Daily Archives: 17 December 2012

Another Party?

Posted on by
Reply

Speaker of the House John Boehner (R, OH) is now joining the growing chorus of…Republicans…who are begging for surrender on the economy: he’s offering tax rate increases, albeit on Americans with more than $1 million of annual income.  This will be an abject failure: President Barak Obama, standing tall with the Republicans now on their knees in front of him, has no need of accepting this.  In fact, he has an excellent chance of succeeding with a gambit that seemingly failed in the debt ceiling negotiations of 2011, when he made a last minute demand for even more taxes: with Republicans now begging for mercy, he can, at this late hour, add to his demands—yet more taxes beyond the $1.6 trillion he’s currently demanding (the offered reduction to $1.4 trillion was never serious).

Given this abject failure, should we walk away from the Republican Party and form a third national party, one more honest and courageous and better rooted in the principles of conservatism—the 18th Century Liberal principles on which our nation was founded and which underlie our prosperity and power?

I’m of two minds on this.  On the one hand, with the Republican Party as currently constituted now empirically in shambles and a failure, we need a national party capable of retrieving our nation from the nearby disaster of Europe-like social and political failure, and from the disaster waiting to be imposed politically and militarily later by our enemies.

The Tea Partiers have the national reach, but remain politically naïve.  They are, however, learning.  Forming a new national party would represent a strategic retreat for the principles of individual liberty and responsibility and of the small, limited government that is the only thing that can help preserve these.  However, sometimes retreat is necessary in order to be able to reengage from a position of greater strength.

On the other hand, the infrastructure of an existing national party is no mean thing.  The primary things wrong with the Republican Party are the RINOs in positions of leadership, who are too willing to sacrifice principle for political expediency however well intended the sacrifice, and their utter inability to make their case in the practical terms of interest to their constituents—and to their neighboring Progressives’ constituents.

The Tea Partiers have made great inroads in the last few years in inserting greater conservatism into the GOP, along with inserting people who will actually hew the GOP to those principles.  Their success was demonstrated in 2010, and confirmed in 2012, other than at the Presidential level.  Their success was both confirmed and expanded down-ticket in the state houses in those 2012 elections.

The Tea Partiers, though, whether in a new national party or through further recovery of the Republican Party, will need to communicate, also.  It isn’t sufficient to make tempestuous—or mild—speeches on the floor of an empty House or Senate and hope the Progressives’ news outlets will give it coverage.  Nor are digital media, important though they are, sufficient.  The new or recovered party needs to get out among the people—in their neighborhoods, their community centers, their diners, their living rooms, and in those of their Progressive constituents’—and explain in practical terms the values of conservative principles.  For this, the Professional Communicators of the GOP need not apply.  They’ve shown their level of competence already.

And the leaders, and membership, of this new or revised national party must understand that this is a struggle for our nation’s soul.  There will be conflict.  There will be demands for compromise of principles.  But they must also understand that if a man has no principles for which he’ll sacrifice, he has no principles.  That means that, sometimes, we have actually to sacrifice, not just bleat.  The present crop of Republican leadership seem to have lost sight of that last, critical part.  And it’s been fatal.

Now is Not the Time

Posted on by
Reply

…to surrender.  Yet that’s what Peter Berkowitz advocates Conservatives do in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed [emphasis added].

Conservatives should…come to grips with two entrenched realities that pose genuine challenges to liberty, and whose prudent management is critical to the nation’s well-being.

The first entrenched reality is that big government is here to stay.  This is particularly important for libertarians to absorb.  Over the last two hundred years, society and the economy in advanced industrial nations have undergone dramatic transformations. And for three-quarters of a century, the New Deal settlement has been reshaping Americans’ expectations about the nation-state’s reach and role.

…

In these circumstances, conservatives must redouble their efforts to reform sloppy and incompetent government and resist government’s inherent expansionist tendencies and progressivism’s reflexive leveling proclivities.  But to reform sloppy and incompetent government and resist government’s inherent expansionist tendencies and progressivism’s reflexive leveling proclivities reflects a distinctly unconservative refusal to ground political goals in political realities.

Conservatives can and should focus on restraining spending, reducing regulation, reforming the tax code, and generally reining in our sprawling federal government. But conservatives should retire misleading talk of small government. Instead, they should think and speak in terms of limited government.

Yet the only way to “reform sloppy and incompetent government and resist government’s inherent expansionist tendencies and progressivism’s reflexive leveling proclivities” is to shrink the government back to a manageable size—to regain the small, limited government we used to have and that is created in the documents of our social compact.  Limited government and small government are inseparable; they are two sides of the same coin.  Yes, yes, monarchies can be small governments, too.  But they’re not limited.

Accepting the status quo and declining to seek to “reform sloppy and incompetent government and resist government’s inherent expansionist tendencies and progressivism’s reflexive leveling proclivities” by shrinking—limiting—that over-large and out of control government is most assuredly an unconservative thing to do; it is to accede to the modern Liberal’s goal.

Berkowitz seems not recognize the role reversal that has occurred.  The modern Conservative is the 18th Century Liberal—the champion of limited government that protects and enhances individual liberty, individual responsibility, and the resulting national prosperity.  The modern Liberal is the 18th Century Conservative, a man who favored government control over men’s lives on the theory that both the common man was too stupid to see to his own ends and that Government—the King—Knows Better.  The only difference between the modern Liberal and that 18th Century monarchist is the accepted superficial structure of the Big Government that Knows Better.

Berkowitz’ second entrenched reality,

…this one testing social conservatives, is the sexual revolution, perhaps the greatest social revolution in human history[]

is wholly irrelevant without the individual freedom and responsibility available only with small, limited government.  With government determining what our lives should be like and how we should live them, things like the sexual revolution and our responses to them also are for governments to determine.

Even under the shadow of big government and in the wake of the sexual revolution, both libertarians and social conservatives, consistent with their most deeply held beliefs, can and should affirm the dignity of the person and the inseparability of human dignity from individual freedom and self-government. They can and should affirm the dependence of individual freedom and self-government on a thriving civil society, and the paramount importance the Constitution places on maintaining a political framework that secures liberty by limiting government.

Indeed, but a modern Conservative is not a libertarian—and he never was.  Moreover, the “social conservative” is a modern invention, defined less by social mores than by opposition to the mores of the modern Liberal.  And the affirmation of the need of civil society as one means of guaranteeing “individual freedom and self-government” and that “political framework that secures liberty by limiting government” separately and together demand an actual limiting of government—its size and the reach of its powers.