Further adventures in Trumpservatism

Some further thoughts (rustles, drops papers, hits head on podium)

Yesterday I was talking about the collapse of conservative intellectual-types in Age of Trump and why it happened so quickly. Today I want to address a question that younger readers, or those with short memories, might have about why I was talking about conservative intellectuals as if they had ever been anything but shit.

Oh, don’t get me wrong, kids, they were always shit. Even the allegedly elegant William F. Buckley Jr. was just a poncy proseur pitching his pseud style at the gullible, and his one great achievement was to prove how vast and well-placed a constituency that was.

No, my point was not that once upon a time they had ever been right about anything, but that, notwithstanding their shittiness, they had played a bigger, indeed at times a seminal role in rightwing politics.

Let’s have a look at an essay by conservative scholar James Q. Wilson from 1981 called “‘Policy intellectuals’ and public policy.” It is obnoxious in just the way you’d expect a conservative’s celebration of Reaganism in 1981 to be. Wilson sneers at the liberal “notion that poverty was essentially the result of a lack of money and so a rational solution to the problem of poverty was to give more money to persons who had little,” that “sluggish economic growth would be stimulated, at no serious cost, by having the government increase aggregate demand by increasing the federal deficit,” that “the proper solution to America’s heroin problem was to engage in some form of decriminalization,” etc.

But why shouldn’t he have? The horrible ideas he and his professor buddies were advancing had gotten very big very quickly:

There are countless examples of an idea serving, quickly or gradually, to alter the terms of a debate and realign existing political coalitions. When Milton Friedman first proposed, over two decades ago, that parents be given, at state expense, vouchers which they could use to purchase education from any of several competing purveyors, it was either ignored or derided… Today the voucher idea, though not universally accepted, is taken seriously as a way of altering the production and consumption of education…

Criminal deterrence is another such idea. I think it a plausible one, though I cannot prove it to skeptics. But the willingness of intellectuals today, as opposed to those ten years ago, to take the idea seriously and weigh it against other goals of criminal justice has altered, at least for the time being, the terms in which crime is discussed…

So also with supply-side economies. What is most striking about it is not the weight of evidence and argumentation mustered in its behalf, but the fact that in the space of a few short years it has fundamentally altered the terms of debate about economic policy…

These ideas had come out of the rightwing thinktanks and were promoted in rightwing magazines. Reagan was no intellectual, and neither were the high-pressure crooks who ran him, but back then the nation still held onto (albeit without really knowing why anymore) the idea that “policy” should be something more than screamed insults and chest-beating. So Ronnie’s team skimmed the intellectual class for schoolly-sounding concepts that would make them look less like the evil carnies they were, and they got these guys.

Though the “criminal deterrence” Wilson mentions owed some of its pedigree to the general hard-ass Archie-Bunker lock-‘em-up lumpen growling, Wilson himself gave it an air of class with his “Broken Windows” theory, which was later the inspiration for Rudolph Giuliani’s back-of-the-hand style of governance. Friedman’s school vouchers was a nice, roundabout way of saying “I don’t pay taxes so my kids could go to school with black people,” and supply-side economics — well, you gotta admit, it’s such a bald-faced grift that you almost have to admire it.

In his essay Wilson brings in some demurrers (“the role intellectuals as scholars… can play in the making of public policy is likely to be small”), but he’s clearly excited that his and these other crackpot ideas had been swept into the public consciousness, not by political platform committees or speechwriters, but by academics like him and the sort of writers who live to popularize their ideas, and that their diagrams and disquisitions had been promoted out of the lecture hall and into the national political agenda.

Note this interesting comment Wilson makes about the infamous and now thoroughly discredited Laffer Curve on which Reagan’s voodoo economics was based:

It would be interesting to know, for example, if the much-discussed Laffer Curve, that purports to show the relationship between tax rates and tax revenues, will turn out to be true. At present, there is not more evidence for it than there once was for the Phillips Curve — probably less…

We are not likely to find out unless we try, but unfortunately we cannot try in incremental or experimental steps: We either do it decisively, and for a long term, or not at all. It is a bold scholar indeed who will speak confidently about what will happen. All this suggests that intellectuals are probably at their best — that is, do things they are best suited to do — when they tell people in power that something they tried did not work as they expected.

No one should be surprised, then, if scholars who behave in their traditional roles turn out to be highly unpopular.

It’s as if he’s admitting that his excitement is not so much at the prospect of achieving great things for his country — hell, he didn’t even know if the shit would work! — but at the thrill of seeing the great unwashed marching under a banner that he and his buddies had designed.

Every so often in the years since, up till Trump Times, some conservative “thinker” or other has found himself or herself hoisted on the shoulders of the conservative movement and their buddies in the prestige press to the same purpose Wilson and Friedman and Laffer served: Making it look good. Look, here’s Camille Paglia — she’s an arts professor and a lesbian and loves Madonna, but she hates liberals, thereby proving that you can be cool and reactionary! Here’s Allan Bloom, he hates Madonna but he’s gay also (though we can only hint, it’s 1987!) and besides, when you have a kid we bet you’ll hate popular culture too! Here’s Bill Bennett, also hates popular culture and totally not gay and actually he’s kind of a drag but buy your kids his books and maybe they’ll grow up moral!  Here’s David Brooks, who has plumbed the mysteries of the salad bar!

Just as the newsweeklies used to have an annual cover slot for the latest Savior of Rock ‘n’ Roll and Relatable Royal, it seemed, they also had a slot for someone who made conservatism look more exciting to general audiences.

But look around now. For one thing, we barely have newsweeklies. And if we did, to whom would you give that hip wingnut slot? Jordan Peterson? Ben Shapiro? Mencius Moldbug? There’s certainly an excitable conservative constituency who would eat them up — but there’s no longer any point to putting them on a national platform and offering them to America at large. Someone like Shapiro isn’t trying to cross over; he knows that to anyone not deep in the hypnotic thrall of ideology he’s a repulsive, mosquito-voiced, aging twerp. He doesn’t need new fans; he just wants to sell the ones he’s got more brain pills.

And as for the “serious” conservative “scholars” — well, nobody’s going to send a Megan McArdle Curve to the CBO for analysis. The politicians that such people used to influence have no need to make it look good, and hence no need for them. Remember that “revenue-neutral flex fund” that we mentioned yesterday that Marco Rubio was promoting as an anti-poverty measure in the Senate back in 2014? Know what he’s pushing these days? From the Senator’s webpage, September 23:

U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) introduced the Mind Your Own Business Act, which would enable shareholders to hold woke corporations accountable. Specifically, the legislation would require corporate directors to prove their “woke” corporate actions were in their shareholders’ best interest in order to avoid liability for breach of fiduciary duty in shareholder litigation over corporate actions relating to certain social policies. It would also incentivize corporate management to stop abusing their positions to advance left-wing social policies by increasing their personal liability to shareholders for breaches of fiduciary duty resulting from those policies. Rubio announced the bill during an appearance with Maria Bartiromo on Mornings with Maria and in a Fox Business op-ed.

We live, as the old saw goes, in the dumbest timeline. (Homer Simpson: “The dumbest timeline so far.”)