Conservatives have been much better, over the last decades since the eighties, of creating a framework for debates. For example, we will routinely read in the press that the right is against the welfare state and government intervention, and the left for it. But this flies in the face of reality, where it is, for example in the U.S., the Republican governments which create the highest deficits. This was true for both Reagan and Bush; and it is true as well for Berlusconi in Italy.
So it is not that they are against the state, it would be more accurate to say that they are against using the state in the sense of fairness and broad popular participation, but that they favour any intervention which channels public money to the corporations and the most wealthy. This is in fact the record of the most recent American administrations.
This whole point is very well made in a new book on the Conservative Nanny State, the excerpts, which are really worth reading in full, were chosen by Kevin Carson:
“Conservatives… want the nanny state to intervene through many different channels to make sure that income is distributed upward. For example, conservatives want the government to outlaw some types of contracts, such as restricting the sort of contingency-fee arrangements that lawyers make with clients when suing major corporations (conservatives call this “tort reformâ€?). This nanny state restriction would make it more difficult for people to get legal compensation from corporations that have damaged their health or property.
Conservatives also think that a wide variety of businesses, from makers of vaccines to operators of nuclear power plants, can’t afford the insurance they would have to buy in the private market to cover the damage they may cause to life and property. Instead, they want the nanny state to protect them from lawsuits resulting from this damage. Conservatives even think that the government should work as a bill collector for creditors who lack good judgment and make loans to people who are bad credit risks (conservatives call this “bankruptcy reform�).
In these areas of public policy, and other areas discussed in this book, conservatives are enthusiastic promoters of big government. They are happy to have the government intervene into the inner workings of the economy to make sure that money flows in the direction they like – upward. It is accurate to say that conservatives don’t like big government social programs, but not because they don’t like big government. The problem with big government social programs is that they tend to distribute money downward, or provide benefits to large numbers of people. That is not the conservative agenda – the agenda is getting the money flowing upward, and for this, big government is just fine .
It is not surprising that conservatives would fashion their agenda in a way that makes it more palatable to the bulk of the population, most of whom are not wealthy and therefore do not benefit from policies that distribute income upward. However, it is surprising that so many liberals and progressives, who oppose conservative policies, eagerly accept the conservatives’ framing of the national debate over economic and social policy. This is comparable to playing a football game where one side gets to determine the defense that the other side will play. This would be a huge advantage in a football game, and it is a huge advantage in politics. As long as liberals allow conservatives to write the script from which liberals argue, they will be at a major disadvantage in policy debates and politics.
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The conservative framing of issues is so deeply embedded that it has been widely accepted by ostensibly neutral actors, such as policy professionals or the news media that report on national politics. For example, news reports routinely refer to bilateral trade agreements, such as NAFTA or CAFTA, as “free trade� agreements. This is in spite of the fact that one of the main purposes of these agreements is to increase patent protection in developing countries, effectively increasing the length and force of government-imposed monopolies. Whether or not increasing patent protection is desirable policy, it clearly is not “free trade.�
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It is clever policy for proponents of these agreements to label them as “free tradeâ€? agreements (everyone likes freedom), but that is not an excuse for neutral commentators to accept this definition…. (In using this term, reporters disregard their normal concern about saving space, since “trade agreementâ€? takes less space than “free-trade agreement.â€?)….
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Unfortunately, the state of the current debate on economic policy is even worse from the standpoint of progressives. Not only have the conservatives been successful in getting the media and the experts to accept their framing and language, they have been largely successful in getting their liberal opponents to accept this framing and language, as well. In the case of trade policy, opponents of NAFTA-type trade deals usually have to explain how they would ordinarily support “free trade,â€? but not this particular deal. Virtually no one in the public debate stands up and says that these trade deals have nothing to do with free trade….
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Unless the debate is reframed in a way that more closely corresponds to reality, conservatives will continue to be successful in their agenda of using government intervention to distribute income upward. This book examines the areas in which the hand of the nanny state is most visible in pushing income to those at the top.”