Jonathan Chait’s Atlantic profile of Josh Barro, the Bloomberg View blogger and columnist who’s gradually transitioned from reform-minded center-right pundit to entertaining scourge of the contemporary G.O.P., has launched a lot of discussion about conservative reform projects in general, and (for my sins) I’ll probably write a post or two on that theme later this week. To start with, though, I think it’s worth saying something in response to this post from Ezra Klein, which uses Barro’s recent arc as a case study in the Republican Party’s intellectual self-marginalization:
Over the last few years, the Republican Party has been retreating from policy ground they once held and salting the earth after them. This has coincided with, and perhaps even been driven by, the Democratic Party pushing into policy positions they once rejected as overly conservative. The result is that the range of policies you can hold and still be a Republican is much narrower than it was in, say, 2005. That’s left a lot of once-Republican wonks without an obvious political home.
Klein goes on to talk about health care (where Republicans used to be open to an individual mandate, but no longer) and climate change (where there used to be G.O.P. support for cap-and-trade, but no longer), and then makes a broader point:
As the Republican Party’s range of acceptable policies has narrowed, the Democratic Party’s range has expanded. Stimulus based entirely on tax cuts? It’s not their preference, but they’ll take it. Market-based approaches to environmental regulation? Sure, why not. Capping the employer-based exclusion for health care? Of course. Hundreds of billions of dollars in entitlement cuts to help reduce the deficit? Uh-huh.
If you imagine a policy spectrum that that goes from 1-10 in which 1 is the most liberal policy, 10 is the most conservative policy, and 5 is that middle zone that used to hold both moderate Democrats and Republicans, the basic shape of American politics today is that the Obama administration can and will get Democrats to agree to anything ranging from 1 to 7.5 and Republicans will reject anything that’s not an 8, 9, or 10. The result, as I’ve written before, is that President Obama’s record makes him look like a moderate Republicans from the late-90s.
A lot could be written on why the Republican Party has been so quick to abandon these positions. I’ll leave that for another time. The point here is that it’s happened, and it’s left a lot of policy wonks who could’ve easily fit into the Republican Party a decade ago in a tough position.
That there are important issues where the G.O.P. has retreated into a kind of policy bunker, with uncomfortable consequences for writers with center-right views on those issues, is not a point that I’m likely to dispute! But I think that Klein’s “basic shape of American politics” paragraph misleads on two counts.
First, you can’t just bracket the “why” of the G.O.P.’s shift without downplaying the ways in which the basic ground of our policy debates has shifted since 2006 as well. For instance, a carbon tax or cap-and-trade bill might have looked like a sensible-centrist “5? back when Nancy Pelosi and Newt Gingrich were sharing a couch. But back then we were pre-crash and thought we were considerably richer than we actually were; back then the prospects for a meaningful global climate treaty looked much better than they do post-Copenhagen; back then global temperatures were expected to rise faster in the short term than they actually have; and back then we hadn’t yet knocked our own carbon dioxide emissions down to 1994 levels without a cap and trade bill.
None of these trends prove the case against carbon taxation, but I would submit that they should at least nudge the position that a sweeping regulatory response to climate change occupies on the spectrum of American policy debates — toward a slightly left-of-center “4,” perhaps? In which case the G.O.P.’s opposition isn’t just a matter of a sudden rightward lurch (though that’s clearly part of the story). It’s also a matter of changing circumstances making a particular program both more politically unpopular (Mitt Romney did not lose in 2012 because of climate change, to put it mildly) and more doubtful as policy, with inevitable consequences for the opposition party’s attitude on the issue.
Second, Klein’s definition of the “policy spectrum” is confined to the set of debates that tends to confirm his hypothesis, while leaving a number of high-profile, highly-contested arenas out. For instance, I think it’s fair to say that there’s a much livelier debate about immigration policy within the Republican Party right now than there is within the Democratic Party (where the Byron Dorgan/Barbara Jordan tendency has mostly disappeared or been suppressed), and the G.O.P.’s uncertainty and internal tensions arguably puts it closer to the center of public opinion than does the pro-amnesty lockstep on the Democratic side of the aisle. On foreign policy and national security, meanwhile, President Obama does clearly occupy a kind of center, but his Republican critics are attacking him (and each other) on a variety of fronts — hawkish, civil libertarian, etc. — that reflect the G.O.P.’s increasingly interesting internal debate, rather than just huddling together at a “9? on the Cheney scale. The debate over entitlement reform doesn’t quite fit with Klein’s paradigm either: On Medicare, for instance, the Obama-era Republicans have alternated between cynical “Mediscare” arguments (whose ideological valence is both right-wing and left-wing at once) and arguments for premium support, which is arguably a centrist proposal, a “6? in the spectrum of 1998 or so, that Democrats have had to move leftward in order to effectively demonize.
And then there are social issues, where it’s the Democratic Party that’s become notably more ideologically conformist in the Obama era — more likely to pick fights over religious liberty, more absolutist on abortion, and lately more inclined to make support for gay marriage a party-wide litmus test. This social-issues consolidation is partially a rational response to underlying ideological shifts, of course (the electorate has grown more “spiritual but not religious” in the last decade, and support for gay marriage was a “2? or “3? in 2006 and probably a “6? today), and partially a defensive response to a G.O.P. that’s been pushing harder on pro-life legislation at both the state and national level. But that, again, makes the case against using ’06 as a permanent baseline for assessing what counts as centrism, and what’s ideologically extreme.
Stepping back a bit, my fellow heterodox conservative James Poulos responded to Klein’s post with an extended brief against the wonkification of punditry, and the ideology-smuggling assumption that “our biggest problems would be better addressed by letting our smartest experts direct our activity toward a solution.” As someone slightly more sympathetic to the wonkish turn in political writing, I would make a narrower point. Left-of-center wonks, like all of us, have a particular set of issues that inspires and defines their engagement with politics, and like all of us they tend to assume that their issues are the most important issues that there are. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that the more you narrow the scope of American politics to the issues that Klein built his reputation covering and that Wonkblog treats in great depth, the more centrist and reasonable liberalism looks, and the more difficult the position of the conservative pundit can seem. Nor should it be surprising that how alienated a given right-of-center writer feels from the contemporary G.O.P. depends on how many premises and interests he shares in common with liberal wonks — a lot for a Rockefeller Republican (or maybe neoliberal) like Barro; some for a social conservative, would-be-1970s neoconservative like me; fewer for others somewhat further rightward, and so on.
This doesn’t mean that liberals can’t profitably analyze this alienation: The Plight of the Conservative Wonk, As Seen From The Vantage Point of Liberal Wonkery, is certainly an entertaining-enough genre, and sometimes an illuminating one. But it would profit from keeping its own distinctive vantage point in mind.
