Conservative burn.
At TAPPED, Ezra writes:
I'm fairly puzzled by the emerging conservative line on global warming. Realizing they've lost the debate on whether it will happen, they've begun turning to the difficulties of stopping it. Pushing that line today is Ross Douthat, who's frustrated by Al Gore's insistence on energizing the issue and adamant that "the kind of economic reforms necessary to do anything significant about the accumulation of carbon dioxide would be immediately and decisively disastrous."
Ezra and Matt go on to have a wonky discussion about whether cutting emissions globally is feasible, technologically or politically. Being shallow, I'm more interested in the domestic politics of the issue. Because this really captures the fundamental difference between liberals and conservatives: liberals' massive soft spot for issue-wonkery. As a result of this soft spot, expertise on some issue or another is de rigeur among Democratic politicians. Everybody's got to have their theme, be it Warner's enthusiasm for the information economy or Edwards' laser-like focus on working poverty. The standard liberal complaint about big Democrats is that "they don't believe in anything". The current crop of Dems is having none of it.
Sure, Republicans have their would-be intellectuals too: Andrew Sullivan-Reason Magazine types have been known to swoon over Newt Gingrich or Charles Murray. Conservatives have their definitive issues too: terrorism, unfortunately, came to be seen as a "Republican" issue -- and now its permutations like jihadism, or dhimmitude or whatever live on as fixations of the right. But it's not like any prominant conservative had, to my knowledge, actually been banging the "gathering storm" drum for years before 911, leaving liberals to choke on the fact that, say, Phill Gramm was right. Probably the closest politician we had to a terrorism cassandra was wonky Atari Democrat Gary Hart, obsessing away in relative obscurity with his (admittedly bipartisan) commission. It's also true that Republicans once had Big Intellectual Ideas about tax-cutting, and the being on the good side of the Laffer curve. But it turned out, after the Reagan tax cuts, then the Clinton tax hike, and then the Bush tax cuts, that the US was actually on the bad side of the Laffer curve (if there is a Laffer curve). The purity of conservative aversion to taxes lives on, now based as much on laughable fairness arguments as on laughable growth arguments. But, again, no liberal will ever have to clasp his throat and rasp that Steve Forbes was right.
And, really, it hardly matters that he wasn't. As a rule, Republicans thrive on symbols and on theme (too often confused with "vision"), a favourite theme being the Big Man of History who doesn't know things so much as he just "gets" things. This is stuff that, unfortunately, wows a big chunk of the punditocracy. It's also been very good politics. The idea that Reagan, unlike Carter "got" the Soviets, and that Bush, unlike Kerry, "got" al Qaeda are vital to the Republican canon, and to Republican electoral success over the past third of the century. Liberals may have nursed their issues and marshalled facts; but Republicans dominated the narrative and consolodated power.
The upshot, though, of the liberal/Democratic wonkery dominance is that, nowadays, pretty much every big liberal issue has its associated issue wonk. And, on climate change at least, this could actually start paying some dividends, at least in schadenfreude, in which liberals have been severely undernourished. As climate change has come closer to its political moment, there has been, in the past couple of years, some competition for the role of head climate change issue-wonk among liberal political figures. Well, I guess about as much competition as there was in the 2000 Democratic primary. How did Al Gore win this time? It's not that he's more charismatic than, say, Robert Kennedy, or more politically promising than, say, Eliot Spitzer, both of whom have prioritized the issue. It's the sheer, indisputable, quasi-messaniac purity of his wonkery. Not even Douthat feels, in his column, that he can challenge the fact that Gore knows more or cares more about climate change than most people; afterall, as David Remnick recently noted, he's been hammering those flow charts for 26 years now, from before global warming was even on the horizon as a political issue.
Thus the condundrum: accepting the reality of climate change is one thing. Afterall, establishment conservatives eventually came to accept that passing the Civil Rights Act was, in fact, a good thing. Ideas are important only insofar as they fit into the current narrative, and the narrative can open up to accept them or it can downplay them. But accepting that Al Gore was right about climate change, well...hoo... That throws a wrench into the personality-based Republican justification machine. As an example of what we can expect, Douthat spends the first few paragraphs of his piece pandering to his readership on the subject, mainly by suggesting that liberals used to share his negative views on Gore before they flip-flopped in typically feckless liberal fashion. Having got that out of the way, he goes on to make some quite substantive points about the global costs of curbing emissions -- the sort of thing a serious, issue-based conservatism might have argued five or six years ago when the science was solidifying but the question of what to do was yet to be seriously hammered out.
Anyway, this is a trend I expect to see a lot of: Roger L. Simon is no Ross Douthat but he does live uncomfortably close to Hollywood, and you can see him lashing out recently on the same uncomfortable subject. Being right -- politically, substantively -- on such a universally important but traditionally elite issue may or may not translate into better policy and Democratic electoral gains. But Democrats and liberals don't just own the issue; our politicians really do personify it, and through the sheer force of determined, unadulterated, even apolitical wonkery. And, while there are certainly more important things at stake in the global warming debate, it's going to be great fun watching conservatives twist themselves into angry knots trying to encorporate that into the narrative.
(Note: I edited this post a couple of times since I originally posted it.)
I'm fairly puzzled by the emerging conservative line on global warming. Realizing they've lost the debate on whether it will happen, they've begun turning to the difficulties of stopping it. Pushing that line today is Ross Douthat, who's frustrated by Al Gore's insistence on energizing the issue and adamant that "the kind of economic reforms necessary to do anything significant about the accumulation of carbon dioxide would be immediately and decisively disastrous."
Ezra and Matt go on to have a wonky discussion about whether cutting emissions globally is feasible, technologically or politically. Being shallow, I'm more interested in the domestic politics of the issue. Because this really captures the fundamental difference between liberals and conservatives: liberals' massive soft spot for issue-wonkery. As a result of this soft spot, expertise on some issue or another is de rigeur among Democratic politicians. Everybody's got to have their theme, be it Warner's enthusiasm for the information economy or Edwards' laser-like focus on working poverty. The standard liberal complaint about big Democrats is that "they don't believe in anything". The current crop of Dems is having none of it.
Sure, Republicans have their would-be intellectuals too: Andrew Sullivan-Reason Magazine types have been known to swoon over Newt Gingrich or Charles Murray. Conservatives have their definitive issues too: terrorism, unfortunately, came to be seen as a "Republican" issue -- and now its permutations like jihadism, or dhimmitude or whatever live on as fixations of the right. But it's not like any prominant conservative had, to my knowledge, actually been banging the "gathering storm" drum for years before 911, leaving liberals to choke on the fact that, say, Phill Gramm was right. Probably the closest politician we had to a terrorism cassandra was wonky Atari Democrat Gary Hart, obsessing away in relative obscurity with his (admittedly bipartisan) commission. It's also true that Republicans once had Big Intellectual Ideas about tax-cutting, and the being on the good side of the Laffer curve. But it turned out, after the Reagan tax cuts, then the Clinton tax hike, and then the Bush tax cuts, that the US was actually on the bad side of the Laffer curve (if there is a Laffer curve). The purity of conservative aversion to taxes lives on, now based as much on laughable fairness arguments as on laughable growth arguments. But, again, no liberal will ever have to clasp his throat and rasp that Steve Forbes was right.
And, really, it hardly matters that he wasn't. As a rule, Republicans thrive on symbols and on theme (too often confused with "vision"), a favourite theme being the Big Man of History who doesn't know things so much as he just "gets" things. This is stuff that, unfortunately, wows a big chunk of the punditocracy. It's also been very good politics. The idea that Reagan, unlike Carter "got" the Soviets, and that Bush, unlike Kerry, "got" al Qaeda are vital to the Republican canon, and to Republican electoral success over the past third of the century. Liberals may have nursed their issues and marshalled facts; but Republicans dominated the narrative and consolodated power.
The upshot, though, of the liberal/Democratic wonkery dominance is that, nowadays, pretty much every big liberal issue has its associated issue wonk. And, on climate change at least, this could actually start paying some dividends, at least in schadenfreude, in which liberals have been severely undernourished. As climate change has come closer to its political moment, there has been, in the past couple of years, some competition for the role of head climate change issue-wonk among liberal political figures. Well, I guess about as much competition as there was in the 2000 Democratic primary. How did Al Gore win this time? It's not that he's more charismatic than, say, Robert Kennedy, or more politically promising than, say, Eliot Spitzer, both of whom have prioritized the issue. It's the sheer, indisputable, quasi-messaniac purity of his wonkery. Not even Douthat feels, in his column, that he can challenge the fact that Gore knows more or cares more about climate change than most people; afterall, as David Remnick recently noted, he's been hammering those flow charts for 26 years now, from before global warming was even on the horizon as a political issue.
Thus the condundrum: accepting the reality of climate change is one thing. Afterall, establishment conservatives eventually came to accept that passing the Civil Rights Act was, in fact, a good thing. Ideas are important only insofar as they fit into the current narrative, and the narrative can open up to accept them or it can downplay them. But accepting that Al Gore was right about climate change, well...hoo... That throws a wrench into the personality-based Republican justification machine. As an example of what we can expect, Douthat spends the first few paragraphs of his piece pandering to his readership on the subject, mainly by suggesting that liberals used to share his negative views on Gore before they flip-flopped in typically feckless liberal fashion. Having got that out of the way, he goes on to make some quite substantive points about the global costs of curbing emissions -- the sort of thing a serious, issue-based conservatism might have argued five or six years ago when the science was solidifying but the question of what to do was yet to be seriously hammered out.
Anyway, this is a trend I expect to see a lot of: Roger L. Simon is no Ross Douthat but he does live uncomfortably close to Hollywood, and you can see him lashing out recently on the same uncomfortable subject. Being right -- politically, substantively -- on such a universally important but traditionally elite issue may or may not translate into better policy and Democratic electoral gains. But Democrats and liberals don't just own the issue; our politicians really do personify it, and through the sheer force of determined, unadulterated, even apolitical wonkery. And, while there are certainly more important things at stake in the global warming debate, it's going to be great fun watching conservatives twist themselves into angry knots trying to encorporate that into the narrative.
(Note: I edited this post a couple of times since I originally posted it.)
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