I thought about it for a little while because it was an innovative argument, but I quickly concluded that Ross Douthat’s latest column is the rankest bullshit. It’s true that there are unorthodox opinions that are being floated by some of the Tea Partiers…ideas that might in some cases attract progressive interest. Whether it’s opposition to an interventionist foreign policy and a willingness to cut defense spending, or it’s skepticism about the NSA and domestic surveillance, or it’s opposition to crop subsidies and other forms of corporate welfare, or it’s a willingness to relax our drug laws and consider prison reforms, there are areas of possible cooperation between progressives and the more libertarian members of the Tea Party. But I haven’t seen even an iota of progress in any of those areas because the Tea Party republicans who might forge bipartisan coalitions to make revolutionary change are not actually interested in legislating. No one is more guilty of dropping this ball than Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky.
Because the Tea Partiers aren’t even trying to do anything constructive, their few good ideas are basically worthless and do nothing to balance out their extremism.
The biggest problem with libertarians among the the folks that the “Tea Party” funded to get into Congress is that they see government specifically as oppressive (hence verbiage against NSA and a war in Syria) but they do not see large institutions with government-privileged limited liability and hierarchical structure (cough, corporations) as equally oppressive.
As far as legislating, only Justin Amash has put a serious measure forward (along with John Conyers) on NSA. Ron Paul and Bernie Sanders did get the Fed meltdown response audit passed, but that is ancient history now.
So Douthat is picking up the extreme left-right mantra. That is a very interesting bit of elephant-washing.
It can work the other way as well. All of these eager libertarians can stand with progressive Democrats when they want to get something done.
But then that wouldn’t serve the purposes of peeling off Democrats–Mr. Douthat’s transparent agenda and why the NYT hired him. (And BoBo for that matter). And it’s not going to work. Progressives are much more likely to vote for non-electables than for the likes of Rand Paul and Mike Lee and the 30 nitwits who killed Food Stamps. (But then, Mike McIntyre and Jim Matheson were right with those guys. Guess Douthat missed his audience.)
There used to be anti-corporate conservatives. A lot of them were religious Catholics. This article
http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2009/10/27/the-anti-corporate-gop.html
claims they are coming back. I don’t think they are for real, they are too anarchic and their thinking is too incoherent (as you point out).
For example, Paul Ryan “says that he’s talking tougher with corporations than ever before. The problem, he argues, is that industry has drifted away from its support of free enterprise.”
Corporations have been drifting away from free enterprise for as long as they have been able to control markets, which is at least the last 150 years.
Ryan has read Ayn Rand from cover to cover, but I don’t suppose he ever read John Kenneth Galbraith, who showed that the libertarian free market is a myth (see especially The New Industrial State,1967.
Ronald Coase explained exactly why corporations exist–to create hierarchical planned administrative structures that lower internal transaction costs. They also leverage the legal and governmental environment more effectively than do independent producers.
Corporations, as a grant of government privileges, have never been about competing in a free market but about avoiding some of the costs of competition.
In the 19th century, advocates of corporations were also the biggest advocates of “public improvements” like canals and railroads and roads and harbor clearance.
Yes, and if you go back to the very beginning of joint-stock companies in the 17th century you will find they were always huge projects for the public good, like chartering huge companies to trade with various parts of the world, or the New River Company chartered in 1613 to supply fresh drinking water to the city of London. The charters and governments of many if not all of the 13 American colonies were modeled on such companies.
http://famguardian.org/Publications/PropertyRights/R5virg.html
The whole rationale for granting corporate privileges through state charters is still, in theory, to promote enterprise for the public good. That’s why it’s particularly frustrating that they are almost never revoked, even though state governments have the legal power to do so.
Brooks is to peel off wealthy ex-liberals living in the suburbs; Douthat is the Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street. He’s also rather better educated than Brooks, but who he peels off is people who believe the Times is dictated by the #DamnedDevil (as Kathryn Jean calls him). Remember that, just like Murdoch, the Times really puts profits ahead of ideology.
Mussolini and Hitler got the trains running on time in their countries.
And I’m sure that made a lot of Liberals in Italy and Germany very happy.
The rest of their agenda?
Uhm…
Not so much.
And when the trains ran on time to the Concentration Camps, I don’t the Liberals cheered too much – they were on them.
Yes, the tea party/”libertarians” of Ron/Rand Paul ilk do share some positions with progressives. That’s what makes them attractive at first. “Sure they oppose abortion and have crazy ideas about a gold standard, but they also are against starting wars and the ‘war on drugs'” … and so on.
The problem is the Paulians are really conservatives/wingnuts at heart. This means that while they support some progressive positions, and probably really mean it when they say it, those are precisely the positions that they’ll offer as bargaining chips at the negotiating table. Or perhaps they’ll be okay with just a certain amount of domestic spying as long as their guys are the ones in charge.
So you’ll end up with abortion and marijuana illegal – the end of civil rights legislation and the continuation of domestic spying. And – absolutely guaranteed – zero government regulation for the environment.