Closing Minds

I still think the "which party is more narrow minded" argument is a stultifying waste of time (because its obvious that it must be the other guy's party -everyone thinks this...). But I would like to agree that on first couple reads this by Ross Douthat strikes me as basically correct.

The research I do on interest groups leads confirms that interests tend to be narrow because they don't want to get into expensive fights with other groups. Intra-party fighting is very expensive, so the constituent groups tend to not get in each other's way. This is true of all politics. I was talking to a student who was saying how he couldn't understand the pro-life movement's desire to have babies born, and then let them starve because they wouldn't fund the welfare state. I explained to him that, to the extent the pro-life movement has a policy on the welfare state, they are the promoters of a "more family friendly" one. Sam Brownback was big on this. But there isn't a political coalition in this country for a Family Friendly natal-welfare policy. There is a coalition for pro-life and a coalition for small welfare state, and the pro-lifers have (correctly) assessed that it is better to be part of the winning the pro-life coalition than to get into a fight with the welfare reformers.

My addition to this is that I am becoming accutely aware of how important the "leadership" resource is. Briefly, ecoplogical interest group theory says that groups seek out areas where they don't have to compete and where they monopolize one or more resources -money, members, political power, leadership or some such. Manipulating policy is about getting a coalition of interests who monopolize the correct sequence of resources.

Douthat notes that there's a great deal of intellectual diversity on the right. The narrow-mindedness comes from the rote-repetition by politicians and the narrow interests of the constituent groups in the movement. This, I think, has always been, is true for the other party, and always shall be. This is the nature of coalition politics. Everyone pursues their own goal, they avoid confrontations they don't need, and they form coalitions around mutually congruent goals and mutually required resources. These intellectual ideas are a resource, but not one that seems to be needed at the moment (Party of No and all that) and not one that any group has monopolized.

What's needed is a group with leadership (or an entrepreneur) who will take those ideas and try to form a coalition around them. The more complicated and unified the ideas, the harder this will be to do -but without leadership, it won't happen at all. However, until a group monopolizes the resource and marries it to leadership, promoting these ideas will be an invitation to intergroup conflict, which, remember, they try to avoid.

In other words, the problem on the right as of this momement is a lack of leadership and an excess of potentially good ideas. This results in too many ingredients and too few chefs to make the stew of political coalition.

I'll end by way of example. I begin to realize how important Bush was to the right. Not everyone liked compassionate conservatism, but because Bush monopolized the leadership resource and monopolized the compassionate conservative resource, for coalition structure he was the only game in town. Competing against Bush and Compassionate Conservatism was going to be an expensive game and it was better for the allied groups to simply accept it as a given and adjust to the new environment. With Bush gone and Compassionate Conservatism dispersed across the movement, there's not a game at all because the necessary players/resources are not on the field. We're waiting for a leader who has a monopoly on a plausibly good idea to provide the core of the new coalition. Put another way, we're waiting for the next Buckley, Goldwater, Reagan, or W. Bush and hoping we don't instead get Nixon, Ford, or HW Bush.