Mike Konczal has an interesting and useful essay over at Wonkblog on what conservatives don’t get — namely, their failure to appreciate that some problems are inherently public in nature, and require public solutions. Somewhat unusually, however, I think that Mike has somewhat missed the point, and engaged in a bit of wishful thinking. His essay is an excellent critique of libertarians; but most conservatives are not libertarians, even if they like to use libertarian rhetoric now and then.

Think about it: the modern Republican party may be the party of deregulation and low taxes, but it’s also the party of social illiberalism. Someone like Rick Santorum firmly believes that the government has no right to tell business owners what they can do in the workplace, but has every right to tell ordinary citizens what they can do in the bedroom. William Buckley’s God and Man at Yale was in large part a diatribe against the notion that colleges were teaching students about unemployment and how to fight it; but what Buckley wanted was, in effect, for those colleges to get back to their proper role, which was religious indoctrination. In its heyday National Review was a staunch supporter of free markets; but it was also a staunch supporter of Jim Crow — which wasn’t just about the right of white business owners to discriminate against blacks, it was about a system of laws designed to protect white privilege.

All of this makes no sense if you think of liberalism versus conservatism as a simple argument about the size and role of the state. But it makes perfect sense if you follow Corey Robin, who sees it as being all about the protection of traditional hierarchy:

For that is what conservatism is: a meditation on, and theoretical rendition of, the felt experience of having power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win it back.

Now, there are some real libertarians out there, particularly in the realm of economics bloggers, but they have no real power base. Even when politicians claim to be libertarian, there are telltale giveaways: the two R. Pauls, father and son, may be unusual in questioning the national security state, but they both have a remarkable tendency to cater to and/or employ white supremacists.

And even the hatred for Keynesian economics has less, I think, to do with the notion that unemployment isn’t a proper subject of policy than about the notion of shifting power over the economy’s destiny away from big business and toward elected officials. That was Kalecki’s point — and I learned about that from Mike Konczal!

So there is an interesting debate to be had about the proper extent of the public sphere. But that isn’t the debate driving our politics; our left-right split isn’t nearly that idealistic, or innocent.