I read this post this weekend and it got me to thinking about the subject of nihilism in politics. Specifically the question raised

I’m advancing a very simple proposition here. Conservatives can be really, really wrong about everything, and centralized solutions could be the only responsible course of action across every policy domain. But is it possible that we conservatives are sincerely wrong, and that we care about more than “power and status”?

I’m trapped in this cycle of thinking that our political leaders, regardless of partisan affiliation, are people, with all the foibles and limitations that this entails. While I do think that a bottomless hunger for power and status exists in the world (we can call this “evil” as a shorthand), I know enough liberals and conservatives to suspect that something else might be at work in our domestic political conflicts.

I don’t think either Salam, nor Sullivan, delve deeply enough into the issue. Sullivan is dismissive and I think Salam is genuinely looking for an answer. It’s not an easy one but it’s important to understand the fundamental difference between Liberals and Conservatives.

Before I go any further, it’s important to note that, in any philosophy, you have two basic groups of people (you can subdivide this a lot more but I’m keeping it simple for the sake of the argument). The largest group is what I call the Believers. These are people who agree with the basic tenets of your argument or movement but only in a visceral sense. They don’t pull the arguments apart or look at it from multiple angles. Instead, they’ve bought into the introductory arguments (which is not to say the arguments are right or wrong, just that they are introductory and often have little substance).  Believers simply take their position for granted. They tend to hang around other Believers and talk in hushed tones about those “other people” who are not Believers. If you ask them why they believe in their philosophy (or worse, questions the introductory arguments) you get a wide range of reactions from silence, to anger, to rationalizations.

In short, Believers generally aren’t sure why they believe, they just know that they believe. They are also the foot soldiers, pawns, hitmen, and evangelists.

Then you have the Core. The Core are your forest people. They not only know why they believe, they can defend it backwards and forwards. If you spot a flaw they might move to straw men or attack you personally. If they’re more rational, they might just agree to disagree but it depends greatly what the forest (the real forest in some cases) is and what they would give up if they were to even admit you might have a point. What determines their reaction depends more on whether or not the Core is based on lies or truth. No matter what the philosophy, the Core is more limited because Believers don’t need to see the forest, they might reject the forest, or because there’s a high cost to getting into the Core that your average Believer doesn’t want to pay.

So what does this have to do with nihilism and politics?

Liberalism and Conservatism are opposite ends of the spectrum. Nihilism is where you see the other end as a force to be stopped at all costs. In politics, this translates into “I can’t stand that you’re in power so I’m going to block you at every turn.” This is a bad policy because it causes serious issues to not be addressed. Each side accuses the other of it all the time. Right now, Liberals (Sullivan) are lobbing it at Conservatives over health care. But it’s important to remember that Liberals have done their own share.

As Salam mentions, in 2005, Pres. Bush wanted to reform Social Security. SS is built on a bad assumption that takes money from current workers to pay current recipients. Bush wanted a change to allow workers to invest some in the stock market. I have no idea how sound the idea was but Liberals proceeded to decry it as a wrecking of the system. They complained that the stock market was risky and that SS will not go bankrupt for many years to come. But the latter argument is weak. Saying it’s not broken now because it won’t fail tomorrow is a poor policy. The system will fail and nobody denies it. A better argument (if less popular) would have been that Liberals didn’t want to deal with the issue. The problem is that it looks very much like the real answer was Nihilism. Specifically the political calculus was that Republicans were weak on the issue (few wanted to take up the cause) and that they would pay no price for doing so.

Sadly, they were right. Few understood the core flaw and Republicans balked at spending the political capital.

So is Conservative opposition to health care Nihilism in kind? Not quite.

First, it’s important to understand that Liberalism’s Core is the philosophy that “The ends justify the means”. What that means is that, if it gets us to where we want to go, we should take it, even if taking it involves poor, wrong or even evil options. With regards to health care, the system really does need reform, but the problem is that the Liberals (like Ted Kennedy) have really meant that their idea of reform is something called Single Payer. Single Payer (proposed by Bill and Hillary Clinton in 1993) is where the government is the only entity that can pay for your health care. It sounds good until you begin to look at the forest. Single Payer means the government is the sole determiner of what care you can and cannot (or will not) get. Worse, the model is simply a tree in a larger forest still, where the government can then determine what you can or cannot consume because, if you make poor consumption choices, the government will, eventually, be on the hook for the consequences. So prepare to pony up punitive sales taxes in the same mold as tobacco products for things you normally eat now because, if you drink too much soda, eat too much red meat or run afoul of anything else lobbyists can get through Congress, the taxpayers will have to pay for it. Worst of all, is that when anything is made “free” by the government, it has to be rationed. In the UK (with single payer), they aim to get you a hospital bed in 18 weeks (4.5 months).

This plan, for obvious reasons, is unpopular with all but the most Liberal (the Core) people. It failed to pass. So we have Round 2 with Pres Obama. This time, we have ideas floated like the “Public Option”, which looks suspiciously like a path to Single Payer. Basically, the government would create its own insurance plan and create a poor mechanism intentionally designed to ensnare more and more people until all people are insured by the government. The Core understands this. Believers are either in denial that it will happen (willful naivete) or they don’t care. But the question is why all the horse trading, deception, and smoke and mirrors for an issue we’re all supposed to be behind? Why the rush to pass one massive bill that does a number of odd things that look like political payoffs when it would be more prudent to make a smaller bill and work with Conservatives?

The answer, sadly, is that the Liberals want their power. If the government gets to decide, sooner or later then it puts them in the drivers seat of your life. You learn what they want you to learn, eat what they want you to eat, and get what treatments they want you to get. They’ll promise to do better on the long waits and let up on the restrictions that people chafe under but now they’ve got you by the nose and they won’t let you go (and we won’t let ourselves go either).

In short, “health care reform” is a bad deal the way it’s written. There are real and salient reasons to oppose it. I don’t see Conservatives as Nihilists on this issue. It’s not the Liberal road or nothing. I do hope that both side will start working together soon to get real reform.

If not, I can see the Liberal forest start losing trees.