Douthat: right policy, wrong politics

[by JSC5]

Ross Douthat’s column today presents a smart critique of the richboy subsidies and corporate welfare enshrined in current law, from the mortgage-interest tax deduction to agricultural subsidies and lack of means testing in Medicare and Social Security. It’s a broad, if not very definitive, endorsement of a more egalitarian state that doesn’t shovel quite so much money towards non-needy recipients each year. There’s a lot of good policy that could come out of Douthat’s vision, and it is heartwarming to have a voice of sanity on the right these days — even if he is (sadly) out of the mainstream of his own party and completely without influence over actual Republican decision-makers. So instead of offering the kind of backhanded compliment you just read in the previous sentence, I should probably be doing my bit to politely encourage engagement on the general principles Douthat lays down.

But I just can’t keep myself from pointing out a very weird moment in Douthat’s column:

“The trick is to channel those [pitchfork] impulses in a constructive direction. The left-wing instinct, when faced with high-rolling irresponsibility, is usually to call for tax increases on the rich. … [But] the class warfare we need is a conservative class warfare, which would force the million-dollar defaulters to pay their own way from here on out.”

So Douthat wants us to believe that leftwingers wake up every morning looking for a tax they can raise, while the conservatives are the adults in the room making sure the government doesn’t subsidize the rich? Pardon me while I scoff. Douthat’s error here is common, if not innocuous. All of us have the tendency to let tribalism infect rational political debate. But it’s still improper to identify a good set of policies and then assume that because (a) you like those policies, and (b) you usually see yourself on Team Red, then (c) those must be conservative policies. It seems to me that means-testing parts of the safety net, rolling back subsidies of McMansions and suburban sprawl, and cutting Big Agra’s welfare checks are all … not conservative policies. They’re broadly ‘liberal’ policies, with everyone from leftwingers like Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias to libertarians like Tyler Cowen* signing up for the same general principles. To my knowledge, no such broad swatch of leading conservative intellectuals (besides Douthat) are ready to heartily endorse these reforms.

Now, to be fair, you’d be hard pressed to find actual politicians of either political flavor ready to sign on to these reforms. But at least they are operable ideas within the liberal realm of thought!

That said, I now retract my backhanded compliments to Douthat, replace them with forehanded compliments, and politely encourage more people from all political walks of life to seriously engage with the issues Douthat raises in his otherwise excellent column today.

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* My apologies for not providing links here. I’m just extrapolating from past posts I’ve read of each of their work. If anyone finds information to the contrary, please let me know and I’ll update.