Liberal Talk Radio

Just got through David Brooks’ piece in the Sunday NYT Magazine. I must admit, I’m a sucker for this kind of big-picture-reinventing-democracy fluff, and Brooks doesn’t disappoint. He’s defly woven his longtime hobbyhorse, “National Greatness Conservatism” into a more fleshed out agenda for where he’d like to see the Party of Lincoln in the 21st Century.

The first thing to note about this article is that, with the subtitle, “Republicans 200[8],” it’s meant to echo Matt Bai’s piece in July on the internal revolution in the Democratic Party. But whereas Bai goes out and reports on the progressives who are in the process of creating the change, Brooks pens his essay in isolation, meaning that either (a) the Democrats are further along in the process of post-Cold-War reinvention, or (b), Republicans don’t air out their dirty laundry, especially to the Times. Since I’m a progressive with a thorough and compete disdain for absolutism, I’ll argue it’s a little of both.

Moving on to Brooks’ actual piece, there’s a lot in here I agree with. He’s basically calling for the Republicans to become the party of opportunity, a mantle which Clinton tried to steal for the Democrats. He essentially assumes the Religious Right will melt away in this new forumlation, because he devotes little or no time to including them in his agenda. Well, OK, David, if you think the GOP can put aside the culture wars, hell, I’ll listen.

Getting to the nuts and bolts, he makes some great arguments for flattening the tax code and getting rid of corporate tax breaks:

Some future president needs to go through the budget and rake out the tens of billions of dollars of corporate subsidies. They can be reduced only all at once, in a great sweep that overwhelms the parochial lobbying campaigns that groups will mount on behalf of each one. They can be reduced only as part of a larger tax-reform effort that will simplify the code, flatten rates and clean out the morass of credits, deductions, phaseouts, differential taxation arrangements, double-taxation provisions, alternative-minimum-tax fiascoes and growth-inhibiting distortions.

This is all well and good, and indeed Bruno and the Prof are strong supporters of it, except that just a few paragraphs earlier, Brooks spoke in favor of tax breaks for low-wage individuals:

If we’re to encourage work, then we must be sure that work is rewarded. The earned income tax credit does that. Other wage- subsidy ideas have been proposed, for example a simplified family credit that would replace the E.I.T.C., the child tax credit and other tax credits and exemptions to provide working families with one, simple benefit.

You can’t have it both ways. Inconsistencies in the system will be exploited. Governing via tax credits is what got our tax system into this mess. You’ve got to take the tax issue off the table completely. Brooks knows this, since his article is framed around the grand idea that the new conservatism can’t be anti-goverment. I agree that there should be benefits for those who work hard and play by the rules, but tax deductions can’t be the only solution.

In this same argument, though, Brooks hits on an amazingly simple rhetorical positions that both parties can immediately adopt:

Conservatives admired capitalism but understood that businesspeople fundamentally did not like competition and would much rather use their lobbying power to induce government to protect them from competition, to confer unfair advantages, to offer them subsidies and to issue regulations that blocked future competitors.

He’s beautifully re-framed the issue of competition, arguing that to be pro-competition is to be anti-business, in the sense that big businesses fear competition above all. Government should be there to ensure fair competition, and the moment that a lobbyist comes to Washington to get his or her company special treatment, the conservative ethos has been abandoned.

The article’s well worth reading, if you like to think big about where America could be in a generation. Unfortunately, It’s hard to see how we’d get the people enthused about such a moderate, sensible platform. But that’s why Brooks is a writer and not a politician.