[Off Topic & Political To Boot] A Further Response To Avik Roy on Establishments

At the beginning of the week I kicked off a week of posts on the Establishment wing of the Republican Party—it’s definition, influence, strategy and tactics—with Red State’s article on What The Republican “Establishment” Really Means.  These are important issues, not merely for Americans, but for anyone at all [hint hint, fellow conservative Episcopalians and yes, even ACNA members] engaged in an organization in which, by necessity, there is internal political action.

That article developed into an exchange between the Red State writer and an NRO writer [which nicely encapsulates the divide].  Red State responded with this interesting article and then followed up with a further article, from which I’m excerpting the below:

My original essay on the current divide between the GOP “Establishment,” on the one hand, and the Tea Party and other anti-Establishment factions, on the other, sought to explain the leading issue (the growth of spending and the size of government relative to the private sector), the proximate cause (the loss of trust that the GOP Establishment would make a serious effort to stem this tide) and the underlying history that led to the wide fissure currently visible in the party and the movement on the Right. As I noted in my followup essay, the loss of trust in the Establishment over spending is by no means the only such divide, but it’s the one that has brought longstanding tensions out in the open and has overcome the natural tendencies of Republicans and conservatives to defer to authority, hierarchy and gradualism. The break is not a sudden onset of irrationality, as some would have us believe, but an entirely rational response to a long and depressing history of failure to check the growth of federal spending, the federal entitlement state, and federal regulation, leading us to the point where our private sector can no longer carry the burden of a perpetually growing public sector.

RoyThis observation has led me into an argument with Avik Roy, a senior healthcare fellow at the Manhattan Institute, professional healthcare analyst and healthcare writer at Forbes and National Review, who insists that conservative voters who have lost faith after some six decades of unkept promises by Republican candidates to stem the tide of growth in government spending and regulation should continue to trust that this time, the promises of such politicians will be different because they have white papers and proposals that would lead to “entitlement reform” (note that Roy nowhere promises that any such reforms would actually reduce the ratio of public expenditure to private production). Roy relies on a false comparison: the fact that not all anti-Establishment candidates for office have offered substantive solutions to the growth of entitlement reform, whereas an ideal Establishment candidate would do so.

This is a straw man argument, and one that continues to ignore history, Congressional dynamics, the basics of negotiation and the actual facts of the current Presidential race. In fact, Roy’s analysis is impractical and detached from reality. The practical reality is that, without pressure and leadership from the anti-Establishment wing of the party, nothing will get done. And the long and dolorous history of prior efforts to restrain spending, entitlement spending and regulation amply justifies the mistrust of Establishment figures who offer purely theoretical solutions and refuse to take political risks to make them a reality.