Questioning the Tea Party's Motives

Andrew Sullivan has a great piece on why he distrusts the Tea Party Movement:

[Tea Party members] have no genuine proposals to reduce spending and taxation. They seem very protective of Medicare and Social Security - and their older age bracket underlines this. They also seem primed for maximal neo-imperial reach, backing the nation-building efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq, favoring war against Iran, etc. Only Ron Paul, peace be upon him, extends his big government critique to the military-industrial-ideological complex.

So they are truly not serious in policy terms, and it behooves the small government right to grapple with this honestly. They both support lower taxation and yet bemoan the fact that so many Americans do not pay any income tax. They want to cut spending on trivial matters while enabling the entitlement and defense behemoths to go on gobbling up Americans' wealth. And that lack of seriousness is complemented by a near-fanatical cultural alienation from the modern world.

. . .

When they propose cuts in Medicare, means-testing Social Security, a raising of the retirement age and a cut in defense spending, I'll take them seriously and wish them well.

Until then, I'll treat them with the condescending contempt they have thus far deserved.

Let me be the first to say: I propose cuts to Medicare, progressive price-indexing of Social Security benefits, a raising of the retirement age, and reductions in defense spending. And, also, higher taxes on both the middle class and the wealthy.

Yes, Andrew, there are people like me out there on the electoral fringes.

Pornography on the Left and the Right

Ryan Sager at True/Slant looks at the research on pornography and social depravation:

While the question of free speech is philosophical, the question of whether porn does any social harm is an empirical one. And the data is pretty clear: Pornography either reduces sex crime by giving males a non-violent outlet for excess sexual impulses, or it has no effect.

I find this result pretty unsurprising, but of course I tend toward a libertarian perspective on social issues.

The debate over pornography has always made for strange bedfellows. Feminists usually oppose it, arguing that sexual objectification of women leads to violence against women. Social conservatives typically see it as a gateway to infidelity and a threat to strong families. For years, both groups have maintained that the research bolsters their argument, pointing to (among other things) the methodologically flawed Meese Report as evidence of the connection between porn and various social ills. But most of the recent research suggests quite the opposite.

While it’s impossible to produce a perfect study on the subject, it seems fairly clear at this point that pornography is not the evil that many on the left and right insisted it was.

The implications for feminism are quite profound. If pornography reduces violence against women, isn’t it something that should be promoted? Should visceral opposition to sexual objectification really trump empirical reality?

Social conservatives confront a similar dilemma. The crime rate has long been an important metric for those on the right. Many conservatives have argued that pornography leads to antisocial behavior, which ultimately leads to higher incidents of crime. But if the opposite is true – if pornography actually reduces crime – shouldn’t social conservatives rethink their position?

I realize that there are broader points of opposition among feminists and conservatives, but at the very least, I think that both groups need to seriously wrestle with their ideological preconceptions on this issue.

Have Americans become more liberal?

The truth is, I don't know if Americans are becoming more liberal or more conservative. But I think one major miscalculation on the left has been interpreting Americans’ dissatisfaction with the Bush administration as resentment toward “conservatism” writ large. In fact, the opposite seems to hold true.

Whether they knew it or not, I believe that many Americans were reacting against the large-scale changes imposed by a Republican administration that was anything but conservative. It wasn’t a liberal impulse that caused Americans to become disenchanted with the Iraq War. It was genuine conservatism – a distrust of government power and large-scale foreign interventions – that ultimately compelled so many of us to abandon our support for President Bush.

“Change” was the theme of the 2008 campaign, but the underlying message was much simpler: putting things back to normal. The lesson that should be gleaned is not that Americans favor progressive – rather than “conservative” – policy solutions, but that Americans are skeptical of dramatic shifts in policy.

I think this is a big part of the reason why we’ve see support for many of the individual provisions in the health care reform bills that have been proposed in Congress, but an overall sense of opposition to comprehensive approach that would generate such sweeping legislation. Incremental reforms are fine, but package them together and you’ve gone too far.

In an era of change, conservatism makes sense. We are, after all, creatures of memory.

To quote Andrew Sullivan:

[I]n those moments of confrontation with time, we are all conservatives. Sure, we all move on. In America, the future is always more imperative than the past. But the past lingers; and America, for all its restlessness, or perhaps because of its restlessness, is a very conservative place. . . . Intrinsic to the human experience – what separates us from animals –is the memory of things past, and the fashioning of that memory into a self-conscious identity. So loss imprints itself on our minds and souls and forms us. It’s part of what we are.

There's a lot more to this, of course. In many ways, America is also a deeply progressive place. We've always had a complex political culture, and we've always tried to have it both ways.

Anyway, just thought I'd think "outloud" for a bit. I'll try to write more on this later.

Update: In his column today, David Brooks makes a similar point about the Tea Party movement:

[B]oth the New Left and the Tea Party movement are radically anticonservative. Conservatism is built on the idea of original sin — on the assumption of human fallibility and uncertainty. To remedy our fallen condition, conservatives believe in civilization — in social structures, permanent institutions and just authorities, which embody the accumulated wisdom of the ages and structure individual longings.

That idea was rejected in the 1960s by people who put their faith in unrestrained passion and zealotry. The New Left then, like the Tea Partiers now, had a legitimate point about the failure of the ruling class. But they ruined it through their own imprudence, self-righteousness and naïve radicalism. The Tea Partiers will not take over the G.O.P., but it seems as though the ’60s political style will always be with us — first on the left, now the right.

As I recently explained to a friend, modern-day conservatism traces its roots to Edmund Burke. But Burkean conservatism is nothing like today's Movement Conservatism, which seems to have spawned the Tea Parties. Burke was skeptical of large-scale policy changes, favoring an incremental approach. Many contemporary conservatives seem to have abandoned this skepticism, as they routinely employ reactionary language and endorse dramatic policy shifts. Today, congressional Republicans appear to be far more focused on achieving specific ideological priorities, even when that requires massive federal legislation or massive changes in the status quo. It's not conservative to totally dismantle the Social Security system, for example.

I think it's good to be skeptical of sweeping policy changes, but it's also important to acknowledge that even that skepticism must be questioned regularly. For example, would slow, incremental changes have been appropriate during the Civil Rights Era, or are there some issues so morally pressing that we need to push for immediate, broad-based changes in society?