My colleague Paul Krugman, commenting on a generous profile of some of my reform conservative friends by Sam Tanenhaus in this weekend’s Times Magazine, is skeptical that any new or new-ish right-of-center policy ideas could meaningfully reshape America’s political debates:
… the whole notion that new ideas are what politics is about is greatly overrated. Governing isn’t like selling smartphones; the underlying shape of the problems you have to confront changes quite slowly, and the basics of policy debate are quite stable.
In particular, the central policy debate in US politics hasn’t changed in decades, nor should it. Liberals want a strong social safety net, financed with relatively high taxes, especially on high incomes. Conservatives want much less of a safety net, and much lower taxes on the affluent.
… I suspect that at some level the reform conservatives know this. The point of their proposed policy tweaks, I’d argue, is less to achieve results than to let the GOP dissociate itself from soaring inequality and stagnating incomes, without changing its fundamental policy stance. And it’s not a trick that’s likely to work.
Reading this, it struck me that my colleague’s skeptical take overlaps in interesting ways with the most stinging critique of reform conservatism I’ve read from the right. I have in mind this recent column by the Wall Street Journal’s Kim Strassel, taking reform conservatism to task for imagining that the right needs a new, post-Reagan-era script:
… a new wing of the conservative movement … has taken to arguing that the whole free-market, supply-side, Reaganesque agenda is passé … this group has made some waves with their manifesto “Room to Grow” … [which] has some interesting ideas, all overshadowed by the book’s central premise: That conservatives need to embrace government to better endear themselves to the “middle class.”
Absent … is any recognition of why Reagan, and the party, embraced tax cuts. It’s this thing called “economics.” Cutting taxes on capital—and cutting high marginal rates—spurs investment, which grows the economy, which benefits everyone, including the middle class. The good politics follows. The middle-class beneficiaries of Reagan’s economic boom showed their own appreciation by signing up for a conservative political realignment that lasted decades.
… What matters to the “reformers,” explained New York Times columnist Ross Douthat last year, in praising the Lee tax plan, is moving conservative tax policy beyond “1979.” This again confuses policy and politics. Good economic policy doesn’t have a sell-by date. ( Adam Smith ? Ugh. He is just so 1776.)
Naturally I don’t think that either my colleague or Strassel are quite doing justice to the agenda they’re critiquing. But in slightly different ways, they represent a powerful bipartisan perspective on our efforts: That right is right and left is left, that the faces may change but the song remains the same, that the top marginal tax rate and the proper percentage of G.D.P. devoted to downward redistribution are the only questions that really matter in modern political economy, and that everything else is just messaging, which either obscures the underlying truth (Krugman’s take) or represents a politically-driven surrender (Strassel’s view) to the other side. When you get down to policy bedrock, it’s always 1979, because it was already 1979 in 1965 and 1933 and 1776, and either you want to keep going with the Gipper or you want to roll back his dreadful mistakes. There is no other alternative.
Can this be right? Well, elements of the argument are plainly defensible: Ideas aren’t bad just because they’re old (and sometimes old ideas are very good indeed), some economic disagreements are evergreen, the right and left are always going to divide over big-picture questions about the proper size and scope of government and the wisdom of certain forms of redistribution.
But I think my colleague and my fellow conservative columnist are making much more sweeping claims. If Strassel is correct, then particular circumstances are essentially irrelevant to policy prescriptions. It matters not whether inflation is high or low, whether the top marginal tax rate is 70 percent or 39 percent, whether we’re spending more on military programs or more on entitlements, whether our population is growing or declining, whether the workforce participation rate is high or low, whether most households consist of families with children or singletons, how fast the cost of health care or education or anything else is rising; the crucial argument and the correct conservative prescription are always and everywhere (save, I suppose, in a flat-tax utopia) what they were when Reagan ran for president.
If Krugman is correct, meanwhile, then a wide array of seemingly interesting questions about how we tax and spend and govern — all the details of the tax code; all the incentives, perverse and positive, embedded in public programs; all the ways that political economy interacts with social trends and cultural forces; all the difficult cost-benefit questions surrounding regulations and mandates and subsidies and the relationship between government and business; all the issues (immigration, criminal justice, marriage law, etc.) that don’t necessarily map onto size-of-government debates at all — are almost always necessarily overshadowed by a conflict in which the only important questions are “how high?” and “how much?”
And if they’re both right, it doesn’t matter how coalitions change or policy agendas seem to shift; we’re basically destined to re-run the 2012 election — with a liberal coalition bound together by socioeconomic fear pitted against a conservative party running on “maker vs. taker” resentment — now and evermore, world without end.
Imagine, in other words, “the life of Julia” and “you built that!” as boots stomping on America’s face, pretty much forever. My deeply pessimistic streak compels me to allow that this is, in fact, a live possibility for our country’s political future. But to the extent that reform conservatism makes a different bet, I’m proud that we’re standing athwart that future, yelling “stop.”