Rush Limbaugh Is Not My Leader

He is a leader of the libertarian*-conservative movement, but he's not the leader of it. It has no leader, nor does it need just one leader. It needs what it has: millions of leaders.

For the record I listen to Rush nearly every day, and mostly agree with him. Sometimes I disagree, and sometimes when I do so it turns out he was right all along. But he is not always right -- just usually so.

* I don't care if Libertarians or libertarians agree with that assessment. Rush is a free marketer, and despite self-labeling as a conservative and championing socially conservative positions, he is equally outspoken in favor of individual liberty.

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Limited Government and Social Conservatives

Over at Power and Control, M. Simon asks:

How do you enforce traditional values and at the same time promote limited government? Until Republicans resolve that question neither the traditional values people nor the limited government people are going to trust the party.

I reply:

The question presupposes that traditional values (a term I will use without scrutiny) need to be enforced, and that social conservatives by their nature want government to enforce their values.

However, most social conservatives want merely not to have laws which are opposed to those values, and possibly for the government to advocate traditional values, as opposed to advocating non-traditional ones.

That is what Prop 8 was all about, I thought. It's not that we care what other people do, really, it's that we don't want the government actively supporting, with legal protection, nontraditional values. That's very different from saying we don't want anyone doing nontraditional things.

It's true that on some level we don't want anyone doing nontraditional things, but since of course we recognize tolerance and pluralism and limited government as higher Enlightenment principles, it's best to keep government away from that area. [I add here that for "tolerance" to have any meaning as a Virtue, we must be forced to make some sacrifice to obtain a worthy goal. The sacrifice we make is to allow something we dislike in order to obtain permission for our own faulty behavior, for no one is perfect. Those who deny wanting to control the behavior 0f others thereby turn tolerance into a nonce.]

So the answer is that we should all oppose government action which would change social mores, rather than supporting government action enforcing them.

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The Trouble with the Base

Reading this Corner piece from the great Ramesh Ponnuru, two things struck me.

First, I noticed a trend: people are picking apart the Republican party and the conservative movement into constituent groups -- Married Anglo-Saxon Protestants, conservative Catholics, et al. Seeing a lack of physical diversity, they then prescribe as remedy the abandonment of foundational ideology.

The troubles with that line of thinking are legion, but the main thing about it is the continual confusion of the Republican Party with the conservative movement.

The Republican Party is a liberal organization. It was founded in the liberal furnace of Abolition, tempered by war with the truly conservative forces of Southern aristocracy, and had its new car smell become malodorous with the stench of Reconstruction. It was the party of the intellectual, of noblesse oblige, and of the black voters they freed from bondage.

Nowadays, the Republican Party exists as a vehicle to win elections, based primarily around the popularity of laissez faire economics. That social conservatives largely identify with it is because A) social conservatives are largely free-market types, as well, and B) they have nowhere else to go.

Modern Conservatism, forged by Buckley, Goldwater, and Reagan, is an alloy of the conservative notion of not fixing what is not broken with the ideas of Enlightenment and classical liberalism. It attempts to keep America fixed in its foundational form. It's a bit of a coincidence that conservative in America means classical liberal.

This unification of the Republican Party and conservatism is a holdover from Ronald Reagan, so forged by the power of his ideas and his steadfast support of them. People are naturally wont to label themselves, and to adopt the ideas of those peers and leaders with whom they largely agree. This, too, welds the Republican Party and conservatism.

But even with the difference between the Republican Party and the conservative movement, it must be recognized that the people who make up these groups are motivated by a set of beliefs. Almost all Republicans have as a core belief that people are better off when they can fend for themselves economically. Government, in this mindset, exists to defend us from each other and from outsiders. As Reagan said, government is not the solution, but the problem.

Another core Republican belief is that all men are created equal. We do not want discrimination, even if it is intended to remedy earlier discrimination in some other direction.

And it is these ideas which fundamentally bind us together, and these ideas we seek to further.

We cannot therefore reach out to other "groups" without recoiling in horror at the thought of dividing mankind up into groups. It stinks of the corpse of that war we fought in our youth, and it is not our way.

We believe our ideas are of universal appeal, and do not need to be packaged to pander to people based on their personal place in the nation's demography.

The second thing that struck me is that Ramesh Ponnuru is for some reason still reading Kathleen Parker.

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Would Jesus Want Rape Legalized?

Over at Classical Values, Simon asks:

A Question For Christian Social Conservatives

Did Jesus promote government solutions to moral problems?

The answer I gave there doesn't stress enough the obvious point that He did promote the Commandments, and not just the Big Ten. He just wanted us not to lean on the Law for approval.

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Carl Cameron Dresses up as Female Superhero

That's what I heard, anyway. The Fox News reporter who "broke" the story about the disloyalty of the McCain campaign staff may be a cross-dresser and female impersonator.

There is no hard evidence to this story, but without denials from those close to Cameron it is impossible to rule it as false.

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Lepers

No one in the McCain campaign who does not publicly denounce each and every vile charge against Sarah Palin should ever work for a Republican again. See the thread at Redstate, and the petition:

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Shorter Hitchens

Vote Obama - he's not as much of a Christian as Sarah Palin.
(w/t: Mark Levin)

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Presidents Govern As They Campaigned

For the most part, presidential candidates will govern the way they campaigned, or as they said they would while campaigning. It's true that many politicians are duplicitous liars who will say anything it takes to get elected. But they do so equally while campaigning and governing, and the President is too visible to change on too much.

There are exceptions, and most politicians break a campaign promise or two, or fail to follow through on their promises, once elected. But few do a dramatic turnaround.

Consider all of the Presidents in the multimedia era, since 1960.

John Kennedy campaigned as a social liberal who was hawkish enough on defense, and in his brief time in office that's how he presided.

I'm not actually that familiar with the Johnson campaign in '64, but I know he contrasted himself with the conservative Goldwater, and as Presidents go he was quite liberal.

Nixon, though he came to prominence as a commie-fighter, campaigned and governed from the middle, with realist foreign policy and activist economics.

Gerald Ford campaigned the way he governed, though we'll never know how he would have changed as an elected President.

Jimmy Carter governed as a witless smile, as we should have expected.

Ronald Reagan governed exactly as he campaigned, by confronting liberalism in all its ignominy.

President G H W Bush campaigned as a caretaker, promising "Read my lips: No New Taxes!". In office he caretook and compromised his way to a huge tax increase, which resulted in fertile economic ground for a Ross Perot candidacy and a Clinton victory.

Bill Clinton was the same guy on the campaign trail in 1992 that we saw in office, and indeed that we see on the campaign trail in 2008.

George W Bush campaigned on "compassionate conservatism", promising education reform and free prescription drugs. While 9/11 took him away from his isolationist foreign policy leanings, he was the same guy all along. And I must note here: the President campaigned as a uniter, who would reach across party lines and not be divisive. That's how he was in office, but he got steamrolled by the unhinged left.

Which brings us to John McCain and Barack Obama.

McCain is campaigning as a centrist. He is a social and fiscal conservative and a war hawk, but with a natural tendency toward bipartisan cooperation. Democrats paint him as Bush's Third Term without noting that habit of compromise, because they also ignore Bush's similar trait. And yet, to the public who know of McCain, it is as a centrist maverick.

McCain will not turn from his bipartisan leanings. As President he will govern from the middle.

Barack Obama has a tendency to make absurd statements and then have to backtrack from them, or to make reasonable, centrist ones and be forced to nuance them into far left ones. He is constantly Changing his wide stances, shifting positions, and Hoping no one notices. He says that to heal the national division on race, all that's needed is to vote for him. As President he would argue for his proposals in the same way, implying or explicitly saying that those who are against him are against racial reconciliation. And he would lose a member of his staff every time he made a gaffe, which during the campaign has occurred several times a week.

Because people don't change that much.

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Hillary and Barack Keep Digging

I didn't watch the Clinton/Obama debate last night on ABC. I didn't want to put myself through two hours of tee-ball questions about things that don't matter to me, like who can promise to support the troops with the best form of socialized medicine.

Luckily for me and for you, good reader, others were kind enough to watch and even give a running commentary.

Josh at the Talking Points Memo was unhappy with it:

What I didn't like about the debate, though, was the debate itself. Not only were most of the questions on partisan gotchas and frivolous points. But more importantly the questions upon which the candidates were pressed the most were ones that presumed the correctness of Republican agenda items, sometimes explicitly so -- on taxes, capital gains taxes, gun rights, Iraq, etc.

Josh, that's because those are the questions which are most difficult for the candidates to answer, and most likely to take them off autopilot.

Redstate commenters saw the debate as a window into the character of the two Democrats running for President.

I hope Hillary Clinton stays in the race until the Democratic Party convention in Denver. Though not all of the facts that have come to light about Obama are due to her digging, it's clear that when she puts him in a hole, Obama doesn't know that he can't dig his way out.

When asked about his relationship with former Weather Underground domestic terrorist William Ayers:

Obama after complaining about "manufactured issues," says, "this is what I'm talking about... He lives in my neighborhood, he's a professor of English. Not someone I've accepted endorsement of, it's not someone I exchange ideas with on a regular basis... (!) He did detestable acts when I was eight years old."

I'm also friendly with Tom Coburn, a man who has suggested the death penalty may be appropriate for those who perform abortions.

He's not accepted Ayers' endorsement for President, but he most certainly got down on his hands and knees and accepted it in order to gain entree into Chicago politics.

And what does, "on a regular basis" mean? Obama and Ayers serve on a board together. It seems likely that Obama doesn't regularly attend the board meetings, so perhaps they only get a chance to exchange ideas when he does attend.

But the final quoted sentence above may be a glimmer of Equivalency shining through the Wright- and Harvard-induced fog. Coburn believes children have the same human rights to 'Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness" a minute before birth as they do a minute after. Abortion he therefore considers to be murder, an appropriate punishment for which is the death penalty. But Coburn isn't bombing abortion clinics. In fact, no one has done that for over ten years, and Coburn never has.

But Obama, steeped in the liberal doctrine of means justified by goals, equates Coburn's work within the system with Ayers' attempts to destroy it.

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Obama Missing the Point

Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) is running for President of the United States.

Transcript of Obama’s Remarks at San Francisco Fundraiser Sunday

[...]

But — so the questions you’re most likely to get about me, ‘Well, what is this guy going to do for me? What is the concrete thing?’ What they wanna hear is so we’ll give you talking points about what we’re proposing — to close tax loopholes, uh you know uh roll back the tax cuts for the top 1%, Obama’s gonna give tax breaks to uh middle-class folks and we’re gonna provide healthcare for every American.

No, we don't care what you're going to do for us. We don't want you to do anything for us, because what you want to do for us is going to end up being done to us.

But the truth is, is that, our challenge is to get people persuaded that we can make progress when there’s not evidence of that in their daily lives. You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

[The following was cross-posted at Redstate]

Dear Senator Obama:

The government only has a small number of jobs. Bringing employment opportunities to rural Pennsylvania, or Illinois, or California, is not among them.

The government's first job is to defend the people from foreign enemies, such as the human rights violations of Chinese bankers and Middle Eastern terrorists.

Defending the people individually from each other also is the government's job. And too, we let the government take care of parks, roads and bridges and other such common areas. That's about it.

But the poisonous witch's brew of notions that somehow the people of small town flyover country are helpless without you, and that we don't have jobs, and that the Bush and Clinton Administrations let us fall through some imaginary cracks, and that all of that makes us bitter enough to hate anyone not like us -- that is just the wrong way to look at things.

(More...)

It is despicable and un-American, and I use that term advisedly, to encourage people to be bitter at the government for not doing enough to help them. The American way is self-reliance, not the desperate bleating of a people living only for the next chance to suckle at the government's teat.

In your class warfare, you foolishly suggest that our alleged bitterness over a lack of jobs causes us to cling to guns and religion. You even said it makes us dislike people who are not like us. Do you not care whom you insult, nor with what hypocrisy?

Guess what, Senator: we know that the jobs aren't as plentiful nor as lucrative in our little towns and small cities as they are in the metropoli of your dreams for us. We read the papers. But we also know that where we live, we don't have to lock our doors at night. We can leave our cars unlocked at the grocery store, or in our driveways. And we even have driveways of our own, rather than having to cram ourselves into mass transit. Our schools don't have metal detectors, because they don't need them.

You have the cart before the horse. We choose to live out here, because we can. It isn't any supposed bitterness over lack of government jobs which causes us to cling to guns and religion. We live here in part so we can go hunting and fishing now and then.

And we like our little churches. They don't tell us that the government created AIDS, either. It's not their job.

We choose to live out here because we like our neighbors, for even the nosiest don't tell us how to live. It's not their job.

And Senator Obama, it's clear from all that we have seen, that the Presidency is not, and must never be, your job.

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Why McCain? Why Obama?

It appears that the two major American political parties have chosen their candidates for President for the same reason.

The Republicans appear to have settled on John McCain as being a good compromise for their coalition of religious conservatives, war hawks, and free marketeers. The Democrats appear to have chosen Barack Obama as a good compromise for their coalition of religious liberals, doves, and socialists.

But I'm not being fair to either party with those descriptions. The Republicans are split between the country club elite and the church supper volunteers. The country clubbers want business stability, while the church supper volunteers want to see America stay true to its Christian heritage. Both sides of that split realize that they share a common enemy in Islamic terrorism, and that John McCain, American patriot, is the best man to deal with that threat.

The Democrats, on the other hand, are divided between the rich/intellectual posers on one side and the poor/uneducated mob at the other.

The Democrats for the last 100 years have been in love with socialism, but that is only a symptom of their true problem, which is an inability to face reality. They are in love with the fantasy that human goodness is all we need to have peace, love, and prosperity for all. Well, human goodness empowered by the State. But the leadership of the party know, in their elitist little hearts, that their socialist, pacifist pandering won't get them anywhere with those who have been freed from the clutches of the government-run education system.

That is why the Dems have this superdelegate business. They know that if they let their base choose, they'll always get an Obama, which would be a disaster for the country. It's patriotism, in other words.

So the answer for why McCain and why Obama is the same.

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In Which a Banana is Exposed

What an amazing feat of mental acrobatics.

Ali Eteraz knows that something is wrong in politics, and his answer is to throw out all religion under the guise of throwing out jihad:

When I say “religious supremacism” I mean the ideology of theocracy, which in the Muslim milieu agitates for the domination of political Islam, ...

(ok so far)

... and in the Western milieu agitates for infiltration of the government by religious (usually Evangelical) zelaots who then legislate on the bases of their religious belief.

Spellcheck aside, the only place that superficially fits his opiated description is the United States, albeit with a President who has never once, in his entire career as an executive, legislated.

But to be as charitable as possible, I will assume that what he meant to say was that he can't oppose religious extremism that wishes to destroy his civilization without opposing all religious involvement in government. This, despite the historical and prima facie evidence that religion is a civilizing influence, serving to keep men from tearing at each other's throats. Religious fervor has helped, along with the respect for science, logic and the rule of law, to create and sustain the very civilization he is so quick to abandon.

It is exceedingly rare for a Christian, Hindu, Jew, Buddhist, or even a Gaian to use force to advance his religion.

By applying the label "theocracy", he lumps jihad and social conservatism together. It's the same old brown moral equivalency banana, wrapped in shiny yellow paper.

He goes further and exploits without development a false choice, as Simon outlines in his post, that he must either oppose or support religious and ideological exclusion in unison. As far as I know, neither Republicans nor Democrats are planning to decapitate their opponents following a feisty episode of Meet the Press, or no matter what happens in a given election. The French may see things differently, but in the country with Evangelicals pushing their narrow religious agenda, political violence seems not to be part of the strategy.

I find it entertaining that the explanation he gives for opposing the institution of partisanship includes a justification by status quo of institutions generally.

That might confuse, except when seen in light of his unstated premise: all cultures and philosophies are equally valid. If one distrusts the adequacy of his own philosophy so much as to regard it the equal of those who openly advocate genocide for those who fail to fully agree, I see no reason to grant him even the smallest concession of insight. Perhaps I am wrong in this, for he also appears to believe quite strongly in the moral superiority of his position.

To sum up: Ali, reject the choices you have for political parties, if you wish. While almost any explanation would suffice for such a step, the one you gave did not.

w/t: Simon at Classical Values

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Libertarian SoCons

Over at Classical Values, Eric had a fine post (as if he ever has anything else) before the November elections about Bill Clinton's characterization of the Republican Party as enthralled by the demonized Social Conservatives.

I think there are a lot of libertarian-leaning social conservatives, as odd as it sounds. We understand the clean-room simplicity of libertarian principles, but also that the tidiness falls down in the face of modern reality. There are also a number of issues, namely abortion and drugs, on which social conservatives largely disagree with libertarians.

Americans, by and large, like to think of themselves a favoring small government, personal liberty, and the rest. But the devil in the details here is defining "small" and "liberty". Given the question, e.g., "Should people be able to control what goes into their own bodies?", most people will say yes. But ask them about PCP or Vallium, and they'll start in about endangering others or the protecting the li'l chil'rens. Oh, and don't touch my farm subsidy.

The issue of abortion falls squarely on the question of when life begins, or rather, when the 'fetus', a collection of cells inside a woman, becomes a 'baby', a human being entitled to legal protection. I believe that moment is the instant of conception, but I understand some people disagree. When pro-choice libertarians can see the unborn child as a person whose rights need to be defended, they become pro-life libertarians.

The War on Drugs baffles me. Why the government should care who ingests or injects what, I don't understand. I think I'll cover what people do when they're on drugs, addiction, and other issuesf an upcoming post (unless the black helicopters prevent it).

A big problem for the Libertarians is Islamic terrorism. The Libertarian philosophy, being a creature of Western lineage, doesn't have room for jihad. Libertarianism can't abide by efforts to root out terrorism with privacy-crowding methods, nor with taking the fight to the terrorist's home turf. Libertarians are left with the plan of sitting around waiting for some jihadist loser to blow himself up.

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