Let's have a look:
Today conservatives tend to favor freedom, and consequently are inclined to be somewhat sanguine about inequalities of outcomes. Liberals are more concerned with equality, understood, they insist, primarily as equality of opportunity, not of outcome.
Freedom, as the poet says, is just another name for nothing left to lose. Here it is defined as an assumed good without any real substance to back it up. How does the so-called War on Terror support freedom? How does the Patriot Act support freedom? How does opposition to abortion rights support freedom? How does opposition to gay marriage support freedom? It's all nebulous nonsense. With the Republican base being motivated solely by Religion and War, we are less free every day.
But let's move on. He next says that conservatives "are inclined to be somewhat sanguine about inequalities of outcomes". How many ways can he hedge his bets here (inclined, somewhat, sanguine). What he means is that they don't care about inequalities of any kind. In academic conservatism everything works out for the best. Those who work hard, get more. Those who are lazy get less.
So when he says, "Liberals are more concerned with equality, understood, they insist, primarily as equality of opportunity, not of outcome," he is not only wordy but both right and wrong. Liberals are more concerned with equality, because liberals view individuals as parts of a whole rather than isolated units pursuing insulated and disconnected destinies. The approach is holistic. How does the individual affect society, how does society affect the individual? More importantly, liberals understand that where you finish is largely based on where you start so if you want change outcomes, you have to put some energy into creating equality of opportunity. Why let the rich kid start at 3rd base, they argue, make him swing the bat!
Liberals tend, however, to infer unequal opportunities from the fact of unequal outcomes. Hence liberalism's goal of achieving greater equality of condition leads to a larger scope for interventionist government to circumscribe the market's role in allocating wealth and opportunity. Liberalism increasingly seeks to deliver equality in the form of equal dependence of more and more people for more and more things on government.
To a certain degree I am in agreement with the first sentence. Though I think Will is implying that Liberals ignore things like ability and achievement. But either way, things quickly run off the rails. Mostly because he ignores the fact that government is not imposed on us. It is something we created of, by, for, the people to serve a purpose. And even a conservative-based small government would have "to circumscribe the market's role in allocating wealth and opportunity" to some degree. So unless he's arguing for anarcho-capitalism, which I doubt, the degree of scope is the only real issue. And under Bush the scope has actually increased so whither conservatism?
More importantly, under Clinton, liberalism learned to step away from big government and social engineering. In fact, the notion that liberalism does anything "increasingly" is sort of comical and hasn't been true since the days of LBJ. Secondly, liberalism does not try to create dependence on its services. They're not the tobacco companies. Government intervention is designed to protect workers and individuals from the predatory inclinations of the market and the corporations that create wealth at the expense of opportunity.
Hence liberals' hostility to school choice programs that challenge public education's semimonopoly. Hence hostility to private accounts funded by a portion of each individual's Social Security taxes. Hence their fear of health savings accounts (individuals who buy high-deductible health insurance become eligible for tax-preferred savings accounts from which they pay their routine medical expenses — just as car owners do not buy insurance to cover oil changes). Hence liberals' advocacy of government responsibility for — and, inevitably, rationing of — health care, which is 16 percent of the economy and rising.
Again the hostility to these privatization programs comes from the fact that they actually undermine and destroy the thing they are trying to improve. Schools, Social Security, Health Insurance are all endangered by privatization which seeks only to increase wealth and eliminate opportunity. All of these moves are un-democratic and openly hostile to anyone except those who can afford to spend the most on education, retirement savings, and health care.
The role of government is to remove the burden of these services off of employees so that they aren't dependent on their jobs for access to these basic institutions. This a particular problem in these days of employment volatility when layoffs and job changes create gaps in healthcare coverage and force workers to spend their 401ks on in-between job survival. Can you imagine if a layoff meant pulling your kids out of school, too?
Steadily enlarging dependence on government accords with liberalism's ethic of common provision, and with the liberal party's interest in pleasing its most powerful faction — public employees and their unions. Conservatism's rejoinder should be that the argument about whether there ought to be a welfare state is over. Today's proper debate is about the modalities by which entitlements are delivered. Modalities matter, because some encourage and others discourage attributes and attitudes — a future orientation, self-reliance, individual responsibility for healthy living — that are essential for dignified living in an economically vibrant society that a welfare state, ravenous for revenue in an aging society, requires.
The notion that liberalism is "steadily enlarging dependence" on anything is a straw man. But I do agree that the argument over the welfare state is largely over. The burden of the poor has been shifted from the state to McDonald's and Walmart at below-poverty wages. Well done there.
His choice of the word "modalities" seems unnecessarily wonky. I think he means the way that people view themselves and the world they live in. Their attitudes and approaches to life. I guess this is some gesture to the "pursuit of happiness" but it's a pretty opaque and uninspiring way to phrase it.
The funny part is the way he tries to sneak the demographic argument in there at the end, and blame it on the welfare state. If you want to know why GM is suffering right now, it's because of demographics. Their retirees are too expensive and drive up costs compared to Toyota. If anyone is going to want to shift that burden in the coming years it's going to be the corporations. It's the market which is going to end benefits and shift the burden to the individual who will have nowhere to go but government. There will be some really sorrowful modalities right about then.
This reasoning is congruent with conservatism's argument that excessively benevolent government is not a benefactor, and that capitalism does not merely make people better off, it makes them better. Liberalism once argued that large corporate entities of industrial capitalism degraded individuals by breeding dependence, passivity and servility. Conservatism challenges liberalism's blindness about the comparable dangers from the biggest social entity, government.
This is just a mish-mash of arguments following in the line of his happy modalities. Benevolent government makes you a slave, capitalism makes you a better person, an ubermensch. You'll be fitter, happier, and more productive. You're teeth will be whiter to. This goes beyond "sanguine" into pure fantasy.
Conservatism argues, as did the Founders, that self-interestedness is universal among individuals, but the dignity of individuals is bound up with the exercise of self-reliance and personal responsibility in pursuing one's interests. Liberalism argues that equal dependence on government minimizes social conflicts. Conservatism's rejoinder is that the entitlement culture subverts social peace by the proliferation of rival dependencies.
OK, but self-reliance should not force each individual to reinvent the infrastructure that supports daily life. One way or another society has the primary role in building schools, hospitals, and roads. I also think that he misses the point that purpose of equality is to eliminate differences and therefore eliminate rival dependencies. It's only because these groups are embattled by conservatives that their identities become more deeply entrenched.
The entitlement mentality encouraged by the welfare state exacerbates social conflicts — between generations (the welfare state transfers wealth to the elderly), between racial and ethnic groups (through group preferences) and between all organized interests (from farmers to labor unions to recipients of corporate welfare) as government, not impersonal market forces, distributes scarce resources. This, conservatism insists, explains why as government has grown, so has cynicism about it.
Like I said, social conflicts are increased when groups are under attack by conservative policies which seek to undermine their opportunities in the name of increasing wealth for the few. Create a system of true equality, and you won't need group based entitlements. If you really want to get nasty about it, the biggest part of the government is the military, and the greatest recipients of government's benevolence are military families who are given guaranteed pensions, and subsidies for everything from health care to groceries. If you want impersonal market forces to rule, let's see you privatize the U.S. Army.
Racial preferences are the distilled essence of liberalism, for two reasons. First, preferences involve identifying groups supposedly disabled by society — victims who, because of their diminished competence, must be treated as wards of government. Second, preferences vividly demonstrate liberalism's core conviction that government's duty is not to allow social change but to drive change in the direction the government chooses. Conservatism argues that the essence of constitutional government involves constraining the state in order to allow society ample scope to spontaneously take unplanned paths.
Wow, this one's really disturbing. Because Will falsely believes that capitalism provides us with a frictionless meritocracy he sees minorities as having "diminished competence" where the reality is that many, many people in this country are poor and lack opportunities that people who wear bow ties take for granted. Also, if he objects to the "core conviction that government's duty is not to allow social change but to drive change in the direction the government chooses" than he must also object to the Civil Rights Movement, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the Union's prosecution of the Civil War. He must also object to the Right to Life movement, and those who oppose Same-Sex Marriage, Stem Cell Research, Human Cloning. Let's spontaneously take some unplanned paths, shall we?
Conservatism embraces President Kennedy's exhortation to "Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country," and adds: You serve your country by embracing a spacious and expanding sphere of life for which your country is not responsible.
Now that's just wishful thinking. When Kennedy asked the nation to serve the country, he meant that people should, like, serve their country. Help the poor. Create a better a sense of community and embrace the notion that we're all in this together. Not go off to the suburbs and hope that our combined commitment to selfishness and consumerism would somehow manifest itself as a greater good.
Here is the core of a conservative appeal, without dwelling on "social issues" that should be, as much as possible, left to "moral federalism" — debates within the states. On foreign policy, conservatism begins, and very nearly ends, by eschewing abroad the fatal conceit that has been liberalism's undoing domestically — hubris about controlling what cannot, and should not, be controlled.
Ha! Hahahahahahah! He can't be serious. He just can't. Does he even know who the president is? Has he not heard of Iraq? What on earth is he talking about. What is our occupation if not the belief that American benevolence comes at the end of a rifle, and that our presence is not just good for Iraq, but it makes the Iraqis better. Our foreign policy is all of the worst aspects of the conservative critique of "liberal government dependence" with the added bonus that when stuff get's out of whack, you just kill a bunch of people. Hubris? Where do you even start. Our presence in the world is based on the belief that if we fight enough wars we'll have complete control. No alarms and no surprises.
Conservatism is realism, about human nature and government's competence. Is conservatism politically realistic, meaning persuasive? That is the kind of question presidential campaigns answer.OK, so this gets us back to the fact that Will is actually trying to argue against the current Republican party in the name of a conservatism that doesn't really exist anywhere except in the newly emergent anti-war right. But why make all of these straw man arguments about Liberalism. Let's see someone stand up to the real issues plaguing this country: religious divisiveness, xenophobia and imperialistic war mongering. All of which are problems that cut to the core values of conservatism.
Trying to argue that the current Republican administration isn't really conservative is like some aging Marxist academic arguing that the Soviet Union wasn't real communism. One thing leads to another. Own up to the fact that you let things get out of hand.
Those of us on the left are just trying to survive conservatism as its practiced. Who cares about these convenient redefinitions.
On the other hand, if you really wanted us to embrace realism and a healthy skepticism about government's competence, you couldn't have done better than forcing us to live with eight years of George W. Bush. I'm convinced! Find me the next Richard Nixon, and he'll have my vote.
