AM I HERBERT HOOVER?: More mail. Zachary Schrag writes, I’m pretty sure “Jazz Judaism” usually goes by the name Hasidism. See here. And there’s always this alternative.

I am still having trouble distinguishing “rock’n’roll conservatism” from the older variant, “Herbert Hoover conservatism.” To be sure, there are differences on legalized pot and free trade, but at the core there is the old reliance on rugged individualism and collective self-help. It all looks very nice on paper until one day you wake to find thousands of angry, impoverished veterans camped on your front lawn. And then there’s nothing to do but send in the midget tanks.

For my part, I will put my trust in “Lerner ‘n’ Loewe liberalism,” which promises me that “there’s a legal limit to the snow here, in Camelot.”

Well, there’s a lot going on in this punchy little email, so I’m not sure I’ll be able to tease out all the different implied questions and assumptions. (Note that I’m not using “assumptions” in a bad, “when you assume you make an ass out of u and me” way–I mean that in order to keep the email brief and sharp, Zach is making most of his arguments by implication, and I’m not sure I’ll follow his train of thought well enough to catch all the nuances. I know I won’t be as succinct!)

1) Actually, I don’t think rock’n’roll conservatism champions “rugged individualism” as opposed to interdependence. A friend put it nicely, I thought, in reference to this Salon article on the ways George W. Bush’s recovery from alcoholism might influence his politics: The friend summarized the article by saying Bush ended up believing that you can’t fix someone’s life for him–the alcoholic himself has to acknowledge his problem and resolve to change–but once the alcoholic does seek help, a “pull yourself up by the bootstraps” approach won’t work. People struggling with any challenge–whether self-imposed, like alcoholism; imposed from the outside, like health problems; or a lot of both, like, say, most of the women I counsel at the pregnancy center, or the people described in this post–need community and huge amounts of personal support. The welfare state (and bureaucratic private charity, like Catholic Charities) not only can’t provide this support, but tends to discourage it. There are ways of using government to help people find genuine, personal, Marvin-Olasky-approved encouragement and aid–for example, governments can become information providers rather than service providers, connecting needy people with local organizations tailored to their needs, and vetting those local organizations for various measures of quality. All kinds of voucher programs–from food stamps to school vouchers to proposals for vouchers for other services like health care–operate on this connect-local-dots principle. In many cases I don’t think government is the necessary, or best, entity to fill that role, but that’s something that can only be decided on a case-by-case basis. So RNRC is not a) Randian individualism, or b) anti-government-as-such. It’s anti-impersonal charity/welfare.

2) I’m not totally sure I see what work the specter of the Depression is meant to do here. If Olasky is to be believed, the personal, interdependent ethic of late 19th-century charities had already been fatally weakened in the decades before the Depression, replaced by a handout mentality. The mutual aid societies lasted longer but were necessarily less well-equipped to deal with widespread poverty. So by the time the Depression hit, under Olasky’s analysis, you’d expect charities to be unable to handle the load, even before the government took over their job. But that’s not necessarily super-relevant, for two reasons:

a) I’m not sure that the roots of contemporary poverty are all that analogous to the roots of Depression-era poverty. I don’t know, for example, what role family breakdown played in Depression-era poverty; but it’s a pretty key feature of poverty today. So the pro-marriage aspect of RNRC may do more poverty-fighting work than Zach acknowledges. In other words, things that worked during the Depression might well not work today and vice versa. (And no, I don’t want to get into “What caused the Depression?” and “Did FDR make it worse?” and “Did Pearl Harbor, not the New Deal, end the Depression?”, both because I don’t know enough about it–I leave that to Jane Galt–and because even if whatever Zach believes about these subjects is the right analysis I’m not sure it matters to the discussion of RNRC. It might, and if people think I really need to wrestle with specifically Depression-related issues more they should definitely email me, but for the moment I think my position doesn’t depend on a particular analysis of the Depression.)

b) I don’t just think the welfare state is useless but harmless. That would be sub-optimal, but in that case, you could argue that we should keep it around because it can save our bacon if the economy turbo-tanks. But if you think the welfare state is actively harmful, then arguing, “We need the welfare state in case we have another Depression!” is kind of like arguing, “We need to keep the rabid dog around because he’ll be so helpful if burglars ever come!” Except that I suspect a Depression-level crisis is a lot less likely than burglars, at least in the area where I live.