Politics – Page 62 – Maverick Philosopher

Political Action and the Principle of Le mieux est l’ennemi du bien

Attributed to Voltaire. "The best is the enemy of the good."

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.

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. His not choosing the better amounts to a choice of the worse.

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Ronald Reagan’s Role in the Fall of the Wall

Twenty years today the Berlin Wall came down. Anthony R. Dolan in Four Little Words explains the difference between a leader like Reagan and an appeaser like Obama. Excerpt (emphasis added):

Reagan had the carefully arrived at view that criminal regimes were different, that their whole way of looking at the world was inverted, that they saw acts of conciliation as weakness, and that rather than making nice in return they felt an inner compulsion to exploit this perceived weakness by engaging in more acts of aggression. All this confirmed the criminal mind's abiding conviction in its own omniscience and sovereignty, and its right to rule and victimize others.

Accordingly, Reagan spoke formally and repeatedly of deploying against criminal regimes the one weapon they fear more than military or economic sanction: the publicly-spoken truth about their moral absurdity . . . . This was the sort of moral confrontation, as countless dissidents and resisters have noted, that makes these regimes conciliatory, precisely because it heartens those whom they fear most—their own oppressed people. Reagan's understanding that rhetorical confrontation causes geopolitical conciliation led in no small part to the wall's collapse 20 years ago today.

The current administration, most recently with overtures to Iran's rulers and the Burmese generals, has consistently demonstrated that all its impulses are the opposite of Reagan's. Critics who are worried about the costs of economic policies adopted in the last 10 months might consider as well the impact of the administration's systematic accommodation of criminal regimes and the failure to understand what "good vs. evil" rhetoric can do.

Political Discourse as Unavoidably Polemical: the Converse Clausewitz Principle

A regular reader writes:

I would urge some caution withyour recent political cartoon. This is only because you may unjustly be treated with less seriousness than your blog deserves if someone wants to peg you in a certain way. I'm certainly not being PC or suggesting that political satire is problematic — it's primarily a tactical point.

I couldn't agree more, of course, that liberalism (and, in particular, it's diseased and mutated zombie baby of multiculturalism) is attempting, even if unwittingly, to destroy its host body. The cartoon is a very powerful one, indeed!

Point taken. It's a tricky issue. But I think it is important to let our opponents know that we will oppose them. There is no way not to be unfairly pegged by the nimrods and numbskulls of the Left. So conservatives shouldn't worry about it. Janeane Garofalo's comment that the 'tea-baggers' as she derisively refers to them are racists and rednecks is, I am afraid, representative of the scum-baggery widespread on the Left. We should stand up to them and speak the truth with courage.

Would that I could avoid this stuff. But I cannot in good conscience retreat into my inner citadel and let my country be destroyed — the country that makes it possible for me to cultivate the garden of solitude, retreat into my inner citadel, and pursue pure theory for its own sake.

Political discourse is unavoidably polemical. The zoon politikon must needs be a zoon polemikon. ‘Polemical’ is from the Greek polemos, war, strife. According to Heraclitus of Ephesus, strife is the father of all: polemos panton men pater esti . . . (Fr. 53) I don't know about the 'all,' but strife is certainly at the root of politics. Politics is polemical because it is a form of warfare: the point is to defeat the opponent and remove him from power, whether or not one can rationally persuade him of what one takes to be the truth. It is practical rather than theoretical in that the aim is to implement what one takes to be the truth rather than contemplate it. 'What one takes to be the truth': that is the problem in a nutshell. Conservatives and leftists disagree fundamentally and nonnegotiably.

Implementation of what one takes to be the truth, however, requires that one get one’s hands on the levers of power. Von Clausewitz held that war is politics pursued by other means. But what could be called the converse-Clausewitz principle holds equally: politics is war pursued by other means.

A political cartoon like the one I posted surely won't convert any leftists. How could it, when the 281 patiently argued pages of David Horowitz's Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left (Regnery 2004) made no impression on them? The Left cannot be persuaded; they must be opposed.

Palin Derangement Syndrome: Another Case

(Written 5 October 2008)

Here is how Richard Cohen begins a recent column:

Thank God for Sarah Palin. Without her jibes, her sarcasm, her exaggerations, her smug provincialism, her hypocrisy about family and government, her exploitation of mommyhood and her personal attacks on Barack Obama, the Democratic base might never be consolidated. This much is certain: Obama could never do it.

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Pessimistic Thoughts on Political Discourse in America

The following piece was written on 12 April 2006. I repost it, slightly emended, because events since then have led me to believe that the grounds for pessimism are even stronger now than they were before. It is becoming increasingly clear that conservatives and liberals/leftists live on 'different planets.' And it is becoming increasingly clear which planet bears the name 'Reality.' A return to federalism may help mitigate tensions, as I suggest here. But that is not likely to happen.

………………………….

A few nights ago on C-Span I listened to a talk by Mark Crispin Miller given at the University of Massachusetts (Amherst). His theme was that of a book he had authored alleging that the 2004 election was stolen by the Republicans and how democracy is dead in the USA. Not having read Crispin's book, I cannot comment on it. But I will offer a few remarks on his talk.

Miller, a tenured professor at New York University, is obviously intelligent and highly articulate and entertaining to listen to, his mannerisms and delivery reminiscent of Woody Allen. He takes himself to be a defender of the values of the Enlightenment. But then so do I. So here is the beginning of a 'disconnect.' From my point of view, Miller is an extremist motivated by the standard Leftist fear of, and hostility toward, religion. (Miller's NYU colleague, Thomas Nagel, owns up to his fear of religion, as I document here.) Miller's hostility was betrayed a dozen or so times during his speech by mocking turns of phrase. But of course he doesn't see himself as an extremist but as a sober defender of values he feels are threatened by Christian Reconstructionism, also know as Dominion Theology.

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How Sartre Saw the USA

Jean-Paul Sartre's "Americans and Their Myths" appeared in The Nation in the issue of 18 October, 1947. The article concludes:

The anguish of the American confronted with Americanism is an ambivalent anguish; as if he were asking, "Am I American enough?" and at the same time, "How can I escape from Americanism?" In America a man's simultaneous answers to these two questions make him what he is, and each man must find his own answers.

It sounds like projection to me. Anguish? Ambivalence? Had I been able to drag Jean-Paul's sorrily citified Parisian ass away from his cafes, Gauloises, and Stalinist comrades and through the Superstition Mountains in June — well, perhaps the univocity of rock and sun and the reality of a world that is not man-made but also not a featureless surd-like en soi would have cured his anguished ambiguity.

The Bigger the Government, the More to Fight Over

Taking a page from Prager, I've already noted that big government makes for small citizens. Let us also note that government expansion exacerbates political divisions and sets citizen against citizen.

Suppose we get to the point where Washington bureaucrats dictate what types of cars and trucks will be manufactured. Then you can be sure that there will be more lobbying, more corruption and the buying of votes, more fighting. Or suppose the czars of Obamacare begin dictating how many cardiologists we need, how many gastroenterologists, etc. Do you think medical students, physicians, and their patients will take that lying down? Hell no, they will organize and fight and protest and lobby. They will be justified in doing so because of the constitutionally protected right to a redress of grievances.

Do you like contention and division? Then support bigger government. We are coming apart as a nation as Patrick J. Buchanan documents here. The rifts are deep and nasty. Polarization and demonization of the opponent are the order of the day. Do you want more of this? Then give government more say in your life. Do you want less? Then support limited government and federalism.

Federalism, roughly, is (i) a form of political organization in which governmental power is divided among a central government and various constituent governing entities such as states, counties, and cities; (ii) subject to the proviso that the central and constituent governments retain their separate identities and assigned duties. A government that is not a federation would allow for the central government to create and reorganize constituent governments at will and meddle in their affairs. Federalism is implied by the Tenth Amendment tothe U.S. Constitution: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited to it by the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

Federalism would make for less contention, because people who love high taxes and liberal schemes could head for the People's Republic of Taxachusetts or the Left coast state of Californication, while the conservatively inclined who support gun rights and capital punishment could gravitate toward states like Texas.

The fact of the matter is that we do not agree on a large number of divisive, passion-inspiring issues (abortion, gun rights, capital punishment, wealth redistribution . . .) and we will never agree on them. These are not merely 'academic' issues since they directly affect the lives and livelihoods and liberties of people. And they are not easily resolved because they are rooted deep in fundamental worldview differences. When you violate a man's liberty, or mock his moral sense, or threaten to destroy his way of life, you are spoiling for a fight and you will get it.

Recognizing these facts, we must ask ourselves: How can we keep from tearing each other apart literally or figuratively? I am floating the suggestion that federalism and severe limitations on the reach of the central government are what we need. Example: Suppose Roe v. Wade is overturned and the question of the legality of abortion is returned to the states. Some states will make it legal, others illegal. This would be a modest step in the direction of mitigating the tensions between the warring camps. If abortion is a question for the states, then no federal monies could be allocated to the support of abortion. People who want to live in abortion states can move there; people who don't can move to states in which abortion is illegal.

Universal Health Care

I'm for universal health care: I want everyone to have health care. But the issue is not whether it would be good for all to have adequate health care, the issue is how to approach this goal. I can't see that increasing government involvement in health care delivery is the way to go. We need less government inefficiency and more market discipline. That will bring prices down while safeguarding liberty, a value liberals, despite their name, seem insufficiently appreciative of. The so-called 'public option' will lead to no option: you will have no option except to use the government plan because private insurers will most of them have been driven out of business. And so only the superrich will get the best care. The phrase 'public option' is a piece of Orwellian bullshit. Descriptive accuracy favors 'government takeover health plan' or something like that.

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On ‘Political’ and ‘Partisan’

People often use 'political' when they should use 'partisan.' A man appeared on C-Span some months ago whose name and the name of whose organization I have forgotten. The man headed an outfit promoting a strict interpretation of the U.S. constitution. Throughout his talk he repeated the remark that his organization was not political, not political, not political!

Nonsense, I say. What could be more political than questions about constitutions and their interpretation, and organizations that promote a particular style of constitutional interpretation? What the man wanted to say was that his outfit was not partisan, not affiliated with any particular political party such as the Republican Party, or the Democrat Party.

'Political' is not a dirty word. How could it be when the human being, by nature, is zoon politikon, a political animal? Aristotle, who appreciated the latter point, also appreciated that the political life cannot be the highest life. That honor goes to the theoretical life. The vita activa subserves the vita contemplativa.

Should We Just Tend Our Private Gardens?

From Thomas Mann's Diaries 1918-1939, entry of August 5, 1934:

A cynical egotism, a selfish limitation of concern to one's personal welfare and one's reasonable survival in the face of the headstrong and voluptuous madness of 'history' is amply justified. One is a fool to take politics seriously, to care about it, to sacrifice one's moral and intellectual strength to it. All one can do is survive, and preserve one's personal freedom and dignity.

I don't endorse Mann's sentiment but I sympathize with it. Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933. Imagine the effect that must have had on a man of Mann's sensitivity and spiritual depth. You witness your country, the land of Kant and Schiller, of Dichter und Denker, poets and thinkers, in Heinrich Heine's phrase, transformed into a land of Richter und Henker, judges and hangmen.

Living in the Past: Is That Why You are Still a Dem?

To understand a person, it helps to consider what the world was like when the person was twenty years old. At twenty, give or take five years, the music of the day, the politics of the day, the language, mores, fashions, economic conditions and whatnot of the day make a very deep impression. It is an impression that lasts through life and functions as a sort of benchmark for the evaluation of what comes after, but also as a distorting lense that makes it difficult to see what is happening now.

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The Incontinental Congress

An apt appellation for the present dominated-by-Dems bunch of fiscal incontinents.

The Conservative Disadvantage

We conservatives are at a certain disadvantage as compared to our leftist brethren. We don’t seek the meaning of our lives in the political sphere but in the private arena: in hobbies, sports, our jobs and professions, in ourselves, our families, friends, neighborhoods, communities, clubs and churches; in foot races and chess tournaments; in the particular pleasures of the quotidian round in all of their scandalous particularity.

We don't look to politics for meaning. Above all, we conservatives do not seek any transcendent meaning in the political sphere. We either deny that there is such a thing, or we seek it in religion, or in philosophy, or in meditation, or in such sorry substitutes as occultism. A conservative who denies that there is ‘pie in the sky’ will certainly not seek ‘pie in the future.’ He will not, like the leftist, look to a human future for redemption. He understands human nature, its real possibilities, and its real limits. He is impervious to utopian illusions. He will accept no ersatz soteriology.

Diversity and Divisiveness

Liberals emphasize the value of diversity, and with some justification. Many types of diversity are good. One thinks of culinary diversity, musical diversity, artistic diversity generally. Biodiversity is good, and so is a diversity of opinions, especially insofar as such diversity makes possible a robustly competitive market place of ideas wherein the best rise to the top. A diversity of testable hypotheses is conducive to scientific progress. And so on.

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