Kosher Food, Health Care, and Why Conservatives Just Can't Win

“Holocaust survivors who for the first time were forced to eat non-kosher because Romney thought $5 was too much to pay for your grandparents to eat kosher . . . . Where is Mitt Romney’s compassion for our seniors?”

—Newt Gingrich Robo-Call on the eve of the Florida Primary

         We learned several important things in Florida this week. First, we learned that Newt Gingrich, along with being a serial adulterer and a megalomaniac, is also a whiney-butt. Second, we learned that Mitt Romney is perfectly willing to pay people to be bastards while he stands on the sidelines smiling. But the most important thing we learned—at least I hope we learned it—is that extreme conservatism just doesn’t work (extreme liberalism doesn’t work either, but we already knew that).

         I refer, of course, to the bizarre robo-call that some Floridians received last night suggesting that Mitt Romney personally shoved pork chops and lobster down people’s throats at the Yad Vashem dinner in downtown Boston. It never happened. Romney took an item out of an appropriation bill that could have eliminated kosher food subsidies, but the legislature overrode his veto. But that’s not the point.

         Much more important to me is what this line of attack says about the extreme conservative position that Gingrich is trying to represent in this election cycle—you know who I mean, people who think that income tax is unconstitutional, that Social Security is a fraud, and that the universal health care bill proves that Obama was born in North Korea. This particular constituency doesn’t think that we should be providing insulin to seniors, much less kosher pastrami. This is exactly the sort of “do-it-for-yourself-but-don’t-expect-the-government-to-do-it-for-you” entitlement that both Gingrich and Romney are supposedly going to end when they get to Washington.

         Both Gingrich and Romney were unwilling to stand behind their own ideologies and say something reasonably consistent like: “This is what ‘tough choices’ are all about. If we are going to balance the budget, we can’t give everybody everything that they want. If we even want to make a dent in the national debt without raising taxes, we are going to have to cut entitlements. This means Social Security. This means the Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit. And this means kosher food.”

         But it will never happen. As long as political power is awarded by popular vote, people are never going to get into power, or stay in power, unless they give people stuff. That’s how the whole voting thing works. People want stuff, and, as long as they hold the reigns of government in their hands, they are going to elect people who will give them stuff.

         This is why conservatives actually never win elections. Oh, people who claim to be conservatives win all the time, but by the time they win the election, they have ceased to be conservatives. And when they actually govern, they normally end up not being conservatives at all. No Republican President in my lifetime—Nixon, Reagan, Bush père, Bush fils—has ever actually taken away anybody’s stuff, nor have conservative presidents come any closer to balanced budgets than liberal ones. Giving people stuff is not about being liberal or conservative; it is about being president or not president.

         But here’s the rub: this might not actually be a bad thing. Maybe Jewish seniors should have kosher meals. Maybe everybody should have health care and security. Maybe, just maybe, these are the sorts of things that government is supposed to do—the reason that people (theoretical people at least) leave the state of nature and form civil societies is so that, through their governments, they can do things on a much grander scale than they could otherwise. Maybe one of the grand purposes of civil government is to give people a mechanism for taking care of the most vulnerable members of society: children, the elderly, the impoverished—the people that Jesus was always hanging around with and telling us to care for.

          And maybe all of this has something to do with what government “by the people, for the people, and of the people” actually means in a modern, post-industrial nation where nobody actually has to starve, to forego lifesaving care, or to eat milk with meat. 

"Class Warfare" is a Stupid Term; Let's Dump It

          It is officially time to retire the phrase “class warfare” from our political vocabulary. 

         Back when words actually meant things, “class warfare” was a pretty scary proposition. Not just anybody could do it; it took a lot of anger and a critical mass of people—always from the lower classes of society—who were willing to, well, have warfare. The French Jacobins certainly fit this description, along with L’ouverture's Haitian slaves and Lenin’s Russian revolutionaries. By the time a society got around to “class warfare,” it was pretty much going to change one way or another.

         Now, however, “class warfare” is the first thing out of a conservative’s mouth when anybody proposes a tax increase. It comes out especially quickly when somebody wants to raise the capital gains tax, or the maximum tax rate, or let the Bush Tax Cuts Expire. We don’t want to have “class warfare,” after all, or Mitt Romney might have to pay the same percentage of his income that I do, and then he will stop creating jobs.

         The tactic of labeling tax increases “class warfare” appears to have worked well in America, mainly because very few Americans perceive themselves as being in a lower class—we are a nation full of people who aren’t millionaires yet. And as long as this is the case, we certainly don’t want to go around doing class warfare things to the people who are millionaires, lest they hold a grudge when we move in next door.

         But it is time to abandon this ridiculous terminology. It was originally designed to convey contempt for the poor, which was bad enough. Now, however, it simply conveys contempt for reality.

Here is some reality to consider:

1.   As long as there is a United States government in any form, somebody is going to have to pay expenses. There will always, therefore, be taxes.


2.   There is no such thing as a tax plan that affects everybody equally. Whatever we do, whatever we tax, there will be winners and losers. In most cases, the winners and losers will each occupy different places on the economic spectrum. Some kinds of taxes are better for people with low incomes, and some kinds are better for people with high incomes. No system can be better for everybody.


3.   Questions about how to structure our tax system are legitimate items for public debate. Talking about who benefits and who does not benefit from a given structure is not “class warfare.” Pointing out that certain tax structures benefit the wealthy more than others is not a hostile act. It is not the same as storming the Bastille. It is, rather, an integral part of the democratic process.

         Criticizing politicians for encouraging rivalries between different social classes is not new in America, of course. It was one of the primary accusations that Hamiltonian Federalists routinely leveled against Jeffersonian Republicans. But Jefferson really deserved the criticism. In his immoderate support for the French Revolution, our third president really did advocate class warfare of the “kill-the-aristocrats-in-their-sleep” variety. And he had plenty of good things to say about early armed rebellions in America (Shea’s Rebellion and the Whiskey Rebellion) as well. Jefferson had very little use for the rich, and the rich felt exactly the same about Jefferson.

         But Jefferson was not actually a Jacobin—the writings of Alexander Hamilton notwithstanding. But he did stand firmly on the side of a government that did not transfer the burden of supporting government from the wealthy to the poor. How nice it would be if the self-proclaimed “Modern Jeffersonians”—the acolytes of small government and state sovereignty—would allow a national debate on the Jeffersonian ideals they reject without resorting to the kind of martial terminology that Jefferson himself despised.

Newtpolian of a Hundred Days

"The Democrats are spending millions of dollars running negative ads against Romney as they are hoping that Gingrich will be the nominee which could result in a landslide victory for Obama and a crushing defeat for Republicans from the courthouse to the White House.” –Bob Dole 1/26/12

"With Newt Gingrich, you throw out the baby and keep the bathwater.”—Ann Coulter, 1/23/12

         The Republican mainstream seems to be treating the Newt Gingrich surge the way that the crowned heads of Europe treated Napoleon’s escape from Elba. They thought they had gotten rid of him, they were finally starting to clean up the mess that he made, and they couldn’t believe that it was all about to happen again. Somebody send for that English fellow and let’s end this once and for all.

         Would-be Wellingtons include Bob Dole, who just got in the act today, along with Trent Lott, Tom DeLay, and Elliott Abrams—and these were the guys friends. The conservative media is not far behind, with Glenn Beck and  Ann Coulter taking turns trashing Gingrich and promoting his rival. And the story they all tell is the same: Gingrich can’t win a general election. If you vote for Gingrich, you will get Obama.
           That is a valid point, but I can’t help thinking that there is more going on—that they are really more afraid that he really could win and become both the President of the United States and the leader of the Republican Party. A large number of mainstream Republicans, I suspect, would rather muddle through four more years of Obama than place an unstable megalomaniac on the throne. Republican strategist David Frum said as much just this week. “Gingrich,” he confides, “has convinced almost everybody who has ever worked closely with him that he cannot and should not be trusted with executive power.”
         Which brings us back to Napoleon. Gingrich shares more with the Corsican general than just a bad haircut. Napoleon was one of the greatest minds of his age and one of the most ambitious men ever to walk the earth. He craved power and could never get enough to satisfy his need. He was willing to throw a half a million of his own soldiers away—as he did in Russia—for no reason beyond his own aggrandizement. And in the end, he was willing to destroy a continent rather than slip quietly away. If he had to go, he was going to take half the world with him.

         If I were a Republican right now, I would be as terrified as the Republicans seem to be that Gingrich would do something similar. I don’t think that he is going to win. The attacks by nearly every Republican that anybody has ever heard of are already driving Newt’s numbers down. But the Gingrich candidacy is exposing a fault line within the Conservative movement that Republicans would rather not expose during an election cycle. On one side of the line are the Tea Party activists; on the other is the Republican Party.

         Tea Party leaders have made it clear that they are only dating, not marrying, Republicans. Last summer, a Gallup Poll indicated that a majority of conservative voters would back a third party if they felt that the Republicans were abandoning conservative principles. With the forces of the right arrayed against him, Newt is now in the unsustainable position of being a former leader of the Republican Party running against the Republican Party for the Republican Party's nomination. And his anti-establishment rhetoric is wildly appealing to the 15-20% of Americans who associate themselves with the Tea Party--without whom the Republican Party would be consigned to perpetual second place in a winner-take-all world. There may be a better scenario for a third-party run, but I can't think of it.

         But, for Republicans, this could get much worse than a single-cycle third-party run. As a Democrat, albeit a moderate one, the idea of a permanent, electorally meaningful third party to the right of the GOP warms my heart cockles. It would virtually guarantee Democratic dominance in government for a generation. But I try not to get too giddy because I know that it would be virtually impossible for a third party to take root in the United States. Our entire political structure is oriented to a two-party system.

         For such a thing to happen, the stars would have to align with almost unreal precision. There would have to be a coherent group of voters that constituted something like (in Madisonian terms) a permanent faction. This group would have to be paired with a leader of rare intelligence and charisma who was also a rudderless megalomaniac. This leader would have to be willing to lead 15-20% of the electorate off of a political cliff with no motive beyond his own aggrandizement. He would have to be willing to turn his back on his own party and throw them out of power for sheer spite. And he would have to see himself as a world-historical figure on an epic scale—with an unshakable conviction that history and destiny were on his side. 

         And all that Democrats have to do is remember Napoleon’s greatest maxim: “never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.”