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The Reform Conservatism movement gets a three part look from Jennifer Rubin. In the first part she asks the authors why they are making the effort now.

Bits and pieces of reform conservatism have been around since the original neo-cons of the 1950, and we’ve had compassionate conservatism. But it seems you are talking about a more fundamental revision in how the right looks at government. What prompted you to put it all together in a cohesive way? GOP political defeat? Obamacare?

 

Yuval Levin: The context for this is really not so much a failure of conservatism as the failure of liberalism. The liberal welfare state has never been a very good match for the realities of American life, and that problem is getting worse and worse all the time as our economy and our society are increasingly moving away from a consolidated, centralized, “big institution” way of life. Americans understand that our institutions of government are not functioning well in the 21st century, and that the country’s economic performance and the prospects of the middle class and of those who want to join the middle class are held back by these failures. We’re not living in a situation in which the left has a winning formula and the right has to learn from it (or vice versa). Both parties have been somewhat intellectually exhausted, but conservatives are in a far better position to recover from that and to offer the public an agenda that applies conservative principles to today’s problems in ways very well suited to the concerns and anxieties of working families. The idea behind this book is really to put in one place some of the key conservative policy ideas that form the backbone of that kind of middle-class agenda.

Ramesh Ponnuru: Every generation of conservatives has to apply conservative principles to the circumstances in which they find themselves, and I don’t think we are trying to change those principles so much as do that work for our generation. I do think that Republicans’ failure to make conservatism relevant to today—to supply a compelling answer to the question, how would a conservative agenda make life better for my family and my country—has contributed to their recent defeats.

Peter Wehner: Republican defeats aren’t the sole reason I think this effort is necessary, but it’s part of the reason. The Republican Party is the political home of the conservative movement, and so when it fails, conservatism is set back. The GOP needs a better, more comprehensive and more modern governing vision. “Room To Grow” is our effort to meet that need. I’d add that there’s a tendency among some on the right to simply disparage government rather than to put forward ideas to improve (and responsibly re-limit) it; to speak only about its size and to ignore its purposes; to talk about abstract theories at the expense of practical solutions to problems facing middle-class Americans. We’re offering a conservative alternative to the failures of liberalism and doing so in a way that’s both principled and potentially popular, that’s consistent with our tradition and relevant to the challenges of our times. …

For the next part, Rubin asks about differences with Libertarians.

The reform conservative idea makes a break with libertarians insofar as you recognize a large but limited government is here to stay and government does have a role in setting the ground rules for people to succeed. Is that inevitable, and, as an electoral matter, do Republicans still come out ahead?

Levin: The role for government envisioned in these proposals is certainly an important role, but it is far more limited than the government we have now. It’s about helping people succeed, rather than doing everything for them. Many libertarians would probably agree that this is the sort of role government should play, and it’s certainly a set of policy proposals that’s closer to where a lot of libertarians are than much of what the Republican Party has offered and done in the past few decades. But it’s not based in a radically individualist notion of society. It’s based in something more like Mike Lee’s idea of the rugged American community — an idea with real liberty at its core. A lot of Americans can relate to that way of thinking about how our society works, so the politics of it do look more promising than the politics of the Republican agenda of the last few years.

Ponnuru: Libertarians come in many varieties, and I would think this agenda would have some appeal to the more practically minded among them. The government has done quite a lot to cartelize higher education, and libertarians have been among those most keen on pointing this out. As Andrew Kelly’s chapter points out, there are a lot of ways to start breaking up that cartel — ways that don’t pretend that we’re going to just get rid of federal support for higher education.

Wehner: Our agenda isn’t a libertarian ideal of course – there are, after all, intrinsic tensions that exists between conservatism and libertarianism – but if its policies were enacted into law most libertarians would, I think, be rather pleased; and they’d certainly be happier with what government would be doing than is now the case. Libertarians would be supportive, I should think, of our efforts to offer a different way of thinking about government, to move from administering large systems of service provision to empowering people to address the problems they confront on their own terms; to provide people with the resources and skills they need to address the challenges they face rather than to try to manage their decisions from on high. …

In the third and final part Jennifer Rubin asks about the “other” marriage debate.

Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) talks about the “other” marriage debate. How does government and should government work to promote marriage, delayed childbearing and other behaviors that keep people out of poverty? 

Levin: Obviously the role and the potential of public policy is always going to be very limited when it comes to these kinds of issues, but there are ways that government could do far less damage and some modest ways of making it easier for people to make constructive choices. Several of the chapters of this book address those kinds of questions, and in particular the chapters by Brad Wilcox and Scott Winship. You can read summaries and the full chapters here.

Ponnuru: It might be helpful merely to publicize the “success sequence”: Your odds of living in poverty are pretty low if you complete high school, get married and have children in that order. Policy might be able to help at the margin, by ending the marriage penalties that are implicit in various government programs — including Obamacare — and by lowering the tax burden on parents.

Wehner: This is an area where the government’s capacity to improve things is especially limited. The truth is we don’t really know what government can do to strengthen the institution of marriage and a marriage culture. As the marriage scholar Ron Haskins has pointed out, as the rates of single parenthood have risen and the consequences have become clear, all levels of government from local to federal have attempted to implement policies to address the problem — and all have met with very limited success. I agree with Ramesh; good policies might make some difference on the margins. But we’re dealing with something extraordinary and unprecedented. In 2000, Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan was asked to identify the biggest change he had seen in his 40-year political career. He responded that it was that the family structure had come apart all over the North Atlantic world, that it had happened in a historical instant, and that something that was not even imaginable in 1960 has now happened. What we have learned is that wise public policies in areas like crime, drug use, welfare and education can limit some of the damaging effects from the collapse of marriage. But that is quite a different matter from government being able to rebuild the institution of marriage. …

At the end of last week we spent some time with India’s election. This week another major electoral turnaround was registered in Europe. John Fund calls it a “European Earthquake.” 

How big was the “Euroskeptic” uprising in the elections for the European Parliament on Sunday? Martin Schulz of Germany, who is the left-wing candidate to become the next president of the European Commission, admitted that the results across the 28 member countries showed voters’ “total loss of trust” in pro-Europe parties. Guy Verhofstadt, a former Belgian prime minister who heads a centrist bloc of deputies in the Parliament, told a reporter that he, too, is now a Euroskeptic who wants reform in Brussels.

But the reality is that most committed supporters of an ever more powerful European Union will be tempted to ignore Sunday’s results, hoping that public dissatisfaction with bailouts and bureaucrats will abate. But the public might not play along. The best economic estimates are that Europe is facing another “lost decade” of economic growth — stagnant economies will do nothing to reduce sky-high unemployment among young people, and the need for more Eurocrisis bailouts will keep taxes high.

In Britain, the political earthquake was huge as the United Kingdom Independence Party, an avowedly Euroskeptic party, won 29 percent of the vote and became the first party other than the Conservatives and Labor to place first in a nationwide election in 108 years. Graham Watson, a defeated Liberal Democratic member of the European Parliament from Cornwall, told the BBC, “Britain is now more anti-European-integration than at any time since Napoleon.” Daniel Hannan, a National Review contributor and Conservative member of the European Parliament, told me last month that “the elites who promised us that greater centralization of power in Brussels would lead to peace have instead delivered what I warned against: animosity between nations and the rise of extremists.” …

Bret Stephens has more.

… When a political genius named Jean Monnet began the work of creating the European Economic Community in the 1950s, he understood, as the historian Brendan Simms notes, that “unity could only be achieved through stealthy cooperation between the major European governments, beginning with the economy.”

The best achievements of European institutions have all stemmed from removing restrictions—to trade, travel, residency and financial transactions. But for at least 30 years, the EU has mainly been in the business of imposing restrictions on everything from the judicial sentences that national courts can impose to the shape of the vegetables that Europeans get to eat. Stealth Europe transmogrified into Busybody Europe.

A decade ago it was conventional wisdom to observe that Europe had become a zone of perpetual peace, an agent of soft power and international law, Venus to America’s Mars. But history is coming back to Europe, and not just at the far margin in places like Donetsk. The European Parliament may be mostly toothless as a political institution. But now there’s no blinking at the fact that fascism is no longer just a piece of Europe’s past but also a realistic possibility for its future.

There will be a temptation to bury the implications of this vote for another five years. But if youth unemployment remains at 25% in France and 57% in Spain, these elections will only be the beginning of another ugly chapter in European civilization. Mr. Putin can sense that the ghosts hovering over the continent work in his favor.

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May 25th Pickings featured a long article by Kevin Williamson seeking to answer the question of why the government always screws up. Now Noemie Emery has an essay that could be a companion piece as she traces all the bien pensants, convinced of their wisdom, who erect an edifice of government coercion.

They had a dream. For almost a hundred years now, the famed academic-artistic-and-punditry industrial complex has dreamed of a government run by their kind of people (i.e., nature’s noblemen), whose intelligence, wit, and refined sensibilities would bring us a heaven on earth. Their keen intellects would cut through the clutter as mere mortals’ couldn’t. They would lift up the wretched, oppressed by cruel forces. Above all, they would counter the greed of the merchants, the limited views of the business community, and the ignorance of the conformist and dim middle class. 

Out of sorts and out of office after 1828, when power passed from the Adamses to the children of burghers and immigrants, they had begun to strike back by the 1920s, led by the likes of George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, H. L. Mencken, Herbert Croly, and Sinclair Lewis. Their stock in trade was their belief in themselves, and their contempt for the way the middle class thought, lived, and made and spent money: Commerce was crude, consumption was vulgar, and industry, which employed millions and improved the lives of many more people, too gross and/or grubby for words. “For the American critics of mass culture, it was the good times of the 1920s, not the depression of the 1930s, that proved terrifying,” says Fred Siegel, whose book The Revolt Against the Masses describes and eviscerates this group and its aspirations. In their dream world, “intellectuals, as well as poet-leaders, experts, and social scientists such as themselves would lead the regime,” as Siegel tells us. “It was thus a crucial imperative to constrain the conventional and often corrupt politics of middle-class capitalists so that these far-seeing leaders might obtain the recognition and power that was only their due.”

Attitudinal rather than doctrinaire in their judgments, they leaned Democratic because of their loathing of business, but they judged people largely by mores and manners, and men in both parties would earn their contempt. Harry Truman, as Siegel notes, “had triumphed not only over Republicans and business, but also over Henry Wallace and the supporters of the Soviet Union on the left, and Strom Thurmond and the Dixiecrat segregationists of the right.” Truman was also a businessman whose small men’s-wear store had gone bankrupt, and for this Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., a solon whose influence would span half a century, called him “a man of mediocre and limited capacity.” Schlesinger, who also complained about the “Eisenhower trance” and described the race between Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter as “Babbitt vs. Elmer Gantry,” would find his true soulmate in Adlai E. Stevenson, a fellow snob and two-time loser in the race for the White House, whom Michael Barone has described as “the first leading Democratic politician to become a critic rather than a celebrator of middle class American culture.” Schlesinger famously fell for John Kennedy and Franklin D. Roosevelt, less for their politics, which were in the end not too different from Truman’s, than for their personal glamour and aura of privilege, which set them apart from the multitude. But even those two, and their successors, fell short. Kennedy shunned Schlesinger’s counsel. Bill Clinton was a wonk but also a Bubba, who never completely outgrew the Hot Springs experience. All three had middlebrow tastes when it came to the culture, sympathized with the middle class, and tried to promote and not stifle prosperity and upward mobility. And thus the elites had to wait for the man of their dreams.

When they found him, he was a rare breed: a genuine African American (his father was Kenyan) who thought  and talked like the academics on both sides of his family, a product of the faculty lounge who dabbled in urban/race politics, a man who could speak to both ends of the liberals’ up-and-down coalition, and a would-be transformer of our public life whose quiet voice and low-key demeanor conveyed “moderation” in all that he spoke and did. Best of all, he was the person whom the two branches of the liberal kingdom—the academics and journalists—wanted to be, a man who shared their sensibilities and their views of the good and the beautiful. This was the chance of a lifetime to shape the world to their measure. He and they were the ones they were waiting for, and with him, they longed for transcendent achievements. But in the event they were undone by the three things Siegel had pegged as their signature weaknesses: They had too much belief in the brilliance of experts, they were completely dismissive of public opinion, and they had a contempt for the great middle class. …

 

… the NewRepublic admitted, the launch (of the health care act) was “a fiasco that could haunt progressives for years to come.” Also, “Liberalism has spent the better part of the past century attempting to prove that it could competently and responsibly extend the state into new reaches of American life. With the rollout of the Affordable Care Act, the administration has badly injured that cause.” One could say also that for the better part of the past century intellectual liberals had been attempting to prove they had superior judgment, and that hadn’t gone too well, either. But to note that it was a setback for their belief in themselves and their wisdom might have been a little too much to expect.

But that doesn’t mean that we cannot draw some conclusions about them and their class and their kind. One is that they were perhaps not as good as they thought they were, and perhaps deserved to be not that much listened to. Another is that the people who shine in the faculty lounge ought to stay in it, that novelists have not been good judges of political horseflesh, and that if you really believe you belong to an aristocracy of the intellect, you most likely do not. The intellectual salons include a whole lot of windbags, and would have excluded a number of very effective real-world practitioners, such as Truman and Reagan and Ike. 

“It is actually harder to do some of these things in reality than we thought when we put it down on paper,” a book review in the Washington Post quoted a former Obama health care adviser as saying. This can stand as the last word for the great aspiration, and the people who held it. They wanted their chance, and they got it. They had it. They blew it. They’re done.

James Geraghty posts on one of these bien pensants, Michelle Nunn who is running on the Dem ticket for Georgia’s senate seat. Michelle has spent her whole life in non-profits. She merged the one she started into G. H Bush’s Points of Light Foundation and in four years her pay went from $120,000 to $322,000. At the same time the number of employees dropped from 180 to 70. Another demonstration of how you can get well by doing good.

Georgia Democrats are quite excited about their candidate for Senate, Michelle Nunn.

Here’s how her campaign describes her work in the nonprofit sector:

“Seeing a need in Atlanta for a vehicle by which young people could engage in service to solve problems in their own communities, Michelle and a group of friends got together to create Hands On Atlanta, with Michelle as its first Executive Director. Over the next decade, Michelle grew volunteerism across Georgia, and eventually throughout the country, through Hands On Network, a national outreach of volunteer-service organizations. Michelle was selected for a three year Kellogg Foundation Fellowship that gave her an opportunity to travel the globe and work with civic and religious leaders to help them translate the common ground of their faith and ideals into building better, more productive communities and services.

In 2007, Hands On Network merged with the Points of Light Foundation, President George H.W. Bush’s organization and legacy. After leading a successful merger, Michelle became the CEO and President of Points of Light, now the largest organization in the country devoted to volunteer service.”

Sounds good, right? When Nunn was running Hands on Network, she was making $120,000 — a lot of money to most folks, but not that much more than the average of a CEO or executive director of a nonprofit in the Southeast. (In 2012, the average was $111,693.) …

Huffington Post has a bit on another fraud hoisted on the public – barefoot shoes.

From snake oil to supplements, Americans keep falling for shaky claims about health products. Blame our obsession with finding shortcuts to better health and fitness, and the many companies ready to take advantage of it.

In the latest example, Vibram, the maker of those $100 running shoes that look like feet, recently said it would settle a multimillion-dollar lawsuit alleging it made baseless claims that its FiveFingers shoes improve foot health, balance and muscles. Vibram is the latest in a line of shoemakers and other purveyors accused of hawking products with questionable health claims. It likely won’t be the last.

“Everyone is looking for that magic bullet that’s going to give them that extra edge,” said Cedric Bryant, the chief science officer at the American Exercise Council. “In most cases, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably isn’t [true].”

Companies make billions capitalizing on our desires for quick fixes and improved athletic performance. The Federal Trade Commission has accused at least four companies just this year of marketing “unfounded promises” of weight loss simply by using a cream or food additive. Weight-loss products accounted for the largest share of fraud claims submitted to the FTC in 2011, according to The New York Times. …