Posts with the tag 'Political philosophy'
Victor Davis Hanson notes:
I think we are slowly (and things of course could change) beginning in retrospect to look back at the outline of one of most profound bait-and-switch campaigns in our political history, predicated on the mass appeal of a magnetic leader rather than any principles per se. He out-Clintoned Hillary and followed Bill’s 1992 formula: A young Democrat runs on youth, popular appeal and charisma, claims the incumbent Bush caused another Great Depression and blew Iraq, and then went right down the middle with a showy leftist veneer.
Second, we will come, through the Obama prism, to see that Bush’s sins were largely the absence of rhetorical skills, unfortunate shoot ‘em braggadocio in 2003-4, the federal response to Katrina, and a certain administration haughtiness about the problems in Iraq between 2002-6, but not most of his policies that included prescription drugs, No Child Left Behind, AIDs relief in Africa, the removal of two odious regimes, and consensual governments in their places, a framework at home to stop 9/11-type terrorism, and good working partnerships with key allies abroad such as Britain, Germany, France, Italy, India, et al, and a pragmatism in handling rivals like Russia and China.
In short, given all that, Obama’s victory (predicated on painting Bush as a Hoover/Nixon redux), more so even than perhaps a John McCain’s, may do more for Bush’s reputation that anyone ever imagined. And the Mumbai mess (over there, not here) will only empasize all this, as an array of old 9/11-era experts who used to warn us about radical Islam, then, in the subsequent respite at home, screamed that Bush fabricated a war against terror against bogeymen, and now in their third manifestation are paraded once more out to warn us about?—why, yes, radical Islam!
Indeed - and, in fact, I’m sticking by my prediction that no matter who won in 2008, we will have cause to miss President Bush in the by and by, and probably not too long after he leaves office. Good, bad or indifferent, President Bush passed the main test of leadership: the ability to make a decision and carry it through. Most people like to dance around the edges when analyzing politics and power - as for me, I deal with the reality, and that mostly revolves around the supreme difficulty in making a decision, especially a decision upon which lives will be at risk.
The great leaders and captains of history are all those who made a decision - One has only to contrast the two British governments of the World Wars. The first had Churchill in it, but a man unwilling to make decisions at the top, and thus the British war effort of the First World War drifted into deadly failure only modestly redeemed by a victory of exhaustion at the end of the war. The second had Churchill at the top and able to make decisions and carry them through, and thus the British war effort in the Second World War had clear direction, much lower cost and eventual overwhelming victory.
If we had had a ditherer on 9/11/01, things would have gone a lot differently over the past 7 years, and almost certainly for the worse. It took courage to launch us into Afghanistan - that mattress grave of Empire; it took courage to secure our nation against outside attack; it took courage to liberate Iraq; it took courage to order the Troop Surge once the liberation of Iraq had transformed into an anti-insurrectionary struggle. Again and again President Bush has shown the courage to make decisions - and trust me on this, even if you think they were bad decisions, a bad decision is better than no decision.
Now we’re going to get Obama at the top - the man who voted “present” a very large number of times. The man who threw his whole early political life under the bus when it became a millstone ’round his political neck. The man who promised hope and change and has appointed the dregs of the worn out and corrupt Clinton Administration. It may be that Obama - blessed with youthful energy and a keen appreciation for politics - will rise to the occasion. It is to be prayed that he will - but, in the end, the only thing Obama may end up doing is making us long for President Bush.
Tags: Political philosophy
November 30th, 2008
We conservatives, of course. It is my contention that when you are beaten in a political fight, you usually deserve it. John Hawkins notes:
Edmund Burke once said, “All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.”
The corollary to that statement here in the United States could be, “All that was necessary for the Democrats to triumph was for conservatives to do nothing.”
It’s fashionable to blame George W. Bush, the Republicans in Congress, and the out of touch, inside-the-beltway pundits for the ascendancy of Barack Obama and the left — and they certainly deserve the largest portion of the blame.
However, it’s worth taking the time to ask: what responsibility does the conservative movement — you, me, and all our conservative friends — have for this disaster?
Quite a bit actually.
We were too slow to challenge Republicans in D.C., including George Bush, when they veered from a conservative course. Yes, we complained, but not loudly enough and too late in the game.
We were also too complacent and too willing to stand pat on an out of date agenda. Consider the irony, for example, of conservatives using an income tax cut as a primary selling point for our domestic agenda when more than a third of the American public doesn’t pay income tax.
Along the same lines, we’ve been too content to advocate policies like the Fair Tax that couldn’t be gotten through Congress, or to merely poke holes in the Democratic agenda on issues like socialized medicine without truly pushing viable alternatives.
Conservatism needs to adapt to changed circumstances, that is for sure - we can’t go forward with the quiet dogmas of the past but must think anew and act anew. Conservatism has been, is and always will be the answer - but the applicability of conservatism changes as circumstances change. As a for-instance, we’ve won the tax battle - leftist Obama campaigned on a promise of tax cuts and hammered McCain very hard on the claim that his health care plan amounts to a tax increase. It is now time (and, indeed, has been time for years) for us to move beyond the mere debate over keeping taxes low and get into a debate on what should be taxed and when.
On and on down the conservative agenda, it is time to recast our efforts in light of the fact that we by and large won the battles of 20 years ago - we live in the economic and political house Reagan built for us and even the most ardent of liberal Democrats really propose no more than tinkering around the edges of it, plus socialized medicine. But we can bring the fight to them - provided we learn to be insurgent, and get fresh blood into our senior ranks, and propose bold, new initiatives to increase freedom, faith, family and prosperity.
I’m up for this debate about the future of conservatism, but I do issue one warning: let us not get into backbiting about who did what to whom. Such internecine battles only please our liberal opponents - clean slate, and lets start building a new conservatism for the 21st century.
Tags: conservative truth, Political philosophy
November 26th, 2008
Interesting:
In her seminal book, The Future and Its Enemies, Virginia Postrel writes about the real political divide — not left versus right, but what she calls stasists versus dynamists. The former fear change and want to use government power to minimize it, if not eliminate it. The latter accept that improvements in the human condition require change by definition, and understand that the best way to ensure it is to allow individuals the freedom to make choices, with consequences, both good and ill, to be borne by them.
By these definitions, both presidential candidates in this election were largely stasists.
Can’t say that I agree with that, but is in a fascinating concept - fascinating, to me, in the indicator of how widespread sheer misunderstanding is in our modern world. We’ve been far too long on this road, and its time we got off it.
As a campaign theme, “change” worked great for Obama. In reality, of course, Obama proposes very little of the change he ostensibly campaigned on, but we are in for some radical changes that were little mentioned during the election (we will get, for instance, a lot more abortion funding out of Obama even though that wasn’t mentioned on the campaign trail, but we won’t get a major shift in Iraq policy, even though Obama was on and on about it). Please observe one thing about the late, unlamented Presidential campaign - neither candidate talked about doing what is right. Curiously enough, I happened to hear Ralph Nader just before election day and in his own kooky but sincere way, he was talking about doing what was right, as he saw it. His tiny vote total can be taken as an indicator of what always trying to do the right thing can do to you, at times.
Change is a word which masks what is really going on - an attempt to avoid the hard and fast, “this is right or this is wrong” of it all. And don’t get me wrong here; John McCain is as guilty on this score as Obama. The jury is out on President Bush, and may not come in for a century. Former President Clinton is the archetype of the leader who will change daily in order to avoid doing what is right and thus risky. Taking one thing with another, we’ve had only a few President’s who were determined to do what was right all or most of the time. Reagan was one; so was Woodrow Wilson, Teddy Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln and, of course, George Washington.
This is not to say that these men made no mistakes - each of them has a large number of rather stunning mistakes in the performance of their office. But the key to all of them was their burning desire to do what was right and the unflinching way they adhered to what was right, as best as they could determine it. And if you think we’re poor in having so few such leaders, please observe that in the entire rest of the world in the entirety of human history, the number of leaders who also tried to do what was right is, perhaps, even less than we’ve had in our 225-odd years. St Louis of France, for certain. Confucious, though he wasn’t in charge. Ashoka of India. Mandela. Christina Alexandra of Sweden, perhaps. Not much, to be sure.
To fault Obama and McCain for not doing what most people don’t do is unfair. On the other hand, to call for perish-the-hindmost change at all costs is insane. What we want is leaders who will try to discover the right thing to do, and then go on and try to do it, come what may. If doing the right thing calls for the complete overturning of a particular institution, then we must do it. If doing the right thing calls for rigid adherence to the existing rules of an institution, then we must do it. Right is right and wrong is wrong, and if you’re not actively seeking to do the right thing, then you run a high risk of doing the wrong thing, even if unintentionally.
Tags: Political philosophy
November 18th, 2008
The phrase is in our Declaration of Independence - used to describe how our ancestors had resisted the attempts of King George to invade the rights of the people. Can you imagine anyone in America uttering such a phrase in 2008? And yet, there it is - in the primary American document. We are, in a sense, afraid to use the words our ancestors wrote and pledged their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor to defend. And, lets also understand that words like “sacred” and “honor” are, while not banned as completely as “manly”, are certainly rarely used. What has become of us?
This concern over words used has been turning over in my mind for some days now - I was reading a book by G. K. Chesterton where he discussed the issue of birth control. The thing is, he called it as it was, and although I am 43 years old and fairly well informed, I had never approached the issue from Chesterton’s angle - the correct angle, as it is. You see, it isn’t the control of birth which is desired by “birth control” advocates, but the prevention of birth. Birth Control would actually be the process whereby we control who is allowed to give birth and when - but, of course, that is not what is wanted. What is wanted, by the advocates, is a smaller number of births. But they call it birth control, and even we who are opposed to the basic concept call it birth control…we’ve all bought into a cowardly way of avoiding the real issue because to confront the real issue would require a great deal of courage and a sublime disdain of the modern pieties.
Our whole society has become unmanned, and this is revealed in the way we deal with issue after issue. If three men who live on the street are, respectively, insane, alchoholic and shiftless, we don’t call them what they are - they are all “homeless”. Abortion is a “choice”; men who suffer from the awesome mental and spiritual weight of battle suffer from “post-traumatic stress disorder”; rape is “sexual assault”; we can murder by degrees (he isn’t so bad, he only committed second degree murder…please un-remember that the person is first degree dead, all the same)…we can no longer, in America, oppose tyrants with manly firmness…we’re not allowed to. To be manly in our firmness is forbidden…blow up our citizens, rape our daughters, butcher our unborn children - we can’t be manly in our opposition. We are to ask politely if those oppressing us will please leave us alone.
The first step in the recovery of our society is going to have to be the recovery of our manliness - our ability, even amongst women (you ladies aren’t off the hook here, ya know?), to call things as they are and demand they stop in clear, ringing tones which leave no doubt as to where we stand. The late, great Pope John Paul II advised us early in his pontificate that we should be not afraid - and that is, indeed, what we must be. And JPII, by the way, resisted with manly firmness the depraved spirit of our current age. Politely and with love, he yet managed to make himself clear and stand firm for what is right - and that is the model we must take.
Take that first step - without being rude or seeking opportunities to stir up ill will, yet always state clearly and concisely exactly what you believe is happening. Let us start to be as manly as our ancestors, and make them proud we are their descendents.
Ed. Note: This first appeared over at Battle Born Politics last year.
Tags: Political philosophy
July 4th, 2008
