JUST DON'T CALL ME LIBERAL

The New York Times' young conservative columnist Ross Douthat flirts intensely with liberalism but can't quite bring himself to admit it:

The Class War We Need

The left-wing instinct, when faced with high-rolling irresponsibility, is usually to call for tax increases on the rich. But the problem, here and elsewhere, isn’t exactly that we tax high rollers’ incomes too lightly. It’s that we subsidize their irresponsibility too heavily — underwriting their bad bets and bailing out their follies. The class warfare we need is a conservative class warfare, which would force the million-dollar defaulters to pay their own way from here on out.

Consider the spread that the Giudices currently occupy (pending potential foreclosure proceedings, of course). The first million of its reported $1.7 million price tag is presumably covered by the federal mortgage-interest tax deduction. Intended to boost middle-class homebuyers, this deduction has gradually turned into a huge tax break for the affluent, with most of the benefits flowing to homeowners with cash income over $100,000. In much of the country, it’s a McMansion subsidy, whose costs to the federal Treasury are covered by the tax dollars of Americans who either rent or own more modest homes.

This policy is typical of the way the federal government does business. In case after case, Washington’s web of subsidies and tax breaks effectively takes money from the middle class and hands it out to speculators and have-mores. We subsidize drug companies, oil companies, agribusinesses disguised as “family farms” and “clean energy” firms that aren’t energy-efficient at all. We give tax breaks to immensely profitable corporations that don’t need the money and boondoggles that wouldn’t exist without government favoritism.

More here.

This is extraordinarily interesting: Douthat sounds just like a liberal.

I mean, he goes through some rhetorical squirming in order to give lip service to his membership in the Conservative Tribe, but in the end, he's essentially calling for raising taxes on the rich. Yeah yeah, I know he condemns liberals for doing the same thing, apparently asserting that his proscription is somehow different, but, when you get right down to it, his hairsplitting is on such a microscopic level that he might as well be a liberal himself. That is, there really isn't much of a difference, in my liberal mind, between raising taxes and eliminating tax breaks--they both amount to the same thing; the rich pay more taxes. This is nothing short of heresy coming from a conservative.

What can this possibly mean?

Of course, I can only speculate. But according to Douthat's above linked Wikipedia biography, he's some eleven years younger than me. That means he missed all the "morning in America" Reagan bullshit that informed the political identity of my lazy good-for-nothing generation. We witnessed the rise of the Conservative Movement just as we were becoming politically aware, and to most of us, it looked pretty damned good. Thus, most Americans around my age, at least the white ones, tend toward the right side of the political spectrum. After all, as we moved from our teens into our twenties, and then into our thirties, conservatism slowly came to dominate Washington's political imagination, and, as usual, the news media followed suit. Even when we were supporting "liberals" like Bill Clinton, we were supporting people that the Washington consensus had forced to move rightward.

Really, as a generation, we never had a chance to fairly consider liberal positions: conservatism, as an ideology, steamrolled everything during our formative years and beyond. I mean, not for me, of course, at least not in the long run, but I'm sure you get my drift.

Douthat, however, was born in 1979. By the time he was fifteen, Newt Gingrich's Radical Republicans had taken Congress. By the time he was nineteen, those same Republicans impeached President Clinton for a blowjob. Douthat was twenty two when radical Islamic extremists, under the watch of Conservative Messiah George W. Bush, crashed jet planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. He was twenty four when the Abu Ghraib torture scandal hit the headlines. He was twenty five when Katrina hit New Orleans. He was twenty seven when Wall Street had its infamous meltdown.

In other words, Douthat started conceptualizing politics when the Republicans were already at the height of their power. Since then, all he's seen them do is destroy themselves. Pretty much the same thing my generation saw with the Democrats.

What we are seeing with this Douthat column, I think, is evidence of a younger generation of conservatives beginning to understand that the ideas that drove the movement with which they tribally identify are unworkable in the real world. That is, young smart right-wingers like Douthat know that cutting taxes and deregulating business is not the panacea that their elders have pitched for years. But these kids still fancy themselves to be conservatives. But movement conservatism is, almost by definition, all about tax cuts and deregulation.

What's a young Republican to do?

It looks like Douthat's solution, for now, is to tentatively embrace a few liberal ideas, dressing them up in a nice blue conservative suit, so as not to cause cognitive dissonance. I mean, that's probably not what Douthat believes; I'm sure he continues to see himself as staunchly right of center. But the guy just called for taxing the rich. He wants a "class war."

What other way is there to explain these strange contradictions?

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