Politics – Page 54 – Maverick Philosopher

Federalism and Governmental Competition

Conservatives understand that competition is good. It breeds excellence. And contrary to what some liberals think, competition that breeds excellence is not opposed to cooperation but presupposes it. We need more competition, not less, and we need it at the level of government not just in the business world and in our private lives.

How is governmental competition possible? Via federalism. See Competition is Healthy for Governments, Too.

Obama and his ilk oppose federalism. Obama must go. And with him his ilk.

The Illiberalism of Contemporary Liberals

When I attack liberals it is always contemporary liberals that I have in my sights. I myself am in several ways a classical liberal. What I object to in contemporary liberals, or 'progressives' as they like to call themselves, is their extremism and their illiberalism. Peter Berkowitz has an excellent article on progressive illiberalism.

There is more true liberalism in today's conservatives than in today's 'liberals.'

Obama on Constitutional Law: Did He Lie or Is He Just Ignorant?

Asked recently whether SCOTUS would uphold the Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare) or strike it down as unconstitutional, President Obama replied, "I'm confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress." Strong majority? Unprecedented? As a former law professor, Obama must know that what he said was false. Now a false statement is not the same as a lie. For a false statement to be a lie it must be made with the intention to deceive. But since the statement in question is one that one would reasonably expect a former law professor to know is false, then it is reasonable to suspect a lie on Obama's part. Thomas Sowell concludes that "he is simply lying."

James Taranto rather more charitably maintains that "The president is stunningly ignorant about constitutional law."

Peter Wehner in a seeming synthesis of Sowell and Taranto opines that Obama "jumped the shark."

Daniel Henninger piles on.

According to John Fund, "There appear to be few limits on how far President Obama will distort the facts."

Obama is a disaster for the country. He is ignorant/dishonest not only with respect to constitutional law, but also about the debt crisis.

The Voter Photo Identification ‘Issue’

Some positions are so absurd as to be beneath refutation. To respond reasonably to the unreasonable lends them a veneer of credibility to which they are not entitled. Mockery, derision, and ridicule are often much more appropriate and effective. Oftentimes, all it takes is a cartoon to refute a stupid liberal. By the way, this voter ID 'issue' — pseudo-issue, actually — is a perfect example of the lunacy of contemporary liberalism. But it is worse than lunacy given that the motive (not the reason, they have none) is to encourage voter fraud. For a leftist, the end justifies the means. Does it take fraud to win? Then you commit fraud.

In the Arena

Say what you want about politicians, they are in the arena taking the heat, under their own names, unlike the wordslingers, too many of them hiding behind pseudonyms, who snipe from the sidelines:

It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat. (Theodore Roosevelt, "Citizenship in a Republic," Speech at the Sorbonne, Paris, April 23, 1910.)

Why are Conservatives Inarticulate?

From the mail:

My two cents on why so many people who hold conservative views come across as inarticulate: most of the values that ordinary, conservative people live by do not require much reflection or explanation. After all, how much justification does a man need for being loyal to his friends, not cheating his customers, and being kind to his neighbors? It is the man who seeks to undermine those values who needs the rhetorical dodges and obfuscations. It takes little mental skill to tell a lie, but it takes quite a bit of deviousness to construct a justification for abolishing the principle of honesty altogether . . . .

My correspondent supplies part of the explanation. For those with a conservative bent there is a defeasible presumption in favor of traditional practices, beliefs, and values. They place the burden of proof on those who would question the traditional practices, beliefs, and values. For the conservatively inclined there is no need to justify that loyalty is good, cheating is wrong, being kind is better than being cruel, and that killing infants is murder. Feeling, with some justification, no need to justify his practices, beliefs, and values, the conservative rarely acquires the skills to do so, and so comes across as inarticulate and unreflective to those skilled in the verbal arts. Of course, I am talking not about conservative intellectuals but about ordinary conservative folk and their political and talk-show representatives.

What my correspondent may not appreciate, however, is that it is not enough to have the right views and values; one must also know how to articulate and defend them when they come under attack. And this is where conservatives are woefully inadequate. How many conservatives could say what I said in the preceding paragraph? Can you imagine George W. Bush speaking of "a defeasible presumption in favor of traditional practices, beliefs, and values"? Even if he could get the words out without stumbling, could he explain what they mean? His defense of marriage consisted of the repetition of the flat-footed, "Marriage is between a man and a woman." A gratuitous assertion, however, calls forth a gratuitous counter-assertion. His mere assertion, unexplained and unjustified, makes him appear a bigot to those who find opposition to same-sex marriage 'discriminatory.' What he ought to have done is provide a brief justification of why the state is involved in marriage in the first place and why same-sex 'marriage' is not something the state should support. But could he do that off the top of his head? I doubt it. He's got the right view, but he can't defend it. And that's the problem.

Or consider Charlie Sykes the talk-show host I mentioned the other day. He claimed that the reasoning in support of the moral acceptability of infanticide was "academic gobbledygook." When you say something like that about careful and clear reasoning, you make yourself out to be a dumbass, allergic to distinctions and nuances. You come across as a rube, a redneck, a hick, a yahoo, an anti-intellectual, an Archie Bunker, a beer-swilling, sports-watching, tobacco-chewing ignoramus, a benighted denizen of fly-over country. Many others who got worked up over that infanticide article claimed that it was 'illogical,' thereby betraying a failure to understand what logic is. They thought that since the conclusion is morally outrageous, which of course it is, the reasoning to it had to be incorrect. But that's an elementary mistake since one can reason correctly to a false conclusion.

A local talk show guy, Mike Gallagher I think it was, was fulminating againt the article in question and came out with the remark that 'medical ethics' is an oxymoron. Well of course it isn't. What he was trying to say was that a medical ethicist who argues that infanticide is morally permissible cannot be an ethicist . . . .

Or consider my man O'Reilly. He often points out that we live in a capitalist country. It's true, more or less. But citing a fact does not amount to a justification of the fact. What O'Reilly may be incapable of doing is to provide arguments including moral arguments in favor of capitalism. That is what is needed in the face of libs and lefties who, when told that we live in a capitalist country, will respond, "Well then, let's change it!"

But having a nasty streak of anti-intellectualism in him, O'Reilly would probably dismiss such arguments as mere 'theory' in his Joe Sixpack sense of the term.

Conservatives, by and large, are doers not thinkers, builders, not scribblers. They are at home on the terra firma of the concrete particular but at sea in the realm of abstraction. The know in their dumb inarticulate way that killing infants is a moral outrage but they cannot argue it out with sophistication and nuance in a manner to command the respect of their opponents. And that's a serious problem

To beat the Left we must out-argue them in the ivory towers and out-slug them in the trenches. Since by Converse Clausewitz politics is war conducted by other means, the trench-fighters need to employ the same tactics that lefties do: slanders, lies, smears, name-calling, shout-downs, pie-throwing, mockery, derision. And now I hand off to Robert Spencer commenting on Andrew Breitbart.

Politics is war and war is ugly. We could avoid a lot of this nastiness if we adopted federalism and voluntary Balkanization. But that is not likely to happen: the totalitarian Left won't allow it. So I predict things are going to get hot in the coming years.

York on Breitbart: Culture is Upstream from Politics

Here:

Breitbart knew instinctively, as people in Washington and most other places did not, that movies, television programs, and popular music send out deeply political messages every hour of every day. They shape the culture, and then the culture shapes politics. Influence those films and TV shows and songs, and you’ll eventually influence politics.

The Left had known that for generations, but on the Right, so many people in politics thought only about politics. To Breitbart, that was folly.

The Feckless Mr. Obama Did What?

He apologized for the unintentional burning of some copies of the Koran. Unbelievable and disgusting. If we can't dump this incompetent come November, it may be all over for this great nation. 2012 is indeed a watershed election year.

Wise up, conservatives. Don't hang back because Romney is not a true conservative. He isn't, of course: he's a wishy-washy, flip-flopping pretty boy. He's going to get shot up like hell in the crossfire from the Tea Party and the Occupy-X malcontents. But he's electable and better than Obama. He's the best we got.

Politics is a practical business. It is always about the lesser of evils, except when it is about the least of evils. It is not about being ideologically pure. It is about accomplishing something in a concrete situation in which holding out for the best is tantamount to acquiescing in the bad. Political choices are forced options in roughly William James' sense: he who abstains chooses willy-nilly. Not choosing the better amounts to a choice of the worse.

Each of the Republican contenders has drawbacks. But any of them would be better than Obama. Even Ron Paul.

Never forget: Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien. (Voltaire) "The better is the enemy of the good." The thought is perhaps better captured by "The best is the enemy of the good." In an imperfect world it is folly to predicate action upon perfection. Will you hold out for the perfect spouse? Then you will remain alone. And if you yourself are less than perfect, how can you demand perfection in others?

Meditation on this truth may help conservatives contain their revulsion at their lousy choices. Obama, who has proven that he is a disaster for the country, got in in part because of conservatives who could not abide McCain.

To expect perfection in this fallen world is to succumb to the sort of pernicious utopianism that characterizes leftists.

On Calling Obama a Socialist

It is a tactical mistake for libertarians and conservatives to label Obama a socialist. For what will happen, has happened: liberals will revert to a strict definition and point out that Obama is not a socialist by this definition. Robert Heilbroner defines socialism in terms of "a centrally planned economy in which the government controls all means of production." To my knowledge, Obama has never advocated such a thing. So when the libertarian or conservative accuses Obama of socialism he lets himself in for a fruitless and wholly unnecessary verbal dispute from which he will emerge the loser.

It is enough to point out that the policies of Obama and the Democrat Party lead us toward bigger government and away from self-reliance, individual responsibility, individual liberty, and sound fiscal policy.

It is even worse to label him a 'communist.' Every communist is a socialist, but not every socialist is a communist. If our president is not a socialist, then a fortiori he is not a communist. It is intellectually irresponsible to take a word that has a definite meaning and turn it into a semantic bludgeon. That's the sort of thing we expect from leftists, as witness their favorite 'F' word, 'fascist,' a word they apply as indiscriminately and irresponsibly as 'racist.'

The Stupider the Citizen, the More the Justification for Governmental Overreach

If this Daily Mail story is to be believed, a 17 year old English girl has subsisted on little more than McDonald's chicken nuggets and fries for the past 15 years. "The factory worker – who says she has never tasted fresh fruit or vegetables – had to be taken to hospital earlier this week when she collapsed after struggling to breathe."

Stories like these are used by nanny-staters to justify ever more government intrusion. But the more the government intrudes, the less self-reliant and childish the people become — which justifies even more intrusion. Or as Dennis Prager likes to say, "The bigger the government, the smaller the citizen." To which I add, "The bigger the government, the more to fight over." So if you want a politics increasingly polarized and embittered, agitate for more government control and less individual liberty.

The 2012 Election Circus

For commentary on the passing scene, Victor Davis Hanson is hard to beat. Here is his latest. Bill Keezer deserves thanks for keeping me apprised of what flows from Hanson's pen. Hanson on Ron Paul:

For someone so savvy about the nature of the disaffected, why did Dr. Paul believe that in the South he could go on rants about U.S. foreign policy that centered around American culpability? Of course, South Carolinians would be receptive to arguments that U.S. expense abroad earned only ingratitude or was counter-productive; but when Paul suggests that we earned hostility on 9/11 by our foreign policy, did he not expect to be widely repudiated? (e.g., So the country that saved Muslims in Kuwait, fed them in Somalia, helped them against the Russians, and bombed a European Christian country to keep them alive in Bosnia and Kosovo had a worse record on Islam than China and Russia, who were not attacked on 9/11?)

Paul has an eerie ability to win over almost anyone on matters of debt and financial insolvency, and lose them in a nano-second when he turns to foreign policy, where he loses clarity and conflates American gullibility with American culpability. A conservative might think it is unwise right now to attack Iran, but he does not wish to be told to look at the situation through the creepy Iranian regime’s eyes.

Hanson on Obama:

What a strange fellow: damning the 1% only to hire three-in-a-row multimillionaire “fat-cat” ex-Wall-streeters as his chiefs-of-staff, while he lives a life indistinguishable from those he caricatures. Obama brags of killing bin Laden, without the slightest concession that he employed protocols to do it that he once smeared, or that he got the troops home for Christmas, without a peep that he followed the Bush-Petraeus plan and not his own that once called for complete flight by March 2008. Poor conservatives: should they praise him for get-real flip-flops or damn him for his hypocrisy and the damage he once did as a critic of what kept us safe? He is a figure right out Aristophanes, a polypgramon scoundrel, a demagogic genius, who can bomb Libya without congressional authority, claim it was not military action — and all the while keep the Michael Moore left silent if not proud of their guy’s duplicity, while begging the right to dare argue that Libya is not better off without the nightmare of Gaddafi.

The man's brilliant and penetrating. (Those are distinct attributes. And of ocurse I'm talking about Hanson.)

Ron Paul and Libertarian Extremism

Ron Paul made a strong showing in Iowa last night despite his coming in third behind Santorum (second) and Romney (first). But there is no way that Paul will receive the Republican nomination. His irresponsible foreign policy positions alone disqualify him. You may disagree with that, but most agree with me, and that includes the better pundits such as Krauthammer. So Paul's electability is zero. It is too bad because Paul and libertarians generally have many good ideas which serve as correctives to the socialist drift of the country and can help us move back in the right direction towards limited government, self-reliance, and individual responsibility. But libertarians cannot seem to control their tendency towards extremism. This is why the Libertarian Party will always be a losertarian party. Paul had the good sense to join the GOP, but he hasn't had the good sense to rein in the extremism that seems bred-in-the-bone with libertarians.

Paul is right that the the U.S. is overextended abroad, but he can't seem to make the point in a moderate and nuanced way. He has to say, foolishly and irresponsibly, that Iran is no threat. And so he comes across as a crazy old man who cannot be trusted with the power of the presidency. His 19th century isolationism was already outmoded in the 19th century.

The extremism of libertarians is connected with their being doctrinaire. It is good to be principled but bad to be doctrinaire. It requires the subtlety of the conservative mind to understand the difference and the dialectic between the two, a subtlety that is often lost on the adolescent mind of the libertarian who wants nice clear exceptionless principles to cling to.

I'll give an example of how libertarians, most if not all, are extreme and doctrinaire. Individual liberty is a very high value. One of the pillars of this liberty is the right to private property. The defense of private property against collectivists is essential to both libertarian and conservative positions. So far, so good. The tendency of the libertarian, however, is to absolutize the right to private property. He has a hard time grasping that principles and values often butt up against competing principles and values that also have a serious claim on our respect. So he cannot see that well-crafted eminent domain laws are right and reasonable. He cannot see that there is something we can call the common good which is in tension with the right to private property.

A second example is how libertarians typically absolutize the value of liberty while ignoring the claims of such opposing values as security and equality. For more see my post, Liberty and Security.

Good, Better, Best

From the mail bag:

Is the way you interpret Voltaire's saying the way it was originally intended? I'm probably wrong here, but I always took the saying to mean this: a willingness to settle for what is "better" makes it likely that one won't acquire what is "good".

Good, better, best. Positive, comparative, superlative. "The best/better is the enemy of the good" means that oftentimes, not always, the pursuit of the best/better will prevent one from attaining the good. The point is that if one is not, oftentimes, willing to settle for what is merely good, one won't get anything of value. So I suggest that my reader has not understood Monsieur Voltaire's aperçu.

Example. It will come down to Romney versus Obama. If libertarians and conservatives fail to vote for Romney, on account of his manifold defects, then they run the risk of four more years of the worthless Obama. Those libertarians and conservatives will have let the better/best become the enemy of the good. They will have shown a failure to understand the human predicament and the politics pertaining to it. He who holds out for perfection in an imperfect world may end up with nothing.

You give the example of a spouse: try to hold out for a perfect wife, and you'll never marry at all. An example that would fit my reading would be, if one settles for a wife who's merely better than most of the available options, then one's apt to settle for a wife who isn't good. Sometimes it's better to refuse all the available options.

I agree that it is sometimes better to refuse all the available options. If the choice is between Hitler and Stalin, then one ought to abstain!

Maybe a better example would be, imagine I need to install plumbing in my house. Crappy plumbing is almost always going to be better than no plumbing. But should I (say, out of laziness) really settle for that, on the grounds that 'well, it's better than the nothing I had'?

Of course not. Voltaire's point is not that one should settle for what is inferior when something better is available. The point is that one should not allow the pursuit of unattainable perfection to prevent the attainment of something good but within reach. Suppose someone were to say: I won't have any faucets or fixtures in my house unless they are all made of solid gold! You will agree that such an attitude would be eminently unreasonable.

The Voltairean principle as I read it is exceedingly important in both personal life and in politics.

Perhaps you know some perfectionists. These types never accomplish anything because they are stymied by the conceit that anything less than perfection is worthless. I knew a guy in graduate school who thought that a dissertation had to be a magnum opus. He never finished and dropped out of sight.

In politics there are 'all or nothing' types who demand the whole enchilada or none. Some years back, when it looked as if it would be Giuliani versus Hillary, some conservative extremists said they would withhold their support from the former on the ground that he is soft on abortion. But that makes no bloody sense given that under Hillary things would have been worse.

The 'all or nothing' mentality is typical of adolescents of all ages. "We want the world and we want it . . NOW!"

Le Mieux est L’Ennemi du Bien

Attributed to Voltaire. "The better is the enemy of the good." The thought is perhaps better captured by "The best is the enemy of the good." In an imperfect world it is folly to predicate action upon perfection. Will you hold out for the perfect spouse? Then you will remain alone. And if you yourself are less than perfect, how can you demand perfection in others?

Each of the Republican contenders has drawbacks. But any of them would be better than Obama. Suppose Romney is nominated. He's a wishy-washy, flip-flopping pretty boy. But he's electable and better than Obama.