Quote:
Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield
There is one good conservative idea out there which will never become liberal: Avoidance of the law of unintended consequences.
Liberals tinker, and with tinkering comes more tinkering. That's not a criticism. They seem to believe intervention is the best initial approach. If it doesn't work, or it causes a problem, it can be cured with further interventions.
Hence we have pages of rules, laws, regulations, etc. that could loop the world a dozen times.
Conservatives are greedy pricks a lot of the time, and they're too reactionary, allowing themselves to be defined not by what they stand for, but what they oppose (even if they originally wrote it). But they do inject a necessary wisdom... The intellectually honest of them question the ripple's effects before chucking the stone in the pond.
Of course, the intellectually honest wing of conservatism is maybe 20% of them, so this comment is even more academic than usual. (And the hypocrites comprising 80% of the party throw conservative caution out the window on matters like the Iraq intervention and conservative use of the environment.) But that 20% does serve a noble purpose. Somebody has to say, "'Embracing complexity' breeds endless complexity... and here's where endless complexity ends." |
Your post makes a lot of sense if you apply a meaning to "conservative" that has nothing to do with what animates current conservatism, and pretend itself that it is a pragmatic, intellectual engaged, empirical approach to formulating optimal government policy,
an approach that cannot be found in the wild. That, by the way, is the Mike Konczal piece to which Delong was reacting in my original post.
If conservatism was anything like what you described, conservatives would want to figure out how they got it so wrong with Iraq and the WMD, or the financial collapse in 2007-08, or the predictions of disaster around the 2009 stimulus and Dodd-Frank, or the Kansas tax cuts, etc. Or the predictions that Obama would seize everyone's guns and that acceptance of LGBT civil rights would be a existential threat to society. Being a conservative means you never look backwards (once you looked backwards to Reagan, but now that they have found an even Greater Communicator to the white working class, he can be forgotten). The only thing in your rearview mirror is the nostalgia that you keep exalting as you drive away from it.
Conservatives don't really care about policy. They care about reaction. When Kevin Williamson writes that women who have abortions should be executed as murderers, he's not really thinking that women who have abortions should be executed. It's a pose, but it's real in the sense that the expressive value of reaction in politics is what matters most to them, not the effects. (Except for the very rich, who want their tax cuts.)
This is what the left often does not understand: Conservatives are not alone in seeing an expressive value to politics, one that usually trumps discussions of policy and its effects.
