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Ramesh Ponnuru writes:
Tod Lindberg argues that conservatives are fooling themselves if they think that the U.S. is a "center-right nation." Me, I'm not sure what it would mean for the country to be either "center-right" or "center-left." I can see the point of saying that the country is "center right" if the point is that we are, compared to most developed countries, a bit more religious, free-market, and nationalistic in orientation. If that's all it means to say "center right," though, we could probably go through a long period of political domination by liberals and still qualify. And I'm not sure what else the phrase could mean.Broadly speaking, I agree with that. The question with center-right, or left, is always "on what?" The American issue space is vast, and the center is different on health care than on gay marriage than on foreign aid. And even compared to Europe, America is far to the left on certain issues, like immigration and cultural assimilation. But if it's hopeless to try and impose a single ideological description on a complicated and large country, there's a structural sense in which we're undoubtedly a relatively conservative political system that produces relatively conservative outcomes. Insofar as you take the traditional definition of conservatism -- which prizes stasis over change -- America's legislative process is designed to prevent large scale action. The reason we don't have a universal health care system, for instance, is not because Europeans wanted health care while Americans didn't. It's that in Europe, the desire for change aligned with the system's capacity for reform. In a parliamentary democracy, where there's no filibuster, you can do things like universal health care. It's a rather heavier lift in our political system, which is choked by the filibuster and the committee structure and a thousand other traps designed to protect the minority from having to submit to reforms desired by the majority (this is al well-described in Sven Steinmo and Jon Watts's essay, It's The Institutions, Stupid). That doesn't make us ideologically conservative -- it doesn't mean that we, as a country, agree with Republicans. But it makes us operationally conservative in a way that's as frustrating to those who would try to roll back the welfare state or privatize Social Security as those who would try and act to prevent global warming or reform our health care system.
