STANDING ATHWART HISTORY, YELLING STOP?

Francis "Manhattan Contrarian" Menton apparently hasn't heard of Fabian gradualism. Progressivism: What Is The Limiting Principle?

Always (or at least, always before now) the progressive proposals to make the world perfectly just and fair have been presented one by one. Wouldn’t the world be so much more fair if we only had free (government paid) college for all? Many people look at such a proposal and think, sure, that would make things a little more fair; I guess I could get on board with it. Then, wouldn’t the world be so much more fair if we had universal (government paid) health care for all. In isolation, same reaction. Separately, wouldn’t it be great to “save the planet” by getting carbon emissions under control (by some form of government subsidy and/or command)? Addressed separately, and with no context of what other proposals may be coming, many people find themselves nodding along. With your attention diverted from the big picture, any of these proposals might get your support.

The "wouldn't it be nice" ratchet has been screwing over people much longer than that: the interstate highways, and urban renewal, and the Great Society, and the story is always the same: self-congratulation over good intentions never compensates for bad policy.  Go, read and understand Thomas Sowell's The Vision of the Anointed.  I'll wait.

Pace Mr Menton, it is the nature of Fabian gradualists to keep ratcheting up the crises.

Is any single Democrat ever going to say, for example, I support universal single payer health care as our first priority, and therefore, let’s be honest, we’re never going to also have total transformation of the energy system, free college, reparations, high speed rail everywhere, universal job guarantees, universal housing guarantees, and all those other things? I’ve never seen it.

I haven’t seen any Democrat, or any spokesperson for the progressive side, ever mention this issue or offer any limiting principle. Isn’t it time we started to get some answers here?

There is no limiting principle.  Unfortunately, as Ross Douthat notes, the people who call themselves conservative are not respecters of limiting principle either.

They envision a larger communitarian panoply — civic associations, religious denominations, charities and universities and private schools — which needs protection against the jealousy of a centralizing state. And they tend to assume that keeping the American corporation embedded in this communitarian system is a better way to balance productivity and innovation and public-spiritedness than just trying to regulate and micromanage businesses into good behavior.

If you wanted to summarize the intellectual uncertainties of conservatives in the Trump era, you could say that the right is trying to figure out whether the unwritten American constitution it imagines itself defending still exists. And if it doesn’t, or if it’s failing, whether that means that “limited government” as a slogan and strategy is increasingly irrelevant when it comes to shaping the society that conservatives would like America to be.

Better, perhaps, to have control of that centralizing state with a different set of guarantees?  That is, might the implicit powers of the state be desirable per se, if simply being misused by the self-styled progressives.

Is America still a deeply religious country, with strong churches and growing denominations? Are American businessmen basically public spirited, eager to compete on equal terms once government removes its heavy hand, and natural allies for a political movement wedded to patriotism and religion?

For years now conservative critics and sociologists and intellectuals have been acknowledging that the answers might be no — that the country’s once-rich associational and civic and religious life is declining and dissolving, that corporate America embraces conservative slogans to keep taxes low and unions weak but otherwise seems post-patriotic and performatively woke, that the “silent majority” of hardworking, pious, culturally conservative blue-collar families is now essentially defunct.

That might be so, and it might also be the case that the best thing for the national government to do might be to stay uninvolved, as bourgeois convention might well be robust against transgressivity.

That's not going to reassure members of the political class, let alone the legions of pundits who rely on the activity of the political class to generate column inches (or is it clickbait these days?)

But while accounts like [Tim] Carney’s acknowledge the role of economic forces — globalization, trade, deindustrialization — in the dissolution of family and community, they also tend to insist, contra liberals and our new socialist vanguard (and also contra Trump), that this cultural collapse isn’t primarily driven by economic policy decisions and can’t be reversed by public policies or programs. Instead they tend to suggest that state interventions often just replace community instead of strengthening it and cast any communitarian revival as a necessarily local project, in which government can play at best a supporting, don’t-make-matters-worse kind of role.

These kind of arguments are still in continuity, then, with the basic conservative posture of the last few generations. But there are also increasingly partisans of rupture on the right, a loose group of state-power conservatives who hint that if the Tocquevillian dream is dying then the cause of “limited government” is increasingly irrelevant — which in turn would require conservatives to become more comfortable using the power of the state, and more engaged in centralized policymaking that has specific social and cultural ends in mind.

It's likely that advocates of a more interventionist national government will use disagreements between libertarian conservatives and national greatness conservatives as a tactic to question all advocacy for limited government.

For my part, I have to wonder why, if Our Political Masters had fixed health care a few years ago, they have to fix it again.  Or why we oughtn't ask how well the Great Society worked out.

It's straightforward to conclude that centralized policy making is unlikely to work out well, no matter who is in charge.