For indispensable reporting on the coronavirus crisis, the election, and more, subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily newsletter.





ADMITTING THE PROBLEM….James Joyner bemoans the lack of substance in the conservative blogosphere:

Part of the reason I’m drawn to the center-left blogs […] while finding it increasingly difficult to find center-right blogs worth my time is that the former are much more likely to get beyond the debates of the 1980 election. There’s almost no serious analysis of health care reform, urban planning, education, and many other issues that regularly crop up on the best lefty blogs on their conservative counterparts. If we read about those issues at all, they’re framed as if Ronald Reagan were still aspiring to high office: Say No to socialism! Abolish the Department of Education! Government IS the problem!

Right. The world has changed in the past 20 years but conservatism doesn’t really seem willing to accept it. Take global warming. Here’s the rough conservative reaction to it starting in the early 90s:

It doesn’t exist. It exists but it isn’t manmade. It’s manmade, but it’s too expensive to do anything about.

Even this is a generous assessment. A lot of conservatives are still stuck at #2, and sizeable chunk at #1. What this means is that they’re basically shut out of the conversation entirely. Which is too bad, because I’d actually be sort of interested to hear a conservative take on how to address global warming that accepts both its reality and the necessity of doing something about it. If we really are facing a global environmental catastrophe, what shape would a conservative solution take? I don’t think anyone knows. Likewise, conservative reaction to wage stagnation and growing income inequality has gone down a similar road:

It doesn’t exist. It exists, but consumption inequality is what really matters. ??

Our current financial meltdown has pretty much wiped out #2 as a plausible explanation, since the stagnating middle class can no longer borrow to keep up their consumption. But what’s #3? Will it be yet another attempt to deny that the problem even exists? Or some kind of interesting conservative take on what to do about it?

Global warming and skyrocketing income inequality are problems that didn’t even exist in 1980, which means there is no “Reaganite” solution to appeal to. There might still be conservative takes on these things, but they won’t do any good until conservatives actually accept that these are real problems that people genuinely care about. That day still seems pretty far off.