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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.