Watching the news feeds from CPAC, I think it's hard for most of us to understand how the attendees can be as delusional as they appear at first glance. How is "I want [Obama] to fail" anything approaching a sane thought in today's economic climate? How can Conservatives, who claim to love America, seem unconcerned with anything except the accumulation of political power?
Are they evil? Opportunistic? Fundamentally uncaring about what happens to the rest of America? Some days, it really looks that way.
But I suspect that most of them are doing what they truly believe is right, even if that sounds sociopathic to many of us. Follow me below the fold for a logical exploration of what's driving these people.
Lately, I've felt like Republicans are making even less sense than they ever have before - which is an impressive feat. I've started thinking of the remaining party faithful as something of a "lunatic fringe". But Dana Houle (DHinMI) has a piece on the front page that talks about the Radical Right at CPAC. And while his story didn't directly confront the reasons behind their rhetoric, it got me thinking.
Here's the thing. The truly far-right conservatives, the ones who CPAC is designed for, they play with a different deck than we do. They have a single fundamental belief, that the free market solves everything. And I think most of us fail to understand the real implications of that belief.
So first of all, because this is DKos, let me shoot down that belief. The free market only solves everything in one VERY SPECIFIC case - when all actors within the market have PERFECT information. I'll use Hurricane Katrina as an example of what it would take for a pure free-market system to be successful. Businesses and individuals are capable of acting together, in a free market setting, to build levies to protect themselves. But if each actor individually protects his/her/itself, then we get individual levies around homes and businesses. Clearly, the better solution is a cost-sharing solution where individual actors work in concert to minimize individual costs. But for that to happen, individual actors must recognize the value of the concerted action, and the amounts of their own appropriate individual contributions. Further, the individual actors must understand and agree on the correct degree of protection necessary. Science can give them a good basis, by looking at the likely lifespan of the community and the maximum destructive force of storm that's likely to occur within that lifespan. All actors must recognize their individual benefit from sharing in the concerted action. And all actors must participate to the appropriate degree - if some actors begin cheating the system for profit, then the system falls apart.
The same problem of perfect knowledge can be seen in the current financial crisis. Deregulation works IF all actors have perfect information. That would mean that a Madoff scandal couldn't happen. Investors would gravitate to the most adaptive market strategies by recognizing where the best long-term stable growth was to be found. But when industries actively try to mislead investors, when investors are too busy to know every necessary piece of information about their own investments, deregulation lets people exploit the sloppiness of the system, to the detriment of the system as a whole.
Hard-line conservatives don't recognize this problem. They believe that the free market is the answer to everything, that full implementation of free-market principles leads to the greatest benefit for all people. They don't recognize the information gap problem. But more importantly, in believing that perfect application of the free market is the best solution to all problems, hard-line conservatives wind up with a VERY peculiar perspective on government.
Government doesn't matter.
Unfortunately (from THEIR point of view), Democrats and Liberals think government DOES matter. And if THOSE PEOPLE get into power, they will restrict the free market and break the system. Ideally (they believe) government has NO ROLE WHATSOEVER to play. People do better taking care of themselves.
This is why Rush Limbaugh can say that he hopes Obama fails, and why he can compare that statement to the Superbowl. For him, that's basically what elections are. It doesn't matter who's running the government, because they can't do anything GOOD anyway. Government, social action outside of the free market, is PHILOSOPHICALLY UNABLE to produce any good result. It IS better if Obama fails, because his failure means it'll be easier for the free market to clean things up again. The free market won't have all these new regulations, all these strictures impeding its perfect operation. Since government CANNOT accomplish anything good, the best that can be hoped for is that they do the least possible BAD.
This is also why hard-line conservatives can seem so power-hungry, so uncaring towards other people. The free market solves all problems. Hard-line conservatives don't believe they HAVE ANY REASON to concern themselves with other people. If you act appropriately within the free market (cf. if you have perfect information), then things will work out for you. If you don't act appropriately within the free market, you're lazy and worthless. Either way, government doesn't have a role to play. All government does is steal money from hard-working Americans and give it to those lazy, stupid people. So why would you NOT play power politics? The goal is to deregulate, to keep the government from meddling, to let the free market do its thing. That IS the greatest good for all people. So it's not at all unreasonable to do whatever it takes to control the government, because GOVERNMENT MUST BE KEPT FROM INTERFERING. Government can't do anything good, so we need to keep it from doing anything at all.
Some of you may think I'm exaggerating these points. Sadly, I am not. There are plenty of people who AREN'T hard-line conservatives - including, I believe, most of the Republican members of congress. Many Republicans who hold office are simply cowards, believing in a more limited form of conservatism but unwilling to stand up to the hard-liners because of what it will COST them as individual actors. The CPAC crowd, though - the Ann Coulters and the Rush Limbaughs - these people really believe that the free market is the only true good. They all want to think they're John Galt.
But really, I'm asking you to stop and think about this for a minute. Is there any other rational explanation for the way these people act? I don't believe they hate America (and the way they act truly DOES suggest that they DO hate it). I believe that they just have an entirely different set of priorities. I believe they fail to understand the information problem in the free market.
If you believed that the free market solved EVERY problem, if you believed that government was INCAPABLE of doing good, how would you approach the question of governance? Wouldn't you hope for government to fail? Wouldn't you do everything you could to make sure that government kept its nose out of industry?
These are the people against whom we're arguing. We'll never convert them to our way of thinking - Eric Hoffer explained that extremists shift from one extreme to the other (fascism --> communism, communism --> fascism), not back toward the middle. But if we want to convince their followers, the ones who buy into their message because they fail to understand its implications, we must understand those implications ourselves. We can't win an argument when we fundamentally misunderstand the ground their argument is based on.