I’m not sure that that is a particularly conservative approach, at least in practice. In our recent election, all major parties had some form of carbon pricing as an important plank in their platform. The Conservative Party, however, had the least aggressive form and were the last to adopt it. The current federal carbon tax has also been (unsuccessfully) challenged in court by centre-right provincial gov’ts.
OTOH, I don’t think it is AOC and her ideological colleagues who are preventing this from being implemented in the US…
As the term “conservative” is used in current political alignments, it doesn’t seem to be. I’m suggesting that it should be, however. I know that back in the 1970s when I first started to be exposed to these sorts of things, the proponents of taxing instead of regulating behaviors which imposed burdens on the community included such people as Milton Friedman. Now, I was a teenager, and not sophisticated in such things, so I was susceptible to easy solutions to complicated problems, but it did seem at the time that a significant “conservative” message was “regulation bad – tax good” when it came to this sort of thing, and while I don’t think of it in such simple terms any longer I do have a long-standing habit of asking, with any regulatory problem, whether there is a tax alternative. It was what my econ professors, who were of a rather right-wing stripe, were always saying.
It’s certainly true that it’s not AOC and crew who are preventing us from having carbon taxes. I will say, though, that here in Washington State some of the neglect, if not outright opposition, of the carbon tax proposal came from people who were more or less of the “left” and who either made the perfect the enemy of the good by insisting that the tax didn’t do ENOUGH or that the revenue-neutral nature of the proposal (some other non-carbon taxes were to be reduced to make it so) meant there wasn’t a big pot of money to spend on climate change projects, or who insisted that, in some unspecified way, the burden of the tax was going to fall upon the least fortunate and that the law was therefore unsatisfactory if it didn’t include a bunch of stuff to ensure some sort of racial and economic equity. That was frustrating.
I have already arrived now at the point where it is obvious to me that the “right” in America will fight any attempt to remedy this problem at all. I hope that they don’t win that fight, and I hope that the solutions crafted by those who are willing to work on these things turn out to be sensible. But I’m no longer willing to say much against any proposal, because we’ve only got the one planet and bad solutions are better than none unless they’re so bad as to be actually counterproductive.
And so you eddie again. (To "eddie* has been defined as bringing up a subject, presenting an opinion on it, and then refusing to discuss it further. Not sure of the etymology.)
Such measures are generally to be preferred, hence why tariff-based restrictions on in international trade are preferred (as less distortionary) to non-tariff restrictions.
However, in implementing such taxes, we need to be careful to make sure that they reasonably accurately reflect the economic externalities that they are meant to be compensating for, so as to avoid loopholes, perverse incentives and/or rent seeking behavior. I’ve heard quite a few reports over the years of companies using changes that only exist on paper to ‘earn’ themselves carbon tax credits.
I was not aware of that. I don’t think I am much, if at all, older than you, but you may just have been politically aware at a more precocious age. As far back as I can recall, the mantra of the right has been “Regulation bad. Tax bad, too.” Doesn’t leave a lot the state can do, which I guess might be the point.
Absolutely! And politics being what it is, people can be very clever at creating these loopholes and then exploiting them.
Unfortunately, yes. And I’ve heard a lot of really numb-skulled defense of the “free market” as being the best way to get rid of pollution, for example, on the theory that consumers will just choose to buy from non-polluting providers. That, of course, doesn’t work at all and is exactly the problem which a tax upon pollution is intended to solve. I’ve never heard a legitimate intellectual defense of free markets which insists that they self-regulate in such a way – but there’s a folk version of free-market economics which seems to be very popular and which DOES insist upon such things.
I dropped out of high school and snuck away to college early, graduating from law school when I was 23, so I was around academic pontificators like econ professors at an early age. I’m 59 now.
I would be very concerned if this were true, but I’m skeptical. Do you have any evidence for this? Surely if almost all of them believe it many must be willing to put it in writing.
I have no hard data on how many times Reagan attended church services, as opposed to Trump, though what I’ve read suggests that Reagan and his wife attended a Presbyterian church with at least some frequency. But if we don’t take my metaphor of “darkening a church doorway” literally, the question is not church attendance but how much a Christian world view informs someone. My impression of Trump was always that of a hard-nosed secular businessman who worships the gods of power, profit, fame, influence, and worldly success, and that his whole life has been driven by ego and self-aggrandizement, not love of humanity or dedication to public service, and that he is about as “Christian” as the fungus on one of my toenails. I don’t see how fundamentalists can have failed to notice his Luciferian pride and his apparently rather late interest (coinciding with his bid for office) in Christianity. My guess is that many of them were willing to swallow a non-Christian (by their standards) as President, because they liked his policies on secular matters, or because they perceived him as, if not religious himself, at least someone unlikely to attack religious belief by any of his policies.
I concede that my statement was hyperbolic, to make a point. However, it is based on an element of fact. An overwhelming majority of university professors and journalists are on the political left, and the political left has a long track record of increasing, not decreasing, the authority of the State to intervene in the choices made by individual citizens. The trajectory is in the direction of regarding the State as a secular Savior, though I grant that at this point such a charge may be hyperbolic. But a description that is hyperbolic today may well be accurate of the future, even the near future. Those of us who favor decentralized forms of democracy over statist, mass-driven forms of democracy (which history shows can lead to totalitarian governments) feel it’s our duty to point out trends which in our view are alarming. But this subject should be a topic of its own. Regarding the topic named at the top of this page, I think that useful discussion long ago ended, and I’d be happy if the moderators closed the thread.
You’re missing the point, as usual. Evangelicals voted for Reagan over an actual evangelical, Jimmy Carter, 40 years ago.
I’m not. Your metaphor is irrelevant; your falsehood is that this is somehow ironic. US evangelicals routinely put politics above any aspect of actual Christianity.
My impression of Trump was, and still is, that of a con man.
Jimmy Carter has been a shining example of dedication to public service and a truly Christian world view.
It was perfectly predictable–the same way they ignored Jimmy Carter’s exemplary Christianity.
Like a woman’s autonomy to make choices about her own body?
Here’s one:
So much for decentralization. Is DeSantis a “man of the left,” or of the far right, Eddie?
But Reagan was still perceived of as, if not evangelical, at least Christian. I don’t see how Trump could be perceived of as Christian, which is why I thought it odd that there wasn’t more concern about him among conservative Protestant Christians. I guess it was a question of the least of evils; the Democrats under Hillary Clinton were probably perceived of as promoting secular humanism (I make no comment on Clinton’s own faith, but speak only about how her Party’s policy leanings were perceived), whereas Trump, even if not actively Christian, was not perceived of as actively promoting secular humanism. Better to elect someone who is perceived as religiously indifferent than someone whose Party is perceived as hostile to traditional Christian notions–that’s my surmise regarding how such people thought about their choice. It would be interesting to read a full-length study on the subject, one that contained the text of actual interviews with voters.
That’s debatable, especially since you seem to be blurring the difference between “evangelical” and “fundamentalist”. Many evangelicals are not fundamentalists, and some evangelicals are more left-leaning in their politics. (That’s clear from the sort of comments made by evangelicals on BioLogos.)
I liked Jimmy Carter, personally. He was also a shining example of gentlemanly manners in public debate – an example which many who write on blog sites about origins would do well to follow.
I think it’s generally a mistake to attribute genuine Christian sentiment to American fundamentalists. They’re basically a political group with a side-line in religion, rather like the Taliban.
You know, I would have agreed with you in the 1970s, but I think I probably would have been wrong then (maybe a bit LESS wrong than today, though), too. One of the peculiar things about both political poles has been that their attitudes toward matters of governance in general and the priority they place upon individual liberty are less dependent upon one another than one might expect, with the result that both the “left” and the “right” are groupings which contain a wide range of views on individual liberty which range from the quasi-libertarian all the way to the authoritarian.
One reason that I, as a still-conservative person, have not cast a single vote for a Republican candidate for any office since the 1990s is that the authoritarian bent within the GOP has been on the rise, to the point that today there are almost no exceptions. One sees this particularly among the judicial appointments. Things like the attitude toward the use of force by law enforcement have become really horrifying, and while the doctrinal pathways through which this works out in civil rights law are a bit obscure to the non-specialist, it is fair to say that almost all of the excessive force cases with which I used to deal in my civil rights practice would now be dead losers for the plaintiffs.
I would rather live in a state which regulates business extensively but which also holds the autonomy of the individual in high regard than in one where cops and executive officials are unrestrained but the burden of regulation is lower. And, of course, as nobody actually thinks all regulation is bad (apart from a few dogmatic libertarians I have known) the question on regulation is never “how much” but “what kind” anyhow. On that, as a specialist in Fourteenth Amendment due process I was always more concerned with the question of whether regulations were fairly applied than with the substance thereof: can the individual who has been unfairly or erroneously targeted by state action obtain a fair and timely hearing and redress for any injury he may have sustained? The “right” wing of the courts has been a disaster for procedural fairness as federal courts have backed away from imposing any standards upon state and local officials. It used to be that in civil rights litigation, the political affiliations of a judge were not much of a guide to his regard for individual autonomy. That’s no longer true.
I don’t see it as odd at all, because conservative Protestant Christians can be counted on to put their right-wing, authoritarian politics (no longer deserving of the name “conservative”) above every aspect of Christianity, particularly the fundamental teachings of Jesus Christ.
Why not? Because it demonstrates my point so well? Are Methodists really that bad?
I think that their choice was based on fear and hate, not any rational thought.
Not at all. Those who self-identified as evangelical voted for Trump, 4:1.
I’m quite aware that there are exceptions, thanks. Did you already forget that I was citing one, Jimmy Carter?
Exactly.
And there’s nothing truly conservative about the modern GOP, except their desire to conserve the racism and sexism of the past.
Yes. Evidently, a “conservative” who writes:
…seems to be saying that the state should not be regulating extralegal executions of its citizens by the police.
I always liked this quote from Mencken, whose adventures exposed him to some of the worst of it:
Evangelical Christianity, as everyone knows, is founded upon hate, as the Christianity of Christ was founded upon love.
I have been trying to better understand how the conversion of the GOP happened. For years I have thought of this principally in terms of the GOP having made a deal with the Devil via the “southern strategy,” beginning with Nixon. Where the Democrats seemed to have some ability to firewall the Ku Klux Klergy from influencing the policy of northern members of the party, the GOP seems to have neglected that bit, so when it thought it was swallowing the Southern Democrats, it was actually the one getting swallowed.
But that telling of the tale, it now seems to me, is at best part of the truth. Something sick was already going on below the surface in the GOP, fed by a variety of causes: the “red scare,” reaction to FDR, and other things.
No, I wasn’t saying anything remotely like that, and only someone inclined to read the worst into anything I write would dream up such a connection. Conservatives believe in the rule of law, and everyone is under the law, including the police. Police officers who break the law, e.g., by killing a suspect they are only supposed to be subduing, have to be appropriately punished. But this requires no new or unwarranted extension of state power; it requires only the will of the state to fully and consistently enforce the laws it already has.
I think much of what you say about the religious right and the recent Republicans is true. I tend to look at things in a more global perspective, however. While conservative thought in the USA may have become distorted in the ways you have outlined, I don’t think that is true of conservative thought everywhere, or of conservative thought in the America of earlier periods. (And indeed, your own remarks about true conservatism seem to bear that out, since you indicate that the Republicans have deviated from true conservatism.) For one thing, conservatism in the USA is entangled with questions of race in a way it isn’t in many other English-speaking countries. For another, in most English-speaking countries, Protestant fundamentalism is less prominent than in the USA; most Protestants in other countries belong to more “mainstream” forms of Christianity. Finally, most other English-speaking countries didn’t handle the “Red Scare” the way the US did. So, speaking in generalities (because one can always find exceptions), I think that paranoia, defensiveness, and other negative features have become more attached to US conservative thought than to conservative thought in other English-speaking countries.
I don’t think it was always thus, but then, as your remarks show, you already knew that.
Anyhow, we have moved into a new topic, so I will not pursue this further. But if you one day start a topic on this theme, I may participate in the discussion, as time permits. I think the recovery of a positive, constructive conservative philosophy is a worthwhile task for all Western countries, and perhaps is needed in the USA most of all.
I can remember reading somewhere that whilst Southern KKK members voted Democrat, in the Mid-West they tended Republican. This would mean that the Southern Strategy would have brought the inheritance of both wings together in a single party. This would in turn have made it nigh on impossible for the party to resist its gravitational pull.
In the English-speaking world, racist conservatism is not restricted to the US. Obvious examples elsewhere are the anti-immigrant sentiments of One Nation and contemporaneous punitively anti-refugee sentiments of the Australian Liberal Party (I was living in Australia at the time of the repulsive Pauline Hanson-John Howard double-act), and of UKIP, whose opposition to the EU’s principle of ‘Freedom of Movement’ has become dogma to the British Conservative Party (to the extent that the Conservatives seem willing to let it wreck the economy).
As far back as I can recall, the mantra of the right has been “Regulation bad. Tax bad, too.” Doesn’t leave a lot the state can do, which I guess might be the point.