Welcome to Freedom Democrats

Will Wilkinson points out a recent studying the relationship between political ideology and his five foundations theory of moral sensibility and judgment. These 5 foundations are:

1) Harm/care, 2) Fairness/reciprocity, 3) Ingroup/loyalty, 4) Authority/respect,5) Purity/sanctity more elaboration here.

Apparently, the survey was more intended to primarily focus on liberal-conservative differences, but a large number of self-identified libertarians(1/8 of the sample population) took the survey, which allowed the authors to draw conclusions about libertarians as well as conservatives and liberals.

"Liberals care most about the Harm/care and Fairness/reciprocity foundations"

"Conservative concern was spread more evenly over the five foundations, and they were less willing than liberals to violate Ingroup, Authority, and Purity for money."

Libertarians, on the other hand, had the lowest sacredness scores on all five foundations. Jonathan Haidt, the author, concluded: "Free-market libertarians appear to be the least outraged and most open to contractualizing moral violations. The differences were particularly stark between libertarians and conservatives on the three binding foundations. Libertarians may support the Republican Party for economic reasons, but in their moral foundations profile we found they more closely resemble liberals than conservatives."

This led Wilkinson to write: "Libertarians are liberals who love markets."

From a political philosophical position, libertarianism, at least historically, is a radical branch of liberalism that replaces the so-called social contract with a market contract(s).

Haidt responded in the comments that the Editors of his original paper cut at quite a bit of his libertarian comparison study observations, so he is working a new paper comparing libertarians to liberals and conservatives on a number of scales. He gives a succinct summary of what he is finding:

Libertarians are liberals who lack bleeding hearts. Libertarians look much more like liberals than like conservatives on most measures, EXCEPT those that have anything to do with compassion, on which libertarians are lower than liberals AND conservatives. The lower levels of compassion, and higher levels of need for cognition and tendency to "systemize" rather than empathize, are probably related to the love of markets.

I'm not sure about the lack of empathy part, at least from my experience, but lack of "sacredness" is pretty spot on. Just because I don't not respond with "there outta be a law" to every social event I may not agree with doesn't mean I lack empathy; the ability to apply a systematic mode of thought to foresee the unintended consequences, and thus conclude why there often "shouldn't be a law" is not an absence of compassion, at least in my book. And from Herbert Gintis' research, for example, we can observe the key role markets play in facilitating empathy among members of heterogeneous groups.

But from Haidt's research, perhaps we can dispense with the nonsense of the oft quoted refrain that "libertarians are conservatives who like to smoke pot." A more accurate quip would be that "libertarians are liberals mugged by economic and political reality."

Some recent developments on the National Security State front:

1) Enemy Belligerent, Interrogation, Detention, and Prosecution Act of 2010

This bill transcends the proto-fascism of the Patriot Act and ventures into outright fascism. One of the reasons I am a radical is precisely because people like Joe Lieberman and John McCain are thought to be centrists/moderates and not the putrid extremists that they actually are. In the Alice-in-Wonderland newspeak world we now find ourselves in, Extremism=Centrism, where Centrism is simply the consensus of elite opinion. At this point, I would say this Bill does not reflect such opinion, but then again, it was proposed in response to a lone "lap bomber" on an international flight. In an event of another significant internal terrorist attack, the consensus would probably shift to reflect the bill. Of course, it always helps if the perpetrators are brown people and muslim.

2) Rockefeller-Snowe Cyber Security Bill

Wired makes the point that the Cyberwar Hype is mere corporatism under the guise of "National Security," the intent being to destroy the Open Internet. Wired is not far off. IPv4 grew out of a largely open, cooperative evolutionary(contrary to uninformed opinion, the US Government did not "invent" the internet) process; IPv6, the eventual 128 bit address Network Layer protocol replacement for the current 32-bit IPv4(especially in terms of the enhanced security protocols), is going to be, and has been, much more influenced by the political process. So the Rockefeller-Snowe Cyber Security Bill would go far in largely supplanting "Request for Comments" with political lobbying in terms of adoption/modification of internet protocols. Frankly, the primary result of this bill, in my opinion, will be to make the NSA an enforcement arm for digital copyright. I mean, if you want to talk about "unauthorized network traffic," piracy and copyrighted content is by far at the top of the list.

3) Schumer-Graham Immigration Reform Bill

It's getting to the point anytime "Reform" is in a piece of legislative, you can probably just go and ahead and substitute "tyranny" and get a better idea of what said legislation entails. Real ID has stalled, so let's find another way to use fear to get a national biometric identification card, this time tying it into getting permission to earn a living. Once again people like Schumer and Graham are held up to be "moderates." Well, Schumer is a crook and Graham is just to the left of Hermann Goering, so i could stand do without this type of bi-partisanship. Quoting Schumer:

"It's the nub of solving the immigration dilemma politically speaking," Mr. Schumer said in an interview. The card, he said, would directly answer concerns that after legislation is signed, another wave of illegal immigrants would arrive.

Well, with the political economy that is emerging out of Washington, I don't think you are going to have to worry about any new "waves" of "illegal immigration," Senator.

4) PreCog Crime Prevention

Minority Report was a lousy movie; real life is just sparing us the delusion of any entertainment value...

During the Bush Years, one wing of the Democratic Party received heavy criticism from the progressive netroots for bowing into Republican pressure on foreign affairs and civil liberties. The Blue Dogs, later nicknamed the Bush Dogs by progressives, tend to be conservative Democrats representing rural Western and Southern districts, with some exceptions like Congresswoman Bean of Illinois. Although they technically unite around fiscal responsibility, they was a high amount of correlation in the eyes of progressives between the Blue Dogs and support for the most egregious of Bush's policies. Today, National Journal notes that Blue Dogs just come from a different type of district than the rest of their caucus.

Nearly half of the fiscally conservative "Blue Dog" Democrats, for instance, represent districts from the low-minority, low-education sector, with another quarter of them representing districts from the high-minority, low-education group. And 30 of the 48 House Democrats in districts that Republican presidential nominee John McCain carried in 2008 hail from the low-minority, low-education quadrant. The most-vulnerable Democrats represent these low-low districts.

In the past, I've always kept myself open to finding libertarian-leaning Democrats among the Blue Dogs and the like. It's certainly possible to imagine a more fiscally conservative Southern or Western Democrats with strong pro-2nd Amendment tendencies also taking a more anti-government perspective on civil liberties. But the reality is far different. Of the entire Blue Dog caucus, only three members, Congresswoman Harman of California, Congressman Thompson of California and Congressman Michaud of Maine, voted with us on both Afghanistan and the Patriot Act.

That's not to say that other members from so-called "low-low" districts didn't vote with us. In fact, fourteen members (Including Michaud) from low-minority, low-education districts voted with us. But they don't come from the Blue Dog wing of the party. There are 66 Democrats from these districts, so 14 members is just over 20%. But when you consider that around 27 members from these districts are Blue Dogs, the math is that around a third of non-Blue Dog Democratic members from these types of districts vote our way. That's a pretty impressive. For comparison, only 10 members of the 62 from districts with high-minority, low-education voted our way, or 16%. If you take out the Blue Dogs, it's 10 of about 48, or 20%. In the high-high quadrant, Democrats hold 84 seats and 30 of them voted with us, about 35%. And among the high education, low minority, around 17% voted with us, 13 out of 35.

It probably doesn't come as a surprise, but only one Democrat from a district that voted for McCain joined us, Congressman Perriello of Virginia. For most Democratic members, the knowledge that their district supported McCain seems to be a strong reason for them to give some support for these flawed policies. But on the other side of the aisle, no Republicans from Obama districts joined with us.

Among the four quadrants, support for our positions is rather similar in three of the four and highest in the high-high category. The percentages get better when you exclude Blue Dogs. I've focused on them first, but I hope to look at the other groups in the Democratic Caucus in future posts.

I wanted to run the numbers more on the members of the Democratic Caucus that voted for an exit strategy in Afghanistan and against the renewal of the Patriot Act. I've picked these two votes because they are iconic of the major issues that led to the creation of Freedom Democrats during the Bush Administration. My argument is still that Republicans as a whole do not have serious plans to promote small government policies on the economic side and Democratic opposition to militarism abroad and a surveillance state at home is not entirely gone. Because of that, Freedom Democrats continues to have a purpose.

A total of 68 Democrats and only 4 Republicans aligned with our interests on these two votes. While the Afghanistan vote received more support, 59 members (3 GOP, 56 Democrats) voted for it but in favor of the Patriot Act renewal, there were 16 members (6 GOP, 10 Democrats) who opposed the Patriot Act renewal but did not support an Afghanistan exit strategy. This includes Congressman Chaffetz of Utah who has now come out supporting an Afghanistan exit strategy. I can give him the benefit of the doubt but I don't know about anyone else.

There are 55 other members who didn't cast a vote on each issue: 6 Delegates who can vote on amendments but not bills, 4 Members who have resigned or passed away, 3 new Members, and 42 other Members who just didn't vote on one of the issues. About twenty on each vote, which makes it seem like there's just always a number of Members who can't manage to vote because something else is up. 8 Members opposed the renewal of the Patriot Act but didn't vote on Afghanistan and 4 are cosponsors of McGovern's bill that would, in effect, do the same as his Amendment: Capuano, Hastings (FL), Lewis (GA), and Velázquez. For the members who didn't vote on the Patriot Act renewal but did support an Afghanistan exit strategy, 1 voted against similar provisions during 2008: Capps.

So our "honorable mentions" are Chaffetz, Capps, Capuano, Hastings (FL), Lewis (GA), and Velázquez.

And, as I said previously, here is the list of the 68 Democrats who voted with us both times:

Abercrombie
Baldwin
Blumenauer
Braley (IA)
Clarke
Cohen
Costello
DeFazio
Doggett
Edwards (MD)
Ellison
Farr
Filner
Frank (MA)
Fudge
Grijalva
Hare
Harman
Hinchey
Hirono
Holt
Honda
Johnson (GA)
Kagen
Kucinich
Larson (CT)
Lee (CA)
Loebsack
Luján
Maffei
Maloney
Markey (MA)
Matsui
McCollum
McDermott
McGovern
Michaud
Miller, George
Moore (WI)
Nadler (NY)
Neal (MA)
Oberstar
Olver
Pallone
Pastor (AZ)
Payne
Perriello
Pingree (ME)
Polis (CO)
Price (NC)
Richardson
Ryan (OH)
Sánchez, Linda T.
Sarbanes
Schakowsky
Scott (VA)
Serrano
Shea-Porter
Speier
Thompson (CA)
Tierney
Towns
Visclosky
Waters
Watt
Waxman
Welch
Woolsey

More on this list to come.

Marc Ambinder makes some interesting observations about Congressman Paul Ryan and his plan to bring down the growth in government spending.

Paul Ryan is the Republican idea man of the hour. Karl Rove endorsed Ryan's approach to budget reform on Glenn Beck, and whenever Republicans are asked about their preferred alternatives to the administration's deficit reduction intentions, Ryan's name and proposals are offered up. Hey, Republicans have ideas too. We don't need health care reform to reduce the deficit -- at least not yet.

So prominent Republicans -- particularly those running for president and those who aren't elected officials -- love Paul Ryan when it's convenient. Why is it, then, that only twelve members of the conference were willing to attach their names to his bill -- and none from the leadership? One reason is that Ryan is introducing it in his capacity as a member -- not as the ranking member of the budget committee. (Ryan's official budget proposal has been supported by the entire caucus -- but that isn't this.)

One theory: Republicans are worried about the political salability of Ryan's specific proposals, which are, in sum, the apeothesis of orthodox party economic policy -- policy that has been politically, if not substantively, discredited. (Ryan's response to some specific criticisms can be found here.)

Paul Ryan may be the only Republican serious about reforming the budget. The rest of the caucus likes the idea of having a plan, but they know that Ryan's plan is radioactive politically. The Republicans claim to be small government conservatives because they oppose Democratic proposals, but as a caucus they don't have any proposals of their own to slow or even cut the increases in government spending over the long term.

It looks like ole JD wants to turn the Tea Parties into a prayer breakfast... Listen

Then again, this is my idea of good church music...

For most of the first decade of the twenty-first century, the two parties were split on some very fundamental issues: foreign policy and civil liberties. Neoconservatives under Bush were pushing a new foreign policy to remake the Middle East while concentrating power in an unchecked executive branch to spy on American citizens. Democrats opposed most of these power grabs, although enough weak centrists and moderates in the party gave into Bush's power grab to give the more liberal netroots activists a reason to feel like their party was out of touch and in the hands of the elite. The rest is, now, history . .

Today, under a Democratic Administration, the same temptation of power is there seducing a new party in power. As noted yesterday, an effort to pull out of Afghanistan got minor support in the House. A measure to extend provisions in the Patriot Act passed with broad bipartisan support. Is all doomed for the libertarian Democrat now that Democrats are in power? Was the "ooze" decade of Democratic opposition to the war on civil liberties and the neoconservative aggression in the Middle East only temporary?

My answer is no.

First, the Republicans have not suddenly switched positions. On the Patriot Act vote 10 Republicans opposed the renewal but 87 Democrats. An immediate withdrawal from Afghanistan got lackluster support, but at least requiring an exit strategy received the majority support of the Democratic caucus last year with 131 Democrats, but only 7 Republicans.

For want of a better analogy, it's similar to the 1920s. Republicans were rather united in their support of Prohibition, while the issue split Democrats internally. Despite a significant dry influence in the Democratic Party, a wet was better off having some affiliate with the Democrats. An activist motivated by these fundamental issues of war and peace, and civil liberties, probably will find more allies among Democrats than Republicans.

The Republicans, not so surprisingly are the usual suspects. The Afghanistan vote received the support of only Coble, Duncan, Johnson (IL), Jones, Paul, Rohrbacher, and Whitfield. And the Republicans opposing the Patriot Act renewal were Bartlett, Bishop (UT), Chaffetz, Duncan, Ehlers, Heller, Johnson (IL), Jones, Paul and Young (AK). Giving Chaffetz the benefit of the doubt since he's since come out in favor of an exit strategy of Afghanistan, the Republicans aligned together on both votes are a small handful of only five: Chaffetz, Duncan, Johnson (IL), Jones and Paul.

Paul Ryan, budget guru and conservative up and comer, isn't on the list. Neither is woe of earmarks and pork Jeff Flake. And, of course, no one in leadership.

With 131 Democrats calling for an Afghanistan exit strategy and 87 opposing the Patriot Act renewal, the overlap was a decent 68 Democrats, excluding a handful of members who have left since the Afghanistan vote, have entered before the Patriot Act renewal, or missed one of the votes. Here is the list, for what it's worth:

Abercrombie
Baldwin
Blumenauer
Braley (IA)
Clarke
Cohen
Costello
DeFazio
Doggett
Edwards (MD)
Ellison
Farr
Filner
Frank (MA)
Fudge
Grijalva
Hare
Harman
Hinchey
Hirono
Holt
Honda
Johnson (GA)
Kagen
Kucinich
Larson (CT)
Lee (CA)
Loebsack
Luján
Maffei
Maloney
Markey (MA)
Matsui
McCollum
McDermott
McGovern
Michaud
Miller, George
Moore (WI)
Nadler (NY)
Neal (MA)
Oberstar
Olver
Pallone
Pastor (AZ)
Payne
Perriello
Pingree (ME)
Polis (CO)
Price (NC)
Richardson
Ryan (OH)
Sánchez, Linda T.
Sarbanes
Schakowsky
Scott (VA)
Serrano
Shea-Porter
Speier
Thompson (CA)
Tierney
Towns
Visclosky
Waters
Watt
Waxman
Welch
Woolsey

If I had to guess just based on the names, this looks like the left wing of the party but with a number of more centrist members too. It may not be the majority of the caucus, but around a quarter of the membership it seems a lot more to work with than on the Republican side.

The New Yorker's George Packer has an interesting blog post about Progressives and Populists, comparing President Obama (the Progressive) to Democratic Congressman Tom Perriello (the Populist).

In political terminology that goes back more than a century, Obama is a Progressive, and Perriello is a Populist. Progressives came from the successful ranks of American society, they identified with the interests and aspirations of the educated and well-off, but their sense of civic responsibility was scandalized by the corruption of political machines and the evils of corporate capitalism. They were driven by moral conscience and pragmatic concern to crusade for a range of reforms, from the primary election to the income tax. Their impulse, individual and ethical in nature, was to cleanse and restore. Their model was the disinterested, public-spirited citizen who brought expert knowledge to solving social problems.

. . . A hundred years later, the scale of powerful institutions is taken as more or less a given by contemporary Progressives like Obama, who appointed an architect of the bank bailout as his treasury secretary. Their quarrel isn’t with bigness itself, but with the unfair advantages that political influence has conferred on corporations, insurance and drug companies, and banks against the consumer, the taxpayer, and the small businessman.

This is where distance between Obama and Tom Perriello begins to open. For Perriello is less a Progressive than a Populist. The Populists were agrarians, and when Perriello told an audience at a grant-giving ceremony in Martinsville, Virginia, that farm jobs could be the jobs of the future, he was sounding a very old chord in American discourse. In his language and sympathies, his frequent use of the word “elite,” his vilification of Wall Street bankers, Perriello is carrying the banner of the laid-off seamstress, the struggling truck-stop owner, the hard-pressed tobacco farmer. These were the constituents of the original Populists. They looked with anger upward rather than with sympathy downward. They didn’t come from the professional middle class, though some of their champions did, and they didn’t put their faith in the training and education of experts. If anything, expertise was suspect as a cover for the interests of the powerful. Hofstadter described the “dominant themes in Populist ideology” as “the idea of a golden age…the dualistic version of social struggles; the conspiracy theory of history; and the doctrine of the primacy of money."

It's interesting to consider that while Parker looks at the Populist vs. Progressive divide, the Progressives were themselves split both by geography and by partisanship. Some Northeaster Progressives first flirted with the Democratic Party while incarnated as "Mugwumps" focused on civil service reform and later joined with the Democratic Party under President Woodrow Wilson. But even within the Republican Party, progressives had two geographic wings. Nicol C. Rae explains in "The Decline and Fall of the Liberal Republicans" the divide:

If a fundamental conservatism inspired the more patrician progressives of the East, this was certainly not shared by their western brethren. Western progressivism, embodied in the figures of Robert LaFollette in Wisconsin, George Norris in Nebraska, and Hiram Johnson in California, was a genuinely radical movement, reflecting its populist antecedents and the continuing economic plight of the western and farm states. While the eastern reformers sought to alleviate the social conditions of the poor, and mitigate the excesses of big business and the machines, the westerners launched an assault on the entire political structure in their states and on the vested interests--notably the railroad companies--that had previously controlled that party structure. In pursuit of the extirpation of business influences from politics, the western progressives instituted the direct primary for all public offices, abolished all forms of political patronage, introduced nonpartisan elections and the city-manager system at the local level, and established the initiative, referendum, and recall procedures. In the western and plains states, with their large numbers of discontented small farmers and small businessmen, this assault on corporate control of the political process aroused enthusiastic electoral support. While the western radical and the urban progressives of the East had a common desire to improve living conditions and curb the excesses of big business and the political machines, the eastern progressives were highly suspicious of agrarianism and the fervor of the radicals' attack on the eastern corporate and intellectual elite.

Western Progressivism within the Republican Party tended to merge with some of the Populist sympathies the region had developed, but tempered by a Republican partisanship that distrusted a Democratic Party that represented "Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion." It's probably not a coincidence that the great Democratic Populist William Jennings Bryan had strong appeal in the West; he was a moral crusader who supported Prohibition, was an evangelical Christian, and was not from the South. And it's not a coincidence that years later many of these Western Progressives ended up supporting FDR. Northeastern Progressive Woodrow Wilson had a window of opportunity in courting these Progressives, but this failed for a variety of reasons (mostly the fault of Wilson).

While FDR came, geographically, from the Northeast he shared a lot in common with the Populist sympathies of the Democratic Party in its bases of the South and West. Parker is absolutely right when he says, "They looked with anger upward rather than with sympathy downward." This anger wasn't just upward, but Northward and Eastward. The economy of the post-Civil War Era favored not a random dispersal of bigness, but a geographic concentration of big business in the Northeast. Populists in the South and West were angry at a regional elite in the Northeast. While aspects of the New Deal have been interpreted as class-based conflict between the have's and the have-not's, there was a regional component between the have region, the Northeast, and the have-not regions, the South and the West.

Today's politics creates a confusion not found in the older political eras. The Republicans today are the party of the have's, but their base of support is in the have-not regions. The Democrats are the opposite, they are the party of the have-not's but are strongest in the wealthiest regions. It adds an unusual twist to politics today as the Democratic advantage in the wealthiest regions comes from the middle to upper class activists that are most similar to the Northeast Progressives of the bygone era. But instead of the party of William Jennings Bryan having a few Northeast Progressives grafted on, it's the party of Northeast Progressives with only a few William Jennings Bryan's.

Today, the House of Representatives will have a vote on a resolution offered by Congressman Kucinich to begin the process of withdrawing from Afghanistan by the end of the year. Just last summer, there was a vote on an amendment from Congressman McGovern to require an exit strategy for Afghanistan that received the majority support of the Democratic caucus. The question for today is if Kucinich's resolution will receive more support as doubts about the President's strategy in Afghanistan linger, or fewer votes because an immediate withdrawal is seen as more radical than just an exit strategy. Stay tuned . . .

The Republicans may have spent the last year attacking Obama's stimulus, but I think that the nature of our political system would have encouraged Republicans to pass their own muddled stimulus package if they had been in power. While there is always the argument that divided government would produce gridlock and force policies toward the center, there is the recent example of both Bush's own stimulus and the later TARP bailout under a Democratic Congress. Would the combination of a Democratic President and a Republican Congress work any better? Depending on the pundits you believe, we might be a few months away from finding out.

The GOP increasingly stands for the Graying Old Party. While a narrative focused on the Tea Parties might claim that opposition to socialist and government-run health care is the key to a Republican resurgence, the polls tend to show that most of the shift in the polling from 2008 and 2006 to 2010 is due to changes in turnout based on the natural likelihood, or lack thereof, to vote in a midterm election. While most Democratic-leaning voters still align with the Democratic Party, there is a shift among older voters who voted for Democratic candidates in 2006 and 2008. Is this about socialism, or simply that Republicans have been making the case for most of a year that Democrats are out to cut Medicare?

The Republican Party is not ready to seriously tackle entitlement spending, aside from a few noble exceptions like Paul Ryan. In the long term, entitlement spending like Medicare will be the budget buster, not the normal Republican monsters of earmarks or foreign aid. Add to that military spending, a category that some Republicans are proposing should be tied directly to GDP, and I don't think that the Republicans have any serious proposals for balancing the budget or even managing the deficit.

I've said this before, but it needs repeating that the Republican Party will try to seize the small government mantle because they oppose new spending proposed by the Democratic Party. But they will fight tooth and nail against entitlement reform or cuts to wasteful military programs. In switching to the Republican Party, Griffith highlighted not only his concerns about health care reform but his opposition to Obama's proposed cuts to an assortment of military and space programs that effected his district.

We may not like the Democratic plan to try to reform Medicare and bring down the long term costs to health care, but at least they have a plan. And while I'm not generally enthusiastic about raising taxes, I don't think that allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire for the wealthiest Americans is the deciding issue in today's political process. Overall, despite the election of Barack Obama and the perception that the Republicans have seized the cause of small government again, I don't really find a compelling case that the Republicans are superior to Democrats on most of the macroeconomic issues.

What we need, and what the Democrats also need, are low cost proposals for economic growth. The political will to tackle entitlement reform, cut defense spending, and clean up the tax code doesn't exist. There are serious problems in the long term with our nation's finances, problems that are growing grimmer the longer they are ignored. With the recent economic crisis creating the very real possibility that our economy will have permanently higher levels of unemployment, unemployment that will devastate a generation of workers, we need political solutions focused on fostering economic growth.

But what?

The Republicans used to have a narrative for economic growth, even if it proved ineffective. Tax cuts on capital and investment, wealth flows into business investments that trickle into research and development. Economic growth! Instead, we got a Wall Street bubble that spread to housing and brought down the entire economy when it burst.

So far the only Democratic narrative I've seen is to increase public investment in research and development directly. Can't Freedom Democrats do better?

Any thoughts?