The Opinion Pages | OP-ED COLUMNIST

The G.O.P. Rejects Conservatism

David Brooks

JUNE 27, 2017


ASPEN, COLO. ‹ There is a structural flaw in modern capitalism.
Tremendous
income gains are going to those in the top 20 percent, but prospects
are
diminishing for those in the middle and working classes. This gigantic
trend
widens inequality, exacerbates social segmentation, fuels distrust and
led
to Donald Trump.

Conservative intellectuals were slow to understanding the seriousness
of
this structural problem, but over the past few years they have begun
to
grapple with the consequences. Basically, many conservative
intellectuals
have come to terms with income redistribution.

Conservative income redistribution doesn¹t look like liberal
redistribution.
Conservatives tend to like their redistribution done at the local
level, and
they like to use market-friendly mechanisms, like child tax credits,
mobility vouchers and wage subsidies. But the intent is the same: to
give
those who are struggling more security and opportunity.

Conservative redistribution extends to health care. Over the past
several
years many plans have emerged from the various right-leaning thinking
tanks
that imagine consumer-driven health care that also has universal or
near
universal coverage.

These plans, from places like the American Enterprise Institute, use
tax
credits or pre-funded health savings accounts or some other method to
give
middle- and working-class people coverage, while reducing regulations
and
improving incentives throughout the system.

Republican politicians could have picked up one of these plans when
they set
out to repeal Obamacare. They could have created a better system that
did
not punish the poor. But there are two crucial differences between the conservative policy johnnies and Republican politicians.


First, conservative policy intellectuals tend to have accepted the
fact that
American society is coming apart and that measures need to be taken to
assist the working class. Republican politicians show no awareness of
this
fact. Second, conservative writers and intellectuals have a vision for
how
they want American society to be in the 21st century. Republican
politicians
have a vision of how they want American government to be in the 21st
century.

Republican politicians believe that government should tax people less.
The
Senate bill would eliminate the 3.8 percent tax on investment income
for
those making over $250,000. Republican politicians believe that
open-ended
entitlements should be cut. The Senate health care plan would throw 15
million people off Medicaid, according to the Congressional Budget
Office.
(This is the program that covers nearly 40 percent of America¹s
children.)

Is there a vision of society underlying those choices? Not really.
Most
political parties define their vision of the role of government around
their
vision of the sort of country they would like to create. The current
Republican Party has iron, dogmatic rules about the role of
government, but
no vision about America.

Because Republicans have no governing vision, they can¹t really
replace the
Obama vision with some alternative. They just accept the basic
structure of
Obamacare and cut it back some.

Because Republicans have no governing vision, they can¹t argue for
their
plans. Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price came to the Aspen
Ideas
Festival to make the case for the G.O.P. approach. It¹s not that he
had bad
arguments; he had no arguments, no vision for the sort of health care
system
these bills would usher in. He filled his time by rising to a level of
vapid
generality that was utterly detached from the choices in the actual legislation.

Because Republicans have no national vision, they seem largely
uninterested
in the actual effects their legislation would have on the country at
large.
This Senate bill would be completely unworkable because anybody with
half a
brain would get insurance only when they got sick.


Worse, this bill takes all of the devastating trends afflicting the
middle
and working classes ‹ all the instability, all the struggle and pain ‹
and
it makes them worse. As the C.B.O. indicated, the Senate plan would
throw 22
million people off the insurance roles. It would send them to private
insurance plans that they could not afford to buy. Under the Senate
bill,
deductibles for poor families would be more than half of their annual
income. The plans are so incompetently and cruelly designed that as
the
C.B.O. put it, ³few low-income people would purchase any plan.²


This is not a conservative vision of American society. It¹s a vision
rendered cruel by its obliviousness. I have been trying to think about
the
underlying mentality that now governs the Republican political class.
The
best I can do is the atomistic mentality described by Alexis de
Tocqueville
long ago:

³They owe nothing to any man, they expect nothing from any man; they
acquire
the habit of always considering themselves as standing alone, and they
are
apt to imagine that their whole destiny is in their own hands. Thus
not only
does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants and separates his contemporaries from him; it throws him
back
forever upon himself alone and threatens in the end to confine him
entirely
within the solitude of his own heart.²


A version of this op-ed appears in print on June 27, 2017, on Page A23
of
the New York edition with the headline: The G.O.P. Rejects
Conservatism.


© The New York Times Company 2017

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