Category — Conservatism

Republicans have traded the “compassionate conservative” for the “populist capitalist”:

“John McCain is a populist. He believes in free markets; he believes in limited government and having the free enterprise system produce the jobs and the prosperity that he seeks, but he does think, as did Teddy Roosevelt, that you do need government there with some oversight and some regulation to avoid excess.”

It’s an odd message for a man whose base doesn’t trust him.  If McCain thinks he can win by trying to attract disaffected Clinton voters while driving conservatives away, he’s got another thing coming.  Those people are going to vote for the liberal, not the quasi-liberal.

Country club Republicans, led by Bush and McCain, look they’re on the road to Waterloo this fall. Continuing red district special election losses don’t bode well for the November elections. Abandoning conservative principles for liberalism-lite will keep them in the minority for years to come.

Really, is there much more you need from these “conservative” republicans?

Grover Norquist, the California Republican Party, and an open-borders debacle continued

Last June, I noted the mortifying open-borders debacle in the California Republican Party. Michael Kamburowski, an Australian immigrant who served as the California Republican Party’s chief operating officer, resigned last summer after the SFChron reported that he had been “ordered deported in 2001,…[snip]

A former California Republican Party official who resigned last year in a controversy over his immigration status had no valid visa or work permit during his high-profile career as a Washington lobbyist for conservative icon Grover Norquist, newly filed court records show.

Is it any wonder conservatives are fed up with party leadership? These people are incompetent, sloppy, arrogant–and they couldn’t care less about following immigration laws.

And this is no coincidence: Republican Party registration is down in California. The party is in turmoil and in debt as it heads into its annual spring convention. Via the SacBee, the California GOP will decide whether to hold to a conservative agenda or turn into a California Democrat Party-lite: [snip]…Records show Republican registration in the state has dropped from 35.6 percent to 33.3 percent since 2004 as more voters seek independent status unaffiliated with any party. Democrats suffered only a 0.2 percent decline over the same period.

Move to the center? Become more like Democrats? Join the global warming fear-mongering crowd? Adopt “centrist” social positions? Marginalize conservatism as “divisive” and “strident?”
Yeah, that’ll boost GOP donations and registrations!

We need to form the Libertarian/Conservative party and pull the plug on the RINO’s and moderates. Start the ball rolling with a (W)right in Romney campaign in the general election.

This will provide one with a positive vote.

Matt Lewis suggests conservatives can “manage” John McCain with a good cop/bad cop routine.  He believes that well placed conservative advisers mixed with a little blunt conservative criticism can win the day.  But is this sustainable over the long-term?

I liken this situation to the interview process.  McCain is “interviewing” and making his best sales pitch to conservative “employers”.  As employers, conservatives have the most bargaining power right now.  But once Election Day comes and the “job offer” gets made, the negotiating power shifts to the employee.  And given recent history, McCain doesn’t have a problem selling himself as a conservative while campaigning and then reaching across the aisle to Ted Kennedy once elected. 

This, my friends, is the high-water mark of conservative influence with John McCain.  It only gets worse if he wins.

Rhod made a statement about McCain and the politics of power. He zeroed in on the target and put a nice shot through the X-ring.

I wish to let someone else speak to this, give weight to the very bones of Conservatism and flesh out the corpus. This limns the philosophical essence of Conservatism, more importantly it delineates the Us from Them.

You are either here or not. This is White and Black. I hated to edit this and probably did a poor job of it. Sobeit! With luck you might be encouraged to read it in it’s entirety. At the bottom is the attribution.

Howard Roark’s Courtroom Speech

“Thousands of years ago, the first man discovered how to make fire. He was probably burned at the stake he had taught his brothers to light. He was considered an evildoer who had dealt with a demon mankind dreaded. But thereafter men had fire to keep them warm, to cook their food, to light their caves. He had left them a gift they had not conceived and he had lifted darkness off the earth. Centuries later, the first man invented the wheel. He was probably torn on the rack he had taught his brothers to build. He was considered a transgressor who ventured into forbidden territory. But thereafter, men could travel past any horizon. He had left them a gift they had not conceived and he had opened the roads of the world.

“That man, the unsubmissive and first, stands in the opening chapter of every legend mankind has recorded about its beginning. Prometheus was chained to a rock and torn by vultures—because he had stolen the fire of the gods. Adam was condemned to suffer—because he had eaten the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Whatever the legend, somewhere in the shadows of its memory mankind knew that its glory began with one and that that one paid for his courage. [snip]

“Man cannot survive except through his mind. […] From this simplest necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and everything we have comes from a single attribute of man—the function of his reasoning mind.

“But the mind is an attribute of the individual. There is no such thing as a collective brain. There is no such thing as a collective thought. An agreement reached by a group of men is only a compromise or an average drawn upon many individual thoughts. It is a secondary consequence. The primary act—the process of reason—must be performed by each man alone. We can divide a meal among many men. We cannot digest it in a collective stomach. No man can use his lungs to breathe for another man. No man can use his brain to think for another. All the functions of body and spirit are private. They cannot be shared or transferred. [snip]

“Nothing is given to man on earth. Everything he needs has to be produced. And here man faces his basic alternative: he can survive in only one of two ways—by the independent work of his own mind or as a parasite fed by the minds of others. The creator originates. The parasite borrows. The creator faces nature alone. The parasite faces nature through an intermediary.

“The creator’s concern is the conquest of nature. The parasite’s concern is the conquest of men.

“The creator lives for his work. He needs no other men. His primary goal is within himself. The parasite lives second-hand. He needs others. Others become his prime motive.

“The basic need of the creator is independence. The reasoning mind cannot work under any form of compulsion. It cannot be curbed, sacrificed or subordinated to any consideration whatsoever. It demands total independence in function and in motive. To a creator, all relations with men are secondary.

“The basic need of the second-hander is to secure his ties with men in order to be fed. He places relations first. He declares that man exists in order to serve others. He preaches altruism.

“Altruism is the doctrine which demands that man live for others and place others above self. [snip]

“The man who attempts to live for others is a dependent. He is a parasite in motive and makes parasites of those he serves. The relationship produces nothing but mutual corruption. […] But this is the essence of altruism.

“Men have been taught that the highest virtue is not to achieve, but to give. Yet one cannot give that which has not been created. Creation comes before distribution—or there will be nothing to distribute. The need of the creator comes before the need of any possible beneficiary. Yet we are taught to admire the second-hander who dispenses gifts he has not produced above the man who made the gifts possible. We praise an act of charity. We shrug at an act of achievement. [snip]

“Men have been taught that the ego is the synonym of evil, and selflessness the ideal of virtue. But the creator is the egotist in the absolute sense, and the selfless man is the one who does not think, feel, judge or act. These are functions of the self.

“Here the basic reversal is most deadly. The issue has been perverted and man has been left no alternative—and no freedom. As poles of good and evil, he was offered two conceptions: egotism and altruism. Egotism was held to mean the sacrifice of others to self. Altruism—the sacrifice of self to others. This tied man irrevocably to other men and left him nothing but a choice of pain: his own pain borne for the sake of others or pain inflicted upon others for the sake of self. When it was added that man must find joy in self-immolation, the trap was closed. Man was forced to accept masochism as his ideal—under the threat that sadism was his only alternative. This was the greatest fraud ever perpetrated on mankind. [snip]

“Degrees of ability vary,[…] There is no substitute for personal dignity. There is no standard of personal dignity except independence.

“In all proper relationships there is no sacrifice of anyone to anyone. An architect needs clients, but he does not subordinate his work to their wishes. They need him, but they do not order a house just to give him a commission. Men exchange their work by free, mutual consent to mutual advantage when their personal interests agree and they both desire the exchange. If they do not desire it, they are not forced to deal with each other. They seek further. This is the only possible form of relationship between equals. Anything else is a relation of slave to master, or victim to executioner.

“No work is ever done collectively, by a majority decision. Every creative job is achieved under the guidance of a single individual thought. An architect requires a great many men to erect his building. But he does not ask them to vote on his design. They work together by free agreement and each is free in his proper function. An architect uses steel, glass, concrete, produced by others. But the materials remain just so much steel, glass and concrete until he touches them. What he does with them is his individual product and his individual property. This is the only pattern for proper co-operation among men.

“The first right on earth is the right of the ego. Man’s first duty is to himself. His moral law is never to place his prime goal within the persons of others. His moral obligation is to do what he wishes, provided his wish does not depend primarily upon other men. This includes the whole sphere of his creative faculty, his thinking, his work. But it does not include the sphere of the gangster, the altruist and the dictator.

“A man thinks and works alone. A man cannot rob, exploit or rule—alone. Robbery, exploitation and ruling presuppose victims. They imply dependence. They are the province of the second-hander.

“Rulers of men are not egotists. They create nothing. They exist entirely through the persons of others. Their goal is in their subjects, in the activity of enslaving. They are as dependent as the beggar, the social worker and the bandit. The form of dependence does not matter.

“But men were taught to regard second-handers—tyrants, emperors, dictators—as exponents of egotism. By this fraud they were made to destroy the ego, themselves and others. The purpose of the fraud was to destroy the creators. Or to harness them. Which is a synonym.

“From the beginning of history, the two antagonists have stood face to face: the creator and the second-hander. When the first creator invented the wheel, the first second-hander responded. He invented altruism.

“The creator—denied, opposed, persecuted, exploited—went on, moved forward and carried all humanity along on his energy. The second-hander contributed nothing to the process except the impediments. The contest has another name: the individual against the collective.

[snip]… The leaders of collectivist movements ask nothing for themselves. But observe the results.

“The only good which men can do to one another and the only statement of their proper relationship is—Hands off! [snip]

“I recognize no obligations toward men except one: to respect their freedom and to take no part in a slave society. […]

From the film The Fountainhead (1949), by Ayn Rand

McCain gave us a glimpse of his plan to rally dispirited conservative Republicans today:

“Most Republicans respect the process, most Republicans say ‘He’s the nominee of our party … I’m going to get behind our candidate to make sure a Democrat doesn’t come in.’ It’s a fairly natural evolution.”

Wow! McCain is amazingly arrogant. He’s daring conservatives to vote against him. I think he’s really misreading the dynamic here. President Bush burned through all the “At least I’m not a Democrat” chits. And I don’t think I’m alone in feeling that way.

As a conservative, I just don’t feel like the Republican Party is my natural home anymore. It’s far more interested in independents and illegal immigrants now. McCain better hope those people turn out in droves for him because when faced with a choice between a Democrat and a Democrat, I’m picking the write-in option.

Peggy Noonan’s interesting article explores Democratic and Republican infighting.  She argues the Clintons are fracturing the Democratic Party along gender and race lines.  But more interesting from my standpoint is the person held culpable for fracturing the Republican Party:

George W. Bush destroyed the Republican Party, by which I mean he sundered it, broke its constituent pieces apart and set them against each other. He did this on spending, the size of government, war, the ability to prosecute war, immigration and other issues. 

Amen, Peggy.  But sadly, conservatives, myself included, brought this pox on our own house.  We supported President Bush even though we knew he wasn’t conservative.  The main arguments for electing him came down to name recognition and he wasn’t a Democrat.  Sounds an awful lot like the argument being made for John McCain, no?  McCain will probably pick a token conservative vice president too.

McCain might be most “electable”, but is 4 more years of compassionate conservatism really winning?  It’s more like losing a bit slower.

The Boston Globe endorsement of John McCain should scare most conservative voters off his candidacy. But even if you didn’t have the damning evidence in the form of this endorsement, McCain is on the wrong side of too many big issues. He’s an enemy of free speech with his unwavering support of campaign finance reform laws. He’s pro-amnesty and will revive those disastrous proposals the second he’s elected. And he wouldn’t harm a hair on bin Laden’s to get valuable intelligence information out of him.

You can make electability arguments for McCain all you like, but like the 2 Bush’s before him, he’ll harm the conservative agenda far more than he’ll advance it.

Emergency Room service is NOT “health care”!

Do conservatives like Hannity understand the problem?

One argument that liberals successfuly make is that conservatism has been wrong on the major issues of the last century.  Liberals’ instincts are clearer, their vision more prescient, their hearts and brains bigger.   There is also historical evidence to support, but not PROVE this, but Ernst Toller’s aphorism about history as propaganda of the victors comes to mind.  Official history is devilish and biased. 

                       Stay away from me.  Go CARE about someone else.

In 1992, when Bill Clinton said “I feel your pain” to AIDS patient Bob Rafsky during a campaign stop, he seemed to mean it.  And he did, in the same way he felt all the narcissistic sentiments of his various realities to come.  We learned that, as he continued to emote and feel things during his priapic presidency, the facts and values of his emotions varied a great deal.  But, whatever his faults, Clinton was a lone act; he just wore the comedy and tragedy masks and didn’t try to institutionalize his pathos.  For that, we have George W. Bush and Compassionate Conservatism.

“Compassionate Conservatism” as a theoretical approach to social problems is the creation of Marvin Olasky, professor/journalist,  former communist, Jewish atheist turned Born Again Christian, Yale grad and former Bush advisor.  The term derives from Olasky’s study of the relative successes of government and private programs in relieving the effects of poverty throughout American history.  Olasky’s ideas and conclusions were the basis for faith-based initiatives, some of them adopted by GWB as governor to Texas and later as President.  

Compassionate Conservatism passed Olasky’s empirical tests.  It had less to do with religion than it did with communitarian possibilities , and almost nothing to do with the administrative state as a dispenser of compassion.  Bush, however, has infused his administration with a soft compassionate conservatism, and pushed the phrase front stage, and  thence into that deplorable family of catch-phrases inflicted upon historians and the public by political dream merchants.   These phrases define eras, visions, goals, national purposes and the evanescent pursuits of political generations, not of “the people” themselves.  

The last full century was fouled by such blinding banalities - New and Fair Deals, New Frontiers, New Convenants, New This, New That, Straight-Talk Express, WIN, and lots more, plus that apotheosis of mawkish liberal romanticism, stewed with a touch of Albert Speer,  The Great Society.  All of them foundered in some way on the shoals of reality.  As vessels for everyone’s different wishes and interpretations, they could never really function as democratic programs.  

As a digression, what the hell was The Great Society?  Someone tell me.  If the New Haven of today, with its brutalist architecture, bloodstains and cement foliage resembles the progressive vision of 1968,  someone needs to be punished for the artwork and the final rendering.  Liberals reduced the faded,  but restorable illuminated script of American urban life to loopy spray-can graffito, not only in New Haven but in every old city in the country because they cared about the inhabitants!   Listen, Uncle Sam.  Wherever I hurt, please don’t touch me there.

The same is true of Compassionate Conservatism, which to me seems to be the spiritual rationale for the President’s  swelling sympathies for anyone who can make it across an American border, to holders of burdensome mortgages, or to a select few who can lay claim to natural rights somewhere across the seas.  Despite Mexican towns emptying of young men, most who never return, despite the  deepening Latin despotism that make it desirable to leave and abandon hope of change, despite tyrannical stasis in the Middle East among our allies, our indiscriminate goodness survives the contradictions and goes looking for another heart to heal.   And we haven’t even gotten to sub-prime borrowers and their angst.

Now Bush is  waxing sympathetic about injustice in Myanmar, which is not a moral gradient he needs to scale to remain compassionate, and which fades into insignificance anyway in the shadows of monstrous injustices in Africa and the Middle East.  No doubt Rice can make a compassionate case for the Burmese/Myanmaris who must be saved by the ameliorative West.  It’s lunacy. There’s a natural limit to caring; it’s cheap, its reality is unknowable, and conservatism is not about pain, its  simply about liberty and justice for all.   You don’t attain either of these things by sloshing in sentimentality. 

With George Bush we got prescription drug subsidies,  support for affirmative action, a volcano of dollars for the orgy of corruption and graft that followed the genuine suffering of Katrina,  open borders, and Bush’s promotion of his four C’s of “civility, courage, compassion and character” (First Inaugural Address),  but not a word about The Constitution or his governing philosophy.  When you have no governing philosophy to defend as President, just a boundless heart,  then the office is your personal hair shirt.  The last time we went down this road, we got the constipated spirituality and crabbed pieties of Jimmy Carter.  Maybe we’re better off this time.  I’m not sure yet.