Dead Right Again

This is the long awaited follow-up to my famous David Frum “Dead Right” post.

Part I garnered generally favorable attention and some sober, measured, polite criticism. Given the snarky, late-nite quality of the original - in which the accuracy of typography declines before your very eyes as I stagger to the finish line, wheezing in indignation at long block quotes - well, I got off pretty lightly. No hate mail. I have spell-checked it and converted it to PDF, for convenience.)

One commenter in particular has been pressing me for satisfaction on a few points. (See comments box.) Here’s the plan: quick review; criticisms and my replies; stuff about George Orwell; then semi-controlled shin-kicking. Then sleep. It's way too long. Again.

My harshest criticism of Frum was encapsulated in a quote from Lionel Trilling, from The Liberal Imagination. Frum claims to have a philosophy. What he has, in fact, are “irritable mental gestures seeking to resemble ideas.” More specifically, when he tries to do philosophy, he goes into a sort of weird, semi-aesthetic fugue state in which he thinks about the Donner party, or how people should be afraid to wear beards. And when he snaps out of it, he thinks he’s done philosophy. Like I said: weird.

Like a said: snarky. Exaggeration for comic effect, but a hard core of truth and justice – otherwise it wouldn’t be funny.

There were four main lines criticisms of the post.

First, it's sneaky and unfair of me to demand from Frum a conservative philosophy; really conservatism is properly a temperament - at any rate, not a systematic sort of affair.

Second, it's a bit unsporting to shoot the messenger. When Frum talks about the Donner party, he is quoting William Bennett, of whom Frum disapproves. When he talks about the horror of kente cloths and beards, Frum is paraphrasing Pat Buchanan, of whom Frum profoundly disapproves.

Third, he didn't really mean it about the Donner party. It was sort of a slip. Holding him to it with a straight face is strictly for entertainment value. All he was really trying to do, by means of this unwisely chosen example, was point the way towards some respectable, if debatable, moral notions about ideal ways of life.

Fourth, Frum is actually a pretty smart guy. So don’t say he isn’t.

Taking these in order. First, philosophy. This is ancient - 1994 and all - but Frum really is advocating that conservatives resign themselves to a stint in the wilderness, where they can console themselves by maintaining ideological purity. (It does not need to be Robert Bly-grade intense, with drums and all. But he makes it clear this manly retreat is going to be pretty serious.)

The question is: what items does Frum think are portable enough to take on the trip. The levers of power are bolted to the ground in Washington. We aren’t going to be doing policy wonkery around the camp-fire, then. On the other hand, "irritable mental gestures seeking to resemble ideas," would not be enough to keep you warm on those cold, lonely nights.

Frum himself dares to utter the 'ph' word - philosophy - at quite a number of points. I did not put this word into his mouth. For example, he talks about how in the halcyon Reagan years "we thought about policy and elections so hard that we seldom stopped to think about philosophy ... we learned to limit our own speculations to what the balance of political forces at that particular moment declared feasible; we wrote articles as if they were memoranda to the president, banning the not immediately practical from our discourse" (p. 201). There is an innate paradox in this notion of impractical, speculative conservatism, if I make no mistake.

On the other hand, there is something plausible about the suggestion – made to me by several people, with varying degrees of force - that, even if Frum says ‘philosophy’, really he’s asking for fidelity to a sensibility or temperament. Something a couple steps above irritable mental gestures, but a few steps below grand philosophical systematicity. So maybe I should lighten up. Again, we shall return to all of this.

Moving on to the second point: I think I was fair in attributing to Frum himself views expressed in passages that are, in a sense, about what Bennett and Buchanan believe, even though Frum does not agree with Bennett and Buchanan. The explanation: he agrees with them about lots of things. These passages contain things he agrees with.

Stepping back, there is a general problem interpreting Dead Right. Frum slams every aspect of conservatism so comprehensively, in the middle chapters, that it would almost be possible to shave off the beginning and the end and repackage the rest as, Why I Must Love Bill Clinton. Frum slams supply-siders and libertarians; he slams Bennett-style social conservatives; he slams Buchanan-style nativists; he denies that there is any such thing as the religious right. The man takes no prisoners. What’s left? Nothing to the right of the left, so it would seem. In fact, this is less deeply mysterious than it sounds. I, of all people, know the serene joys of getting wound up and seriously exaggerating for effect. Frum gets going at top speed and sort of overshoots the finish line in a cloud of Roadrunner dust.

Read the beginning and the end (or any of his occasional journalism) and you know: the man is a social/cultural and economic conservative. More specifically, the social stuff officially comes first. Frum says in no uncertain terms: he would be willing to drop his economic demands for small government and laissez faire if he could achieve his socially conservative goals by other means.

The problem with Bennett, according to Frum, is that he lectures about morals to no effect; and - when Drug Czar - spent like a drunken sailor and trampled the individual rights of decent, ordinary citizens. The problem with Buchanan is that he is a populist, and he’s prepared to empty the government’s pockets to prove it. (I imagine Buchanan's anti-semitism does not sit well either, though I don't recall any explicit mention of this in the book.) The problem with both is that they are big government conservatives, who do not see their true cultural and moral goals instrumentally require small government. Frum is a small government conservative It is an article of faith for him that the only way to get the social results is to shrink government.

None of the passages I quote has Bennett or Buchanan advocating big government conservatism. The passages advocate social and cultural goals Frum shares. Frum’s tone is generally approving. So I infer that Frum agrees. If he does not agree with this stuff, he really ought to vote for Howard Dean this time around. (Sorry if this seems like a small point, but I really have got a whole pile of emails and comments saying I got this wrong. I don’t think I did.)

Third, the Donner party. Frum quotes Bill Bennett reading about the courage and fortitude of the Donner party, wondering where these people went. (I guess he hadn’t finished the book yet when he said he didn’t know where they went.) Somehow the government should encourage us to be tough and self-reliant, like the Donner party. I did make quite clear that I don't really think Frum is in favor of government-sponsored snow-bound cannibalism. I guess I wasn’t clear enough about what I do think. I got email and comments objecting that it isn’t nutty to think that it would be nice for people to be tough and self-reliant, not fat-bellied. Also, it is reasonable to be concerned about the government trying to do too much, making things worse, perhaps by encouraging dependency, which is undignified, economically inefficient, so forth.

But my point was that Frum just isn’t – and cannot – be making any of these reasonable points. Among a host of reasons: everyone agrees with these points, and Frum thinks he is saying something the majority of the people won’t agree with. That’s why he’s advocating a conservative ideological retreat into the wilderness. He thinks that, ideally, the government should impose hardship on the people. He does not actually advocate that the government do this against the will of the people – I think I flubbed that point in the original post - but he does think (and say) the will of the people is corrupt and mistaken. If the people knew what was good for the people, the people would ask the government to inflict hardship on the people.

Well, maybe that’s still not quite the right way to put it. The government offers various services for the people: safety nets, of various sizes and shapes. Frum thinks that the people ought to voluntarily forego these safety nets, not because they don’t work, not because they cost too much, not because you really don’t want the protection from risk; simply because it would be better for your character to go it alone. (Don’t confuse the issue with questions about whether it’s actually a well-designed net; just stipulate that it is. Frum is of course willing to debate efficient versus inefficient welfare programs. He obviously prefers the efficient ones, but he thinks they are all bad, since they corrupt our characters.)

So if the people knew what was good for them, they would not vote for what is good for them. I do understand how you can have a so-called ‘positive’ conception of liberty on which people are so deluded that they don’t know their true interests. You need to wrench them out of their seats in the cave, drag them kicking and screaming into the light. But when the question is whether to have a welfare program that is, by hypothesis, efficient? It’s like telling people that if they were really tough, they wouldn’t buy auto insurance; they’d drive a little more conservatively instead. Welfare is just insurance, and insurance sometimes makes sense; and it’s just a machine, and I quoted George Orwell on why you’ve got to use machines when it makes sense:

“So long as the machine is there, one is under an obligation to use it. No one draws water from the well when he can turn on the tap … Deliberately to revert to primitive methods, to use archaic tools, to put silly difficulties in your own way, would be a piece of dilettantism, of pretty-pretty arty and craftiness. It would be like solemnly sitting down to eat your dinner with stone implements. Revert to handwork in a machine age, and you are back in Ye Old Tea Shoppe or the Tudor villa with the sham beams tacked to the wall.”

The iconic image of the rugged worker is useful because – so I think – it insulates Frum from the strangeness of his own view, by being ambiguous between some stuff everyone agrees with, and some stuff that’s just silly. Frum ends up not seeing that he leans towards the silly stuff. He thinks what he’s got is a sort of bold philosophy of self-reliance. I think it’s just an irritable mental gesture.

OK, I give up. If that doesn’t satisfy you, explain by citing passages why it doesn’t satisfy you.

Fourth point: yes, Frum is a pretty smart guy. I do see that. He is a good policy analyst, much as I disagree with him; but he sure is not good at reflecting on what conservatism means, or why you should be conservative.

Now let me move on to the interesting stuff. The above Orwell quote is from The Road to Wigan Pier, and it is worth mentioning that there are lots of other things Orwell says in that book that would be quite congenial to Frum when he is in one of his Donner moods. It is fair to say that Orwell only arrives at the above conclusion after much soul-searching. He really would like to be able to say that we should break all the machines because they are making us soft. He doesn’t think that’s ultimately reasonable. People would just build them again. But Orwell is really attracted by the thought that civilization is corrupting us all. (He’s got Brave New World concerns, basically.)

Frum could then reasonably say: Orwell wouldn’t hate me, as you imply in your post. He’d sort of agree with my conservative impulses. He would admire those rugged individuals. Fair enough, I guess.

And now let me tell you some other things about The Road to Wigan Pier, which are going to be the basis for some reflections on what it means to have a philosophy, and what it means to not go mad.

Everyone loves Orwell, of course, and the world contains only about 10,000 pieces of ‘why Orwell is great’ journalism. As Orwell wrote of Dickens: some men are well worth stealing. Orwell is one. (I’m sure there are approximately 500 other ‘why Orwell is great’ pieces that have already begun with this particular line.) Well, he is great. It’s no lie. But let me do a bit to motivate the wonder of it.

The Road to Wigan Pier – I’ve read it five times – is half about the plight of coal miners in Northern England in the late 30’s. Needless to say, specific conditions have since changed. That stuff is strictly of historical interest now. The other half is about how British socialism is moribund. Again, historical interest. Also, the author labors under the heavy delusion that liberal democracy has no possible future whatsoever – it’s socialism or fascism. He thinks this sort of because recent military and political developments suggest it, sort of because he is pretty confused about economics. He thinks it’s just obvious that command economies are innately more efficient than free markets. (I think he thinks about two armies: one with a rigid command structure; the other a mob, everyone doing whatever they want. Who do you think is going to win? Which just goes to show: economies aren’t quite like armies going to war.) Also, there are a number of passages which strongly suggest the author is not fully reconciled to the nature of the human body. It’s features just make him uncomfortable. Also, the author is, on a number of subjects, a crank.

“In addition to this there is the horrible – the really disquieting – prevalence of cranks wherever Socialists are gathered together. One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words “Socialism” and “Communism” draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, “Nature Cure” quack, pacificist and feminist in England.”

Usually he remembers to add ‘birth-control advocate’ to his list of beyond-the-frozen-limit loonies.

Orwell has a lot to say about how ‘the worst advertisements for socialism are socialists’. I think it works best if you read these passages in a Monty Burns voice, a la that “Simpsons” episode in which the old gent ejaculates indignantly: “The Japanese! Those sandal-wearing goldfish-tenders!”

Now what is my point? My point is that everything I’ve just told you strongly suggests that The Road to Wigan Pier is really not worth reading, over half a century on. But that’s not right. It’s a great book. It’s got a lot of wisdom in it, in addition to some brilliant writing. You should read it.

So my way of putting the eternal question is: what enabled Orwell to be not just a great writer, but a great human being, and a great thinker, in spite of all these strikes against his stuff? (I’m just saying: if all you knew about the book was what I just told you, you’d think it was probably past its ‘best if sold by’ date. But it isn’t. So what did he do right?)

It seems to me the answer is: Orwell has got a political philosophy. Not a system, mind you; heaven forfend. Just a basic thought – a temperamental orientation – that guides him through life. Orwell’s philosophy might go like this (you could formulate it a little differently, I know):

“Indeed, from one point of view, Socialism is such elementary common sense that I am sometimes amazed that it has not established itself already. The world is a raft sailing through space with, potentially, plenty of provisions for everybody; the idea that we must all co-operate and see to it that everyone does his fair share of the work and gets his fair share of the provisions, seems so blatantly obvious that one would say that no one could possibly fail to accept it unless he had some corrupt motive for clinging to the present system.”

Now Orwell’s conservative fans have to deal with lots of stuff like this, and they really don’t have much trouble swallowing it, I expect; even though Orwell just insinuated that they have probably got a corrupt motive. Why does Orwell go down well? Because readers of all political orientations see that it’s basically honest, and a perfectly understandable and eminently honorable point of view, even if they don’t share it.

At any rate, the fact that this really is Orwell’s philosophy – this is what he believes, not just what he says - saves him from being the guy who just wrote about coal miners, the guy who thought liberal democracy was doomed, the guy who didn’t understand economics, the guy who printed pamphlets against the evils of fruit juice and sandal wearing and damply pressed them into the hands of nervous strangers. Regarding all the crankiness, Orwell’s governing conviction that people really ought to be fair to other people – vague and maybe even naive as it is - keeps him from losing sleep about the fact that some people like to wear sandals. It bugs him, but he can tell it isn’t such a big deal. After a sentence or two, he recovers the big picture. He manages to preserve a sense of moral proportion even though he was, in many ways, a man at risk of losing his sense of proportion.

Regarding the mining, politics, economics – the thing that makes it last is not just the fine writing; of course the man is a superlative stylist, but that wouldn’t be enough. The thing that saves it is that it is all genuinely infused with an honest, moral point of view that is timelessly worthy of consideration. Especially, Orwell notices when others lack a sense of moral proportion. That is, he sees when people are in danger of not being decent people, and that bothers him more than anything:

“Sometimes I look at a Socialist – the intellectual, tract-writing type of Socialist, with his pullover, his fuzzy hair, and his Marxian quotation – and wonder what the devil his motive really is. It is often difficult to believe that it is a love of anybody, especially of the working class, from whom he is of all people the furthest removed. The underlying motive of many Socialists, I believe, is simply a hypertrophied sense of order. The present state of affairs offends them not because it causes misery, still less because it makes freedom impossible, but because it is untidy.”

Now this is the sort of thing that cheeses off academic lefties, because they think St. George is being too mean to them. And maybe he is, although he does remember to say ‘some’. But basically he’s right. Academics can easily turn things into satisfactory academic puzzles and problems and papers. That often means losing track of what’s really important. But everyone else is the same: every type of person has his or her type of deforming nook or cranny. Partisanship itself is the most obvious example. You get wound-up about how your side must be right, as if it were like winning a game. You don’t take a step back and say: what the hell did I get so worked up about?

So the woolly Marxist is, to repeat, just an example. Orwell skewers conservatives more harshly for being small-minded and selfish, and pretending that they are gripping their cash so tightly for all manner of lofty reasons.

There’s a Nietzsche quote I like (Beyond Good and Evil, §156):

“Madness is rare in individuals – but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule.”

Whay needs to be added – and Nietzsche probably meant for it to be: individuals are exceedingly rare. Almost everyone is not one.

So that’s the shortest way of stating what makes Orwell great: he was not mad. Which is accomplishment enough, but he managed it even though he was also crazy, and sort of confused about stuff to boot.

And this is why everyone likes Orwell. He isn’t mad. That’s why he’s worth stealing. And mostly everyone else has to steal him, because mostly everyone is mad.

Sometimes I wonder about the wisdom of blogging; all my day-to-day nattering suspended in amber on some server forevermore. Will my grandkids think I look like a complete crank? Hell, will I myself check out my archives in five years and think: you never keep your eye on the important stuff. You just focus in on something, pick sides, and convince yourself it actually matters. You dork. I already sort of feel that way about stuff that’s only six months old. I look like someone seriously lacking a sense of proportion. So I’m sort of going more for the Montaignean ‘I meant to look inconsistent that way, it’s how I’m getting to know myself’ look. I think it’s that or nothing for me.

But never mind about me. I was talking about Frum. I hope it is clear that this point about Orwell’s philosophy is supposed to get us back to the question whether Frum has got one. Not a system, obviously; but some simple, potent thought; something with some heft to it. This is obviously precisely what Frum needs. He needs something that will command respect – if not agreement – from all sides; something that will have some solidity, even if it isn’t connected up to the levers of power. Because he’s planning on being in the minority. And he thinks he can’t hold power, or shouldn’t try for now. (Again, this was 1994, but in 2003 the question does linger: is there any point to the ‘conservatives’ being in power? Do they believe in anything much, apart from the desirability of conservatives being in power?)

Well, obviously my answer is going to be: a philosophy in this very unsystematic, unacademic yet potent sense is precisely what Frum doesn’t have, even though he thinks he needs it. And, because this is what he doesn’t have, he sort of loses track. He’s a good policy wonk, make no mistake. He can analyze stuff and add it up tolerably well, seems to me. (I wouldn’t want to get in an argument with him about any complicated political or policy question unless I had seriously done my homework and had my notecards all ordered and ready to go.) But, as I argue in my previous post, he’s cranky: he gets sort of obsessed about obviously little and unimportant things that bug him, and he just doesn’t get control back. This seems to me to be generally a problem with most social and cultural conservatives – maybe it’s true of them in all ages. They lack a sense of due proportion, even though they pride themselves on being steady and taking the long view. I won’t run through it all, but – if you care to – you can read my previous post in this light.

In Frum’s case - in addition to causing him to zone out about Donner parties and beards other things that aren’t so much obsessions as easy distractions – his lack of a philosophy seems to cause him to not really realize what he is effectively defending. Basically, it seems to me that he is evolving a complex cultural apologia for long-term efforts by the Republican party to shift the tax burden off the rich onto the middle-class and lower-classes. This does not seem to me something you should try to go off into the wilderness to defend, or pretend is a terribly philosophical sort of notion. It’s basically just rich people who don’t want to pay and are exploring, in an aggressively experimental sort of way, whether everyone else will put up with that. You can actually think it is quite justifiable to shift the tax burden. I don’t. But it can be defended. But you can’t do it with lots of self-important slogans about standing athwart history shouting ‘stop!’ It really isn’t about that at all.

Again, you can read the previous post in light of this proposal. It seems to me rather important that Frum emphasizes the importance of making the middle-class and downwards live risky lives, to keep them properly conservative. This is supposed to be for their moral health, and the ultimate health of the country and the economy and so forth. But he does not extend a similar moral solicitude to the rich, who are apparently allowed to languish in risklessness. (Wouldn’t it make them more rugged if you taxed inheritance much more heavily, for example?)

I’ll just conclude with some stray notes that sort of fit in here. The first concerns a mental problem I’ll call ‘Oswald Spengler reforms welfare’. (I thought about calling it: ‘Plato’s Republic corrupted by spending on Aid to Bronze Families with Dependant Bronze Children.) It’s sort of interesting because it’s a quite common confusion, I think, and a member of an interesting class of confusions to boot. Let me start with the class which, I think, has no recognized name.

Example: evolutionary psychology is, notoriously, a locus of very bad arguments – weak, thoroughly speculative, ad hominid arguments and just-so stories – piggy-backing on the credibility of possibly quite respectable empirical hypotheses. So the type is: wild a priori speculations that are a whisker away from sober empiricism, and which therefore pretend to be sober. Even though they are wild. It’s a form of mimicry. Maybe we could call it memicry. Lousy memes capitalizing on superficial resemblance to good memes? Like the stupid, bad twin who is always getting the good twin in trouble in the dumb comedy.

Anyway, in the case of welfare, the good meme is a rather humble, sober and obvious one (they usually are). It might seem that (say) an unemployment insurance scheme is very economically efficient, until you realize that you have actually encouraged unemployment by implementing it. And now there are more associated costs than you realized when you designed it. You have encouraged dependency or laziness or something. In general, in designing policies you cannot just look at present behavior. You have to anticipate what behavior is likely to be like after the policy is implemented. This can be tricky, of course. But the principle that policies can change the natures of the things they govern is pretty darn obvious.

Now this thoroughly dull and obvious and right notion gets crossed with all sorts of weird models of decline and decadence. Hence Spengler. Hence Plato, who has some definite ideas about how cities go to hell in handbaskets. The memicry comes when you slide from the simple truth that (say) welfare programs can have negative externalities (is that the fancy word for this stuff?) in terms of bad behavior encouraged, to the rather hysterical notion that welfare programs, of their very nature, are associated with the downfall of civilization. The idea is: you help people; they get dependent; you help them more; they get more dependent; so it goes, until darkness descends on the West.

The proper thing to point out is that this doesn’t happen with seatbelt laws. That is, you pass them; then people feel a little safer so they drive a little faster, and there are actually a few more accidents. This is serious. You should do your best to count these costs when weighing the value of the law. But it’s still a good idea to have the law, probably. What you do not get is a hideous negative feedback loop. People get seatbelts; people have more accidents; people get better seatbelts; people speed around like maniacs, so there are lots and lots more accidents; everyone is now wearing three-point racing harnesses; everyone feels super safe in those and thus installs Road Warrior nitrous injectors and flies around at 500 miles an hour killing everyone, until darkness descends on the West. Nope. Not a problem.

There is really no reason why welfare should be all that different than seatbelts, is there?

Frum, despite being a capable wonk most days, is weirdly susceptible to these sorts of decline models of welfare. It seems like the decline narratives appeal to him a bit too much aesthetically. He dislikes the very idea of welfare so much that the notion that it’s killing civilization overleaps the rather modest data set and breaks its legs on the other side. It’s funny: he himself actually uses seatbelt laws as an example of negative feedback, without noticing that it’s a counter-example to the idea that such systems are necessarily negative feedback loops. (See pp. 190-200 of “Dead Right”, if you are curious about all this.)

Well, of course it’s possible to argue that in the US lots of entitlement programs are out of control. But the dynamic behind that is not inherent to the content of the programs – at least showing that would take some argument. The problem of bloated government spending does not equal the fact of there being a welfare state. (There have been times when military spending seemed to people to be out of control, in a sort of hideous loop of growth. It would be silly to argue against military spending on the grounds that it will always get locked into a hideous feedback loop of endless growth until darkness falls in the West. No reason why it should.) When you look at it soberly, a welfare program is an insurance policy. If people are sensible, they ought to be able to figure out which ones they want to buy. You ought to encourage them to make sensible choices.

Another welfare-related note. And again, this is Frum but not just Frum I think. So maybe it’s of general interest: Frum does not seem to realize that there is something inherently conservative about welfare programs, in both a functional and a historical sense. Welfare programs are instituted to innoculate society against revolution, to put it crudely. A little place called ancient Rome comes to mind, and lots of those guys were sort of conservative, but they didn’t want the rabble slitting their throats. If memory serves Bismarck came up with the first modern worker unemployment program, and he wasn’t exactly a bleeding heart liberal. Other historical cases – Nixon, for example – come to mind. Quite apart from the historical point, welfare programs obviously make people stakeholders in the system. If you are worried your check might not come next month, you are less likely to overthrow the government that runs the office that issues your check. Makes sense to me.

Not that this is such an all-fired hot argument for welfare, maybe. But Frum goes on and on for pages and pages – chapters, actually - without mentioning it. He actually seems to think welfare is designed to destroy the family. It seems to me that a conservative who doesn’t recognize an anti-revolutionary insurance policy when he sees it is not going to be very good at standing athwart history and making it stop, or whatever he’s supposed to be doing.

It seems to me like lots of conservatives these days have this problem. They really ought to see something to like in welfare, or else they aren’t really conservatives at all.

Very last point, and related to these previous two. When Frum gets all misty-eyed for the vanished conservative past, he never thinks about people working together. He thinks about individuals struggling alone, or actually about people being bastards to each other (seems to me).

“Suppose a young couple in a conservative town believes that marriage is a hypocritical institution and determines to live together without it. They attempt to rent an apartment together – and no landlady will accept them. The young man is fired from his job; the girl is told to her face by her boss that she is a slut. When he hears about her immoral way of life, the owner of their favorite restaurant refuses to seat them any longer. Eventually the two have a son. When the boy applies to the local private college, he is denied a scholarship because of his illegitimacy. None of these manifestations of moral outrage involves any action at all by any branch of government. Every one of them would have been legal – and quite likely to happen – the United States forty years ago. Every one of them would be illegal today.” (p. 162)

Frum seems to think this is a bad thing.

Ah, the good old days.

I’m not even going to rail against this passage. To be fair, it’s not exactly clear what Frum’s point is. Narrowly, his point is that libertarianism – i.e. protecting this free love couple from all this crap – requires quite a bit of government interference with all the other people. Which is a fair point. But Frum also genuinely seems to feel nostalgic for this stuff, which I just don’t get. But I’m not a cultural conservative, so I guess I’m not supposed to get it.

I’m just going to point something out. This choice of examples of cultural conservatism at work is telling because – well, let me pick an example from Orwell’s Wigan Pier: he remarks that the English lower classes can actually live better on less money than impoverished members of the middle class. Why? Because the lower classes belong to different sorts of communities and can and will give and receive assistance in ways highly useful to people who are constantly short of cash. The poor fallen middle-class folk will cling to their respectability in desperate isolation. That’s plausible to me.

Frum seems sort of tone deaf to communitarianism, in a way that seems to me unhealthy in a conservative. Communitarianism obviously smacks of socialism to him, so he sort of does not find it pleasant to dwell on cases of people pooling their resources for the greater good of all. He’s sort of attracted to cases of people policing other people, in an informal way, so that they don’t do things that annoy Frum. But – although illegitimacy is obviously a potential source of social cost – there is no clear reason to believe that this sort of policing is generally conducive to social goods, rather than bads. I guess I’ve written enough. I guess I’ll stop now.

I guess the simple way to state the point I’ve been ineffectively noodling around with, lo these last several paragraphs: if Frum really had some simple, potent conservative philosophy, he would be more of a communitarian than he seems to be. It seems to me if you are such an individualist – that is, not thinking other people can demand your help – then you ought to be a libertarian. If you are a conservative individualist, but not a libertarian, it seems like your philosophy is: being selfish. Which is OK. But not terribly lofty or admirable, in and of itself.

Comments

[bryan]

thanks, as a side note I think the conservative dislike of the revolution insurance policy is that it seems, to them, to be a bribe given to the lower classes to keep them from going communist.

Now that communism is no longer a viable political philosophy, there seems to them to be no more reason for paying the bribe.

[Russell Arben Fox]

"I guess the simple way to state the point I’ve been ineffectively noodling around with, lo these last several paragraphs: if Frum really had some simple, potent conservative philosophy, he would be more of a communitarian than he seems to be."

Damn straight. Great job John. I think this Frum post easily surpasses the first one. I have a few quibbles (and may write about them sometime) but for now, let me reiterate what I said last time: you've got a book on your hands here. A good one.

[Abu Frank]

. . . welfare programs can have negative externalities (is that the fancy word for this stuff?)

"Negative externalities" would be one of those fancy words with a space in the middle?

The term of art is "moral hazard". Not to be confused with "moral danger", which (at least in Australia) is a situation in which an adolescent girl might do things that middle-aged men know she shouldn't.

[Cosma]

I think the proper term of art is just "unitended consequences", which includes moral hazard (the specific example John gave) but is broader. (See e.g. Raymond Boudon, The Unintended Consequences of Social Action.)

While on the subject of pedantry: "negative feedback" is when the system's response to a change is in the opposite direction from the change; "positive feedback" is when it's in the same direction. The usual vicious-cycle argument is a claim that there will be positive feedback, with negative results.

[baa]

I haven’t read Frum’s book. Nor do I plan to. So take this for what it is: namely, an a priori analysis of what I think Frum likely means, or ought to mean, based on an broader acquaintance with conservative and ‘American right’ thought. (Again, Frum may be worse than I think, so please freely substitute “the ideal Frumian” where that helps).

I believe your interpretation goes wrong awry here:

I got email and comments objecting that it isn’t nutty to think that it would be nice for people to be tough and self-reliant, not fat-bellied. Also, it is reasonable to be concerned about the government trying to do too much, making things worse, perhaps by encouraging dependency, which is undignified, economically inefficient, so forth.

But my point was that Frum just isn’t – and cannot – be making any of these reasonable points. Among a host of reasons: everyone agrees with these points, and Frum thinks he is saying something the majority of the people won’t agree with.

But in fact, not everyone agrees with Frum on self-reliance (alternately read: “personal responsibility”). Or rather, not everyone agrees on the importance of encouraging self-reliance when designing policy. Here’s an example: welfare reform. Here’s another: the ‘root-causes’ approach to crime. And -- what do you know? -- on both of these issues you’d find the electorate breaking fairly predictably along partisan lines. So Frum looks reasonable so far.

The escape hatch for the Frum-equals-madman reading is the claim that “welfare is just insurance.” This claim does lots of work, so it’s important to note that it’s false. If there were a market for unemployment insurance, it would look nothing like the 1980s American welfare system. Similarly, if there were a market for family farm insurance it would look nothing like American agricultural subsidies. In both cases these aren’t just (or even primarily) insurance schemes administered by the government, they are government mandated *transfer payments*.

This claim will provoke opposition (possible objection: it is so insurance, and who cares what a market would look like, you heartless fetishizer of markets, etc. etc.). And at some point Frum the political scientist or Frum the philosopher will need to answer tough questions about the effect of pure insurance on self-reliance. For now, however, just stipulate that some aspects of the welfare state involve transfer payments, and that those are the elements of the welfare state opposed by Frum. If so, it seems (again) that Frum has a concept of self-reliance that can generate differentiated policy positions.

But what about the all important Donner party issue? If we read Frum this way, does “self-reliance-increasing” just translate into “hardship imposing?” Doubtful. There are many ways to increase self-reliance without advocating privation. But Frum must acknowledge some increases in hardship – namely, citizens will not be insulated by the state against hardships they bring upon themselves through their own vices. And (just to belabor the insurance point with a trivial example) insuring one’s house against fire because one smokes in bed will not, on this view, be analogous to a policy whereby the government uses general tax revenue to purchase insurance for you. This analogy will be further strained if as justification for taking the decision out of your hands the government offers any of the following: a) you can’t be expected to quit smoking, b) the market price for such insurance is “too high,” c) you’re too stupid to buy the insurance yourself.

So what in the end, might Frum’s “philosophy paragraph” look like? Let me suggest the following:

“Personal responsibility is terribly important. You may think this obvious, but many do not understand how easily one can view oneself primarily as a passive victim of events. Nor does everyone realize that such a self-conception greatly diminishes the possibility of living a good life. This realization has political consequences. For even if we hold no personal interest in the self-reliance of others (although we should, if we care about them), it’s very important for a state like ours that this virtue be possessed broadly. We must therefore take care that government policy not erode personal responsibility. This can happen when the state insulates citizens from the consequences of their bad behavior or diminishes the natural rewards of good behavior. Bad policies, then, often appear as transfers of money and privileges from the virtuous to the vicious. Above all, when designing social policy, we should avoid systems that look like that.”

Could there be a great deal more to explain, or understand, about this paragraph? Sure. It’s highly contentious, and may indeed be largely false. Self-reliance may not be important for living a good life or for the success of representative government. State policy may have little effect on the self-conception of citizens. Or other concerns (like need, or efficiency) may often/usually outweigh the value gained by enhancing self-reliance. But the above paragraph doesn’t say anything absurd(nor, relatedly does it tacitly endorse cannibalism). And Frum would sign on to it in a heartbeat.

[Adam Stephanides]

To those who didn’t read the preceding thread, I'm the "one commenter in particular" John mentions in his third paragraph. (Incidentally, I didn't intend to "press" you for anything. When you didn't reply as quickly as you said you were going to, I assumed that you either were short of time, had decided on reflection that you didn't really have anything to add to what you'd already said, or had just lost interest. It's happened to me.) And I agree with Russell that this post is much better than your first one. Then, you were ridiculing Frum. Now you're refuting him.

As I said before, I'm not out to defend Frum. I certainly don't wish to assert that the welfare state should be abolished, or that abolishing the welfare state would have the social effects Frum claims it would, or that the political strategy Frum advocates would succeed. Insofar as you're arguing against these propositions, I'm on your side. But I still think you're underestimating Frum, and by extension conservatism in general.

Before getting into the nitty-gritty, a couple of minor points. With all due respect, if anyone is "obsessed" with the Donner Party, it's not Frum but you. Frum mentions the Donner Party exactly twice, as far as I know (the passage you quoted, and on the following page); it doesn't even show up in his index, though P. J. O'Rourke and Philip Roth do. And while unsympathetic commentators can deride them, it's perfectly plain to me what Bennett meant when he referred to it, and what Frum means when he refers to it. Rather than belabor the point, I'll just invite people to read the book and decide for themselves, or at least the full chapter in which the Donner Party appears. And the same applies to Frum’s alleged hatred of beards. (Even if the passage you quoted indicated that Frum hated beards, which it doesn’t, it’s still the only mention of beards in the book afaik. How you can claim that Orwell is in control of his “obsessions” but Frum isn’t, I don’t understand.)

On to more substantial matters. First of all, your characterization of Frum's opposition to the welfare state as "silly" and "an irritable mental gesture." baa has already pointed out the falsity of the "welfare state equals insurance" argument. (I'd add that, while there is a problem of "moral hazard" in private insurance, insurers do charge higher premiums for, or refuse to insure, those whose behavior makes them bigger risks, whereas the government usually does not.) But there's a deeper problem with your argument. Frum is not arguing that individuals should voluntarily decline to avail themselves of the government safety net because it will build their character. He's asserting that we collectively, as a society, should give up the safety net because its bad social effects outweigh its material benefits. This may be wrong--I think it is--but it's not "silly," or at any rate you haven't shown that it is. As for Orwell's "Ye Olde Tea Shoppe" quote, frankly that seems to me a much clearer example of "aesthetic politics" or "an irritable mental gesture" than anything in Frum. (And is it really true that "So long as the machine is there, one is under an obligation to use it"? Is someone who walks five blocks to the library or coffeeshop when they could hop in their car and drive there indulging in "dilettantism"? What about someone who cooks a meal from scratch when they could just pop a frozen entree in the microwave?)

Next, Frum vs. Orwell. According to you, the reason that Orwell is a great man with some crankish tendencies, while Frum is just an intelligent crank, is that Orwell has a “simple, potent” political philosophy (in a broad sense) and Frum doesn’t. And you summarize Orwell’s philosophy as follows: “Indeed, from one point of view, Socialism is such elementary common sense that I am sometimes amazed that it has not established itself already. The world is a raft sailing through space with, potentially, plenty of provisions for everybody; the idea that we must all co-operate and see to it that everyone does his fair share of the work and gets his fair share of the provisions, seems so blatantly obvious that one would say that no one could possibly fail to accept it unless he had some corrupt motive for clinging to the present system.”

First of all, the final clause is just wrong. There are, and have been, millions of people (many of them poor) who reject socialism, rightly or wrongly, and are not doing so because they have corrupt motives for clinging to capitalism. But that aside, this “philosophy” does not seem to me as solid as you contend. Taken literally, it seems to imply a worldwide command economy, which a lot of people would be unwilling to accept, including me. If, on the other hand, it means just that poverty and unemployment are bad, then that’s a nice sentiment, but it hardly constitutes a political philosophy, even in a broad sense; nor does it imply socialism. And if it means neither of these things, what does it mean? (The above is solely directed at your paragraph, not at Orwell: it’s been years since I’ve read anything by Orwell except 1984, so I have no idea how adequate your summary of Orwell’s philosophy is.)

And as baa points out, it isn’t hard to extract a “philosophy” from Frum on the same level as this. He’s given one version (though it goes beyond Frum in places). A terser alternative would be: “People should take responsibility for the consequences of their actions, because if nobody does so, then society will collapse. Therefore, governments should avoid policies that undermine such responsibility.” Whether or not you agree with this, I’d bet that a majority of Americans would assent to it. Of course, there would be problems attempting to put this philosophy into practice, but the same is true of your rendering of Orwell’s philosophy.

A couple of subsidiary points: you deride Frum for believing that the welfare state is caught in a vicious spiral in which welfare programs create dependency, which leads to expanded welfare programs, which create further dependency, etc. And to show that this won’t happen, you use the analogy of seatbelts. Once again, while Frum is probably wrong, your seatbelt analogy doesn’t prove it. There are two crucial differences between seatbelts and the welfare state. First, while people wearing seatbelts may be less careful drivers, they don’t deliberately set out to get in accidents. In contrast, if welfare payments are at all adequate, there will be people who prefer receiving welfare to working. No doubt there are far fewer of them than conservatives claim, but the "progressive" insistence that this never happens is equally disingenuous. And the more generous the welfare payments, the more such people there will be. Secondly, if I wear a seatbelt and drive carelessly, that doesn’t reduce the incentives for other people to drive carefully--quite the opposite, in fact. But when I receive money from the government, this has to be paid for by taxes (or inflation), which arguably does reduce the incentives for other people to be thrifty and work hard, at least in a system in which the government gets most of its revenue from payroll and income taxes.

Finally (!), a couple of times you refer to Frum as “standing athwart history shouting ‘stop!’” with the implication that efforts to roll back the welfare state are futile. I wish I could agree with you. As it is, though, this sentiment seems to me not only wrong but dangerously complacent. At the moment, it feels more like it is we liberals and leftists who are “standing athwart history.” Throughout the industrialized world (let alone the “developing” one) governments are cutting back on the welfare state, or trying to. To be sure, it’s not likely that welfare programs will be entirely abolished, particularly those benefitting the middle class. Nor will the rollback happen because conservative philosophers have persuaded the electorate of the evils of such programs, as Frum wishes. More likely, once the full costs of Bush’s tax cuts kick in (plus whatever further tax cuts he’s able to pass), Republicans will suddenly rediscover the evils of twelve-figure deficits and proclaim that even the diminished welfare state we have is “unsustainable,” while still being able to block any tax increases, thanks to the endless drumbeat of conservative propaganda and the bloated political clout of the wealthy. That will leave “us” with a choice between drastic cuts in Social Security and Medicare, and galloping inflation: while I’d put my money on the latter in this situation, the former can hardly be ruled out.

[jholbo]

Thanks to baa and Adam again for very worthy and – in Adam’s case – lengthy criticisms. It all deserves yet another full-length response post, but I lack the will, and I expect most readers of this fine blog would lack the patience. So this will have to do.

First, a point Baa rightly picks on: welfare is not like private insurance schemes. This is right. I meant to explain myself better; I didn’t. Point to Baa, no dispute. But here’s what I meant, but didn’t say. Welfare isn’t insurance, to put it crudely, because Bill Gates would be nuts to buy unemployment insurance, but without Bill Gates’ pay-in, the scheme won’t fly. So really welfare is progressive taxation/wealth redistribution. The people getting ‘insured’ are not the same as those doing the paying. Hugely important difference. Nevertheless (we are now digging deep into my thought-processes as I composed my post) Frum does not argue against progressive taxation, per se, in his book. And he is not alone. Lots of conservatives are not, per se, opposed to progressive taxation. Or at least they are not willing to press their flesh to that especially hot third rail. Think about how all the other Republican candidates tore a piece out of Steve Forbes for his 17% flat tax, or whatever the rate was going to be. To put it another way: Frum is very clear that, whatever his version of conservatism is, it is not libertarianism – not even close. He doesn’t just say: progressive taxation is wrong.

So by calling it insurance I was just speeding past a point of debate – the propriety of redistribution – which is not being presently debated. In other words, I was speeding without a seatbelt.

The importance of the insurance comparison, for all its inaccuracy, can be brought out with regard to Baa’s proposed one-paragraph conservative philosophy. He concludes it by saying, roughly: we should avoid systems that diminish the rewards for good behavior. The problem is: technically, this is too strong. Because buying fire insurance diminishes the rewards for good behavior. (I take it to be obvious what I mean but I’ll just say it: if all your fire prevention measures work, and your house doesn’t burn, you aren’t going to get a refund on the insurance premiums paid. So your reward is less than the guy whose house didn’t burn, who didn’t buy insurance.) Once you admit that sometimes it’s OK to discourage good behavior in a marginal sort of way, because of the net benefits, you are no longer in a debate about principle but a debate about optimum balances. I think Frum would admit as much, but in the book he consistently hints as if there is some point of iron conservative principle around here.

I’ll make another quick point about Baa’s paragraph: the trouble with it is that almost everyone will sign-on, because everyone will choose to understand what it means in a way that is consistent with whatever outlook – conservative or liberal – they may have. The paragraph even anticipates this problem with it’s stern ‘you may think you know what this entails, but’ warning. But everyone will just interpret the warning differently.

I think that Frum will have genuine difficulty writing a paragraph-long statement of what he believes, which will be even approximately consistent with what he says more generally, and that isn’t too bland. Frum needs a philosophy that will REQUIRE him to go off in the wilderness. I think what Frum actually is fighting for – the tax burden should be shifted from the rich to the middle-class and poor wage-earners – is a good candidate for ballot box office poison, if you just state it as baldly as that. The voters will indeed send you to the wilderness. Why would the middle-class and poor vote against their interest, since they don’t by and large think a bit of redistribution is unjust? But ‘milk the middle and bottom on behalf of the top’ isn’t the high-toned philosophy Frum wants.

This brings me to Adam’s post, and his point about Orwell’s philosophy. Here again is something I meant to say and didn’t: I didn’t mean to imply that Orwell’s philosophy is obviously a wise philosophy. He is basically just saying: ‘I hope there is some way to extract from each according to his ability, and give to each according to his needs, without having a boot crush the face of humanity forever more. Anyway, that’s what I’m placing my long-shot bet on.’ Now it was supposed to be part of my point that (as Adam points out) this is not exactly a popular philosophy these days, and for very sound reasons. But it really is Orwell’s, and it is rather remarkable that Orwell’s honesty in espousing it is very winning. He wins the respect, even passionate allegiance, of people who think socialism is a terrible idea, because he is obviously personally repelled by all the bad things people worry about. If the face boot is inevitable, Orwell would turn against socialism in a heartbeat. This is related to Frum because, in a way, this is what Frum is looking for: a conservative philosophy that most people think is a terrible idea, but which wins their grudging respect for its honesty and humanity. I think Frum does not have such a philosophy, whereas Orwell does. That was supposed to be my point. A very unclearly made one it turned out to be.

Adam makes the same points as Baa about how it isn’t crazy – in fact, it’s smart – to have a philosophy that boils down to: encourage people not to lean on government, because government can actually collapse under that sort of pressure. The problem, basically, is that this is not enough for Frum, because there are any number of liberal and libertarian and other sorts of philosophies that are consistent with this, so Frum does not hereby get at what is truly distinctive about his view. I think he lacks anything to make his view distinctive. Also, Frum seems to me strangely oblivious to the likely destabilizing effects of removing welfare safety nets. A good conservative should be more worried about hungry poor people erecting barricades in the streets. But I do admit that all my antic hopping around in my posts, exaggeratedly whacking the man, was not the most economic way to make my point. He is, at the end of the day, a very shrewd fellow and I haven't shown him enough respect for that.

I know you’ve got a few more points, Adam. Don’t mean my relative brevity as a brush-off. I just lack the will to keep hammering away. The proper thing to do at this point is pretty much to drop Frum as a target/defense, and just debate various issues. Which I am always willing to do. Thanks for being good interlocutors, you two.

[Realish]

A psychological point:

Why do I strive to prevent fires in my home? Why do I drive at reasonable speeds? Why do I have a job and work hard at it? I submit that the answers to these questions have nothing to do with gov't policy. Or rather: gov't policy would have to be much more extreme than it is to substantially affect these behaviors. My tax burden could be much higher or much lower and I wouldn't behave much differently. I drive safely and work hard because I love my family, I know I am important to them, and I want to take good care of them. I grew into self-reliance organically, through becoming invested in the world and people around me. Nobody forced me, through cleverly designed policies, or could have.

This might seem a trivial point, but everybody's talking like the role of gov't is vital in such matters. Human nature is the real driver. It's true that hardship brings out many admirable qualities. It's also true, as John keeps saying, that nobody will seriously propose to deliberately impose hardship to get those qualities. Given our current freedom and wealth, simple compassion demands that we don't allow any group of people to sink into total privation; simple human nature dictates that some subset of people is going to rely to an unhealthy degree on that compassion.

When conservatives like Frum rant against the softening of our natures, they are ranting against what is an inevitable side effect of our success. Either they should openly advocate artifical means of creating hardship--which they won't--or they should concentrate on their own damn characters. Anything else is, in fact, an irritable mental gesture.

[Aaron]

Has Mr. Frum responded?

[jholbo]

No, I never heard from the guy, Aaron.

[NeoDude]

When conservatives like Frum rant against the softening of our natures, they are ranting against what is an inevitable side effect of our success. Either they should openly advocate artifical means of creating hardship--which they won't--or they should concentrate on their own damn characters. Anything else is, in fact, an irritable mental gesture.

Brilliant!

[perianwyr]

Spam comments always add a piquant air of what the fuck to a long-forgotten blog post, don't they?

[jholbo]

All cleaned up. Thanks for noticing.