The Table At Aspen

We've been taping The Table here at Aspen, with distinguished guests taking part as well as the usual Atlantic crew. Here are the first two segments of a conversation with C. Daniel Mote, Paul Verkuil, and Michael Bennet, on the subject: "Is Higher Education For Everyone?"

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Flexibility and Family

I don't want to be that guy who relates everything back to his book, but ... this passage from Russell Shorto's Times piece on fertility in Europe and elsewhere dovetails awfully well with what Reihan and I talk about in Grand New Party vis-a-vis work-life balance, and the sort of policies social conservatives should champion:

Last year the fertility rate in the United States hit 2.1, the highest it has been since the 1960s and higher than almost anywhere in the developed world. Factor in immigration and you have a nation that is far more than holding its own in terms of population. In 1984 the U.S. Census Bureau projected that in the year 2050 the U.S. population would be 309 million. In 2008 it’s already 304 million, and the new projection for 2050 is 420 million.

“Europeans say to me, How does the U.S. do it in this day and age?” says Carl Haub of the Population Reference Bureau in Washington. According to Haub and others, there is no single explanation for the relatively high U.S. fertility rate. The old conservative argument — that a traditional, working-husband-and-stay-at-home-wife family structure produces a healthy, growing population — doesn’t apply, either in the U.S. or anywhere else in the world today. Indeed, the societies most wedded to maintaining that traditional family structure seem to be those with the lowest birthrates. The antidote, in Western Europe, has been the welfare-state model, in which the state provides comprehensive support to couples that want to have children. But the U.S. runs counter to this. Some commentators explain its healthy birthrate in terms of the relatively conservative and religiously oriented nature of American society, which both encourages larger families. It’s also true that mores have evolved in the U.S. to the point where not only is it socially acceptable for fathers to be active participants in raising children, but it’s also often socially unacceptable for them to do otherwise.

But one other factor affecting the higher U.S. birthrate stands out in the minds of many observers. “There’s much less flexibility in the European system,” Haub says. “In Europe, both the society and the job market are more rigid.” There may be little state subsidy for child care in the U.S., and there is certainly nothing like the warm governmental nest that Norway feathers for fledgling families, but the American system seems to make up for it in other ways. As Hans-Peter Kohler of the University of Pennsylvania writes: “In general, women are deterred from having children when the economic cost — in the form of lower lifetime wages — is too high. Compared to other high-income countries, this cost is diminished by an American labor market that allows more flexible work hours and makes it easier to leave and then re-enter the labor force.” An American woman might choose to suspend her career for three or five years to raise a family, expecting to be able to resume working; that happens far less easily in Europe.

If I may wax chauvinistic for a moment, I think the American model is self-evidently better: As Reihan suggests, a more flexible approach to work and childrearing represents a place where feminism and social conservatism don't have to be at odds, and indeed can reinforce each other's insights. This means that to the extent that we should consider doing more, a la Europe, to ease the burdens on working parents, we should be forging pro-family policies that strengthen our existing flexibility - as opposed to expanding the more inflexible, Europe-style policies that effectively penalize women (or men) for taking time off when their children are young, rather than outsourcing their care to strangers and going back to work.

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My Big Idea: Supreme Court Supermajorities

Like my colleagues, I'm out at the Atlantic-sponsored Aspen Ideas Festival for the next few days, and last night I attended the opening ceremonies, where a parade of worthies stood up to offer their "big idea" for the week. Matt's already taken note of the evening's most interesting moment: Shelby Steele choosing "the case against white guilt" as his big idea, which led to a certain amount of seat-shifting among the predominantly-liberal audience, who are after all attending a Festival that frequently partakes of precisely the spirit Steele was criticizing. Which is to say: Good on the organizers for having him. (Though I agree with Matt that Steele largely lost me when he concluded by arguing that "white guilt" is largely responsible not only for the failures of affirmative action, but for our military difficulties in Iraq as well.)

Steele was followed to the podium by Sandra Day O'Connor, who delivered rather less memorable remarks about civic engagement, which included her usual bit about how we need more respect for the judiciary and fewer attacks on activist judges in our public life. She seemed like a perfectly nice, perfectly intelligent person, but listening to her I experienced something like the feeling Jim Manzi expresses here: Namely, a mix of annoyance and outrage at how many significant controversies in American life have come down to the question of what Sandra Day O'Connor (and now Anthony Kennedy, of course) thinks about the matter.

With this in mind, here's my big idea for the week. Over the past few years of court-watching, I've gradually moved from supporting some version of Scalia-style originalism to a much more radical judicial minimalism, in which the Court would be obliged to show far greater deference to the other branches of government than either liberal or conservative jurists show today. (I have, of course, no qualifications to argue seriously for any theory of jurisprudence, but set that aside.) Of course, judicial nominees' fine-sounding theories of minimalism have a way of collapsing upon contact with the kind of power the Supreme Court wields, so perhaps we ought to consider enforcing it - for instance, by requiring a supermajority of the Justices (either 6-3 or 7-2) to deem any existing legislation unconstitutional.

Essentially, this model would mean that whenever there are strong arguments on both sides of a given constitutionality question - the sort of situation that produces most of the 5-4, "how will Kennedy vote this time?" decisions - the Court would be forced to defer to the legislative branch. The theory would be that in a polarized Court, if you can't convince at least one Justice who doesn't share your ideological preconceptions to side with you - and there are plenty of recent cases where John Roberts has done exactly that, so it isn't a pipe dream - the issue should be left to the public and their representatives to hash out. (And note that I'm arguing against interest here, because this rule would leave my least-favorite ruling - Roe, decided by 7-2 - in place, while overturning recent decisions - on guns and affirmative action, among others - that I agree with.)

Of course there are all sorts of reasons why this wouldn't work - but hey, it's an Ideas Festival, dammit! I'm just throwing it out there!

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Blogging GNP

The nice thing about having a co-author is that he can help shoulder the load of responding to comments on your book - and with that in mind, here's Reihan responding to Ezra Klein, to Ramesh, to Norm Ornstein (by way of Jonah Goldberg), and of course to Rush Limbaugh.

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E. Coli Conservatives?

Al Gore, endorsing Obama:

If you care about food safety, if you like a T on your BLT, you know that elections matter. If you bought poisoned lead-filled toys from China or adulterated medicine made in China, if you bought tainted pet food made in China, you know that elections matter. After the last eight years, even our dogs and cats have learned that elections matter.

Sounds like he's been reading Paul Krugman on how Milton Friedman poisoned your food, and Rick Perlstein on "e. coli conservatives." So far the only attempt I've seen to actually quantify the Bush-era decline in food safety belongs to Alex Tabarrok, who pulls up numbers suggesting that, well, it hasn't declined at all. There are obviously a lot of variables at work here, and I wouldn't call Tabarrok's chart dispositive - but I'm curious if there are any actual numbers, as opposed to anecdotes, to support the Gore-Krugman-Perlstein thesis.

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The Relevance of ANWR?

Ramesh responds:

I agree that by itself ANWR is not the stuff presidential elections turns on. But widen the lens a little bit and look at energy policy as a whole. A candidate who wanted to allow drilling in ANWR and other restricted areas and opposed increasing energy prices to fight global warming would have, all else equal, a political advantage over a candidate who opposed drilling and supported cap-and-trade. That's what is driving the frustration on the Right with McCain right now, and the political judgment that underlies that frustration seems to me to be correct: He is missing a good opportunity.

Point taken. But McCain's embrace of cap-and-trade didn't happen in a vacuum: It was an attempt, albeit a misguided one, to break with the heads-in-the-sand approach to energy and climate change that far too many conservatives have been taking for far too long. And the right-wing zeal for drilling in ANWR has been part of the problem, not part of the solution: It's licensed conservatives to posture about energy independence while sidestepping the global-warming debate entirely. If the argument for drilling in ANWR were embedded in a broader Jim Manzi-meets-Shellenberger-and-Nordhaus approach to the dual imperatives of cheaper and cleaner energy, then I'd be all for it. But for the most part, that isn't how it's being framed. It's just "drill here, drill now, pay less," full stop. Which is bad policy and bad politics.

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McCainomics

My take on McCain's big economic policy speech is over at the Current.

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A More Equal Capitalism

Instead of fretting about the isolationist menace, John McCain should consider listening to Jim Manzi.

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McCain's Domestic Policy Problem

Ramesh writes:

If he’s the nominee, I actually don’t think repairing relations with conservatives is going to be his biggest problem. His biggest problem is going to be the one that Romney has identified over the last few weeks – he doesn’t seem to care about economics enough to have developed and internalized a compelling message on it, and he isn’t a particularly credible messenger either. He may have a weakness on domestic policy as a whole. He has played a big role on some issues, but typically his interventions have not required a great deal of study. I’m not sure he can pull that off all year.

One irony of the talk-radio right’s antipathy to McCain is that despite all his years of deviationism, if you look at the issues he’s emphasized since comprehensive immigration reform blew up in his face last year, he’s actually hewed as closely as any of his rivals to the “back to basics” line that many movement conservatives have insisted (wrongly, in my view) represents the GOP’s best path forward in the wake of the ’06 debacle. Yes, his heretical views on climate change and sundry other issues have come up here and there, but for the most part, McCain’s been running as the candidate of victory in Iraq, porkbusting at home, and … well, not all that much else.

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The "Myth" of Welfare Queens

In one of his slew of Republicans-are-racist posts earlier in the year, Paul Krugman wrote, sarcastically:

When [Reagan] went on about the welfare queen driving her Cadillac, and kept repeating the story years after it had been debunked, some people thought he was engaging in race-baiting. But it was all just an innocent mistake.

Of course, there couldn't be a third option - like, say, that Reagan was indulging in his typical fondness for using vivid Reader's Digest-style anecdotes to illustrate his arguments, and that the "welfare queen" story drew on real-life incidents to get at the underlying reality of an easily-abused welfare system, even if the Gipper's details were fuzzy. No, it's racism or nothing.

I thought of the Krugman line while reading (via Rod Dreher) the story of protests in New Orleans over a plan to demolish several public housing complexes. Here's a snippet:

Sharon Jasper, a former St. Bernard complex resident presented by activists Tuesday as a victim of changing public housing policies, took a moment before the start of the City Hall protest to complain about her subsidized private apartment, which she called a "slum." A HANO voucher covers her rent on a unit in an old Faubourg St. John home, but she said she faced several hundred dollars in deposit charges and now faces a steep utility bill.

"I'm tired of the slum landlords, and I'm tired of the slum houses," she said.

Pointing across the street to an encampment of homeless people at Duncan Plaza, Jasper said, "I might do better out here with one of these tents."

Jasper, who later allowed a photographer to tour the subsidized apartment, also complained about missing window screens, a slow leak in a sink, a warped back door and a few other details of a residence that otherwise appeared to have been recently renovated.

If you click through to the story, you'll find a photo of Ms. Jasper's digs, paid for out of the public purse, which in addition to having been recently renovated appear to house an absolutely enormous flat screen television. There was, admittedly, no Cadillac in evidence, so calling her a "welfare queen" is a tad unfair. "Welfare duchess," though, seems like a reasonable term of art ...

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Anti-Intellectualism, the Right, and Rudy

David Frum, on populism and anti-intellectualism:

Conservatives have drawn strength from populism. But you can overdo any good thing —and I am beginning to think that on this one, we've zoomed the car into the red zone.

For me, the lights started flashing in 2005, during the battle over the nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court of the United States. Defenders of the president's under-qualified nominee began attacking the concept of qualification. One wrote: "The GOP is not the party which idolizes Ivy League acceptability as the criterion of intellectual and mental fitness. Nor does the Supreme Court ideally consist of the nine greatest legal scholars." Harriet Miers, we were told, had a good Christian heart. That was enough ... In the end, it was not quite enough for Ms. Miers. But it may be enough for many voters in 2008.

The currently front-running candidate in Iowa, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, has built his campaign on a plan to abolish the Internal Revenue Service and replace the federal income tax with a national sales tax ... Economists and tax experts virtually unanimously agree that the plan is beyond unworkable -- that it is downright absurd.

... Just a little lower down in the polls is a libertarian candidate named Ron Paul. Paul is best known for his vehemently isolationist foreign policy views. But his core supporters also thrill to his self-taught monetary views, which amount to a rejection of everything taught by modern economists from Alfred Marshall to Milton Friedman.

Huckabee and Paul have not the faintest idea of what they are talking about. The problem is not that their answers are wrong -- that can happen to anyone. The problem is that they don't understand the questions, and are too lazy or too arrogant to learn.

Fair points all: Huckabee's Fair Tax zeal and Paul's anti-Fed enthusiasm are genuinely foolish; there is a touch of Miers-ish identity politics in the evangelical community's Huckaphilia, and Frum's larger worry about anti-intellectualism in the contemporary Right is one I share in spades. But if you're going to be hard on the current crop of Republican candidates for making bogus claims about public policy, it seems awfully unfair to leave out the candidate given to running ads in which he announces: "I know that reducing taxes produces more revenue. The Democrats don't know that. They don't believe that." (They don't believe it, of course, because in the current fiscal landscape you can't find a serious conservative economist who thinks it's true.) Or penning op-eds in which he explains that "the meaning of fiscal conservatism" includes the principle that "lower taxes can result in higher revenue." Or telling a GOP debate audience, in response to a question about whether we need to raise taxes to fix up our nation's transportation infrastructure, that the way “to do it sometimes is to reduce taxes and raise more money.”

Now it’s true that occasionally Rudy Giuliani hedges his bets (“sometimes,” “can,” and so forth) on this topic, and it’s true as well that he may not actually believe the extreme supply-side talking points he’s spouting, in the way that Huckabee presumably believes in the Fair Tax and Paul in the gold standard. On the other hand, neither of those ideas are likely to serve as the basis for economic policy in the United States any time soon, and both are marginal even within the right-wing coalition; the “tax cuts raise revenue” canard that Giuliani keeps promoting, on the other hand, is a staple of Bush Administration rhetoric and probably the dominant view among movement conservatives. If you’re looking for cases where the Right’s anti-elitism has shaded into outright anti-intellectualism - for cases where, in Frum's words, a GOP politician has deliberately failed to "study the problem, master the evidence, and face criticism" - Giuliani’s frequent channeling of Larry Kudlow seems like at least as telling an example as anything Mike Huckabee and Ron Paul are peddling.

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Who Needs Marriage?

A couple weeks ago, remarking on the coexistence of steadily rising illegitimacy with relative social peace over the last decade, Andrew wrote:

... social conservatives have long argued that the breakdown in traditional family structure is the core reason behind other social ills, such as crime. Perhaps it isn't in all social settings. Perhaps living in sin for a while before marriage is actually a social good for some; perhaps lower rates of marriage are not the end of the world - as many victims of awful marriages can attest. Perhaps child-birth outside marriage is not necessarily a bad thing if the relationship is solid and care for the child is secure. Perhaps, in other words, holding the family of the 1950s up as the standard by which all family structure should be measured is not, in fact, very helpful. I don't know, but it seems one obvious inference from the data worth exploring further.

It seems clear from looking at Europe that Andrew's right, up to a point: Child-birth outside marriage doesn't necessarily lead to negative social outcomes "if the relationship is solid and care for the child is secure," which it usually is in countries like Sweden where most children born out of wedlock are still raised in two-parent households. Unfortunately Americans aren't Swedes, and marriage qua marriage tends to be a much more important indicator of well-being, both for children and for parents, in the United States than it does in Europe. Perhaps this will not always be so; perhaps the coexistence, in the 1990s and early Oughts, of falling crime and higher rates of out-of-wedlock births are a leading indicator of the Swedenization of American social norms. But I doubt it, not least because the secondary consequences of family breakdown, persistent inequality and social immobility chief among them, appear to have worsened over the last decade, while support for an expanded welfare state - Swedenization of a different sort! - has risen over the same stretch. It seems more likely that the lesson of the Nineties is that a long economic boom and the end of willfully counterproductive poverty policies can make up for growing social disarray in other areas. And counting on another tech boom or another poverty-fighting reform as successful as the shift from AFDC to TANIF seems like a poor guide to social policy.

All of this is a long way around to noting that the latest numbers on out-of-wedlock births have been released (though they're only receiving attention from immigration opponents, so far as I can tell), and the news is, well, not good: Up among blacks, up among whites, way up among Hispanics. Here's hoping Andrew's right about what this portends, or what it doesn't. But here's betting that he isn't.

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The Trouble With Heroic Conservatism, Cont.

I think these remarks from Yuval Levin (in an EPPC discussion of Heroic Conservatism with Michael Gerson and David Brooks) nail the problem as well as anything I said. I'll quote at length:

I think it has to be said that the book is terribly unfair to fiscal conservatives. It treats them as essentially devoid of principle and idealism and lacking concern for the poor. Mike calls them at one point “small minded, cold, and uninspired.” I think ... this dismissive attitude is really a consequence of something more general that’s missing in the vision that’s laid out in Heroic Conservatism ...

For me, this was crystallized most fully in the last chapter of Mike’s book ... where Mike really lays out, more than anywhere else, what he really means by “heroic conservatism.” He begins the chapter…the first sentence of the chapter is, “At various stages in my life, like many idealists of a serious turn of mind, I have dabbled in despair.” And Mike lays out the ways that he’s seen the partial appeal of a kind of conservatism of deep pessimism – of beauty in the twilight. And I think we all have an idea of what he means and of the kind of appeal that [it] sometimes does have. But he writes that in the end, “My skepticism and pessimism have been confounded by my heroes.” And he describes the heroic deeds and the struggles against slavery and tyranny and on behalf of the weak and the needy that make up so much of the rest of this book.

But here I think is the choice that’s presented to us by Mike most clearly: it’s despair or nobility, it’s the lowest or the highest. And I think that this arrangement of the options lays out a profoundly tragic view of life, that even where it’s hopeful, it’s an other-worldly kind of hope, a hope for the suffering and wretched to be redeemed by dramatic acts of heroism. It’s noble and it’s very inspiring, and I think it has to have a place in our politics, but I think that is can’t be the foundation of our politics.

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Dubai Ports Redux

If Lou Dobbs is winning the free trade debate, as David Brooks says, stories like this one aren't going to help matters.

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As Goes the Family ...

Those African-American social mobility numbers I mentioned earlier are depressing enough to deserve to be unpacked a little:

Forty-five percent of black children whose parents were solidly middle class in 1968 -- a stratum with a median income of $55,600 in inflation-adjusted dollars -- grew up to be among the lowest fifth of the nation's earners, with a median family income of $23,100. Only 16 percent of whites experienced similar downward mobility. At the same time, 48 percent of black children whose parents were in an economic bracket with a median family income of $41,700 sank into the lowest income group.

If you're looking for a reason to be pessimistic about the future of the American social fabric - and particularly the fabric of working-class life - in the face of a decade's worth of good news, it's right here. Why are African-Americans more likely to be downwardly-mobile than non-blacks? Probably because of two inter-related factors: The weak cultural capital afforded by the black community's disastrous family structure, which in turn reinforces the black-white wealth gap that's a legacy of slavery and segregation. Now consider that the first factor, the decline of marriage and the rise of illegitimacy, is increasingly visible in white and (especially) Hispanic America as well. This raises the possibility that what's true of African Americans today - that they have a hard time making it to prosperity and a harder time staying there - may be true of the rest of working-class America further down the road. The United States as a whole has a higher same out-of-wedlock birth rate at present - around 37 percent as of 2005 - that black America had in the 1960s, when Daniel Patrick Moynihan first sounded the alarm about family dissolution in the African-American community. If that number inches higher, or even if it stays constant, it's going to be harder and harder for working-class Americans to compete in the global economy, and harder, as a result, for them avoid stagnation and downward mobility at home.

As I said, this is a pessimist's forecast, and the pessimists' forecasts of the early 1990s were proven wrong in spite of the steadily rising white and Latino illegitimacy that has characterized the fifteen years since. But the problem is still there, and still real, even though crime and drug abuse and many other negative social indicators have gone into eclipse of late. The U.S. isn't likely to suddenly morph into Scandinavia, which has managed to maintain impressive family stability - and the social stability and economic competitiveness that comes with it - without high marriage rates. Nor are we likely - though never say never, where the U.S. economy is concerned - to enjoy another period of expansion like the Nineties boom. Enormous wealth-generation can (and seemingly did, in the last decade) cover over a variety of social ills, but it's easy to imagine the reverse happening over the next few decades, with the decline of the American family making any era of diminished expectations self-reinforcing, so that the country, as well as its working class, becomes downwardly-mobile over time. This isn't a future we should expect, by any means - but it's a possibility we should be aware of, and one that we should strive to avoid.

I should note, as well, that Reihan's post today on a politics of "infinite demands" dovetails with this pessimistic vision in interesting and not-so-obvious ways.

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The Republicans and the Black Vote

Stories like this one, about black evangelicals' flirtation with the GOP, are a reminder that the declining salience of racial politics - which Paul Krugman thinks will deliver the country back to the Democrats - could theoretically end up cutting in the GOP's favor in certain respects, as middle-class, socially-conservative African-American voters become more comfortable with the idea of voting for Republicans. So are blog posts like this one, from Fred Siegel, who notes that even at a moment rife with bad news about downward mobility among African-Americans, old-fashioned racial politics are playing almost no role in the Democratic primary campaign. And so are numbers like these, from a Pew survey on African-American public opinion:

A 53% majority of African Americans say that blacks who don't get ahead are mainly responsible for their situation, while just three-in-ten say discrimination is mainly to blame. As recently as the mid-1990s, black opinion on this question tilted in the opposite direction, with a majority of African Americans saying then that discrimination is the main reason for a lack of black progress.

One of these years, these kind of shifts will produce a spike in the Republican Party's miniscule share of the black vote. But I'm pretty sure that 2008 isn't going to be that year.

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Ignorance Isn't Strength

Fred Thompson has a tax plan:

Speaking on Fox News Sunday, the presidential candidate recommended extending President Bush's tax cuts, due to expire in 2010, eliminating the estate tax, repealing the alternative minimum tax and lowering the corporate tax rate to no more than 27 percent from the current 35 percent.

Thompson also said that he would adopt the approach of the conservative Republican Study Committee in the House of Representatives that would offer, as an alternative to the current income tax, a two-rate income tax system stripped of deductions and credits.

Here's Ramesh, in response:

I see two possible problems with this plan. The first is that it would have to be coupled with a plan to restrain spending, or even to cut it, to avoid a large expansion of the deficit. The second is that, as presented, it shifts the tax burden onto parents. Indeed, it shifts it from corporations onto parents. If I were Mike Huckabee or Mitt Romney, I might have something to say about that.

Good points both, but Ol' Fred doesn't buy into that whole "expansion of the deficit" business:

Estimates devised earlier this year by the nonpartisan staff of the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation indicate that major parts of Thompson's plan would lose at least $2.5 trillion over ten years, nearly as much as the entire federal government is expected to spend this fiscal year.

In the interview, Thompson said such official estimates are often wrong and that his tax cuts would stimulate "growth in the economy" and bring in more revenue than expected.

Obviously, affluent business-class types are deserting the GOP primarily because of its stance on social issues. But I can't help thinking that this sort of transparently bogus supply-side dogmatism - which fits into a larger narrative, sometimes fair and sometimes not, of the Republicans as the know-nothing party - has more than a little to do with it as well. Business-class voters want lower corporate tax rates, sure, but they also want a party that acts like it knows how to manage the economy more generally, particularly as the dollar weakens and the country edges toward recession. And sound economic management would seem to require, at the very least, demonstrating an understanding of basic principles like how tax cuts affect revenue.

If I'm right, this raises the possibility that the party's commitment to supply-side orthodoxy is hurting the GOP coming and going: To savvy business-class voters, the Thompson-style magical thinking it requires makes Republicans look ignorant and untrustworthy; to middle-income families, meanwhile, the emphasis on estate taxes, corporate tax rates and upper-bracket cuts makes the party look out-of-touch with kitchen-table concerns.

But hey - at least it keeps the Club for Growth from bolting to the Democrats.

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Race, the GOP, and Paul Krugman

His latest column is yet another broadside in the whole "does race explain the Republican realignment" argument, and as you might expect, it combines convincing specific examples of Republicans playing the race card in the South with totally unconvincing macro-level analysis. For instance, there's this:

... everyone knows that white men have turned away from the Democrats over God, guns, national security and so on. But what everyone knows isn’t true once you exclude the South from the picture. As the political scientist Larry Bartels points out, in the 1952 presidential election 40 percent of non-Southern white men voted Democratic; in 2004, that figure was virtually unchanged, at 39 percent.

First, as Matt has pointed out, the fact that the bulk of the white-male shift occurred in the South doesn't mean that white males were simply changing their party allegiance in response to GOP race-baiting. Most white Southerners were conservatives - on God, gays and guns, among many other issues - who happened to vote for the more liberal party in the '30s and '40s because it was the segregationist party, and once that issue receded, and the Republicans moved rightward, you would have expected them to shift to the more conservative party even in the absence of dog-whistle politics.

More importantly for the sake of this example, 1952 is a really poor baseline to use for comparisons to present-day politics, since it was an exceptional year - a Republican landslide in a Democratic era, created by Eisenhower's celebrity and ostentatious moderation, Truman's unpopularity and Stevenson's mediocrity as a candidate. Ike took 55 percent of the vote to Stevenson's 44 percent, meaning that the GOP vote was much higher than the FDR-to-LBJ norm in almost every demographic category - and for Bush to match Eisenhower's share of the non-Southern white-male vote fifty years later while winning only 51 percent of the vote to Kerry's 48 suggests that conservative have made gains between then and now in that demographic, rather than just treading water as Krugman suggests.

Moreover, even if the Republicans had merely tread water it would still be an impressive achievement, given that a rightward shift - all other things being equal, which they weren't - would have been expected to produce a 1964-style result, in which the GOP consolidated the South and lost ground everywhere else. Arthur Schlesinger famously announced that the results of '64 proved that "if the parties were realigned on an ideological basis ... the Democrats would win every election and the Republicans would lose every election." It was an entirely plausible contention at the time, and Krugman's "race explains everything" narrative doesn't explain why he was proven wrong.

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What Compassionate Conservatism Did

I'm working on a review of Michael Gerson's book, so I basically want to keep my powder dry on the subjects that everyone's talking and talking about. But this, from Matt, seems worth a rejoinder:

It's clear that there's a strain of Republican Party rhetoric that's similar in spirit to the Catholic-inspired Christian Democratic parties of the European center-right. Gerson, both as a speechwriter and as a columnist, clearly falls into that tradition. So, too, for most of his presidency has George W. Bush. And now on the campaign trail Mike Huckabee has taken up that banner.

But what neither Bush nor Huckabee nor anyone else seems to have offered is a policy agenda that cashes the rhetorical checks they're spreading around. If the libertarian tradition in the GOP mostly consists of a free-market agenda that's friendly to the interests of rich people and big companies, the Bushian deviations from the free-market line have overwhelmingly been aimed at advancing lobbyist-friendly policies. Similarly, Mike Huckabee talks a good game about inequality, but his distinctive policy proposal is a massively regressive (and phenomenally stupid) National Retail Sales Tax. There's just no there there. In practice to find Republicans likely to support programs that help poor people, you need to look to the generically "moderate" (i.e., vulnerable) Republicans representing culturally liberal coastal areas — Susan Collins, Gordon Smith, etc. — and Christian Democratic talk remains just that: talk.

I don't entirely agree. Bush did have a pseudo-Christian Democratic policy agenda: It consisted of the faith-based initiatives, No Child Left Behind, the prescription drugs bill, and immigration reform. The first was small potatoes, but the rest weren't small at all. Now it's true that both the prescription drugs bill and the immigration bill were friendly to business interests as well as to seniors and recent immigrants, which is what you'd expect from an administration where both Gerson and Dick Cheney had the President's ear. But there's no inherent contradiction in giving more money to schools or seniors and to corporations (though there's the problem of how you pay for it all); or in helping illegal immigrations toward citizenship and helping businesses keep their supply of cheap labor. And those combinations constitute a large chunk of the Bush domestic-policy record - or the attempted record, in the case of immigration reform.

I should add that I think it's a record that points to a significant problem with any "compassionate" or "big government" or "Christian Democratic" conservatism - the tendency to just co-opt liberal ideas and make them more business-friendly, while leaving anything distinctively conservative by the wayside. But I don't think you say there's no there there and leave it at that.

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The New Class Warfare

Maybe it isn't a conscious strategy for the Democrats, but it makes a certain sense: Take from the super-rich, who aren't tax-sensitive, and the pretty-damn-rich, who will probably vote for the GOP no matter what, and give to upper-middle class professionals, a constituency where the Dems have been making inroads for a while now. Greg Mankiw reports, Reihan comments.

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Foreign Aid and Tax Credits

Justin Muzinich is a friend of mine, but don't let that dissuade you from reading the very sharp op-ed he's co-penned in today's Times.

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Debating RomneyCare

Cato and Heritage discuss how it's working out so far.

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Losing the Tax Issue

Ramesh, in today's NYT:

What Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani — who have made the most detailed remarks on taxes of the top-tier candidates — are really saying is that they will make sure that taxes on capital gains, dividends, estates and high earners will stay low. Not many middle-class taxpayers will benefit directly from any of those policies.

... Both Mr. Romney and Mr. Giuliani speak vaguely about making sure the alternative minimum tax doesn’t affect any more middle-class families. That is a step in the right direction. But it isn’t a tax cut.

Mr. Romney has also proposed an initiative to make the return on middle-class savings tax-free. It may also be a step in the right direction, but it’s small change. The primary focus of the Romney and Giuliani tax plans remains high earners.

What would be a serious middle-class tax cut? One answer is to expand the tax credit for children. But none of the candidates is proposing to do so, or any other big tax relief for regular folks. You might think that Mr. Giuliani would want to do everything he can to appeal to social conservatives short of actually becoming one himself. But why should he offer a pro-family tax cut when even the hard-core social conservatives in the race aren’t interested? Mike Huckabee wants a national sales tax and Sam Brownback wants a flat tax. Either proposal would increase taxes on a lot of middle-class families.

The Republicans in Congress are no better. For much of the right, the great passion of the moment is to make sure that the carried interest at hedge funds is taxed at what look an awful lot like preferential rates. For years, liberals have said that Republicans talk about “family values” but won’t do anything to meet the economic needs of families. Right now, on taxes, that charge hits home.

Read the whole thing. I would only add that while smart liberals may not think much of Barack Obama's tax plan, it seems likely to have a lot more mass-market appeal than anything the GOP candidates are proposing.

Update: Reihan adds his two cents here.

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The EITC Versus Wage Subsidies

Don't let your eyes glaze over - it's one of the most interesting anti-poverty debates, I swear. Megan digs in to the difficulties with the EITC here, while Matt makes the liberal case for a much more generous, much less strictly-policed EITC here. The smartest case for wage subsidies can be found here or here, from the recent Nobel winner Edmund Phelps. (I should note that Reihan and I will make a somewhat-less-brilliant case for wage subsidies in our forthcoming book.)

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The Haves and the Have-Nots

Having spent the week siding with Will Wilkinson against Jon Chait in the debate over whether crazy tax cutting has ruined America, let me briefly return to the grounds on which Will and I disagree - whether these are propitious times for a new left-populism - and point to the following Pew study:

Over the past two decades, a growing share of the public has come to the view that American society is divided into two groups, the "haves" and the "have-nots." Today, Americans are split evenly on the two-class question with as many saying the country is divided along economic lines as say this is not the case (48% each). In sharp contrast, in 1988, 71% rejected this notion, while just 26% saw a divided nation.

Of equal importance, the number of Americans who see themselves among the "have-nots" of society has doubled over the past two decades, from 17% in 1988 to 34% today. In 1988, far more Americans said that, if they had to choose, they probably were among the "haves" (59%) than the "have-nots" (17%). Today, this gap is far narrower (45% "haves" vs. 34% "have-nots").

One can certainly over-interpret these kind of numbers, but at the very least they provide the partisans of social democracy with something to work with.

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More Chait-Mania

Will Wilkinson weighs in here. I offer further commentary here.

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More Supply-Side Excitement

Megan McArdle joins Chait-Mania 2007. And on a related subject, I highly recommend Bruce Bartlett's history of starve-the-beast theory.

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Me Versus Chait

Get it here, hot off the presses.

Update: Fixed the link, sorry.

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Huckabee the Extremist

I'm actually somewhat sympathetic to Garance Franke-Ruta's suggestion that Mike Huckabee might be too far right on social issues to be a winning Presidential candidate, but I think this is a bit much:

I mean, just look at his agenda. Mr. Guitar-Rocker Folksy Nice Guy wants to: eliminate all contraception education in schools; use our tax dollars to fund ideological and ineffective abstinence education programs in those schools; and get rid of condom distribution in schools in favor of Bible distribution programs that have been overturned by the courts. He favors: a federal marriage amendment to the U.S. constitution; a human life amendment; the teaching of creationism to children; and the South Dakota law that banned all abortions and was so extreme the state's own highly traditionalist voters overturned it in a referendum.

... In short, Huckabee, the former Baptist minister and religious TV executive, is the candidate of exhausting and divisive social issues and the ongoing war by what Andrew Sullivan calls Christianists against the mainstream views of the majority of the American people. But, hey! As long as he can tell a good joke and strum a guitar, right?

Um, about "those mainstream views of the majority of the American people" ... Yes, it's true that Huckabee's abortion position and his opposition to sex ed in schools place him decidedly to the right of the public. (Although many Democrats are to the public's left where funding for abstinence education is concerned.) But as for the rest, well, more than half of John Kerry voters shared Huckabee's position on teaching evolution in public schools, and as of 2006 a slight majority supported the federal marriage amendment. I don't know how Americans feel about handing out Gideon Bibles in classrooms, but seventy percent or so reliably support returning prayer to public schools, which I assume was the issue that Huckabee was gesturing at in that comment.

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Supply-Siders and Their Friends

In the course of a larger debate over the influence of supply-side economics, touched off by Jon Chait's book and TNR excerpt, Ezra Klein complained that mainstream conservative (and non-conservative) economists regularly write for the Wall Street Journal op-ed page, and in the process lend "their titles and credibility to an outlet that continually promotes a fundamentally poisonous and empirically laughable ideology."

To which Will Wilkinson retorted:

I’m sure it seems to many intelligent people that the collected work of Robert Kuttner, the founder and editor of Ezra’s magazine, is extremist and intellectually sloppy (if not always mendacious) and “promotes a fundamentally poisonous and empirically laughable ideology.” Yet Ezra still chooses to write for The American Prospect. And so do many perfectly respectable academics. Why? Probably because its editorial vision is closer to their views than the relevant alternatives. And, just perhaps, the economic outlook of the Journal editorial page is closer to the views of many Nobel Prize-winning economist than the relevant alternatives, as inconvenient or annoying as that fact may be to some people.

Then Larison chimed in:

It isn’t a question of credible people lending support to a “laughable ideology” or credible people who are ideologically inclined towards the paper’s editorial views publishing in a comfortable venue. Prominent, respectable economists submit articles to the WSJ op-ed page because the paper is one of the most widely-circulated national newspapers whose main focus is reporting on business and finance. A huge percentage of WSJ readers, whose politics are happily not always that of the immigration-cum-imperialism crowd who write the paper’s editorials, is made up of people who make their living working for corporations or investing in the market (or both) and who want to have informed commentary about developments in the economy. Economists publish their op-eds in the WSJ to reach an audience that is going to be interested in what they have to say. And supposedly clever schemes of building up the empire of the supply-siders really has nothing to do with it.

I think they're both right. As Daniel says, the WSJ op-ed page is important because the WSJ is important, and so if you're interesting in reaching influential readers it makes sense to publish there regardless of what you think of the editorial page next door. (The same goes for the Times op-ed page, obviously; if I had an op-ed published there, I wouldn't beat myself up because I was somehow "lending credibility" to the Times' arch-liberal editorials.) But it's also the case, as Will says, that mainstream conservative economists don't go around bashing supply-siders because, well, supply-siders tend to be their political allies. As Megan has been arguing, it's possible to support lower tax rates - as it's possible to support any policy - for good reasons and bad, and it's the nature of politics that alliances form around shared support for particular policies, not on "quality of your reasoning" grounds. So yes, conservatives who believe in lower taxes and leaner government but recognize that cutting taxes doesn't raise revenue could spend all their time anathematizing Larry Kudlow and attacking every GOP politician who makes "free lunch" claims. But I don't think it's intellectually dishonest or hypocritical for the Greg Mankiws of the world, who publicly acknowledge that tax cuts don't directly raise revenue but support them for other reasons, to work with and for supply-siders, rather than threatening to resign in protest every time a Bush Administration official makes an implausible boast about tax cuts' magic powers. It's just a recognition that political reality requires making alliances with people who believe the right things (or what you take to be the right things) for the wrong reasons.

Now, I also think that conservatives have taken this principle too far where the Kudlows of the world are concerned, but I'm participating in a forum on Jon Chait's book over at TPMCafe next week, so I'll keep the rest of my powder dry till then.

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A Further Note on Populism

While on the subject, I should mention that like Reihan, I consider “populism” a less-than-ideal term to describe the constellation of policy ideas that he and I support (I don’t think we use the term very often in our forthcoming book). On the other hand, I think it’s pointless to deny that our program, such as it is, would require some harnessing of popular sentiment in order to shift the governing consensus on various issues. This strikes me as a fairly banal observation, though, since any program of reform necessarily requires either popular pressure or a shift in the elite zeitgeist (or both) to come to fruition. And I’m afraid that I don’t quite get where Will Wilkinson is coming from when he writes:

My guess is that some intellectuals get excited about populism because they thrill to the fantasy of riding popular passions to power and harnessing them to set in place their ardently desired policies. It is a thrilling, if repulsive, dream.

This is an exceedingly odd position for a libertarian to take, I would submit, given that the story of America’s recent rightward shift on various liberty issues – particularly taxes, but extending to issues as diverse as economic deregulation and gun control – has been in large part a story of smart libertarians “riding popular passions to power and harnessing them to set in place their ardently desired policies.” (Indeed, it’s not a coincidence that a major left-wing talking point of late – from Thomas Frank and others – has been the notion that Republicans have harnessed popular passions to trick the public into supporting free-market policies that they would otherwise reject.) This is how policy change in a democracy works – except, of course, when it’s just imposed by intellectuals without the public having much of a voice in the matter, as has been known to happen from time to time.

Obviously, there are aspects of Reaganism and the Contract With America that a consistent libertarian like Will would reject, but both the Gipper and Gingrich – and the policy minds around them – played a substantial role in making America more libertarian than it was circa 1975, and they used “popular passions” to achieve their desired results. Was this really so “repulsive”? Or are intellectuals and politicians who harness popular discontent “repulsive” only when their “ardently desired policies” don’t conform to Will’s own worldview?

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Left-Populism or Something Like It

Will Wilkinson:

Last, what is populism anyway? I think of a politics that pictures the economy as a huge zero-sum game, sets social and economic classes against each other, and promises “the people” free stuff at the expense of some other, usually richer, people. Ezra adduces evidence from the recent Pew Political Typology that shows increased support for a bigger, more domestically activist government. I certainly don’t dispute it. But what does that have to do with populism, exactly? Is this shift in opinion Ezra identifies motivated by “people vs. the powerful,” “two America’s” stuff? Where’s the evidence of that? And, more to the point, if there is any evidence of it, where’s the evidence that it is driven largely by economic anxiety?

Broadly understood, I take the term “populism” to refer to any politics that champions issues that have a broad base of popular support but receive short shrift from the political elite. This explains why you can have left-populists and right-populists, populists who demand higher welfare spending (see Long, Huey) and populists who champion welfare reform (see every successful GOP politician from Nixon to Gingrich), and so and so forth. More narrowly, though, in the case of the new left-populism I was discussing in my Atlantic mini-essay, I take it to describe a politics that pictures, not the economy in general, but the welfare state specifically as a zero-sum game (a not-entirely-accurate assessment of how taxing and spending works, but one that isn’t all that wide of the mark), and that argues either that the well-off should be taxed at higher rates or that wealthy interests should receive less government money than at present, with the goal in each case being to distribute federal largesse across a broader portion of the population, whether through spending on health care or education or what-have-you.

I think it’s very hard to argue that this latter sort of politics doesn’t command more support today than it did a decade ago – so difficult, in fact, that Will doesn’t bother to make that argument, and instead suggests that rising support for an expanded welfare state doesn’t count as “populism” because it doesn’t come wrapped in “two America’s” or “people vs. the powerful” rhetoric. In defense of my locution, I would note that it was precisely this sort of rhetoric of “people vs. the powerful” that launched much of the Democratic class of ’06 into power; I would note, too, that I specifically described the new redistributionism as a new-model populism, to distinguish it from the more-explicitly class-warriorish appeals of leftisms gone by. But I’m not all that invested in the term, so if Will admits that the country has moved steadily left on tax-and-transfer issues since the ’94 GOP landslide, then I’ll declare victory and accept whatever terminology he prefers.

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