Right Wing Nut House

I got the idea for this post from a piece on Andrew Breitbart’s Big Hollywood entitled “Bond Forever, Bourne Forgotten” where John Scott Lewinski reports on Entertainment Weekly’s “All Time Coolest Heroes in Pop Culture.”

The list is a triumph for conservative values - with some notable exceptions. Placing Harry Potter at #4 was probably a sop to the success of the franchise but the “kids as heroes” theme is more suited to Saturday morning TV than iconic film making. True, Harry fights evil but the last couple of films he has demonstrated a debilitating introspection bordering on narcissism where he wonders whether he is, in fact, as evil as the dark lord who wants to kill him. As Potter reaches adolescence, he is cursed with the doubts and confusion that roil the psyche of most teenager’s and cause all kinds of trouble including bad decision making and an attraction to “the forbidden.” While this makes for excellent filmaking (the movies are an example of pop culture at its best), I question whether Potter should be included on such a heroic list.

Heroes do not question their motivations. By definition, moral clarity is is at the center of their heroic nature and is why the life lessons their deeds impart are so important. There are no tragic heroes in EW’s list which is probably as it should be. Hollywood’s Dream Machine has had our heroes living happily ever after for 100 years and any break with that tradition has been usually met with audience resistance.There are exceptions, of course, but few producers wish to back a project where a nearly pure hero meets their end.

There a few others on the list that should raise eyebrows including Nancy Drew (#17), Bufffy the Vampire Slayer from the TV series (#8), Roxy Brown, Pam Greir’s Blaxploitation film character (#13) and Sydney Bristow from Alias (#20). Not coincidentally, they are all women which, I believe, cheapens Ellen Ripley (Alien) high ranking (#5). Out of that bunch, I might have put Greir’s character in the bottom 5 and tossed the rest. It appears that an ubiquitous form of political correctness infected this list to some degree but not so much as to totally delegitimize it.

Others on the list are mis-ranked in my opinion. Jack Bauer at #16? Superman (Christopher Reeves) at a lofty #3? Christian Bale’s Batman at #18? And perhaps the most egregious mis-ranking of all - Gary Cooper’s Will Kane from High Noon at a lowly #14. By contrast, aside from the aforementioned Superman at a much too high #3, there is Han Solo at #7, Mad Max at #11 and Captain Kirk at #12. I would have crowded all of those selections somewhere near the bottom with the exception of Solo who I would place somewhere between 10-15.

Of course, it’s all in fun and we shouldn’t get too exercised over a few additions made for politically correct reasons or a few mis-rankings due, no doubt, to the personal preferences of EW editors.A few months ago I took a stab at a “heroes list” by developing my “10 Favorite Mythic Heroes of all Time.” The list was almost entirely made up of literary and legendary heroes with a couple of exceptions including John Wayne who appears nowhere on the EW list and featured the pulp fiction icon, Edgar Rice Burrough’s John Carter of Mars as my #1 mythic hero.

I didn’t consciously seek out mythic heroes who reflected my conservative values but my choices could hardly have been otherwise. Running down the EW list, I was amazed to find that to one degree or another, most of the icons on that list held to the best of conservative values to see them through their ordeals. Aside from having no trouble identifying which side they should be on in the struggle of good versus evil, most of the heroes on that list demonstrated core beliefs that are usually ascribed to conservatism.

Perhaps the most obvious trait in most of these heroes is their desire to bring order to chaos by battling the agents of evil. A related theme is their desire to preserve traditional society (or the status quo) as recognizable evil seeks to alter society (or community) for the worse. It bears mentioning here that conservatives are not against change as long as it is firmly rooted in values and traditions of the past. The change being sought by most of these heroe’s antagonists would be achieved after tearing down tradition and fomenting an alien way of life that would be demonstrably inferior to what it was replacing.

The “lone hero” motif is also prevalent among the chosen. This has been a staple of Hollywood for as long as the film industry has existed and hearkens to an American past where icons like Daniel Boone, Davey Crockett, Kit Carson, and the lone Mountain Man battled Mother Nature and native Americans in order to bring white civilization and justice to the frontier. One can argue how heroic in real life those men truly were but their mythic status, sealed by eastern writers in the cheap dime novels of the time (the “Hollywood” of the 19th century) who fictionalized their exploits to a public eager for American heroes, gave us larger than life figures to look up to and admire.

This kind of rugged individualism - in many cases on the list, man against “the system” or a pitiless bureaucracy - is perhaps the most celebrated conservative trait in American history. So it is not surprising that so many heroes in the EW rankings would be of that mold.

Our heroes on the list also celebrate a belief that human nature is a constant and that a just moral order is necessary for a society to survive. Evil exists because unless his passions are governed by enduring moral precepts, man gives into the temptation to try and dominate his fellows. This is what historian Page Smith referred to as a “Classical Christian Consciousness” that has been at the heart of conservatism since the founding of the republic. John McClane may be a foul mouthed lout, but his fight with terrorists is as much a battle against nihilism - a concept alien to his strong identity as a New York City cop - as it is to save his wife. Jack Bauer may be a thuggish brute but his sense of duty is eternally connected to his belief that society must be protected from the Visigoths that seek to sack and burn America.

This is not to say there are no heroic liberals in pop culture who probably should have been on that list. I would have included Neo from the Matrix franchise whose selflessness and desire to sacrifice himself for the greater good represents the best values that a classically liberal hero should aspire. Another liberal icon not on the list would be Jason Bourne (actually a totally made up character having little in common with the literary figure created by Robert Ludlum). But Bourne exhibits a brave and compelling sense of self sacrifice and personal morality even if he is wildly conflicted about the moral ambiguity of being an assassin.

And that brings me to the #1 hero on the EW list. James Bond is the anti-Bourne - at least as far as how the two characters have been transferred to celluloid. In his Big Hollywood piece, Lewinsky makes some salient points about the two heroes:

Damon or Greengrass seem obsessed with attacking the James Bond films and the character himself every chance they get. Mixing up a bitter soup of professional envy at Bond’s legacy and success, personal insecurity at producing movies beholden to Bond and (of course) self-righteous political arrogance, both artists froth at every opportunity to brand Ian Fleming’s creation a soulless killer. Ignoring Bond’s efforts to battle terrorism and global crime, they stamp him a militarist imperialist misogynist.

That’s a lot of “ist”s to heap on a fictional character, and the Damon/Greengrass vitriol festival seems unwilling to turn the same critical eye toward their own non-corporeal screen creation. While Robert Ludlum’s character is an impressive and skilled killing machine, the movie Bourne is gloomy, bitter, self-absorbed and motivated only by personal revenge and the desire to be left alone (a trait of questionable heroic value).

But Bourne fights predominantly middle-aged white men in suits who are part of the military and intelligence establishments. Combine that with the character’s inherent narcissism, and he’s the perfect screen hero for the hard left.

But EW left him out of their Top 20 — a decision that could indicate Bourne is already fading into also-ran spy status as Daniel Craig and the Bond franchise flourish

Ian Fleming and Robert Ludlum crafted the personaes of their two heroes in very different times. Ludlum especially would have been horrifically disappointed in the way Hollywood brought his brooding, conflicted, and yet gentle and compassionate David Webb/Jason Bourne to the screen.

The most egregious sin was making Bourne a real assassin and not the CIA cutout who was created to smoke out the world’s #1 terrorist - Carlos the Jackal. Ludlum, an actor and producer, had little or no knowledge of real CIA operations which is why his villains always worked for rogue elements in the government and intelligence services usually manipulated by some faceless corporation. But the cutout Bourne (who never assassinated anyone, only taking credit for the killings by others through a complex gaming of the terrorist underworld), battled inner demons caused by his amnesia more than any regret at the lives he was forced to take when he went on the run with his beloved Marie. It was she (who he ended up marrying and not leaving at the bottom of some river in India) who never stopped believing that at bottom, he was a good man and not a cold killer. (See the miniseries The Bourne Identity from 1988 which is more faithful to the literary Bourne in many respects but which suffers by featuring the rather tepid performance of Richard Chamberlain in the title role.)

By contrast, the last two actors to play James Bond have nearly gotten the character right (and the early Sean Connery efforts also reflected an identity closer to Fleming’s vision than the clowns who played him subsequently). Both Pierce Brosnan and Daniel Craig have a certain coldness about them that Fleming would have accepted. Brosnan was a little more playful than the literary Bond but had a much more pronounced sense of fatalism than any other actor who has portrayed the icon. Craig, on the other hand, obviously read and absorbed the literary Bond better than all of them; The sense of danger when he enters the room (that was an aphrodisiac to women), the smoldering violence that exists just below the surface, and a Jack Bauer-like sense of duty all combine to make Craig’s portrayal ring truer than other Bond portrayals on screen.

But the movie icons Bourne and Bond also reflect differences in the cultural touchstones each uses to exhibit their heroic qualities. Early incarnations of the screen bond fought the criminal enterprise SPECTRE which exceeded even the KGB in evil intent. Only later did Bond join the cold war and battle communists which is not inherently a conservative motif but given the times, certainly represented the thinking of most conservatives as opposed to most liberals. Bond was battling the evil of communism and, like Jack Bauer, had a clear moral mandate to kill while fighting that war.

Bourne, on the other hand, kills solely in self defense and not for any greater good - unless you believe exposing CIA operations a “greater good” as most on the left clearly do. There is also no moral certitude in what he does unless you consider his personal desire for revenge against those who “turned him into an assassin” after he had volunteered to be one a moral justification for going after Treadstone and Blackbriar. Bourne becomes the epitome of liberal angst and uncertainty by first, wanting to apologize to the families of his victims and on top of that, refusing to take personal responsibility for his own life choices in volunteering to “save American lives” by becoming a killer. It’s not his fault he’s an assassin. It’s Treadstone’s. And while this loopy logic might sit well with many on the left, it weakens his moral arguments to take down the rogue operations while negating any claim Bourne might have to the kind of moral superiority over his enemies that Bond clearly demonstrates.

Bond does not lose sleep over killing his targets although his internal conflicts are paralyzing at times. I think that Judi Dench’s “M” is the perfect foil for Craig’s Bond in that she appears to program Bond to carry out his missions by expertly pushing his psychological buttons. In the end, Bond performs and succeeds due to his own innate abilities and trust that his cause is just. It is anachronistic in these times but that’s what makes him so effective. Inevitably, his belief in himself is his greatest weapon.

Admittedly, Bond is #1 more because of enduring popularity of the films and legendary status of the character, not because his actions are animated by conservative principles. But for all the complaining we conservatives do about Hollywood not making movies with conservative themes, the “coolest heroes” on the Entertainment Weekly’s list remind us that such is not always the case.

An interesting discussion piece in today’s Washington Times by Big Hollywood’s Andrew Breitbart that tries and make the case that Americans today, compared to the “Greatest Generation” that fought World War II, are a bunch of weak willed wimps, enamored of wealth and privilege while being frightened of our own shadow. In short, we are a bunch of self-indulgent philistines who lack the capacity to deal with the numerous crisis in our midst.

We’ve all heard this rant before - as I’m sure the “Greatest Generation” heard it from their elders back in the 1930’s and the generation before them, and on backwards to the founding of the republic where as early as Washington’s administration, ministers were bemoaning the loss of the “revolutionary spirit” and the desire by a majority of the populace for “material possessions” rather than seeking spiritual uplift. I guess it goes without saying that the more things change, the more likely the previous generation sees a danger that American values are threatened.

The question: Is it truer today than it was in the past? Has something “gone out” of America in the last decade or two?

Breitbart cites 9/11 as clear evidence that something has:

Signs of our collective weakness emerged after 9/11 when only part of the American population took seriously that we were at war with an evil and motivated enemy determined to destroy our way of life. Since then, al Qaeda has refused to quit despite debilitating losses.

Clearly, our national will is wilting away.

Following the tragic lead of Europe, too many Americans no longer want to engage our external threats head-on. And on the domestic front, we are confronting the economic crisis of our lifetime with the same full-steam-ahead spending-spree mind-set that got us into the mess to begin with.

We say: Let’s create more government dependency, reward the incompetent and print more money.

That’s doubling down on stupidity.

We are a trust-fund nation (picture Tori Spelling in the Lifetime Channel role of her career) whose BMW has run out of gas in the middle of the Mojave Desert after a pointless 115-miles-per-hour joy ride. The credit cards are maxed out. We’re out of cell phone range. And dad, who just got taken by Uncle Bernie Madoff, wouldn’t take the call anyway.

I would say that Mr. Breitbart is off base. Much more than a “part” of the population wants to confront al-Qaeda. The question up for debate - and still being debated - is what is the best way to go about doing that? There are those of us who believe that we must hit them militarily and keep hitting them no matter where they hide. Many others believe that this strategy “creates more terrorists” and wants to see a more studied approach to the threat that would rely almost exclusively on intelligence and law enforcement actions to break up terrorist cells before they can strike.

Is one approach “wimpier” than the other? Is the law enforcement path less in tune with our values and national character? I have been struggling with this question since 9/11 and I still don’t have an answer as far as which path would keep us safer although the biggest drawback to the law enforcement/intelligence argument is that it isn’t proactive enough, that it presupposes we will be hit and that the response to terrorism should be grounded in bringing the perpetrators to “justice.” In the nuclear age, this is myopic in the extreme which is why I come down on attacking al-Qaeda and keeping them constantly off balance and unable to mount a serious attack.

But that’s not the question. Breitbart is positing the notion that people who oppose this kind of war lack intestinal fortitude and other qualities that made the World War II generation the “Greatest.” I reject that idea as silly - turning a political/policy argument into a litmus test for who better represents the “real America.” (Liberals and others who support the police/law enforcement approach are equally silly when they accuse those of us who support a more proactive approach as being “warmongers.”) Ideally, a combination of the two policies would probably work best although it is never that simple.

But the argument over how to confront terrorism after 9/11 is symptomatic of something much deeper and Breitbart continuously misses the boat when he lays out arguments like this in describing the Baby Boom generation:

We are a trust-fund nation (picture Tori Spelling in the Lifetime Channel role of her career) whose BMW has run out of gas in the middle of the Mojave Desert after a pointless 115-miles-per-hour joy ride. The credit cards are maxed out. We’re out of cell phone range. And dad, who just got taken by Uncle Bernie Madoff, wouldn’t take the call anyway.

The silent generation, which learned valuable lessons from the Depression and World War II, is not here to guide us through these difficult times. The narcissistic baby boomers, who probably think this song is about them, are now firmly in charge. And that’s the rub.

It’s a clever metaphor but hardly the point. Mr. Breitbart hasn’t been paying attention because what he is describing is nothing new. Since the mid 1980’s, Americans have been in hock up to their eyeballs and the economy has been wholly dependent on how willing consumers have been to pile on personal debt. There is nothing new in Americans buying more house than they need or can afford nor is there anything earth shattering in the extraordinary number of citizens who try and escape their bad personal financial decisions by declaring bankruptcy which has been on the rise for a quarter century. It’s not just the boomers who have become irresponsible but their children and now grandchildren.

We are coming up on the 64th anniversary of the end of World War II. In those 64 years America has seen the rise of democratic socialism in the form of a very large and intrusive welfare state that has destroyed the notion of “self reliance” and substituted dependency for the underclass. What of the rest of us? Are we, as Breitbart suggests, a “trust fund nation?” Andrew must lead a very sheltered life. I look around me and see my neighbors struggling - in good times and bad - to make their way through life, raising their children, finding happiness wherever they can, and still believing in an America that he and I would definitely recognize.

These and tens of millions of other families outside of Andrew’s Hollywood bubble have not abandoned the ideals of prudence, independence, self-reliance, and the American way of life. They have not given up on helping their neighbor. They refuse to yield on moral questions about which they feel passionately. They haven’t completely lost faith in our institutions although the last several years has tested that faith.

There is a small percentage of irresponsibles who do not share these values and have totally abandoned them. And yet Mr. Breitbart sees fit to lump the rest of us in with these profligates? Is it because so many voted for Obama?

When the going gets tough, the weak go on Leno.

I can’t get out of my head that the leader of the free world gave the British prime minister 25 films on DVD that don’t even work in U.K. machines.

I can’t wrap my head around the fact that the commander in chief tried (for a minute anyway) to require injured warriors to pay to have private insurers take care of their treatment.

I can’t believe the president would allow the likes of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid to dictate the terms of his budget - and Barney Frank and Christopher Dodd, the symbols of government kowtowing to Wall Street - to be spokesmen for his financial bailout.

And did President Obama really produce a YouTube video to appease President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the mullahs of Iran?

Yes, he did.

These aren’t beginner’s mistakes. These are his core incompetencies.

So because we voted an incompetent into office, this proves that our “national will is wilting away?” Pardon me if I am completely unimpressed.

What Mr. Breitbart is really railing against are our elites. Many of them have indeed become overly cynical, hypocritical, greedy, grasping and acquisitive. There has been a massive failure of leadership in America - both parties, the business world, in organized labor, the intelligentsia, and most especially, the political class that includes politicians, bureaucrats, big media, and the loosely defined gaggle of academic intellectuals, policy wonks, and think tankers who play such a large role in actually governing the country. To say that they have all let us down is an understatement. Be as partisan as you like but no one can escape blame for our current mess.

It seems our elites have got it in their head that once they reach a certain level of achievement in America, they have a license to rob, cheat, and steal everything that isn’t nailed down. This sense of entitlement is perhaps the most damaging aspect of modern America. And I would say to Mr. Breitbart that this is a cross-generational phenomenon and not confined to the boomers. The president of the United States is making the argument that it is “greed” that is to blame. Such simple minded idiocy we might expect from a sophomore in high school (or a liberal). Greed is a symptom of the much larger problem that we refuse to face; a loss of faith in our institutions and, more directly, in each other.

At bottom, we don’t know who we are anymore. The old verities - as comforting as an pair of old shoes - don’t describe what we have become the last 50 years; a modern, industrialized nation, wired from one end of the continent to the other, that has destroyed regional differences (which played such a huge role in our development) and united us as we have never been united before. What does “self reliance” mean when we depend so much on government for such mundane things as making sure we have clean water to drink or safe highways, or bridges that won’t collapse, or prevent us from buying products that might kill or injure our children? You can claim “self reliance” all you want but how meaningful is it when you can’t even turn on the faucet without the help of government?

We have yet to translate these American values into modern nomenclature. The values aren’t anachronistic, only the way we define them. This is something I have been preaching for many months as I have struggled to redefine conservatism for my own aggrandizement. I’m not sure how to go about doing it, only that it needs to be done. We are, most of us, looking at an America through a spyglass that is giving us a view of the past, not an America is it exists today. And the biggest rub is we wouldn’t know how to describe it even if we could see it. There are no touchstones, no signposts that can aid us in coming to grips with this brave new world.

The practical effect of this is it has unmoored so many and set adrift the idea of a shared American experience so that morals and values become meaningless. This leads to excesses in our culture, hedonism, a catering to our own pleasures, and a destructive selfishness that goes beyond simple minded ideas of “greed” and warps the fabric of our national polity.

All of this, for lack of leadership.

Breitbart believes he has the “answer:”

The last time I felt this hopeless was when the Democratic Party and its cohorts in the media sold us on the false premise that we lost the war in Iraq. In the process, they also sought to demonize the very man that led us out of our peril.

His name is Gen. David H. Petraeus.

Less than two months into the Obama presidency, which appears to be lost somewhere in the Mojave Desert, I have decided to try to soothe my anxieties by placing my hope in a political surge.

In the election of 2010, Republicans should run heroic veterans of Operation Iraqi Freedom who exhibited the will and fortitude to defeat the enemy and to rebuild a torn nation, even while too many of their fellow countrymen wrote them off.

And in 2012, the man President Obama’s staunchest allies called “General Betray Us” should come in with guns blazing and defeat the man whose only weapon to lead us to victory is a teleprompter.

Generals make lousy presidents, generally speaking and politically inexperienced generals have been disasters. The exception is Eisenhower who lived and breathed politics for 3 years as Supreme Allied Commander, working the miracle of keeping a coalition together that featured ultra-capitalist and ultra-marxist states, not to mention maintaining a good relationship with some of the prickliest, most outsized personalities in world history including FDR, Churchill, Stalin, and DeGaulle. Ike was born to be president and made a damn fine one.

But Petreaus? He may in fact be an improvement as far as leadership is concerned over the current occupant of the White House (whose interview on 60 Minutes was almost surreal in the way he giggled about economic disaster), but it is ridiculous to believe the good general is the answer to a prayer. General Petreaus would almost certainly be just as dependent on a teleprompter as President Obama given his extraordinary lack of experience in the political arena. And the fact that Obama depends on the device isn’t the problem; it’s that we were sold a bill of goods on how articulate he was without one. How Petreaus would be an improvement in that regard is immaterial to whether he could do a better job with the economy. Since we don’t have a clue what the General thinks on that issue, the whole idea of him running for president is moot.

None of this deals with the core problem I mentioned above - of an America that is in the midst of a gigantic upheaval of which we have yet to come to grips. I imagine time will be the balm that soothes our distress. This is generally true of all big historical changes. But in the meantime, we are apparently in for a very rough ride, being led by a president with his own ideas of what values and traditions are important in America. He will decide which are important enough to save and which should be tossed under the bus.

I just finished visiting the blog Crooked Timbers and, as is the case when I read stuff by very smart people, I need an aspirin because my head hurts. I take that as a sign that too much brainy stuff is crammed into my head and I must access the release valve so that some of the older crap can dribble out of my ears to make room for the next clump of logical, coherent, analysis from writers who know a helluva lot more about philosophy and politics than I do.

I lose a lot of long term memory that way, but hopefully, nothing major like the batting averages for the 2005 World Champion White Sox or the names of my children. (Do I have any children? Too late.)

Some very smart writers give me both a headache and make me want to throw up. Juan Cole comes to mind because even though I find his history writing the bomb, he is a nauseating self-referentialist and a terrorist apologist. Come to think of it, just about anyone who writes a blog is guilty of the former so perhaps I am being too hard on Professor Cole as far as his constant self promotion is concerned. His views on Hezbullah and Hamas are another matter and not only have me gagging but also make me want to take a shower after reading him. Same thing happens to me after trying to read Jane Hamsher’s foul mouthed spewings which only goes to show that you can have the mind of slug and still engender massive disgust. Nice trick, that.

There is great virtue in reading stuff by people more intelligent than you are. First of all, generally speaking, you learn something new - even if it’s that the writer is a dork and despite his brilliance, would benefit from the intellectual equivalent of a bracing thwack across the noggin with a two by four. Beyond that, learned writers offer perspectives you will never find by reading most columnists (the sainted Buckley one of the few exceptions), bloggers, or pundits, or by listening to your bartender expound on the mysteries of the universe (despite the fact that most PHD’s in philosophy work as mixologists or cab drivers).

That said, this well toned argument by Henry Farrell at Crooked Timbers on whether or not Barack Obama is turning America into a European style social democracy should be must reading for those who have been complaining about the president’s “socialist” policies.

Farrell quotes Roger Cohen on turning America into France-lite:

To paraphrase Mauriac, I love France, but I don’t want there to be two of them, least of all if one is in the United States. … I think President Obama’s counter-revolution goes in the right direction. … Still, the $3.6 trillion Obama budget made me a little queasy. There is a touch of France in its “étatisme” — the state as all-embracing solution rather than problem — and there’s more than a touch of France in the bash-the-rich righteousness with which the new president cast his plans as “a threat to the status quo in Washington.” … You know possibility when you breathe it. For an immigrant, it lies in the ease of American identity and the boundlessness of American horizons after the narrower confines of European nationhood and the stifling attentions of the European nanny state, which has often made it more attractive not to work than to work. High French unemployment was never much of a mystery. Americans, at least in their imaginations, have always lived at the new frontier; French frontiers have not shifted much in centuries. Churn is the American way. … If America loses sight of these truths, it will cease to be itself.

Cohen sums up the argument nicely, referencing American exceptionalsm without naming it explicitly. Any such mention of exceptionalism would put him in very bad odor with some of his friends on the left who have a jaundiced view of such old fashioned, outmoded, jingoistic nonsense.

Farrell also quotes from this Clive Crook piece at National Journal where the author speaks the forbidden words and points out that if we were to adopt some French social policies (health insurance, labor protections, etc.) that we would not become some kind of French-American hybrid while maintaining our “exceptional” character but rather something totally different:

I was hoping that Brooks would press Shields to say what exactly it is about France he objects to, what makes him recoil at the parallel. Where has France gone too far, in the view of an American liberal? … Presumably, liberals approve of the universal health care, the generous and extensive welfare state, the comprehensive worker protections, the stricter regulation, the vastly more-generous subsidies for higher education, the stronger unions, the higher taxes, and especially the higher taxes on the rich. … Perhaps some liberals privately long to make the United States over in the image of France, but the great majority, I imagine, are more interested in taking the things they regard as best in the European economic model—all the things I just listed—and combining those “socially enlightened” policies with the traditional economic virtues of the United States. Take French social policies and welfare-state institutions and add them to the American work ethic, spirit of self-reliance, and appetite for change. Et voila, the best of both worlds. Color me skeptical. Culture shapes institutions and vice versa. Culture—that bundle of traits of self-reliance, self-determination, innovation, and striving for success—underpins the American exception. … In ordinary times, this culture makes it hard for a government to push the United States in a European direction … But now, maybe, the time is ripe. This unusually severe economic crisis has called American capitalism into question, highlighting its weaknesses and making it easier to forget its strengths. Liberalism has a rare opportunity. … But the interaction between culture and institutions works both ways. Change the system and, with time, you will change the culture.

Farrell’s take deals with the shocks to the political economies of Europe in the 90’s when the “Anglo-Saxon” model of capitalism seemed to be the road to take in a globalized economy:

France and other countries faced a profound crisis – a crisis which in some ways was even more profound than that facing the US today. They have faced continuing pressures to ‘reform’ institutions in a more market-liberal direction over the succeeding two decades. And they have indeed changed in some very important ways. But France did not converge onto the US model despite these pressures. If it had, presumably Crook’s and Cohen’s criticisms would be rather different than the ones that they are making Instead, it has reformed along a divergent trajectory to the US, with continued heavy state involvement in the economy but of a different variety than previously.

This reinforces a near-universal finding of the relevant literature in political economy as I read it. While there is some diffusion of policy lessons across states, it tends to have limited consequences. Different countries respond to common shocks in very different ways, because of their existing institutional structures. National economic trajectories are quite robust. Even in major crises, advanced capitalist countries tend to tinker around the edges of their institutional systems rather than opt for wholesale reform, let alone converging on a perceived ‘better national model’ elsewhere.

And this is what is happening in the US. The Obama proposals are not particularly radical departures from existing practice in the US. They are certainly nothing like traditional European social democracy. Even David Brooks effectively acknowledges this, when he says that they are potentially problematic in combination rather than individually. They aren’t going to set the US on a different national trajectory, let alone make it ‘French’ or ‘European.’ Some of us might like to see this happen, but it isn’t going to, even given the ideological trauma that the US is undergoing. And arguing that American individualism is likely to wilt if exposed to nasty foreign influences smacks more of a kind of capitalist-road José Bové-ism than any serious kind of intellectual analysis.

Reformer, not radical? Farrell seems to be saying that because our “Americanism” is so ingrained, that Obama can slap all the social democratic nonsense he wishes over the exceptionalism template and we will remain virtually unchanged in a cultural sense. I agree. A little more “progressive” in our tax and spending policies perhaps. But it will take a lot more than universal health insurance or card check legislation to destroy what has taken 400 years to build. The problem is, it is not Obama’s policies per se that are necessarily “radical” but rather the ways and means he will achieve them.

But I think Farrell is missing one part of the argument - the practical political effect of Obama’s transformative agenda. This is where the real “change” will occur - a change that will fundamentally alter the relationship between the governed and the governors. For this, we must look to the last American president who attempted transformation - Ronald Reagan.

At bottom, Reagan’s revolution was also firmly grounded in a non-radical departure from existing practice. Reagan did not repeal the Great Society or the New Deal. Social spending skyrocketed under his leadership, anywhere from 3-5% above inflation. Part of this was the fact that he was dealing with a Democratic majority in the House (and, for the last two years, the Senate). The traditional guarantors of aid to the poor made sure there was plenty of funding available to take care of their dependent constituency. Reagan managed to cut the rate of growth as a percentage of GDP in social spending, nothing more - a not inconsequential achievement given the spending trajectory we had been on in the 1970’s.

But even beyond that, Reagan’s “revolution” altered the national conversation on entitlements, bringing some much needed realism and perspective to the debate. Whether this caused a backlash or was itself a product of middle class resentment I will let the historians duke it out to discover the truth of the matter. I don’t see President Obama trying to bring us back to the days when the only question about entitlements was “How much more do we spend?” That part of the Reagan legacy seems secure and may be a starting point to finally come to grips with the frightening prospect of stupdendous social security and medicare outlays 20 years down the road that could literally bankrupt us (if Obama doesn’t beat the clock and do it sooner).

Further, Obama is not going to “undo” the Reagan tax revolution, not when 48 million Americans are paying no taxes at all and the marginal rates he proposes will still fall far short of the rates in place when Reagan took office. Again, Reagan’s tax policies were not really radical in retrospect (Bush’s tax cuts fit that bill nicely) but the changed perspective on taxation - influenced by the California tax revolt that was occurring at the same time - may have been radical in the sense that it reversed 50 years of thinking about taxation. Seeing taxes as personal property and that the government that confiscates the least, governs the best may have to undergo some slight adjustments given our current deficits but the overarching belief that low taxes are a beneficial model for our government will outlast Obama.

So the question of how radical Obama’s policies might be must be seen in the context of politics and history. While grounded, as Farrell rightly points out, in practices and theories of the past, the “remaking” of America that I and others see in Obama’s policies have more to do with a psychological barrier being broken with regards to government intervention in the economy and the resulting alteration of the national conversation about the efficacy of statist solutions to a myriad of social problems. Not France and yet, not America as we have known it either. I realize that “change” is what people voted for but did they vote for the kind of Middle Class dependency that some of Obama’s policies would seem to promote? I struggled with this question in a post I wrote last month, “If Government Makes Life Easier, Does That Make it Better?”

The transformation of American society from one that values liberty to one that embraces dependency has taken longer than any other western nation. This has largely been due to American conservatisms steadfast refusal to abandon what Kirk calls the “voluntary community” in favor of the stifling hand of collectivism. Where once only the poor felt the deadening hand of statism which created a permanent underclass, destroyed the family, and smothered ambition, now the middle class is in line to be granted similar attention…

Liberals do not like to discuss the loss of freedom their collectivist ideas entail. But we are clearly in an era where choices are to be limited for the middle class in order to make life less of a burden . And any society that limits choice, limits freedom.

But isn’t this what the people want, what they are demanding? How can you live in a democracy and tell people that government acting to make your life easier is wrong and that the alternative - struggling to make the right choices for yourself and your family and where not choosing wisely might cost you - is the preferred, indeed the “American” way of self sufficiency and taking responsibility for your own life?

There is nothing noble in suffering but I would posit the notion that independence is, in and of itself, enobling and in any society that values freedom, the slide into dependency cannot be allowed without a recognition of what we lose as well as what is gained. There are 400 years of struggle behind us to create a society where the individual took responsibility for his own well being and that of his family, his fortunes rising or falling based on his native abilities and talents. The reward was “an earned life” of personal satisfaction and a feeling of self worth and accomplishment that you simply cannot experience if you depend on government for as much as we do today. Or as much as we will in the near future if more of our freedoms are given up in the name of personal security and comfort.

Farrell does not believe that kind of “rugged individualism” is at stake in an Obama presidency. I believe it is. I believe the real transformation that Obama’s ideas and policies represent might not make us into a France (which isn’t really the point) but will result in a different kind of America - one that is inconsistent with our founding and an anathema to conservative (traditional) principles upon which we have built a society unique among men. And what I find despicable is the president and his cohorts using the “opportunity” of an economic crisis to bring about these transformative policies by subterfuge. They wouldn’t fly otherwise and they know it.

Give us a stand up fight without resorting to political tricks of fear mongering and partisan bitchery and I would guarantee the bulk of Americans would be standing with us and not the president.

They were just whispers a couple of weeks ago - a hint there, a question here. But if you believe Howard Fineman, the inside the beltway crowd has taken the mettle of our new president and discovered that despite all the hype, Obama may not be all he’s cracked up to be.

I hasten to add that this has not and probably will not affect his enormous personal popularlity anytime soon. The mass of citizens have more common sense than the elites and a lot more patience as well. But to people who follow politics as a religion and look for signs and portents as a soothsayer would look for harbingers in the entrails of a frog, there are a few things to be worried about when looking at our president’s performance so far.

What has he done in 50 days? He has proposed much and accomplished some. The primal push of his presidency - the stimulus bill - is getting it from both sides with conservatives deriding it as pork while liberals already saying it wasn’t big enough. This is something we better get used to from the left because they area establishing the parameters of debate when the ultimate let down occurs and it is shown that Obama’s massive spending is not working. The battle cry will be “not enough!” rather than “let’s try something else!”

But why not enough? Rahm Emanuel, Hillary Clinton, and even President Obama himself have all used the exact same phrase to describe their approach to governance in these times of economic hardship; “In crisis, there is opportunity.” I am convinced this phrase will come back to haunt them because if the first stimulus bill wasn’t enough to get the economy moving, it was because it was loaded up with “opportunity” spending that had nothing to do with economic recovery and everything to do with remaking America. In other words, a great deal of the spending in the stimulus package was discretionary and not crisis-related.

And now Obama wants to come back for more? For hundreds of billions that will be for “real” stimulus?” He’s got to be kidding. What this shows is a frightening prospect; Obama cares less about economic recovery than he does about changing America to reflect his left wing vision.

This is also born out in how he has established his priorities. At Obama’s first press conference, he refused to discuss what his administration was going to do about the banking crisis because he “didn’t want to steal any thunder” from his Treasury Secretary who was going to announce the plan the next day.

This was a lie. There was no “thunder” to steal because his Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner had no plan to announce. Once that became apparent, the markets began a serious slide to oblivion. And here we are more than 5 weeks later and Geithner is still mum about his plans to save the banks. This is causing not only a lack of confidence but has opened the Administration up to questions about their basic competence. It has made Geithner a butt of jokes and has even led to calls in some quarters for his resignation.

Did Obama think we wouldn’t notice? Did he believe that people would simply forget his promise to have a plan? And here is where wildly misplaced priorities come into play. The fact is, the key to this whole economic mess is getting the banks to lend money again. Obama could pass 10 stimulus bills and it wouldn’t make a difference because as long as credit is frozen, our economy will continue its free fall.

This begs the obvious question; why did the Obama Administration choose to try and pass the stimulus bill before solving the banking crisis? Why didn’t they concentrate on that fundamental problem rather than ram an $800 billion spending free for all down our throats when even its supporters say didn’t contain enough money to immediately stimulate the economy? Shouldn’t they have been working from the first hours after the election on trying to solve the problem that, more than any other factor, could lead to a catastrophe for our nation and the world?

Or was it more important to take advantage of the “opportunity” found in the crisis to fund liberal programs that the president feels will remake America?

Obama claims he can work on more than one problem at a time:

“I know there are some who believe we can only handle one challenge at a time,” Obama stated today. “They forget that Lincoln helped lay down the transcontinental railroad, passed the Homestead Act, and created the National Academy of Sciences in the midst of Civil War. Likewise, President Roosevelt didn’t have the luxury of choosing between ending a Depression and fighting a war. President Kennedy didn’t have the luxury of choosing between civil rights and sending us to the moon. And we don’t have the luxury of choosing between getting our economy moving now and rebuilding it over the long term.”

As Jules Crittenden points out, Roosevelt needed the war to get out of the depression. And Kennedy? I know Obama went to Columbia and all but Holy Smokes! Kennedy hardly “chose” civil rights - it was forced on him by the courage of the Freedom Riders and the demonstrations in Selma and elsewhere. Kennedy was furious with King for forcing his hand and sicced Bobby on him to try and get him to pull back. Also, as Jules points out, civil rights and the moon program together did not cost the government even a tenth of a stimulus bill in today’s dollars.

That’s beside the point, however. Yes, presidents can and should deal with more than one problem at a time. But Barack Obama is starting to look suspiciously like Jimmy Carter who tried to do so much those first 3 months that he ended up accomplishing very little. This description of Obama by Howard Fineman is eerily Carteresque:

Obama may be mistaking motion for progress, calling signals for a game plan. A busy, industrious overachiever, he likes to check off boxes on a long to-do list. A genial, amenable guy, he likes to appeal to every constituency, or at least not write off any. A beau ideal of Harvard Law, he can’t wait to tackle extra-credit answers on the exam.

But there is only one question on this great test of American fate: can he lead us away from plunging into another Depression?

Carter was so desperate to be liked and yet, ended up being universally despised because he ineptly used the powers at his command. What do you call a president who puts economic recovery as a secondary goal in a deep recession while being unable to come to grips with the fundamental reasons for the downturn?

Inept? Incompetent? Misguided? In over his head?

Fineman:

If the establishment still has power, it is a three-sided force, churning from inside the Beltway, from Manhattan-based media and from what remains of corporate America. Much of what they are saying is contradictory, but all of it is focused on the president:

• The $787 billion stimulus, gargantuan as it was, was in fact too small and not aimed clearly enough at only immediate job-creation.
• The $275 billion home-mortgage-refinancing plan, assembled by Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, is too complex and indirect.
• The president gave up the moral high ground on spending not so much with the “stim” but with the $400 billion supplemental spending bill, larded as it was with 9,000 earmarks.
• The administration is throwing good money after bad in at least two cases-the sinkhole that is Citigroup (there are many healthy banks) and General Motors (they deserve what they get).
• The failure to call for genuine sacrifice on the part of all Americans, despite the rhetorical claim that everyone would have to “give up” something.
• A willingness to give too much leeway to Congress to handle crucial details, from the stim to the vague promise to “reform” medical care without stating what costs could be cut.
• A 2010 budget that tries to do far too much, with way too rosy predictions on future revenues and growth of the economy. This led those who fear we are about to go over Niagara Falls to deride Obama as a paddler who’d rather redesign the canoe.
• A treasury secretary who has been ridiculed on “Saturday Night Live” and compared to Doogie Howser, Barney Fife and Macaulay Culkin in “Home Alone”-and those are the nice ones.
• A seeming paralysis in the face of the banking crisis: unwilling to nationalize banks, yet unable to figure out how to handle toxic assets in another way-by, say, setting up a “bad bank” catch basin.

There’s more at the link but you get the idea. We are, for all intents and purposes, adrift and at sea with the president’s answer to every problem to spend more, borrow more, and use the crisis as an opportunity to tear at the fabric of our founding. The Administration is frozen about what to do with banks that are teetering on the edge of insolvency (along with the entire banking system) and appear not to be focusing on the chaos their incomprehensible delay in proposing solutions to solve the problem is causing. Instead, we get nonsense about comparing the stock market to tracking polls rather than a vote of “no confidence” in Obama’s plans - or lack thereof.

Are these just the growing pains that all presidents go through when they first take office? I’m sure some of this can be ascribed to that notion. It is, after all, still very early in Obama’s term. And I would hardly write off one so gifted so easily.

But Jimmy Carter was also seen as brilliant, a super technocrat who could answer the question of the day, “Is the presidency too big for one man?” It took Reagan - chuckling and snoozing his way through history - to definitively answer that question; it depends on the man.

To those who read the signs of this administration, the question is not if the presidency is too big for one man but whether the man currently occupying the office is up to the challenges that face us.

The jury is still out on whether or not he is.

Remember the controversy in Washington a few years back when a white aide to Mayor Williams made the mistake of saying “niggardly” when talking about the amount of federal funds allocated for some program?

Do you remember how some racialists hit the ceiling and Williams was forced to fire his aide?

Washington, DC’s black Mayor, Anthony Williams, gladly accepted the resignation of his white staff member, David Howard, because Mr. Howard uttered the word ‘niggardly’ in a private staff meeting.

Webster’s Tenth Edition defines the word ‘niggardly’ to “grudgingly mean about spending or granting”.  The Barnhard Dictionary of Etymology traces the origins of ‘niggardly’ to the 1300’s, and to the words ‘nig’ and ‘ignon’, meaning “miser” in Middle English.  No where in any of these references is any mention of racial connotations associated with the word ‘niggardly’.

In other words, it’s a perfectly good and useful word.  But there is the unfortunate coincidence that it starts with the same four letters as the word “nigger”.  The news media are so loathe to use the “N” word, that they’ve been substituting the phrase “racial slur”, as in “…they mistook the word ‘niggardly’ for a racial slur…”

Washington, DC’s population is 60% black, and it’s citizens have been very critical of Mayor Williams for “not being black enough” — especially because he hired several well-qualified whites to help him run this troubled city.

It was a perfect example of political correctness in the media plus the conniving racial grievance mongers who knew full well that “niggardly” is a perfectly acceptable word, does not have anything to do with race, and the farthest thing from Mr. Howard’s mind when he uttered it was to make a racial slur.

Reality, intent, and Webster’s Dictionary matter little to the racialists. It is their mission in life to gin up outrage over anything that could possibly be construed as racist - even when it is clearly and definitively not.

For we are not talking about the redress of a grievances but rather the exercise of power - raw, in your face, power for power’s sake. When Al Sharpton announced that the New York Post cartoon depicting two white police officers who have just shot a chimp with the caption “They’ll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill” was worse than the “nappy headed ho” comment by Don Imus, you knew that the writing was on the wall and the New York Post was in trouble.

And, despite the fact that the cartoon had nothing to do with Obama (it referred to the recent story about a chimp that was shot dead by police after it mauled a woman), the racialists, and their white toadies who saw an opportunity to attack Post owner Rupert Murdoch, put the pedal to the metal and came out in full throated howls of outrage over this “slurring” of Obama.

Here’s the offending cartoon:

The chimp does not resemble the president which is the usual practice for racist cartoons. Besides, anyone with half a brain and who follows the news knows full well Obama did not write the bill. The cartoon refers to the fact that the chimp was mentally ill hence, the idea that the person (people) who wrote the stimulus bill - Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid - should have their heads examined.

There were no lack of warnings before Obama was elected that this would be the tactic of the left to stifle dissent. I wrote at the time they would be crazy NOT to use the race card as early and often as they could. It is the most powerful political weapon the left and the Democrats have at their disposal and it is something their opponents cannot hope to counter or match.

It appears that the mostly white Huffington Post  got the ball rolling as their excellent but partisan political reporter Sam Stein wrote the initial article decrying the portrayal  of Obama in such a fashion. It was picked up by the netnuts and before you knew it, Al Sharpton was in front of the Post building carrying on about the “racial smear.”

It was all over cable news in a matter of hours. Condemnations emanated from the usual quarters in media and academia - all pretending that the cartoon was about Obama and not a crazy dead chimp who had mauled a woman.

The point had absolutely nothing to do with the cartoon but that opposition must be squashed and opponents of the administration intimidated. What surprised me is that it was done with Nazi-like efficiency. Old Joe Goebbels couldn’t have carried it off better.

Like a grotesque Kabuki dance where everyone knows their parts and what movements they should make, this self-orchestrated gaggle of left wing zealots appeared almost out of nowhere, all saying the same thing, all trying to shame the Post into a humiliating retraction. Today, they succeeded - to a certain extent:

It was meant to mock an ineptly written federal stimulus bill.

Period.

But it has been taken as something else - as a depiction of President Obama, as a thinly veiled expression of racism.

This most certainly was not its intent; to those who were offended by the image, we apologize.

However, there are some in the media and in public life who have had differences with The Post in the past - and they see the incident as an opportunity for payback.

To them, no apology is due.

Sometimes a cartoon is just a cartoon - even as the opportunists seek to make it something else.

The Post, I’m afraid, is dreaming. A cartoon will never be “just a cartoon” as long as there are dishonest, unscrupulous, greedy (donations to Sharpton’s personal piggy bank of an “activist group” probably surged so that the good Reverend will no doubt buy himself a couple of additional $3000 suits), and shameless partisans who will seek to use the excuse of President Obama’s race to invent, exaggerate, or or simply lie about any criticisms of the president they believe they can get away with employing the race card.

Unfortunately, for the vast majority of Americans who don’t follow the news closely, they will more often than not be successful. The only way to stop this slide into authoritarianism is for the press to do its job and act as unbiased referee between those in power and those in opposition.

A vain hope given how in the tank the press is at this point for Obama.

The theme of this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) should be “Cocooning our way to Irrelevancy” or perhaps “How to lose the next 5 elections in 10 easy steps.”

From my point of view, it really is that bad. With the exception of some effort to bring conservatism into the 21st century communications-wise, the program appears to be an excellent panacea for what ailed conservatism in about 1980. It’s as if the debacles of 2006 and 2008 never happened. Does it matter that the very same people who helped get us clobbered the last two election cycles are running seminars and roundtables at the conference? Not if you’re a movement still in denial that it will take more than “message tweaking” and better utilization of the internet to bring conservatism back and make it relevant to a large portion of Americans again.

The side conference being sponsored by PJTV - “Conservatism 2.0″ - looks interesting but here again, we have familiar faces who haven’t expressed much interest in real conservative reform. (Some panelists on the communications side are the exception.) Glenn Reynolds and Michelle Malkin are internet friends of mine and I agree with them on many issues. But are they really the people to be running a “Conservatism 2.0″ conference? Perhaps I misunderstand what they are trying to accomplish. And I may be pleasantly surprised. But before we can even get to “Conservatism 2.0″ perhaps we should be thinking of taking a remedial course in what conservatism should mean in our modern society. I’m afraid this sort of introspection will reveal how far afield conservatism has strayed but may also generate thoughts and ideas about how conservatism can be relevant in a 21st century industrialized democracy.

Online activism is fine and seeking new ways to communicate is an excellent idea. But does it matter what we will be trying to get across? If so, I’m not sure that this PJTV side conference will accomplish anything useful.

Alright…so. My idea of “reform” is probably a helluva lot different than most conservatives. But maybe we could start with the recognition that in elections, the way you win is by getting one more vote than the other side. And no matter how you want to add up the numbers, the 30% of so of the nation that identifies itself as “conservative” will always fall short of 50% + 1. I hate to break this news to my fellow conservatives; you can use any kind of mathematical hocus pocus you wish but there just aren’t enough of us to only allow “true conservatives” a place at the table. The absence of conservatives like David Frum, Peggy Noonan, David Brooks, and others who probably agree with 90% of conservative positions on the issues but have been driven from the movement for their apostasy — real or imagined — is as incomprehensible as it is depressing.

This is the way back? It’s not a question of being “moderate” or “true-blue” but rather how long does conservatism want to wander in the wilderness? Ideas on how to reform conservatism — and I speak of real reform, not the cosmetic solutions that appear will be offered at CPAC — must come from as many sources as possible. Some conservatives might not like the smell inside the “Big Tent” but turning up your nose at people who disagree with you on one or two issues is just plain nuts. “Litmus tests” and the like are all well and good unless you are a minority, getting smaller and less relevant, and don’t wish to find a way back in order to compete in the marketplace of ideas.

Our dire situation doesn’t seem to have sunk in yet. This is evident by how many sessions are scheduled that appear to have been lifted from the agenda of a decade or more ago. To wit:

Thursday, 2/26 at 10:10:

“The Key to Victory? Listen to Conservatives”

Michael Barone, U.S. News and World Report
Rep. Aaron Schock (IL)
Rep. Peter Roskam (IL)*
Rep. Virginia Foxx (NC)*
Saul Anuzis, Michigan Republican Party

Moderator: Al Cardenas, American Conservative Union Board of Directors

I would listen to Michael Barone if he appeared in a bathtub. As for the rest, the day the conservative movement stops listening to members of Congress (with precious few exceptions) is the day we begin the road back.

Thursday, 2/26 at 1:50 pm

“New Challenges in the Culture War”

Rep. Chris Smith (NJ)*
Dr. Janice Crouse, The Beverly LaHaye Institute
Mat Staver, Liberty Counsel and Liberty University School of Law

Moderator: Marjorie Dannenfelser, Susan B. Anthony List

New, old, what’s the difference? The issues are losers. The GOP is no longer seen as the party of fiscal restraint, low taxes, and strong defense but rather the gay bashing, anti-woman, anti-minority party. Those who believe a simple tweaking of the message will change that are dreaming.

Friday, 2/27 at 9:00 AM

Breakfast with Phyllis Schlafly: “Doing the Impossible”

Schafly is one smart, tough woman but part of the ancien regime. The same goes for many of the speakers at the conference. Ann Coulter will once again try to make headlines by attempting to top her own outrageousness. Ralph Reed is selling a book and hardly relevant to my idea of modern conservatism. The Members of Congress invited are, with a couple of exceptions, an uninspiring lot. Mike Pence and Eric Cantor are two of the more thoughtful House members in the Republican caucus but the rest are vanilla and oatmeal.

There are a couple of interesting sessions including Thursday morning’s “Timeless Principles, New Challenges: The Future of the Conservative Movement.” But the panelists? Van Hipp, American Defense International, Steve Moore of the Wall Street Journal, and Bay Buchanan, of the The American Cause would not be my choices to run this session. How about Ross Douthat or Marc Ambinder? These are guys who have given conservative reform a considerable amount of thought. Alas, they are not “pure” enough for this crowd.

Also a session I plan on attending will be “Building the Conservative Hispanic Coalition.” I will almost guarantee that it will be the least popular session as far as attendance at the conference. Given the way GOP candidates shamefully and inexplicably dissed Hispanics by refusing to show up for the Spanish TV debate, I would be ashamed to show my face at this session too.

And, as I mentioned, there is the PJTV side conference. At least here, there appears to be an effort to think outside the box. Patrick Ruffini will be on a panel with Jude Cristobal, singer-songwriter, Andrew Klavan, award-winning author and screenwriter, and Alfonzo Rachel, advocate of right-minded ideas on new media talking about “New Media Empowering Conservative Messages.” There isn’t a new message yet but at least we’ll be ready when there is one.

Saturday’s PJTV session is being billed as a “conservative answer to The View “and features some pretty savvy women moderators including Michelle Malkin, political strategist Jeri Thompson, and pollster Kellyanne Conway. The concept is interesting but I question how it plays into the “Conservatism 2.0″ theme. A take off of an MSM television show and transferring the format to internet TV may be entertaining but instructive how? It would seem to me that the format might get in the way of any kind of serious discussions about the future of conservatism but, I may be pleasantly surprised.

Perhaps I am expecting too much from a conference where conservatives are gathering to learn about activism (there are several sessions about “nuts and bolts” politics that are always very good), enjoy the company of mostly like minded people, and gape at some of the stars of the conservative movement.

But looking at the agenda and the speakers for CPAC 2009, I can’t help but think that this will be a lost opportunity. There is so much for conservatives to think about; facing up to the failures of the Bush years and conservative’s role in enabling those failures; less ideology and more pragmatism; a fundamental reassessment of how conservative principles can be relevant in a nation of 300 million people of varied ethnicity and interests; and a radical cleansing of limiting ideas that stifle debate and place more emphasis on assessing the purity of one’s conservative beliefs by a self-selected minority rather than accepting and embracing our differences.

And most importantly, fleeing the mindset that re-enforces the notion that there isn’t much really wrong with conservatism that a dab of message clarification here and a spot of renewed enthusiasm there won’t cure. Accepting the fact that there are fundamental problems is the first step toward recovery.

Unfortunately, CPAC fails miserably in that regard.

UPDATE

Here’s more from some clear thinking conservatives:

Frum:

Could we possibly act more inadequate to the challenge? More futile? More brain dead?

If we’re to make progress in 2010, we have to look serious. This week we looked not only irrelevant, but clueless and silly. Quite a job for a little mouse.

Douthat:

But that’s a big if - which is why the more likely road to revival for the GOP probably starts outside Washington, with politicians who can afford to be experimental without constantly worrying about what Rush Limbaugh would say about them. This is one of the ways reform happened in the Democratic Party of the ’70s and ’80s: You had a collection of distinctive and innovative political figures - your “Atari Democrats,” your neoliberals, your “New Democrats” - who were testing out new ways of being liberal in statewide races long before their ideas were embraced by the party nationally. (Some of them still haven’t been, of course, as Mickey Kaus will be happy to inform you.) What the Republican Party needs, above all, is a generation of politicians who can fill the “center-right” space currently occupied by time-servers like Arlen Specter and Susan Collins with a politics that’s oriented around policy, rather than process. It needs a reform caucus that’s actually interested in reform (as opposed to deal-cutting), and that’s populated with politicians who have tried something new in difficult political terrains, and proven that it might work.

If such a caucus doesn’t emerge in Washington, though, then the party has to hope it emerges in the statehouses - and that one such statehouse occupant has what it takes to win the party’s nomination, the Presidency, and singlehandedly turn the GOP away from it’s self-defeating, self-destructive habits along the way. This is both the easiest way for the party to acquire the leadership it needs, and the hardest: It’s the easiest because it only requires the emergence of one great politician, rather than the slow cultivation of a generation of them; and it’s the hardest because it depends on the skills and vision of a single reform-minded leader, rather than a pooled efforts of like-minded cohort. Some of the failures of the Bush Administration, it’s worth noting, reflect precisely the latter set of dangers: You had a President trying, fitfully but with some sincerity, to create a new kind of conservatism (compassionate, big-government, whatever) without the kind of institutional and intellectual support that his project required. And it’s easy to imagine the next Republican President - whether it’s Jindal in 2016 or whomever - running into the same sort of problems, and running aground on them as well.

And yet, these guys are frozen out of CPAC and Ann Coulter gets center stage?

“Those who cannot remember the past, are condemned to repeat it,”
(Essayist, philosopher, novelist, and non-historian George Santayana)

One of the things I find fascinating about the debate over the stimulus bill is that proponents claim that they have learned the lessons of history both from FDR’s New Deal and the more recent Japanese “Lost Decade” in that while massive government spending didn’t work to bring those economies out of a serious tailspin, this stimulus bill will do the trick.

The reason? The sheer size of the monstrosity will act like a defibrillator and shock the economy back to life. Proponents advance the idea that neither FDR or the Japanese were bold enough in their spending on infrastructure to do any good. What is needed is truly gargantuan government outlays over a long period of time.

Paul Krugman has been advancing this theory as have those who are responsible for pushing the plan forward. Treasury Secretary Geithner:

In a nutshell, Japan’s experience suggests that infrastructure spending, while a blunt instrument, can help revive a developed economy, say many economists and one very important American official: Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner, who was a young financial attaché in Japan during the collapse and subsequent doldrums. One lesson Mr. Geithner has said he took away from that experience is that spending must come in quick, massive doses, and be continued until recovery takes firm root.

Moreover, it matters what gets built: Japan spent too much on increasingly wasteful roads and bridges, and not enough in areas like education and social services, which studies show deliver more bang for the buck than infrastructure spending.

“It is not enough just to hire workers to dig holes and then fill them in again,” said Toshihiro Ihori, an economics professor at the University of Tokyo. “One lesson from Japan is that public works get the best results when they create something useful for the future.”

There is $80 billion in funding for education over the next two years in the current stimulus bill But when you consider the current budget of the entire Department of Education is $59.2 billion, one begins to see the truly massive size of this “stimulus.”

This $80 billion will go to:

Education for the Disadvantaged
Impact Aid
School Improvement Programs
Innovation and Improvement
Special Education
Rehabilitation Services and Disability Research
Student Financial Assistance
Student Aid Administration
Higher Education
Institute of Education Sciences
School Modernization, Renovation, and Repair
Higher Education Modernization, Renovation, and Repair

Building new schools and rehabbing old ones is probably legitimate spending on infrastructure that will pay off immediately and long term. Student aid? With the credit crunch, another legitimate outlay.

Special education is underfunded nationwide but why include it in a “stimulus bill?” Because otherwise the amount being asked - $13 billion - would never make it out of committee much less survive as a separate entity. Hence, they tack it on to the stimulus and threaten “catastrophe” for the economy unless we pass it.

What about spending for higher education? If one dime goes to Harvard we should scream bloody murder. There’s a school with a multi-billion dollar endowment. If they want improvements in their campus or if they want to invite some performance artist who will smear feces all over himself and spout rancid poetry, fine. Let them do it on their own dime.

Ditto for most of the bigger schools out there who have rich and generous alumni. Something is wrong if these institutions get any money from the taxpayer when they are sitting on massive amounts of money in the form of endowments and building funds.

And as far as this stimulus funding “School improvement programs,” do we really want the guy who ran the Annenberg Schools Project in Chicago - a massive waste of $100 million in private funds that didn’t improve Chicago schools one iota - telling America how to improve their schools? And let’s not even bring up his Education Secretary, a former Superintendent of those same Chicago Schools. His stellar credentials include running a school system where barely half the kids graduated from high school and where reading comprehension skills were so bad that it was estimated 30% of high school graduates were functionally illiterate.

The point being, what kind of “lesson” did these jamokes learn from the Japanese and New Deal efforts to jumpstart the economy using government funds? Maybe we should ask the Japanese:

Most Japanese economists have tended to take a bleaker view of their nation’s track record, saying that Japan spent more than enough money, but wasted too much of it on roads to nowhere and other unneeded projects.

Dr. Ihori of the University of Tokyo did a survey of public works in the 1990s, concluding that the spending created almost no additional economic growth. Instead of spreading beneficial ripple effects across the economy, he found that the spending actually led to declines in business investment by driving out private investors. He also said job creation was too narrowly focused in the construction industry in rural areas to give much benefit to the overall economy.

He agreed with other critics that the 1990s stimulus failed because too much of it went to roads and bridges, overbuilding this already heavily developed nation. Critics also said decisions on how to spend the money were made behind closed doors by bureaucrats, politicians and the construction industry, and often reflected political considerations more than economic. Dr. Ihori said the United States appeared to be striking a better balance by investing in new energy and information-technology infrastructure as well as replacing aging infrastructure.

Japan’s experience also seems to argue for spending heavily to promote social development. A 1998 report by the Japan Institute for Local Government, a nonprofit policy research group, found that every 1 trillion yen, or about $11.2 billion, spent on social services like care for the elderly and monthly pension payments added 1.64 trillion yen in growth. Financing for schools and education delivered an even bigger boost of 1.74 trillion yen, the report found.

I can see spending money on some of these education projects, but $80 billion over two years? Sounds to me like an invitation to massive waste. But then, this payoff to the teachers unions (who love to tinker with new ways to make our children ignorant) isn’t necessarily meant to jumpstart the economy but will pay off in the long term. And as Rahm Emanuel has said, “Why waste a crisis?” Use fear mongering to scare people into supporting a bill that spends hundreds of billions in tax monies on programs that otherwise would either not get passed or not receive half the amount earmarked for them in this stimulus bill.

Another huge outlay in this bill is money to the states. This would be funneled through a variety of departments so it is hard to put a number on the total amount but it is well over $300 billion. A lot of this will be targeted monies to education and health care programs. Some of it will be of the “no strings attached” variety which has politicians like Mayor Daley of Chicago licking his chops. Along with money for extended unemployment benefits which is needed in this economy (Note to my rightie friends: There are no jobs out there at the moment - MacDonald’s isn’t even hiring), a case can be made to include a large portion of these funds in a stimulus bill to deal with the crisis.

Here’s the problem: If Mr. Keynes is in charge of our fiscal policy - and he clearly is - what does this mean for the future?

Beyond that, proponents of Keynesian-style stimulus spending in the United States say that Japan’s approach failed to accomplish more not because of waste but because it was never tried wholeheartedly. They argue that instead of making one big push to pump up the economy with economic shock therapy, Japan spread its spending out over several years, diluting the effects.

After years of heavy spending in the first half of the 1990s, economists say, Japan’s leaders grew concerned about growing budget deficits and cut back too soon, snuffing out the recovery in its infancy, much as Roosevelt did to the American economy in 1936. Growth that, by 1996, had reached 3 percent was suffocated by premature spending cuts and tax increases, they say. While spending remained high in the late 1990s, Japan never gave the economy another full-fledged push, these economists say.

They also say that the size of Japan’s apparently successful stimulus in the early 1990s suggests that the United States will need to spend far more than the current $820 billion to get results. Between 1991 and 1995, Japan spent some $2.1 trillion on public works, in an economy roughly half as large as that of the United States, according to the Cabinet Office. “Stimulus worked in Japan when it was tried,” said David Weinstein, a professor of Japanese economics at Columbia University. “Japan’s lesson is that, if anything, the current U.S. stimulus will not be enough.”

In other words, prepare yourself for Stimulus II and probably III, IV, and V. This is the US of A and by God, we don’t do anything half-assed.

It apparently doesn’t matter that this kind of spending didn’t work in the 1930’s or in Japan in the 1990’s. But we are going to plunge ahead anyway and in what can only be termed a radical departure from sanity, we are going to ignore Mr. Santayana - who after all wasn’t even an historian - and double or triple down holding 16 while the dealer has a Jack up. Even if we win, we lose because it ain’t our money we’re betting with. And if we lose, the bottom falls out and the US probably defaults.

Santayana should have stuck to poetry and philosophy.

What conservatives have yet to do is confront the large but inescapable truth that movement conservatism is exhausted and quite possibly dead. And yet they should, because the death of movement politics can only be a boon to the right, since it has been clear for some time the movement is profoundly and defiantly un-conservative–in its ideas, arguments, strategies, and above all its vision.
(Stan Tanenhaus writing in The New Republic)

First in a series.

I hope I am forgiven by my regular readers for leaving behind arguments over stimulants, diuretics, laxatives, and other government remedies for what ails us while I return once again to the theme of making this site a “Blog of Self-Discovery” or, the “Writings of the Self-Absorbed Man” if you prefer. In truth, after more than 4 years of struggle, I am in many ways, more of a stranger in my minds eye than I was when I began this journey of self criticism; challenging everything I believe, forcing me to justify the underlying assumptions of my philosophy to my own satisfaction.

Although it should be the goal of any examined life to make such a quest a lifelong pursuit, it is a journey that is best begun when one is young, I think. At age 55, one has lived too much, experienced too much, seen too much, lived and loved and lost too much to retain the suppleness of mind that can process and absorb the terabytes of information we mainline every day. Can we recognize what all of this data is doing to us, how it is changing us, why it challenges our long and comfortably held assumptions as new insights are gleaned and new directions in thought are explored?

For those handful of you who have taken seriously my earnest but woefully inadequate attempts to put into words the “velocity of my thoughts” on the nature of man, of conservatism, and the threads of history and the evolution of man’s relationship to the state that seeks to find a complementary connection between them, please bear with me over the next few days as I attempt to explain the insights that have been granted to me recently. I hope by sharing them, some small part of the joy and satisfaction I received from the opening of new vistas, new horizons on this journey will help assuage your craving for acquiring knowledge for knowledge’s sake - learning for the simple happiness that comes from knowing.

I was pleased to discover that even at this point in my life, I could read something and have it reach out and slap me in the face with the power of the ideas contained therein. This essay by Sam Tanenhaus in The New Republic has, in one fell swoop, crystalized much of my thinking that has been taking shape over the life of this blog while connecting many of the unordered, incoherent threads of criticism through which I have vainly sought to explore my personal philosophy.

Also assisting in this process was Andrew Sullivan who has cataloged what appears to me to be a similar journey to my own on his site and in the pages of leading journals of opinion and news. I am well aware of the distaste most of the right has for Sullivan (Tanenhaus, who edits the New York Times Book Reivew, is no catch either for righties) and yet, when the filter of politics and ideology are removed, what you are left with are ideas and concepts - take them or leave them. There is much with which to disagree from both men, but rejecting their thoughts out of hand and in their totality smacks of a deliberate effort to remain ignorant - a tale too often told on the right in recent years. Not being open to new ideas and new ways of looking at the world has been our downfall both philosophically and electorally.

Tanenhaus has written what he calls “an intellectual autopsy of the movement” which dovetails with the title of his essay, “Conservatism is Dead.” What has died, Tanenhaus believes, is the post World War II strain of conservatism that grew into a “movement” in the 1950’s and ’60’s, reaching its apex, he believes, in the late 1970’s. He carefully separates this “Movement Conservatism” from the classical conservatism of Burke, Disraeli, and Matthew Arnold, seeing the movement as something of an antithesis to Burkean logic which eschewed ideology altogether in favor of a society that favored both “conservation and correction.”

The author takes us on a guided tour of the history (his version) of “movement conservatism” and where it’s failures to adhere to classical conservative thinking led to a gigantic contradiction - one I have explored in depth elsewhere - between the natural center of gravity of classical conservatism’s mandate to eschew the “totalizing nostrums” and ideological purity of revolutionary politics, and the rebellious revanchism of the Goldwater-Reagan “counterrevolutions” which sought, at bottom, to undo the New Deal and Great Society.

The story of postwar American conservatism is best understood as a continual replay of a single long-standing debate. On one side are those who have upheld the Burkean ideal of replenishing civil society by adjusting to changing conditions. On the other are those committed to a revanchist counterrevolution, the restoration of America’s pre-welfare state ancien regime. And, time and again, the counterrevolutionaries have won. The result is that modern American conservatism has dedicated itself not to fortifying and replenishing civil society but rather to weakening it through a politics of civil warfare.

One might legitimately ask what conditions led to this contradiction. It takes two sides to make a war and Tanenhaus doesn’t excuse the radical left of the 1960’s from contributing to the growth of this backlash:

As liberals unwittingly squeezed themselves into the stereotypes conservatives had invented, conservative intellectuals began to look like prophets for identifying a self-appointed “managerial elite” (Burnham’s term from 1941) that was leading a “liberal revolution” (Kendall’s, from 1963). The poor–believers in the American dream, content to struggle upward on their own–had become “a project” for technocrats intoxicated with nostalgie de la boue. In his book Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding, Moynihan–disillusioned with the programs he helped instate–ridiculed the pretensions of social scientists, “who love poor people [and] … get along fine with rich people” but “do not have much time for the people in between.” “In particular,” he wrote, “they would appear to have but little sympathy with the desire for order, and anxiety about change, that are commonly encountered among working-class and lower middle-class persons. The privileged children of the upper middle classes more and more devoted themselves, in the name of helping the oppressed, to outraging the people in between.” The absurdities of “social engineering” became sport for observers like Tom Wolfe, who satirized their excesses in Mau-mauing the Flak Catchers: “So the poverty professionals were always on the lookout for the bad-acting dudes who were the ‘real leaders,’ the ‘natural leaders,’ the ‘charismatic figures,’ in the ghetto jungle.”

This liberal overreach combined with the right’s new sophistication promised a new period in U.S. politics, one in which conservatives, fortified by Burkean principles, might emerge as the most articulate voices of “civil society,” separating out the strands of true reform, which drew on inherited values, from “liberal-left” attempts to make those values extinct. Perhaps the Great Society could be retooled, tamed into a legitimate extension of the New Deal. But, to accomplish this, the right would have to deal honestly with capitalism and its many ambiguities.

Dealing honestly with capitalism wasn’t in the cards for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was a fervent belief by the movement that entrepreneurs are gods and the “American system” was a self correcting mechanism where a level playing field for all economic actors was a a virtual given. “Bigger is better” was not necessarily a battle cry of the Movement but the dangers inherent to gigantic, international corporations to the very free markets that were enthusiastically espoused were largely ignored.

There have been harsh critiques of capitalism that have, of course, turned the tables in an equally exaggerated way and painted the businessman as a combination Beelzebub and Babbitt. How much of the Movement’s unquestioning support of capitalism was in response to the latter view espoused by many on the left to this day? Tanenhaus seems to acknowledge that the Movement’s failings were not born in a vacuum; that the whole idea of a “counterrevolution” is that there is something to counter in the first place.

So what happened? What sidetracked the movement from adopting Tanenhaus’s “Burkean principles” and becoming a partner with government in building not only a “just moral order” but a “civil society” as well?

One reason is that the most intellectually sophisticated founders of postwar conservatism were in many instances ex-Marxists, who moved from left to right but remained persuaded that they were living in revolutionary times and so retained their absolutist fervor. In place of the Marxist dialectic they formulated a Manichaean politics of good and evil, still with us today, and their strategy was to build a movement based on organizing cultural antagonisms. Many have observed that movement politics most clearly defines itself not by what it yearns to conserve but by what it longs to destroy–”statist” social programs; “socialized medicine”; “big labor”; “activist” Supreme Court justices, the “media elite”; “tenured radicals” on university faculties; “experts” in and out of government.

“A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation,” was a warning by Burke that accepting the reality of government was paramount to stability. Tanenhaus avers that the Movement ” placed an idea of the perfect society over and above the need to improve society as it really existed” which describes perfectly the Utopian moral universe of many on the right who believe only through God can America prosper and achieve the pinnacle of a perfect moral order - a world where gays would still be in the closet, abortions performed in back alleys or not at all, everyone would pull their own weight, and school children would be taught the Bible in public schools. Removing God from the equation was unthinkable because only through the Creator was true harmony possible.

It is a determinedly myopic view of modern industrialized society that has caused many, less ideological conservatives to revolt. This has led to the spectacle of the Movement imposing “litmus tests” and enforcing a stifling ideological purity, something Tanenhaus argues convincingly is very unconservative.

And it highlights perhaps the greatest problem with modern Movement conservatism: It’s lack of a coherent, positive agenda setting out what it supports that would improve a modern society. “Tax cuts, less regulation, and a strong national defense” are catch phrases and bear little on the realities of living in a 21st century industrialized democracy of 300 million people. Tanenhaus recognizes this dilemma for conservatives - that being against everything means that you can’t be for anything - and how this principle has led to the slow strangulation of the Movement over time. He tells the story of one of the lions of the old guard, Whittaker Chambers whose own intellectual journey from Communist to conservative was so consequential to 20th century thought:

But, if it’s clear what the right is against, what exactly has it been for? This question has haunted the movement from its inception in the 1950s, when its principal objective was to undo the New Deal and reinstate the laissez-faire Republicanism of the 1920s. This backward-looking program mystified one leading conservative. Whittaker Chambers, a repentant ex-communist, had passed through a brief counterrevolutionary phase but then, in his last years, had gravitated toward a genuinely classic conservatism. He distilled his thinking in a remarkable sequence of letters written from the self-imposed exile of his Maryland farm, and sent to a young admirer, William F. Buckley Jr. When their relationship began, Buckley–a self-described “radical conservative”–was assembling the group of thinkers and writers who would form the core of National Review, a journal conceived to contest the “liberal monopolists of ‘public opinion.’” Buckley was especially keen to recruit Chambers. But Chambers turned him down. He sympathized with the magazine’s opposition to increasingly centralized government, but, in practical terms, he believed challenging it was futile. It was evident that New Deal economics had become the basis for governing in postwar America, and the right had no plausible choice but to accept this fact–not because liberals were all-powerful (as some on the right believed) but rather because what the right called “statism” looked very much like a Burkean “correction.”

Chambers witnessed the popular demand for the New Deal firsthand. He raised milch cattle, and his neighbors were farmers. Most were archconservative, even reactionary. They had sent the segregationist Democrat Millard Tydings to the Senate, and then, when Tydings had opposed McCarthy’s Red-hunting investigations, they had voted him out of office. They were also sworn enemies of programs like FDR’s Agricultural Adjustment Act, which tried to offset the volatility of markets by controlling crop yields and fixing prices. Some had even been indicted for refusing to allow farm officials to inspect their crops. Nonetheless, Chambers observed, his typical neighbor happily accepted federal subsidies. In other words, the farmers wanted it both ways. They wanted the freedom to grow as much as they could, even though it was against their best interests. But they also expected the government to bail them out in difficult times. In sum, “the farmers are signing for a socialist agriculture with their feet.”

It is this schizophrenia that has marked the skein of conservatism from Taft to Bush; people actually want government to do for them, just not everyone else. And to make matters worse, they don’t want to pay for it - a singularly unhappy outgrowth of conservatives telling them on the one hand that government is the problem and on the other, showering them with tax cuts while the beneficiaries of this largess want social welfare programs to make their lives easier. No matter what legerdemain is performed, the numbers will never, ever add up to anything even approaching a zero balance. You can spout supply side nostrums from here to Christmas and not make what we spend match what we take in.

Deep down, I really think even Movement conservatives know this but are reluctant to abandon the contradiction because if they do, a chasm opens beneath their feet and the stark reality of being wrong about a fundamental tenet of Movement conservatism stares them in the face. Infallibility is another by-product of the Movement, as Tanenhaus points out, and the dreadful consequences of opening a crack in the dam might mean catastrophe if further self-examination revealed other weak points in their thinking.

Tomorrow: Small government, big government, or the right government?

I have written extensively on a man I consider one of the most brilliant conceptualists in the conservative movement, Newt Gingrich. There is little doubt that Newt drives both friends and enemies batty at times and, like all conceptualists is given to vagueness and a maddening circular logic when it comes to describing problems.

But those lefties unable to see any human being in more than one dimension fail to understand Gingrich, seeing him as some kind of partisan ogre rather than the political theorist and historian he can be when the mood strikes him. No doubt that when the partisan juices flow, Gingrich can and has been a lightening rod for liberal hate of conservatives. This was probably most true when Newt was a GOP backbencher in the early and mid 1980’s and Republicans in the House were nearly somnolent, allowing Democrats to run roughshod over them. Virtually accusing Speaker Tip O’Neil of being complicit in communist atrocities in Nicaragua did not endear him to the left and his subsequent role in Clinton’s impeachment while Speaker himself no doubt made him an inviting conservative punching bag for liberals.

That being said, there is no one who has a better grasp of “The Big Picture” among politicians right or left. But listening to Gingrich is dangerous because the threads of his logic are so clear and riff so easily from one to the next that he can hypnotize the listener with the power of his presentation. His grasp of history, his ability to weave a narrative that traverses the past, present, and future can leave one breathless - until you realize that his conceptualizations, while impeccably logical, don’t go anywhere. Ideas and observations have no purpose, no destination. He rarely offers solutions and when he does, they are high concept dissertations that are long on rhetoric but short on practical, real world applications.

One of his oldest friends, ex-Congressman Vin Weber:

“I never saw a lot of crackpot ideas. I saw a lot of good ideas. But there was difficulty in assessing a cost-benefit ratio. Even if every idea is good, resources are limited. With Newt, it didn’t matter if we were overreaching, we had to do everything.”

A staffer noted that “He would always get people started on a project or a vision, and we’re all slugging up the mountain to accomplish it. Newt’s nowhere to be found…He’s gone on to the next mountaintop.”

Gingrich is afflicted with the same disease that brought down another brilliant conceptualizer in politics Adlai Stevenson. Stevenson set liberals on fire with the suppleness and power of his intellect but his problems in taking the next step and putting those concepts into a framework that was politically actionable had the Kennedy’s dismissing Adlai as a lightweight. That feeling of disdain persisted right on up to the Cuban Missile Crisis when, after proposing the solution that inevitably became the basis of agreement between the Soviets and the US - removal of the Jupiter Missiles from Turkey and a “no-invasion” pledge for Cuba - Stevenson was lambasted by Bobby Kennedy as “an appeaser” and there was serious thought given to replacing him at the UN (Bobby calling anyone an appeaser was a joke dripping with irony considering his father was the world’s #1 appeaser of Hitler.).

In the end, Stevenson performed more than adequately at the UN and history has judged him correct with regard to the eventual concession on the Turkish missiles - a fact not revealed about the crisis until fairly recently due to the Kennedy’s fears that the luster would be lost on JFK’s “victory” over Khrushchev in the crisis if it became known we gave up the strategically relevant Jupiters for missiles in Cuba. There was also the immediate matter of the 1962 mid term elections where Kennedy did not wish it known he had folded on the Jupiters thus giving the Republicans a club to beat him with.

Gingrich and Stevenson are similar in that they could mesmerize an audience with their brilliance but when it came to offering solutions to the problems they so exquisitely described, they were already on to talking about the next problem that needed addressing. Such men do not make good executives which is why any talk of Newt in 2012 scares me. Still, this piece in The Hill today gives us some vintage Newt in a real tour d’horizon performance:

“The world is much more difficult than any American realizes, and it’s likely to get worse before it gets better,” Gingrich said at a breakfast sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor.

From an economic system in tatters to dangerous enemies abroad and a culture of corruption among politicians from coast to coast, Gingrich said President Obama faces truly mountainous tasks. The country, he said, will require “changes on a scale that is going to drive the establishment crazy.”

Gingrich voiced disappointment with the economic stimulus package moving through the Senate this week, saying any package should focus on boosting small businesses rather than on bailing out big corporations and banks.

“What they’re trying to do now is bail out the guys who failed, and I think that’s very dangerous,” Gingrich said, comparing the latest stimulus plan with bailout legislation signed by former President Bush. “That’s not change you can believe in. That’s more of the same.”

Facing increasingly well-educated generations of Indian and Chinese citizens, Gingrich also called for an overhaul in the nation’s education system. While high schoolers in India get four years of physics training, “this country is aggressively preparing for the 1956 Olympics,” Gingrich said.

Warning that foreign challenges are mounting just as quickly as domestic concerns, Gingrich pointed to Mexico, where violence fueled largely by drug cartels has exploded, and Pakistan, where terrorists roam freely in some parts of the country, as two of the nation’s top concerns.

“We are piling up risks, and one morning one of those risks is going to break loose,” he said.

Gingrich never concerns himself with solutions, believing that identifying the problems clearly and concisely is enough - at least for him. But if he wants to be a force in presidential politics, he is going to have to get used to the idea that most people prefer a candidate who can both articulate what’s wrong and propose common sense solutions to fix it. To date, Newt is more enamored with that “next mountaintop” rather than slogging along, doing the grunt work of pushing solutions forward.

It is perhaps less glamorous to labor to bring about change rather than simply announce that change is necessary as Obama is finding out. In the case of both men, their success or failure will depend on how each of them perceives the enormous challenges we are facing and goes beyond the atmospherics of electoral politics to enter the world of policy making where the power of one’s ideas count only as much as the viability of solutions those ideas bring forth.

So far, neither Obama or Gingrich has set forth any convincing solutions to the problems they both have so brilliantly defined.

I am not a well read man - or, at least, not as well read as I should be. Nor do I claim any extraordinary intellectual gifts. I regularly fail the test of possesing a “well ordered mind” in that my insights at times lack depth and even coherence. I admit to emotionalism when logic and reason are called for. And I lack the discipline to rigorously examine concepts that do not generally conform to my own, narrow view of the world.

I guess that makes me human. And a blogger. “Humility is truth,” said my favorite philosopher Erasmus. Would that all of us take those words to heart and perhaps even etch them onto our monitors. “A man’s got to know his limitations,” said my favorite movie character Harry Callahan. That adage should be branded on our hearts to remind us that an examined life is a fulfilling life.

One can immediately see the connection between the 16th century Dutch humanist and Dirty Harry. If we give ourselves permission to not have all the answers, it liberates our minds from the slavery of formalism and allows us to freely explore ideas that we otherwise might reject out of hand or worse, adopt without question as dogma.

If, at times, it seems to some of my regular readers that my conservatism appears “inconsistent,” it is only because the principles upon which my political philosophy is based might be unchanging but the ideas that animate those principles are in a constant state of flux. For instance, I believe in the conservative principle of a just moral order being necessary for a society to thrive. But the idea of what constitutes a “just moral order” has changed for me - from one informed by a belief in a diety to one informed by a belief in the ultimate wisdom of man to manage his own affairs.

Does being an atheist make me any less of a conservative? Some would say yes, judging by the outcry over Obama including “non-believers” in his inuagural address. But I think I share most of the same basic principles of conservatism with conservatives of faith. The difference is in how we internalize those principles through our own, individual and unique life experiences and beliefs. There’s more than one way to skin a cat as there is more than one way of seeing the world through the prism of bedrock conservative principles - immutable and unchanging as those principles are.

I have taken some pains to explain my personal thoughts because the subject is so important. I don’t claim to have all the answers or have any better insight into the great issues of the day than anyone else. But to my mind, the question of whether we in the United States will be living an “easier life” in a European style welfare state were the poor and middle class are dependent on government for many things they could or should be doing for themselves or enjoying an “earned life” in a state that promotes individual responsibilty and self sufficiency will be answered in the next 4 to 8 years. And as it stands now, conservatives haven’t come up with a philosophical or political answer to the idea that whatever the people want from government, they should receive even if, as is many times the case, individual liberty is the price to be paid.

The transformation of American society from one that values liberty to one that embraces dependency has taken longer than any other western nation. This has largely been due to American conservatisms steadfast refusal to abandon what Kirk calls the “voluntary community” in favor of the stifling hand of collectivism. Where once only the poor felt the deadening hand of statism which created a permanent underclass, destroyed the family, and smother ambition, now the middle class is in line to be granted similar attention. Health care, education, even important life choices such as whether to open one’s own business or questions about child rearing are soon to be made at least partly matters of state and not wholly questions to be resolved by individuals and families.

Liberals do not like to discuss the loss of freedom their collectivist ideas entail. But we are clearly in an era where choices are to be limited for the middle class in order to make life less of a burden . And any society that limits choice, limits freedom.

But isn’t this what the people want, what they are demanding? How can you live in a democracy and tell people that government acting to make your life easier is wrong and that the alternative - struggling to make the right choices for yourself and your family and where not choosing wisely might cost you - is the preferred, indeed the “American” way of self sufficiency and taking responsibility for your own life?

There is nothing noble in suffering but I would posit the notion that independence is, in and of itself, enobling and in any society that values freedom, the slide into dependency cannot be allowed without a recognition of what we lose as well as what is gained. There are 400 years of struggle behind us to create a society where the individual took responsibility for his own well being and that of his family, his fortunes rising or falling based on his native abilities and talents. The reward was “an earned life” of personal satisfaction and a feeling of self worth and accomplishment that you simply cannot experience if you depend on government for as much as we do today. Or as much as we will in the near future if more of our freedoms are given up in the name of personal security and comfort.

What do we care how our ancestors lived? This is, after all, the 21st century and the need for a large government is self-evident. A nation of 300 million people have legitimate needs that no one except government can fill. We can’t walk out our door and shoot a deer to feed our families. Nor can we build a cabin to house them. And few of us have the skill necessary to make our own clothing. There’s no alternative to modern medicine if we get sick - a hugely expensive proposition as we all know. Beyond that, we must be protected from those who would abuse the freedoms they’ve been given to deliberately pollute the land and water, make dangerous products, place workers in unnecessarily hazardous conditions, and take untoward advantage in the marketplace.

On the one hand, we are presented with the abstract - the ideal as it were - of self sufficiency and independence while on the other the real world problems of living in an industrialized democracy. But recognizing the value of possessing as much independence as possible within that reality seems to me to be an unargued proposition. We don’t say “this far and no farther.” We don’t even think it. Government is a juggernaut with a life of its own, gathering momentum over the last half century like a snowball rolling down a hill, gathering speed and size, until it is impossible to control only get out of its way.

Does any of this matter? I believe it should. The issue is choice not the size of government. Restraining government growth would be nice but it is not necessary in order to restrain it from taking away our choices. I would say to my friends on the left that everything you wish to accomplish for the middle class and the rest of us that will unburden our lives and supposedly make them easier also involves a price that we pay in independence of action. And it disturbs me that I hear nothing about how that affects the manner in which liberty is diminished and we become that much farther removed from our roots as a people who valued freedom more than life itself.