The Economist has interviewed Richard Posner. Posner has attracted my attention (and the attention of many others) for being economically conservative out of the Chicago School but acknowledging that deregulation has gone too far and is partly responsible for the current economic crisis. Posner has also been very critical of the anti-intellectualism of the Republican Party. He sees the country moving to the left under Obama as leaving room for a more rational Republican agenda which can move back from the extreme right:
DIA: In writing about the intellectual decline of conservatism you say that the movement has “so far succeeded in shifting the centre of American politics and social thought that it can rest, for at least a little while, on its laurels.” Are you at all afraid that, while conservatives rest, Barack Obama will have shifted the centre of American politics back to the left?
Mr Posner: That may happen, but if so it will be good for conservatism! President Clinton in effect co-opted the conservative agenda; I have often referred to him as the consolidator of the Reagan revolution. His economic policies were conservative, but he also supported capital punishment and welfare reform, though obviously the control of Congress by the Republicans was a big factor in the latter. His judicial appointments were generally of moderates, and the two liberals whom he appointed to the Supreme Court were less liberal than the justices they replaced. If the current administration moves the country left, conservatives will be able to campaign from a position of responsible conservatism, rather than pushing a conservative agenda beyond reasonable bounds in order to differentiate conservatism from the centrist policies of moderate Democrats.
Posner considers Obama’s handling of the economic crisis to be a mixed bag, giving him far more credibility than conservatives who attack all aspects of Obama’s actions without being able to offer any reasonable alternatives of their own:
DIA: What do you think of the Obama administration’s handling of the crisis?
Mr Posner: A mixed bag, but given political constraints and the inherent awkwardness of a presidential transition in the midst of a crisis, probably as well as could be expected. I think we needed the Keynesian stimulus (the $787 billion in tax cuts, benefits increases, and public works), although it could have been better designed; and the stress tests, a distant cousin of FDR’s bank holiday (during which bank examiners examined the books of the banks and allowed only those adjudged solvent to reopen), apparently have assisted the major banks to obtain additional capital. Above all, Mr Obama has radiated confidence, competence, and control, and those are important qualities in a president who is trying to allay public anxieties. For those anxieties stimulate hoarding (by banks as well as by individuals), which reduces spending, which reduces production, which increases unemployment, which reduces incomes, which reduces spending further—the downward spiral that it is imperative to arrest. But the harassment of business over compensation policies, and the impending federal takeover of General Motors, are negatives: they increase the uncertainty of the business environment, which dampens the incentive to invest, and shift the balance between government and business in the management of economic activity too far in favour of the government.
Posner also refers to the opposition by conservatives to closing Guantanamo Bay and moving prisoners to federal prisons in the United States to be an example of “idiot conservatism.” Posner also does not go along with the conservative outrage over considering empathy in a Supreme Court nominee:
I think empathy, which means the ability to understand how other people feel, is a valid and important attribute of a judge, because his decisions affect people, often profoundly, including people who are not before the court, and he should have a sense of how they will be affected by and react to the decision, and of the motivations and circumstances that led them to act as they did in whatever dispute or incident led up to the case.
