There are three reasons I didn’t post my response to Larison (et alia) over my farewell to conservatism post here at Balloon Juice. First, I was looking for the proper vehicle to write about this break at The League and to link back to my Balloon Juice post. Larison’s post provided me with that vehicle. Second, I figured you all had heard enough about the matter and didn’t need what was largely a repetitive post (though I did try to further flesh out some of my thoughts on the matter I fear I was rather too long-winded…I know, such a surprise!). And last, I didn’t think I would have time to respond to comments adequately when I wrote the piece, and since that has been a primary complaint around here I thought it would be best to simply not post it here at all. In any case, some commenters have asked why I didn’t post it here and that’s my answer. You can read Larison’s post here, and my response here.
P.S. Regarding my last pro-stimulus post, a lot of people have said something to the effect of “That was fast! You say you’re going liberal and you really mean it!” Well, I do mean to advocate for the side I’ve come to believe is right. But more to the point, I’ve never really been against stimulus to begin with though I’ve certainly had my doubts about moral hazard, etc. which I’ve written about here previously. No, for a long time now I’ve essentially believed we’re in some sort of balance-sheet recession, and that there is no really good way out of that short of a great deal of public spending. I’ve also said before that I favor a good portion of that in the form of infrastructure investment. So I’m not sure this really represents a sudden shift in my politics so much as it represents my feeling a little more open to making that case forcefully.
P.P.S. This post may also be worth a read if you’re interested. I had been writing here for a short time, had been a bit of a back-and-forth with Ta-Nehisi Coates, and was starting to feel like I was just arguing for argument’s sake, only half believing even myself. I suppose I feel like this was a bit of a turning point, and a post which led directly to my farewell to conservatism piece.
Steeplejack
I think it should be “into the breach.” At least if you’re shooting for an echo of Shakespeare.
morzer
Breach, yes. Breech would suggest half a pair of trousers. Entertaining, but not quite as resonant.
E.D. Kain
@Steeplejack: Thanks. I googled it and it appears people use it both ways and I really didn’t want to spend too much time on the bloody title. I trust Shakespeare on this.
E.D. Kain
@morzer: Breech would only be half of a pair trousers, no?
Villago Delenda Est
It’s “into the breach”, unless you’re loading yourself into a howitzer to be sent downrange the hard way.
On second thought, perhaps breach IS for a howitzer. It’s all so confusing. Why don’t I go and look it up and be sure? You can bet your last dollar Sarah Palin would never take THAT radical step…
OK, I was right the first time. Another thing I don’t have in common with Sarah Palin…
General Stuck
Life is a breach.
or is it, another day at the breach.
morzer
@E.D. Kain:
I rather thought I had just said that.
E.D. Kain
@Villago Delenda Est: It appears the really critical question has now been answered. Thank goodness.
E.D. Kain
@morzer: Good lord, you did. I read you completely wrong.
morzer
@E.D. Kain:
Must be the orange mohawk getting in your eyes….
jeffreyw
It’s breach in the city, and in the city too.
sven
Ha, until reading TNC I hadn’t realized that you live in Flagstaff!
Is Black Bean still any good? If so, please order a Thai Peanut Wrap in honor of my misspent undergraduate years! Also too, Vertical Relief is teh awesome. Nostalgia officially over, feel snide returning, all better now.
soonergrunt
Into the breach, as in the breach created in the enemies’ defensive line (or one’s own defensive line, as necessary.)
The breach being the decisive place in battle where the the battle itself is either won or lost, so both sides would throw their best reserves and as much as possible at the breach to carry the fight. Therefore the fighting would be worse there than anywhere else on the line.
A breech is the rear part of a firearm or cannon that contains the working mechanism for the firing device.
E.D. Kain
@morzer: No the mohawk never gets in my…hey…!
@sven: Yeah, it’s still pretty good but we have better joints these days…
morzer
@jeffreyw:
That’s very Delphic of you, good sir. Care to unpack your koan a little?
morzer
@E.D. Kain:
Ah ha..
Of course, whales also breach….
Villago Delenda Est
To get back on topic, I think that one of the principle problems we have is the term “conservative” itself. “Movement conservatives” LOATHE conservation. They don’t think that taking steps to reduce energy use through smart things like insulation and such is moral. Because if you’re not wasting things left and right, you’re not doing your part to make sure our parasite overclass is rolling in wealth, real or imagined.
morzer
@Villago Delenda Est:
They hate conserves as well. A regime that loathes jam will never last!
Of course, if one goes by the Burkean standard of conserve and correct, one might ask what modern American conservatives actually conserve, outside a tendentious reading of the Constitution and the laws of the land.
jeffreyw
@morzer:
I can shed more light on it, perhaps.
morzer
@jeffreyw:
Once we get ED Kain into China Mieville, his doom is sealed and he must cleave to our vast liberal conspiracy.
suzanne
You live in Flagstaff? I’m now officially jealous. Phoenix is making me want to slit my wrists these days.
Bill H
Interesting that you see the problem being on the balance sheet and the solution being on the income statement. Very few accountants would find that logical.
To put it another way, our problem is that we have too few assets, and we solve that by spending money?
That might make some sort of sense if it were done in the form of infrastructure investment, although the effect of that on the balance sheet is at best neutral as the increased value of the infrastructure is offset by the debt incurred in paying for it, but that is the one thing that no one involved in governance has so far actually suggested.
morzer
@Bill H:
I think a balance-sheet recession implies not too few assets but that the assets held by private people and banks have been damaged financially – i.e. the collapse of property values etc – as opposed to the classic income-shock driven recession. A balance-sheet recession involves deleveraging, and fiscal stimulus can help to fend off a collapse in incomes, coupled with capital injections into the financial system to repair balance sheets. Thus, we have a combination of damaged assets and spending which can help to repair that situation. At least, this is what I take to be ED Kain’s point.
E.D. Kain
@morzer: I’m reading The City and the City now – when I have time to read, of course. Excellent stuff.
Americaneocon
Jeez, E.D., you come out as a full-blown liberal after I’ve been saying it all along: ‘E.D. Kain Alleges Defamation: True/Slant Blogger’s Workplace Intimidation Attempts to Shut Down American Power!’. No, I’m not expecting an apology, but definitely gloating a bit here. All that intimidation for what? To prove me right in the end? Freakin’ loser. Sheesh.
E.D. Kain
@suzanne: Yeah, Phoenix does that to a person. Though I get jealous of your weather when we get hit with five feet of snow in the winter…
E.D. Kain
@morzer: Pretty much, yes.
arguingwithsignposts
bacon = EDK saved it.
Could you cut my hair sometime?
suzanne
@E.D. Kain: Not just the weather, though it’s awful. SB1070 really made the environment hostile this summer. The minister at the UU church I sporadically attend got arrested, and my Latino friends are all universally freaking out. My husband is a bilingual speech pathologist at an elementary school in a poor area, and the education cuts have really hurt, and he and all his coworkers are having to do more with a whole lot less. Blar.
E.D. Kain
@suzanne: We attend alternately a UU church and the Catholic church here and both organizations have been fantastic about the whole immigration thing. But Flag is very chill, very blue city in a very red state. Great little place all around.
Yutsano
@Americaneocon: ONE! TWO! THREE! FOUR! I DECLARE A BLOG WHORE!!
Ignore that one ED. It seems to come here only to up its link count and contributes little else.
@E.D. Kain: I went to Flagstaff for a convention once. Didn’t get to see a lot of the town but what I did see was a touch frontier and a touch liberal college town.
E.D. Kain
@Yutsano: Pretty much – with a very lively, bohemian downtown that is just wonderful. I’m a big fan of my hometown – part of why I’m into localism.
suzanne
@Yutsano: Yeah, Flagstaff kind of rocks. I get up there as often as possible. I’d move in a heartbeat if I could get a damn job.
Comrade Luke
In reading all this over the last few days, the thing that strikes me is how hard it is to affiliate yourself with any party to begin with.
It used to be that you could say that you agree with certain aspects of a party’s platform and disagree with other aspects, and say you’re a Republican/Democrat/whatever. And guess what: not agreeing with some parts of the platform was ok! You could have rational debates about everything and there would be no problem.
Now, though, if you disagree with anything other than the most minute aspect of a party platform you’re banished to the wilderness. You’re soshulist, communist, neocon or whatever, and now suddenly ALL of your opinions don’t matter.
Nuance used to be considered a good quality to have. Not anymore.
roshan
Hey Kain, put up an open thread. Got some posting to do.
RareSanity
@Kain
Good on you, mate.
As an aside to both your and Larison’s posts, I do think that the upcoming generation of “liberals” are moving back toward, dare I say, Thomas Jefferson liberals. Which is open mindedness, logic, personal liberty and competent governance.
Unfortunately, the current political establishment, is stuck in the 60’s and still arguing over Viet Nam. In that time period, liberal=hippie=communist, I think that you and John Cole are perfect examples of where the political discussion will move once enough people, unscarred by the 60’s, enter the arena.
Mnemosyne
@Bill H:
What morzer said — the problem is that we have the same number of assets, but their value has gone down, and it ain’t coming back.
During the height of the housing insanity, you had one-bedroom houses in Watts (South Los Angeles, aka the bad side of town) that were supposedly worth $400,000. The houses still exist — the asset hasn’t vanished — but the price dropped drastically. That’s what makes it a balance sheet problem.
In Michigan, a friend of mine and her ex-husband have been fighting over who gets stuck with the house, because they have an $80K mortgage on a house that’s now worth $20K. I would call that a balance sheet problem.
DickSpudCouchPotatoDetective
Arizona is basically a purple state with Mormons and retired people. It isn’t that strongly red. More to the point, the Mormon-Christian axis has a stranglehold on the Legislature here. Gerrymandering has seen to that. The actual politics of the general population is more complex than meets the eye.
But anyway … this whole “goodbye to conservatism” thing strikes me as nonsense. First of all, there is no such thing as American conservatism. There is no hint of any coherent intellectual or even moral thread holding together something that used to be called the “conservative” movement.
The CW says that it’s about small government, but it’s not … it’s about an intrusive and moralistic view of government that is empowered to scold and preach and manipulate, but hamstrung to actually provide any leadership or services that add any value to any part of the population that is not filthy rich. It’s a rich peoples’ club that has to whore itself to 6000 Year Old Earthers and End Times readers and other willfully ignorant and easily manipulated people to get votes. Promotes nihilism and tax resistance under the guise of economic conservatism and libertarianism. Promotes functional libertarianism even in the absence of any objective evidence that the scheme has worked or can work in any real world nation government model. A list of the great Libertarian countries, please?
Conservatism is a marketing slogan, it has never been a coherent movement or even worldview. I grew up in the land, and time, of Barry Goldwater, and went to the same elementary school he attended. I am not aware of any coherent conservative politics ever advanced in this country except in a rhetorical context. Not in an actual governance context. Not that worked, and held together, and served the real interests of real people.
So how do you say goodbye to a myth? A farce? A trainwreck, a non-movement? A set of slogans that has to appeal to lunatics and stupid people to get votes?
My question is, how does anyone get conned into saying Hello to this shitpile in the first place? You apparently live in Arizona. Go down the street and ask the first twenty people you see to name three things that John McCain has ever done for Arizona. As them to explain Fife Symington, Evan Mecham, and Jan Brewer. Republicans have made a laughingstock of this state. How did you ever become a “conservative” here? Were ya drunk at the time?
That's Master of Accountancy to You, Pal (JMN)
@Bill H:
This accountant wonders how else you could solve a balance sheet problem except through the income statement. Net income creates net assets, as it is balanced by an increase in owners’ equity rather than an increase in liabilities. Balance sheet problem solved.
You have a couple of conceptual problems that I see. The first is thinking that the money spent by the government must come from a source exogenous to the government. This isn’t the case, and is even less the case for a country such as the US that can borrow in its own currency. Interaction between the Fed and the Treasury can literally create money out of . . . well, not thin air, actually, but for merely the cost of moving some electrons around. It’s even cheaper than it used to be, when they actually had to move pieces of paper from one room to another.
The second problem is that you are unduly limiting your idea of what constitutes a useful investment, from a societal perspective. Right now, anything that takes idled assets (like factories, or unemployed people, or closed retail space) and gets them involved in economic activity is useful. This is related to the first problem, in that all of these things have real value, while right now, money has zero value to the government. This can be noted by the fact that people are letting the government borrow in the short term for essentially nothing. Check out T-bill rates. Hell, the 10-year note is trading at less than 3%, which is just about the same thing as zero.
The only real caution is that you have to be prepared to withdraw that money back out of the economy once the balance sheet problems are fixed and interest rates start to rise again. This is why, vis-a-vis the argument a few threads down, deficits really do matter and we can’t just ignore them right now; we can run all the deficit we want at the moment, but we need to recognize that it will not always be thus and have some plan to deal with them when they do become an issue.
Joe Buck
There’s a ton of infrastructure work that desperately needs to be done. There are thousands of bridges that need maintenance, and a number of older cities need to replace large chunks of their sewage systems. And people are willing to lend the feds money these days for a near-zero interest rate. Time to borrow some money to pay for what needs to be done and put people to work. If well-off people want to cry about the deficit, then they can pay more taxes. If they want to complain about what the bond market will think, ask them to look at the current price of long-term government debt: the market has spoken and feels comfortable loaning to the US government.
asiangrrlMN
Shit. I have a China Mieville book (recommended by TattooSydney), but I have not read it yet. Must I be assimilated into the Borg?
And, E.D., I wanted to respond to your response to Larison (unpack that sentence structure, bitchez). I think you were too hard on yourself. He was reading something that wasn’t there, or rather, seeing it with his own bias (as we all do). What you said in your post on The Ordinary League of Gentlemen is pretty much what you said here. You were not unclear, but then again, I tend to wander to get to a point, too, so there is that. To me, Larison’s post read like a post from a lover scorned (probably my own biases shining through), though I will admit my mind slammed down as I read that he found the papers, please law unobjectionable.
At any rate, from your very first post, I puzzled at the conservative label Cole had slapped on you. It just did not fit you–not because it’s bad, mind you. I could accept that you were a liberal-libertarian (with difficulty), but I really thought you’d be at home in the big liberal tent.
Linkmeister
@RareSanity: Hey, now. Plenty of us hippies weren’t and still aren’t enamored of government, particularly not government for government’s sake alone. But we are (borrowing from both Erik’s and Daniel’s arguments) in favor of competence. If there’s a problem which can only be fairly solved by government, then government should be the one to do it. None of this half-assed privatization and outsourcing to contractors which puts profit ahead of the solution to the problem.
mnpundit
Actually it’s good that I read Larison’s response to your post. Quite a needful read for me.
I had warmed up to him lately, and it was useful to be reminded he’s actually a racist piece of scum.
That's Master of Accountancy to You, Pal (JMN)
@That’s Master of Accountancy to You, Pal (JMN): As an aside, the balance sheet/income statement thing is related to why I think a lot of people, including a lot of people here at Balloon Juice, are really misreading a lot of what is going on in the financial industry and banking regulation. The general belief seems to be that, because the big financial firms are making really big profits, that this means that the financial crisis is a thing of the past. From that belief stems the idea that someone like Tim Geithner, who is still very concerned about the banks and doesn’t want to interfere with their ability to make money too much, obviously must be clueless or corrupt.
That doesn’t follow. The financial crisis, much like the recession (and for the same reasons) was very much a balance sheet crisis. Just because the banks have been extremely profitable for the last couple of years doesn’t mean that they have been profitable enough for their balance sheets to look good. For a number of reasons, I suspect that they haven’t. If we were to go rooting around through their loan books and reserves and do a thorough and honest analysis of whether the latter was sufficient for the former, we’d find that they aren’t.
If I’m right on this, the only thing that will prevent a return of the worst moments of 2008 is making sure that the banks can continue to make profits faster than they have to recognize bad loans. Theoretically, it’s no longer such a big problem, since the government now has legal authority to put financial companies that are insolvent into receivership and dealing with them. In practice, I don’t think that the theory holds. The ability to deal with insolvent banks requires money. Right now, that money would have to come from Congress. Down the road, there are alternative routes, but none of them have had the chance to build up the required capital yet.
Now, do you really think Congress would actually appropriate that money as it is currently constituted? Me, either. So we’re stuck having to keep them from having to declare that they’re insolvent.(1)
Now, I do absolutely agree that this makes the big bonuses the banks are throwing around even more problematic.(2) The question remains what we can do about it. If we don’t have the cash lying around, the only threat we can make is that we’ll force the banks into insolvency, which is exactly what we’re trying to avoid, and the bank executives no it. Trying to win a poker hand with ten high is pretty tough when the other guys can see your hand.
(1) The Fed could probably do it. However, the current board of governors has a majority that are really teabaggers in very nice suits.
(2) Feel free to substitute the word “obscene” for the word “problematic” if you like.
E.D. Kain
@asiangrrlMN: @mnpundit: This is one big reason I know I could never be a part of paleoconservatism (one among many). While I find Larison very good on foreign policy, the moment you get into gay marriage, immigration, etc. I disagree vehemently.
E.D. Kain
@roshan: I put one up just for you, roshan.
asiangrrlMN
@E.D. Kain: Since I see being against teh gheys and against immigration as bellwethers of the conservative movement, your stance pretty much put you out of the category for me from the beginning. I will freely admit, however, that I do not know all the nuances of the different types of conservatives (neo v. paleo, most of all).
mclaren
@Joe Buck:
Good news! It’s all being done.
Bad news: it being done in Iraq and Afghanistan, not America.
Yutsano
@asiangrrlMN: I’ll give you a hint hon: they all pretty much stink, it all depends if we’re talking skunk stink, Limburger stink (full disclosure: I like Limburger cheese) or three day old diaper stink. ED is probably best acquainted with the last odor, having just hatched a young one recently.
SiubhanDuinne
@asiangrrlMN: Just an aside to thank you for spelling “bellwether” correctly. That’s rare enough these days to cause notice and invite comment.
hamletta
I was a breech birth!
Depending on how my mom tells the story, I was born feet-first, or mooning the world.
I prefer the latter.
El Cid
I wish every single post could be on what E. D. Kain now thinks of his position, why he changed, and what we think about it.
dan
It’s Labor Day weekend, dude.
So it is “Once more to the beach!”
jwb
I’m glad to see that you finally mentioned this on the front page. I wasn’t surprised you didn’t choose to post your response to Larison here; but I was surprised that you didn’t mention it at all here.
Linda Featheringill
@That’s Master of Accountancy to You, Pal (JMN):
So on that sad day when China suddenly demands that we buy back all the debt they are holding for us . . .
The Fed and/or Treasury can magically create a bunch of electronic money and pay for the rejected bond, etc. online. And in the meantime, life goes on and it is business as usual? [I’m ignoring any side effects like inflation.]
Cool!
Yes, I worry about some strange things.
Bob
Yes, Erik, that has been a chronic bitch around here, but….
Okay, I may be completely wrong about this, but I don’t see a lot of interaction on the part of the front pagers with us folk below the fold. (That is not a complaint.)
I don’t read a ton of blogs, but my experience is that such exchanges are rare. The League excels in that area.
Mike Furlan
@mnpundit: Larison is either a white supremacist kook, or he very much wants people to believe that he is a white supremacist kook (to get on the wingnut welfare?).
Kirk Spencer
@Linda Featheringill:
Not gonna happen. First, at this time China makes more money by letting the bonds and notes fully mature. Second, demanding an early payout of all those bonds and notes would crash the US economy which would in turn crash the Chinese economy.
Explaining the last, Chinese exports to the United States accounted for a full 7% of its 2009 GDP. Further, exports account for 36% of the 2009 GDP, and the US collapse would have some domino effect on other nations that import Chinese goods. So before you can reasonably expect the Chinese to demand full buyback you have to account for why it’s worth the inevitable depression.
E.D. Kain
@El Cid: Great idea!
Bill H
@morzer:
Okay, got it. So now you have repaired assets on the balance sheet, back to their full value (yea!), accompanied by a mountain of debt.
So toxic assets and no debt = bad balance sheet.
Good assets + lots of debt = much better balance sheet.
Financial genius, I tell you, financial genus.
Bill H
@Mnemosyne:
And how does spending money solve that? Does it make the value of your house increase?
Violet
Morning, Erik. I just wanted to acknowledge your post here because I think I was one of the ones who nudged you toward posting it. I still haven’t read your post at the League, nor Larison’s et al, so I can’t really comment on the content. (I do still have them open in tabs and plan to read them.) I did skim Larison’s post the other day, or perhaps it was your post at the League quoting his, and this stood out to me:
Wow. It’s hard for me to understand how a conservative can support such a law. Outside of the OMG!Brownpeople! fear factor, it’s a very anti-conservative law, both on its face and also in how it has to be implemented. But I digress…
That’s just a small portion of the posts, and I haven’t read everything, but wanted to acknowledge your post here.
Suffern ACE
@Violet: The conservatives I have grown up with have never objected to any erosion of the 4th amendment as it pertains to the poor in the advancement of their social engineering program, which is cloaked under “law and order”. It is very consistent for conservatives to support the law. They have always thought that the poor will better themselves if thoroughly policed and aren’t extended too much freedom.
mslarry
@mnpundit:
Meet too and the best way to respond to Larison is to paraphrase from the wire, one of the best shows on television… ever..
Wald sits across from Mcnulty both middle fingers prominently up in the air —
Wald: Fuck you Mcnulty (indicating fingers)
(the left middle finger) this one should go up your narrow, backward ass
(the right finger) this one is going in your eye, you racist piece of shit
there…now i feel better.
Turgid Jacobian
@Kirk Spencer: This, and too few people seem to get that their Sword of Damocles is also ours.
The Pale Scot
Has M. Kain volunteered to lead the Forlorn Hope?
Suffern ACE
@Kirk Spencer: @Linda Featheringill: China could do many things. It could refuse to buy new bonds. It could sell all of its bonds all at once on the open market. But if it demands that we “pay everything we owe it” I doubt that we would. And yes, we could just create the funds. So China would then have dollars instead of bonds…and then what?
asiangrrlMN
@mslarry: I am so stealing that. That’s perfect.
@SiubhanDuinne: If I can’t spell it, I don’t use it.
Phoenician in a time of Romans
The second problem is that you are unduly limiting your idea of what constitutes a useful investment, from a societal perspective. Right now, anything that takes idled assets (like factories, or unemployed people, or closed retail space) and gets them involved in economic activity is useful. This is related to the first problem, in that all of these things have real value, while right now, money has zero value to the government. This can be noted by the fact that people are letting the government borrow in the short term for essentially nothing. Check out T-bill rates. Hell, the 10-year note is trading at less than 3%, which is just about the same thing as zero.
Cf this post from Brad DeLong which explains why stimulus spending isn’t a good idea in normal times, but is a brilliant idea now (with interest rates low and with unemployment high).
If you could get a $450,000 house now by paying $2,400 a year, or a $15,000 car by paying $80 a year, you’d jump at the chance. That, in essence, is the sort of cost/benefit situation the US is in now with government spending.
Flugelhorn
The fact that you ever felt yourself to be a conservative in the first place is what baffles me. Your opinions have been anything but conservative.
RalfW
Infrastructure spending seems the way to go for my buck.
Our bridges are crap (I know, I live in Minneapolis) and our rail system lags behind any reasonable developing country, not to mention (since it’s conservative anathema) Europe.
Really, I’d love to take the train to Milwaukee to see my partner’s family, or to Chicago when said partner is staying there for a few weeks at one of his grad school intensives.
But I ain’t gonna spend 8-10 unreliable hours on Amcrack. I’ll drive, thank you, or fly. But if we had HSR (OK, really Medium Speed Rail – HSR is decades away in this, the most, ahem, advanced and fantastically free nation).
110 MPH or better, WiFi, a low carbon footprint and downtown-downtown service, and I’m there.
BTW just read that the GOPer running for Gov of WI is very loudly running to derail HSR thru Wisconsin. What a retrograde dope! Jet fuel is going to get expensive one of these days. Maybe not so long off, if China and India keep growing thier economies and carbon diets as expected.
And when jet fuel spikes, it will, IMO, spike quickly and by then the lag time to invest in rail will just kill us.
Bah. No one likes vision these days. It’s all about anger, regression and blame.
HyperIon
@Violet wrote:
Thanks for expressing your opinion.
I personally much prefer your approach to MNPUNDIT’s
he’s actually a racist piece of scum.
phein
Ahem.
You’re all wrong on the question of the post. It’s unto, not into.
KING HENRY V
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;
E.D. Kain
@phein: Damn it I had the whole damn thing wrong. Sheesh.
SciVo
@DickSpudCouchPotatoDetective:
If I may interject, I explain my own journey here. Basically, religiosity made me credulous. Then, I got better.
SciVo
@RalfW:
Yes. When a resource become supply-constrained, the most salient result is price volatility. It’s like a store with too few cashiers: there won’t always be too much demand for checking-out capacity, but when there is, the lines will stack up fast and long.
David Brooks (not that one)
Jeebus, Cole, you promised us a conservative and all we got was a polite version of yourself, explaning why-I-am-no-longer. At least he is distinctive in his reflectiveness and self-examination.
I know some conservative Repulicans who can see the game objectively, can handle meta, and can explain themselves rationally. But they don’t blog.
(Erik, nothing personal; I vaue your insights. Do I need to send you another email expressing my appreciation of the openness of your basic coming-froms? No, I thought not)
E.D. Kain
@David Brooks (not that one): Well, you know, I think this was a long time coming and actually writing here, being challenged here, having to really, truly self-examine just pushed me over the edge I was edging toward to begin with. You know?
Gex
This all reminds me of those online quizzes that tell you what your political affiliation is based on your stance on issues. Basically many of the self-labeled conservatives I know ended up being anything but.
The right-wing frame that dominates our discourse has made a lot of words, like liberal, taboo – an insult. The way they simplify issues (for us or against us?) makes it easy, on surface, to agree with it and think yourself a conservative. Especially after Reagan.
It was when they had to think beyond the soundbite length argument that many of them discovered they aren’t conservative.
I think it is inherent in conservatism to be more ideological than liberalism. To my mind, liberals have no stated or preferred route to get to better policy – we just articulate what we’d like the end result to be. If economies undergo rapid change, displaced workers should get help. How we do that is debatable, ill take whatever looks most effective in terms of helping people and cost efficiency. To my mind, conservatives have this idea of personal responsibility where they believe those who are unemployed are at fault for being so. And of course, that view doesn’t apply to them when it happens to them.
The basic urge to preserve the status quo works in service of those who benefit most from the status quo.