Tag: politics

Ross Douthat reveals the intrinsic and incoherent dislike for principle harbored by the pragmatic Republican:

Like many outside-the-box thinkers, they’re good at applying their principles more consistently than your average partisan, but lousy at knowing when to stop. (Hence the tendency to see civil rights legislation as just another unjustified expansion of federal power.) And like many self-conscious iconoclasts, they tend to drift in ever-more extreme directions, reveling in political incorrectness even as they leave common sense and common decency behind.

It isn’t surprising that two of the most interesting “paleo” writers of the last few decades, [Samuel] Francis and Joseph Sobran, ended their careers way out on the racist or anti-Semitic fringe. It isn’t a coincidence that the most successful “paleo” presidential candidate, Pat Buchanan, opposes not only America’s interventions in Iraq, but the West’s involvement in World War II as well. It isn’t surprising that Ron Paul kept company in the 1990s with acolytes who attached his name to bigoted pamphleteering.

And it shouldn’t come as a shock that his son found himself publicly undone, in what should have been his moment of triumph, because he was too proud to acknowledge the limits of ideology, and to admit that a principle can be pushed too far.

Douthat is correct to say that Rand Paul could have and should have avoided a discussion of the merits of a 46 year-old law. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 isn’t on any libertarian’s top 10 list of Federal actions that require overturning. In fact, it probably isn’t even on anyone’s top 25 list. But Douthat’s criticism of Paul’s principles naturally leads to the question of how much principle is too much? How much good is too good? And precisely how much principle should be, ideally, be cast aside in order to reach an optimum balance between principle and pragmatism? The illogic stems from ignorance; Douthat has clearly never stopped to think that the civil rights act, however justifiable, was in fact an expansion of central state power with all of the long-term danger that presents. He obviously has never thought about World War II in a critical manner, viewing it instead as a mystic and hallowed event that is beyond question. And he adroitly skips over the fact that the only reason Francis and Roberts ended up on what he calls a “fringe”, despite the fact that their views are far more popular in the mainstream public than those of their neo-conservative foes, is because they were exiled by the neocons after their successful conquest of the conservative media’s high ground.

Rand Paul is hardly “undone”, no matter how much Douthat and the other faux conservatives in the Republican Party would like to believe he is a political dead letter. The America of 2010 simply doesn’t view the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in the same manner that the America of 1980 did. The liberal white guilt that fueled the civil rights of the 1960s and diversity of the 1990s is all but dead, having been slain by the Vibrant Society, and besides, what does a Mexican or Somali immigrant care about 18th, 19th, or even 20th century American history anyhow.

It is, of course, entirely possible that Americans have ideologically devolved to the point that they are simply too unprincipled to elect principled politicians, in which case it doesn’t matter whether men like Rand Paul are elected or not. Because an unprincipled electorate will fully merit the fate that appears to be in store for them.

In which I respond to an erroneous assumption made by a commenter on John Scalzi’s blog:

I think Libertarians are the most idealistic people in the world. They really do believe that left to their own devices people will do the right thing. Look at Alan Greenspan and his shock that large corporations didn’t act in their investors’ best interests.

This is a wildly incorrect notion of libertarianism and is almost precisely backwards. It is because libertarians understand that people are capable of committing great acts of evil, especially the sort of people who desire power over others, that they wish to prevent government from interfering in people’s lives to the greatest extent possible. We libertarians most certainly do NOT believe that people will do the right thing if left to their own devices, rather, we believe that since most people will do the wrong thing if given power over others, it is in the interests of everyone to make sure that the force multiplier offered by government to those people is as small as possible.

As for Alan Greenspan, it is important to understand the difference between the supposedly innnocent, self-servingly revisionist Greenspan and the coldly calculating servant of Wall Street. There was absolutely nothing libertarian about Greenspan’s actions; it wasn’t as if he eliminated all of the many government regulations that create and govern corporations as well as forcing them to sell their stock on certain specific private exchanges rather than freely on the Internet.

As for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it was positive in that it overturned government enforcement of segregation, which was a clear violation of the Constitutional right of free association. And it was a negative in that it also violated the individual’s Constitutional right to free association.

It is profoundly stupid to claim that a private individual does not have the right to refuse to serve someone on the basis of race, sex, or any other criteria he happens to choose, given the right of free association. (Yes, I am aware that the Supreme Court has declared otherwise, that still doesn’t change the perfectly clear text of the Constitution.) Once you eliminate that right, you have transformed the individual into a legal serf with no control over his own services as there is no bright line on further directives from the government except the momentary whims of the responsible agents.

Libertarians are those few who understand that the problem with the brick is not the brick itself, but that it is another brick in the wall.

I should note that it is also profoundly stupid, in many cases, for business owners to exercise their right to free association on the basis of superficial factors. If I manufacture computers and refuse to sell to Asians, I am voluntarily abandoning a huge international market. If I own a bar in Detroit and refuse to serve blacks, I am not likely to remain in business very long. These things tend to sort themselves out over time courtesy of the inexorable market forces. On the other hand, in some cases, it is necessary for other businesses owners to exercise their free association right on a superficial basis if they are to remain in business. The successful fitness franchise, Curves, is built upon little more than anti-male discrimination whereas the traditional men’s social clubs are all but extinct because their customers were not interested in patronizing the government-dictated mixed-sex format.

Everyone discriminates/exercises their right to free association, the only question is where one happens to draw the line. The primary problem with permitting the government to draw the line for everyone is that the government is a dynamic entity. Those who cheer government involvement in telling business owners they cannot discriminate against homosexuals are unlikely to be happy about a government telling business owners they must discriminate against them. But once you have permitted the camel’s nose into the tent, you have very little control over which part of the tent it will eventually choose to defecate.

Best to keep the damn camel outside where it belongs!

Rand Paul hasn’t quite figured out the art of dealing with critics looking for gotchas:

Rand Paul is coming under attack for things he said about the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed race discrimination in privately owned restaurants and hotels.

First of all, I would absolutely voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which is an egregious violation against property rights as well as the Constitutional Right of Free Association. That being said, it is remarkably stupid for any politician, of any party, to comment upon what he would or would not have done had he been voting on a bill 46 years ago.

The correct response would have been to say: “Rachel, I have no more intention of speculating about how I would have voted on the Civil Rights Act of 1964 than I have of speculating how I would have voted on the Declaration of War against Spain of 1898 or the Proclamation of Imperial Divinity of 14 AD. I was not a Senator in either Washington DC or Rome at the time of those previous votes, and while hypothetical speculation is always interesting, it’s simply not relevant to a Kentucky Senate campaign in 2010.”

Of course, if she pressed further, I would answer the question as if she had asked about the Augustan godhood. “Well, Rachel, there’s no question that Octavian accomplished great things and reunified the empire after it was riven by a series of failed triumvirates and the subsequent civil wars, but I’m not sure it actually required the mind of a deity to outthink Marc Antony.” If your interlocutor is being silly, the idea is to respond in a way that highlights the inherent silliness of his approach, not be dragged down into the mire of the ridiculous.

Charles Krauthammer suggests that Kentucky Republicans chose for Rand Paul over the establishment candidate, Grayson, because they don’t like Obama:

Well, I think that‘s the most amazing phenomenon of this day. He came literally out of nowhere. And when you compare him — politically he’s not exactly like his father, Ron Paul, but Ron Paul when he ran for the presidency in ‘08 was a bit of a joke. He was way out there.

It tells you how much our country has changed in two years that that kind of libertarianism was considered kind of kooky at the time, and now his son who is less libertarian, he’s more sort of centrist, but still – he’s really challenging the Republican establishment . . .

This has been I think the amazing story of the last year. Look, the tea party, which is behind Paul, barely existed a year ago. . . .

This is I think a tribute to how radical is the Obama agenda — the spontaneous reaction to overreach, a trillion-dollar stimulus, a health-care takeover, and cap-and-trade, all of that at the beginning of a term. This is an amazing, spontaneous phenomenon, and we‘re going to see a lot of its effects tonight.

Right, it can’t possibly be because Bush and his establishment Republican White House rammed the bank bailout down the throats of an unwilling America. What a pathetic attempt at co-option. It’s not hard to see that the Republican leadership absolutely hates what is happening and is getting concerned that their plans to send another Dole/McCain sacrificial goat up against Obama in 2012 may be falling apart. Ron Paul wasn’t a joke in 2008, but Charles Krauthammer is most certainly a joke in 2010.

I’m not a big fan of politicians, to say the least. And even the best of them are usually capable of turning around and selling out both their principles and their constituencies. But, I have to admit, I kind of like what I’ve seen of this guy. Anyone who can summon up such instinctive and dismissive sarcasm in refusing to suffer journalistic fools will tend to strike a positive chord with me:

I’m not particularly concerned about presidential Supreme Court nominees since most appointees by both parties have zero respect for the Constitution as written. I find Obama’s present stealth nominee to be more amusing than anything, considering how she wishes to throw out literal centuries of tradition, jurisprudence, and free speech rights in favor of a nonexistent concept:

President Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court, Elena Kagan, argued certain forms of speech that promote “racial or gender inequality” could be “disappeared.” In her few academic papers, Kagan evidences strong beliefs for court intervention in speech, going so far as to posit First Amendment speech should be weighed against “societal costs.”

In her 1993 article “Regulation of Hate Speech and Pornography After R.A.V,” for the University of Chicago Law Review, Kagan writes:

“I take it as a given that we live in a society marred by racial and gender inequality, that certain forms of speech perpetuate and promote this inequality, and that the uncoerced disappearance of such speech would be cause for great elation.”

All societies are “marred” by racial and gender inequality because there has never been any equality of any kind in any society. And there never will be. It would be as reasonable, and as meaningful, to write that society is marred by the absence of flying pink unicorns and that the magical appearance of those wonderful creatures would be cause for great elation.

As a bonus, Kagan’s blathering also demolishes the idea that the Left is as vehement in its defense of the First Amendment as the Right is in its defense of the Second.

At least with Obama, you know perfectly well that he wants to turn USA into a quasi-socialist third-world hellhole for the benefit of Goldman Sachs and the rest of Wall Street:

Dobson pulls Grayson endorsement, backs Paul

Just a week after backing Trey Grayson in the Kentucky Senate race, evangelical leader Dr. James Dobson pulled the endorsement, backed Rand Paul and blamed GOP leaders for providing him misleading information about Paul’s record.

“Senior members of the GOP told me Dr. Paul is pro-choice and that he opposes many conservative perspectives, so I endorsed his opponent,” Dobson said. “But now I’ve received further information from OB/GYNs in Kentucky whom I trust, and from interviewing the candidate himself.”

Now, history demonstrates that the Republican Party leadership will happily choose a Democrat over a principled Republican every single time. And often, when a Party “moderate” like Crist or Specter is beaten in a primary, he will run as an independent in order to keep the conservative out. Intelligent observers of these practices may wish to ask themselves if this behavior is keeping with the idea that the party officials always want the party to win.