fiscal conservatism

Think about these two survey results:

- There is a significant disparity between younger and older voters on gay marriage and some other culture war issues.

- Southerners have a significantly different view of places like San Francisco and France than do the rest of the country.

- The only region where Barack Obama does not have high approval ratings is the South.

Over and over, Democrats have been crowing that the Republican Party is turning into a regional rump party with very limited appeal outside the old Confederacy and a few Great Plains states.  It's true that the South is different from the rest of the country, which doesn't have to be a bad thing.  The only problem is that you can't talk to the whole country in the same way because of it.

The remedies to the GOP's slide proposed thus far follow the same basic paradigm.  The purists say that the GOP needs to purge the RINOs and create a clear distinction between the parties.  The problem is that the American public sees the difference between the parties and is choosing Democrats.  It turns out that the endless harping on pork and nomination battles nominally related to abortion drive the base, but seems petty and shortsighted to most everyone else.  On the other hand, the reformers are more interested in creating more conservative and market-based solutions to problems Democrats are also addressing, but they are scorned by a base that sees them as part of a cocktail-sipping Northeastern elite, thus apostates unworthy of attention.  Moderate Republican candidates who have shown their ability to win in blue states are targeted by the Club for Growth.  They may hardly better than Democrats on some issues, but they contribute to creating a majority of seats.

So how do you hold on to a base that holds increasingly unpopular ideas on social policy while reaching out beyond so-called "real America" where many voters agree with our foreign and fiscal policy but can't stand the anti-intellectualism and public moral posturing of the hard-right southern wing?

   Set it free!

Why not split the GOP into a regional southern party while creating a new fiscally-conservative, socially-moderate party in the Northeast, Great Lakes and West?  Although I don't know if this is legal, why not have the two new parties sign a non-compete agreement?

I see the following benefits:

- The two parties can get together on issues they agree on, like taxes and perhaps elements of foreign policy.

- Freeing the SoCons to be SoCons.  They always lose within the GOP at the agenda-setting stage to the FisCons.  A three-party system will involve a lot more horse-trading, so more issues important to SoCons can actually make it to the floor, where they may even have a chance of winning.

- It does not imperil the solid South.  I can't imagine that many GOP incumbents in Dixie would be ousted by a party more attuned to the region's wants and needs.

There are risks.  There are huge risks.  One wonders how Presidential elections would work. However, it doesn't seem sane to keep trying to reconcile a largely regional base with parts of the country they don't even consider "real," or to write off voters and candidates who can win because they don't tow a line that is unpopular in their districts.  If the goal is not a GOP revival for its own sake, but the implementation of conservative governance, it's worth looking at.

Matt Moon keys off a tweet of mine suggesting a total earmark ban, at least until we get beyond the current disfigurement of the federal budget. He writes:

I agree with Patrick that earmarks are the most visible symbol. But that's exactly the problem. I don't agree that it's enough for Republicans to fix "symbols" of how we've lost our way. I don't agree that we need to focus on symbols. Yes, we need to fix the abuse of the earmark process by reforming it. But the fact is that not all earmarks can be construed as wasteful spending and not all wasteful spending are in earmarks.

I agree that earmarks are the tip of the iceberg when it comes to wasteful spending. Of late, I've also taken a dim view of symbolism as a substitute for policy. But here's the thing.

If we are going to spend $819 billion on an economic stimulus, and a $410 billion omnibus on top of it, the least Congress could do to signal that they are giving up some part of the gravy train is to suspend earmarked spending for the duration of the budget crisis. This is a political winner for Republicans. Republicans didn't have the votes to stop the stimulus or the omnibus, but we could rally public opinion around the idea of cutting off the part of the budget process perceived as the most politically self-serving and corrupt. It's not hundreds of billions of dollars, but it still makes a statement against the idea that the electorate can be bought with government dollars. In a minority situation such as the one we are in, it helps to pick fights we can win in the court of public opinion.

The political case for earmarks rests on the myth that constituents, Republicans and Democrats, want earmarks. In individual cases, this is true. But in the aggregate, polling has shown that the public takes a dim view of the process. And incumbents who do not take earmarks are re-elected at the same rate as incumbents who do.

The trouble with earmarks, beyond just their symbolic importance, is that earmarked spending is inherently recreational in nature. They are mostly for one-off projects that were never funded before, and are often a substitute for private investment -- making each earmark a mini-bailout.

Regardless of price tag, Republicans should not be in the business of defending new and optional spending. It's just not in our DNA as Republicans. One can be a fiscal conservative and support spending on basic public services like police, schools, and roads that are funded year in and year out. If earmarked projects are truly necessary, they should be funded through the ordinary budget process, not through haphazard one-off earmarks.

I agree with Alexander Brunk's main point over on the main site (unfortunately my screen-reading software doesn't cope well with HTML so I can't post the link and make it look pretty). II intended to post this comment in response, but I decided it was long enough to merit a post of it's own.

There is an increasing tendency to hyphenate our conservatism, which I think  is dangerous. In general, I'd describe conservatives as people who, whensome grand new form of social engineering is proposed, stand athwart the train yelling, at the very least, "hold on a minute. Let's think this over shall we?" This is the tendency which unites opponents of redefining marriage with opponents of redefining the role of government; a basic sense that our institutions and liberties have served us well and shouldn't be overturned lightly. Incidentally, I'd argue that defense cons are opposing a redefining of our national interests and defense policy from the common framework we've accepted throughout history. The US has almost never embraced the isolation of the Paulites or the internationalism of the progressive left, and for those who think neoconservatism is some radical form of new foreign policy, I'd recommend a more careful reading of the history of the nineteenth century. Now, this isn't to say that conservatives are lock-step opposed to "change", but we tend to, I think, look for reforming rather than revolutionary change. As Rudi Giuliani brilliantly pointed out in the primary, we should be talking about the kind of change we want, rather than simply talking about change.

This does not mean that every conservative is going to agree about everything all the time. Mike Huckabee and Rudi Giuliani have, policy-wise, fairly little in common. There are also some conservatives who believe that their caution should extend to both fiscal and social issues, but who tend to emphasize one or the other more. However, if we all share this basic caution and skepticism about the social engineering which has fascinated progressives from eugenics to the "new new deal", then we are all conservatives.

I think progressives have a different, more eschatological philosophy. For a progressive (which is a more accurate term than liberal I think), there is always (A) some catastrophic calamity facing society which (B) we have brought on ourselves and which (C) only a radical re-engineering of society can ultimately solve. Eugenicists railed against the polution of "good genes" by hordes of Eastern European immigrants and the handicapped. Their solution was a new, almost unheard of regime of national entry quotas for immigration and the sterilization of those they demed mentally and physically incapable. The recession of 1929, under the progressive presidencies of Herbert Hoover (read Modern Times by Johnson if you disbelieve Hoover was a progressive) and FDR gave birth to the single greatest expansion of the role and scope of government in American history to that point. LBJ fought a war on poverty with yet another such expansion. The calamity of US foreign policy causing all manner of domestic and international ills (the Progressive read not mine) must be met with unilateral nuclear disarmament and a policy of "getting along better" with other nations. Racism could, for progressives, be socialy engineered away by successive government programs from bussing to affirmative action. Finally, in modern times, global warming must be met with another radical reconstruction of our society. Of course, some of these problems (racism) were and are real and others (the fears of eugenicists) were products of progressives' fevered imaginations. Whether real or imagined however, the problems spotted by progressives are almost never solved by them. We need progressives in society, spotting areas which need reform, but we probably ought never actually let them run things.

One more thought. I think that, among some fiscal conservatives, there is a fear that "so-cons" are really social engineers in Christian clothing. This may be true in a few cases, but in general I think you've got nothing to worry about. For the most part, so-cons want to be left alone to live and worship in the way they choose, and they feel that the hostility of culture and government makes this problematic. In many cases, so-cons want to change culture, but through persuasion and the open marketplace of ideas by preference. Unfortunately, much of the media and cultural attention lavished on so-cons portrays them as social engineers. Don't believe the hype.

DaveG has a conventional-wisdom challenging piece over on Race42008 outlining some of the shortcomings he sees in Bobby Jindal's performance as Governor so far. Dave frets that Jindal seems to be turning into a Huckabee, being more apt to compromise on fiscal issues than social issues. But the evidence of Jindal's fiscal apostasy is pretty thin, to say the least:

Behold, the broken campaign promise. Jindal recently signed into law a massive legislative pay increase in Louisiana after specifically promising not to do so on the campaign trail. I guess a 123 percent raise is justified given today’s gas prices. Or something.

But never fear, Gov. Jindal is not the sort of politician that will back down on all of his principles. Especially when those principles involve religion. Indeed, Jindal has just signed into law a measure that will allow public schools to teach something other than science in science class. Local school boards can now approve “supplemental materials” for schools to include in discussions of evolution. Something tells me those materials won’t involve the scientific method (because if they did, they’d already be there) and will involve lots of concepts that belong in philosophy, theology, and religion classes, not in science class.

If anyone is looking for evidence of Jindal the fiscal conservative, they'll find it in the six tax cuts Jindal has passed in six months, including the repeal of 2002's Stelly tax increase signed last week totaling $300 million in savings to the taxpayers. To say that Jindal has not has not governed in a fiscally conservative manner is a stretch.

It also ignores his record in Congress, where he voted against earmarks 98% of the time in the last Congress.

Speaing to Dave's broader point, at least in the short run, fiscal conservative maximalism tethered to social conservative maximalism -- a brand of politics Jindal represents -- is still the best way to reignite the Reagan coalition and get the activist core inspired again. This level of grassroots participation is an essential waypoint on the path back to real power.