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Three Things Conservatives Wrote This Week That Everyone Should Read

CREDIT: SHUTTERSTOCK
CREDIT: SHUTTERSTOCK

Welcome to TP Ideas‘ weekly roundup of the best conservative writing! Every Friday, we take a look at three pieces by right-leaning writers that constructively articulate core elements of their worldview. The goal isn’t to find conservatives telling us how right liberals are, but rather to pick out writing that helps liberals understand where their ideological foes are coming from.

So let’s get started.

1. “At CBO, A Choice For Republicans” — Peter Suderman, Reason

Douglas Elmendorf has worked as the director of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) since 2009. Early next year his current term will end, and the Republican-dominated Congress will have to decide whether to keep him on or find someone new. That’s set off a rather contentious conversation within conservative circles, between those who would like Elmendorf to continue at CBO has a show of nonpartisan legitimacy, and those who would like him replaced for various ideologically-inflected reasons.

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Over at Reason this week, Peter Suderman — a libertarian who has written extensively on economics — parsed the arguments. Suderman dismisses the charge that Elmendorf has operated as a an apologist for liberal policies, and points out that dynamic scoring, an approach to projecting tax revenues that assumes tax cuts spur economic growth which replaces lost revenue, yields minimal results if done soundly. But then Suderman brings up a third reason for replacing Elmendorf that’s been much less discussed:

The better and more interesting argument for change is that new leadership would be better able to open up the CBO — to “modernize” its methods, as National Affairs editor Yuval Levin has suggested, by making its various processes and conventions more transparent. Levin argues that the CBO is a “black box” opaque to those on the outside. “The agencies are both staffed by hard-working and highly professional economists who try to ensure their assumptions and methods keep up with the latest academic research, but their models are opaque and proprietary — which also makes them seem arbitrary and unpredictable.”

The goal, Levin argues, should be to fix this by transforming the CBO into a sort of open source modeling shop; its spreadsheets, assumptions, and supporting evidence public for all to see. CBO would still produce estimates, but its primary role, along with the Joint Committee on Taxation, would be to maintain up-to-date models — models that outsiders could tweak and adjust on their own.

The end result of a change like this would be to create a competitive environment for legislative estimates; outside analysts could take CBO’s models and adjust the assumptions and inputs, then show how the results would be different under different types of circumstances. It would underscore the effects of those assumptions, and highlight the range of possible outcomes for any given policy change.

As Suderman acknowledges, this would change CBO’s role. The “black box” model has allowed the agency to function as an establisher of facts both sides can agree on, and Elmendorf has been instrumental in building that institutional authority and turning into CBO into a counterweight for budget scoring done by the executive branch. Opening up CBO’s methodological toolkit for public inspection could transform it into just another battleground for partisan warfare. But it could also bring the guts of economic and budget projection into the light of day, where more policymakers and the public at large can grapple with its inherent limitations and uncertainties, and perhaps be more honest with themselves about just what they expect from economic policy changes and why they want them.

2. “Dear Media: This Elizabeth Lauten Nonsense Is Why Everybody Hates You” — Mollie Hemingway, The Federalist

A few days ago, a low-level Republican staffer named Elizabeth Lauten wrote a Facebook post criticizing the Obama daughters for their dress and demeanor at a recent public event. It caused a brief firestorm of stories — the Washington Post even assigned a foreign affairs reporter to dig through Lauten’s writing going all the way back to her college years — and Lauten ultimately resigned.

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At The Federalist, the episode struck Mollie Hemmingway as an example of what she believes is a liberal bias in the editorial decision-making of much journalism: which stories are covered in detail, which are not, where resources are directed, which targets are choices and how priorities are organized. She cites the Gosnell abortion story, the sexual assault of a minor by a major donor to the Obama campaign, the treatment of Bristol Palin, and other examples of instances where mirroring events occurred, but the one that made conservatives look bad by association was covered far more extensively than the equivalent story associated with liberals. Hemmingway ends on this note:

There are many wonderful reporters. They work hard to get the story right and provide a valuable service to their readers and viewers. But we have a serious problem — and it’s a problem at the editor level at least as much as it’s a problem at the reporter level.

Republican media operative Rick Wilson went on a beautiful rant last night about this embarrassing Lauten debacle. You can read the whole thing here. This is edited down, but he wrote, “Reporters and media folks wondering, ‘Why don’t people trust us?’… The last couple weeks should be clarifying for you… But the endless, agenda-driven games are repellent to readers/viewers. Your sins are of omission and commission both… You used to be able to claim news judgement and ignore stories you hated. You still do, but now people see it, and you loathe it… So you’ll do one piece on Gruber, then pretend you dug in hard. But god forbid a staffer dings the Obama kids. Then you flood the zone… You pick and choose when to provide context… I love pros in the business. Love them. And most of you ARE pros. Most of you DO work stories, look for interesting angles… But you tolerate (and your editors tolerate) a lot of outrageous, absurdly bad practices. Gruber? Unforgivable… the frustration Americans feel about media isn’t getting any less acute, and some introspection might go a long way…”

Indeed it would. There are some tenacious and wonderful reporters. But the overall picture in many newsrooms is getting worse. Under no circumstances should scarce newsroom resources be diverted from real stories onto fake ones that have already been covered more than a Beatles hit.

Now, there are some bones to pick with this analysis. Given the way budget fights, tax cuts, and the deficit are covered, for instance, it is much harder to claim the media has a liberal tilt on economics specifically as opposed to social issues. Furthermore, what Hemmingway describes largely boils down to elite infighting, i.e. conservative elites feeling like the media doesn’t give them a fair shake in the same way it does liberal elites — possibly a fair complaint, but hard to see how it could contribute to the distrust the public at large feels towards journalists. All that said, the sheer number of examples builds up a compelling momentum, and the throw-everything-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks approach provides liberals with a useful opportunity to see the world through a conservatives’ experiential eyes, even if they ultimately don’t agree with the analysis that comes out of that.

3. “Power Corrupts, And Sometimes An Innocent Man Ends Up Dead” — Tim Carney, The Washington Examiner

Conservatives are known for harping on the concept that human beings are fallen and sinful. A corollary conclusion of that idea (which perhaps more conservatives themselves should note) is that human behavior doesn’t reliably improve because cultural values improved, but because the structural circumstances influencing humans improves. What defines structural circumstance is how much power one human being wields over another. As Lord Acton noted, “power corrupts.” Over at the Washington Examiner this week, libertarian-ish conservative Tim Carney linked this point to the death of Eric Garner, and to Chris Rock’s recent observation that racial progress in America has occurred not because of any improvement in black people, but improvement in white people: “White people were crazy. Now they’re not as crazy.”

But why were white people crazy? What’s made us less crazy? Is it fluoride in the water? Climate change?

No. Whites were more racist against blacks in the past because society had given them power over blacks — at first explicitly and brutally in slavery, then still officially but less violently through segregation and Jim Crow. Even after Jim Crow, social and governmental structures persisted that gave whites power over blacks, and this power, to borrow Chris Rock’s phrase, made white people crazy.

Today there are fewer settings where white people explicitly have power over black people, and so we’re “not as crazy.”

The second lesson about power comes from the failure to indict Pantaleo. We don’t know what evidence the grand jury saw or heard beyond what the public has seen or heard. But we do know this: Prosecutors and police are partners. Simply to do their jobs well, police need prosecutors to be allies, and prosecutors need police.

Staten Island District Attorney Daniel Donovan won re-election in 2011 with the endorsement and support of the police unions. Consider the lead paragraph of this Staten Island Advance article from 2011: “Saying he was their ‘partner’ in fighting crime, a passel of law enforcement unions yesterday endorsed GOP District Attorney Daniel Donovan for a third term in office.”

It’s great that Donovan and the police have a strong relationship. But how can we ask Donovan to prosecute his “partners”? That dynamic is why the public is so skeptical of the prosecutors who failed to get indictments in both Garner’s and Brown’s deaths.

It’s an interesting analysis that builds off of a traditionally conservative understanding of human moral nature to make what’s ultimately a structural critique that liberals could find common ground with. But Carney also turns the screw again, pointing out that power’s corrupting potential is intrinsic to the workings of government: “We have no choice but to delegate the power to government officials, but once we do that, we create a circle of insiders who have the power to protect and reward one another at the expense of all outsiders.”

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It’s an idea that’s worth grappling with. But it’s also noteworthy that the idea of economic power never shows up in Carney’s analysis: the power of employers over employees — who must work on their employers’ terms on pain of not being able to feed or educate their children — and of those with wealth to shape the social, economic and political lives of those without it. One wonders how American politics might work if conservatives were as skeptical of power in that sphere as they are of power in the political sphere.