Defending Conservatism, Part 8: The Way Forward and Additional (Better) Reading

So far, I have mostly spoken in favor of approaches to politics and policy, rather than details. This is in the interest of being somewhat ecumenical; I think these approaches can work for people across the political spectrum, and I want to avoid too many landmines in making that case. But for me, the final piece of the puzzle is more specific, and less philosophical than actuarial. In short: I think the trajectory of America’s entitlement programs, specifically Medicare, is simply unsustainable. Progressives wish to continue expanding those commitments, or adopt mostly-destructive top-down solutions (like the rationing of care) to reduce their costs. Most of what I believe in terms of making changes to existing and venerable programs comes down to my read of the math. (This is why I have insisted for years that it is appropriate for middle- and upper-class people pay more for predictable health care expenses.) I do not trust the top-down solutions to solve those problems optimally. For years, I have believed that Republicans were more likely to solve this issue than Democrats, and as such, I have voted for Republican after Republican.

Alas, the election of Trump changes all that. Trump does not recognize the problem. It is likely that he will be followed as president by a Democrat who also does not recognize this, or who places it below the desire for additional government spending. That would take us to 2024 or 2028 before we’d even have a slight chance of fixing this problem. Meanwhile, every year, the problem will get worse. So now we have two parties that refuse to grapple with this problem, and the party that used to rhetorically has abandoned its position.

It’s hard to say where things go from here, but I suspect the answer is in a very negative direction. American politics for the next few decades will likely be a constant fight over health care spending and benefits: what services are required, what services are non-essential, what experimental drugs are available, what drugs are not covered, what treatments get subsidized, etc. I expect health care delivery to become increasingly mechanical, with less and less personal care and attention from medical professionals, and more and more from standard operating procedures, written by technical experts and vetted and approved by bureaucrats. At the same time, I expect medical innovation to slow to a trickle, as government increasingly regulates prices, and research and development budgets get slashed.

This is a bleak vision, and we will never know the lives lost--or at least shortened--by the errors that will emerge in this process, and the lost or delayed medical advances.

It actually gets worse, though: what I have outlined above is essentially a society governed by the politics of scarcity, which are substantially scarier than the politics of abundance that characterized much of the 20th century. Scarcity is terrible, and we should expect people to vote out of desperation. The first salvo in that new world was election of Trump. We should not expect it to be the last.

This all means that it is critical that we do what we must to avoid the further fraying of the social ties that bind us. The approach I have outlined here is specifically tailored to avoid backlash. Give people more of an investment in their communities through decentralization. Avoid politicizing every sphere of life, so that people can form stronger, lasting connections. Create predictable laws so that the government treats people equally, and people don’t get frustrated by favoritism. Don’t push policy that destroys or weakens the hold of traditional institutions without extreme caution and care. Take the broad population’s concerns to heart by not reflexively dismissing populist movements. In a world we don’t understand, these are prudential steps to deal with uncertainty.

The alternative, in my estimation, is a society that continues to fracture as people are constantly disappointed, and a political order that swerves violently between the political poles, driven by aggressive executive action rather than prudential lawmaking. Our victories will be temporary, our struggles permanent. That is the future I wish to avoid.

I’ll close with Lincoln. Though I don’t anticipate violent civil war, we are drifting in a bad direction, and Lincoln’s conciliatory words closing his First Inaugural are always worth remembering:

We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

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OK, so you’ve made it this far and you don’t hate yourself for wasting your time. Who should you be reading instead? By and large, right-leaning media is horrendous (see: Breitbart, FOX, etc.), but the Right commentariat is really quite good: they engage thoughtfully with their progressive interlocutors in different ways and from different perspectives, and they often engage with one another over their various differences on policy and priority.

I’ll offer a few people:

Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s writings helped crystallize some sentiments I had about the social sciences; I started to read him right after I got out of college, at a time where I was open to his ideas. I’m glad I did! Taleb has persuasively written on the problems of living in a world we don’t understand, and saw the financial crisis coming years in advance. The Black Swan is the essential text. Antifragile is a tougher read, but worthwhile as well.

Next, the Catholics: Michael Brendan Dougherty, Ross Douthat, and Pascal Emmanuel-Gobry are sort of on the same spectrum, with Dougherty the most skeptical about foreign entanglements and Emmanuel-Gobry the most enthusiastic (though also measured). All are probably best described as “reform conservatives,” and all are deeply influenced by their Catholicism. Douthat is both a wonderful prose stylist and the most consistently thoughtful writer I read. Dougherty and Emmanuel-Gobry write at The Week; Douthat retains his perch as the New York Times’ token conservative columnist.

Next, the libertarians. Tyler Cowen should probably win a Nobel Prize in Economics for his prolific blogging, writing, and general status as a polymath. He is always interesting. His stuff is compiled at Marginal Revolution, where he blogs with Alex Tabarrok. Megan McArdle is an equally-prolific blogger over at Bloomberg, and her writing has greatly influenced how I make and evaluate an argument. She is a principled, pragmatic libertarian.

Reihan Salam is a brilliant writer and journalist. He has taken a special interest in how conservative ideas can interact with urban societies. He writes a column for Slate and is an editor at National Review.

The most intelligent, thoughtful “movement conservative” I read regularly is Ramesh Ponnuru. He also has a column at Bloomberg (a trend here), and works for National Review. You’ll also periodically hear him sparring with EJ Dionne on NPR if David Brooks isn’t available.

Jay Cost of The Weekly Standard has been a great political commentator for over a decade, and is a recently-minted PhD from the University of Chicago. He has an encyclopaedic knowledge of history, which gives him the ability to put current events in perspective, and is also somewhat heterodox on key conservative policy issues. He left the GOP over Trump.

Mollie Hemingway of The Federalist is the best media critic on the Right writing today; she’s absolutely fearless and quite compelling. She relentlessly identifies double standards and weak logic.

For environment and technology questions, I tend to defer to Jim Manzi. Manzi doesn’t write often, but he’s always excellent. I’ve adapted some of the ideas in his excellent book, Uncontrolled, as part of the framing here.

But on the Right, Yuval Levin towers above all. He’s not on Twitter or social media, but he blogs (periodically) at National Review Online, and his contributions are always the most thoughtful on the site. He is also the editor of National Affairs, a policy journal released once per quarter.

Defending Conservatism, Part 7: The Virtues and Vices of Populism

Populism, in short, is an emphasis on the wisdom and preferences of common folk at the expense of an educated elite. From the perspective of a world we don't understand, populism offers promise and peril.

One large advantage of populism is that common folk are often more attuned to traditional wisdom, as laid out in Part 6. They may not know why or how they believe what they believe, but populists can serve as a necessary corrective to elite opinion, when elite opinion falls prey to passing intellectual fads. At their best, populists keep us grounded in the known, and hesitant to dive headfirst into the new and untested.

But at its worst, populism leads towards hero worship of a tribune: a leader who proclaims that (s)he can fulfill the desires and needs of the people by virtue of his/her will and good intentions. While the populist may connect to valuable and forgotten ideas (like the preeminence of the nation-state in the face of an increasingly cosmopolitan and detached elite), they often delve into discredited ideas and conspiratorialism. Populism demands a villain: whether it be immigrants or bankers, it's toxic for thoughtful policymaking and governance. (In a world we don't understand, the contention that there is a grand conspiracy causing our problems seems particularly rich. As if the conspirators know enough to pull the strings!)

Although prudence demands a healthy skepticism of elite pieties and schemes, populists often take it too far, disdaining all of the conclusions of scholarship as biased and corrupt, and choosing to “wing it” instead.

But we must also acknowledge the potency of the populist appeal, particularly when popular concerns are ignored. The prototype is the European Union. Since World War II, gradually, technocratically-minded officials have accumulated more and more power for the largely-unelected European Union bureaucracy. National sovereignty has been frayed, and voters in those countries have gotten angry. As mainstream parties have largely acceded to this course, extremist parties on the Far Right and Far Left have grown more competitive in elections: the public demands a voice in a democracy, and in getting ignored, they turn to destructive voices and ideas. Or, to quote Alfred from The Dark Knight: “... in their desperation, they turned to a man they didn’t fully understand.”

Moreover, populists often identify valid and important policy problems that demand thoughtful attention. People generally point to problems that they are experiencing, even if elite opinion doesn’t. A classic example: elites in American society are deeply concerned about the costs of a four-year education. In my estimation, this is because most of them had a four-year education and resent paying their student loans, or resent hearing about their friends paying their student loans. But a plurality of students in higher education are starting in community colleges, or going part-time. These stories are ignored, or, the square peg of these experiences is jammed into the round hole of the four-year residential college experience, in much policy development.

We may not fully understand it, but we see it as a refrain in the history of democracies. It is a force to be reckoned with, and one that should serve as a constant reminder: do the people's business and care about their concerns, or face their wrath. It’s important to start by listening. Elite expertise is essential, but it must be grounded.

I close this series tomorrow with a review of where all of this leads, and some suggestions for future (and better) reading.

Defending Conservatism, Part 6: The Legitimacy of Tradition

While written law and regulation is critical in our society (see Part 5), much of what makes society work is actually unwritten, even in a highly-litigious society like our own. The US constitution is a remarkable document, but the constitution is not the source of our prosperity or stability as a society; it is merely a written institution surrounded by an array of unwritten institutions. The Federalist Papers are wonderful philosophical treatises on the role of government and the balance of powers, but they are not an “instruction manual” for building a good society; they are merely an approximation of the lived reality of the 18th century, and offer wisdom for the 21st.

So then, where does this unwritten wisdom come from? In short: tradition.

“Tradition,” as the philosopher GK Chesterton put it, “means giving a vote to most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead.” He continues, “Democracy tells us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our groom; tradition asks us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our father.”

Unfortunately, we can’t ask the dead why it is they did what they did. We can comb their books and their writings for insight, and we still do. (Again, read The Federalist Papers! Brilliant political philosophy, and still eminently comprehensible and appropriate.) But even Madison, Hamilton, and Jay might not have fully understood why what they did worked.

As an historical digression, it’s worth comparing some 18th century revolutions. As a young writer in the 1830s, future British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli reflected on the American constitution and why it worked:

Why has the republican constitution flourished in New England, and failed in New Spain? Why has the Congress of Washington commanded the respect of civilised Europe, and the Congresses of Mexico, or Lima, or Santiago, gained only its derision or disgust? The answer is obvious: The Constitution of the United States had no more root in the soil of Mexico, and Peru, and Chili [sic], than the Constitution of England in that of France, and Spain, and Portugal: it was not founded on the habits or the opinions of those whom it affected to guide, regulate, and control. … The electors and the elected were both suddenly invested with offices for the function of which they had received no previous education and no proper training; and which they were summoned to exercise without any simultaneous experience of similar duties.

If the US constitution were a perfect document, we should expect that its precepts would work everywhere they were tried. But it’s not, and they don’t. So, why did the American experiment work? To Disraeli, the answer was simple: experience and tradition.

He is a short-sighted politician who dates the Constitution of the United States from 1780. It was established by the Pilgrim Fathers a century and a half before, and influenced a people practised from their cradles in the duties of self-government. The Pilgrim Fathers brought to their land of promise the laws of England, and a republican religion; and, blended together, these formed the old colonial Constitution of Anglo-America. … The Anglo-Americans did not struggle for liberty: they struggled for independence; and the freedom and the free institutions they had long enjoyed secured for them the great object of their severe exertions. He who looks upon the citizens of the United States as a new people commits a moral, if not an historical, anachronism.

In other words, the American constitution worked because it solidified institutions that had been built over generations of experiential learning. It did not attempt to build new habits from scratch, or destroy the existing order entirely. While firebrands like Thomas Paine saw the opportunity “to begin the world over again,” the more responsible American approach was to tinker with existing habits and structures.

The opposite, of course, was the French Revolution, where the desire for rationalization and “newness” led to silly things like a brand new calendar and the utter destruction of the old regime. The great Edmund Burke, a supporter of the American Revolution, reacted to the French approach with well-deserved scorn:

All your sophisters cannot produce anything better adapted to preserve a rational and manly freedom than the course that we [in England] have pursued, who have chosen our nature, rather than our speculations, our breasts rather than our inventions, for the great conservatories and magazines of our rights and privileges. You [in France] might, if you pleased, have profited of our example, and have given to your recovered freedom a correspondent dignity. Your privileges, though discontinued, were not lost to memory. Your constitution, it is true, whilst you were out of possession, suffered waste and dilapidation; but you possessed in some parts the walls, and, in all, the foundations, of a noble and venerable castle. You might have repaired those walls; you might have built on those old foundations.… but you chose to act as if you had never been moulded into civil society, and had everything to begin anew. You began ill, because you began by despising everything that belonged to you.

The proof is ultimately in the pudding: American society was built on solid ground, en route to a centuries-long process of expanding the promise of American life to a larger and larger span of the population. France descended into chaos and tyranny and was “rescued” only by a once-in-a-generation historical figure, Napoleon Bonaparte. (Meanwhile, America’s Napoleon, Alexander Hamilton, was channeled by the structures of government and society into the productive tasks of constructing an effective financial system. But that’s a different story.) Burke was right; Paine was wrong.

At the risk of mischaracterizing my progressive friends, much of the project of the progressive Left is about the rejection of tradition in its quest for greater public equality. To quote Damon Linker, when progressives do study the past, “it is often in a spirit of antiquarian curiosity about how the oppressor classes and benighted masses of past ages managed to defend the indefensible,” rather than an effort to glean wisdom for our current day. The past that is actually written down is rejected, as we are smarter than they were; the unwritten past--the source of the world we live in at present--is just ignored, or accepted as vestigial and unimportant, a speed bump in the way of progress, rather than a map that hints at something vital and essential.

The core conservative insight is that social harmony (see Part 3) is endogenous; in other words, it grows out of a deep historical context, and it is fragile. George Will writes about this in his Statecraft as Soulcraft:

... when the social sciences do their work well, they convey a sense of complexity and necessity in the life of society. In this regard, not even journalism is invariably a net loss to understanding. It too occasionally helps people understand that the milieu in which politicians operate is not the light, open space of Newtonian philosophy; rather, the milieu is more the thick, clinging mud in which Darwin embedded mankind's sense of itself. Liberalism thinks of society too much the way the eighteenth century thought of the heavens (and society): as clear, tidy and timeless. Liberalism is political astronomy--anachronistic astronomy, unaware that even the planets do more wobbling and wandering and banging about than the eighteenth century thought. Conservatism is political biology. It emphasizes the indeterminateness, the complexity of things, and the fact that there is more to a social system than meets the eye. (156)

Will rightly emphasizes the fundamental mystery of the world around us. We can learn things, but to conservatives, much of what makes society work is not necessarily knowable. (Indeed, the unseen plays a large role in conservative thinking in general; unintended consequences lurk behind every plan.) Contrary to this, the Left often seems to believe that the foundations of society are indestructible: whatever preexisting social harmony, stability, and prosperity we have are just the canvas onto which they can paint their desired reforms and changes. It all just happens, regardless of what we tinker with, so we should tinker with anything and everything to achieve our aims, rather than recognizing the complex, deep balancing act that we must keep in mind when pushing forward.

The progressive aims are noble, and ones that I often admire and share. But to pursue them in a way that ignores tradition and attempts to shunt aside well-established institutions, like the family, can lead to unintended consequences. This is not to say that we should be slaves to tradition or resistant to change at all. But we should accept that there may be things that have worked for years, or centuries, for reasons that we do not fully understand, and opting to dislodge those institutions is something that we should only do with great caution. When we do feel compelled to make changes in pursuit of fairness or justice (as we should at times), we should attempt to do so within the confines of existing structures, rather than from scratch.

A final comment: in addition to traditional structures, we should also be mindful of traditional personal virtues. Things like personal honor are out of vogue these days, but striving for virtue can be a source of meaning. We dispense with this sort of meaning--particularly in a world where remunerative work is often scarce or tedious--at our peril.

In the next piece, I will offer some thoughts on populism in a world we do not understand.

Defending Conservatism, Part 5: The Imperative of Predictable Laws and Regulations

Consequentialism is tempting.

It is easy to look at a situation, see the aggrieved or oppressed party, and believe that government must step in with whatever resources it has available. (In general, this is a good impulse, but it must be backed by the text of the law.) This was, essentially, what the Obama administration opted to do, time and time again. After losing the House in 2010, and the Senate in 2014, rather than being chagrined by his electoral defeats, President Obama declared that he had a “pen and phone” to make the changes he wanted to make. This was a tendency throughout his entire administration: in the face of resistance from the American system, Obama attempted to circumvent it using extralegal powers, rather than attempting to work within its confines.

That the Congress refused to act on his priorities should not have been an invitation to do so unilaterally. But he did, over and over and over. A few examples: he dramatically expanded the scope of the waiver power in the implementation of No Child Left Behind; he took executive discretion to unprecedented levels in the enforcement of immigration laws with his “deferred action” programs; he modified the Affordable Care Act over and over; he restructured the auto bailout in ways contrary to standard bankruptcy practices; and he expanded the scope of federal regulation dramatically beyond that of his predecessors, in ways often far beyond what a plain reading of statute would allow.

The American system of government has millions of procedural roadblocks to getting things done. While this is often frustrating for those in power, it is by design that the system requires broad consensus, or multiple elections pointing in the same direction, to make changes. After 2010, President Obama never had that consensus. But President Obama wanted a legacy, and he wanted to make a difference in people’s lives, so he felt compelled to act where he could and to stretch the limits of executive power.

These sorts of actions breed toxic policy uncertainty: when the executive branch has such discretionary power, businesses must operate scared, and markets don’t work as intended. There are intrinsic benefits to policy certainty, even if it doesn’t lead to the outcome that we desire. Predictability is a valuable asset for personal and business planning. An example: some businesses may well benefit from the impending destruction of the Affordable Care Act, but any such benefits could be destroyed by the costs of planning for the impending upheaval.

The best example of “policy uncertainty” in the Obama administration would be the bailout of General Motors. President Obama opted to give the secured creditors a “haircut” in the bankruptcy settlement in the interests of the United Auto Workers. While it must have been satisfying to pay back a client, and to help autoworkers instead of investment bankers, American bankruptcy provisions work because they are predictable and stable. A world where secured creditors do not get the first bite at the apple is a world with less investment and less stability, as businesses avoid the risk of getting hammered on a bad investment and an unfavorable White House.

Policy uncertainty also requires that businesses develop a greater footprint in Washington DC. This is a wholly-negative development in American politics and society. Every dollar that a medical research company spends on lobbying to get a more favorable deal from the government is an unproductive dollar, in terms of potential research. A lobbyist can buy a nicer house in Fairfax County, Virginia, and the local economy there booms (as it has for decades). But this is not--and should not--be the end aim of government. (This is, of course, what Jeb Bush was alluding to when he suggested that Washington DC needs a recession.) The more that government can grant a business, the more likely that businesses are to dedicate resources towards swaying the government.

If I’m an investor in the post-GM world, it might make more sense to focus on the regulatory climate and how favorably or unfavorably I am viewed by the powers that be than on my core business. The real risk here is favoritism and cronyism: where businesses get a better or worse deal from government based on the whims of the current executive. This is deeply unfortunate, and has only been expanded by President Trump, with his “government by Twitter” approach to industrial policy.

This is a long-winded way of suggesting that we are better off operating in a world where laws mean what they say and are enforced accordingly, rather than subject to flexible interpretation by the executive branch. The implementation of the Affordable Care Act was a textbook example of the alternative. Because of the election of Scott Brown, the Democrats never had the chance to form a “conference committee” to clean up errors in the Senate and House versions of the bill. The bill that became law was the sloppily-drafted Senate bill. The Obama administration unilaterally opted to modify the law with broad executive discretion. (One count suggests 70 separate changes to the law by executive action.)

We should accept a bipartisan limit on executive power and discretion because sometimes, the person in office is one we’d like to restrain. One has more moral and practical power to oppose executive overreach if one critiques it even when it ostensibly furthers one’s policy priority. In other words, we should oppose the Obama administration’s ad hoc conference committee of executive discretion that implemented the Affordable Care Act, as well as the Trump administration’s sweeping executive order granting overly broad enforcement discretion on the ACA to his Cabinet agencies.

Consequentialism also underlay President Obama’s philosophy in picking judges, which is also worth critiquing. In a 2007 speech, he said,

We need somebody who's got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it's like to be a young teenage mom. The empathy to understand what it's like to be poor, or African-American, or gay, or disabled, or old. And that's the criteria by which I'm going to be selecting my judges.

In opposing the nomination of John Roberts (who, oddly enough, saved the Affordable Care Act from destruction), Obama went further:

In those 5 percent of hard cases, the constitutional text will not be directly on point. The language of the statute will not be perfectly clear. Legal process alone will not lead you to a rule of decision. In those circumstances, your decisions about whether affirmative action is an appropriate response to the history of discrimination in this country or whether a general right of privacy encompasses a more specific right of women to control their reproductive decisions or whether the commerce clause empowers Congress to speak on those issues of broad national concern that may be only tangentially related to what is easily defined as interstate commerce, whether a person who is disabled has the right to be accommodated so they can work alongside those who are nondisabled -- in those difficult cases, the critical ingredient is supplied by what is in the judge's heart.

This is, in short, a consequentialist’s manifesto: in the tough cases, put your thumb on the scale. Use your power not out of a desire for uniform, principled, or predictable exercise of power, but to address wrongs. Stated differently, “you’re only president (or justice) once!” But this sort of view is ultimately dangerous for the rule of law, as we become more subject to the personal whims of those in power, rather than the text of a law itself. Text is predictable; people are not. A mode of judicial interpretation that focuses on the original meaning of text in its analysis--as advocated by the late Antonin Scalia and the extant Clarence Thomas--is the fairest way to get to a society founded on the rule of law. This is aspirational, of course; one may never get to the beau ideal of the form. But the alternative is explicit discretion.

Discretion, too, has cascading effects: if legislatures know that courts will read for “intent,” they can draft more haphazardly. Contrarily, if legislatures know that courts will read their words closely, then they will draft laws more carefully and circumspectly, which is for the better.

In general, our approach should be less focused on consequence and more focused on process. Conservatism, well understood, gets us there.

In part 6, I will argue for the legitimacy of tradition.

Defending Conservatism, Part 4: The Benefits of Social Harmony and Apolitical Spaces

In Part 3, I defended the need for decentralization and a robust civil society. Building on that point is the need for apolitical spaces, so that we can work together with people of different ideological persuasions in doing good.

This is, of course, a fairly rich perspective, coming as part of an eight-part series on politics and political orientations. But there is much more to life than political views.

There is a frequent debate (often by proxy) between two perspectives on how life and politics should interact. One view states that it is best to keep politics and other parts of life separate.The other postulates that the personal is inevitably political, and that those who seek to keep politics and life separate merely oversee that their own political preferences are *implicit* in the areas they seek to “protect.”

This second view is compelling, but in a world we do not understand, the advocates of separate spheres have the stronger argument.

First is the more prosaic one: in a world we don’t understand, we are likely to be wrong, periodically. Keeping contact with and listening to people who have differing views is one way to insure ourselves against error. We can learn things, or be persuaded that our approach on a given issue is more likely to be mistaken.

But there is a deeper rationale. If we accept that life is improved by the connections that we make, it doesn’t really make sense to preclude personal attachments and socialization with people who don’t agree with us on politics. What an impoverished view of the depths of human contact! There are so many dimensions of human contact in the real world: physical chemistry, sports, hobbies, conversational styles, religion, philosophy, scientific inquiry, and musical interests, among thousands of others. Why eliminate possible gains across those dimensions because of a disaffinity on a single dimension, politics, particularly when those politics may be misguided anyway?

This is not merely about rejecting gains; it’s also about assistance in the tough times. Human societies are full of sadness, loss, hardship, and loneliness. The connections we make can help us through those difficult emotions and can allow us the ability to bond with a greater number of people. When politics produce outcomes that depress us, when we lose our loved ones, when our long-term significant other terminates our relationship, when our favorite sports team loses in crushing fashion--all of these experiences produce varying degrees of despair. Having a broad array of connections and people to share our interests and hobbies with makes those times easier.

This is an easy, consequence-free position to have as a white male. To use the academic jargon: I am privileged enough to have the opportunity to set aside politics, because it doesn’t directly affect me. But for those who do feel that politics bombards them because of their choices or their “invisible backpack,” to what end does living in a perpetually-political world lead? Does it make you happier? Does it increase the odds of politics turning out the way you want them to, of the outcomes turning in your favor? I contend, simply, that it does not. Privilege is a fact of life, and one that it makes sense to recognize in our political lives. But allowing it to consume the rest of things does not necessarily result in sustainable change. If anything, it generates a backlash from those who are accused of “privilege” but don’t feel it in their daily lives. A 45-year old white man in rural Indiana is “privileged” under the hierarchies of privilege theory, but if he’s divorced with two drug-addicted teenage kids and has been in and out of part time jobs for 15 years, he probably doesn’t see it that way. And if 2016 proved anything, it’s that backlash is toxic.

There is a third rationale that is equally important: the politicization of everyday life leads almost inexorably to the desire for government involvement in everyday life. Politics is a long-term discussion about what government should do. But government is force, first and foremost. It’s a blunt instrument that has a monopoly of violence over a given area. Any law that is passed compelling someone to do something is ultimately backed by the force of arms, and could be enforced by a man or woman in a uniform with a gun.

All of this leads to where we should be headed: a bias towards tolerance and toleration rather than uniformity and acceptance. As a society, we should encourage acceptance of difference, but the force of government should insist on a society where people of difference tolerate one another. Moving in the direction of acceptance is a rejection of this sort of difference and the liberty interest of folks who reject someone else’s choices, and it ultimately results in the politicization of non-political spheres. Resentment, not harmony, is the byproduct, and force, not persuasion, is the tool.

A final point: Part of the problem here is the cultural ubiquity of the president. He is everywhere, and anywhere the president is involved, politics (almost) inevitably follows. A president who actively shunned the spotlight, and remained in political spheres, would help depoliticize more of society.

In Part 5, I will defend the rule of law.

Defending Conservatism, Part 3: In Favor of Decentralization and Subsidiarity

For the sake of argument (see Part 2), we’re accepting that we don’t fully understand the world around us. One very straightforward implication is that we should prefer the local to the national. A single solution at the national level may well be wrong because of our knowledge problems and our issues understanding policy reality. Getting policy wrong at a national level affects us all, and often locks us into bad outcomes. Preferring local policies is better: some of those will likely work better than others, and states and localities can gravitate, over time, to models that prove more effective. Moreover, the calamities are more contained, and there are ready-made solutions to consider in response, with actual data and a track record worth evaluating.

Let’s take health care policy as an example. Three fictitious states are trying to figure out how best to provide health insurance in their states:

• Columbia: Columbia adopts a “three-legged stool” model and provides subsidies for the purchase of private insurance: all individuals must have a policy, either through their employer or via purchase on an individual market. Insurance companies cannot deny coverage for any reason, and cannot charge sicker people larger premiums or deductibles.
• New Eagle: New Eagle opts for a market-oriented “Health Savings Account” model, providing tax credits to all of its citizens for spending on routine services, and insurance coverage for more unpredictable expenses. The state sets up a “reinsurance” system for catastrophic expenses, where insurance companies can have the state government partially cover patient expenses above a certain amount.
• Cascadia: Cascadia goes for a “single-payer” model. Insurance companies exist only for their administrative expertise, but ultimately, all reimbursements come from the state government.

I have my suspicions about which state model would work best. But the reality is that we’re just guessing until we try the models out. And even if we do get data, no two states are exactly alike. If New Eagle’s program succeeds, that does not necessarily suggest that it is the best approach; there may have been confounding factors that were more relevant. It is merely a data point in favor of one position.

The alternative is that the federal government steps in, makes its decision about which model is most effective--or decides to “solve” the issue by hammering out perverse compromises through a challenging political environment--and locks us into whatever solution results. If the federal government chooses poorly, or if the political dealings result in less-than-ideal outcomes, we are stuck with a bad model, complete with the backing of well-funded, entrenched stakeholders.

Decentralization, in contrast, gives us the opportunity for policy experimentation. This is vital in complex domains, because otherwise, we are essentially hoping that the one answer to the policy question we come up with happens to be the best of all possible worlds. The odds of this are not great in a complex domain. At the government level, decentralization points towards federalism; let individual states have discretion to try new things. But more broadly, decentralization suggests that we should look towards markets for new models and new approaches to complex problems. Thousands of decentralized actors will likely create better models for the 21st century than the wisest government bureaucrats; they have many more opportunities to fail, and will recognize their failures quickly. Bureaucracy is much slower.

The only situations where we should prefer a national solution are ones where there are dramatic risks of externalities. In those situations the risk of broad errors and contagion are surpassed by the inability of a local solution to remain a local solution. This is typically a question of prudential balance: one can make an attenuated externalities argument about most issues. For example, education: if students in New Eagle are worse than students in Cascadia, then we all suffer due to the loss of potential human capital. There is certainly a claim worth considering here, but we should not compare our “bad New Eagle” example against a beau ideal; we need to compare it against the reality of what we can and cannot do.

Environmental regulations are one such area where externalities are relevant and immediate. (If New Eagle wants strict air quality standards, and Columbia doesn’t, then New Eagle will not actually be able to implement their policies because of the prevailing winds.) Likewise with climate change: New Eagle dramatically reducing its emissions is practically meaningless, in the overall scheme of things, if other states and countries do not. In other areas, though, like transportation, education, and health care policy, externalities are much less relevant, and as such we should be open to broad and bold experimentation at the local level.

Moving towards a locality-driven approach means that we should become more comfortable with regional differences in our country: they’re not necessarily failures; they’re learning experiences, and opportunities to grow.

Decentralization need not be entirely limited to the states, though. In general, subsidiarity is the way to go: drive the decision-making to as low a level of government or organization as it can go. Encourage people to get involved in their own communities, rather than focusing exclusively on the activities of the federal government. The more people are involved, the more they can take ownership of their lives and society, rather than feeling voiceless when pitted against a cold bureaucracy. Most critically, mistakes are less contagious mistakes this way.

One final point here: not all of this needs to be “the government.” Republican Senator Ben Sasse often cites “Rotary Clubs” as the foundation for American civil society. I’ve never lived in a place with an active Rotary Club that had a real visible presence in a community, but I envy that.

People tend to be more charitable when dealing with the local than with the national or international. Having nongovernmental organizations that can step in and provide stability for struggling kids, and public meals for low-income families, and toy drives, and all of the other things that benefit the less fortunate is a must. These are intrinsic goods, and they help us achieve meaning in ways that simply sending a few extra bucks a year in taxes to Washington DC will ever do. On top of that, we shouldn't reject a state-sponsored safety net, but we should steer it towards the local when and where we can.

Defending Conservatism, Part 2: The Problem of Modernity

A proposition, to begin: there is a true reality about the world around us. We may not always know it, but the truth exists. We attempt to use our cognitive faculties to ascertain what the truth is.

It is possible to disagree with that assertion, or to argue that not being able to comprehend the truth is functionally equivalent to there being no truth at all. But for the purposes of this series, I am going to assume that truth is real.

But instead of delving into this from the perspective of politics and government, a better place to start is from a seemingly-more complicated domain: particle physics.

I never quite understood even the hints at particle physics in my high school classes, and I so feared studying a STEM subject in college that I majored in history and took a class on diseases as a way to fulfill my general science request. I was probably right to avoid it, for what it’s worth; it’s incredibly complex, so much so that it took a $10 billion investment in a gigantic particle accelerator to do the necessary research on it. We’ve learned a fair bit about the way that the universe functions, thanks to the Large Hadron Collider. Among other things (courtesy of Wikipedia):

• The “Standard Model Higgs boson, if it exists, is most likely to have a mass constrained to the range 115–130 gigaelectronvolts.”
• There exist two previously-undiscovered subatomic particles. They are “baryons that are composed of one bottom, one down, and one strange quark.”

My friends who majored in hard sciences often expressed envy for those of us who chose the humanities, or business, as our fields of study. After all, they were doing complex math and experiments, and we were writing papers on subjects of our choice, essentially. Particle physics may be the most complicated thing we study, but students of the “hard sciences” deal with higher levels of complexity than do students of the “liberal arts.” Organic chemistry requires more esoteric knowledge than political science; microbiology requires more esoteric knowledge than economics; astrophysics requires more esoteric knowledge than history.

But we draw the wrong conclusions from this. Intuition suggests that because something is harder to study, it is actually harder to comprehend the “truth” in that subject. But this is precisely backwards. It is, in fact, the opposite: the truth underlying politics, policy, and economics is much more complex than the truth underlying physics and chemistry. But because our tools to measure the truth in those areas are so (comparatively) ineffective, there is a lot more wiggle room for debate, disagreement, and competing interpretations. You cannot build a Large Hadron Collider for studying economics. You can do some rudimentary experiments, which helps, but those experiments cannot be fully regulated, in the sense of having complete control over your dependent variables and constants. Conclusions are always tentative, and always subject to change. Paradigms are more fragile, with less consensus.

Note, too, that it’s much harder to “fake” your way through the hard sciences. In contrast, it’s very easy to fake your way through politics and policy: you can make bold assertions with selective evidence, and at best, the response will be debatable. (In a field where the truth is more opaque, “faking it” works a lot more effectively.) Try doing the same in a physics lab. They will laugh you out of the room, or, if they’re feeling polite, ask you to leave.

All of this makes sense, if we think about humans in a material sense: humans, after all, are the synthesis of billions upon billions of those very same scientific processes, acting through their own logic. What we study in economics, political science, and history is merely the effect of the outcomes of those particles, not those particles themselves and how they affect actions and decisions. It’s infinitely more complex, because we are not merely studying the particles themselves, but how the particles combine to form a consciousness, and how the consciousness interacts with its surrounding environment. Everything we study there is a mere approximation of reality, not reality itself.

This very same pathology--that we study approximations, not realities--infects all fields. But it is worse in fields that are associated with the “social sciences”--a misnomer if there ever were one--and the humanities. But this leads us to the key point: we live and breathe in the world of the liberal arts, not the world of the hard sciences; politics and economics, not physics and chemistry, are the levers we use to change the world, when discussing public policy. With apologies to Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the problem of modernity is thus: we live in a world that we do not fully understand.

Unfortunately, we see the effects of this all the time when we study and review politics and policy: we treat the knowlege of those fields as if they were as solid as the knowledge that we learn in the hard sciences. A few examples:

• The “Great Moderation” of monetary policy in the 1990s and 2000s--where we thought that we had learned to control the business cycle through the wise stewardship of the Federal Reserve--was merely an exercise in hiding risk, rather than eliminating risk. Brilliant people like Alan Greenspan underestimated the risks of a calamity (though Greenspan personally gets more blame for this than he should).
• It turns out that democracies are much more prone to war than was assumed by the pervasive “Golden Arches” theory (popularized by Thomas Friedman) of the late 1990s.
• It turns out that party structures have less control over the outcomes of presidential nominating processes than was argued in the leading book on the issue, The Party Decides.

F.A. Hayek nailed this in his 1974 Nobel Prize address, and it remains correct today:

Unlike the position that exists in the physical sciences, in economics and other disciplines that deal with essentially complex phenomena, the aspects of the events to be accounted for about which we can get quantitative data are necessarily limited and may not include the important ones. While in the physical sciences it is generally assumed, probably with good reason, that any important factor which determines the observed events will itself be directly observable and measurable, in the study of such complex phenomena as the market, which depend on the actions of many individuals, all the circumstances which will determine the outcome of a process... will hardly ever be fully known or measurable. And while in the physical sciences the investigator will be able to measure what, on the basis of a prima facie theory, he thinks important, in the social sciences often that is treated as important which happens to be accessible to measurement. This is sometimes carried to the point where it is demanded that our theories must be formulated in such terms that they refer only to measurable magnitudes.

The more important piece is this: not only do we not really understand the world, we aren’t particularly likely to “understand” it anytime soon. We’ve been making mistakes for centuries, and we should expect that it will continue. The pretension that we do understand the world leads us towards grave errors.

It is both terrifying and liberating to accept that we live in a world that we cannot and do not fully understand. It’s terrifying, in that we have invented or discovered thousands of things that can kill us, from bacteria to nuclear weapons, and we don’t fully understand the space in which we interact with those doomsday devices. But it is also liberating, in that admitting that we have a problem is the first step towards figuring out an approach to solving it.

The remainder of this series is going to focus on how we deal with a world that we don’t understand. Below will follow five suggestions, each of which will get its own writeup this week. In a world we don’t understand:

1. Decentralization is better than centralization.
2. Social harmony is an intrinsic good, and apolitical spaces are an important way to foster it.
3. We should strive for a system built on predictable rules, rather than reliance on individuals.
4. Tradition and the “old ways of doing things” deserve some deference, though we should not slavishly adhere to them.
5. We should be wary of demagoguery and populism, though not reflexively dismissive.

Finally, I will attempt a synthesis, and I'll recommend some (better) writers.