and then what?

This is the closest I'll come to cogently explaining my political identity.

The central question of liberalism, and the central challenge to conservatism, is three little words: and then what?

Conor Friedersdorf approvingly links to this piece by Will Wilkinson where Will points out that he doesn't believe that equal opportunity is feasible in the real world. It's as smart as most things Wilkinson writes (which is to say, very smart indeed). I have some disagreements with what Wilkinson says. And as always, I would say that if the fact that something is a practical impossibility means we shouldn't pursue it, it's time for our species to give up on morality, ethics, justice, love, right living, happiness, self-fulfilment.... But look, let's set those concerns aside. Say Wilkinson is right, and we are foolish to pursue equal opportunity. And then what, Will? What if you are one of those who is denied equal opportunity? What if you're prevented from pursuing the aspects of human life which will leave you fulfilled and actualized? What if you're the one who is stuck in inequality, to the point where you can't live the life that you have dreamed of, and that the American dream (that conservative god) has promised you?

This is the question, for conservatives, the crucial, intelligent question. And then what? When a conservative argues that food stamps create a culture of dependency and should be abolished, the question that must be asked of him is, and then what? There are still hungry people, and they will not be fed without these food stamps. He might be right, and he might be wrong, when it comes to the negative consequences of such programs. But right or wrong, these people still exist, and they still need to eat. Conservatives love to say that conservatism is non-ideological, but damn, does it seem to be concerned with hypotheticals and purely notional constructs. The actual flesh-and-blood consequences of shrinking the government is often ignored in favor of complaining about the negative aspects of the social programs in question, or simply talking about pure ideology.

So when a conservative says that subsidized housing creates inefficiencies in the market, and becomes a breeding ground for crime, and on and on and on.... Okay, and then what? There are people who need housing. The "free market" or whatever has left them in a place where they are unable to provide it for themselves; church and charity aren't, as a matter of fact, providing it for them and obviating the need for governmental intervention. It could very well be the case that many or most of these people are largely to blame for not being able to afford housing. I'm sure I and the average conservative will have profound disagreements about the degree of that blame. But look, even if every single person in subsidized housing needed it because of their own failures, what difference does that make? Do we have an obligation to house them, or not? And if the answer is no, are all of us, conservative or liberal, prepared to live with a homeless population that is totally dependent on the ability of people to pay for housing? Will conservatives walk uncomplaining through a New York that has become a Bombay, look at the teeming masses of homeless crowding the street, and have no complaints? When conservatives rushed to blame the victims of Katrina for their own dependence on government, the same question leapt to my mind. Even if they're all responsible for their own fate, what comes next? There are people literally drowning in the street. So what now? What next? Or should we be the kind of society where people see corpses floating on Bourbon street as an object lesson in being a responsible person?

My least favorite conservative trope-- my very least favorite-- is the "liberals are naive" meme. Drives me a little crazy, both because as I said above I have never seen a compelling reason why we should abandon pursuing impossible goods, and because conservatives simply have their own naivete. Where liberals are supposedly naive about the ability of government to create happiness/security/fulfillment, conservatives either naively think that the market, community or society will provide these things, or they elide those concerns altogether. I read so many articles and blog posts where I get to the end and I say to myself "Where's the second half? When does he explain what, exactly, people are going to do without this government intervention?" Happens literally ever day. Okay, you've explained why you're ideologically opposed to, say, free drug rehabilitation. Okay, you've explained the ways in which free drug rehab creates an incentive for addiction, or whatever the conservative argument du jour is. When do you get to the part where you explain what should be done about addicts who simply cannot get off of drugs without rehab paid for by government?

Those explanations never show up because conservatism has no answer to those questions. Conservatism doesn't know what to do with those who can't fend for themselves. Conservatism has no solution for people with needs that, their own fault or not, they can't fill themselves. That's conservative incompleteness. And this is why I long for Gordon Gecko. I long for a conservatism that publicly says what some conservatives say privately, that they don't care what happens to people with needs that they can't fill themselves. It used to be that libertarianism was a bastion for this kind of cruel but honest conservatism, where people were fine with saying "sucks for them". But libertarianism, as it has grown in popularity, has become just another ideology of free market utopianism, where people conveniently assert that, if government disappears, there won't be any suffering. Because the question of a real social safety net of last resort is so intractable for these thinkers, they think them away. They can't confront the problem of people who can't feed or house or clothe themselves in any responsible way, so they don't. Instead they contribute to the popular and growing project of asserting that capitalism is a system that eventually is going to mean no suffering, no one left behind.

I recently went to a conservative gathering where ideas were rigorously debated, where these kinds of very basic questions were considered thoughtfully and responsibly. These were all intelligent, principled, committed people, and they open their arms to me and invited me into their debate knowing full well that I was a leftist. Their courtesy and their intellectual integrity is a credit to conservatism, and reminds me that conservatism will have a bright intellectual and philosophical future to come.

But one moment sticks out above all others. I asked a question about people who truly can not fend for themselves: children, the mentally ill, those with severe cognitive and intellectual disabilities. I wanted to know what happens when, in fact, there is literally no one to take care of them outside of government. What if there are no relatives? What if there is no community? No friends of the family willing to take on that responsibility? The person I asked paused for a moment and said "Well, I don't want to get bogged down in that hypothetical." He was sure, as were some others, that you couldn't have a situation where there just isn't anyone to care for those who can't care for themselves.

I'm here to tell you that this just isn't the case. We want it to be true. We feel like it should be true. But it isn't true. I assure you, it isn't true. So the question remains for conservatism. And then what? What next. Some conservatives assert a world where there is never really a situation where only government can intervene, and then call me naive. Let me be clear: I have no illusions about the efficacy or efficiency of government solutions. It's true, often government hurts more than it helps. Of course, government should usually be the safety net of last resort. Of course there are negative consequences to most government intervention.

But there are two things I desire from conservatism. I want conservatives to admit that there are times when there really is no one else but government left to intervene. There are times when a lack of government intervention means, at the most extreme situations like Katrina, bodies floating in the street. And I want conservatism, or at least individual conservatives, to decide if society has an obligation to intervene, given that this is the case. It seems like less and less conservatives want to answer that question in the negative. That's better for my ideology, but it leaves us in a place where too much conservative argument is undone by my simple question. For those who will indeed say that government has no responsibility whatsoever to provide for people who have nothing else, I applaud your honesty. But I insist you admit that this means that sometimes, people will starve; sometimes, people will be homeless; sometimes, people will die. Because that's the sad simple truth of the matter.

Until we get those things sorted out, the question for conservatism remains. At the risk of being self-important and pretentious-- okay, the certainty of being self-important and pretentious-- I think that question for the right is "a whistle of wind in a crack, a knife thrust, a window thrown open on emptiness."