case that the absence of marriage discourages work, rather than that the absence or scarcity of work discourages marriage (or some more subtle interplay between the two). A rise in the number of working-class people declaring bankruptcy proves to Murray that they’re dishonest, not increasingly shackled to debt by a decline in wages. An increase in the number of white working-class Americans who tell pollsters that they value job security over the rewards of a job well done provides Murray with evidence that they’re lazy, rather than rightly insecure about employment in a changing economy.
Of course, Murray never mentions the fact that the country’s so-called red states have the least government and the highest levels of religious practice, yet they have the highest poverty and divorce rates in the country. Conversely, the godless liberal blue states have the lowest rates of divorce and single parenthood. He also ignores the possibility that changes in our tax code have given the wealthy ever more powerful incentives to practice the “moral” behavior that wealth rewards, while a shrinking public sector makes it feel more imperative to secede from the commons into their SuperZips and private schools. And he ignores the way wealth can also save marriages, allowing unhappily married husbands and wives to console themselves with separate vacations, homes, even separate lives.
But hypocrisy on the part of the wealthy or the Founders doesn’t bother Murray at all. The fact is, rich people can mostly be trusted to do the right thing — even if, when it comes to marriage, they sometimes try and fail and fake it, or in the case of religion and our skeptical Founders, they don’t personally practice what they preach. It’s among the lower classes that the loss of “virtue” matters most. Because the non-wealthy have to be forced to do the right thing, whether by strict religious mores or the threat of going hungry. Ideally, in Murray’s view, it’s both.
The fact that these family trends have accelerated even as the U.S. has cut back much of its welfare state would seem to undercut Murray’s argument. Unless, that is, you believe that any government support at all encourages indolence. And Murray does. The only major increase in government social spending has come in the category of Social Security and Medicare, which take care of old people after they work. But maybe those programs let the working and middle classes work less hard, since they don’t have to fully support their parents in old age.
I’m not sure that the term “anti-establishment conservative” means anything when it encompasses the likes of Palin, Cain, and Perry. If there are conservatives who think that backing Gingrich is a way to stick it to the powers-that-be in their party, they have already been defeated. An “anti-establishment” protest that makes Gingrich its standard-bearer has zero credibility. It isn’t just that Gingrich and his recent record embody virtually everything that many conservative activists loathe, but that he is winning some of them over by using the most superficial cultural and rhetorical cues available. Conservative Gingrich supporters are at a point where their identity politics and policy-free pseudo-populism have become self-parodying. Eunomia ☀
In March, Haidt will publish The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (Pantheon). By laying out the science of morality—how it binds people into “groupish righteousness” and blinds them to their own biases—he hopes to drain some vitriol from public debate and enable conversations across ideological divides.
Practically speaking, that often means needling liberals while explaining conservatives and religious people, and treading a fine line between provocation and treason. Haidt works in a field so left-wing that, when he once polled roughly 1,000 colleagues at a social-psychology conference, 80 to 90 percent classified themselves as liberal. Only three people identified as conservative. So hanging out in his lab can jar you at first. You’ll be listening to his team talk shop over boar burgers and organic ketchup in Greenwich Village, and then you think—Wait, did Haidt just praise Sarah Palin?
Indeed. “She’s right,” he says, that “it’s not left-right so much as it is the big powerful interests who control everything versus the little people.” And National Review? “The most important thing I read” to get new ideas. And Glenn Beck? “A demonizer,” says Haidt, but one who has “a great sense of humor, so I enjoy listening to him.”
Meanwhile, though Haidt still supports President Obama, he chides Democrats for a moral vision that alienates many working-class, rural, and religious voters. Though he’s an atheist, he lambasts the liberal scientists of New Atheism for focusing on what religious people believe rather than how religion binds them into communities. And he rakes his own social-psychology colleagues over the coals for being “a tribal moral community that actively discourages conservatives from entering” and for making the field’s nonliberal members feel like closeted homosexuals. (See related article, Page B8.)
“Liberals need to be shaken,” Haidt tells me. They “simply misunderstand conservatives far more than the other way around.”
Which conservative in the mid-1980s could have imagined the Age of Obama? Who could have predicted that statist liberalism would come roaring back to life with such persuasive power? Kirk, a friend of Reagan’s and an honored guest at the White House, wrote glowingly in his memoirs of Reagan’s achievement: “To the American people, Ronald Reagan had become the Western hero of romance—audacious, faithful, cheerful, honest, and skilled at shooting from the hip.” He had reformed education, had reduced taxes, inflation, and unemployment, and had stood up to Libya and the Soviet Union, Kirk recalled.
Such an endorsement from one of the greatest inspirations of the post-World War II conservative renaissance carries considerable authority with the movement. And rightly so. It should give pause to anyone reckless enough to challenge Reagan’s legacy. But that legacy itself raises nagging questions. The federal payroll was larger in 1989 than it had been in 1981. Reagan’s tax cuts, whatever their merits as short-term fiscal policy, left large and growing budget deficits when combined with increased spending, and added to the national debt. His tax increases were among the largest proportionate ones in U.S. history. And more than one historian has called Reagan’s foreign policy “Wilsonian.” In short, it is hard in 2009 to point to any concrete evidence that the Reagan Revolution fundamentally altered the nation’s trajectory toward bloated, centralized, interventionist government. Conservatism in the 1980s made its peace with much of liberalism—if not with all of its legislative agenda, then at least with its means to power. Republicans and Democrats now argue over how big the bailouts should be or how long the troops should remain deployed, rarely about first principles.
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