At the risk of using intellectual capital paying attention to an "alternative weekly," the copy of LEO I picked up while enjoying an Asian Sesame Salad and free wi-fi at Panera just begs for it. I’ll check out the Best of Louisville choices later (I was happy to see the Twig and Leaf picked as best cheap eats), but the editor just had to follow his pre-election prediction of a resounding Kerry victory with this:
Like many other liberals, I am still in denial,
which, as they say, is not a river in Egypt. However, as a refuge it’s
warmer than Canada and you don’t have to watch hockey.Speaking
of denial, while I congratulate the Republican partisans on their
victory, I contend it is they who remain in denial about many important
things. Here are 10 ways you will know you’re a conservative in denial:1.
You believe American gays and lesbians are preparing for mass suicide.
They are going to go on living — together — sometimes right next door
to you — and they will eventually be married or civilly united despite
cruel, manipulative referenda like the one passed here in Kentucky. And
in a stunning development, heterosexual marriages won’t change, for
better or worse.
First, a caveat. I don’t really consider myself a conservative in the purest sense. I do, however, share many conservative positions, and this list just begs a nice fisking. On, as they say, with the show. Yarmuth here trots out the tired saw that the "moral values" voters swung the election for Bush, particularly the gay-hating voters in the eleven gay marriage amendment states. This is simply not true - as I have pointed out before, Bush gained more in several surprising states than he did in the Gay Eleven. More importantly, Bush voters are almost evenly divided on the issue of recognition of homosexual relationships. 49.3% of Bush voters approve of either gay marriage or civil unions (all exit poll data via CNN). Given that nearly 60% of Bush voters self-identify as conservative, there is some support for civil unions among conservatives (not the least from the President himself). I don’t completely disagree with the description of the Kentucky amendment - I voted against it - but the support for these amendments comes more from a sense that the issue is being judicially imposed than from hatred of gays or a desire that they not "go on living — together — sometimes right next door
to you."
2. You believe there is such a thing as a permanent
tax cut. Maybe Congress will eliminate the “sunset†provisions of the
Bush cuts, but what Congress gives it can take away, and it surely will
raise somebody’s taxes at some point.
Well, duh. I don’t know any conservative, in denial or otherwise, that actually believes this. After seeing taxes increase under Clinton, and hearing Kerry and his Democratic legislator colleagues call for a tax increase, who would? "Make the tax cuts permanent" should be obvious shorthand for "make the tax cuts permanent until Congress goes on the record supporting a tax increase instead of allowing them to raise taxes without voter accountability" to anybody paying attention. Which Yarmuth isn’t.
3. You believe that deficits don’t matter. They
especially matter to the foreign investors who have loaned such a huge
percentage of the money we are borrowing to finance the Bush/GOP
spending spree that is racking up debt at the rate of $400 billion a
year.
This is a valid point, but not the point Yarmuth thinks he is making. Conservatives aren’t in denial thinking deficits don’t matter - its a basic tenet of conservative doctrine that the government spends too much. Rather, this proves that when it comes to fiscal policy, President Bush is not a conservative.
4. You believe the health-care crisis in this
country can be solved within the free marketplace. Health care is not a
free market; to a large extent, demand for medical treatment is not
affected by supply or cost, and unless we control costs or ration
supply, we will go broke taking care of people.
Here Yarmuth makes a typical liberal error and faulty argument, assuming that the current state of the health care system proves that health care is not a free market. It’s very hard to determine the true elasticity of demand for routine health care because the current system perverts market forces. Under the current system, the payer (largely employers) and the consumer (the patient) are not the same, so there is no easy way to determine how demand responds to cost. Of course, in some cases the choice is between a medical procedure and death, but a big chunk of health care costs are not. Further, our current system of health care "insurance" is not really insurance at all (as would be, say, catastrophic-care insurance). Rather, it’s a system of employer subsidization of routine medical costs and a means for employees to pay for care using pretax dollars. If you want market forces to be effective, a system of catastrophic care insurance and medical savings accounts makes more sense.
5. You believe global warming is a myth. It isn’t,
as another important study demonstrated earlier this week. There is no
escaping the fact that the Bush-Cheney extraction-industry-dominated
agenda is doing serious harm to nature.
Hard to know where to begin with this one. First, not all conservatives believe global warming is a "myth." Some certainly do, and those on each side of the equation have studies in their respective arsenals. Some conservatives believe there may be some truth to theories of human influence on climate change, but believe that the costs of the remedies proposed outweigh the putative benefits. In any event, the Bush agenda is neither "extraction industry" (whatever that is) dominated nor doing serious harm to nature. And liberals espousing this view have not proposed any serious alternative to the "extraction industry," primarily because there is none.
6. You believe Roe vs. Wade will be overturned. The
GOP needs the issue far more than it wants to end abortions. It is
becoming the wedgie (as in wedge issue) party.
Let’s take the last sentence first - this is an unfair and gratuitous slam on conservatives. Any issue on which people disagree is a wedge issue, in the sense that proponents of one position use it to try to influence voters to vote for their side or vote against the other. Why is it that when conservatives do it (i.e. abortion), they’re the wedgie party, but when liberals do it (i.e. scaring seniors with vague threats about Social Security or spreading the absurd draft issue this year), it’s legitimate politics?
As for the first point, it is true that most (but not all) conservatives oppose abortion. And most (but not all) would like to see an end to Roe. Many of us who actually disfavor criminalizing abortion still oppose the Roe decision on constitutional or federalist grounds. Both parties have a clear interest in keeping the Roe bogeyman alive - Republicans raise a lot of money and win a lot of votes by agitating against the Roe decision, and Democrats raise a lot of money and win a lot of votes by agitating against Republican threats to Roe. If the decision were overturned, and the battle turned to the statehouse (where it belongs in the first place), the dynamic, but not the ideology, would change.
7. You believe stem cell research has been ended.
England, France, Germany and probably many other countries (not to
mention California), will continue to aggressively pursue stem cell
research, which means that they’ll have something else we need.
Nobody with half a brain believes this. Those who support the President are smart enough to realize that limiting federal spending on an issue has little to no effect on private, state or foreign spending on that issue. In any event, there is a lot more liberal denial here than conservative. The President’s action didn’t affect federal spending on adult stem cell research an iota, allows significant level of federal funding for embryonic stem cell research, and has no effect at all on private spending on research, even at federally-supported institutions. Plus, I’m sure there are a goodly number of fiscal conservatives who believe as I do, that this, like much research, is better supported with private dollars than funds expropriated from taxpayers.
8. You believe the “No Child Left Behind†act really
leaves no children behind. Until we (and here I mean states as well as
the feds) get as serious about funding as we are about testing and
blaming, our schools won’t improve.
At least two errors in thinking here. First, conservatives have been vocal in decrying the liberal educational establishment’s interference with NCLB, which has led to very few of the students eligible to transfer from failing schools actually transferring. If public school administrators and teachers unions won’t let kids leave failing schools, the statute won’t have its desired effect, as you’ve taken away the stick (and there wasn’t much carrot to begin with).
Second, the idea that if we just gave schools more money, they’d excel has been thoroughly debunked. The Jefferson County Public Schools spend nearly as much per-student as I pay in private school tuition for my kindergartner. But they still fail. They fail because the public school establishment is dominated by teachers’ unions opposed to any accountability, because they’re dominated by groupthink and a devotion to protecting the psychological well-being of failing students at the expense of education, because they have abandoned proven educational models in favor of "new" techniques developed in the Education Schools turnigng out the teachers who aren’t successfully teaching students. And because they refuse to see that they are providing a service to consumers, who have a right to demand acceptable performance as does every consumer of any service, while denying consumers any degree of choice or competitive alternative.
9. You believe the world will now support George W.
Bush’s foreign policy because he won. Just as conservatives don’t want
to be dictated to by intellectuals (also known as the reality-based),
the world doesn’t want to be ordered around by a cowboy.
This is just dumb. George Bush got a whole lot of votes from a whole lot of voters, both conservative and otherwise, precisely because they don’t give a good goddamn what the rest of the world believes about U.S. foreign policy. Because they don’t care that the French and Germans are crying in their provided by bribes and UN graft cabernets and beer. No conservative believes that the world will toe the U.S. line because Bush won reelection, any more than they thought the world would do that during the previous four years because Bush won election the first time (maybe Yarmuth is from the "selected not elected" school of liberal nuttery).
10. You believe you have driven a stake through the
heart of liberalism. Fifty-five million Americans voted for the “most
liberal member of the U.S. Senate.†Young people and most ethnic groups
supported the liberal candidate, and they will constitute an
increasingly larger percentage of the electorate. Demographic trends
aren’t good for conservatives.
Most conservatives don’t believe this either, but it should be noted that the only Democrat to win election since 1976 won because he successfully promoted the idea that he was not a liberal. And that unprecedented amounts of George Soros’ money, Hollywood agitation and Michael Moore blather couldn’t achieve victory in an election involving a war about which the public was divided. If the liberals can’t win under these circumstances, it’s unlikely that they can win national election (the so-called liberal candidate this time couldn’t even win the Iowa primary).
The demographic trends don’t necessarily help Democrats either. They don’t have a stranglehold on their base the way they used to. Bush increased his share of the Latino vote by nearly 10 percentage points over 2000. He increased support among Catholics, Jews and Atheists. As minority groups move further into the middle class and the suburbs, it is likely that a significant subset will vote Republican. As the 18-29 set actually graduate from college, get jobs and pay taxes, a significant subset will vote Republican. As Churchill is alleged to have said "If you’re not a liberal when you’re in your 20s you haven’t got a
heart; if you’re not a conservative by the time you’re 40 you haven’t
got a brain." This is likely to hold true. Finally, the electorate has been growing more Republican, not less. This year, voters were as likely to say they were Republican as Democrat (37% for each). This reverses the usual pattern in national elections, and makes it unlikely that "[d]emographic trends
aren’t good for conservatives."
November 21st, 2004 at 10:04 am
I like your thoughts on this.
I’ve always felt that Yarmoth’s best and most informed articles are when he talks about the democratic party. He’s on solid ground there. He knows them best. He is an unashamed libral, hangs out with his liberal friends, co-workers, and political cohorts so that is the field he knows.
When he criticizes the conservatives, it becomes painfully obvious that he just doesn’t know any. Get out there and mingle John!
Oh! And great site, BTW. I just found you this morning.