hayek

Has the Right been approaching politics wrong all along?  The Right has not figured out good policy means to accomplish its limited government & individual freedom ends.  The Right has been good at being anti-Left, but unsure what to do once it gains power. So what has been the problem?

Friedrich Hayek's essay, Why I am Not a Conservative, contains a few points the Right should consider carefully.

Let me now state what seems to me the decisive objection to any conservatism which deserves to be called such. It is that by its very nature it cannot offer an alternative to the direction in which we are moving. It may succeed by its resistance to current tendencies in slowing down undesirable developments, but, since it does not indicate another direction, it cannot prevent their continuance. It has, for this reason, invariably been the fate of conservatism to be dragged along a path not of its own choosing. The tug of war between conservatives and progressives can only affect the speed, not the direction, of contemporary developments. [...]

Personally, I find that the most objectionable feature of the conservative attitude is its propensity to reject well-substantiated new knowledge because it dislikes some of the consequences which seem to follow from it - or, to put it bluntly, its obscurantism. [...] By refusing to face the facts, the conservative only weakens his own position.

The implication of Hayek's position is that conservatism can never achieve the vision of genuine individual freedom - it can only oppose the Left.  If that is the case, then who can achieve limited government?  The Compassionate Conservative approach has been tried, miserably (though some, like Douthat and others advocate variations on it).  The religious right seems inclined towards a Christian Democrats approach (Huckabee, et al).  There is the "energetic" and "ambitious" "national greatness" approach advocated by those like David Brooks, Bill Kristol & John McCain.  LIbertarians and many independents/moderates are inclined toward a, you know, libertarian approach.  And there is also a more moderate libertarian parternalism approach that recognizes a role for government in addressing economic issues and market failures, but focuses on optimizing defaults and preserving choices.

So, a question: If conservatism is more of a social and cultural tendency, rather than an effective political philosophy, then what should be the driving political philosophy for the Republican Party?   (NOTE: This does not imply that the Republican Party becomes inimical to conservatives; only that the "movement" be driven by a political vision, not a social/cultural tendency)

There’s a weird symmetry between the Right and the Left. It’s difficult to articulate, but it’s becoming clearer to me now. They’re both Keynesians, only in different domains. The Left are Keynesians about economics, the Right are Keynesians about political strategy. The trouble with either is that Keynesianism doesn’t work very well anywhere it's applied.

Lest I lose my reader straight out of the gate, allow me to explain in simpler terms the defining characteristics of what I’ll call the “Keynesian Model.” This model:

1. Deals almost exclusively in macro-level aggregates.

2. Holds that these aggregates are mostly informative.

3. Information can be successfully used for macro purposes.

For example, in economics, Keynesians want to tweak or “stimulate” the economy by raining largess on particular sectors to stimulate aggregate labor demand, say.

But the trouble with this way of looking at the world is:

I. The micro-level is where most of the action is.

II. The devil of the economy is in the details of billions of individual means-ends actions, coordinations and transactions, which makes knowledge mostly local.

III. These details are far to complex to be reduced to aggregates and manipulated to positive effect.

Now, I believe the Left has figured out I-III in the political domain, though sadly not in the economic (indeed, I seriously doubt they care about the micro mechanisms of economic growth at all, as I argue here.  Keynesian policies of the Obama Administration are merely a pretext for the end of consolidating power, economics be damned. But I digress.). The point is, the right seems to be under a similar spell, except in their approach to political strategy.

"Yet though hot socialism is probably a thing of the past, some of its conceptions have penetrated far too deeply into the whole structure of current thought to justify complacency.  If few people in the Western world now want to remake society from the bottom according to some ideal bluepoint, a great many still believe in measures which, though not designed completely to remodel the economy, in their aggregate effect may well unintentionally produce this result.  And, even more than at the time when I wrote this book, the advocacy of policies which in the long run cannot be reconciled with the preservation of a free society is no longer a party matter.  That hodgepoedge of ill-assembled and often inconsistent ideals which under the name of the Welfare State has largely replaced socialism as the goal of the reformers needs very careful sorting-out if its results are not to be very similar to those of full-fledged socialism.  This is not to say that some of its aims are not both practicable and laudable.  But there are many ways in which we can work toward the same goal, and in the present state of opinion there is some danger that our impatience for quick results may lead us to choose instruments which, though perhaps more efficient for achieving the particular ends, are not compatible with the preservation of a free society.  The increasing tendency to rely on administrative coercion and discrimination where a modification of the general rules of law might, perhaps more slowly, achive the same object, and to resort to direct state controls or to the creation of monopolistic institutions where judicious use of financial inducements might evoke spontaneous efforts is still a powerful legacy of the socialist period which is likely to influence policy for a long time to come."

-Hayek, in the Preface to the 1956 Edition of The Road to Serfdom.

The Freedom Coalition is scrambling. Bipartisan bailouts and a profligate Republican Party seem not only to have conjured up the specter of Keynes but the American Left in force. The left has outsmarted the center-right Freedom Coalition in all the ways that count. That is, our democratic republic is, and always has been, about getting that 50 percent plus one. The left has figured this out and put the bulk of its investments behind this fact. And while we may like to tell ourselves that 'politics goes in cycles,' no one may credibly doubt the effort and organization of Democrats and progressives and the failure of the Freedom Coalition to adapt.

Meanwhile, as libertarians smugly explained the irrationality of voting – you know, clustering problems, paradoxes and the improbability of the tie-breaking vote – leftwing activists have spent a fortune in time and money getting people to do something irrational. And it worked. Aging right-wingers have been content to jockey their wingback chairs and will their estates to AEI, Cato or Heritage, so these goliath think tanks can print up yet more high-quality policy reports 250 people will read. This is a problem.

The Think Tank Bubble

F.A. Hayek is known among freedom lovers as describing the structure of production. The idea is often rendered as a triangle cut into thirds, like a simple hierarchy: At the top are the raw materials (say, silicon). The second slice is the capital goods (assembly line). Then come the consumer goods (iPod, marketing). The idea is of a production process whereby resources pass through each stage before finally satisfying human wants and needs.  Likewise, we can imagine socio-political change going through a similar process. First, you have some abstract academic theory, which filters down to the think tanks and policy shops, finally to be run through the legislative sausage grinder or presented to voters as talking points. That's the 30,000 foot view. From ideas to policy to implementation (or from academia to think tanks to ordinary politics). Obviously, the structure of social change is much more complicated than this simplified model reveals. But it's largely correct. The devil, as they say, is in the details.

Now, if we look at the average "freedom portfolio" we're going to see something that will go very far in explaining the Freedom Coalition's most recent voting booth humiliations—an investment bubble. Too many resources are going to think tanks—that is, that second slice of the structure. (The left has put most of its resources into implementation, never mind academia, which it has always owned.) Any renaissance of the Freedom Coalition will require freedom-lovers to divest themselves of legacy think tanks and start putting their freedom investments into something else. But where?

First, the Freedom Coalition is going to have to play catch-up on the one hand and tit-for-tat on the other. To figure out how to compete, it will have to look at the competition for benchmarks. What are they doing right? If the Freedom Coalition does its due diligence, it will find a second-mover advantage. Then, the right is going to have innovatively to reconfigure itself around what it has learned: new media; mass media, branding and marketing and get out the vote (GOTV)—and any other unseemly aspect of deadweight activism. Individualist-types may find this unsavory. We prefer ideas and analysis to groupish activism. We relish the holistic logic of market solutions and believe the world must kneel to rational argument. Tough. That's not the world in which we find ourselves. So unless we're prepared to argue with the machine or take up arms and rebel, we've got to play the implementation game and play it better. (Part Two here - Max Borders, Free to Choose Network)