It might be time for some real outside-the-box ideas

In the years before Donald Trump, various conservatives tried to come up with new ideas for a movement that seemed exhausted and unready for new challenges. Whether we called ourselves “reform conservatives” or something else, we shared — or so we thought — a realistic assessment of what was possible within the broader two-party system, within a stagnant but basically stable Western order.

Maybe that self-conscious realism was a trap. The Trump campaign (and the Bernie Sanders campaign across the aisle) suggests that there is a public appetite for ideas that are well outside the ideological boxes of postCold War conservatism and liberalism. The evidence emerging — read Nicholas Eberstadt’s big, depressing essay in the latest Commentary for a synthesis — suggests that the slow-burning social crisis in American life is much worse than even those of us who wrote a lot about it thought. And the chaos in the Middle East and widening fissures in European politics suggest the times might require a more substantial rethinking of U.S. foreign policy than most Washingtonians have contemplated.

Earlier this month, I read the debut issue of American Affairs, a new right-of-center policy journal for the age of Trump. Its proclaimed purpose is to advance “the discussion of new policies that are outside of the conventional dogmas,” with the strong implication being that recent efforts to propose such new policies have been too timid and constrained, and that the times demand something more adventurous and ideologically unbound.

I accept the critique. But if I may venture one in return, I found the journal’s inaugural issue not quite as daring as I had hoped.

As an experiment, I thought I’d write a few columns floating genuinely radical visions of how policymakers might respond to our order’s slippage toward something worse than stagnation.

Let’s start with what one might call an emergency response to the social crisis. That crisis is apparent in the depressing litany of data that Eberstadt and many others have collected.

An emergency response would set an ambitious goal: a swift boost in workforce participation and family formation, using a few sticks and a lot of very expensive carrots.

The carrots would include a large wage subsidy and a large per-child tax credit and a substantial corporate tax cut and an employer-side payroll tax holiday to encourage hiring. They would also include an increase in government hiring in traditionally male fields — more military spending earmarked for recruitment, more federal cash for hiring cops.

The sticks would include cuts to disability and unemployment benefits and tighter Medicaid eligibility rules for the able-bodied.

As for how all this would be paid for, the answer is that it wouldn’t be. Instead, the risks of inflation and the drag of deficits on growth would be accepted as necessary costs of the experiment.

The scale of spending means this proposal gores more conservative oxen than liberal ones. But that’s only because I’m saving a related proposal to ban pornography and video games for a later installment in this series — which I promise will only grow more outlandish as it grows.