Has conservatism ever gotten anything right?

The only thing that comes to mind is nuclear power. Though it was hardly very clear 30 years ago as it is now, increasing the use of nuclear power would have been much better for the environment than our use of petroleum products. All other things being equal.

Apart from that, has the conservative approach ever gotten anything right in the grand scheme of things?

Trickle down economics is a fiction. Cutting taxes to to stimulate the economy don't work. Practically every military intervention of my lifetime has been a disaster. (and it doesn't matter if a "liberal" like Lyndon Johnson did it. American military intervention is almost always driven by  conservatives and conservative aims, not liberal ones.)

Civil rights. Wrong. Women rights, Wrong. Gay rights. Wrong.

National Health Care. Wrong. (there "plans" are ridiculous)

They can't even run the government that they nominally want to be in charge of, because they think the government (their employer) is the enemy.

Is there anything they were right about?

Ever, ever?

A 15-member Supreme Court.

Bell bottoms. 

Orange juice.

Winston Churchill was a conservative

ETA: I believe there is a difference between 'conservatism' and the Republican party

lord_pabulum said:

Winston Churchill was a conservative

Through his career, he swung both ways, as it were.

He was somewhat of a consensus, unity choice as WWII began.

Kind of a leading question, right, in that it really depends on how you define your terms? What is "conservative?" By some measures, President Obama is quite conservative, after all.

I think there's a risk here of defining the terms in such a way that it reduces the question to "has anyone acted in a way that I think was a failure in such a way that was not a failure...," where any "conservative" successes are called conservatives-acting-as-liberals.

Conservative (and liberal) are too broad, and subjective, and relative, of terms for such a question.

Still over the last 180 or so years of American history conservatives have gotten it wrong far more often than progressives. 

Slavery, women's rights and civil rights top the list. The only thing I can think of that progressives really got wrong was prohibition.

When we look back, those who objected to progress could be labeled conservatives, so in a sense, by the definition of the word, at least when looking back, conservatives don't have a chance of getting it right. However, in the present, conservatives -- those who want to keep things the way they are and not make drastic changes -- can potentially be a balance to those who want to change things too much, too fast. That's not what is happening currently, though.

Not on any social issue, ever.

lord_pabulum said:

Winston Churchill was a conservative

ETA: I believe there is a difference between 'conservatism' and the Republican party

oh, I agree with you, but that doesn't let conservatism off the hook in any way.

as for Churchill - I know nothing about his domestic policy. Did he do anything great other than work his way through WW II? Would his domestic policy be characterized as conservative by American standards I honestly don't know.  And I don't think his prosecution of the war was conservative anyway. He had to save England from military defeat. There is no "conservative" way to do that. It's non ideological.

hoops said:

Ever, ever?

pretty much

I can only hope my epitaph isn't as feeble as "Did nothing great other than work his way through WWII."

child labor, fake medicines, pollution, tainted food...

Case closed.

PVW said:

Kind of a leading question, right, in that it really depends on how you define your terms? What is "conservative?" By some measures, President Obama is quite conservative, after all.

I think there's a risk here of defining the terms in such a way that it reduces the question to "has anyone acted in a way that I think was a failure in such a way that was not a failure...," where any "conservative" successes are called conservatives-acting-as-liberals.

Conservative (and liberal) are too broad, and subjective, and relative, of terms for such a question.

well, this is why I invited the conversation.  

yes, definitions are certainly important.

So that it's clear where I stand, I always point to this essay on conservatism:

http://polaris.gseis.ucla.edu/pagre/conservatism.html

As for Obama - yeah. No argument. We haven't had an actual liberal in the White House since FDR.

RobB said:

Case closed.

when Presidents were men!

You got us on that one RobB, so lets keep all the conservatives in the bullpen until we need a pitcher in government.

Who knows, maybe Obama will throw out the first pitch this year and be all "I am not left handed." Boom. Strike.

I can only hope my eephus is as accurate as the toss of a former major-league owner who's the son of a College World Series team captain.

Perspective is key

Doctrine beats results

Welcome Donald Trump

Not to mention, two beats short.   

drummerboy said:

PVW said:

Kind of a leading question, right, in that it really depends on how you define your terms? What is "conservative?" By some measures, President Obama is quite conservative, after all.

I think there's a risk here of defining the terms in such a way that it reduces the question to "has anyone acted in a way that I think was a failure in such a way that was not a failure...," where any "conservative" successes are called conservatives-acting-as-liberals.

Conservative (and liberal) are too broad, and subjective, and relative, of terms for such a question.

well, this is why I invited the conversation. "> 

yes, definitions are certainly important.

So that it's clear where I stand, I always point to this essay on conservatism:

http://polaris.gseis.ucla.edu/pagre/conservatism.html

As for Obama - yeah. No argument. We haven't had an actual liberal in the White House since FDR.

Well, if Obama counts as conservative, then I'd say conservatism gets a lot of things right (and given various posts of yours supporting Obama, so do you).

More broadly, though, I think the way you're framing this can be dangerous.  To illustrate what I mean, let's consider the current conservative coalition, the one that finds its political expression in the Republican party. It's not a pretty sight, is it? They are increasingly cut off from objective reality, on topics ranging from climate change to immigration (eg, the fact that net migration from Mexico is actually negative), etc, and prey to a progressively scary series of charlatans, hucksters, and narcissists.

Why do you think this is? Are they just stupider than liberals? Perhaps there's some inherent moral failing - they're just not as virtuous? Are they just, to put it bluntly, terrible people?

No - their problem is that they've succeeded in building themselves a nice little media bubble where they can say, and have reinforced, ideas like "Liberals have never gotten anything right."  Everyone they know believes and says things like this, all the people they trust, all their institutions, are all devoted to spreading and reinforcing this kind of message. And the result, well, as I just said above... not pretty.

Politics is about organizing people. The dark side to it is that it can very easily slip into a self-reinforcing tribalism. This is human nature, not something inherent to any particular political philosophy, and just about the only defense against it is to be aware and on guard for it in our own thinking, rather than indulging it.

I have very specific and deep critiques of the political philosophies which animate today's Republican party. This is very different from a sweeping claim like "conservatives never get anything right" (and it's implied corollary, liberals, eg people like myself, are therefore nearly always right). I think if we make the liberal political coalition into a a mirror of the conservative coalition, then we're really going to get into trouble.

I have very specific and deep critiques of the political philosophies which animate today's Republican party. This is very different from a sweeping claim like "conservatives never get anything right" (and it's implied corollary, liberals, eg people like myself, are therefore nearly always right). I think if we make the liberal political coalition into a a mirror of the conservative coalition, then we're really going to get into trouble.

I agree with this when speaking generally about people but I've lived long enough in the climate of polarization where this conservative right-wing point of view is the assumed standard of what is good and right about America, that I doubt the conclusion to your sentence has any meaning whatsoever.

We are really in trouble.  There is no end in sight to that trouble, except by growing the liberal tribe to be larger and more powerful than the conservative tribe until that tribes viewpoints can be honestly looked at and evaluated with respect to the value of people, education, employment, poverty, etc,  over the value of dollars.

For quite some time, there was a conservative movement to protect the environment, then the true conservatives lost representation to the exploitative profiteers.

"Politics is about organizing people. The dark side to it is that it can
very easily slip into a self-reinforcing tribalism. This is human
nature, not something inherent to any particular political philosophy,
and just about the only defense against it is to be aware and on guard
for it in our own thinking, rather than indulging it."

Actually it is more inherent to conservative philosophies. Psychological studies have shown that "the conservative mind," so to speak, is much more prone to the kinds of thinking that lead to tribalism, information bubbles, authoritarian tendencies and so on. 

Certainly groups with a more liberal set of goals have organized in the past, but you'll notice that they tend to be fractious. Even now, look at the discord within the BLM movement. Conservative groups like the Tea Party have much better enforcement of ideology. 

As the old saying goes, Democrats fall in love; Republicans fall in line.

Here are a few items that I think even liberals might concede (or I think should concede) that their forebears supported and were wrong about.

1.      Urban Renewal + Public Housing

2.      The nature of the Soviet Union

3.      NJ Specific, the Abbott Decision

Urban Renewal + The Projects

1.       Liberals might want to blame the architects themselves, but 1950s-1970s style urban renewal, ie, the idea that you can demolish a poor neighborhood and replace the poor people (usually black people) with middle class people (usually white) and get a net-positive outcome did not succeed.

Sometimes the targeted neighborhood did become middle class, or the city got some successful amenity (like Lincoln Center), but the displaced poor people became homeless and their migration to other neighborhoods made those other neighborhoods less stable as middle class or working class areas.

One early and accurate conservative critique of urban renewal you might want to check out is "The Federal Bulldozer" by Martin Anderson.

Public housing, ie “The Projects” I think was a failure everywhere in the US except New York City. 

The practice of demolishing huge swathes of “slum,” consolidating the blocks into superblocks, and then building unadorned highrises surrounded by lawns was also a bad idea architecturally, but in many cases, the number of new apartments built was less than the number of apartments demolished and in the meantime, the poor people who lost their houses had to struggle to find anywhere to live.

Public housing was initially a lot more working class/middle class than it became, but that’s because demand was so high in the late 1940s/early 1950s and because there was tenant screening.

After tenant screening was abandoned most everywhere (pressured by ACLU affiliates) and working class people started to avoid public housing and conditions deteriorated greatly. 

Because rents in public housing were often dependent on income, a middle class or working class person would pay more than a very poor person.  Since a middle class or working class person could get a nice private-sector apartment for the same rent they would pay in public housing, they had yet another incentive to avoid public housing.

Not all liberals supported urban renewal, but many did, including the editorial page of the NYTimes.

https://ohiostatepress.org/index.htm?/books/complete%20pdfs/schwartz%20new/schwartz%20new.htm

2.      The Abbott Decisions

The Abbott “Parity Plus” policies have been a failure and conservatives have been correct to argue that big spending would not produce big improvements in educational performance.

Remember, the Abbott (II) decision didn’t just order money to urban districts so that they could be adequately staffed and have decent facilities, the Abbott decision ordered that the Abbott plaintiffs to be funded ABOVE the level of NJ’s richest districts. 

In other words, the Abbott decisions intentionally rejected using an economic measure of adequacy, but said that whatever NJ’s most affluent districts spent, urban districts had to be able to spend more.  So, if Princeton built a turf field the Abbotts automatically had a right to spending at Princeton's level.

What is worse about the Abbott decision isn’t just how far-reaching they were, but how unfair they were too.  Cruelly, the Abbott II decision left behind numerous districts that were just as poor as the Abbotts but not part of the Abbott lawsuit. Guttenberg, Dover, Prospect Park, East Newark, Woodlynne, Belleville, and many more would all receive less aid over the next 25 years because so much state aid would go to the Abbotts.

Has the big Abbott money worked?  No way.

Asbury Park spends over $30k per student and its schools are at the 1st-3rd percentiles.

Hoboken is NJ’s second highest spending K-12 district ($25,000k per student, plus universal Pre-K) and its students are only 49% FRL-eligible and 1% ELL, yet Hoboken underperforms numerous non-Abbotts who spend half as much AND have poorer students. 

Hoboken HS is at the 18th percentile in academic performance.

When Belleville spends barely 1,000 per student and is at the 27th percentile something is seriously SERIOUSLY wrong with premise of the Abbott lawsuit.

Even if you look at AP course taking, Belleville outperforms Hoboken.

I’m not cherry picking with Belleville either.  Many (not all) of NJ’s other most-broke non-Abbott districts equal Hoboken or outperform it. 

NJ’s highest-performing high-FRL district is Dover, which spends $11,300 per pupil and yet its high school is at the 64% percentile. 

Finally, the electorate and special interest groups of NJ would not pay for Abbott (all of Florio’s pillars to pay for Abbott were quickly undone), NJ has “paid” for Abbott by underfunding the pension system. 

http://www.state.nj.us/education/pr/1314/17/172210005.pdf

http://www.state.nj.us/education/pr/1314/13/130250020.pdf

3.       The Nature of the Soviet Union

Most (almost all?) liberal politicians were anti-communist, but there was a largish section of the liberal intelligentsia that had a lot of goodwill towards “the Soviet Experiment” and refused to believe reports of gulags, mass starvation in the Ukraine, and political executions.  Even when Stalin was totally public about executing political opponents, like in the Moscow Show Trials, some members of the intelligentsia (like Walter Duranty) professed that the trials were honest and fair.

Even in 1953, by which time everyone should have known how monstrous Stalin was, Paul Robeson gave him an exceptionally warm eulogy “To You, Beloved Comrade.”

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/biographies/1953/04/x01.htm

This tendency hasn’t completely disappeared.  Noam Chomsky refused to believe refugee reports coming out of Cambodia during the rule of the Khmer Rouge that mass murder was taking place there.  He said such reports were motivated by “anti-communist bias.” 

Perhaps it's inaccurate to call Chomsky and Robeson liberals , but I think a lot of liberals look up to them. 

https://chomsky.info/19770625/

I don’t think that the conservative intelligentsia was enamored of the Third Reich to an equivalent degree, and, if you read In the Garden of Beasts, you see that a lot of non-ideological Americans were willing to morally accept the Third Reich too.

A NY Times Book Review article in this morning's paper discusses two books about the dark side of Progressivism in the early 20th century.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/20/books/review/imbeciles-and-illiberal-reformers.html

America in the early 20th century was awash in reform. As giant corporations took root, so too did calls to check their power. Laws were passed setting maximum hours and minimum ­wages, limiting child labor, preserving natural resources and breaking up the “trusts” that were said to be destroying fair competition. Not all of these laws worked out as planned, and some were eviscerated in the courts. But a new force had been unleashed, aiming to serve the greater good not by destroying big business but by curbing its abuses.

Progressivism was always more than a single cause, however. Attracting reformers of all stripes, it aimed to fix the ills of society through increased government action — the “administrative state.” Progressives pushed measures ranging from immigration restriction to eugenics in a grotesque attempt to protect the nation’s gene pool by keeping the “lesser classes” from reproducing. If one part of progressivism emphasized fairness and compassion, the other reeked of bigotry and coercion.
...
In Washington, Congress was busily writing the most restrictive immigration law in our history, the National Origins Act, to protect the country from foreign contamination. In the words of The Saturday Evening Post: “If America doesn’t keep out the queer, alien, mongrelized people of Southern and Eastern Europe, her crop of citizens will eventually be dwarfed and mongrelized in turn.”

According to Thomas C. Leonard, who teaches at Princeton, the driving force behind this and other such laws came from progressives in the halls of academia — people who combined “extravagant faith in science and the state with an outsized confidence in their own expertise.” “Illiberal Reformers” is the perfect title for this slim but vital account of the perils of intellectual arrogance in dealing with explosive social issues. Put simply, Leonard says, elite progressives gave respectable cover to the worst prejudices of the era — not to rabble-rouse, but because they believed them to be true. Science didn’t lie.

PVW said:

drummerboy said:

PVW said:

Kind of a leading question, right, in that it really depends on how you define your terms? What is "conservative?" By some measures, President Obama is quite conservative, after all.

I think there's a risk here of defining the terms in such a way that it reduces the question to "has anyone acted in a way that I think was a failure in such a way that was not a failure...," where any "conservative" successes are called conservatives-acting-as-liberals.

Conservative (and liberal) are too broad, and subjective, and relative, of terms for such a question.

well, this is why I invited the conversation. "> 

yes, definitions are certainly important.

So that it's clear where I stand, I always point to this essay on conservatism:

http://polaris.gseis.ucla.edu/pagre/conservatism.html

As for Obama - yeah. No argument. We haven't had an actual liberal in the White House since FDR.

Well, if Obama counts as conservative, then I'd say conservatism gets a lot of things right (and given various posts of yours supporting Obama, so do you).

More broadly, though, I think the way you're framing this can be dangerous.  To illustrate what I mean, let's consider the current conservative coalition, the one that finds its political expression in the Republican party. It's not a pretty sight, is it? They are increasingly cut off from objective reality, on topics ranging from climate change to immigration (eg, the fact that net migration from Mexico is actually negative), etc, and prey to a progressively scary series of charlatans, hucksters, and narcissists.

Why do you think this is? Are they just stupider than liberals? Perhaps there's some inherent moral failing - they're just not as virtuous? Are they just, to put it bluntly, terrible people?

No - their problem is that they've succeeded in building themselves a nice little media bubble where they can say, and have reinforced, ideas like "Liberals have never gotten anything right."  Everyone they know believes and says things like this, all the people they trust, all their institutions, are all devoted to spreading and reinforcing this kind of message. And the result, well, as I just said above... not pretty.

Politics is about organizing people. The dark side to it is that it can very easily slip into a self-reinforcing tribalism. This is human nature, not something inherent to any particular political philosophy, and just about the only defense against it is to be aware and on guard for it in our own thinking, rather than indulging it.

I have very specific and deep critiques of the political philosophies which animate today's Republican party. This is very different from a sweeping claim like "conservatives never get anything right" (and it's implied corollary, liberals, eg people like myself, are therefore nearly always right). I think if we make the liberal political coalition into a a mirror of the conservative coalition, then we're really going to get into trouble.

Um,did you tell me what they get right?

And I reserve the right to call out an individual policy as conservative or leftish in and of itself. Obama has done conservative stuff (drone strikes) and liberal stuff (trying to close gitmo). It's the policies that count - not the person. e.g. Obama's greatest failure, in my estimation, was his education policy. He took NCLB, gave it Arne Duncan, and made an even bigger mess.

That was a mistake of conservative driven thought (e.g. - market based solutions to education- charter schools. And some bastardized competition/merit thing driven by standardized test scores) not liberal thought.

He seriously screwed the pooch on this one.

Also, evaluating Obam,a on a left/right scale is difficult. Do you count the ACA as a triumph of liberalism (yes, because government is intruding into the market) or as a sell-out to capitalism because it forces people to buy a privately produced product?

They both happen to be true - but on the whole the liberal solution to healthcare (i.e. single payer) is clearly superior to the mish-mosh we have now.

runner_guy,

Good post and thanks for all the detail. Haven't read it all, but I've read enough to say the following, which is I agree that public housing was pretty much a disaster - but was it a technocratic failure in the implementation or an actual failure of policy? I tend to view it as the former.

As for Abbot - yes, I agree that early admonitions to spend more on education as the simple way to achieve results was naive. (Not as widespread as assumed though. Real education wonks know that economic stratification is the fundamental problem in American education and financial achievement. But seeing as how socialism was never an American option, we had to settle for throwing money at the problem.)  But (always a but) for this to count as a failure, you have to have a reasonable alternative to the liberal policy, and I don't see any.

And as for the Soviet Union - I was actually going to mention this as an example of a liberal failure too. But, again, I don't know how widespread it was (was Soviet apologia ever a part of general Democratic/liberal policy and\or discourse? We're talking 50's 60's here, as I certainly don't remember it be much of anything during the 70's. Only the very fringes of the left thought that the USSR was some sort of success. ) And again, for there to be a failure, there should be a reasonable alternative that could be considered as a replacement. And what was that?