The Fetal Conceit
Adding to my last post, regarding the fatalism John Quiggin talks about. I’ve been wrong about many things in years of blogging, but right about a few. In particular, I long maintained that there are no important fault lines within the Republican/conservative coalition. That different factions have some issue preferences at odds with each other doesn’t herald a “conservative crackup.” Once you take preference intensity into account, any “incoherence” in the right-wing coalition vanishes. America’s ruling elite comprises executives in the FIRE and energy sectors, military contractors, the active-duty brass and the leaders of socially conservative megachurches. There is at most one political dispute among these factions that matters, and indeed quite a bit of overlap.
Its institutional infrastructure is those magachurches, law-enforcement and corrections-employee associations, the current Tea-Party organizations, veterans organizations and trade associations like the US Chamber of Commerce and its local equivalents. There is at most one significant political dispute among these factions, and indeed quite a bit of overlap. Its activist base is (almost exclusively white) business owners and professionals, recipients of agricultural subsidies, active evangelicals and, recently, exurban retirees. There is at most one significant political dispute among these factions, and indeed quite a bit of overlap.
The one signficant dispute has nothing to do with civil liberties or the rule of law or drug prohibition or national security. It’s not wealth distribution or social issues like abortion or gay rights. You’ll find some people and groups in the ruling coalition with views on any of the above that dissent from Republican orthodoxy (which is the American ruling orthodoxy). But you won’t find any material dissent on those issues that rises to the level of deal-breaking. The stereotypical “economically conservative but socially liberal” businessman, to the extent he still exists, may disagree with his coalition partners about gay rights in the abstract, but his practical preference intensity is on his tax bill and regulatory sway. The cosmopolitan neocon who used to be a Trotskyite way back there somewhere may not burn to repeal Great Society economic programs, but what he cares about is American international hegemony, and if the price of that is going along with right-wing economics and fundamentalist social policies, so be it. Besides, his Trotskyite days were decades ago, and he’s since reared a brood of much more conventionally right-wing children, and gotten them good jobs in the conservative apparat. The economically precarious churchgoer is theoretically ripe for a message of left-wing economic populism, but his real concern is what penises go into and the two-way traffic through American vaginas. American flag officers manage a massive multi-ethnic organization of men and women, and, in practice, have to work constructively with at least some elements of diverse local cultures around the globe. But they are also mostly white, mostly male, substantially of conservative Christian background and sympathy, whose natural post-service career paths point toward munitions manufacturers, beltway bandits and private military contractors.
In real life as opposed to media schema, neocons and evangelicals largely hold conservative economic views, businessmen are political nationalists, active-duty officers and Pentagon contractors are social conservatives. And all of them are very, very white.
The one significant issue is immigration. Here the views of the business sectors and nationalist elements clearly conflict. Business-people want more immigrants in the labor force; nationalists and nativists want fewer. This is a real dispute within the American Right, and clearly the nationalists hold the upper hand. It hasn’t been enough to break up the corporate/nationalist political alliance, however. It’s interesting to theorize why that should be*, but it’s clear that the top-income brackets are not going to permanently rupture with their coalition partners over the issue. Note that the progressive perspective on immigration – for it as an increase in human welfare – is completely irrelevant to the political dynamic. No corporate/progressive alliance strong enough to pass a pro-immigration reform bill has arisen or appears likely to arise.
It’s hard to see from here what fault lines might arise in the ruling (conservative) coalition in the foreseeable future, and it’s hard to see the shape of a progressive coalition that the ruling coalition can’t ignore, pick off or compromise. The conservative coalition will go on until it makes things so rotten it simply can’t continue, and then it will go on awhile after that, harder. When it does finally collapse, I’ll raise my colostomy bag to the television screen in a quiet toast – if I can afford a colostomy bag.
* I suspect practical issues mute the preference intensity of business elites on immigration: first, they can still get immigrant labor because movement controls are slipshod; second, the Great Recession is already applying plenty of downward pressure on wages, and cut into immigration flows anyway; third, many businesses, unable to import labor can offshore production instead, and the nationalist elements of the conservative coalition show no interest in restricting offshoring.
Comment by Thoreau —
March 13, 2011 @ 10:36 am
I wonder/fear if we are already in the “even harder” phase.
Comment by TGGP —
March 13, 2011 @ 10:50 am
On immigration the nationalists (”nativist” would be the better term, and they prefer “restrictionist”) believe they are getting well and truly fucked by the business class. Precisely because the law is not enforced and the immigrants keep coming. They believe the law is perfectly capable of stopping immigration, since that was the case before 1965 and there’s the example of Eisenhower’s “Operation Wetback”. They see things like court decisions overturning California’s referendum restricting social services to the children of illegals and the attempts to stop Arizona from doing the work the feds won’t do, and decide the legal system is stacked against them by forces trying to sabotage the will of the people (pretty much the same deal on social policy). So the obvious solution is to put the right people in charge of government appointing the right people as judges!
Comment by qaz —
March 13, 2011 @ 10:50 am
It is not clear that business owners are in favor of immigration. Business owners who want immigrants to work in their factories don’t really care if they are illegal or not as long as the punishments fall on the immigrants themselves and not the business owners.
Comment by Jim Henley —
March 13, 2011 @ 11:24 am
@TGGP: Sure. I think that captures the nativist perspective pretty well. But do you see that ever going beyond jockeying for position within the existing ruling coalition? Because aside from outliers among intellectual paleoconservatism (AmConMag, Chronicles), nativists are nationalists who abhor “socialism.” Opposition to “Invade the World, Invite the World,” is a coherent ideology, but “We don’t like foreigners coming here, and we’ll kick their ass anywhere on Earth they get out of line” is a coherent attitude. And it’s the latter that predominates.
@qaz: I think that plays into the preference intensity. Nevertheless for over a decade “open or at least opener borders” was a major goal of business-class policy organs. They spent good money and real time on trying to relax immigration restrictions right through 2007. They just lost.
Comment by Rarely Posts —
March 13, 2011 @ 11:43 am
The conservative coalition won’t collapse until demographics completely kill it. The problem with the coalition is that it cannot incorporate substantial numbers of non-white citizens as long as the nativist issues are salient and high-profile. Meanwhile, the proportion of the population that is non-white continues to climb. That’s why Bush and company courted latinos so heavily, but they can’t pull it off when the nativists become the public face of the coalition.
Comment by Jim Henley —
March 13, 2011 @ 11:57 am
I think it’s an issue. The way racial issues around coalition-building have been finessed in the past is by redefining what counts as white. We may reach the limits of that at some point. OTOH, The old South Africa sustained outright de jure racial dominion by a white minority and successfully found enough nonwhite foot-soldiers (literally) to enforce their will for decades.
Comment by Glaivester —
March 13, 2011 @ 2:05 pm
The problem with the coalition is that it cannot incorporate substantial numbers of non-white citizens as long as the nativist issues are salient and high-profile.
I disagree with the implication here that if the GOP were just to become “less racist,” it would have an easier time recruiting minorities. Part of the issue here is that a lot of blacks and Latinos believe that the government should use the welfare state (broadly defined) to redistribute wealth from non-Hispanic whites to them in order to remedy past injustices. For the GOP to get a significant share of the black vote or to get a majority of the Latino vote would not simply require becoming “unracist,” it would require a total turnabout in how they view the welfare state – and even then, it might not work because the Democrats could jsut go even further left.
Trying to stop the demographic change, however difficult that may be, is probably more realistic than trying to change black and Latino voting patterns.
Asians, of course, could be a different matter.
With Jews, I think the main problem is that the vast majority of Jews tend to be very wary of Christians who view the theology of Christianity as important. Again, this would make it difficult for the GOP to increase its percentage of the Jewish vote without it more or less rejecting the evangelicals.
Comment by Glaivester —
March 13, 2011 @ 2:11 pm
The way racial issues around coalition-building have been finessed in the past is by redefining what counts as white. We may reach the limits of that at some point.
The reason why this cannot be finessed is largely because the government disincentivizes people from identifying as white. Affirmative action and “disparate impact” antidiscrimination policies mean that, all else being equal, belonging to an underperforming minority group gives you a better shot in a number of endeavors, such as college, civil service jobs, etc. Therefore, there is a great incentive for people who can idenitfy as non-white to do so.
Comment by Glaivester —
March 13, 2011 @ 2:18 pm
Besides, his Trotskyite days were decades ago, and he’s since reared a brood of much more conventionally right-wing children
I think the issue is far less that the neocon’s kids are more conventionally conservative, and far more than “conventionally conservative” has been defined down, partly by the neocons’ own efforts. I very seriously doubt that most of today’s “conventional conservatives” would be considered anything but “social radicals” in the 1950s.
Comment by b-psycho —
March 13, 2011 @ 5:10 pm
Glaivester:
Wouldn’t approaching that be an admission on their part that their immigration stance is about race & not “rule of law”?
Comment by Jim Henley —
March 13, 2011 @ 5:22 pm
It’s certainly true that 50s conservatives held especially vicious social views compared even to most contemporary conservatives. OTOH, as a middle-aged white man, I’m privy to unguarded talk by middle-aged white men, and I also, God knows why, listen to sports talk radio a fair bit, so I know that white racist and sexist attitudes remain pretty common. And that’s not even to mention attitudes toward gays.
We do see a fair number of people like the old conservatives starting to attain power thanks to the latest wave of Bircherism. So far it’s at the state level, and they’re starting with safe targets like Muslims, the mentally disabled and women who’ve had sex. Whether they’ll ever go the Full Uganda on gays or try to bring back Jim Crow is unknown. I’d probably bet against it, but that might be Whiggishness on my part.
The thing about how today’s conventional conservatives would look compared to troglodytes of an earlier era is a side issue, though. Conventional conservatism remains a project of preserving the privileges of the dominant. That means militarism, corporatism and xenophobia, spiced according to the occasion it’s being served up for. That’s what it was in the 1950s too. That cultural contexts do change, despite conservatism’s best efforts, just means that conventional conservatism will adjust its flavoring a bit from meal to meal. You still won’t mistake salad for dessert.
Comment by Jim Henley —
March 13, 2011 @ 5:25 pm
@b-psycho: Glaivester’s always struggled with the temptations of conventional white racism while trying to stay on the preoccupied with racial resentments side of the line. I don’t know if he’s since crossed over from where he was last decade.
Comment by Thoreau —
March 13, 2011 @ 6:28 pm
the government disincentivizes people from identifying as white
I’ll grant you that a few HR departments and academic funding programs show a certain amount of token favoritism toward certain minority groups. However, the police, NSA, FBI, CBP, DHS, TSA, and others all treat you better if you identify as white.
Comment by TGGP —
March 13, 2011 @ 9:38 pm
I don’t really disagree with your “but”, Jim. I wasn’t arguing that there would be a crackup (Tancredo’s beef with Bush was the closest thing) so much as that restrictionists (and social conservatives) are losers. If their opponents can’t see that, they are just deluded. The real power are the national security wing of Romney’s stool. Military budgets never go down in nominal terms, and it’s assumed must keep pace with GDP. And what’s the point of having this big military around if we don’t use it?
Comment by Jim Henley —
March 13, 2011 @ 10:22 pm
@TGGP: I agree. Theoretically, if the military-industrial corps and the FIRE firms came to a difference they couldn’t split, things could get interesting. But I can’t imagine what such a difference might look like. Also, how many battalions has Wells Fargo?
Comment by Thoreau —
March 14, 2011 @ 12:10 am
Bullets cost money.
Comment by abb1 —
March 14, 2011 @ 3:32 am
Wow, this is one confused post, IMHO.
The active-duty brass and the leaders megachurches are nowhere near the ruling elite, and race has nothing to do with it. It’s all about capital, large, mostly multi-national corporations.
Money talks, the rest is a red-herring.
Comment by mpowell —
March 16, 2011 @ 12:28 pm
As depressing as this post was, it’s always amusing to watch a republican complain that minorities will never vote for the party of cartoonish levels of evil even if that party stop being quite as racist because they’re just too socialist and it’s just not fair!!