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Friday, October 21, 2005
The Friday Grab-Bag
1. Presidential Extortion
In the middle of a grumble about traffic distortions caused by a Bush fundraising visit to Los Angeles, Michael Williams just had to say this:
Compared to the hundreds of thousands of man-hours lost to freeway closures during rush hour today and tomorrow, I think it would have been far more efficient for the city to simply write a check to the RNC for a million dollars and paid the President to stay away.
Damn it all, Michael, couldn't you have let the politicians think of that on their own?
2. Political Affiliation And Christianity
It's no secret that uber-moonbat Mark Morford, the bizarro-world columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, hates Christians to the point of apoplexy. But it appears he has more than one reason:
Who are you to judge? Who are you to say that the more than slightly creepy 39-year-old woman from Arkansas who just gave birth to her 16th child yes that's right 16 kids and try not to cringe in phantom vaginal pain when you say it, who are you to say Michelle Duggar is not more than a little unhinged and sad and lost?[...snip...]
Why does this sort of bizarre hyperbreeding only seem to afflict antiseptic megareligious families from the Midwest? In other words -- assuming Michelle and Jim Bob and their massive brood of cookie-cutter Christian kidbots will all be, as the charming photo suggests, never allowed near a decent pair of designer jeans or a tolerable haircut from a recent decade, and assuming that they will all be tragically encoded with the values of the homophobic asexual Christian right -- where are the forces that shall help neutralize their effect on the culture? Where is the counterbalance, to offset the damage?
Where is, in other words, the funky tattooed intellectual poetess who, along with her genius anarchist husband, is popping out 16 funky progressive intellectually curious fashion-forward pagan offspring to answer the Duggar's squad of über-white future Wal-Mart shoppers? Where is the liberal, spiritualized, pro-sex flip side? Verily I say unto thee, it ain't lookin' good.
So it's not just that Christians deplore Morford's preferences in polyamory and perversity; it's that we're out-breeding him and those who agree with him, thereby rendering more likely an enduring Christian-conservative majority. Well, as oxygen-deprived as he often sounds, it's clear that he understands population dynamics and the inheritance of political affiliation to some extent.
Imagine how hard it would be for Morford to make a living if there were no San Francisco.
3. Why Do They Always Qualify?
Among conservative columnists, Jeff Jacoby is one of the very best: plain-spoken, incisive, and careful about his facts...yet he appears compelled to qualify his written opinions about Islam:
"The Muslim world is plunged into an abyss of darkness, antimodernity, anti-Americanism, and anti-Semitism," Sayyed says. Only a minority of Muslims are personally hateful or fanatic. But a minority can wreak enormous damage when the majority is unwilling to act.
That, Gentle Reader, was the concluding paragraph of an otherwise brilliant article on Pakistan's refusal to accept Israeli aid in the wake of their recent earthquake.
Jacoby's no fool, nor is he ignorant of the facts about what Islam dictates and demands of its followers. Perhaps he's under editorial constraint to issue such qualifications. Whatever his circumstances, in point of fact, nearly all Muslims approve of Islamic terrorism, at least to the extent that they refuse to condemn it. A healthy majority actively approves it, whether or not they support it with their sons or their money -- and a strong minority, perhaps as many as 15%, would willingly give it their funds, concealment in their homes, and perhaps their lives as well.
The proof is in the variant responses surveyors get when they ask Muslims about these matters. When the surveyor is identifiably an "infidel," the tendency is to hedge, to evade the question, to give ambiguous answers -- but almost never to condemn terrorism outright. When the surveyor is identifiably a Muslim, the real opinions come out, and they're not pretty.
It is fanatic to believe that God has sanctified the use of force against those of other creeds. It is hateful to lend even passive support to those who act on that belief. But such is Islam.
4. We Need A New Conservatism
The one currently in play is doing more harm than good:
Suddenly, conservatives are starting to question whether George W. Bush is even a one of them at all. One of my heroes, Robert Bork, recently wrote in The Wall Street Journal that "George W. Bush has not governed as a conservative. This George Bush, like his father, is showing himself to be indifferent, if not actively hostile, to conservative values." Conservative columnist Bruce Bartlett opines: "The truth that is now dawning on many movement conservatives is that George W. Bush is not one of them and never has been." Even at National Review Online - where I hang my hat most of the time - several of our contributors have echoed these concerns.[...snip...]
Contrary to most stereotypes, conservatism is a much less dogmatic ideology than modern liberalism. The reason liberals don't seem dogmatic and conservatives do is that liberals have settled their dogma, so it has become invisible to them.
[...snip...]
Within conservatism, however, there are enormous philosophical arguments about the proper role of the state. This debate isn't merely between libertarians and social conservatives. It's also between conservatives who are "anti-left" versus those who are "anti-state."
The technical term for this sort of conservatism is "unprincipled."
If it's true that conservatives have no consensus among themselves on principles -- that is, on fundamentals of right and wrong, particularly about the legitimate uses of force -- then there's no conservatism worthy of being called a movement, an intellectual current, or an ideology. There's merely statist left-liberalism and whatever isn't statist left-liberalism. This might sound strange and contrary to the prevailing assessment of conservatism as in-the-saddle while liberalism is disordered and "bookless," but it is nevertheless true. It will cost the country mightily as folks of widely divergent beliefs, all of whom call themselves conservatives, discover how far apart on fundamental matters they really are.
Political activists, above all other persons, must reflect on fundamentals. It's not enough to be anti-left or anti-state. One must know what one is for -- and why.
It's time for "anti-whatever" conservatives to start listening to the one and only group in America that pays attention to principles: the libertarians. Libertarians have their own besetting faults, most notably a tendency to push their animating principles into realms where they don't properly apply. But at least they've started at the correct end of the elephant. They've asked, and are asking, the questions whose answers are prerequisites to all others: What is right? What is wrong? What are the necessary conditions for sustainable peace, prosperity, and social order? Until these have been answered, nothing but visceral revulsion against the prevailing order of things will tie conservatives to one another. On those occasions when they displace it from the seat of power, they'll immediately turn on one another...as they're doing now.
Comments
Conservatism is not a political ideology. It is a weltanschauung onto which can be mapped any set of political beliefs.
Even Buckley calls himself a libertarian. The problem is that too many people have been allowed for too long to call themselves libertarians when in reality they were anarchistic loons. And they’ve thereby scared off people who otherwise would think of themselves as libertarians.
I suspect the term “libertarian,” as useful a coinage as it may have been in the past, has been corrupted beyond all repair. Unfortunately, we need another term for liberty-lover.
Maybe we need to steal back the old virtuous term “republican”?
M
::grin::
Posted by Mark Alger on 10/21/2005 at 03:41 PM”...asexual...”
Wonder where Morford thinks all those kids are coming from? Budding?
Posted by on 10/21/2005 at 04:13 PMLately I’ve been thinking that trying to get libertarians electd to national or local office is analogous to getting windows guys elected to the Apple board of directors.
Our present government exercises power, takes money and redistributes or spends it, and issues edicts over people.
Someone running for office who says “I won’t do any of those things, or the mimimal possible” is running for the wrong office.
look at the success rate of libertarian politicans.Posted by Doug_S on 10/21/2005 at 04:22 PMProblem you’re going to run into, Francis, is that a majority of conservatives consider themselves principled. It’s just that they have widely differing principles within conservatism - it’s not a monolithic philosophy, unlike Objectivism.
Neither is Liberalism, when you look at it. Nor Leftism. ;]
Libertarianism isn’t monolithic in principle either. An it were, we wouldn’t have schisms between the Randites and other facets of Libertarian belief.
Posted by Ironbear on 10/21/2005 at 05:26 PM
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