Conservatives still have a hard time coming up with new ideas to address the problems in our changing world.
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Over at Bloomberg Noah Smith posed a great question, why do conservatives have such a hard time coming up with new ideas these days? This isn’t exactly a new subject, as Jonathan Chait and some self-styled conservative reformers having been going back and forth about this subject as of late. But Smith make a great point about a structural reason why this problem keeps arising, namely that conservatives have embraced the idea that being conservative is defined as being not liberal:
There may be a more fundamental problem with reforming conservative ideas. Over the last few decades, the definition of “conservative” has hardened into dogma. “Less government”—deregulation, lower taxes and privatization—is “conservative.” Any policy that doesn’t include cutting government is “liberal.”
But there are a lot more ways to use government than not to use it, so the universe of “conservative” policy is therefore much smaller than the set of “liberal” ones. There are a million and one interventions, but there’s only one free market.
I think Smith is really onto something with this. After all a conservative devoted to free markets should be able to support cutting back on regulations when it comes to starting a business while at the same time wanting more regulations on economic activities with lots of negative externalities like coal mining without risking their conservative credentials. But unfortunately the “true conservative” position in modern American politics is largely to oppose all regulations.
In addition, it’s important to remember that modern American conservatism is really alone, at least in the developing world, with its agenda that focuses heavily on rolling back the welfare state that came into being in the middle of the 20th Century. While the Republican Party still focuses heavily on things shrinking and privatizing safety net programs like Social Security and Medicare, conservative European political parties largely defend the existence of even more generous safety net programs and simply seek to curtail their growth or manage them in a more efficient way. While also working to cut taxes on the rich.
All of this shows how hard it is for modern conservatives, or at least American conservatives, to come up with new ideas without either falling into the self-made traps of offering vague platitudes that never turn into concrete policy or simply offering the same policies they embraced in 1979.
This isn’t to say that conservatives as individuals or the Republican Party as an institution is incapable of coming up with new policy ideas. Indeed they did come up with viable policy alternatives three decades ago by embracing the idea of cutting sky high tax levels to spur economic growth and using tight money, rather than the wage and price controls of the 70’s, to end inflation. But the world has changed a great deal since 1979. Today taxes and inflation are at historic lows while new problems like a fragile financial system, rising inequality, and slowing growth are the new problems. If conservatives keep defining themselves as “not liberal” they won’t come up with any new ideas. But they are willing to shed that identity they might be able to come up with some new and innovative solutions, which would be a good thing for all Americans, regardless of their politics.
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