The document’s emphasis on the middle class is a thinly veiled repudiation of the Romney campaign, whose emphasis on “job creators” reduced the 2012 Republican convention to a gathering of the National Federation of Independent Businesses. As Sen. Mitch McConnell noted at a “Room to Grow” public event last week, Republicans must stop imagining that average Americans are anything like John Galt in Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged.” Few of them are entrepreneurs, let alone heroic individualists. Most of them are holding jobs or looking for them. A political party that doesn’t address their needs isn’t likely to get their votes.
Pointer from Reihan Salam.
Let me propose the following distinction between politics and policy. Politics is a set of gestures and poses that politicians use to win votes, either in elections or in Congress concerning legislation. Policy is what actually gets done.
The Obama team has been magnificent at executing gestures and poses and thereby winning votes. Their approach to policy appears to have been much more haphazard, with results that I imagine disappoint even many of their supporters.
My criticism of “Room to Grow” is that it while it purports to be a policy document, it is in fact a set of gestures and poses. I think that the way Galston and Salam discuss “Room to Grow” tends to confirm that. Rather than complain that these are just gestures and poses, they are willing to engage with the gestures and poses and ask how well they will work politically.
I seem to be the only one who cares whether there is a coherent, implementable policy agenda embedded in “Room to Grow.” Maybe it is premature to worry about that. If you don’t get the poses and gestures right, you won’t have the opportunity to implement anything. But I do not think you should come in as unprepared as the Obama Administration was to deal with actual policy.
Have you ever thought there may not be any coherent implementable policy? That it may be only dealing with things as they are and a few things that are possible. That there is less to politics than meets the eye and all that matters is the attention and focus on those few things. Probably not what anyone wants to hear.
Here is Arnold showing some real intellectual resemblance to Prof. Woodrow Wilson: arguing that policy is wholly distinct from politics, and best left to the professionals. Like Bryan Caplan, Arnold’s professionals would be Hayekian and attempt to limit the state’s scope; but Arnold (and Bryan) are every bit as contemptuous of the messy process by which ideas are brought to bear on concrete problems in our democratic system as Wilson was. Democracy as pesky side-constraint; people who engage directly in the democratic process when framing their policy alternatives as intellectually (and probably morally) compromised.
I would note that this impulse is very familiar to me, and perhaps to anyone who invests their time heavily in studying policy issues. But a little self-awareness at the limitations of this way of thinking would be nice.
I’ve often felt like saying this myself.
Read the essays in R2G. Does this seem like something that is made to be part of a campaign of democratic politicking, getting votes, swaying moderates, rallying the base? Is the vision exciting and compelling, in addition to being coherent?
No on all counts. It it a product of the right-leaning policy intelligentsia to a sophisticated and minority audience. It should make sense and stimulate this audience with a coherent, comprehensive, big picture vision and strategy that is more radical than timidly tinkering with the knob settings of the status quo.
So, a possible plank of such a campaign could be “Private Choices in the Private Sector; Free to Decide in the Free Market.” If the right is going to accept the premise of welfare state redistribution, it can say, “In every possible way, we are going to deliver that help to people in a way that they can use it according to their own best judgment about what works best for them, and also in a way such that those goods and services are provided by normal companies obeying universal regulations, and not by the government or its contractors that must comply with special rules.”
And then you could see how that common thread runs through education, health care, food stamps, housing, and so on. The vision of government who acts as transfer agent, but otherwise gets out of the way.
R2G hasn’t achieved anything like that.
I have often attacked professionals as policy makers. However, the democratic process is not the solution. I think that the only real solution is competitive government. But somebody is going to win the election in 2017, and they can either try to implement a coherent agenda or flail around making gestures. If it’s a Republican who flails around, then the Democrats will sweep back into office and once again it will be their professionals who call the shots.
–“the only real solution is competitive government”
But different nations with different governments have always competed with each other throughout human history. If a more libertarian arrangement is both economically most efficient and most conducive to human thriving then isn’t the burden of proof on you to explain why we don’t see the world evolving in that direction?
I believe that the key is smaller governmental units. Many smaller countries are evolving in the direction of more economic freedom. I wrote an article a while back showing that many of the top countries in terms of the Fraser Index of economic freedom are now smaller countries. Within the class of large countries, the competition is pretty weak on economic freedom. http://www.american.com/archive/2014/january/the-recipe-for-good-government
I am skeptical of the value of metrics like the Economic Freedom Index. I’m pretty sure you would be skeptical if someone offered a “Social Justice Index” to compare different countries. “Economic freedom” seems equally subjective.
Also it seems to me that, for the most part, government at the state and local level is no better than at the national level.
It does make sense that you would see more variation in all directions at smaller scales of government. I would be inclined to expect to see a significant evolutionary trend at larger scales as well.
Correcting for the big countries gobbling up smaller ones? The plunder impulse is strong. That doesn’t mean that it’s good.
The way we run “democracy” undermines democracy.
I was going to let this die, but now I’ll point out just one example, not the one that would be most illustrative, but the one that is most definitive. Obama has flat-out lied about the NSA. This is an institution that DESTROYS democracy. And the head of state, in his posing and posturing, has lied to the voters about EVERY aspect of it.
Any reform or any rebranding of the Republican party to successfully appeal to the middle class must present a policy statement that drops the Right to Life position.
Oh really? I think it is going in the other direct.