See the whole thread by @DouthatNYT of which this is a part. Why don’t nationalists care about child tax credits? I’m going to give my view of the hard-right’s answer, then a view of my own.
First, the hard right—Roy Moore Christian or Trump nationalist—doesn’t think child tax credits really are “something.” They won’t change demographic trends.
It’s not that the hard right, Christian or nationalist, is opposed to child tax credits, even if Trump is. They just don’t put much stock in them.
I haven’t seen Roy Moore or Pat Buchanan oppose the credits, for example. But they clearly don’t deem them as important as @DouthatNYT does.
So what is the hard-right’s pro-family policy, if not tax-code wonkery? It’s an idea Ross has touted elsewhere: the breadwinner.
Do you get back to “breadwinners,” men who make desirable husbands & fathers, with tax incentives? The hard right doubts it.
So how does the hard right want to restore “breadwinners”? For economic nationalists, this is the role of industrial policy, not taxes. Good jobs matter most.
I’m sympathetic to that idea because in my own life & those of my working-class kin, jobs are a helluva lot more important than marginal tax rates.
So if you want an economic answer to family decline, focus on jobs, not the tax code—the latter is of minimal efficacy & may distract from the bigger questions.
But the hard-right’s answer isn’t just about economics but about culture & economics together. The hard right’s anti-feminism is important here.
Whether you’re a Roy Moore Christian rightest or a “natalist nationalist,” you don’t want “equal pay for equal work,” because you think that’s anti-family.
For the hard right, family & economics go together in a “traditional” pattern. Using taxes to try to fake the traditional social structure is useless and compromised.
So this is why the hard right not only doesn’t care much about child tax credits, but doesn’t give much right-wing “cred” to those who do.
The hard has has had these views since Pat Buchanan was running in the 1990s. But there are so few hard-right voices in the media, this enduring viewpoint is unknown to many folks.
And the last place you’ll find Roy Moore-like or even Buchananite views represented is in what was formerly the conservative mainstream. It’s like looking for Bircher views there.
So even a lot of conservatives, especially of certain suburban backgrounds, have never encountered the hard Christian or nationalist right, except as an occasional sideshow to “serious” politics.
Policy-minded conservatives see an obvious problem with the hard right—@DouthatNYT knows it well—namely, that its social vision looks like sheer romantic nostalgia in 21st-century America.
This is the crux of the right’s problem: the policy wonks may not go far enough, and the reactionaries may not go anywhere at all in practice.
I keep hoping that this impasse will lead to more penetrating insight: maybe both kinds of right are stuck for a reason, even if both make some valid points.
But usually, instead of reflecting on failure in order to succeed in the future, it’s easier to deny that you’ve failed, and insist your ideas just weren’t tried hard enough—or exclusively enough.
The policy cons can always blame the hard right for letting down the serious policy cause, and the hard right can always say it was sold out by craven wonks.
Lather, rinse, repeat—this has been the story of the right for whole the quarter century I’ve been involved (first as a high school student), and for years before then, too.
My engagement with all this leads me to keep open the hope of finally breaking the impasse, yet simultaneously recognizing that politics, policy, punditry, etc. just may not be able to deliver what’s being asked.
When I look at history, what I see about demographics and civilizational rise and fall looks beyond human planning.
Beyond a certain level of prosperity & security, populations tend to fall. Yet prosperity & security are among the clearest attainable goods of politics (broadly understood). Success is its own punishment, viewed in this light.
You know what’s good for population growth? Often, new religions or religious movements; land-grabbing settler efforts; and the first flush of industrialism. Various forms of adversity can be, too.
There are chicken-or-egg questions here, but my sense is that the impulses that lead to new religions, settling of territory, and industrial surges can’t be planned or finely manipulated.
They’re outbursts of spirit. Which is why old-fashioned Providential history seems to understand something that policy brains and assertive reactionaries do not.
So part of my own view is—just wait. Do what you understand to be right & good but don’t indulge in the conceit that you’re owed the outcome you want. Or that you get to choose the hour of victory.
I think Michael Oakeshott is a good antidote to the anxieties of policy wonkery and reactionary dreaming.
But on the particular issue of child tax credits, I’m skeptical for policy reasons as well as philosophical ones.
Admittedly, policy and philosophy, and temperament, are hard to separate. Part of me just shudders at the technocratic manipulatively of getting people to breed by fiddling with their taxes.
I mean, honestly, what kind of BF Skinner world are we living in if something as intimate and human as family is so susceptible to the motive of a rat in a maze looking for cheese?
But I don’t think child tax credits have much effect, and I do tend toward the right-wing view that they’re hardly more than virtue-signaling inanities. Maybe I have too much faith in humanity! Or at least the sex drive.
I also wonder about the unintended effects of child tax credits and the like. After all, where do families come from? Single people. If you shift the tax burden to singles, isn’t it harder for them to start families?
There’s also a covert nastiness to some of this “pro-family” stuff, and it’s not lost on the single women in the conservative movement, who often feel like second-class citizens.
Reactionaries will outright tell a childless woman that she’s a failure as a human being. But some center-right wonks quietly have the same view, or their policy seems to insinuate as much. Again, the old problem: a social ideal at odds with lived reality.
Liberals may think that a social ideal at odds with social reality is useless, but their ideals are also at odds with social reality. It’s a human condition.
So, child tax credits & other modest pro-family measures, yea or nay? I don’t have high hopes for such things & I know there are costs as well as benefits—but that just makes it a prudential question.
Prudentially, I favor tax relief for lots of groups, and I’d put families high on the list. My preferences, however, are for broader rather than narrow relief, and more pro-family experiments at the state level—and outside of government.
I used to think tax-code simplification was a distraction, but as I’ve looked more and more at who really benefits from various deductions—often, lenders and speculators—I’ve come to favor scrapping lots of deductions.
