Of course you only address the part of my post about a house fire and nothing else. Am I surprised? No, of course not.
I mean, to the one,you missed the point (
i.e., "… they seem a weird change of subject …"); to the other, you lied (
e.g., "… your 'feedback loop' example about college tuition …").
But, here, just for you, let's go ahead and run through it:
As I said,
#98↑ really is an odd post in its moment.
The general subject is Trump, and the condition of American conservatism, and largely per the legal woes swirling around the former president, and while nothing precludes subject creep, the turn to a partisan personal thesis on governance is a little strange.
Of your three points, one would simply be called doing a little science, except your examples are more political than scientific; the other two are partisan talking points that, historically speaking, are inconsistently applied both in politic and practice.
Still, look at your "feedback loop". I won't explicitly nitpick—or, at least, in any binding sense—the point about what you put in quotes, but it does make a subtle difference. As it is, though, to establish a feedback loop would be, approximately, doing a little bit of science. Toward that point, it's not simply a question of results, even regardless of intentions; part of doing a little bit of science would involve looking into the history of how these political philosophies, arguments, and outcomes work, compared to what history shows us they brought.
And it would be easy nitpick your examples, that the one is a conservative policy goal and the other a vague expression of a complex liberal policy, but the more important points are that we have some historical information, and the actual "feedback loop" for legalization is much more complex than the conservative policy priorites in re drugs.
If the question is doing a little bit of science, the doubt I show your context is easily enough explained by the other two points; you might suggest these points should apply whether one is liberal, conservative, or otherwise, but they are generally conservative talking points. The balanced budget thing is, historically, just an excuse for sustaining and even augmenting domestic suffering. Think of a complaint that goes, approximately,
「If we had spent the money we just spent on wars for domestic programs …」, and the thing is that it probably wouldn't have taken that much money. Domestic spending would provide some return that would, at least, mitigate the expense significantly, and some part of the historical record would argue can create certain economic growth. There is a big complex of feedback loops about economic returns on domestic spending.
And the point about gradual changes is always an unwieldy beast. The thing about people needing time to adjust is that, for instance, is that it means different things under different circumstances. Unless you mean people need time to adjust on broken obligations and usurped trust, then ending Social Security means paying out a lot of obligations.
Here is another aspect that your analysis overlooks:
Purpose.
There was a time, not really so many years ago, when conservatives went through a trend of demanding every piece of legislation include its constitutional justification, and, for the most part, it was a quasi-originalist thing disdaining penumbras; it's complicated, and kind of stupid, but the Supreme Court might finally settle the question for them, although I can't imagine the actual case path. Anyway, a bit of important trivia, here, is that the one part of the Constitution the Court does not hold binding is
the part that tells us what the Constitution is for↱. Toward our moment, in the spirit of constitutional justification, and considering the context of the feedback loop, how does this or that policy fulfill its constitutional purpose?
How would the end of Social Security
promote the general welfare? What would the end of Social Security contribute toward the
establishment of justice?
Or the question of homelessness: Can you police your way into
domestic tranquility? Can you patrol and arrest enough to
secure the blessings of liberty? How does this
establish justice, and, again, what does it do to
promote the general welfare?
Rousting the camps certainly isn't a solution. Or, perhaps, we might wonder what rousting the camps actually solves. To reiterate: Compared to
Wilde's↱ argument that the "proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible", the requisite poverty of capitalism and the aesthetic priorities by which it is allocated really do stand out as both craven and arbitrary. What passes for justice, or tranquility, or welfare? And the blessings of liberty? If too much liberty can be tyranny, then not all of what liberty brings is a blessing.
Which, in turn, brings us 'round to conservatives, Republicans, and Trump. Like I said, compared to the idea that William F. Buckley Jr. would somehow be distressed by what conservatism has become, the actual point that would trouble him is the lack of subtlety. Or,
per Ben Stein↑, "Trumpism is basically old-fashioned republicanism." The part of conservatism and the Republican Party that Trumpism
destroys with its craziness↑ is the careful strategic planning and tactical calculations of more institutional and mainstream conservatism. There is no question, for instance, that the last three or four decades of conservatives looking at supremacism and deciding to complain that Democrats would criticize is any sort of accident. That's who these people are, and they're willing to destroy the institutions they never really believed in for the sake of assuaging their consciences by legitimizing their supremacism. The thing about conservatives and Republicans is that, as two different subjects, Republicans were the lying face of conservatives, and Trumpism destroyed that pretense by saying pretty much all of the quiet parts out loud. After all, if it was something conservatives and Republicans wanted to distance themselves from, they might do something other than dutifully lining up to complain about Democrats, liberals, women, people of color, schoolteachers, doctors and nurses, homosexuals, transgender, Aunty Phở, workers, migrants, imaginary radical leftists, imaginary child traffickers, and even actual windmills. It's a pretty miserable conservative condition.
