Hating Modern Conservatism While Voting Republican

Yes, I Still Want the Stupid Party to Win

Apparently confused by some of my tweeting, many have been asking who I will vote for this year. I’m certainly not a leftist, but it’s clear by now that I think many conservatives are stupid, intellectually lazy, conspiratorial, bigoted, anti-democracy, have awful views on abortion and euthanasia, and are in many ways largely motivated by ugly instincts.

Yet I still want them to win. Here, I’ll explain how I think about which side in our politics is better on the issues that I care about in the context of the 2024 election.

Most do not feel as negatively as I do towards the party they support. As a psychological defense mechanism, it makes sense to want to see the best in one’s tribe even if you can’t endorse every single one of its traits or policy beliefs. Moreover, as a matter of strategy, too much truth can be demoralizing. To motivate political action, it’s more effective to believe that your side is clearly and unambiguously better than its opponents in every imaginable way. Finally, for writers there is simple audience capture. Other people are tribal, and many readers don’t like hearing about the flaws of the party or movement that they identify with.

But those of you who read me are looking for something different. I’ll tell you that politically active conservatives and Republican voters can be seriously flawed people, and they are in many ways inferior to their opponents on some of the most fundamental cognitive and personality traits that are worth caring about. Nonetheless, the world is better off when the red team wins elections, and 2024 is, although a closer call than most years, no exception. Across time and place, conservatism tends to be the worldview of lower human capital, but mostly due to historical contingency, we live in one of those relatively rare societies where it is associated with more pro-market policies.

Personal (Non-Economic) Liberty Considerations

Fundamentally, my main consideration is that economic growth is what matters. I care about freedom too, but that’s also partly a function of wealth. If your income was cut by half, you’d be a lot less free to live your life the way you want. Things might be different under an authoritarian regime, as the richest man in China is in certain important ways less free than the average American. But if you look at differences between liberals and conservatives when it comes to how you can live your life, outside the economic realm, there really isn’t that much of a gap between the parties in the grand scheme of things. Yes, Republicans want to make it more acceptable to misgender people at work. But the right to do this is not worth all that much.

It’s bad Republicans ban abortion at the state level, but this mostly only affects poor women, and as society gets wealthier and travel becomes more affordable the number of Americans harmed by these bans decreases each year. Of course, this doesn’t help women in Red States being turned away from hospitals in emergency situations, and that’s truly unfortunate, but such circumstances are rare. Euthanasia is different, and if Democrats came out unapologetically in favor of a Canadian-type system, I would seriously consider voting for them despite all of their other flaws. The current MAID regime originally stems from a Canadian Supreme Court ruling, and this shows that it is possible that Democratic judges appointed today will one day rule that the US Constitution requires that we allow assisted suicide. Nonetheless, this doesn’t appear to be on the immediate horizon. One argument against supporting Republicans is that they will give us more theocratically-inclined judges who will completely foreclose such a possibility.

I also don’t think you should vote based on a general sense of cultural grievance. If I was convinced that electing one party would solve problems like young women getting tattoos, gender confusion among the youth, or diversity casting in movies, it would affect my vote. But although political views are often motivated by cultural grievances, the connections between election results and such phenomena are tenuous at best.

Typical Republicans

Covid tyranny was one exception to the general rule that the parties aren’t all that far apart on matters of individual liberty. And this obviously cuts against the left. Covid restrictions may be gone, but I’ll always remember leftists as being the people who literally masked children for years. The pandemic might not be directly relevant to policymaking today, but it showed what elites were capable of in the name of safety, and it was truly frightening. Of course, Democrats weren’t really outliers on a global scale, as most of Europe had similar lockdown and masking policies, which were in some cases stricter and more long-lasting. So the Red State pro-freedom response to covid might be considered more a plus for the conservative side rather than a strike against the left.

Economic Freedom as the Main Issue

Setting aside the now mostly moot but perhaps still informative issue of covid, where the parties truly differ in important ways is, as implied already, on matters of economic freedom. The debate over legalizing prediction markets is instructive. This isn’t a hot-button culture war issue, and if you asked an informed American which party would be on which side, they probably wouldn’t have a strong opinion on the matter. But, as it turns out, all three of the Democrats on the board of the CFTC are in favor of stricter regulations, while the two Republicans are opposed. It should be a pretty easy decision for government to take a hands-off approach here, because betting markets provide important information about the world and the risks they pose to society are minimal. Yet Elizabeth Warren and her allies complain that their legalization would allow election interference on behalf of foreigners and big money interests.

Not all Democrats are bad on prediction markets. Congressman Ritchie Torres, for one, is a fan. But Warren types who are reflexively anti-market are far more prominent on the Democratic side. Republicans aren’t better on most issues because they all carry around Hayek’s books and have internalized his arguments about how markets are the only rational way to aggregate information. They’re often just too busy getting worked up over drag queens to be constantly paranoid about anything involving money and prices. People who are ideologically pro-market as a reflex moreover are disproportionately represented among conservative elites. Belief in economic freedom doesn’t motivate many Republican voters, but when Elite Human Capital does tilt right, it’s usually for this reason. All of this means that while the typical Republican voter might not be much more pro-market than the typical Democratic voter on any particular issue, the gap between the judges and high-level government officials of each side is vast.

Any voter is going to be uninformed about the vast majority of issues. As I wrote in 2022,

To get a scope of the information problem facing the voter, consider that an American president is allowed to appoint up to 4,000 officials in the federal government, although many jobs go unfilled at any one time. How many of those appointed by Trump can you name, and of those, how many policies that they implemented are you familiar with? The last president signed 220 Executive Orders throughout his time in office, Biden added around 2,000 pages to the Code of Federal Regulations in 2021, and the current Democratic-controlled Congress has passed 213 laws since the beginning of last year. You probably have never read a single page of the CFR.

The point here is that “become informed about policy” is not a realistic goal. You might focus on gathering facts in one or two areas, but you will remain extremely ignorant about over 99% of what the government is doing. I know civil rights law and foreign policy very well, and have done a lot of research on issues related to the pandemic. But I have limited knowledge on basically everything else, despite still being more informed than all but the tiniest sliver of the population.

You can assume most things are like prediction markets. Democrat judges, political appointees, and politicians default to “do something,” while Republicans default to “do nothing,” or, if they’re feeling ambitious, “undo what has been done.” The conservative approach is usually better. To believe in the do something heuristic requires one to not only believe in an activist government, but that government is likely to get things right most of the time, or at least behave reasonably when it comes to the most important challenges it faces.

Analysts focus too much on individuals, but really, voting for a politician should be seen primarily as a matter of throwing one’s support behind a coalition, and presidents of the same party tend to appoint similar people. Trump’s Supreme Court justices could’ve been named by Jeb. Biden’s personal views might not be as bad as those of Elizabeth Warren, but intraparty dynamics have ensured that her allies play a major role in his administration. This is why you shouldn’t take Trump’s seeming moderation on abortion too seriously. He’s still going to be appointing the same kinds of pro-life justices that got rid of Dobbs, and he can’t ahead of time stop the judges he names from doing things like banning mifepristone.

The Kamala campaign recently came out for price controls on groceries, a type of regulation that practically all serious economists are hostile to and one that Bill Clinton or Barack Obama wouldn’t have gone anywhere near. This comes on the heels of Biden unveiling a plan for rent control. Regardless of whether such policies are implemented, these proposals suggest that Democrats are not only the anti-market party, but moving in the wrong direction. The same can be said of Republicans of course, with the rise of populist discourse and Trump doing things like ruling out entitlement cuts, but there’s no doubt that they have a long way to go before being as bad as the other side. Housing is a possible exception here, although federal government involvement in the issue is limited. Right now, housing reform doesn’t seem to be a clearly partisan issue, with red and blue states both showing progress, although that doesn’t mean that Democrats might not become clearly more pro-YIMBY at some point. If and when they do, this might tilt the balance in favor of me supporting them some of the time, given the importance of this issue.

Anti-Foreigner Bias, Foreign Policy, and the Threat to Democracy

There are a few areas where Republicans are obviously more in favor of economic intervention. They are mainly immigration and, in some cases, trade. The Republican default of “do nothing” gets overruled by their heuristic that “foreigners are icky” in these two domains. Conservative voters have always had irrational views on these topics, but until the rise of populism and the ultimate triumph of Trump elites were able to get away with being more globalist. This is unfortunate, though in comparing the two parties, it is worth noting that Democrats have also become less pro-free trade over the years as they’ve turned increasingly hostile to economic liberty and reached an accommodation with a xenophobic public.

Immigration, however, remains a major difference between the two sides, and here Democrats are the better option. Trump flopped around and didn’t decrease net migration all that much in his first few years, but when covid came along he took the opportunity to place severe restrictions on who could come into the country. Even without a new pandemic, I suspect that now that he and other conservatives have discovered which levers to pull, they will do what they can to slow down the issuance of visas and green cards.

Source

This of course would be a human tragedy and make Americans poorer. Imagine that a Republican administration lets in 150,000 fewer people a year, which seems completely possible, and that’s 600,000 fewer newer arrivals over one term. If there’s a libertarian case for voting Democrat, this should be at the center of it.

On foreign policy, Trump will likely support Ukraine, give Israel carte blanche to do what it wants, and take a strong stand against Iran. His first term Middle East policy was an unquestionable success, resting on bringing the Israelis and most Arab governments together and taking the grievances of the Palestinians less seriously. The same approach should work again. And while it wasn’t a good idea to keep NATO membership on the table before February 2022, the case for supporting Ukraine now that Russia invaded is strong.

Another major issue with voting Republican is that Trump did try to steal the election. It’s unlikely he’ll be able to once again try to pull off any kind of serious fake electors scheme or another January 6, especially now that he’s not in the White House and Kamala rather than Pence will be presiding over certification. Plus, Congress actually passed a law clarifying that the vice president’s role in the process is purely ceremonial. So one may desire to punish Trump for what he did after the 2020 election, but it doesn’t make much sense to vote against him to prevent something similar from happening again. It sounds funny to say Trump should be jailed for attempting a coup but since he hasn’t been he should be elected president since he’s the more pro-market candidate, but this is pretty much where I am at.

A more pressing concern is that Trump will simply corrupt the legal system by demanding that law enforcement prosecute his enemies and let him commit whatever crimes he wants. Trump supporters sometimes point out that he didn’t prosecute his enemies during his first term, though it clearly wasn’t for a lack of trying. The only check on this before was the fact that he had appointed people like Bill Barr and Jeff Sessions who weren’t complete toadies. Next time, loyalty will be the main criterion he selects for, and this makes the recent Supreme Court ruling on presidential immunity particularly troubling. I’m actually sympathetic towards a lot of the conservative critiques of the administrative state and arguments that the president should have more control over the executive branch. But it’s disturbing to see these arguments gain ground in the service of the goal of making it easier for one man to commit crimes and subvert democratic institutions. This is a legitimate concern that leftists have. And although I don’t believe Trump would try to stay for a third term in 2028, I don’t think the possibility can be completely discounted given the degree to which the Republicans have now become a cult of personality.

In this election, one side threatens democracy and the other threatens capitalism. My sympathy towards Republicans is based on my belief that capitalism is simply much more important, and also a lot more fragile. Advanced democracies practically never morph into dictatorships, while all of them are plagued by policies that are much too statist. Moreover, the threat to democracy is unique to Trump, while hatred of markets is deeply embedded in the left. When Trump appoints Republican judges, they won’t be harming democracy thirty years down the line, while Democrat judges will continue finding bad reasons to restrict individual liberty and make society poorer for the rest of their lives. We don’t live in a country that is clearly divided along the pro-/anti-freedom axis. Given that reality, in my judgement Republicans’ theocratic leanings, bias against foreigners, and cult of personality do not make them worse than the side that is more consistently hostile to economic liberty.