Matthew Yglesias: More Condescension Needed: Starts with a quote from Gerard Alexander:

Every political community includes some members who insist that their side has all the answers and that their adversaries are idiots. But American liberals, to a degree far surpassing conservatives, appear committed to the proposition that their views are correct, self-evident, and based on fact and reason, while conservative positions are not just wrong but illegitimate, ideological and unworthy of serious consideration.

I may not be qualified to speak for liberals, but aside from the word "fact" I don't see any evidence that conservatives are any less convinced that their positions are self-evidently right and that opposing views are "illegitimate, ideological and unworthy of serious consideration." (Facts do seem to be a distinct refuge for liberals, and something conservatives casually disregard.) And I can recall any number of conservatives deriding liberals as idiots (Mona Charen's Useful Idiots is one example; the collected works of Ann Coulter is another), and this has been going on a long time. You might argue that liberals have finally caught up with conservatives in mustering disdain for their opponents, and you might bemoan that uncivility, but it didn't come from nowhere. And one might even argue that liberal invective is the direct result of the degradation of conservative thought. Ten-twenty-thirty years ago there were liberals who readily acknowledged that some conservatives had some good ideas -- there was indeed a period when conservatives touted themselves as "the party of ideas." That doesn't happen anymore because a lot of those ideas have been tried and found wanting, and because conservative mindsets have increasingly shrunk back into their reptilian shell, lashing out incoherently about taxes and big government and the need to destroy anyone who doesn't like us enough.

Alexander digs up an old Lionel Trilling quote:

Liberals have dismissed conservative thinking for decades, a tendency encapsulated by Lionel Trilling's 1950 remark that conservatives do not "express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas."

It's worth remembering that in 1950 the Republican Party was dominated by its northeastern wing, having nominated Wendell Wilkie and Thomas Dewey as its last standard bearers, with Ike Eisenhower in the wings. Conservatives were marginal within the GOP, and even those who passed as mainstream conservatives then would be hard pressed to pass muster now. By 1950 the New Deal had outgrown its personal association with Roosevelt, and had moved on to conquer the Axis powers in WWII, to build the US economy up to a point where it was not only world-dominant but also more equitably distributed than at any time before or since. (Actually, the decline and decay began around 1970, as conservatives started to make their comeback.) So Trilling's quip had a whiff of triumphalism to it.

Still, it seems more apt now than ever. Conservatives have often been able to talk a good game, but after the last 8 or 14 or 28 years it should be clear that no matter how attractive their ideas seem, in practice they are disastrous. Especially while Bush was in the White House liberals have had plenty of opportunity to sharpen their critique. On the other hand, since Bush left office, the conservatives (or Republicans, since the two have become one) have raged and ranted but it's hard to see a single coherent idea they've brought to fore. They rant about banking industry bailouts, but they oppose any attempt to regulate the banking industry (such as the regulations that kept banks from needing bailouts from the 1930s until they were repealed less than a decade before the meltdown). They rant about budget deficits, which they practically invented with the Bush tax cuts, but recoil in horror at either raising taxes (which Reagan and the first Bush did to limit deficits) or address rampant growth in health care costs. They oppose Obama's conservative health care reform program (negotiated with industry and the AMA to keep private insurance companies in business despite overwhelming proof of dysfunctionality), but can't give a single coherent reason why. The way things are going, we can shorten Trilling's quote: the "irritable mental gestures" remain, but they scarcely even "seek to resemble ideas."

I suppose it's possible that there are thoughtful conservatives somewhere. One thing that makes it hard to tell is that since Obama took office the public face of conservatives has been the media celebrities (Alexander excuses "relatively marginal figures or media gadflies such as Glenn Beck") and Republican politicos, with all the Tea Party nonsense noise in the background, plus the occasional terrorist like Scott Roeder or Randall Terry. And the fact that congressional Republicans have maintained party unity only underscores their commitment to their most vocal fringe. On the other hand, it's not hard to find self-styled conservatives who have broken ranks, especially under Bush -- some names that come to mind include John Dean, Bruce Bartlett, Andrew Sullivan, Andrew Bacevich. I saw a bit with David Stockman tonight where he argued that the age of tax-cutting that he inaugurated as Reagan's budget director is over and that we need to be raising taxes. I looked him up, and ran across this bit of advice he has for Obama:

He should immediately stop the unconscionable bailout of Wall Street, housing, autos and other sectors. These bailouts are an enormous waste of resources that add huge amounts to the public debt while accomplishing nothing in terms of real economic recovery. Instead, he needs to focus government spending exclusively on the safety net; that is, helping the poor and unemployed to cope with the economic disaster created by the Fed and Washington, while leaving the markets and economy to liquidate excessive debts and failed investments. The second thing he needs to do is fire his economic team: Bernanke, Geithner and Summers.

That's a combination of ideas that can't be simply caricatured as either conservative or liberal, but it's consistent and has a workable sense of balance. From the left, I have a different set of ideas, but this at least is something I can see as plausible. Sure, ideological conservatives and ideological liberals would probably reject either Stockman's or my ideas out of hand, but pragmatic reformers wouldn't be so close-minded. Interestingly, a lot of people who conservatives viscerally reject as liberals, socialists, fringe leftists, and/or fascists, are really people who just recognize problems and are willing to try things that may work even if they aren't first choices. For instance, cap and trade is a flexible market mechanism for dealing with a problem that people from the left would traditionally try to deal with through regulation. Yet most so-called liberals, including Obama, are pushing for cap and trade to mitigate global warming: partly they do so because it should be an approach that would attract market-oriented conservatives (if they can extricate their heads from wherever they've stuck them), but also because it might be a more effective way of dealing with the problem. Private health insurance exchanges is another Obama sop to market-oriented conservatives (and to some powerful business interests). In this case, no one on the left has any fondness for the idea, but most would support it if that's what it took to get health care reform going. (And in this case it is definitely not a better idea, even if it is marginally workable.)

Through two wars and several rounds of tax cuts, Republicans plunged us into massive deficits while allowing private interests to steal us blind, and doing whatever they could to cripple the welfare state safety net. Among the results was a major financial meltdown: the simplest way to understand it is that the rich wound up with so much money the only way they could pretend to invest it was to construct a huge ponzi scheme that eventually collapsed on itself, taking a big chunk of the real economy with it. The combination cost the Republicans power, and that loss is the only thing they can think about remedying -- putting an end to their wars or their financial misadventure is way beyond their conception -- so they've orchestrated a massive slander campaign against Obama and the Democrats. They can't do this honestly -- honesty would involve admitting some culpability, and that in turn would ease Obama off the hook -- so they spew out nonsense and cover it up with rage, and it sort of seems to be working. You don't have to be liberal, let alone a leftist, to see this as a hollow scam, but it helps because if you are one you've seen this sort of scam from these same people before. And for those who see into this scam, how do you expect them to regard those who can't see it? I don't know about you, but stupid is the first word that pops into my mind. And as I look for other possibilities, stupid seems the kindest, because pretty much everything else suggests sinister ulterior motives.

Alexander whines and pouts that liberals think conservatives are stupid. OK, so what? From what we've seen of late, the shoe sure fits. But Alexander is wrong in saying that liberals have always thought conservatives stupid. Throughout most of history, liberals figured conservatives to be privileged, greedy, uncaring, and often flat-out spiteful. It's only when they start claiming that their programs will benefit everyone (not just themselves) that it becomes clear that they are stupid (or worse). Moreover, it's not just liberals (and leftists) who have come to conclude this. Consider this little item from Bruce Bartlett's blog (titled "Why I Am Not a Republican"):

I can only conclude from this new poll of 2003 self-identified Republicans nationwide that between 20% and 50% of the party is either insane or mind-numbingly stupid.

In racking my brain above, even I didn't come up with "insane": something more to be said for approaching a problem from multiple perspectives.

Since I started with Yglesias, let's finish by letting him continue:

I have a condescending attitude toward this op-ed. Of course I think my views are correct and based on fact and reason. If I thought my views weren't correct and based on fact and reason, I would adopt different views -- correct fact-and-reason based ones. Does Alexander really think that conservatives don't think their views are correct? Does Alexander not think his own views are correct? Not based on fact? Not based on reason? I'm not sure it's possible to be condescending enough to this op-ed.