His critiques of right-wing elites land beautifully (admittedly, their intellectual and moral stagnation make such a task easier every day), but he goes further to reveal an equal or greater disdain for the “white underclass.”
As Williamson discusses the ugly world of poverty that he grew up in, he gets to a line that feels the most true and is thus the most insidious: “The more you know about that world, the less sympathetic you’ll be to it.”
He intends this to skewer the chattering classes of liberals who are overflowing with sympathy for the abstract “poor” but squirm at the thought of sharing a school or subdivision with actual poor people.
Feeding such people the lie that their problems are mainly external in origin — that they are the victims of scheming elites, immigrants, black welfare malingerers, superabundantly fecund Mexicans, capitalism with Chinese characteristics, Walmart, Wall Street, their neighbors — is the political equivalent of selling them heroin. (And I have no doubt that it is mostly done for the same reason.) It is an analgesic that is unhealthy even in small doses and disabling or lethal in large ones. The opposite message — that life is hard and unfair, that what is not necessarily your fault may yet be your problem, that you must act and bear responsibility for your actions — is what conservatism used to offer
.. These ideologues have been shocked to see their principles abandoned in favor of vulgar might-makes-right tribalism and you can find any number of well-written essays from this past year reckoning with this disappointment and cursing the alliance of fools, cowards, crazies, and racists that have come to dominate right-wing institutions.
.. If all conservatism has to offer is a stern message about personal responsibility and a repetition of something conservative-sounding you heard from that one black friend of yours, it’s no wonder nobody wants it. It’s simply not a political philosophy you can govern with, win votes with, or even communicate with.
.. If personal responsibility and tax cuts were the path to prosperity and virtue, then Kansas and Alabama ought to be shining exemplars of governance.
- .. The first way he’s wrong relates to common tropes about welfare: the more poor people you know, the more you realize how little they get from the government and how few of them actually get anything. The most shocking anecdotes get our attention – a cousin or a friend of a friend who is a lazy drug addict and gets a disability payment – but these examples are far from representative. You can only know that, though, if you are actually spending time with poor people.
- .. it actively discourages friendship with the poor and praises the sort of ignorance his statement is meant to lambast liberals for.
- our obsession with meritocracy. When we are constantly encouraging people who are born with or acquire the virtues necessary to live a stable life to shake the dust off their feet and abandon their dysfunctional friends, those left behind stagnate in ever-more-toxic dysfunction.
- Conservatism rejects the deterministic economics that denies people their agency, but the modern conservative movement has preached an atomizing freedom that eviscerates the structures and relationships that help people to exercise agency. This is why the eloquent ideas of politicians like Mike Lee or Ben Sasse ring hollow:
- The most prominent right-wing writers at various outlets .. are always suggesting the old wineskins of 20th-century conservatism, which is part of why their reformocon ideas have never taken off.
- .. conservatism needs to decide what it is we’re trying to conserve and rewrite everything else around that.
- Conserving the institutions that help people to flourish – churches and families most prominent among them – is more fundamental than “liberty” or “small government”.
- .. Williamson’s formulation is backwards: the more that one chooses to love and share in the pain of the poor, the more intimately you will want to know them and be friends with them.
The GOP health-care bill shows the need for regular order.
Kennedy was the showy performer in that ugly spectacle, but Senator Biden, as chairman of the Judiciary Committee, was the stage director. Prior to Bork’s nomination, Biden had in fact said that he would support it: Bork was, after all, a distinguished legal scholar with a long history in public service. Bork had many challenges in front of him: For one thing, he was very sharp-elbowed in intellectual disputes, which had not won him very many friends.
.. The Senate majority leader at the time was Democrat Robert Byrd, a man who had rejoiced in the title of Exalted Cyclops of the Ku Klux Klan, and who held a grudge against Bork for his role in the Watergate scandal, during which Bork had fired special investigator Archibald Cox on the orders of President Richard Nixon.
.. The Senate majority leader at the time was Democrat Robert Byrd, a man who had rejoiced in the title of Exalted Cyclops of the Ku Klux Klan, and who held a grudge against Bork for his role in the Watergate scandal, during which Bork had fired special investigator Archibald Cox on the orders of President Richard Nixon.
.. The Democratic primary field was very full: There was Biden
.. Biden could not afford to stand by his earlier assessment of Bork and announced his opposition to the nomination shortly after it was made formal.
.. The 14 hours Senator Byrd had spent filibustering the Civil Rights Act of 1964 did not prevent him from becoming the Democratic leader in the Senate.
.. The Bork nomination, on the other hand, was an ordinary piece of government business elevated by Democrats to the status of national emergency in the service of narrow partisan interests. Biden was running for president, Kennedy was running for conscience of the Democratic party, and Byrd, frustrated by Republicans’ lack of cooperation on a number of his spending priorities, had promised: “They’re going to pay. I’m going to hit them where it hurts.”
.. The hysteria and vitriol directed at Bork were of a sort rarely seen since the early 19th century. But they quickly became commonplace.
.. But the rules of the game are not all there is to the game. What in another context might be called “sportsmanship” is in politics a question of prudence and even of patriotism, forgoing the pursuit of every petty partisan advantage made possible
.. The progress from Robert Bork to Merrick Garland is a fairly obvious story, but there is more to it than that:
- The increasing reliance upon legislative gimmicks such as omnibus spending bills and retrofitting legislation to fit with the budget reconciliation process,
- the substitution of executive orders and open-ended regulatory portfolios (“the secretary shall . . . ”),
- the prominence of emergency “special sessions” in the state legislatures,
- the absence of regular order in the legislative and appropriations process —
all are part of the same destructive tendency. Procedural maximalism in effect turns the legislative system against itself, substituting the exception for the rule and treating every ordinary item of business as a potential emergency item.
.. at the time, their numbers in the Senate were enough to secure their victory without a filibuster. But the course they set in those hearings — one of maximal confrontation, of reaching for whatever procedural cudgel is close at hand — led directly to our current state of governmental dysfunction.
.. at the time, their numbers in the Senate were enough to secure their victory without a filibuster. But the course they set in those hearings — one of maximal confrontation, of reaching for whatever procedural cudgel is close at hand — led directly to our current state of governmental dysfunction.
.. The recently proffered Republican health-care bill instantiates much of what is wrong with our politics:
The bill was constructed through an extraordinary process in which there were
- no hearings,
- no review from the Congressional Budget Office, and
- no final text of the legislation until shortly before the vote.
- The process is erratic and covert rather than regular and transparent.
- It was put together in a purposeful way to avoid substantive debate and meaningful public discourse,
making the most of the majority’s procedural advantages for purely political ends.
.. As Rod Dreher recently put it, Republicans will have to choose whether they love the rule of law more than they hate the Left.
.. Republican populists who argue that the GOP must play by the same rules in the name of “winning” have very little understanding of what already has been lost and of what we as a nation stand to lose.
The United States will not thrive, economically or otherwise, in a state of permanent emergency.
.. What’s truly remarkable about our current constant national state of emergency is that no one can say exactly what the emergency is. But we all seem to be very sure that something has to be done about it right now, that we must rouse ourselves to excitement about it, and that the ordinary rules of lawmaking and governance no longer apply.
There is not much political mileage to be had from arguing for regular order, transparency, and procedural predictability — but that’s part of what makes those things so valuable. Order in the little things is a necessary precondition of order in the big things. Orderly government cannot be built on a foundation of procedural chaos.