Ross Douthat on the Tea Parties

From what appears to be Ross Douthat's penultimate post on his Atlantic blog, before his move to the New York Times op/ed page ("The Tea Parties"):

They resemble nothing so much as the anti-war protests during Bush's first term. The claim that they don't have an organizing premise strikes me as obviously wrong: They're anti-bailout, anti-stimulus, anti-deficit, and anti- the tax increases that will eventually be required to pay for the current spending spree, and complaining that they don't also have a ten-point plan for reforming Medicare and Social Security reflects a misunderstanding of the nature of protest marches, I think. The claim that they're hypocritical and partisan is a bit stronger - where were they when Bush was running up the deficit, etc. - but in fairness, many of the organizing figures were anti-TARP from the beginning, and there's something slightly odd about saying that if you didn't take to the streets to protests a $300 billion deficit you aren't allowed to protest a $1 trillion deficit. The numbers matter, surely ...

But they do have all of the weaknesses of the anti-war marches: Their message is intertwined with a sense of disenfranchisement and all kinds of inchoate cultural resentments, they've brought various wacky extremists out of the woodwork (you know, like Glenn Beck), and just as George W. Bush benefited from having opposition to his policies identified with peacenik marchers in Berkeley and Ann Arbor, so Barack Obama probably benefits from having the opposition (such as it is) associated with a bunch of Fox News fans marching through the streets on Tax Day, parroting talk radio tropes and shouting about socialism.

In those two paragraphs we may have the case for Douthat as a New York Times token conservative columnist distilled. In the first paragraph Douthat makes a gesture of standing athwart the spending tsunami and... noting that it's troubling; in the second paragraph he expresses his disdain for the grassroots conservative rabble that has been protesting this same spending tsunami. For good measure, Douthat finishes with a soupçon of hypocrisy in that last sentence, where he parrots the snark of the Washington Insider's David Weigel (see the caption below the third photo), while mocking protesters for "parroting talk radio tropes".

The handy graphic above comes from Douthat's post.

Atlas Shrugging

Ayn Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged has come up a lot recently in commentary about Obama administration initiatives (e.g., this column by Robert Tracinsky last week, "The Ayn Rand Factor In the Santelli Revolt"). Since one of Daniel Wahl's favorite posts (#5) on his old blog expressed Randian sentiments, I mentioned the Tracinsky column to him and suggested he might want to consider writing a post on the subject at his new blog, Systemically Important. Daniel hasn't written a post there on Atlas Shrugged yet (Today's Systemically Important post is "Mottos: Business Peopleguys"), but several other bloggers have, including Will Wilkinson (Hat Tip: Ross Douthat). For those who haven't read Atlas Shrugged and plan to, be warned that Wilkinson's post ("On Going Galt"), and the parts of it I'm about to excerpt below, include some spoilers.

Wilkinson:

I can’t help but feel that threatening to withdraw from economic production, ala Atlas Shrugged’s John Galt, is a certain kind of libertarian-conservative’s version of progressives threatening to move to Canada.

[...]

But insofar as this is all about taxes on the wealthy (as the link to Malkin suggests) it’s a bit hard to see tax rates somewhat exceeding the Clinton era’s as a move over some inflection point from the tolerable to the completely outrageous. And of course none of these folks designed an engine that would have created basically free energy (and made global warming a non-issue). In the individual case, “going Galt” smacks of a kind self-aggrandizement in the same way that climate smuggery does. Because, really, your marginal contribution doesn’t matter that much.

By the way, Atlas buffs, the point of Atlas Shrugged is not that you are John Galt. The point is that you are not John Galt. The point is that you are, at your best, Eddie Willers. You’re smart, hardworking, productive, and true. But you’re no creative genius and you take innovation — John Galt — for granted. You don’t even know who he is! And this eventually leaves you weeping on abandoned train tracks. 

Wilkinson makes a good point in that last paragraph, one I thought was plain when I read the book years ago, but this misunderstanding seems to be shared by some Atlas Shrugged detractors as well as buffs. Back to Wilkinson:

I think Obama’s policies will be bad for innovation, but not because higher marginal tax rates will lead our best and brightest to retire from the field of endeavor. I’m rather more worried that our best and brightest will follow the incentives and go Robert Stadler. I’m worried that our money, which might otherwise have gone to capitalize real innovation, will be confiscated in order to finance government directed “investment” instead. Our economy can readily absorb a passel of drop-out Willerses (though Eddie never quits!). It’s the misdirected capital embodied by the Stadlers and their Project Xes that really hurts.

Wilkinson is less convincing there. All things equal, additional government spending on scientific research (e.g., National Institutes of Health research grants) would probably increase innovation. The bigger potential threat to innovation isn't increased government spending per se¹, but the prospect of price controls (de facto or de jure) or rationing that might be part of a universal national health insurance program.

¹Increased government spending on transfer payments could indirectly stifle innovation if it increased pressure for price controls or reduced reimbursements in a universal government health insurance program.

I borrowed the image above, of the cover of a paperback edition of Atlas Shrugged, from this blog, which I'm sure borrowed it from Amazon.com or somewhere else.

Update: Daniel Wahl joins the discussion with his latest post: "Going Going Galt".

Ross Douthat on Obama's Speech and Jindal's Response

From his Atlantic blog ("Snap Judgments"):

Obama was fantastic - worlds better than his inaugural. He laid out the most ambitious and expensive domestic agenda of any Democratic President since LBJ, and did it so smoothly that you'd think he was just selling an incremental center-left pragmatism. I think that he has an acute sense - more acute than most people in Washington, probably - of just how much running room is open in front of him at the moment, and he intends to make the absolute most of it. Burkean temperament or no, this was not a Burkean speech by any stretch: It was the speech of a man seeking to turn a moment of crisis into a domestic-policy revolution, and oozing confidence from every pore along the way. Now all he has to do is find a way to pay for it ...
 
And Jindal - yeah, he was just as lousy as everybody's saying. As far as themes and messaging went, he basically chose option A on Ambinder's list - government isn't the solution; pork is the problem; etc. - and embedded it in a weak, sing-song delivery that I suspect left even the people who respond favorably to that message cold. Sure, responding to a Presidential speech is almost always a thankless, hopeless job - but shouldn't someone as smart as Jindal have recognized that, and either turned the opportunity down flat, or found a way to sound like something other than a kindergarten teacher delivering familiar GOP talking points? In the event, his speech was the capstone on a lousy night for conservatism: If that's the best the Right has to offer as a rebuttal to Obama, American liberalism is going to be running untouched down the field for years to come.

Douthat's mostly on-target here. There are plenty of legitimate criticisms of the stimulus bill Obama recently signed -- e.g., that it won't provide enough stimulus when it's needed most, that many of its provisions aren't likely to be temporary and will strain the long term fiscal picture, etc. -- but dogmatically opposing fiscal stimulus during a long recession (especially when monetary policy has already taken the Fed funds rate to near-zero) is bad politics and bad economics. The smarter approach for Republicans in Congress would have been to demand a more effective stimulus -- one with more temporary, fast-acting measures (e.g., more aid for the unemployed, a payroll tax holiday, a temporary tax credit to encourage businesses to move up capital spending to this year, etc.).

On the other hand, on the longer-term policy objectives President Obama listed in his speech last night (e.g., free college for everyone, etc.), a good economic case (though a more difficult political one) can be made to oppose them, or to offer more fiscally sustainable alternatives.

Governor Jindal is a Rhodes Scholar who has had a meteoric political career so far, so he ought to be smart enough to realize this. He has time to reposition himself as a "effective government" conservative and differentiate himself from some of the Republican leaders in Congress by offering intelligent, nuanced opposition to President Obama's liberal policies. Jindal's rebuttal last night was an inauspicious start though¹.


¹One small example was Jindal's mockery of volcano monitoring in his rebuttal last night. As Matt Yglesias asked on his blog,

What’s with the attack on “something called ‘volcano monitoring’”? Volcano monitoring is where they monitor volcanos. So as to better understand, better predict, and better prepare for natural disasters. Is that so complicated? Are only hurricanes worth responding to?

If you're going to pick an example of wasteful government spending, volcano monitoring doesn't seem like the best one (not that Sen. McCain got much traction last fall with his jihad against pork -- which, in the big picture, has little impact on the federal budget anyway).

You Pick the Post, Part II

Here are a few more topics I've been considering posting about:

- Chipotle (got a free dinner there last night, incidentally) and its competitors; the niche it and similar upscale fast food chains fill in high cost cities like New York.

- The trouble with Harvard-educated elites: Atlantic editor and Harvard alumnus Ross Douthat thinks its their arrogance; I suspect it's something else.

- That Reg. T post.

- Dealing with Deflation, Part II: The pros and cons of the government borrowing money to buy assets such as corporate bonds, stocks, etc.

- The Fox TV show The Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.

Contingency and Causation

On his Atlantic blog yesterday, Ross Douthat posted an excerpt from an article by Princeton professor Larry Bartels in The Wilson Quarterly ("The Irrational Electorate"). In his article, Bartels argues that sea changes in politics are often driven not by changes in ideology or political philosophy but instead are contingent on other factors, e.g., economic conditions. Surveying the political realignments of the Depression era, Bartels writes,

Considering America's Depression-era politics in comparative perspective reinforces the impression that there may have been a good deal less real policy content to "throwing the bums out" than meets the eye. In the U.S., voters replaced Republicans with Democrats and the economy improved. In Britain and Australia, voters replaced Labor governments with conservatives and the economy improved. In Britain and Australia, voters replaced Labor governments with conservatives and the economy improved. In Sweden, voters replaced Conservatives with Liberals, then with Social Democrats, and the economy improved. In the Canadian agricultural province of Saskatchewan, voters replaced Conservatives with Socialists and the economy improved. In the adjacent agricultural province of Alberta, voters replaced a socialist party with a right-leaning funny-money party created from scratch by a charismatic radio preacher, and the economy improved. In Weimar Germany, where economic distress was deeper and longer-lasting, voters rejected all of the mainstream parties, the Nazis seized power, and the economy improved. In every case, the party that happened to be in power when the Depression eased dominated politics for a decade or more thereafter. It seems farfetched to imagine that all these contradictory shifts represented well-considered ideological conversions. A more parsimonious interpretation is that voters simply--and simple-mindedly--rewarded whoever happened to be in power when things got better.