“A Challenge To Conservative Principles”: Humankind Is Better Off Than It Has Ever Been, And It’s Thanks To Government
There has never been a better time to be a human being than in March 2014. People live longer, wealthier, happier lives than they ever have. Each of the Four Horsemen — disease, famine, war, and death — are being beaten back.
This isn’t just my opinion. The data is incontrovertible. Life expectancy is the highest it’s ever been, and getting higher. Global GDP has never reached our present heights. The number of humans in poverty has never been lower. Wars between nations are almost extinct, and wars in general are getting less deadly.
The notion of human progress isn’t a grand theory anymore; it’s a fact. So why do so many people insist on telling you it’s impossible?
Almost everywhere you turn, some pundit or “literary intellectual” is aching to tell you the “hard, eternal truths” about the way the world works. Progress is a false idol, they’ll say — and worse, an American one. The harsh reality is that nothing ever changes; the sad truth of the human condition is pain and misery.
These people position themselves as besieged truth tellers, braving the wrath of the masses to challenge our dominant, rose-tinted national narrative. In reality, they’re just saying what most people think. A reasonably large majority of Americans think the country’s “best years” are behind it. Post-Great Recession, doom-and-gloom is in.
But while pessimism may be the conventional wisdom nowadays, its intellectual avatars have never been more anemic. Take British philosopher John Gray. Gray has made debunking the notion of “progress” his life’s work, having written two whole books on the matter in addition to innumerable columns and magazine articles. His review of Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature, a book that carefully assembles immense amounts of statistical evidence showing that war and violence claim fewer lives than ever, does not dispute a single bit of Pinker’s data. Incredibly, Gray thinks pointing out that some Enlightenment thinkers disagreed with each other constitutes a devastating rebuttal to Pinker’s detailed empirical argument. The review’s shallowness is emblematic of the general tenor of Gray’s sad crusade.
It’s not just John Gray. Given the enormous amounts of data on the optimists’ side, pessimists have little more than handwaving left to them. The pessimists babble on about “permanent human nature” and “timeless verities.” The optimists cite U.N. life expectancy statistics and U.S. government crime data. Having no answer to books like Pinker’s, Charles Kenny’s Getting Better, or Angus Deaton’s The Great Escape, the pessimists resort to empty pieties.
The irony here is obvious. The pessimists accuse optimists of falling prey to a seductive ideological thinking; “the worship of Progress,” as Christian conservative Rod Dreher puts it. Yet the only people being seduced are the pessimists, clutching the pillars of their ideological house while its foundation shatters.
Today’s optimists notice clear evidence that humanity’s lot is getting better — a point that does not require assuming that it must get better as a consequence of some inevitable historical law. Opponents respond by asserting the world simply cannot be getting better, as their own pessimistic theory of history says it’s impossible. The critics of blind faith have put out their own eyes.
The reason that purportedly hard-boiled realists adhere to the absurd pessimistic ideology is plain. Their own political views depend crucially on the idea that nothing about the world can be improved. The clear evidence that human inventions — government, the market, medicine, international institutions, etc. — have improved the world point to devastating truths adherents to pessimistic ideologies are loath to admit.
The two ideologies I have in mind have been at odds of late: American conservatism and foreign policy “realism.” Yet popular versions of both rely on the notion of an unchanging, conflict-filled political landscape.
For many conservatives, the idea of “progress” constitutes liberalism’s fatal conceit. Russell Kirk put it most eloquently: “Man being imperfect, no perfect social order ever can be created.” Bill Kristol, living proof that movement conservatism has been immune from the happy trends improving the world, is more blunt. “Progressivism is a touchingly simple-minded faith,” he says. “The higher the number of the century, the better things should be. But progressivism happens not to be true.”
Kristol’s understanding of progressivism is wanting, to say the least. But the reason he needs to stamp his feet and deny the evidence of progress is that hard evidence of human improvement challenges his conservative first principles. Improvements in human welfare have come from government — most notably through public health programs, like the campaign against leaded gasoline, but also through institutions like the welfare state and mixed-market economies. It’s no surprise that the wealthiest, healthiest, and happiest countries are all welfare state democracies.
But more fundamentally, human progress runs against the conservative assumption that human nature does not permit fundamental victories over evils like war. Government will always fail, as Kirk suggests, because human nature will frustrate any attempt to eradicate suffering.
But as it turns out, human nature itself is shaped crucially by the institutions we find ourselves surrounded by — including government. The newest research on humanity’s basic psychology, lucidly explained in recent books by neuroscientist Jonathan Greene and primatologist Frans de Waal, find that human “nature” is malleable. We’re naturally inclined toward both conflict and cooperation, and thus have the potential for both great good and great evil. The crucial deciding factor is the circumstances we find ourselves in. The reality of human progress, then, suggests that the political and social arrangements we’ve created are bringing out our better angels. This is a truth the conservative view of human nature cannot abide.
Foreign policy realists are also concerned by human nature, but nowadays tend to rely more on arguments about “the international system.” For them, global harmony is impossible because nations can never trust each other. Without a world government, no one can really ensure that another country’s army won’t come calling on your doorstep. States are driven to conflict by the need to secure themselves from an always-there risk to their security.
The decline in violence constitutes an existential threat to this worldview. There is strong evidence that international institutions, trade interdependences, and the spread of democracy have all contributed to war’s decline. If that’s true, then it really does seem like the globe isn’t destined for conflict forever. Neither human nature nor the international system make war inevitable.
Now, there are real grounds to worry about the future of human progress. Most notably, climate change has the potential to wipe out much of what we’ve accomplished. The reality of human progress isn’t an argument against heading off ecological disaster.
But that crisis hasn’t happened yet. You can simultaneously celebrate the fact that humanity is better off than it has ever been and argue that we need to take drastic action if we want to make sure that progress doesn’t stop with our generation.
So there’s no reason not to sing progress’ praises. Today’s world is much more Lego Movie than True Detective: everything really is kind of awesome, and time is not a damn flat circle.
By: Zack Beauchamp, The Week, March, 13, 2014
“From Backyard Barbeque To Food Fight”: CPAC, The Right-Wing Woodstock Or A Bad Family Reunion?
Like at a family reunion, the infighting at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) started long before anybody arrived.
First, the group American Atheists announced that it would be sponsoring a booth at the conference, with the goal of bringing conservative nonbelievers “out of the closet.” The religious right was not pleased.
“CPAC’s mission is to be an umbrella for conservative organizations that advance liberty, traditional values and our national defense,” said the Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins. But he made clear that atheists would certainly not fit under his umbrella: “Does the American Conservative Union really think the liberties and values they seek to preserve can be maintained when they partner with individuals and organizations that are undermining the understanding that our liberties come from God?” he asked. Good question.
So, the American Conservative Union, which organizes CPAC, gave the atheist group the boot. In response, the atheists showed up anyway to debate attendees in the hallway.
Then there was the perennial problem of the gays. In 2011, religious right groups including the FRC boycotted CPAC after the ACU allowed the conservative LGBT group GOProud to cosponsor the event. Once again, the establishment sided with the religious right and for the next two years banned GOProud from participating. This year, ACU offered a “compromise” in which GOProud was allowed to attend the event but not to so much as sponsor a booth in the exhibition hall. The “compromise” was so insulting that one of GOProud’s founders quit the organization’s board in protest.
But what about the people who were too embarrassingly far-right for CPAC? Not to worry, there’s no such thing.
Although the atheist and LGBT groups were too far off-message for the ACU, it did allow the anti-immigrant group ProEnglish to sponsor a booth at CPAC. Just a quick Google would have told the conference organizers that ProEnglish is run by a zealous white nationalist, Bob Vandervoort. In fact, CPAC’s organizers might have recognized Vandervoort’s name from the uproar his inclusion in the event caused in 2012 and 2013.
Now, just because the ACU was ready to welcome anti-immigrant extremists doesn’t mean that that was enough for immigrant bashers. A group of anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim activists who were worried that CPAC was going too soft on their issues organized an alternative conference across the street. One of their concerns was the perennial conspiracy theory that ACU member Grover Norquist is a secret Muslim Brotherhood agent. Another is that CPAC dared to hold a panel featuring immigration reform proponents.
They shouldn’t have worried. Three days of speeches on the CPAC main stage made clear that many prominent conservative activists have no intention of moderating their stance on immigration reform. Donald Trump told the audience that immigrants are “taking your jobs,” Rep. Michele Bachmann said she wouldn’t even consider immigration reform until they “build the danged fence,” and Ann Coulter, never one to disappoint, suggested that if immigration reform passes “we organize the death squads for the people who wrecked America.” Then, there was One America News anchor Graham Ledger, who used the CPAC podium to claim that because of immigration, schools no longer teach “the American culture.”
To be fair, CPAC did make some efforts at opening the Republican umbrella, hosting a panel on minority outreach off the main stage. But the gesture would have been slightly more meaningful if anybody had bothered to show up.
Any family has its squabbles. But this awkward backyard barbeque has turned into a full-fledged food fight.
By: Michael B. Keegan, President, People For The American Way; The Huffington Post Blog, March 11, 2014
“Let Them Eat Dignity”: Conservatives Assure The Poor That The Health Of Their Souls Demands They Go Hungry
A few days ago, Paul Ryan got caught repeating a little fib in his speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference. It was of a not-uncommon type, in which a vivid anecdote somebody hears from somewhere gets told and retold in a game of political telephone in which the facts get mangled and the story from elsewhere becomes something the speaker claims happened to her. We can forgive Ryan for repeating it, since the falsehood didn’t originate with him. But the real power of the story lies in its revelation of the cruelty that underlies the way contemporary American conservatives look at the poor, and the wispy veil they try to pull over that cruelty in the hopes we won’t see it for what it is.
To start, here’s the story Ryan told, about Eloise Anderson, who directs the Wisconsin Department of Children and Families:
She once met a young boy from a very poor family, and every day at school, he would get a free lunch from a government program. He told Eloise he didn’t want a free lunch. He wanted his own lunch, one in a brown-paper bag just like the other kids. He wanted one, he said, because he knew a kid with a brown-paper bag had someone who cared for him. This is what the left does not understand.
As the Washington Post‘s Glenn Kessler explained, though Anderson indeed told this story at a congressional hearing, it actually didn’t happen to her, but came from a book (which she later admitted). More important, she changed the story to make it more closely fit conservative ideology; in real life, the child in question wasn’t getting a lunch from the government, but from a rich lady he met; and more important, it wasn’t that he didn’t want a free lunch, he just wanted his free lunch in a paper bag so the other kids wouldn’t know he was getting help. That’s an old story about poverty and shame—a relationship, by the way, that conservatives work hard to maintain.
But here’s the part of Ryan’s speech that really matters: “The left is making a mistake here,” he said. “What they’re offering people is a full stomach and an empty soul.” And later: “People don’t just want a life of comfort. They want a life of dignity.” Ah yes, the “life of comfort” you get when you are able to eat not one, not two, but as many as three meals a day! Talk about easy street.
Whenever conservatives start throwing around ideas like “dignity” and talking about the contents of people’s souls, watch out. Because it almost always means that what they’re proposing is to make the lives of the vulnerable a little tougher and a little more deprived. This’ll hurt you more than it hurts them.
And that is indeed what Ryan proposes. The last budget plan he released, like those before it, sought to cut hundreds of billions of dollars from Medicaid, food stamps, and other programs that provide assistance to the poor—because as Ryan once said, “we don’t want to turn the safety net into a hammock that lulls able-bodied people to lives of dependency and complacency, that drains them of their will and their incentive to make the most of their lives.”
I suspect conservatives talk this way as much for their own benefit—for the maintenance of their souls, if you will—as for the poor people they’re ostensibly addressing. Almost all of us, with the exception of a few true-believing Ayn Rand cultists, believe that we have obligations to one another, no matter how selfish we might be on most days. If you’re literally taking food from the mouths of hungry children, you have to justify it somehow, to assure yourself that you’re still a moral person. So you tell yourself that you’re doing it to help them. You’re giving them something more valuable than food, because you care so deeply about them. When that six-year-old gets that grumble in her stomach, you can tell her what she’s feeling is the growing pains of her soul, as it swells with its newfound dignity.
The souls of the wealthy, on the other hand, are apparently so healthy and strong they can withstand the indignity of government help. Special tax treatment for investment income? The mortgage interest deduction? Cuts to upper-income tax rates? The rich are truly blessed with souls so resilient that they remain intact even in the face of such injuries of government largesse.
But that’s the way it is with everything. Conservatives are not worried that hedge-fund managers will be slowly sapped of their will to work when their income is taxed at an absurd 15 percent rate because of the carried interest loophole, leaving the rest of us to pick up their slack. When they address that question, there is no talk of dignity. Only when it comes time to cut food stamps or kick people off of the first health insurance they’ve ever had (as Ryan also wants to do, by eliminating the Affordable Care Act’s expansion of Medicaid) do conservatives turn so philosophical, casting their gaze beyond the trivialities of daily existence, like food, and toward such higher considerations.
If you were being unkind, you might say that when it comes to poor people’s dignity, the right has mostly been concerned of late in seeing that they have as little as possible, by advocating things like forcing people to take drug tests before getting welfare benefits. Perhaps they believe that a combination of hunger and humiliation will be just the encouragement those lazy poor need to take a firm hold of their bootstraps and pull. True, that expression originally meant doing something that is physically impossible—you can tug on your bootstraps all you like, but it won’t pull you out of a hole. You will be carried aloft by your soul, though, so long as it isn’t sullied by safety net programs.
This, in the end, is the essence of conservative thought on these issues. Better a child should go hungry than get a free lunch. Better a poor person should have no health insurance at all than get insurance from the government. Their suffering may multiply, but they’ll still have their dignity. If only you could eat it.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, March 10, 2014
“Why Does The National Media Get Texas So Wrong?”: Ultra-Conservative Candidates Aren’t Fading Away
Tuesday, as Texas primary voters headed to the polls, Politico published an article titled, “The Texas tea party’s best days may be behind it.” Below the headline were photographs of Governor Rick Perry, the state’s junior U.S. Senator Ted Cruz, and Congressman Steve Stockman, who had decided to wage a last-minute, barely visible campaign again Texas’s senior U.S. senator, John Cornyn. The article focused on the Cornyn-Stockman race, and it mentioned a congressional primary in which incumbent Pete Sessions faced a Tea Party challenge from Katrina Pierson.
To anyone familiar with Texas politics, the article was baffling. It made no mention of the state’s most-watched (and most important) GOP primary, the race for the lieutenant governor nomination, and it made only a passing reference to the attorney general race, even though both contests featured bloody fights between so-called “establishment” and Tea Party candidates. The state’s hardest-right election force, the Empower Texans political action committee, also didn’t figure anywhere in the story.
Even after results poured in showing that for the most part Texas remains a dangerous place to skate too near the center, The New York Times headlined its recap with “Texas GOP beats back challengers from the right.” The Times reported that “conservatives inspired by Senator Ted Cruz largely failed to topple mainstream incumbents”—largely because Stockman and Pierson lost.
From these write-ups, you would never guess the significance of incumbent Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst’s poor showing. Dewhurst, whose U.S. Senate dreams were toppled by Ted Cruz in 2012, managed only 28 percent, while his challenger, the pro-life, pro-Tea Party state Senator Dan Patrick, hit 44 percent. The two will run off May 27 but things don’t look great for Dewhurst. The lieutenant governor, who occupies the state’s most powerful office, has personal wealth that can provide whatever funds he needs, but Patrick’s fan base is larger—in addition to being a state senator, he’s a talk-radio personality in the state.
Results shook out similarly in the attorney general’s race, where Tea Party-backed state Senator Ken Paxton got the most votes and will run off against state Representative Dan Branch. You’d also have no idea that veteran state Senator John Carona, one of only a few moderates left in the Texas senate, had fallen to a Tea Party challenger, as did a handful of state representatives. Stockman may have garnered the most national attention, but he was never a serious contender. He ran a haphazard campaign that received little support from the state’s strong Tea Party network, despite his extreme rhetoric.
So how did Politico and the Times miss the big picture? Texas is complicated because there’s no binary opposition between “establishment” candidates and those affiliated with the Tea Party. Should we define “establishment” as Speaker of the House Joe Straus, who has himself a relatively moderate record but has presided over one of the state’s most conservative legislatures? Outside Tea Party groups have tried to topple Straus, yet he also commands support from Tea Party-backed state representatives. Or is the “establishment” closer to Governor Rick Perry, the state’s longest-serving governor, who gave one of the first major speeches at a Tea Party rally in 2009? Or is it David Dewhurst, who hung tight to Perry’s message, passed extreme measures, but then watched his political dreams crumble as Cruz rose to power by accusing Dewhurst of being a moderate?
There’s no clear leader of the Texas right. Cruz may be the current face of the Tea Party movement, but he’s busy gumming up the gears in Washington; when it comes to state politics, particularly in a dominant party with several different factions, there’s a lot more to consider than just Cruz’s endorsement. Ever since his “oops” moment while running for president, Perry’s iron fist has been slackening back home. And Empower Texans, the state PAC that frequently bullied elected officials with threats of a primary challenge, managed to annoy too many incumbents and is now facing ethical charges.
Incumbency is the least helpful method for judging whether someone is Tea Party or establishment. This is the Tea Party’s third election cycle. The candidates of 2010 are now veteran lawmakers, and many moderate Republicans have peeled off over the last four years. Plus, a number of prominent party members currently affiliated with the Tea Party predated the movement anyway. Arguing that the right is getting beat back because incumbents largely escaped unscathed misses the whole point. Many incumbents are Tea Party already.
In the attorney general’s race, for instance, three candidates ran. Ken Paxton, a state senator who, as a House member, challenged Straus for the speakership and earned plenty of Tea Party accolades, got the most votes and will run off against Dan Branch. Branch is a state representative from Dallas’s wealthiest suburb, and he’s been a loyal Straus lieutenant. That’s relatively straightforward until you throw Barry Smitherman in the mix. Smitherman came in last, but during the campaign he may have won the award for most extreme comments, including his promise for a “conservative crusade.” So is his loss a loss for the Tea Party? Don’t tell that to Paxton.
The Tea Party isn’t monolithic and it sure as hell isn’t represented solely by national fundraising groups like FreedomWorks or figures like Ted Cruz. There are rural Tea Partiers and suburban ones who are bound to have different views on issues like public schools or water policy. There are stylistic differences and substantive differences, from those who are more libertarian to those who are more business-oriented, and of course the social conservatives. They all hate President Obama, but that doesn’t mean they’re all going to look just like Ted Cruz.
The “movement” may no longer be the powerhouse it was in 2010, and certainly its splintering means there’s no central “Tea Party voice.” But Tuesday night’s results don’t show the ultra-conservative candidates fading away. Maybe by the May runoffs, the national media will see that too.
By: Abby Rapoport, The American Prospect, March 5, 2014
“The Misguided War On Envy”: Conservatives Love To Hate The Envy Their Policies Caused
Conservatives have launched a War on Envy. This week, Arthur Brooks, president of the American Enterprise Institute lamented “a national shift toward envy” which, he said, would be “toxic for American culture.” Venture capitalist Tom Perkins recently made the same point in much more inflammatory terms: He equated those who criticize rising inequality with Nazis persecuting Jews, a salvo attack that quickly drew censure from those now running KPCB, the VC powerhouse that he once led.
Both conservatives and progressives agree on basic facts: The percentage of Americans who see this country as a land of opportunity, in which hard work leads reliably to material reward, is falling rapidly. This shift brings envy, resentment, cynicism and despair. And these negative emotions undermine our social structure and bring unhappiness.
But that’s where the agreement ends. Conservatives insist the problem is one of perception. They think that if the media would just stop talking about inequality things would get better. They say that if our leaders (read: President Obama) would simply offer up “an optimistic vision in which anyone can earn his or her success,” the envy would dissipate and everything would be just fine.
That is not going to work.
It won’t work because the sense that the dream is slipping away, the sense of diminished mobility, of a system that’s increasingly rigged, is not a fantasy that can be dispelled with clever rhetoric. It is the everyday, lived experience of millions of Americans. The only consequence of elites refusing to discuss it will be to confirm that those elites are indeed out of touch with ordinary Americans and their problems. That aloofness is reflected in the appallingly low approval ratings of the current Congress.
Brooks and other influential conservatives fail to acknowledge that the envy they lament, and the loss of opportunity that fuels it, results directly from the policies they have championed over the years. Consider higher education, which is acknowledged by both liberals and conservatives as the single most powerful force for economic mobility. Conservatives have succeeded in slashing taxes at all levels of government, and these cuts have gutted state funding of higher education.
Tuitions have spiked as a result. The soaring cost has put college out of reach for many middle-class families and nearly all of the poor and near poor. In 1971 an American family at the median income level had to pay 13 percent of its annual income to send each child to a public four-year university. That’s tough but it’s doable, with considerable sacrifice, savings, loans, a part time job and so on. Now the cost has more than doubled to 29 percent of income. This puts college out of reach for many, and leads to students graduating with staggering debt burdens. To put it mildly, this much debt does not encourage entrepreneurship.
That’s not the only way that conservative policies have limited upward mobility and destroyed confidence in the American Dream. Conservatives have long championed corporate tax policies that accelerate the harsher aspects of globalization, outsourcing and offshoring. As a result, American workers in many industries have seen their wages stagnate even as productivity has gone up, profits have soared and those who hold stock and options have done exceedingly well. Hard work now means breaking even for most Americans, rather than pulling ahead.
Here’s another example: Conservatives have championed individual tax structures that reduce the share of taxes born by the richest and increase the share born by the rest. Tax law changes such as the reduction in top tax brackets, lowering of capital gains rates and elimination of estate taxes confirm many Americans’ suspicion that the deck is indeed stacked against them.
I built and enjoyed a successful career in business before becoming an advocate for a sustainable economy. One of the things I learned in my career was to look for the true root cause of problems and not waste time attacking symptoms. Another thing I learned was that if what you’re doing isn’t working, stop doing it and try something else.
We are not going to bring optimism back to ordinary Americans by belittling those who discuss the real state of our economy. Waging war on envy won’t make people more confident in their job prospects and more entrepreneurial in their careers. Not if the reality of our tax, trade, labor and other policies is to strip away the rewards of working Americans and concentrate more and more wealth at the top.
It’s good that both left and right want to make the American dream credible again for more people. It’s good that both sides see loss of optimism as a problem. But diminished opportunity won’t be solved by refusing to talk honestly about its causes, and envy won’t be eliminated by more of the policies that kindled it in the first place. The success of the American economy and the American political system depends on people having the genuine conviction, based on the reality of their day-to-day experience, that hard work brings upward mobility.
By: David Brodwin, U. S. News and World Report, March 6, 2014
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