Shikha Dalmia devoted a recent column in The Week to criticizing what she takes to be the views of “reform conservatives.” I don’t think she characterizes those views with sufficient accuracy to achieve disagreement. In some instances the mischaracterizations are substantial enough to deserve comment.
1) The original version of the column claimed that Senator Mike Lee’s Working Families Flexibility Act “would mandate that employers give employees a choice in taking overtime compensation in money or time off.” She made this claim by way of illustrating that reform conservatives don’t want to shrink government and instead want to re-orient it toward servicing conservative constituencies such as families. But the legislation does not, in fact, mandate that companies offer comp time, as following the link Dalmia provided made clear. The column has thus been revised to inform readers that Lee’s legislation would actually make it legal, where it is currently illegal, for companies to offer that choice. Obviously there is nothing statist about that, as Dalmia now acknowledges.
She has to salvage her point, though, so her revised text claims that the bill would “also require that this option be included in private sector collective bargaining agreements.” On this point, the link she provides is mistaken, as a quick look at the bill language reveals. The legislation says that employers “may” offer comp time in collective-bargaining agreements where existing law provides for such agreements. Doubtless Lee would also like to reduce union privileges, which is why he has also been a co-sponsor of the National Right to Work Act.
2) Yuval Levin has frequently argued that the Republican party too often stands, or seems to stand, merely for a cheaper version of the welfare state or a welfare state that gives the party’s “own friends . . . a piece of the action,” to quote a recent post of his. He has also frequently argued that the expansion of the welfare state too often crowds out civil society, and that we should replace the welfare state with a much less prescriptive, micromanaging safety net. He sees Rep. Paul Ryan’s Medicare reform, which abolishes that program’s attempts to set prices throughout the health sector and brings competitive pressure to bear on the program, while also reducing costs, as a step toward this sort of replacement.
Those are Levin’s actual views. Here’s how Dalmia describes them.
Levin eloquently notes that what matters most about society “happens in the space between the individual and the state occupied by families, communities, civil and religious institutions, and the economy.” I agree. But libertarians (like me) would argue that we ought to expand that space by keeping the government at bay.
That is not the reformicon conclusion. They believe that to limit the demand for government, one has to first use the government to strengthen these institutions, especially in the face of the instability and uncertainty produced by a dynamic capitalistic system.
There’s a reason that last sentence includes no quote marks: Levin has never, to my knowledge, said anything of the kind, and his comments about civil society have been overwhelmingly directed at the dangers posed to it by big government.
She comes back to Levin a little bit later, saying that conservative reformers’ agenda
deliberately leaves the welfare state intact so as to coopt it for conservative ends. “We should move away from arguing about how much we should spend for the liberal welfare state to arguing about how to replace it with a conservative approach to government,” Levin explains.
Her use of the word “deliberately” is peculiar: It’s not as though Levin and company have the power to eliminate the welfare state but are refusing to pull the trigger. Nor is Levin, in the sentence she quotes, saying anything about co-opting the welfare state for conservative ends. Indeed, both the quote and the post from which it comes are saying pretty much exactly the opposite of what Dalmia claims.
3) Dalmia writes that some reform conservatives “want to restrict immigration and trade, just like unions of yore.” This sentence is half-right. Some reform conservatives do indeed want lower immigration levels, although her link does not illustrate the point. (It goes to a Reihan Salam post arguing for more skills-based immigration rather than more restricted immigration.) I am not aware of any reform conservatives who want to restrict trade, and of course Dalmia provides no evidence that many of them do.
Dalmia might well disagree with reform conservatives if she understood our views. Most of us, for example, reject her open-borders view of immigration policy. But her column does not show much evidence that she understands our views or is particularly interested in learning them before going on the attack.