The party line of the Democrats and their fellow travellers is that the Tea Party Movement is fueled by racism. The moral scum who make these absurd and scurrilous allegations ought to be ashamed of themselves. I name names and go into details in other posts which you will find in the Race and Leftism categories. But just to verify what I already had excellent reasons for believing, namely, that there is no racist motivation to speak of behind the Tea Party protests, I decided I'd better attend one, which I did today. I visited one of the lesser gatherings of the day here in the Valley of the Sun, one held at Freestone Park, Gilbert, Arizona. The main speaker was Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio. There was no racism apparent in the signs, the speakers, or the people I observed and spoke with. No racism, no extremism, no xenophobia, no overheated rhetoric, no incitements to violence. Just trenchant political dissent in the good old liberty- and free speech-loving American style, something that leftists don't understand, laboring as they do under the strange conceit that they own dissent, as if dissent were something inherently leftist. Here are some amateur shots of the event by your humble correspondent.
Category: Politics
Intellectuals’ Flight From Politics
A 1947 essay by Irving Howe. It is perhaps not unnecessary to say that to link is not to endorse. Remember my motto: Study everything, join nothing.
The Racism Charge: The Left’s Attempt to Shut Down Debate
In The Faith of a Liberal, Morris Raphael Cohen writes that "The touchstone that enables us to recognize liberalism is the question of toleration . . . ." Now if toleration is the touchstone of liberalism, there is nothing liberal about contemporary liberals. They should therefore not be called 'liberals' but leftists. There is nothing tolerant about them. They show no interest in open discussion, free inquiry and the traditional values of classical liberalism. And they are poor winners to boot. With the passage of the health care bill they scored a victory. So why all the querulous fulmination against the Tea Party patriots to whom the lefties love to refer as 'teabaggers'? Why, in particular, the routinely repeated charge of 'racism'?
This is now the party line of the Dems and toe it they will as witness the otherwise somewhat reasonable and mild-mannered Alan Colmes in this segment, Political Hatred in America, from The O'Reilly Factor. Colmes begins his rant around 6:07 with the claim that "what is driving this [the Tea Party protests] is racism." It looks as if Colmes is under party discipline; otherwise, how could so intelligent and apparently decent a man say something so blatantly false and scurrilous? That something so silly and vicious should emerge from the mouth of a twit like Janeane Garofalo is of course nothing to wonder at. What idiocies won't HollyWeird liberals spout? But Alan Colmes? If we remember that for the Left the end justifies the means, however, things begin to fall in place. The Left will do anything to win. Slanders, smears, shout-downs . . . all's fair in love and war. Leftists understand and apply what I call the Converse Clausewitz Principle: Politics is war conducted by other means.
When leftists hurl their 'racism' charge, just what are they alleging? Two possibilities.
A. One is that the arguments brought against Obama's policies are not arguments at all but mere expressions of racism and bigotry. But this 'possibility' is beneath refutation. Make a simple distinction. There is Obama and there are his policies. Obama is black, or rather half-black and half-white, but his policies are not members of any race. White leftists advocate the same policies. Arguments against the policies are not attacks against the man. Need I say more?
B. The other interpretive possibility is that the conservative arguments are genuine arguments, not mere expressions of racism and bigotry, but that the can be refuted by claiming that the people who advance them are all, or most of them, racists. But of course it is egregiously FALSE that all or most or even many of these people are racists. Only some of them are. But then there are 'bad apples' in every bunch, so this fact is not significant.
But even if we suppose, contrary to fact, that every single conservative who argues against Obama's policies is a flaming racist, that has no bearing on the validity or invalidity of the conservative arguments. To think otherwise is to commit the genetic fallacy. Again, need I say more?
Welcome to Civil War
To Dennis Prager's "The bigger the government the smaller the citizen," I add my "The bigger the government, the more to fight over." The more the government takes over, the more they violate the individual liberty of the citizens, the more they insinuate themselves into every aspect of your life, the more protests, the more lobbying, the more lawsuits, the more money and time wasted on pointless bickering. I floated my observation months ago and recent events demonstrate its accuracy. Brace yourself for ever larger doses of acrimony as the months and years wear on. Some are speaking of civil war. It's a Civil War: What We Do Now.
David Harsanyi's The Mugging of Personal Freedom is worth reading.
Bernard Goldberg on Health Care
I enjoy Bernie Goldberg's commentary on The O'Reilly Factor and I generally agree with it. But I just heard him say something that is not quite right. He sees the leftist-conservative disconnect on the recent health care legislation in the following terms: for leftists it is a moral and civil rights issue whereas for conservatives it is an economic issue. Leftists are for it because they think citizens (and presumably anyone who resides in this country whether legally or illegally) have a RIGHT to it, whereas conservatives are against it because the country cannot afford it. (If you listened to that preternatural dumbass Nancy Pelosi last night, you heard her lame attempt to 'derive' the positive right to health care from the genuine constitutionally grounded negative rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.)
But Goldberg's is a superficial analysis. It is true that we cannot afford it. Hell, we cannot afford the entitlements already in place. See here for a breakdown of medicare expenditures. But the conservative objection is not merely an economic one. It too is a moral objection: it is morally wrong, among other things, for the government to force its citizens, on pain of being heavily fined, to buy a privately-sold product such as health insurance. It is an affront to the liberty which is our birthright as Americans. Think about it: they are going to force you to buy something from a private company, 'for your own good' whether you can afford it, want it, or need it. Now either you see what is wrong with that or you don't. If you don't then I put you down as hopeless.
This is a liberty issue before it is a 'green eyeshade' issue. In this respect it is no different from taxation. It too is a liberty, and hence a moral, issue long before it is an economic issue. But individual liberty is one of those things that 'liberals' don't understand (unless it is the liberty to be a cultural-polluter) — which is one of the reasons we should retire the word 'liberal' and call leftists what they are. We contemporary conservatives have a much better claim to the 'liberal' label.
Goldberg made a mistake tonight that conservatives routinely make. They fail to see that they do in fact occupy the moral high ground, or perhaps I should say that they are strangely reticent about proclaiming the morality of their position. When they put the issues in economic terms alone they play right into the hands of their opponents who are all too eager to paint them as mean-spirited, moneygrubbing protectors of their supposed economic privileges.
Liberty took a beating yesterday. That's the main thing. The economic considerations, important as they are, are secondary. Bill and Bernie need to 'wise up' to use Bill's expression. This war is about ideas first and money only second.
Now the Battle Begins in Dead Earnest
Speaker Pelosi really outdid herself last night in point of mendacity. She referred to the opening sentence of the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence: "We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness . . ." She then tried to link yesterday's successful leftist takeover of the health care system to the principles and values of this great document, suggesting that there is a right to health care. How's that for chutzpah? What is despicable about her and her ilk is their mendacity: they know full well that their welfare state principles are radically at odds with the founders' conception of limited government, but they refuse to state clearly to the American people what they stand for.
But it ain't over til it's over and these lying leftists will have hell to pay. The battle is just beginning. Some commentary: Victor Davis Hanson, Newt Gingrich, Varadarajan, Trende.
Ron Paul on the 2010 Census
On this issue, he talks sense.
Should Conservatives Take the High Road When Opposing the Left?
This just over the transom from a regular reader:
Your recent, small quip about the possibility of accusing liberals of racism had me curious of something. Clearly you think that many on the left use unfair or unjust means of persuasion (Attempting to label their opponents as racists, for example.) And I've often heard it lamented that liberals tend to fight tooth and nail, using every fair and unfair advantage they can, in a political dispute (see the possibilities of the 'nuclear option' or bypassing a vote in this health care debate, etc.) while conservatives tend to be reluctant to.
So here's my question. Do you think conservatives should mimic liberals in this regard – fight tooth and nail, use every means available, including calling their opponents racists, etc,? Or do you think conservatives should (regardless of pure pragmatic effectiveness) always take the high road? Doubly so since conservatives actually believe there is a real high road to take?
I wish I had a good answer to this excellent question. First of all, I agree to the central presupposition of the question, namely, that leftists will do and say anything to win, no matter how outrageous. (Here is a recent example of the widespread race-baiting and slander that even prominent leftists routinely engage in.) They do it because they think the end justifies the means, and because of their conviction that, as the Bard has it, "all's fair in love and war." Leftists think of themselves as good and decent people who are battling valiantly against the dark forces of bigotry, racism, religious fanaticism, science-denial, etc. And because they see themselves in a noble fight against people who are not just wrong, but evil, they feel entirely justified in doing whatever it takes to win.
The essence of it is that the Left accepts and lives by what I call the Converse Clausewitz Principle: Politics is war conducted by other means. (Von Clausewitz's famous remark was to the effect that war is politics conducted by other means.) The party that ought to be opposing the Left, the Republicans, apparently does not believe that this is what politics is. This puts them at a serious disadvantage.
David Horowitz, commenting on "Politics is war conducted by other means," writes:
In political warfare you do not just fight to prevail in an argument, but rather to destroy the enemy's fighting ability. Republicans often seem to regard political combats as they would a debate before the Oxford Political Union, as though winning depended on rational arguments and carefully articulated principles. But the audience of politics is not made up of Oxford dons, and the rules are entirely different.
You have only thirty seconds to make your point. Even if you had time to develop an argument, the audience you need to reach (the undecided and those in the middle who are not paying much attention) would not get it. Your words would go over some of their heads and the rest would not even hear them (or quickly forget) amidst the bustle and pressure of everyday life. Worse, while you are making your argument the other side has already painted you as a mean-spirited, borderline racist controlled by religious zealots, securely in the pockets of the rich. Nobody who sees you in this way is going to listen to you in any case. You are politically dead.
Politics is war. Don't forget it. ("The Art of Political War" in Left Illusions: An Intellectual Odyssey Spence 2003, pp. 349-350)
It is clear how Horowitz would answer my reader's question: Because politics is war, conservatives, if they want to win, must deploy the same tactics the lefties deploy. Joe SixPack does not watch C-Span or read The Weekly Standard. He won't sit still for Newt Gingrich as this former history professor calmly articulates conservative principles. He needs to be fired up and energized. The Left understands this. You will remember that the race-hustling poverty pimp Jesse Jackson never missed an opportunity to refer to Gingrich's "Contract with America" as "Contract ON America." That outrageous slander was of course calculated and was effective. Leftists know how to fight dirty, and therefore the 'high road' is the road to political nowhere in present circumstances.
The fundamental problem, I am afraid, is that there is no longer any common ground. When people stand on common ground, they can iron out their inevitable differences in a civil manner within the context of shared assumptions. But when there are no longer any (or many) shared assumptions, then politics does become a form of warfare in which your opponent is no longer a fellow citizen committed to similar values, but an enemy who must be destroyed (if not physically, at least in respect of his political power) if you and your way of life are to be preserved.
As I have said before, the bigger and more intrusive the government, the more to fight over. If we could reduce government to its legitimate constitutionally justified functions, then we could reduce the amount of fighting. But of course the size, scope, and reach of government is precisely one of the issues most hotly debated.
Coming back to my reader's question, I incline toward the Horowitz answer, though I am not comfortable with it. You will have to decide for yourself, taking into consideration the particulars of your situation. Some of us are buying gold and 'lead.' I suspect things are going to get hot in the years to to come, and I'm not talking about global warming. Things are about to get interesting.
Primum Non Nocere
"First of all, do no harm." Not just for medicos. Also for the benighted politicos who would 'fix' health care. Their approach is a bit like fixing a roof leak by tearing down the house and building a new one.
And don't you just love the way these idiots use 'fix' and broken'? Talk like a first-grader and you'll think like one too. And these fools are our rulers?
Progressives and the Growing Dependency Agenda
Liberal Condescension
Why are liberals so condescending? Especially when they are so frightfully wrong about so frightfully much? Gerard Alexander's WaPo article is an outstanding piece of analysis. Liberal disdain is expressed "in the form of four major narratives about who conservatives are and how they think and function."
Balık baştan kokar
Balık baştan kokar is Turkish for "The fish stinks from the head." Quite apropos of the Obama administration the corruption, incompetence, and stupidity of which boggles the mind. He's done everything wrong. But there is hope: Obama's fiscal irresponsibility and liberty-destroying socialist malfeasance has suffered a massive rebuke in, of all places, the People's Republic of Taxachusetts. Here are the precinct-by-precinct statistics of Brown's win over Coakley in the Bay State. (Perhaps it should be called the Pay State.) The results for Cambridge precinct show a whopping 84% for Coakley (DEM) and a paltry 15% for Brown (GOP). No surprise there, of course. You know what Cambridge is home to.
How Bob Dylan Got Unpoliticized
The story is told in My Back Pages. "Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now."
How Joan Baez Got Politicized
David Hajdu, Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Farina and Richard Farina, 2001, p. 147:
Dylan nestled his guitar on his lap and began strumming a C chord in three-quarter time. He repeated it until the small room hushed, then he slid into the opening of "With God on Our Side." By the end of the song's nine verses, Joan Baez was no longer indifferent to Bob Dylan or irked by his crush on her sister Mimi. She was startled by the music she heard and fascinated with the fact that the enigma in the filthy jeans had created it. "When I heard him sing 'With God on Our Side,' I took him seriously," said Joan. "I was bowled over. I never thought anything so powerful could come out of that little toad. It was devastating. 'With God on Our Side' is a very mature song. It's a beautiful song. When I hear that, it changed the way I thought of Bob. I realize that he was more mature than I thought. He even looked a little better." Social consciousness as an aphrodisiac? [. . .]
Dylan played a few more of his topical songs, including "The Death of Emmett Till," "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall," and "Masters of War." They astounded Spoelstra, who had not kept up with his old Village cohort's development as a songwriter, and they seemed to overwhelm Baez. (In one interview, Baez recalled "The Death of Emmett Till," not "With God on Our Side," as the Dylan song that changed her view of him and prompted her to take up protest music; "I was basically a traditional folksinger," she said. "I was not 'political' at that time. When I heard 'Emmett Till' I was knocked out. It was my first political song. That song turned me into a political folksinger."