As I noted earlier this week, there’s been a lot of liberal discussion of conservative reformers recently, ranging from the Washington Monthly’s attempt at a
taxonomy of the tendency to
Mike Konczal’s recent piece expressing doubts (echoed by
my colleague Paul Krugman) about whether the reforming tendency within conservatism adds up to anything significant at all. Reading through
the responses to Konczal’s post from
“reformish” types, I’m in the rare position of disagreeing ever-so-slightly with my friend and co-author
Reihan Salam, who writes:
One challenge for [Konczal] is that he is describing an idiosyncratic and diverse group of thinkers, and it’s not at all clear that the loose collection of conservative reformers he has in mind has coalesced into anything like a cohesive movement. That is, if the question is whether or not there really is a “conservative reform” movement in policy, the answer would have to be no under a stringent definition of a movement. It might be more apt to refer to a reformist tendency, which doesn’t so much represent a dramatic departure from U.S. conservatism as it’s been practiced in recent decades but rather a shift of emphasis.
I agree with the last part: As Salam says, “conservative reform is conservative,” which is part of why it (understandably) strikes many liberals as disappointing, counterproductive or woefully insufficient. But I think there’s a little more intellectual cohesion among would-be reformers than he suggests — maybe not enough to qualify as a movement, but getting there at least.
How much cohesion you see, of course, depends on the definition you employ. If a “reform conservative” just means somebody who thinks that the Republican Party should offer different arguments on domestic policy than it did in 2012, then it’s hard to find anyone on the right of center who
isn’t a reformer. (Sheldon Adelson qualifies; so does Allen West; so does … you get the idea.) But what people who use the term mostly have in mind, I think, are those of us who think that the American right’s biggest problem, both politically and practically, lies in economic policy, where the Reagan-era catechism is insufficient to meet contemporary challenges, and where the Republican Party is currently offering a set of policies and slogans that simply aren’t responsive to the anxieties of Americans who aren’t already securely in the upper class.
Now this reformist camp, too, is a broad circle: It includes veterans of Bush-era “compassionate conservatism” like
Pete Wehner and Michael Gerson, combative moderates like David Frum and Josh Barro, moderate moderates like my colleague David Brooks, free-market populists like the Washington Examiner’s Tim Carney, “crunchy con” localists like The American Conservative’s Rod Dreher, pragmatic libertarians like The Daily Beast’s Megan McArdle and her husband, Reason’s Peter Suderman, and many others.
But within that circle (and close to its center, I’d say, though I’m biased) there’s a tighter circle still, consisting of writers like Salam, National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru, the American Enterprise Institute’s Jim Pethokoukis, National Affairs editor Yuval Levin, and others. And here I think you can see not just a tendency or an impulse, but at least the outline of a reasonably coherent reform agenda. It’s rooted in two major premises, which I would summarize as follows:
1) The core economic challenge facing the American experiment is not income inequality per se, but rather stratification and stagnation — weak mobility from the bottom of the income ladder and wage stagnation for the middle class. These challenges are bound up in a
growing social crisis — a retreat from marriage, a weakening of religious and communal ties, a decline in workforce participation — that cannot be solved in Washington D.C. But economic and social policy
can make a difference nonetheless, making family life more affordable, upward mobility more likely, and employment easier to find.
2) The existing welfare-state institutions we’ve inherited from the New Deal and the Great Society, however, often make these tasks harder rather than easier: Their exploding costs crowd out every other form of spending, require middle class tax increases and threaten to drag on economic growth; their tangled web of subsidies and credits and tax breaks often
benefit the already-affluent and
create perverse incentives for the poor, and the distortions created by the way they pay for health care, in particular, contribute mightily to the rising cost of health insurance and thus the stagnation of middle class incomes. So we don’t face a choice between streamlining the welfare state and making it more supportive of work and family; we should be doing both at once.
Proceeding from these premises, the basic “reform conservative” agenda looks something like this:
a. A tax reform that caps deductions and lowers rates, but also reduces the burden on working parents and the lower middle class, whether through an expanded child tax credit or some other means of reducing payroll tax liability. (Other measures that might improve the prospects of low-skilled men, ranging from a larger earned income tax credit to criminal justice reforms that reduce the incarceration rate, should also be part of the conversation.)
b. A repeal or revision of Obamacare that aims to ease us toward a system of near-universal
catastrophic health insurance, and includes some kind of flat tax credit or voucher explicitly designed for that purpose.
c. A Medicare reform along the lines of the Wyden-Ryan premium support proposal, and a Social Security reform focused on means testing and extending work lives rather than a renewed push for private accounts.
d. An immigration reform that tilts much more toward Canadian-style recruitment of high-skilled workers, and that doesn’t necessarily seek to accelerate the pace of low-skilled immigration. (Any amnesty should follow the implementation of E-Verify rather than the other way around, guest worker programs
should not be expanded, etc.)
e. A
“market monetarist” monetary policy as an alternative both to further fiscal stimulus and to the tight money/fiscal austerity combination advanced by many Republicans today.
f. An attack not only on explicit subsidies for powerful incumbents (farm subsidies, etc.) but also other protections and implicit guarantees, in arenas ranging from copyright law to the problem of “Too Big To Fail.”
To bring things to a finer point, if reform conservatives were suddenly put in charge of the Congressional G.O.P.’s legislative agenda, the party would immediately advance
Robert Stein’s plan for family-friendly tax reform and champion some version of
James Capretta’s proposed replacement for Obamacare. It would continue to push hard for Paul Ryan’s entitlement reforms, while setting more realistic targets for discretionary spending than his budget blueprints have done to date. It would try to revise the immigration reform bill along the lines
suggested by Levin here, and failing that would probably push a more modest increase in high-skilled immigration, paired with more enforcement mechanisms, as an alternative to the comprehensive approach. It would become notably more sympathetic to the
Brown-Vitter banking overhaul and to
Derek Khanna-style proposals for copyright reform. And it would
stop attacking Ben Bernanke for his supposed dovishness and recognize that if anything monetary policy has probably been too tight.
You’ll notice, in what I’ve included and what I’ve left out above, that there are also things that a G.O.P. reformed along these lines wouldn’t do. It
wouldn’t embrace (or re-embrace) a cap-and-trade bill, or any sweeping regulatory response to climate change. (The influence of
Jim Manzi is strong here.) It wouldn’t endorse further tax increases — or not unless something like the Wyden-Ryan Medicare plan was actually on the table. It would remain skeptical of many of the major features of Obamanomics — the design of the stimulus bill, the individual mandate, forays into industrial policy. It would be reality-based regarding the likely outcome of the gay marriage debate and non-Akinist on abortion, but it wouldn’t try to jettison social conservatives or sideline their concerns; instead, it would mostly work to broaden the pro-family message into the realm of economic policy. And it wouldn’t make immigration reform central to the party’s “rebranding” effort.
Again, you can be a reforming conservative and disagree with some, most, or all of these ideas and choices and emphases. But I think that they constitute a common ground that a number of would-be reformers share almost completely, and that draws from multiple “reformish” tendencies — libertarian, moderate, compassionate conservative, etc. — within the broader right.
Is this a policy synthesis that would make the G.O.P. more effective at winning national elections? I think so, but that’s certainly debatable. Is it an agenda that the party is likely to actually embrace anytime soon? That’s much more doubtful: On a few fronts, it’s already there or on its way, but the crucial idea that conservatism ought to focus directly on the economic interests of downscale Americans has not exactly caught fire within the G.O.P., and the party’s relationship to reform-minded policy wonks remains … well,
distant is a kind way of putting it.
But obviously I think it does have at least one quality that makes it worth supporting even if the effort is ultimately in vain: Both its diagnosis and prescriptions are correct.
