Jon Henke's blog

Three years ago, Markos Moulitsas floated the idea of an emerging brand of "libertarian Democrats."   At Cato Unbound, Kos argued that the Democratic Party was "growing increasingly comfortable with moving in a new direction, one in which restrained government, fiscal responsibility, and—most important of all—individual freedoms are paramount."

And in fact, libertarians did swing from voting overwhelmingly from Bush in 2000 to overwhelmingly for Obama in 2008.

Recently, though, the people Kos once sympathetically and invitingly described as "traditionally Republican voters [who] simply want to live their lives in peace, without undue meddling..." have been protesting policies and politicians, both Republicans and Democrats.  The Democratic response to this widespread public concern has been...ridicule.  Thanks for the votes, now get lost.

The Democratic/libertarian alliance won't last long.

Clever and well done.

What will Sarah Palin do next?  So far, the punditry has outpaced the evidence, so I won't speculate about her intentions.  However, the most interesting theory - floated by one of Glenn Reynolds' readers - is that Palin "will try to start a new Tea Party" to challenge the Republican Party.  There are some very important problems with this.

• First, Reynolds is correct that ballot access is a major barrier.  His reader suggests that Perot won 19% of the vote, and it would be very significant is Palin helped a Tea Party win "20% of the contested seats in 2010".  But winning 20% of the vote is not the same as winning 20% of contested seats.  To accomplish that, you would need to win a lot more than 20% of the vote in a lot of elections, but a brand new party just would not have the campaign infrastructure needed to do effective GOTV on anything like a large, reproducible scale.  Certainly not by 2010.

NOTE: The Barry Goldwater and Howard Dean campaigns suggest there is movement-building value even if you lose...but note that the were insurgents operating within their Party, not revolutionaries going outside of it.

• Reynolds argues that Palin would "draw almost entirely from Republican voters".  That is correct and a serious barrier.  But Palin draws almost entirely from Republican voters because Palin does not appear to differ a great deal from the Republican Party.  If she has some grand vision to sustain a new movement, she hasn't actually explained it or otherwise gone beyond standard Republican talking points.  A 3rd Party would be redundant.  Immediately.

There could, in fact, be an exploitable gap in American electoral politics.  A lot of voters just don't map consistently on the liberal/conservative spectrum in both economic and social matters.  There might be room for a fiscally liberal, socially conservative movement (i.e., Christian Democrats).  Or perhaps it could be a fiscally conservative, socially liberal movement (e.g., Goldwater).  What you can't do is build a new movement around being exactly like Republicans, except super-sincere.

Another Instapundit correspondent hit closer to the mark.

I think the third party talk is ill advised. I think Palin just needs to try and stick her finger in the eye of the Republican establishment. She can do that by supporting/encouraging challengers to incumbents, where appropriate, in the Republican primaries.

The next leaders of the Republican Party will be the people who kill some sacred cows, make a lot of Republican enemies and force the movement itself to evolve past this comfortable equilibrium.

Reform starts at home. So far, nobody has had the guts to take on the sacred cows.

What to make of the rapid-fire revelations that Sarah Palin is...

• ...not running for re-election
• ...resigning her office
• ...getting "out of politics for good"

There's no doubt that Gov. Palin and her family have been through a very difficult year, and I sympathize with a desire to get out of the public spotlight. I hope that is what's happening here, because it's just not plausible that quitting the only significant political accomplishment on her resume would help Sarah Palin in a Presidential run.  It's awfully hard to go from "Alaska is better off if I am not Governor" to "Who wants to elect me President?"

On the other hand, Lefties can spare me their wailing and gnashing of teeth over just how irresponsible it is to quit in the middle of your first term.  Take it up with the President first.

It's hard to know what more to make of this until we get a much better explanation, but the view from here is that you won't have Sarah Palin to kick around anymore.  Her Presidential prospects are done, and it's hard to see how Republicans will still consider her a potential leader of the movement.

But perhaps that's best.  Republicans need to stop looking for a Leader and start thinking about where they want to go.

Paul Krugman, 2005, saying universal health care would make us more like GM...

Why should we be a country in which hard working people aren't guaranteed health care if they need it? ... But the problem is that ... our economy is starting to look more like Wal-Mart and less like General Motors in the good days. The share of workers who get benefits at all is declining and the quality of the benefits.

Wal-Mart is very profitable. GM filed for bankruptcy.

The annual Personal Democracy Forum was Monday and Tuesday in New York, and it was very good.  As always. You can read more about it at TechPresident.

Naturally, there was a great deal of conversation about the imbalance between the Left and Right online.  The general consensus is that Republicans are behind on the internet, though there is a great deal of debate over how and why.  The least convincing answer was offered by a PDF audience member, and it basically boiled down to "Republicans suck. Democrats are cool.  So we're better at the internet."

Yeah, well, those who forget history...

Democrats race to catch up to GOP online

The Democratic National Committee relaunched its Web site Friday and appointed its first technology adviser in an effort to match the Republican party's success in using the Internet to build its constituency. [...] "We realized that the Republicans were ironically peddling their Stone Age ideas with modern-day technology tools, and we were just not at their level in our dedication to technology," Buck said.Insiders say it's widely acknowledged that the Republican committee has done a better job than the Democrats' committee in creating an online strategy.  The Republican committee "is far and away ahead in securing a large constituent of online activists and does a better job of using the medium to move their message," said Pam Fielding of E-advocates, an Internet advocacy consulting firm based in Washington, D.C.

That was 2002.

What changed?  Again, that's the subject of a great deal of debate, but I would argue that it was two things:

1. Republicans got comfortable.
2. Democrats got entrepreneurial.

In 2016, there's no doubt that the online landscape will be very different.  The Right will be much more effective.  The only question is how they will do it.  The balance of power on the Right will depend, in large part, on who the new entrepreneurs are and how they build the infrastructure.

I tend to agree with Patrick Ruffini that Gov. Sanford should not be obligated to resign for having an affair (as distinct from his disapperance and deception of his staff).  While I think that resignation is a perfectly legitimate, even appropriate, path to take after disgracing oneself, a personal disgrace should not necessarily require resignation from one's job, whether in politics or the private sector.

Indeed, as I pointed out in the comments there, I've been trying to think of a prominent politician who resigned from their elected political office because of an affair (note: McGreevey and Spitzer resigned because of the major ethics/legal violations involved, not the affair), and the only one I can come up with is Rep. Livingston, who resigned his Congressional seat in 1999 after admitting an affair.  I'm sure there are others - probably more at the State/local level - but I can't think of them offhand.

On the other hand, I have to disagree with part of what Max Borders wrote here.

The Right is now reaping what it sowed. By making social conservatism central to its platform, it left no room in the GOP for sinners.

I don't think the backlash against Gov. Sanford has a lot to do with social conservatism.  Social conservatives do not have a unique position on adultery.  Pretty much everybody considers it immoral.  And the social conservative position on gay marriage (which Sanford shared) is not predicated on heterosexual people being uniquely faithful, either.  The appropriate criticism is not so much hypocrisy as it is failure.

Ultimately, there are no political or ideological lessons to be drawn from Mark Sanford's affair.  There are only human lessons.

I also think Max is wrong on a practical and logical level to conclude from this story that "it is time to purge the Right’s politics of social conservatism".  As a libertarian, I certainly favor the harm principle over the offense principle - that is, I think politics should focus on addressing force and fraud instead of things which are merely unpleasant.

I believe that libertarianism is a very internally consistent way of marrying the personal and political spheres, but I actually don't think it works. Or rather, it's wonderful in theory, but human nature has not adopted that theory for any large, sustained social group in history.

For my part, I've come to believe that libertarianism is a personal moral philosophy, not a political philosophy. It describes how we ought to behave individually, but it does not give us practical advice for how we can resolve social disputes in a political system.

The political system requires accomodation.  Libertarians can either disengage or they can find a way to work within a coalition.  Unprincipled?  Maybe.  But so is everybody.  That's human nature.

But there is one final, very important point: Social conservatism is basically a personal moral philosophy (or tendency), as well.  As Hayek said of conservatism, "It is that by its very nature it cannot offer an alternative to the direction in which we are moving. It may succeed by its resistance to current tendencies in slowing down undesirable developments, but, since it does not indicate another direction, it cannot prevent their continuance. It has, for this reason, invariably been the fate of conservatism to be dragged along a path not of its own choosing. The tug of war between conservatives and progressives can only affect the speed, not the direction, of contemporary developments."

Social conservatives also need to accomodate libertarians.  That does not mean they must minimize their objections to immorality, but it does mean they are going to have to accept fewer litmus tests and, if trends hold, a somewhat less decisive role within the Right's coalition.

Social conservatives and libertarians do have some common interests.  The Right's coalition has worked best when they have focused on those common interests and left the rest to the social and personal spheres.

Paul Krugman is not concerned about how much universal health care will cost taxpayers.

I’m not that worried about the issue of costs. Yes, the Congressional Budget Office’s preliminary cost estimates for Senate plans were higher than expected, and caused considerable consternation last week. But the fundamental fact is that we can afford universal health insurance — even those high estimates were less than the $1.8 trillion cost of the Bush tax cuts.

Krugman waves away the matter of cost with "One way or another, the numbers will be brought into line".  However, in a 2005 interview with the Asian Times, Paul Krugman explained what he thinks we need to do...

"We should be getting 28% of GDP [gross domestic product] in revenue. We are only collecting 17%."

2008 tax revenue was 17.7% of GDP.  So, in Paul Krugman's ideal world, we would see a 60%+ increase in taxes.  But Krugman is "not that worried about the issue of costs."

This is what happens under a monopoly.  Consumer concerns about cost and value are called irresponsible, and the only "responsible" option - ever - is to gouge consumers for even more money.

If Democrats want to pass the health care legislation, then let's pass the tax hike necessary to pay for it simultaneously.  Let's bring those numbers into line and see how Americans feel about universal health care then.

Ezra Klein says the health care public plan is very popular in polling, so Senate opposition to it means "the Senate hates democracy" and "is resolutely, aggressively, anti-democratic."

Paul Krugman says poll results show that a majority of Americans prefer deficit reduction to higher government spending, but Krugman says "most people don’t know much about macroeconomics" so "the moral for Obama is, of course, to ignore this poll".

Discuss.

NOTE: Aside from the fact that people tend to accept or dismiss polls results based almost entirely on what they already wanted, I think there are two problems with the idea that popular support equals legitimacy, propriety or even democracy.

1. Stated preference (poll) and revealed preference (how people actually behave when making a choice) differ widely.
2. With no real price mechanism through which people can evaluate the costs and benefits of policy, we end up with simultaneous public support for massive spending and minimal taxation.  Well, who doesn't want something for nothing?

#1 is a political problem that can't really be changed - thus, we have a representative democracy, rather than direct democracy.

#2 is a policy problem that both Republicans and Democrats should be doing more to fix - e.g., indexing tax rates to spending, pigovian taxes, federalism, etc.

Here is a great example of a story that Republicans should be using to regain their credibility, instead of simply bashing Democrats.  The Republican Whip blog (of Eric Cantor) says Democrats are shutting the House GOP out of the process.

In a completely unprecedented fashion, House Democrats have used their power as the majority party to shut out floor amendments from the minority party on spending legislation. Right at the beginning of the debate, House Democrats decided to go to the Rules Committee, to report out a Structured Rule and shut the House GOP out of the process.

So, Republicans (who spent years in the majority strong-arming legislation, bending the rules and shutting out Democrats) are now upset that Democrats are abusing their power.  My sympathy is a bit limited.  However, Democrats spent those same years complaining about the Republican abuses of power, so "Republicans did stuff too!" isn't really an excuse.

This does offer a good excuse to review some Nancy Pelosi quotes from years past, though.

1. “Every person in America has a right to have his or her voice heard. No Member of Congress should be silenced on the floor…guaranteeing that the voices of all the people are heard.” - Nancy Pelosi, 2008
2. "House Republicans might have their doubts, but Minority Leader Pelosi says a Democratic majority next year would place a heavy emphasis on bipartisanship — and would offer the Republicans minority rights often denied Democrats now." - National Journal on Nancy Pelosi, 2006
3. "It's not about a defeat, it's about a decision. I certainly would not say that we can't bring things to the floor because we'll lose ... [Republicans] are afraid of ideas. That's why we can't have amendments, substitutes, and all the rest for the most part." - National Journal on Nancy Pelosi, 2006
4. "I'm a big believer in bipartisanship on so many issues. You can't address the entitlement issue, the healthcare issue, and do it in a partisan way. They are too big, they involve too many people, and they involve too much money, private and public money. You've got to do it in a way that has legitimacy." - Nancy Pelosi, 2006

Frankly, the solution is a much more granular, well-defined and transparent process that doesn't allow politicians to do the horse-trading and ad hoc deal-making that corrupts legislation so much.

At this point, both Congressional Republicans and Democrats are pretty unpopular, and the public trend is towards higher "independent" identification.  Forget bashing Democrats; Republicans need to sell the public on Republicans.   "Democrats suck" is not really a selling point for Republicans.

This issue is, again, a place where Republicans could build credibility and set themselves apart from Democrats by working with bipartisan outside groups to develop an objective, fair, accountable and rational process for legislation, abiding by it (to the extent possible) now, and making a public, written and enforceable commitment to adopt it once they regain the majority.

If Republicans are serious about both reforming the party and ensuring good governance, they could do that and do it now.  Campaign rhetoric about "fixing the problems" if they regain the majority are likely to be as empty as those from the Democrats were.