Natalie Gonnella
Follow Natalie on Twitter
With economic confidence sinking sharply across the country, Young Americans for Liberty this week offers an interesting look at how the nation's current fiscal challenges are impacting the youth vote as the 2012 election cycle begins to gain momentum:
Ryan Streeter
Follow Ryan on Twitter
We're a conservative country. And yet we're massively in debt. How does being conservative square with letting our finances get so out of control?
It’s ironic that Gallup released it’s political ideology survey this week showing that America continues to be a conservative country just as Congress was passing a bill allowing America’s debt load to surpass its GDP.
When it comes to party affiliation, America is pretty evenly divided, but we are definitely more conservative than liberal – and it’s been that way quite a long time (see the graph above). While 41% of Americans say they are conservative, only 21% say they are liberal. Even 23% of Democrats – nearly one in four – say they are conservative, compared to just 4% of Republicans who say they are liberal. Independents are also pretty conservative – 44%, or nearly half – and they’ve grown more so since Obama has been elected.
So we’re a conservative country. And we’re massively in debt. And the debt is growing like crazy even with the debt ceiling deal that has made cuts substantial enough to slow the debt growth.
One common explanation for this tension – namely, how such a conservative country could be saddled with so much out-of-control spending – is that it’s Washington’s fault. The political class has lost touch with ordinary Americans. This is true, but it’s not a complete explanation.
The harder truth to accept is that we conservative Americans, over time, have supported the expansion of entitlements that are driving our deficit spending. There has been plenty of evidence that conservatives resist cutting those entitlements, despite recognizing they are a problem. It’s much easier to support cutting foreign aid, welfare, and space exploration, for instance, than entitlements such as Medicare. And yet it's the latter, not the former, that are fueling our spending binge on into the future.
As the public reaction to the House Republicans’ budget – which proposes to reform Medicare – has shown, Americans are not yet ready to apply their conservatism to the government’s biggest spenders.
We need political leadership (someone with conservative views in the White House would sure help) to change this. But we also need an uprising of Main Street conservatives from around the country who stand ready to apply their conservatism to the country’s problems. Without grassroots support and enthusiasm, real reform will be too slow in coming.
An uprising of this sort would need to be based on some key principles and realities:
Conservatism needs to reclaim the reliable old values and rhetoric of thrift. Conservatives in America should be the anti-debt caucus, not just when it comes to Washington but when it comes to personal debt, too, which is still at threat-level heights. Savings should be central to a conservative vision of the future. This requires living within our means, not just as a nation, but as citizens.
Conservatives need to be as anti-entitlement with themselves as they were anti-entitlement with welfare moms in the 1990s. In the 1990s conservatives frequently spoke about the “entitlement mentality” of people on welfare and the bureaucracies that encouraged them, but you never hear that expression used today to describe – us. And yet what other than a sense of entitlement to future benefits (paid by others) makes changing Medicare and Social Security so hard?
Conservatives are the pro-youth caucus. Millennials, generally those born after 1982, went big for Obama in 2008 and remain quite liberal in their views, and yet they stand the most to lose by America’s fiscal mess. Conservative politicians and policymakers have advanced the most pro-youth reforms out there, and yet they haven’t articulated them as such. That needs to change. A conservative renewal should actually be driven by young people.
Conservatives need to get wiser on tax reform. Conservatives generally all support lowering tax rates so we can have more growth. They need to be as staunchly against special interest tax breaks as they are for lower rates, even if it means supporting eliminating some of those breaks without the offsetting tax cuts that many insist on now. This will help conservatives sell the tax rates they want to a larger part of the population. More importantly, it would help conservatives renew their commitment as advocates of ordinary, middle class Americans, not protectors of whoever was well-connected enough to get their wishes written into the tax code.
Conservatives need to redefine “shared sacrifice” away from class warfare and into something more noble. Instead of resisting Obama’s use of the term to apply to higher taxes for the wealthy (something a good number of Main Street conservatives actually support), conservatives need to coopt the term for what everyone under 55 years old should be prepared to do: give up the entitlements as they are currently defined, and prepare for a whole new system. The truth is, if we make reforms soon, this won't require too much sacrifice. But it will require embracing programs that do less than previously promised, and should also ask people to save a bit more than they have been.
Without a renewal of conservatism in the country that is focused not just on spending cuts but on real reform, America the conservative nation will continue to go the way of the wayward, undisciplined child we have unwittingly become.
