Reflections on primary night: "In the nineteenth century, we were the liberals"

Primary night has come and gone, as has Texas Independence Day, one of my favorite holidays of the year. But before getting to that, I will backtrack a few months to an essay by University of Chicago economist Gary economist Gary Becker on Barry Obama’s crazy job-subsidizing plan. As the Nobel laureate put it,

        The president is aware that efforts will be made to game the proposal, and he proposed various safeguards. However, new ways will be discovered to get around the restrictions that would reduce the net job creating potential. Further efforts to close loopholes would lead the government to become more and more involved in the employment decisions of companies.

Such is entirely what I spent two years in graduate school to learn, but perhaps the most useful line on the page was is in the comments, from one “Jake”:

        Many of Obama's policy proposals (not to mention the very fact that he got elected to the White House) are a testament to the ignorance of the large segment of the electorate who are too young to remember how bad things were under Jimmy Carter. Back in the late 1970s and even into the early 1980s, the government experimented with so-called "targeted job tax credits" for employers who chose to hire unemployed people. For the most part the jobs did not outlast the time period that employers had to keep the new hires on the payroll in order to earn the tax credits.

As I’ve been saying, this guy is Jimmy Carter all over again. The illiberal notions of phony liberals seem sometimes to be intellectual zombies, mindlessly wandering the landscape until we find the presence of mind to drive a stake through their or shoot them in the heads.

So fastforward to this past evening, where I spent the first hour in our precinct convention here in Travis County precinct #273. In this exalted role, I purport to be the leader of all GOP activities in a roughly square mile area. If I had a resolution for 2010, it was to invigorate the neoliberal faithful in Rosedale, and perhaps then in Texas and the world beyond. I say liberal, and that puts off more than a few conservatives, who wonder why I’m such a committed Republican.

I’ll explain. I spent the next several hours at Donna Campbell’s election night party at the Stephen F. Austin Hotel at 7th and Congress, talking to some of our impressive slate of Republican candidates. The only race in which I clearly lamented the outcome was that for the State Board of Education in district 10. We defeated several other paleolithic members of the SBOE, but defeating Ken Mercer proved more difficult that we had hoped. At least, that is, for an opponent—Tim Tuggey—who had recently given money to Democrats. Democrats like Chet Edwards, one of the few in the federal congress to vote against Obamacare. Democrats that we could all use more of, by the way.

The trouble is that the Blue Dogs, those Democrats we respected and wanted to work with, have become few and far between. For as actor John Ratzenberger famously put it while campaigning in Massachusetts for Scott Brown, “this isn't the Democratic party of our fathers and grandfathers. This is the party of Woodstock hippies.”

Our opponents, that is, are no longer the party of Jack Kennedy, who sensibly assailed Ike’s bizarrely progressive, indeed oppressive, income tax regime. Today, our opponents have gotten themselves so far off the rails that they’ve almost ceased to be meaningful opponents. Almost, that is—if we Republicans can recommit to the neoliberal philosophy that defined our party under the leadership of luminaries like Reagan.

“In the nineteenth century,” a candidate told me tonight, “we were the liberals—the people who believed in economic freedom, and not in all this other stuff” that doesn’t play well in Travis County anyway. It plays in certain parts of the Hill Country, or on the plains and in the Pine Country, but that’s not a recipe for building a national movement, whether in Texas or the US at large.

In the long run, the principled moderation of neoliberalism will always outperform the compulsive intervention of nanny-statism. In the long run, Barry Obama will be understood as an embarrassing recycling of Jimmy Carter. In the long run, we can control politics in central Texas. But the long run will come a lot sooner if we’re smart about it. By and large, I’m excited about where the party is going in, and I’m happy to be on board.