So who's *truly* committed to free speech?

"[I]n perception and rhetoric the Left has certainly lost or even surrendered the high ground. Conservatives have successfully seized the mantle of free speech advocacy in many public debates. But whether that shift reflects a deeper, principled commitment to the ideal remains to be seen ... "

~ David Harvey from his post 'Speak the Speech, I pray you'

No, Mr Hooton. Let's *not* steal years off Young NZers' lives.

The odious Matthew Hooton asks, "If New Zealand really plans to spend billions more on defence, why not invest it in universal military training ...?"

Here's a simple reason why: Because neither nation nor government owns the lives of the young New Zealanders who would be conscripted for universal military training — and whose lives and futures would be put on the block to please and appease the likes of Matthew bloody Hooton.  And however much he tries to smuggle in the idea behind the idea of it as some kind of "Outward Bound" kind of health-giving outdoor programme, in the end what he's talking about it is lining up youngsters to be disposed of by the state.

To "invest" in universal military training is quite simply a vicious abrogation of rights. As Ayn Rand explains:

It negates man's fundamental right—the right to life—and establishes the fundamental principle of statism: that a man's life belongs to the state, and the state may claim it by compelling him to sacrifice it in battle. Once that principle is accepted, the rest is only a matter of time.
    If the state may force a man to risk death or hideous maiming and crippling, in a war declared at the state's discretion, for a cause he may neither approve of nor even understand, if his consent is not required to send him into unspeakable martyrdom—then, in principle, all rights are negated in that state, and its government is not man's protector any longer. What else is there left to protect? ...

But of course, a conservative like Hooton has no interest in an individual's rights.

But nor does he have any genuine interest in young people's lives.

The years from about fifteen to twenty-five are the crucial formative years of a man's life. This is the time when he confirms his impressions of the world, of other men, of the society in which he is to live, when he acquires conscious convictions, defines his moral values, chooses his goals, and plans his future, developing or renouncing ambition. These are the years that mark him for life. And it is these years that an allegedly humanitarian society [would] force him to spend in terror—the terror of knowing that he can plan nothing and count on nothing, that any road he takes can be blocked at any moment by an unpredictable power, that, barring his vision of the future, there stands the gray shape of the barracks, and, perhaps, beyond it, death for some unknown reason in some alien jungle.

What makes Hooton's proposal to steal vital years off young New Zealanders' lives even more repugnant is that he poses his "modest proposal" in the context of fiscal rectitude—an invitation to "think creatively" about how ministers "might spend the extra $10b a year to keep Australia and Nato happy."

What a vile piece of shit.

"...the threat today’s Republican party poses to so much of what is unique and great about America."

"Vice President ... JD Vance ... [and his advisers] belong to an elite coterie of illiberal Christian conservatives animated by an attitude reminiscent of what historian Fritz Stern once called the 'politics of cultural despair' ... [harking back to] a movement of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century intellectuals who shared a loathing of liberalism rooted in personal frustration. 'They attacked liberalism because it seemed to them the principal premise of modern society; everything they dreaded seemed to spring from it. . . . their one desire was for a new faith, a new community of believers, a world with fixed standards and no doubts.' ...

"The worldview many of Vance’s muses hold up as the alternative to liberalism is self-avowedly Roman Catholic. Catholicism offers anti-liberal intellectuals a way to anchor their dislike of the modern world in something bigger, a tradition that promises timeless truths and solutions to every social problem. Yet their Catholicism is much smaller than the tradition it rests on because of the way they have politicised it: Their use of the Catholic tradition is motivated by their animus against liberalism and therefore selective.

"One sees this in the barely disguised admiration some of them have for twentieth-century Catholic 'corporatism,' what others call clerical fascism. ...

"The high-water mark for Catholic corporatism came in the wake of the 1931 papal encyclical Quadragesimo anno. Speaking to the social question, Pope Pius XI explicitly embraced the idea of 'corporations' [a system drawing inspiration from mediaeval guilds in which the whole of society would be organised into distinct corporations arising from common interests]. 

"In a controversial set of paragraphs, he even appeared to approve of Italian fascism. Years later, the primary ghostwriter of Quadragesimo anno insisted the encyclical had been misread. Be that as it may, the encyclical was widely understood in its time as endorsing clerical fascism. In the words of one historian, 'Virtually every Fascist revolution of the next decade was to fly the flag of Quadragesimo anno and its corporative State.' ...

"[C]orporatist regimes were not merely experimenting with policy proposals that others might copy; they were engaged in a radical project of social transformation. The corporatist organisation they envisioned aimed to embrace every aspect of society and define life’s meaning. “In the corporation,” Messner wrote, “the individual discovers himself placed in a community whose reality he experiences, which embraces him in the day to day life of his vocation, but which also shapes the entire surroundings of his life, because it determines an area of life and cultural values of a special kind.”

"One needn’t engage in endless debates about the nature of fascism to recognise [this] as a political vision that treated individuals as parts of a societal collective, assigned the state responsibility for directing the pursuit of happiness, and had the audacity to equate its repressive regulation of people’s lives with human flourishing. That such a vision is deeply inimical to America’s Constitutional tradition should be self-evident to every honest legal scholar.

"Which brings us back to JD Vance. One cannot tell the extent to which he is an unprincipled opportunist, a true believer, or just a very online guy. What we do know, however, is that he moves among a small circle of intellectuals who toy with dangerous, deeply un-American ideas. Vance’s remark that the United States is currently in a 'late republican period' in need of a Caesar may be an indication that he’s studied De bello civili—but it’s much more likely he’s reading figures from the conservative revolution like Carl Schmitt and Oswald Spengler who talked about how Germany needed a Caesar to deliver it from parliamentary democracy. Or, likelier still, he’s reading others who have imbibed their ideas.

"That ideas like these, and the people who promote them, have influence with a man who might be placed a heartbeat from the presidency is one more piece of evidence, if more were needed, of the threat today’s Republican party poses to so much of what is unique and great about America."

~ H.David Baer from his article 'The Influence of Austrofascism on JD Vance'

DOGE represents both a triumph of cronyism & a scaling back of conservative ambitions

"Ostensibly, the goal of DOGE [the US Department of so-called Government Efficiency] is to cut government spending. ... 

    "Anyone who knows anything about the budget understands that the goals that DOGE has set are basically impossible to reach, and practically nothing it does will significantly impact the debt. As The Economist points out, ... 'no matter how aggressive DOGE is, its actions are focused on barely more than a tenth of the overall federal budget' ..."[E]ven if you let go of 1 in 4 government workers, you’d only reduce federal spending by 1%. You’d need to cut spending by about a quarter to balance the budget, so firing that many people would get you about 4% of the way there....
    "But even if DOGE has limited effects on the budget, that doesn’t mean that it won’t have a major policy impact ... the better way to understand DOGE is as a tool to reshape the federal workforce and its activities in accordance with the wishes of Elon Musk and Donald Trump. ...

"We can make an analogy here to the way that ... the Red Army used political commissars who reported directly to the Communist Party to maintain loyalty to Bolshevik ideology, a system that continued after the establishment of the Soviet Union. ...
    "DOGE ... maintains direct lines to Trump and Musk, ensuring that departments do not thwart the will of the president and his agenda. Members of the DOGE team have reportedly been conducting short interviews with employees asking them to justify their jobs. This is ostensibly to help the government work better, but in practice this control over personnel selects for loyalty to the administration and a willingness to do its bidding. ...
    "Getting past a screening process focused on 'government efficiency', as defined by Trump-Musk ... tells you a lot about a person’s politics.

"We can think of the administration right now as a coalition of three forces: Trump himself, Musk, and the entirety of the conservative movement. Each has its own reasons for being enthusiastic about the DOGE project. Trump would like to be able to do whatever he wants, and not face legal consequences ... Musk in turn has all kinds of business interests before the government, as shown in the figure below. If you’re a federal bureaucrat who makes a decision that goes against the interest of Tesla or SpaceX, good luck keeping your job.

"Conservatives, and probably Musk himself, also want to cut spending. However, that is a fundamentally difficult if not impossible thing to do through the executive branch alone ... DOGE [therefore represents] a scaling back of conservative ambitions. ... Republicans used to dream about cutting Social Security and Medicare and changing the budgetary realities of the federal government at a macro level. Now, they celebrate firing a DEI consultant, which will have no impact on the size of government or our fiscal outlook."

~ Richard Hanania from his post 'DOGE as a Control Mechanism of the Trump-Musk Co-Presidency'

"... a broader, decade-long 'crank realignment' in American politics."

"Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s transition from semi-prominent Democrat to third party spoiler to Donald Trump endorser is emblematic of a broader, decade-long 'crank realignment' in American politics.…
    "The partisan shifts of both Trump and RFK Jr. are part of a long term cycle in which .... a generic suspicion of institutions and the people who run them has come to be associated with conservative politics. Conservative cranks are not even close to new (the John Birch Society, for example), but they’ve become increasingly prominent ...

    "If I’m agitating for a 'liberal' realignment of American politics, it’s partly because I live in terror that the realignment will come anyway—but it will be illiberal….
    "Let’s talk about what kind of implicit idea would cause someone to combine a traditionally conservative proposal (keeping out immigrants) with a traditionally leftist proposal (government price controls)—and do so in a way that so overwhelms every other consideration, including democracy itself, that it causes them to flip their vote.
    "The implicit premise is that government exists to hand out favours to 'people like me'—and to kick everybody else in the teeth, especially poor immigrants coming here in search of a better life. That particular policy combination indicates a tribal mindset….
    "At any rate, this is precisely the political realignment I’m trying to avoid, one that brings together the worst of both worlds: bloated Big Government welfare-statism and paranoid, xenophobic nationalism."

~ Matt Yglesias from his post 'The crank realignment is bad for everyone.'  Hat tip Robert Tracinski who comments, "There’s still a good chance that this is exactly what we’re going to get."

 

Young men are resenting being resented

 

"Young men seem to be motivated, not so much by a specific issue, but by their resentment of the current culture. If true, the upcoming elections will express the 'Breitbart Doctrine,' named after the late conservative journalist Andrew Breitbart. This doctrine states 'politics is downstream from culture.' To change the politics of a society, you must change its culture because politics originates from culture which, in turn, originates from the values of individuals who constitute society. Simply stated, if a person’s values and culture are transformed, his politics transforms accordingly.
    "The culture surrounding young men is dramatically different from that of their fathers, and the change has not been kind. The Brookings Institute notes, 'Young men increasingly feel as though they have been experiencing discrimination.' For decades now, prominent voices of political correctness, which is now called social justice, have blamed men as a gender class for a long slate of social wrongs. And, for young men, the past few decades constitute all of their lives. This means they have heard about their collective guilt since birth, and it would be natural for them to feel resentful for being castigated as a class for social wrongs. Such young men are reportedly turning to Donald Trump as a symbol of more traditional and proud manhood. ... [!]"

   "Women need healthy and well-adjusted men to be life partners, loving family members, friends, good neighbours, co-workers, and the peaceful strangers you pass on the street. The last thing women need is to live beside a generation of resentful men who act on their resentment, especially if the feeling is justified."

~ Wendy McElroy from her post 'Ignore The New Power Demographic at Your Own Risk: Young Male Voters'

"Libertarianism differs fundamentally from both left liberal and conservative perspectives."

"Popular opinion views [left] liberalism and conservatism as radically different perspectives about the proper size and scope of government. ... Yet [left] liberal and conservative perspectives are the same in one key respect: both advocate using government to impose particular values.
    "Conservatives want to ban drugs, liberals guns. Conservatives advocate banning abortions, [left] liberals subsidising them. Conservatives support subsidies for home schooling and religious schools, [left[ liberals the same for low-income housing and 'clean' energy. ... Thus the goals of favoured policies differ, but not the belief that government should promote specific views ... —all of which involve government interference with private decisions ...
    "Libertarianism differs fundamentally from both [left] liberal and conservative perspectives. ... consistently ask[ing] whether government intervention does more harm than good. And it applies this skepticism regardless of the associated 'values.'
    "Thus libertarianism argues against both drug prohibition and gun control; against government protection of unions, but not against unions per se; against government-imposed affirmative action, but not against privately adopted affirmative action; against any government-imposed content moderation of social media, but not against private moderation policies; against all trade and immigration restrictions; against government restrictions on school choice; against government-mandated licenses; and against the government defining marriage.
    "Perhaps libertarians are wrong about the merits of some government interventions. But applying a consistent lens across policies helps understand the inconsistencies of both [left] liberal and conservative perspectives."

~ Jeffrey Miron from his post 'Libertarian Consistency'

"How is it conservative to back Putin’s Russia?"

"Donald Trump’s selection of Ohio Senator J D Vance as his running mate on Monday ... was a death knell marking the end of the American conservative movement as it was constituted from the mid-20th century until now.
    "The movement’s birth date is typically traced back to 1955 ...  Ronald Reagan would go on to restate the [founding] principles by observing that the [modern] Republican Party ... was held up by a 'three-legged stool' of social and fiscal conservatism, as well as anti-communism. After the fall of the Soviet Union, this third tenet was unofficially amended to emphasise the importance of American leadership on the world stage.
    "Though the GOP has always represented these values to varying degrees, Trump was the first to seriously stress-test the stool during the 2016 Republican presidential primaries. By promising to implement tariffs, leave entitlements untouched, and seek a rapprochement with Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Trump threatened to kick at least two of the movement’s legs out from under it. ...
    "By making Vance his heir apparent, Trump has not only set the tone for what his second term would look like, but what the GOP will stand for in the years that follow.
    "Vance is not merely an advocate of a more restrained foreign policy, he’s a demagogue plagued by a single minded obsession: rewarding Putin for waging a bloody, unprovoked war on Ukraine. ...  

    "He may claim to put America first, but Vance can be better understood as a member of the 'Blame America First' crowd that conservatives once rightly deplored.
    "His economic outlook is similarly indistinguishable from the Right’s ancestral opponents. ... resort[ing] to the simpleminded, envy-laden demagoguery of the Left since entering the political fray.
    "He supports minimum wage hikes and indiscriminate protectionism. He opposes Right-to-Work laws and tax cuts. ... and has suggested that Senators Bernie Sanders (a socialist) and Elizabeth Warren (a quasi-socialist) were his favorite candidates among the 2020 Democratic presidential field.
    "Moreover, Vance’s prioritisation of his own personal ambition over all else throws even his claim to being a committed social conservative into doubt. ... This should come as no surprise. Vance now claims to be proud to be the running mate of a man he once compared to Hitler and agreed was a serial sex predator. ...

"Reagan, and their contemporaries ... fought and won an uphill battle to bring much-needed contrast, not to mention wisdom, back to American politics.
    "By contrast, Vance’s rapid rise has been characterised by his sycophancy toward a single charismatic figure whose coat-tails he hoped to ride.
    "With Trump and Vance cemented as American 'conservatism’s' frontmen for the foreseeable future, it is no exaggeration to say that the values – and the spirit – of the conservative movement shaped by  Reagan [et a] are functionally dormant, if not dead."

~ Isaac Schorr from his column 'JD Vance as Trump’s running mate is the death knell of American conservatism'

"...they lost the debate on economic issues within the economics profession. So they moved over into the English department and other humanities..."

"One of the great untold stories of the 20th century political left is how they lost the debate on economic issues within the economics profession. So they moved over into the English department (and other humanities) instead, and resumed teaching discredited economics there.
    "Note that this also explains why many of the humanities adopt an explicitly conspiracist epistemology when they talk about economics as a discipline. See also the neoliberalism studies' literature ... and similar.
    "Corollary: this also applies to the protectionists of the NatCon right ... They lost the economic debate on trade over a century ago ... "

~ Phil Magness

"Republicans today stand for nothing, and on the rare occasions that they do stand for something, that something is woeful."

"The Republican Party has a problem that runs deeper than Trump (though it may have gotten much worse under Trump). It's this: Republicans today stand for nothing, and on the rare occasions that they do stand for something, that something is woeful. From protectionism to vile anti-immigration rhetoric, from government-engineered paid leave to the extended child tax credit, and from threatening to punish big tech and to impose industrial policy, with a contingent shouting 'free-markets are actually bad,' the party is in disarray intellectually -- a fact that plausibly contributes to its current disarray politically."

~ Veronique de Rugy, from her post 'Who Will Carry the Classical Liberals'

The modern Welfare State wasn't created by Michael Joseph Savage, as his fan-boys and -girls seem to believe, but by the warmongering big-state general who created the united Germany that set the world on the path to war -- yet putting his countrymen on the dole was perhaps the most unforgivable legacy of Otto von Bismarck, says Lawrence Reed in this guest post, and it’s high time we learn from it.

Otto von Bismarck: The Man Behind the Modern Welfare State

by Lawrence Reed

The late political humorist Tom Anderson once said that the Welfare State was so named because the politicians get well and the rest of us pay the fare. Economist Walter Williams claimed it was like “feeding the sparrows through the horses.” Someone else defined it as “a lot of people standing in a circle and each one has his hands in the next guy’s pocket.” Personally, I think it’s a scenario in which politicians offer security but ultimately deliver bankruptcy—financial and moral.

Perhaps the most eloquent critiques of the welfare state come from economist Thomas Sowell. In various places, he has described it thusly:

The welfare state is the oldest con game in the world. First you take people’s money away quietly, and then you give some of it back to them flamboyantly... It has always been judged by its good intentions, rather than its bad results... It shields people from the consequences of their own mistakes, allowing irresponsibility to continue and to flourish among ever wider circles of people... It is not really about the welfare of the masses. It is about the egos of the elites.

That’s a lot of wisdom packed into a few pithy sentences, but the Welfare State’s track record has always been a far cry from its promises. It begins modestly, then the bills pile up. To pay for it, deficits, taxes, debt and inflation rise. Robbing Peter to pay Paul, demagogues wage class warfare and buy votes with it. The long-term fiscal health of a country is sacrificed for short-term gratification. Incentives get skewed away from self-reliance and personal initiative and toward dependence on concentrated power. People become less charitable, figuring the State will take care of things they used to handle themselves at half the cost. Sooner or later, if the Welfare State isn’t reversed, the takers outnumber the makers.

And why should we expect anything but bad outcomes from a fundamentally immoral practice rooted in legalised plunder? Not even the animal world is dumb enough to embrace it, as I wrote in this article about lessons that animals can teach us.

So where did the idea come from that the State should be the national nanny, that dependence upon politicians should displace personal responsibility and private institutions?

Welfare States are not new to history. The ancient Roman Republic degenerated into one before it lost, not by coincidence, both its liberties and its life.

One man is known as the Father of the modern versions. That would be Otto von Bismarck (1815-1898), chancellor of Germany for nearly 20 years.

Through no fault of his own, Bismarck was born on April Fools’ Day. For pranking an entire country into a Welfare State, however, he is culpable. Did he do it because he loved people and just wanted to help them out? That’s the naïve and non-historical perspective. The truth is that he was far more cynical and self-serving than that, delivering to his new country "statism in the guise of reform."*

The Iron Chancellor, as he was known in his day, united 25 separate principalities, kingdoms and city-states into a federated German Empire in 1871, mostly by war against Prussia's neighbours and Germany's many small principalities. Reasoning that "a Franco-German war must take place before the construction of a united Germany could be realised," he engineered the conflict that nearly destroyed Paris, broke France for a generation, and killed a quarter-million souls. 

With Wilhelm I in place as the new Empire’s sovereign, Bismarck moved in subsequent years to consolidate his own power over German politics and society. Within a decade, he saw the socialists as a major and growing threat. Like many conservatives before and since, he decided the best way to stymie them was to bribe the electorate before the socialists did. 

Ismael Hernandez of the Freedom & Virtue Institute notes that Bismarck’s welfarism was sold as an antidote to insecurity:

The insecurity that drives individuals into action was seen as a hindrance and a threat to human dignity. Insecurity creates a sense of helplessness and entitlement was proposed as the solution… Bismarck affirmed that the state should offer the poor “a helping hand in distress…. Not as alms, but as a right.” He called his system Staatssozialismus, or “state socialism.”

It wasn't just political calculation. "Whoever has pensions for his old age," he boasted, "is far more easier to handle than one who has no such prospect. Look at the difference between a private servant in the chancellery or at court; the latter will put up with much more, because he has a pension to look forward to."

Thus was 'insecurity' exchanged for heel-clicking obedience, and 'compassion' for state dependence.

He was methodical. In 1883, after a programme of increasing protectionism, nationalism and anti-Catholicism, Bismarck secured passage of national health insurance. He followed up a year later with accident insurance, then a few years later with disability insurance. 

In social terms, he aimed to preserve the social order and the Hohenzollern State. In political terms, he was a practitioner of the school of long-term thinking called “feed the alligator so he’ll eat you last.”  The socialists came to power anyway, not long after Bismarck died in 1898 at the age of 83, and the national socialists only a few decades later. 

It was a relatively modest start for a welfare state but, to use another animal analogy, the camel’s nose was now under the tent. Bismarck’s initiatives imparted a confidence to 20th Century Welfare Statists that they too could do so much more (and wreak so much more havoc in the process).

Bismarck had earned his nickname, the Iron Chancellor, for good reason. He demanded that others bend to his will. “He raged and hated until he nearly killed himself” and “lost his temper at the slightest provocation,” writes Steinberg. To Bismarck, lying was a compulsive obsession. Exercising power was his raison d’etre. If Emperor Wilhelm II hadn’t insisted on his resignation in 1890, Bismarck would have bullied the German people until his dying day.

In his masterful biography, Bismarck: A Life, historian Jonathan Steinberg offers this assessment of the Iron Chancellor’s legacy:

When Bismarck left office, the servility of the German people had been cemented, an obedience from which they never recovered.

What a terrible endowment for future generations!

How refreshing and noble it would be for a man in office to leave his people freer and more independent than they were when he first took the job! Bismarck did not do that. And not even the “free stuff” his welfare state provided was ever truly free. It was, in the end, very expensive. 

Insecurity proved ultimately to be the least of the German people’s worries.

Putting his countrymen on the dole was an unforgivable legacy of Otto von Bismarck, and it’s high time we learn from it.

* The description comes from Arthur Ekirch's excellent 1955 book The Decline of American Liberalism.

For Additional Information, See:

• No Such Thing as a Free-Market Welfare State by Kai Weiss
• 12 Reasons to Oppose the Welfare State by Bryan Caplan
• John B. Calhoun’s Mouse Utopia and the Welfare State by Lawrence W. Reed
• The European Welfare State is Small Compared to What Bernie Sanders Proposes by Ryan Bourne

Lawrence W. Reed is the President Emeritus of the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), Humphreys Family Senior Fellow, and Ron Manners Global Ambassador for Liberty, having served for nearly 11 years as FEE’s president (2008-2019). He is author of the 2020 book, Was Jesus a Socialist? as well as Real Heroes: Incredible True Stories of Courage, Character, and Conviction and Excuse Me, Professor: Challenging the Myths of Progressivism. Follow him on LinkedIn and Like his public figure page on Facebook. His website is www.lawrencewreed.com.

An earlier version of this essay appeared at El American.org, and at FEE.

 

"...the destruction of the Conservative Party we know has to happen."

"[O]ne hundred years on from 1922 [when the 'modern' UK Conservative party was born] the Tories as currently understood are doomed. They need to crash and burn and indeed they will. The Labour government that will follow is going to be economically and culturally even worse (which given how crap the Tories have been will a remarkable achievement, but I believe Labour is absolutely up to the task). But the destruction of the Conservative Party we know has to happen. We have just arrived at the end point of where 30 years of “lesser evil” voting has led us."
          ~ Perry de Havilland, from his [already aged] post 'The Tory Party: Controlled flight into terrain'

The "anti-imperialism of idiots" + "the Americocentric delusion" = Putin?!

"The anti-anti-Putin Left are most usefully described as 'campists,' whose geopolitical philosophy is summed up by the phrase 'the enemy of my enemy is my friend.' America is the font of all evil, therefore its opponents must have something going for them.
    "The British-Syrian writer Leila Al-Shami calls this 'the anti-imperialism of idiots': 'This pro-fascist Left seems blind to any form of imperialism that is non-western in origin. It combines identity politics with egoism. Everything that happens is viewed through the prism of what it means for westerners....' Russia’s unprovoked war of imperialist aggression is as inconvenient to campists as China’s oppression of the Uyghurs. Either they must find a way to blame America after all or they must downplay the issue. Left-wing support for corrupt authoritarians such as Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro and Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega is disappointing enough, but sympathy with Vladimir Putin, Bashir al-Assad and Xi Jinping is symptomatic of a morally broken worldview."

~ Dorian Lynskey, from his column 'Why the Left is split over Ukraine.'  Hat tip Perry de Havilland, who observes sagely that a similar criticism also applies to certain libertarians/conservatives in the grip of the Americocentric delusion...

"...how counterproductive to define one's beliefs in opposition to a hated other group"

"For the record: Both 'sides' of the media divide offer varying amounts of actual information laced with propaganda. Anyone who accepts any of it uncritically -- or reflexively rejects any of it -- is not really getting news.
    "Consider how many conservatives out there have joined the hippies in becoming anti-vaxxers or buy into stupid arguments against masks.
    "Often, there is little evidence that they support (or at least think people should be free to take) either measure -- but oppose the government forcing people to do so; there's just blind opposition based on blanket (although understandable) suspicion of traditional media and, perhaps a conspiracy theory or two... [demonstrating once again] how counterproductive defining one's beliefs in opposition to a hated other group can be."

~ Gus Van Horn, from his post ''Fake News,' 'Faux News;' To-may-to, To-mah-to.'

Radicals/Conservatives

"The radical of one century is the conservative of the next. The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out, the conservative adopts them."

          ~ Mark Twain, 'Notebooks and Journals', 1898

[Hat tip Mark Twain]

.

"I am a rational animal."

 

"They offer me their truth vs my truth; instead I choose objective truth.
    "They offer me their whim vs my whim; instead I choose reason.
    "They offer me black vs white, male vs female, young vs old, straight vs gay, instead I choose individualism.
    "They offer a sacrifice of myself to others vs a sacrifice of others to myself; instead I choose non-sacrificial trade.
    "They offer me anarchy vs totalitarianism; instead I choose freedom.
    "They offer me socialism vs fascism, instead I choose free-market capitalism.
    "They offer me conservative vs liberal; instead I choose individual rights with government limited to protecting them.
    "They offer false alternative after false alternative; but I think in objectively defined fundamental principles.
    "I am a rational animal."

          ~ Mark Conway Munro

. 

“It can now safely be said, as his first term in the White House draws toward closure, that Donald Trump’s party is the very definition of a cult of personality." #QotD

“It can now safely be said, as his first term in the White House draws toward closure, that Donald Trump’s party is the very definition of a cult of personality. It stands for no special ideal. It possesses no organising principle. It represents no detailed vision for governing. Filling the vacuum is a lazy, identity-based populism that draws from that lowest common denominator [former SC governor Mark] Sanford alluded to. If it agitates the base, if it lights up a Fox News chyron, if it serves to alienate sturdy real Americans from delicate coastal elites, then it’s got a place in the Grand Old Party.” 

~ Tim Alberta on 'The Grand Old Meltdown: What happens when a party gives up on ideas?'

[Hat tip Andy Clarkson] 

"'Conservatism' has always been a misleading name. Today, the fighters for capitalism have to be, not bankrupt 'conservatives,' but new radicals, new intellectuals and, above all, new, dedicated moralists." #QotD

"Capitalism is not the system of the past; it is the system of the future—if mankind is to have a future. Those who wish to fight for it, must discard the title of 'conservatives.' 'Conservatism' has always been a misleading name ... Today, there is nothing left to 'conserve': the established political philosophy, the intellectual orthodoxy, and the status quo are collectivism. Those who reject all the basic premises of collectivism are radicals in the proper sense of the word: 'radical' means 'fundamental.' Today, the fighters for capitalism have to be, not bankrupt 'conservatives,' but new radicals, new intellectuals and, above all, new, dedicated moralists."

~Ayn Rand, from her article 'Conservatism: An Obituary,' collected in the book Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal
.

"Most people use 'right' and 'left' journalistically: to designate shifting bundles of social-political beliefs and attitudes. It’s important to remember that there are other positions completely outside the [bundles]." #QotD

"Most people use 'right' and 'left' journalistically: to designate shifting bundles of social-political beliefs and attitudes. The bundles are usually not internally coherent. So more analytic thinkers try to bring order out of mush by identifying multiple dimensions of contrast: individual versus collective, liberty versus authority, majority- versus minority-rule, etc. They abandon the simple one-dimensional left-right spectrum and use Venn Diagrams and other arrays better to capture the realities. And/or they add adjectives to clarify the genus-species relations...
    "Yes, there are differences within conservatism and between conservatives and the left. But national conservatism overlaps with national socialism which overlaps with international socialism. And when drawing the Venn Diagrams to clarify who belongs inside which circle, it’s important to remember that there are other positions completely outside the circles."
          ~ Stephen Hicks, from his post 'Against the new post-2016-Trump right too'
.

ACT needs its own “Clause Four Moment”

With the ACT Party’s vote numbers now almost down to Libertarianz levels, the obvious questions are being asked about whether the party any longer has a purpose, other than simple being a reliable coalition appendage for what the party’s luminaries call “the centre-right.” (In other places, they would probably call it the “conservative” side of the tent.)

Digging out old files over the weekend, I came across the very first copy of Ayn Rand’s Objectivist Newsletter from 1962, which throws some light on the woes of the ACT Party 2017.

Politics, she explains, is not a primary. Political goals cannot be achieved “without a wider ideological context."

Politics is based on three other philosophical disciplines: metaphysics, epistemology and ethics — on a theory of man’s nature and man’s relationship to existence. It is only on such a base thart one can formulate a consistent political theory and achieve it in practice. When, however, men attempt to rush into politics without such a base, the result is that embarrassing conglomeration of impotence, futility, inconsistency and superficiality which is loosely designated today as ‘conservatism’ [aka the ‘centre-right’].

Does that describe what folk here have seen of the ACT Party people this year? I fear so. Nice people, most of them, but having rushed into politics with little more than a naive and muddled utilitarianism they now see their party backed into the ghetto, every election, of explaining MMP to voters (three MPs for the price of one!) instead of being able to proudly and articulately promote their principles.

They might be reminded that, as Rand continued:

A half battle is worse than none: it does not end in mere defeat — it helps and hastens the victory of your enemies.

Is that not what we’ve seen?

A full battle might begin with tightening up those principles, and a programme of education so their candidates can articulate them.

They also desperately need troops on the ground. But both candidates and troops — and voters — may be more forthcoming if the other long overdue prescription for the party’s woes be undertaken. By which I mean dragging out the toxic carcasses of the former leaders still stinking up the political room, and very publicly euthanasing them.

How they do that is up to them, but if they wanted a model for how such a fumigation is done they could do worse than look at how and why Tony Blair dragged out the carcass of the Militant Tendency and undertook the battle over Clause 4 to make New Labour.

In short, they need their own “Clause Four Moment."

Without that they will just be rearranging deckchairs while the ship goes down. Neither voters nor spear carriers will be attracted unless those earlier sins be explunged. Whatever else may or may not be done, without that the party will guarantee its doom as a vital political force.