Fareed Zakaria* has again offered a different way to think about a puzzling, unsettling question: how should we view and understand the new identity markers and behavior of the 21st-century Republican Party? In this case, he suggests we need to recognize the GOP as no longer rooted in the practical reality of America, her challenges or their resolutions. Rather, and ironically, like other extreme ideological orientations, they are now more driven by abstract principles and philosophical constructs.
He introduces us to his premise by recounting a years-ago interview with George Will, Newsweek columnist and self-described conservative. From his recent article in Time:
He introduces us to his premise by recounting a years-ago interview with George Will, Newsweek columnist and self-described conservative. From his recent article in Time:
Conservatism, he explained, was rooted in reality. Unlike the abstract theories of Marxism and socialism, it started not from an imagined society but from the world as it actually exists. From Aristotle to Edmund Burke, the greatest conservative thinkers have said that to change societies, one must understand them, accept them as they are and help them evolve.
Watching this election campaign, one wonders what has happened to that tradition. Conservatives now espouse ideas drawn from abstract principles with little regard to the realities of America's present or past. This is a tragedy, because conservatism has an important role to play in modernizing the U.S.
I'm guessing you may not have cast the GOP's new "conservative" political identity in quite those terms, thought about it in quite that way. But he unpacks his argument for the position as he goes on. More from the same Time article:
Consider the debates over the economy. The Republican prescription is to cut taxes and slash government spending — then things will bounce back. Now, I would like to see lower rates in the context of tax simplification and reform, but what is the evidence that tax cuts are the best path to revive the U.S. economy? Taxes — federal and state combined — as a percentage of GDP are at their lowest level since 1950. The U.S. is among the lowest taxed of the big industrial economies. So the case that America is grinding to a halt because of high taxation is not based on facts but is simply a theoretical assertion. The rich countries that are in the best shape right now, with strong growth and low unemployment, are ones like Germany and Denmark, neither one characterized by low taxes...
But what about the GOP's insistence that we have outsized government that must be cut back drastically? Mr. Zakaria:
[R]ight now any discussion of government involvement in the economy — even to build vital infrastructure — is impossible because it is a cardinal tenet of the new conservatism that such involvement is always and forever bad...[But] from Singapore to South Korea to Germany to Canada, evidence abounds that some strategic actions by the government can act as catalysts for free-market growth.
Of course, American history suggests that as well. In the 1950s, '60s and '70s, the U.S. government made massive investments in science and technology, in state universities and in infant industries. It built infrastructure that was the envy of the rest of the world. Those investments triggered two generations of economic growth and put the U.S. on top of the world of technology and innovation.
But that history has been forgotten. When considering health care, for example, Republicans confidently assert that their ideas will lower costs, when we simply do not have much evidence for this. What we do know is that of the world's richest countries, the U.S. has by far the greatest involvement of free markets and the private sector in health care. It also consumes the largest share of GDP, with no significant gains in health on any measurable outcome. We need more market mechanisms to cut medical costs, but Republicans don't bother to study existing health care systems anywhere else in the world. They resemble the old Marxists, who refused to look around at actual experience.
Mr. Zakaria is no less direct and clear in his concluding points, as he calls out today's GOP to embrace the principles and identity that once made them an essential part of shaping the American economic and societal success story. In conclusion:
Conservatives used to be the ones with heads firmly based in reality...Today conservatives shy away from the sensible ideas of the Bowles-Simpson commission on deficit reduction because those ideas are too deeply rooted in, well, reality. Does anyone think we are really going to get federal spending to the level it was at under Calvin Coolidge, as Paul Ryan's plan assumes? Does anyone think we will deport 11 million people?
We need conservative ideas to modernize the U.S. economy and reform American government. But what we have instead are policies that don't reform but just cut and starve government — a strategy that pays little attention to history or best practices from around the world and is based instead on a theory.
Amen, Mr. Zakaria. Thank you for the perspective.
[*Fareed Zakaria has been managing editor of Foreign Affairs, a columnist for Newsweek and editor of Newsweek International, and now is Editor-at-Large of Time and host of CNN's Fareed Zakaria GPS. He has been called a liberal, a moderate, and a conservative, but identifies himself as a centrist. If you look across the span of his writing and speaking, it is hard to fit him into a tidy ideological or political identity, although he did support Barack Obama for president. His views and values are considered, well informed, and well reasoned. If one were to place Fareed Zakaria and David Brooks as the book-ends of the space defining a centrist orientation to government and political identity, it would be a well-informed, principled, practical, and honorable identity, indeed.]
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