So, belatedly, I started working on this over a week ago:
Huge smackdown in Virginia, and a surprising upset in New Jersey amounting to a good six points. In both states, good coattail surging has helped the bottom of the tickets (although in VA, the Lt. Gov and AG races were well handled by themselves), with good pickups in house legislatures. Two out of three seems to be what we’ll settle for though, as Owens has been declared the victor over Hoffman the upstart tea party/Glen Beck candidate.
Unless you actually live in any of the relevant areas or have no life except the wonkish (see earlier election night post), why does this matter? Well, if you do care, a few thoughts:
First the good. Most of this is pretty clear from the conservative outlets. Big statement, shows the GOP is still competitive, etc. And I’m particularly jazzed that Christie, and the entirety of the top of the VA ticket is very strongly pro-life. In Virginia, Deeds ran a negative campaign specifically geared to oppose McDonnell’s social conservatism and to tout his pro-choice credentials in an attempt to court Northern Virginia (which is essentially an appendix of Washington D.C.) . It backfired, badly. The campaign blue prints laid down by McDonnell and Christie could be a very good model for GOP candidates across the board last year, and an encouraging sign that such a strategy can produce good dividends.
So rah for that, certainly. And I’ll grant the truth that Virginia always goes the opposite of the party which takes the White House, and that Deeds was a particularly bad candidate, while McDonnell was a particularly good one. Very similar situation in New Jersey. But the bare fact of the matter (especially in New Jersey) is that the transformative change promised by the Obama Administration could not help Deeds or Corzine. Remember that as the spin stories start (go here to see what I mean). Even admitting the point that Virginia “always goes the other way,” wasn’t the election of The Hopeful One supposed to usher in a completely new era and a mandate for his policies? Business as usual in Virginia doesn’t jive with Audacious Change. So yay again. And on a final point of optimism, this could very well be a springboard and road map for next year. McDonnell was a fantastic conservative, but he also ran a brilliant campaign, appealing to moderates with good practical solutions, and avoiding the Glenn Beckianisms.
But would we be good conservatives without a healthy dose of skepticism? Let us not forget our Russell Kirk, the tenants of conservativism, Burke’s permanent things, are the traditional institutions and moral bedrock of a strong civil polity. And those permanent things erode, sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly, but rarely do they get built up again. On it’s own, without a renewal/renaissance (the intangible X factor like a Goldwater or Reagan), all conservativism can do is slow down runaway progressivism, a bit of a brake on the entropy. That’s been good conservative canon for a while now.
We can go celebrate all we want about two nice thumbs in the administration’s eye, but neither govs. Christie or McDonnell will be able to vote against health care. Symbolic and momentum victories are nice, but all this amounted to a nice sweep around the right tackle to get the ball out of our own end zone, we’re not even in their territory yet. There’s a very long way to go yet, and what then?
There was a really interesting post over at Hot Air a few days a go. J.E. Dyer was ripping Peggy Noonan for a recent editorial she wrote. Peggy’s article was solidly conservative canon, ripping America’s leaders for not understanding the country, not understanding that continual tax’n/spendathons don’t work and force businesses and investors to close, killing the goose that lays the golden taxpayer’s egg.
Peggy also had a darker, more depressing tone:
talked this week with a guy from Big Pharma, which we used to call “the drug companies” until we decided that didn’t sound menacing enough. He is middle-aged, works in a significant position, and our conversation turned to the last great recession, in the late mid- to late 1970s and early ’80s. We talked about how, in terms of numbers, that recession was in some ways worse than the one we’re experiencing now. Interest rates were over 20%, and inflation and unemployment hit double digits. America was in what might be called a functional depression, yet there was still a prevalent feeling of hope. Here’s why. Everyone thought they could figure a way through. We knew we could find a path through the mess. In 1982 there were people saying, “If only we get rid of this guy Reagan, we can make it better!” Others said, “If we follow Reagan, he’ll squeeze out inflation and lower taxes and we’ll be America again, we’ll be acting like Americans again.” Everyone had a path through.
Now they don’t. The most sophisticated Americans, experienced in how the country works on the ground, can’t figure a way out. Have you heard, “If only we follow Obama and the Democrats, it will all get better”? Or, “If only we follow the Republicans, they’ll make it all work again”? I bet you haven’t, or not much.
This is historic. This is something new in modern political history, and I’m not sure we’re fully noticing it. Americans are starting to think the problems we are facing cannot be solved.
I thought that was a pretty fair point, worth pondering. J.E. Dyer, however, slammed her. Peggy hasn’t been all that popular since she showed some disapproval of Sarah Palin last year, and has been thrown by a lot of conservatives into Frum/David Brooks camp of moderate sell-outs. Read the rest of Peggy’s article though, it was very good.
Dyer won’t have any of it though:
Peggy, Peggy. If you weren’t so busy dismissing the “Palin faction” and the Tea Partiers, you might understand that there are millions of Americans out here who have no such pessimistic thoughts. Oh, no one thinks the “Republicans” can “make it all work again” – not if by “Republicans” you mean a Congressional delegation that keeps putting up Gangs of Ten and Fourteen, and spent the years 2001 to 2007 using its majority to make drunken sailors look like paragons of thrift. And of course no one thinks “it will get all better” if we “follow Obama and the Democrats.” Obama and the Democrats are the people who are in the process of doubling our national debt in less than 12 months, and who want to charge us ordinary folks out here hundreds more per year so they can do some arcane mumbo jumbo behind a programmatic curtain and then present us with new, improved health care that starts with a lifetime limit on MRIs and runs out when we hit 65.
So, no, we aren’t looking to any of these people or their proposals for a way to solve our problems. But that doesn’t mean we are pessimistic about the problems ever being solved. There are millions of Americans who think our problems can be solved – just not by a good 95% of the people who hold public office right now, at least at the federal level.
I call it “Optimistic Conservatism.” It’s a belief, based on historical evidence, that when government is limited, and when it focuses on what empowers the people – freedom of thought and speech, the rule of law, law and order, property rights, constitutional limitations on what majorities can do – that under these conditions, what the people can and will do for themselves far surpasses the grandest visions of even the most fanciful statist ideology.
This is a nice spin, but I think borders on the overly-idealistic. Because even Dyer admits that the problem solvers aren’t in any position of power to actually fix things. It’s great that so many grassroots folks have some dynamic optimism, but when many of the problems we face are institutional and policy related…well, tea partiers don’t actually write tax code. I don’t simply mean that conservatism hasn’t found its next generation of leaders yet.
It’s wonderful that there’s been a huge populist backlash with the Tea Party movement, it’s a good thing for rallying opposition to the administration. But too much of it seems to me (echoing Peggy here), to be a blind knee-jerk reaction to liberalism by falling back on a mixture of Founding Father/19th Century Liberal/Reaganite cliches. I completely agree that Governments too big and taxes are too high, and will probably get higher, and that the Conservative answer is less government and less taxes. But what I’m not seeing generally from Conservatives is the explanation of why those things are so good. I know it sounds obvious to us why those maxims are good (we believe them after all), and in some sense it’s a tremendous strength that Conservatives across the board have internalized the teachings of Constitutional Originalism and Free Market Economics. But there’s a huge danger in internalizing something to the point where it becomes inflexible, unthinking, dogma. That’s what we always bash the left for. I think everyone knows I’m not a David Frum disciple (all he really wants to do is extend compassionate conservatism minus the pro-life platform, which seems about as dumb as you can get).
I may very well be the proverbial Eyeore who’s not comfortable with anything less than certain doom. It may be that McDonnell and Christie set an example that a lot of very good candidates next year will successfully emulate. But the realistic best case scenario will probably only amount to keeping F.D.R’s little copycats further at bay. Conservativism keeps slows down soft despotism’s advance. It hardly ever retakes lost ground.
But the white elephant in the room (and I apologize for the sudden apparent change in direction with this) remains that in order to present intelligent Conservative platforms, you need intelligent voters, thus revolving back on education, which remains the single greatest weakness to political and cultural conservativism today. The liberal campaign promise is always “vote for me and I’ll give you stuff,” while the Conservative promise has to be “vote for me and I’ll give you less stuff, more freedom, and you’ll be better off for it.” Not only is that a harder sell, but unless education is won back from the victimology of cultural liberalism, the Conservative message will continue to be harder and harder to sell, until even the watered down soundbites of this summer’s tea parties sound as alien as they are ancient.
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