It might have been while I was writing my previous blog post, during which I found, to my surprise, that The Intercollegiate Review was a journal that admitted only essays that advanced conservative thought. To my naive mind, thought -- the product of honest thinking and not of self-deception -- is neither of the left nor of the right; it just is, objective and transcendent, and while reasonable people can disagree on many things, they will, all of them, reach substantially the same conclusion if their reasoning is honest.
Or, it might have been as I was reading a Bloomberg View column by Peter Orszag, the illustrious former Director of the Office of Management and Budget in the Obama Administration, attacking as a "mirage" the reputed savings from Medicaid reform through competitive bidding. "Demoralized" is the word I would use to describe my feelings when I read that article. It turns out that introducing more competition to health-care provision will result in higher, not lower, costs to the taxpayer. Fortunately, my feelings were rehabilitated when The Wall Street Journal posted a rebuttal shortly afterwards, saying that the alternative to competition is "coercion" and that for the sake of individual liberty and historical fealty, let us please try competition because those cost estimates are just that: estimates.
Or, it might have been while I was brushing my teeth, or shortly before actually doing so, when I usually look at myself in the mirror and practice a speech, this time in response to some provocative leftist rant. The Republicans are out to destroy the welfare state and leave poor people without the social safety net they have depended on for almost half a century, the Democrats say. Well I say: Medicare and Medicaid will be bankrupt within ten years if left as they are, and President Obama has responded only with demagoguery.
But people -- opinion-makers and leader-writers throughout cyberspace -- have kept on defending Obama. Where are "my people" anyway, the ones who would advance my argument and defend my position? We need to do our arguing fast and quick, yet people are missing!
And then it hit me: What if the brightest people, the most articulate people, the most respectable people are just not on my side? What if the ideas that I follow command respect only among people from the "other schools"? Does it mean that once you get into an Ivy League school, you automatically advocate leftist causes and lose your conservative bearings? Are my ideas simply ... bad?
A quick look at the most prominent conservative columnists today seems to indicate otherwise.
But moving along to the shaded rows, we see that the politicians (Elizabeth Warren is an aspiring politician) are different on each side. Where is Eureka College, anyway?
Perhaps this listing, which cannot be creditably called a "sample," is distorted by the presence of the Clintons of Yale University, but it is noteworthy that although G. W. Bush had degrees from Harvard and Yale (and was the first President with an MBA degree), he was often mocked for his intellectual ability, or lack thereof -- he was "the Decider," he said, not the thinker.
What this simplistic table tells us is that the liberals do not have a monopoly on high academic honors. True, it does not distinguish between the merely liberal from the Leftist agitators on stage during the 2012 Democratic National Convention. But it is clear that the politicians on the left have higher academic credentials than those on the right. What then?
Perhaps this trend of conservative intellectuals remaining in academia or journalism and liberal/socialist thinkers thriving in politics reflects the conservative taste for division of labour: the politicians do their work, the writers theirs, and the judges remain judges.
But the striking implication is that compromise is more possible with the politicians of the right than with those of the left. When politicians of the left advocate more empathy, they are not constrained by political realities. They have ideas, and then use politics to see those ideas realized and implemented. They are thinkers first, politicians second.
By contrast, the politicians of the right are politicians first, thinkers second. Anything that can advance a political goal will have primacy over policy prescriptions. But the obverse of this coin is that even if a policy is not entirely "conservative" in character, the rightist politicians can accept it if a substantial number of their constituencies will benefit from it.
This conclusion is ironic and perhaps unacceptable to those whose image of the Republican Party is molded by Sarah Palin's tea party. To counteract this image properly, one needs to write an academic thesis or a book, filled with examples and illustrated with charts. But just to avoid leaving readers hanging, allow me to generalize.
The Democrats want to increase spending on health care, on fiscal stimulus, on the automobile industry, and on a host of other things to stimulate economic activity. The Republicans want to decrease spending in order to contain government debt. On the surface, the Republicans are guided by their textbooks: The Road to Serfdom by Hayek, and Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand; the Democrats just want to reduce unemployment. So far, in the practicality contest, the Democrats run away with the prize.
But let us look at the constituencies that benefit from the competing policies. The Democrats' core voters are the minorities (but the Latinos will soon be the majority), gays and single people or childless couples in urban areas. Their lifestyle virtually demands empathy, and to them will flow, almost exclusively, the benefits of this Democratic orientation. On the other hand, the Republicans have their eye on the taxpayer and on their tax dollars ... in short, on everybody.
And from that word -- "everybody" -- stems our final conclusion. The Republicans are the managers; they govern, and when you govern you will see that you need to bear in mind the interests of as many groups of people as possible. None is broader than the category "taxpayer". Empathy is good, but who will pay for it?
Now: which group is more practical, the left or the right? Can't bad policy come from a good idea?
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