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Not that it matters, but WTF is Ross Douthat talking about? (Or maybe it does matter...) [1]
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Date: 2022-10-02
Hi there. I'm a reasonable conservative and person of faith with serious ideas you should consider - because I'm a reasonable conservative, not like those other people. Can you say populism? Are you worried about secularism? About having enough babies? Too many old people?
I like force myself to look at what Ross Douthat is writing on the theory that it’s a good idea to see what’s going on in the conservative pundit bubble periodically, just as it’s a good idea to get things like a colonoscopy, a root canal, or a Pap smear every so often as needed. It's not pleasant, but neither is letting things go.
So the latest from Mr. Douthat is watching him trying to deal with the new Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Liz Truss. Truss is causing consternation as she is instituting a number of policies that seem stark raving mad to people who are not Conservative Party leaders. (And possibly some of them are… concerned as well.)
What I find revealing is the way Douthat tries to spin the narrative; it says a lot about Douthat’s conservative world view, such as it is.
He begins with this critique:
Her big gambit upon succeeding Boris Johnson, a mini-budget crowded with tax cuts, looks like a policy debacle, recklessly inflationary and fiscally destabilizing. As politics, the mini-budget looks even dafter….
Douthat lays out in this word salad what she should be aiming for:
..At the moment the electoral sweet spot for right-of-center governments in the Western world is a mixture of cultural (not religious) conservatism and relative economic moderation — an anti-libertarian right-wing politics, favorable to the welfare state and skeptical of immigration, that appeals to constituencies buffeted by globalization and anxious about national identity.
Well maybe that’s possible in countries where the nominal head/leader/cult figure for conservatives is not Donald Trump/Tucker Carlson. Possible translations for what Douthat considers “a mixture of cultural (not religious) conservatism and relative economic moderation”:
anti-libertarian right-wing politics = readiness to crack down with police state tactics to keep a lid on favorable to the welfare state = got to keep from committing political suicide by not cutting the things that are barely making life in the UK tolerable. skeptical of immigration = got to control those borders because we already have too many of ‘those people’ here. anxious about national identity = racism, fear of being ‘woke’, where’d all the white folks go? (And how can we live in a world where Elizabeth II is no longer sitting on the throne?)
So what does Douthat like about that ‘right of center sweet spot’?
This is the style of politics that just elevated Giorgia Meloni’s populist movement in Italy and that’s brought right-wing populism into the mainstream of Swedish politics. It’s also the politics that the Republican Party is perpetually groping toward without quite getting there.
In case you haven't been following the news from Italy, Meloni is openly an admirer of Benito Mussolini and an avowed Fascist — or Neo Fascist. Something like that anyway. From The Guardian:
What’s indisputable is that Meloni is a radical ultraconservative who opposes gay adoption, fetishises idealised confections of a “traditional” family unit she did not herself grow up in, associates refugee arrivals with “crime and prostitution” and rallies against the influence of those eternally slippery, hazily undefined “globalists”. Ahead of the election, she told the Italian people: “Don’t be afraid.”
Sound like anyone we know here in America? Only she can fix it, of course.
It should be noted that neither Truss nor Meloni achieved their position with the support of a majority of their respective populations; more through party politics, a parliamentary form of government, and multi-party coalition agreements than anything like straightforward democracy. It beats sending a mob to the Capitol to overturn an election — although that doesn’t mean they wouldn’t try it if they thought they could pull it off to take or hold on to power.
So, what is the great challenge Douthat sees facing conservative governance?
This is European conservatism’s predicament at the moment. It can win power because the old establishment, the supposedly sensible center, helped create and failed to solve three interconnected problems. First, globalization and European integration enriched the core more than the periphery, the metropole more than the hinterland. Second, wealth, secularization and economic stagnation drove down European birthrates, threatening depopulation and decline. Third, the preferred centrist solution to both economic stagnation and demographic diminishment, mass immigration, has contributed to Balkanization, crime and native backlash — even in a progressive bastion like Sweden.
emphasis added
Translating this into a U.S. perspective is tricky, so let’s try this as an approximation:
the core more than the periphery, the metropole more than the hinterland = the Coastal Elites versus Flyover Country, economic anxiety, grievance secularization and economic stagnation drove down European birthrates, threatening depopulation and decline = attack on Christianity, no jobs, they’re going to replace us, and the country is being destroyed. mass immigration, has contributed to Balkanization, crime and native backlash = the borders are out of control, division is rampant, there’s crime everywhere, and people are fighting back.
What does Douthat see as possible remedies?
A shift from public spending on the old to spending on young people and parents.
A shift from welfare spending to industrial policy.
A shift from relying on immigrants to boost your gross domestic product to investing in domestic growth and regional renewal.
A shift from deregulation on behalf of finance to deregulation on behalf of young families who presently can’t afford to buy a home.
Several observations. One is that the dualities Douthat puts up aren’t mutually exclusive. It might be worth considering that it’s not that we can’t afford to address these issues comprehensively — it’s that our economy has been shaped into a wealth transfer machine that has ramped inequality up to record levels even as the power of government to address it has been compromised.
If Douthat had ever run across The Spirit Level, he might consider that all of these problems would start improving IF we started by reversing the current redistribution of wealth up to a relative handful of people into a distribution that works for everyone.
Douthat himself argues that his proposed solutions are probably not possible for the “populist right” because it would require some thought and some time — and false choices like:
..a lot of conservative voters have an interest in the status quo; they don’t like how things have changed, without acknowledging how they’ve contributed to the problems. Older voters, especially, are likely to resist rebalancings that trim their pensions or the value of their homes, even if such a rebalancing is necessary to restore the societal vigor that they miss.
See, it’s all the fault of those selfish, greedy old people. Translation: we must cut back Social Security and Medicare.
Another aspect of that birthrate fixation should be mentioned as well. It’s not just about ‘preserving’ culture and traditional values. It’s also about having enough workers to keep labor cheap — and to ensure a sufficient supply of cannon fodder for the holy/patriotic wars that the Right seems to always be pushing us into.
Certainly Vladimir Putin can sympathize with Douthat. He has been making much of the ‘right’ kind of Russians having the ‘right’ kind of babies and mandating traditional sex roles because he needs a steady supply of bodies to feed into the slaughter in Ukraine and elsewhere — and he’s running out of the minorities he’s been preferentially shoving into the meat grinder. The American Right is obsessing over the ‘feminization’ of the U.S. military — but this is probably what is really freaking them out.
Douthat fears that a populist right would end up badly (well yeah) because as he sees it:
..populists might end up as right-wing custodians of the same sclerosis that helped bring them to power — ruling as defenders of a fusty chauvinism rather than actual tradition (because a secularized continent is not actually traditional), preserving a museum culture for as long as possible against further waves of immigration, with some of the rage against a civilizational twilight that Meloni offers in her fiery speeches, but no actual plan to turn societies with empty cradles and budget shortfalls around.
emphasis added
You think?
Again Douthat reveals more about where he’s coming from with this. If he’s not openly a Christian Nationalist who fears being replaced, he's certainly CN curious, or even CN adjacent with his fixation on religion, birth rates, and immigration. It goes right along with his conclusion:
..Facing a European future that’s so plausible and grim, it’s not surprising that some right-wing politicians would seek refuge in the happier, simpler future once promised by the past.
The idea of a happier, simpler future once promised by the past is the essence of conservatism: things are always getting worse, and the past was always better. Someone has remarked something along the lines that conservatives are really trying to get back to a world like their childhood, or what they imagine childhood was: everything they need is taken care of, the world is a safe place because Daddy makes it so, and nothing is ever their fault.
The myth of some glorious past that needs to be restored is also an element in Fascism, which is not a coherent set of principles so much as an irrational belief system wrapped up in fantasies.
You know — like MAGA.
(Before anyone gets into a big debate over what Fascism really is, I suggest reading through David Neiwert’s Rush, Newspeak and Fascism: An Exegesis over at Orcinus. It’s a series of essays that do a deep dive into the nature of Fascism — how it manifests and what drives it. It’s essential reading to understand what is happening in America right now.) Neiwert and Robinson have a lot of good material over there — check the left margin of the site webpage for links.
Douthat actually brushes past what may be an especially revealing tell near the start of this latest round of conservative mental masturbation:
Is there anything to say in defense of the stumbling prime minister? Only this: When politicians return, with seeming irrationality, to ideas that seem zombielike and ill-suited to the present moment, it’s often a sign that the problems of the present moment just don’t have clear solutions. The defaults of the past may be wrong, but at least they feel attractively familiar.
emphasis added
Whether Douthat admits it or not, he’s channeling a bit of Paul Krugman who has been warning about Zombie Ideas for some time now. See here and here for two recent columns; the second link addresses what Truss is doing. Krugman even wrote a book about it: Arguing with Zombies.
Zombie Ideas are, as Krugman says, “ideas that have failed repeatedly in practice, and should be dead, but somehow are still shambling around, eating policymakers’ brains.”
Conservatives like Douthat are particularly susceptible to zombie ideas because of the nature of conservatism. Rick Perlstein summed it up in 2005 with this:
Conservatism never fails. It is only failed.
It’s from a piece at Huffington Post: “'I Didn't Like Nixon Until Watergate': The Conservative Movement Now”. Digby has referenced the phrase a number of times, as here for example.
To spell it out, conservatism is never wrong — if it doesn't work, it can only be the fault of whoever is trying to put it into practice. Either it wasn't ‘real’ conservatism, or they weren’t ‘real’ conservatives, or they didn't do it hard enough. Lather, rinse repeat. Hence zombie ideas.
It’s almost possible to feel some sympathy for conservative columnists like Douthat and Brooks. Almost. You can see them flailing these days. The right wing has gone so far to extremes in America, it’s left them in a kind of limbo. There’s nothing ‘conservative’ about what the Right is these days. So, they try to divert with increasingly weird columns, like bizarre movie reviews, or musings on office spaces.
But f*ck ‘em. They’re an integral part of the establishment that foisted Donald Trump on America and they’re still legitimatizing ideas coming from the extreme right end of the political spectrum, if only by trying to reframe them in more genteel language.
The only justification for giving this much attention to a man who seems to think the answers come down to: more God, more white babies, closed borders, and leaving old people out in the cold because they are a drag on the economy, is this. It clarifies what the alternatives are and because it tells us where they want to take us, however people like Douthat cover it in sanctimony.
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