George W. Bush = Reagan II
I just watched and old re-run of a presentation at Cato with Bruce Bartlett and Andrew Sullivan. They’re angry with Bush for “betraying the Reagan legacy”.
Bartlett’s main point is that Reagan was a real “fiscal conservative” while Bush is not. This term, I’m convinced, has become meaningless. Was it “conservative” to steer the nation’s fiscal policy according to napkin sketches of highly controversial economic theories? Or to teach Dick Cheney that deficits don’t matter? Check out one part of the legacy of the “fiscal conservative” Reagan years:
Conservatives are incensed over Bush’s betrayal of Reagan’s economic legacy, but to me it looks like he’s generally following the same path. Under Reagan, not only did federal spending increase more than it did under Clinton, but the federal civilian workforce actually grew, wheras under Clinton it was reduced. So, under Reagan the Federal Government grew, while under Clinton it shrunk. Faced with this, most conservatives will rightfully point out that these two presidents had very different Congresses to work with. Fine. But it’s the “Reagan” legacy that we’re hearing about, which, when viewed by those of us unintoxicated with rosy 80s political nostalgia, looks not much different from Bush’s on the fiscal front.
Sullivan’s major subject of wistful longing is “limited government”. Limited like we had under Reagan? I can’t for the life of me figure out what government or president he is talking about. Remember how limited a role the Reagan government took on during the Air traffic controller’s strike?
Or consider one of the ugliest and most harmful parts of Regan’s legacy: the war on drugs. If only Reagan had really believed in limited government! No, he believed in the vast expansion of government as a means to disrupt the market forces (oh, the irony) that govern the drug trade. The drug war did more to take away the civil liberties of citizens than 100 patriot acts. When any part of government wanted to expand its funding or power, all that was needed was utterance of that grand boogey-word “drugs”. Through marijuana policy alone good money is thrown after bad imprisoning potheads, families and lives are destroyed (family values, anyone?) and yet the drug trade is alive and well. Hardly the libertarian style conservatism that these nostalgic Reaganites seem to be pining over.
Or how about the real biggie: Iran/Contra. Reagan’s limited administration decided that it was not bound by the people or by Congress or the rules it passes. It withheld information from Congress, armed (and by the calculus used by most conservatives today “appeased”) Islamists and then covered it up. Where are the limits? The Bush administration’s open contempt for any checks on its power (as we’ve seen with the wiretap issue and the prisoner torture scandals) is highly reminiscent of the Reagan years. How much more unlimited can a President’s power get than being autonomously free of Congressional oversight or even the laws passed by the people?
The only limits Reagan attempted to impose on government were on its ability to serve the needs of its citizens. In this, as in the case of AIDS, Reagan wanted to limit government, but he was eager to give it unrestrained power over the bodies of pregnant women.
Sullivan makes the additional accusation that Bush has “hitched the Republican base to Christianism” to which I can only ask where he was during the 80’s. Did he miss that whole “moral majority” thing? He derides Bush for thinking the government is there to do good, and end Tyranny on earth. His tone is remarkably similar to that taken by Reagan’s opponents after his “evil empire” speech. So is his critique.
So, I’m not really sure what the problem is. It seems like any real fan of Reagan’s policies would be pretty pleased at the closeness with which Bush has mimicked them.
Spiderspider, Spiderspider, does whatever a Spiderspider does…
I snapped a couple of cool pics of a big old spider that has taken up residence on my front porch. Here’s my favorite:
I call him Spiderspider, which is like Spiderman, but a spider.
The rest of my pics are here.
Alaskans against Palin
Ran across this post on dailykos today about an anti-Palin rally in Alaska. The pics are worth a looksie.
Is God Neccessary?
I won’t try to answer that question in this post, exactly. Recently I was in a debate with a fellow atheist who believes that religion is necessary for the masses; without it, they don’t seem to behave. To bolster his point, he pointed toward Will Durant’s version of history – Durant being himself an agnostic who believed that one of the lessons of history is that when religious belief declines so does culture. My debate partner proposed that when you look at history, those cultures that have believed in an absolute and revealed morality have indeed been more moral societies; thus we’re better off encouraging religious belief and merely trying to steer it in a moderate direction.
My take on this is that it rings of Leo Strauss. Strauss believed that Marx was right in that religion is the opiate of the masses…he just didn’t realize that the masses need opiate.
This is at the center of the Neo-Conservative world view. Strauss was an atheist, but believed that most humans don’t have the capacity to behave in society without religion. Sure, we, the intellectual elite who know better, realize that life is essentially absurd and there is neither divine order to the universe nor absolute morality. But the frightened masses are incapable of navigating complex modern life without having myths and absolute truths to guide them. They are too apt to become greedy and selfish, too inclined to a myopic view of what is in their own self interest, to function in the harsh world of Darwin, Nietzsche and Freud.
The traditional conservative view is that cultural touchstones and shared traditions and language is vital to social cohesion. The neo conservative view is similar, it just holds that these touchstones should be created by the intellectual elite. If God didn’t exist, it would be necessary to create Him.
Thus, this elite vanguard class is charged with the responsibility of creating the sweeping absolutes inherent in religion and nationalism and using them to subtly but forcefully guide the masses in the right direction. We know best. From this, they gleaned that America has the responsibility to spread its model to the rest of the world, planting the seeds of Democracy in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. In their view, war can be prevented by assimilating as many people as possible into a shared ideology.
Ironically, this means spreading democracy, an idea that they admit to finding vulgar and mob-like; the very antithesis to their own elitism. Thus, what they have always truly intended to spread is faux-democracy where people are given the illusion that they are in total control over their own lives while an elite class owns and controls the social framework and uses it to move the people in whatever direction they think is best.
I think if you look at what the neo-cons have “accomplished”, and what was accomplished by countries like the USSR, Nazi Germany and North Korea which have similarly decided to create religions in order to keep the people in line, you’ll find that the whole notion is self-refuting. The elite are just as given to vice and greed.
I also think that if you look closer at historical periods like ancient Greece, you’ll find that religion doesn’t usually lead cultures in any direction, usually it’s the reverse. When you see upheaval in social institutions, religion is affected, but “losing their religion” isn’t really a cause for any major social collapses with the possible exception of a couple periods in Egyptian history, and even that was due to the social aspects of religion, not the morality it ostensibly provided.
Rural vs. Urban, ctd.
I ran across this absolutely hysterical column on NRO today by Bill Whittle. It’s worth a read just for the sheer pomposity alone. But the main reason I mention it is because it underscores a point I made a few posts ago; namely that “small-town” folks show open hostility and prejudice toward urban people far more often than the reverse. Money quote:
It is the small-town virtues of self-reliance, hard work, personal responsibility, and common-sense ingenuity — and not those of the preening cosmopolitans that gape at them in mixed contempt and bafflement — that have made us the inheritors of the most magnificent, noble, decent and free society ever to appear on this earth. This Western Civilization… this American City… has earned the right to greet each sunrise with a blast of silver trumpets that can bring down mountains.
Now, Bill Whittle is in Los Angeles; last I checked LA wasn’t exactly a bastion of “heartland” values. I do, however, think that somehow people who live there, or in any other major city, manage their share of self-reliance and hard work. Those skyscrapers didn’t build themselves. Sure, cities also have their share of blight, but jeez, ever been to West Virginia?
But, I doubt Mr. Whittle can hear much over the “blast of silver trumpets that can bring down mountains” that he seems to hear every day lol.
Thomas Sowell describes fantasyland
A doozie of a column by Thomas Sowell, revered on the right for being kind of like a cross between George Will and Ann Coulter.
On its face, his point is pretty silly when you consider that in places where the population is most isolated, conservative ideas tend to be the strongest. At the same time, places where the population has the highest level of exposure to many different kinds of people tend to be places where liberal ideas are strongest. A person living in NYC is exposed on a daily basis to the real world where many languages are spoken, religious beliefs are wide ranging, gay people actually exist, and America is one country in a world of many.
Meanwhile, a person who lives in rural Oklahoma or Wasilla, AK can easily come to reside entirely within a bubble in which everyone speaks English, gay people aren’t gay in public, everyone believes in Jesus, etc. In the Real World, people must learn to coexist and compromise with each other…the true childish thinkers are the individualists who believe every man is his own island, capable of existing completely independent from the rest of us and not in any way indebted to the society and institutions that provide him an environment like America in which to live.
I don’t have any empircal evidence on this point, but I’d also venture to guess that if you gathered some data on the voting habits of people who have actually traveled off the continent and seen more of the world vs. people who have never stepped outside America in their lives, you’d find that the more traveled people are disproportionately liberal. If anyone has figures, I’d be interested to see them.
Charlie Gibson – almost as uninformed as Sarah Palin
Charles Krauthammer writes in this column that Charlie Gibson committed a “gaffe” by misidentifying the Bush Doctrine when he questioned Sarah Palin about it. He’s pretty up in arms about it, saying essentially that while Palin didn’t know what it was, what’s really important is neither did Gibson.
Now, even if you grant Krauthammer his claim of ownership over the term “Bush Doctrine”, last I checked Charlie Gibson wasn’t running for Vice President. It’s like he’s saying “Sure, Palin didn’t know, but neither did some reporter so that makes it even.”
Project much?
Much of the Sarah Palin coverage has been making an issue of urban condescention toward “small-town America”. We get this every four years. Remember George W. Bush running on an anti-Massachusetts platform in 04?
It’s an extension of the “Culture War” and it’s in high-gear once again. It seemed, once, that we were about to have an election that was about policy issues. Now, it’s once again about how large groups of very bad people such as “Coastal Elites”, “Liberals”, and “San Franciscans” are helping the Republican party by driving hordes of middle Americans into their tent through the power of their sneering condescention at their entire way of life. We make fun of their NASCAR, their accents, their guns and their Thomas Kinkaide paintings. And so they say to themselves “fuck Obama…I like the painter of light, and since he makes fun of it I’m voting Republican.”
What’s remarkable about this is not simply that it’s a myth. What’s remarkable about it is that it’s the opposite of what is true. Conservative politicians win elections by openly sneering at the latte drinking liberals, and have been since the Reagan years. A Democratic candidate for national office would lose handily be even seeming to do the same thing to rural Americans.
Has anyone paid attention to the last few presidential campaigns?? On one hand you have a Republican party that runs campaigns based on contempt for San Francisco liberals. On the other you have a Democratic party desperately trying to prove to “heartlanders” that they share their values, they respect their right to hunt, they love Jesus too, etc.
Even more to the point, for my entire life I’ve seen the “heartland” call itself thus based not on geography but upon its own self-appointed status as the Real America. Listened to any country music lately? In popular country music there is an enduring theme of defensiveness, of how the rough-and-tumble, strapping, corn-fed Country Boy is more of a real man than any effette, wussified City Boy. Do you hear anything comperable in urban music? There are plenty of negative themes in urban music, but hating on hillbillies doesn’t seem to be one of them.
In this sense, social conservatives of today are a lot like the Russians during the Cold War (or today with regards to Georgia). They manage the feat of justifying an attack by portraying it as a just response to an attack on them which never, in fact, really happened.
Meanwhile, the mythology of the noble small-towner being condescended to by the mean city yuppies remains embedded in the popular consciousness.
Asked to picture the ideal American main street or neighborhood, most of us instinctually think of something like a Rockwell painting. Asked to picture the darker side of America in the form of a drug-infested nightmare, most probably picture a highly urban inner city. The fact that these pictures are often the exact inverse of reality is lost in the folklore. I think to some extent even we liberals have bought into the suburban and rural white-picket-fence myth. An entire modern mythos, and practically an entire system of belief, has evolved out of ideas involving bumpkin-supremacy, and yet we still humor people who carry on about this dreadful emotional battery “heartlanders” have been forced to endure at the hands people like “Massachusetts liberals”. Evangelical Christian conservatives openly advocate biblical public policy, often a very hateful one, and if liberals aren’t polite enough with their condemnation of such a bankrupt idea then public discourse takes a tone as if there is a fleet of Volvos committing drive-by latte-drenchings across Alabama.
By itself, the label “Heartland” is an empty myth. America has never been propelled by farming, and her power has never come from rural America. Her strength has always been in urban areas, the centers of industry, technology and progress. Even going back to the founding, everything that became America was hatched in the most urban areas of the time. The blood of this country is pumped by our cities.
Another facet is the country-folks resentment of any Lesser Americans who are perceived to be taking their tax dollars for welfare, or stealing their jobs. To this day, urban America pays the bills, and rural America sucks the teat. Federal tax surpluses are generated largely in wealthy blue states, and they are gobbled up largely by poor red states (Alaska being by far the biggest welfare queen in the union). Yet, we are consistently finger-wagged by “heartlanders” about welfare with platitudes involving bootstraps and self-reliance.
After the 2004 election we were subjected to the Cable News analysis that part of the reason Bush won was that small-town Americans were sick of being condescended to by urbane liberals like John Kerry. But Bush campaigned against Massachusetts and urban culture! It wasn’t because “heartlanders” were tired of all of the traditional rural vs. modern urban prejudice that they handed Bush his victory. It was because they and their candidate embraced it.
We may be in for a repeat, if McCain wins. Obama-Biden will try hard to connect with the working class, religious white voters in non-urban areas while trying not to lose the interest of the urban votes. Meanwhile, McCain-Palin will travel the country mocking the huge numbers of city-based Americans who believe in individuals’ right to an abortion, gays’ right to be treated as equals, and an internationalist foreign policy. And yet, the story would go something like this: Conservatives in the rural areas and suburbs flocked to John McCain because Obama called them bitter while McCain picked one of them for his running mate.
“Ask what you can do for your country” – fascism?
An online friend of mine, Kazim (whose blog you should take a look at, and who contributes to The Athiest Experience as Russell Glasser, and who posts regularly at TMF) brought up a good point about my previous post.
He wonders if I’d be as creeped out as I am by the RNC’s “Country First” theme by Kennedy’s speech when he said “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”
On the surface, it does seem like Kennedy was saying something akin to country first. But let’s put it in context. Here’s the tail end of the speech in which he gave that line:
Now the trumpet summons us again—not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need; not as a call to battle, though embattled we are—but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out, "rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation"—a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself.
Can we forge against these enemies a grand and global alliance, North and South, East and West, that can assure a more fruitful life for all mankind? Will you join in that historic effort?
In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility—I welcome it. I do not believe that any of us would exchange places with any other people or any other generation. The energy, the faith, the devotion which we bring to this endeavor will light our country and all who serve it—and the glow from that fire can truly light the world.
And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.
My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man.
Finally, whether you are citizens of America or citizens of the world, ask of us the same high standards of strength and sacrifice which we ask of you. With a good conscience our only sure reward, with history the final judge of our deeds, let us go forth to lead the land we love, asking His blessing and His help, but knowing that here on earth God's work must truly be our own.
I don’t think there’s much of a comparison to be made between this and the Republican convention. Kennedy’s line is a single line of a single speech; and the line is not spoken in the spirit of nationalism, but international cooperation. Kennedy’s saying that America needs to be a partner with the rest of the world in working for peace and social justice, that America is prepared to work with other nations toward this goal, and that it would be nice if we all pitched in rather than sitting back and letting other people do the work.
Contrasted with the RNC, “Country First” (the theme of the whole convention) is spoken in the spirit of unrestrained nationalist demagogy – the firm belief that America is better than all the other countries, the hyper-glorification of loyalty to flag, and the unbridled contempt for the kinds of liberal, internationalist, cooperative ideas Kennedy was speaking about.
Kwame-Palin ’08
I’m hereby recommending that the Republicans draft former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick for president. He’s a perfect fit. He’s got SEVEN YEARS OF EXECUTIVE EXPERIENCE! That’s more than Giuliani, more than Romney, more than Zero-Executive-Experience-Amateur-On-the-job-learner-McCain. He’s got more foreign policy experience than any of them, because Detroit borders Canada. For their convenience, his obligatory corruption/sex scandal is already old news.
Plus, he’s never had an abortion!
He needs a job, the Republicans need a presidential candidate with some executive experience, and they’d get the added benefit of not having to change his diapers and install a Hoveround ramp in Air Force One. What could be better for them?
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