Blogs For Victory

Interesting:

Four Republican-leaning groups with close ties to the party’s leadership in Congress — Crossroads and its “super PAC” affiliate, the Congressional Leadership Fund, and Young Guns Action — raised a combined $7.7 million in 2013. By contrast, four conservative organizations that have battled Republican candidates deemed too moderate or too yielding on spending issues — FreedomWorks, the Club for Growth Action Fund, the Senate Conservatives Fund, and the Tea Party Patriots — raised a total of $20 million in 2013, according to Federal Election Commission reports filed on Friday.

“This is by far the biggest nonelection year we’ve ever had,” said Matt Hoskins, the executive director of the Senate Conservatives Fund. “It shows how committed people are to electing true conservatives and to advancing conservative principles.”

The golden rule of politics is, of course, “whoever has the gold, makes the rules”.  How long can the establishment GOP really retain control of the party when the non-establishment part of it is pulling in more money?

Democrats have been gleeful ever since 2008 over the GOP “civil war” – I haven’t viewed it in those terms.  It believe that what is happening is that the Republican Party is becoming a party of Jacksonians.  This would, no doubt, surprise and amuse that old Whig Lincoln who helped to build the Republican Party, but I don’t think he’s be dismayed by it, either.  We are a long way, after all, from the Republican Party of the 1860’s, just as we are from the Democrat Party of that era.  Things change and ever since FDR routed the Civil War era GOP in 1932, there has been no political party which has broadly expressed the old, Jacksonian principals of limited government.  Both parties have been broadly in favor of government, with just different ideas about just whom is to benefit the most from government largesse – though with both parties tending, in the last 20 years, to favor the rich and the poor over the middle class.

Jackson, it should be recalled, was for States’ rights…but not in an absurd sense, as shown when he smacked down South Carolina over nullification.  Jackson was in favor of free enterprise, but not to the idiotic limit of just allowing the rich to grind the poor.  Jackson’s power emerged out of the State militias rather than out of the traditional financial (in the North) or planter (in the South) Establishments.  Jackson would fight a man to the death to preserve his rights, but then adopt that enemy’s son and raise him as his own – this neatly encapsulates the American ideal.  Our modern Jacksonians – even if they don’t know they are – are also for States’ rights; for free enterprise (but getting more and more disgusted with crony capitalism); and for the right of the individual to live his or her life however they wish.  These are the general political ideals which are fueling the new forces in the GOP – and the forces which now look to take over the whole enterprise.

To be sure, the final part of this battle for the GOP might result in handing the Democrats just one more victory in 2016 – but the bottom line is that the old GOP Establishment will have to knuckle under to the TEA Party (broadly defined), or go over to the Democrats.  I think most will knuckle under – after all, any group which can raise $20 million in an off year is a force to be reckoned with…and a force which is probably going to win it all, in the by and by.

From Volokh Conspiracy:

…One other point that I find really interesting and important about Haidt’s work is his findings on the ability of different groups to empathize across these ideological divides. So in his book (p. 287) Haidt reports on the following experiment: after determining whether someone is liberal or conservative, he then has each person answer the standard battery of questions as if he were the opposite ideology. So, he would ask a liberal to answer the questions as if he were a “typical conservative” and vice-versa. What he finds is quite striking: “The results were clear and consistent. Moderates and conservatives were most accurate in their predictions, whether they were pretending to be liberals or conservatives. Liberals were the least accurate, especially those who describe themselves as ‘very liberal.’ The biggest errors in the whole study came when liberals answered the Care and Fairness questions while pretending to be conservatives.” In other words, moderates and conservatives can understand the liberal worldview and liberals are unable to relate to the conservative worldview, especially when it comes to questions of care and fairness.

In short, Haidt’s research suggests that many liberals really do believe that conservatives are heartless bastards–or as a friend of mine once remarked, “Conservatives think that liberals are good people with bad ideas, whereas liberals think conservatives are bad people”–and very liberal people think that especially strongly. Haidt suggests that there is some truth to this…

We see this all the time.  First off, anyone who is right of center in any meaningful sense can usually with 100% accuracy determine what a liberal will think on any issue before the liberal is queried.  This is why we don’t need to tune in to CNN, read the New York Times editorial page or watch the President’s State of the Union Address.  We already know what they are going to say. There is never a surprise in a liberal.

Secondly, we know that liberals will not know what we think about any particular issue, even after they have asked us.  Whatever we say will just go through the liberal’s mental filter and come out as us saying whatever the liberal believed we should have said, given that we are conservative.  The most recent example of this absurdity is the way liberals treated Huckabee’s recent comments  –  whatever one wishes to think about them, all Huckabee said as that liberals treat women as if they are unable to control their libidos and need Uncle Sugar to take care of them.  Once that went through the liberal filter, it came out in liberal thinking that Huckabee thinks that women cannot control their libidos and need Uncle Sugar to take care of them.  I can assure one and all that if Huckabee is still prominent 20 years from now, liberals will be condemning him for having once upon a time said that women cannot control their libidos.

If you read the whole article linked from Volokh, you’ll see that it starts out describing how people originally come to their views – that we tend to take up views which meet our predispositions and then tend to concentrate on evidence which confirms us, rejecting that which denies our view.  This is probably true to a certain extent.  I can see why I was open to the conservative argument when I first started paying attention to politics in the late 1970’s – Carter’s liberalism was such a clear failure that I’d have had to be an idiot to think that liberalism had the answers.  Any particular liberal out there can provide us with reasons why liberal twaddle appealed to them at the start.  But I think there is this difference – when you start entering in to conservative thought, you’ll find a variety of views right from the get-go.  Unlike the mindlessness of liberalism, conservatism has dissidents.

And because we have dissidents, we are forced to argue and when you argue (if you are to be at all successful) you have to get in to the mindset of your opponent.  You have to accord their point of view some respect and assume that they want the same good end as you, even if their means of doing so are different (and perhaps incorrect).  Liberals don’t have dissidents – the powers that be of liberalism decree that this or that is the only acceptable view and everyone must conform to it – and everyone who doesn’t is slandered as a hate-filled bigot.   Naturally, all of us would urge liberals to try and understand our views, but that won’t really be successful – a liberal who enters in to the worldview of a conservative in order to understand it would very swiftly cease to be a liberal.  Not saying that they’d go out and become TEA Party activists the next day, but they’d cease to be liberal because they’d cease to automatically accept whatever the liberal powers-that-be decree…and thus they would be ostracized by fellow liberals, and most people cannot tolerate ostracism (not for nothing did the ancient Greeks give you a choice between drinking hemlock and going in to exile; some choose hemlock as the preferable option).

What all this means is don’t expect liberals to be kind or merciful: they can’t be and remain liberals.  To remain liberals they must remain ignorant of and fearful about us.  Just keep that in mind as we battle it out.

And, as you might guess, he’s in favor of the experts:

…I fear we are witnessing the “death of expertise”: a Google-fueled, Wikipedia-based, blog-sodden collapse of any division between professionals and laymen, students and teachers, knowers and wonderers – in other words, between those of any achievement in an area and those with none at all. By this, I do not mean the death of actual expertise, the knowledge of specific things that sets some people apart from others in various areas. There will always be doctors, lawyers, engineers, and other specialists in various fields. Rather, what I fear has died is any acknowledgement of expertise as anything that should alter our thoughts or change the way we live…

The author, Tom Nichols, presents himself as, “…an expert. Not on everything, but in a particular area of human knowledge, specifically social science and public policy.”  The first question that leaps to my mind is, “how do you attain ‘achievement’ in public policy?”.  I know that when I go to a doctor that I’m going to get some doctoring done – a blood pressure test, a cut stitched up, or some brain surgeried upon.  How do I know I’ve got some “public policy” when I go to an expert in public policy?  Now, don’t get me wrong, Mr. Nichols is clearly an intelligent and well-informed man and his article well repays reading – but the one thing certain about Mr. Nichols is that he’s no democrat.  He’s an elitist – someone who has gathered a certain amount of knowledge attached to a credential and thus thinks his views should carry more weight than people without the certain knowledge and, especially, the credential.  Here’s the worst thing I read:

...There was once a time when presidents would win elections and then scour universities and think-tanks for a brain trust; that’s how Henry Kissinger, Samuel Huntington, Zbigniew Brzezinski and others ended up in government service while moving between places like Harvard and Columbia…

While Mr. Nichols is clearly well-informed, I doubt that he’s really thought the matter through.  The lauding of Kissinger, alone, reveals that.  What are Kissinger’s greatest achievements?  Detente with the USSR, opening relations with the People’s Republic of China and negotiating the end of America’s involvement in Vietnam.  Somewhere on a trip between Harvard and Columbia, I guess, Kissinger decided that the USSR was eternal and had to be kowtowed to, that Mao’s China could be a partner for us and that scuttling the Republic of Vietnam were in our best interests.  Fortunately, shortly after Kissinger stopped being our national expert, we managed to get that bone-headed, non-expert Ronald Reagan who at least managed to dismantle the USSR, even if he couldn’t undo our defeat in Vietnam, nor turn our policy towards China in a rational manner (which would be to have nothing to do with that beastly, anti-human government).

Experts brought us the United States Federal Reserve.  Experts decided that we should enter full-blown, provide-them-everything-we-can-even-if-we-stinted-our-own-forces alliance with the USSR against Germany, without a reciprocal requirement of the USSR to immediately enter in to the war against Japan.  Experts shoved us in to the Korean War and then settled for a stalemate with enemies who disposed less than a 10th of the power of the United States. Experts got us in to Vietnam (and experts lost us Vietnam). Experts brought us Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, affirmative action, the EPA and $17 trillion in debt.  Had the experts consulted the average American on any of these things, none of them would have come out as they did.  Think about it – ok, American people, I want you to decide: 33,000 dead over three years for a stalemate in Korea, or 10,000 dead in a year for complete victory?  You pick.  The experts picked the former.

If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.  That was from Chesterton, explaining that in the very important things in life – whether to marry, to bear children, to fight a war – it is of no use going to an expert.  The expert won’t know the right answer because he lacks sufficient knowledge to decide.  No matter how much time he spends in Harvard and Columbia, no matter how many credentials he acquires, he simply will not know enough.  The most brilliant economist ever produced in a university won’t know the answer to even the simple question of how much spaghetti should be produced next month.  And yet he’ll propose to tell us how to organize our whole economy.

This does not mean the average bumpkin will get it right, either, of course.  But if the average bumpkin is making his own decisions, then he’s likely only to affect – for good or ill – himself and those around him.  The expert proposes to decide for society and thus it is all of society which pays the price if the expert gets it wrong, as he almost invariably does for lack of sufficient knowledge.  But, also, I think the bumpkins will more often get it right than wrong.  A bumpkin, for instance, instinctively knows that if you’re going to fight a war, you fight it all the way with everything you’ve got.  It is true that a bumpkin might be demagogued in to a war – but he won’t be demagogued in to a war where he’s forbidden to use all of his power to fight it…or that he’s got to be more careful about offending opinions than the lives of his comrades.

I do understand the distaste Mr. Nichols has for the opinions of the ignorant and the way they can be shouted so loud because of the internet.  They irritate me, as well.  Nothing quite gets on the nerves so much as to listen to people who clearly know nothing making absurd statements about an issue.  But some of the most absurd statements these days come from people with the credentials from the prestige universities.  I understand the desire that the terms of the debate be set by just a few and that we all argue only within those parameters.  This is called adhering to the party line.  But patient people, people with a bit of love for the people; leaders who are any good, at all, learn how to humor people and get their views across even in the face of the most mind-boggling idiocy.  No great king, President or Prime Minister of the past worked with a collection of geniuses.  He worked with people, which means a certain percentage were fools and some of them quite destructive fools, at that.  There is an appeal in exiling the fools but we face two insuperable obstacles: we can’t define “fool” with sufficient precision and without the fools the truly great cannot achieve their highest potential.  Paradox of human life – it is only by the frictions of dealing with a wide variety of people, some of whom seem to go out of their way to deliberately hamper action, that we can find the leaders who will be able to thread their way through crisis to victory.

Is there, then, no place for an expert?  Depends.  When I’m heading in for brain surgery then I very much want an expert.  Same thing when I want the leaking faucet fixed.  But in the grand scheme of things and in the largest issues of life, then the experts must just join the argument and do their best with everyone else.  If an expert feels he isn’t getting his way, then it might not be so much a flaw among the morons, but a flaw in the expert’s argument.

In the end, I trust to democracy – the rule of the people.  This is not an arrogant assumption that I know better than the man with more education, but that I know what’s best for me – and even if I’m wrong, it is still vastly better for me to decide for myself than to supinely accept some allegedly expert opinion in contravention of my own sense of the matter.  Experts, after all, vigorously assured me that we had to bail out the banks in 2008-2009 in order to save the economy – my common sense rebelled against it back then and my common sense has been proven correct in the event.  The banks were bailed out, but the economy didn’t get better.  I felt instinctively that if someone made a bone-headed investment decision and faced bankruptcy, then he’d better just deal with his bankruptcy and work for the best.  I’ll bet that if the question were put that way in 2008, the vast majority of the non-experts would have agreed that the failures must endure the results of their actions.  Experts disagreed and they won the argument.  How is that working out for us?

Here we are in 2014 and our nation is a wasteland, brought to this state of affairs by experts bamboozling us in to accepting a load of nonsense about how things work.  To be sure, we average dimwits played our despicable role in this – too many of us, too many times, were eager to accept an expert opinion if it was couched in terms of “no pain, lots of gain”.  But the con artist is not let off because his mark is a sucker.  As we move forward and try to find the ways and means of fixing the problems and restoring America, I think our best course of action is to just go with plain, old common sense – the sense of the average person, even if he’s at a TEA Party demonstration with a misspelled sign.  He might not be educated, might not know all the nuances of the issue, but if his basic thrust is “leave me alone to take care of me and mine”, then I think he’s on to something…and his desire should take precedence over even the very best written policy paper from a credentialed expert.