Wednesday, December 28, 2005
The Politics of Expectations II
My shorter response to Jeffrey Hart's Wall Street Journal essay, "The Burke Habit":
Many political enterprises of the conservative movement were once dismissed as impossible. Some won anyway. Some are pending. And some really were impossible. The trying is what matters.
|posted by Jim on 5:58 PM|
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The Politics of Expectations
Much ado about Jeffrey Hart's Wall Street Journal essay, "The Burke Habit."
Hart, a Dartmouth professor and contributor to National Review pines for the old ways like a modern Cato. A sample:
Religion is an integral part of the distinctive identity of Western civilization. But this recognition is only manifest in traditional forms of religion--repeat, traditional, or intellectually and institutionally developed, not dependent upon spasms of emotion. This meant religion in its magisterial forms.
What the time calls for is a recovery of the great structure of metaphysics, with the Resurrection as its fulcrum, established as history, and interpreted through Greek philosophy.
Any form of Christianity outside of Roman Catholicism and possibly the various eastern rite Orthodox Christianities was not "interpreted through Greek philosophy." Thus, the nominally Catholic "peace and socialism" folks at Sojournors would be a pillar of conservatism by Hart's definition while the Assemblies of God and the Southern Baptist Convention, places where the Bible matters and Aristotle does not, would be excluded.
Hart ponders the right to life issue and is not happy:
[M]ost conservatives defend the "right to life," even of a single-cell embryo, and call for a total ban on abortion. To put it flatly, this is not going to happen. Too many powerful social forces are aligned against it, and it is therefore a utopian notion.
A quick thought experiment -- substitute "Soviet communism" in the above paragraph, thusly:
[M]ost conservatives oppose the spread of communism internationally, and call for the defeat of Soviet communism. To put it flatly, this is not going to happen. Too many powerful social forces are aligned against it, and it is therefore a utopian notion.
If this sounds familiar, it should. It was the view of foreign policy realists like Henry Kissinger and many, many liberals, all of whom scoffed at Ronald Reagan's simplistic views.
There have been many political enterprises of the conservative movement dismissed as impossible. And even when those projects have had some success, the organized left does not quit trying to repeal them. For the last five years, whatever the problem, from 9/11 to Katrina, we are told the solution is "repeal the Bush tax cuts." Conservatives would do well to be as visionary and single minded as was Ronald Reagan.
More Hart:
Conservatives assume that the Republican Party is by and large conservative. But this party has stood for many and various things in its history. The most recent change occurred in 1964, when its center of gravity shifted to the South and the Sunbelt, now the solid base of "Republicanism." The consequences of that profound shift are evident, especially with respect to prudence, education, intellect and high culture.
Another though experiment -- which is more likely to have a conservative influence on a child and create a love of the arts in the bargain: (1) Mommy praising Jr.'s artistic composition of crayons upon paper and awarding it space on the family refrigerator; or (2) Mommy taking Jr. to a museum to enjoy the "high culture" of a crucifix submerged in urine?
Hart makes the mistake of asserting that his personal preferences equal conservatism generally. Yet the audience at an opera house may benefit from the performance, but still vote for socialism. (In fact, history shows that whenever the communists seized power, we in the West were informed that communism had give poets and classical musicians their rightful due, in addition to free medical care for all. The general starvation that followed in short order was not mentioned.)
Great cathedrals and old time religion do not equal great Christians. Nor do a modern sanctuary and guitar-driven "praise music."
I have no doubt that, in contrast to the delegates at the 1960 Republican convention, the GOP delegates of 1984 were less likely to be high church Episcopalians, less likely to have season passes to the opera, and less likely to discuss Caravaggio's paintings and contrast them with the works of Monet or Thayer. Hart seems to argue that because of shifts of this sort, the 1984 GOP folks were less conservative than the GOP in 1960.
Hart, himself a retired teacher of books, concludes by arguing that the "teachings of books that have lasted--the Western tradition--are essential to the Conservative Mind." If you have not read the works of William James, let along recognize his name, you are to be cast from the conservative fold into outer darkness. It is not enough for Hart that one believes the right things. One must believe only for the right reasons.
Conservatives used to be the snobs and the elitists, a role which is occupied today by liberals basking in their superiority to the rest of us peasants.
Once conservatives started talking to people, instead of talking down to them, people started giving conservative ideas a hearing and began to like what they heard. Meanwhile liberals increasing talked among the elite few, a group which they consider themselves to be properly included, and have been lecturing people ever since.
The result? Conservatives started winning elections, even as they fought for utopian ideas. Is there something wrong with winning by making converts?
"John Kerry: he's better than you" was the meta-message of the 2004 campaign. It flopped. Professor Hart should take note.
(Joseph Knippenberg finds some other Hart writings which suggest why the man is so unhappy with the GOP's religious conservatives.)
|posted by Jim on 4:44 PM|
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Wednesday, December 21, 2005
More Abramoff Connections to Puerto Rico
Jack Abramoff is reported to be negotiating a plea agreement to avoid a trial on the charges against him.
Inquiring minds want to know about a group called "The Future of Puerto Rico". This group paid Abramoff $1.22 million from 1998 until mid-2000, according to lobby reports on file with the Secretary of the U.S. Senate.
The problem here is not being paid for lobbying work, but the cause Abramoff appears to be fighting for: making impoverished, Spanish-only Puerto Rico our 51st state.
Abramoff was known as a conservative Republican, yet he was willing to to fight for the other team. Granted, he did not come cheap, earning sixty thousand dollars per month from January to June of 1998.
Given its economic circumstances and dislike of the English language, a 51st state of Puerto Rico annexed to the United States would benefit conservative Republican causes not one bit.
|posted by Jim on 1:44 PM|
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Monday, December 19, 2005
Peter Ferrara, Jack Abramoff and Puerto Rico Statehood
Social Security expert (and my friend) Peter Ferrara has had his column dropped by two newspapers. The reason? Ferrara told Business Week that "he, too, took money from [D.C. super lobbyist Jack] Abramoff to write op-ed pieces boosting he lobbyist's clients. "I do that all the time," Ferrara says. "I've done that in the past, and I'll do it in the future."
Ferrara told Business Week that there was no conflict of interest because his columns never violated his ideological principles.
"It's a matter of general support," Ferrara says. "These are my views, and if you want to support them, then that's good."
What then are we to make of a Ferrara column supporting U.S. statehood for impoverished Puerto Rico? Franklin Foer of The New Republic reported this past weekend: "In 1998, the Puerto Rican statehood movement shelled out $400,000 for Abramoff's services. That year, Ferrara made the conservative case for that client's cause."
The Weekly Standard earlier this year highlighted the direct conflict of interest between Ferrara's views and his pro-statehood column:
On March 2, 1998, Peter Ferrara, general counsel for [Americans for Tax Reform], published an op-ed in the Washington Times in support of HR 856, which, he wrote, "simply requires us to face the Puerto Rico commonwealth anomaly and resolve it." Also, "it would free U.S. taxpayers from a growing $12 billion per year subsidy bill." (It's worth noting here that support for Puerto Rican statehood has been a longstanding GOP position.)
Ferrara's facts were technically accurate. However granting American statehood to impoverished Puerto Rico, a Spanish-only island with half the income of our nation's poorest state, would result in six or seven new Congressmen and two new Senators from the island, each hunting for U.S. taxpayer dollars with the zeal of Senators Ted Stevens (R-AK) and Senator Robert Byrd (D-WVA) combined.
"If it were a state," writes former Gov. Carlos Romero-Barcelo in his frankly titled book, Statehood Is for the Poor, "Puerto Rico would be absolutely assured of enormous amounts of federal money -- money the island needs in order to come to grips with its many problems. But without statehood, such large quantities of money are going to be increasingly hard to come by" (New York Post, "The Puerto Rico Question," July 14, 1997).
In 1989, Peter Hamill, writing for the New York Post, said of Puerto Rico, "you would never suspect that this island receives 72 times more food stamps than Mississippi, eight times more than New York." The Washington Post explained the practically of Puerto Rico statehood for island residents on December 27, 1990:
It is the financial argument for statehood that thousands of people here find compelling. Many would suddenly get between $300 and $400 a month more in federal welfare payments under statehood, which would automatically remove many of the current limits Congress has imposed on welfare programs on the island.
This evidence suggests that support for Puerto Rico statehood was clearly inconsistent with the lower taxes/less government spending agenda of both Ferrara and Americans for Tax Reform.
|posted by Jim on 7:29 PM|
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Immigrant "Gratitude" versus "Attitude"
Robert George of First Things gets some big things right about assimilation:
How do immigrants become Americans? Well, I’ve thought about it, and I think I have the answer. The key ingredient is gratitude. It all begins with gratitude. An immigrant’s feelings of gratitude to America for the liberty, security, and opportunity our nation affords him and his family is what leads to his appreciation of the ideals and institutions of American cultural, economic, and civic life. From this appreciation comes his belief in the goodness of American ideals and the value of the institutions by which they are effectuated. And from this belief arises his aspiration to become an American citizen together with his willingness to shoulder the responsibilities of citizenship and even to make great sacrifices for the nation, should it come to that. ...
If, as I have argued, it is gratitude that launches immigrants on the path to becoming Americans, it is attitude that impedes and prevents immigrants from embarking on the journey. Grateful immigrants become Americans; immigrants with attitude do not. What do I mean by attitude? I mean what the kids mean: a bad attitude. An attitude of hostility to America and her principles. An attitude of superiority. An attitude of entitlement. An attitude promoted, as I say, by influential people in education, journalism, and even government. An attitude abetted by misguided policies, such as forms of bilingualism that have the effect—though I am not claiming they all do (“bilingualism” means different things)—of discouraging mainly Latino young people from fully mastering the English language. Policies that turn the ideal of pluralism into an attack on national unity and common bonds. Policies that foster a culture of entitlement—one where all the emphasis on is on rights, and none is on responsibilities; one in which assistance provided by states or the federal government to those in need is perceived not as a manifestation of the generosity of the American people, but as payment (inevitably said to be meager and inadequate) on a debt created by the allegedly predatory and exploitative acts of previous generations of Americans.
Where a culture of opportunity flourishes, immigrants will feel, as my grandparents felt, gratitude for the opportunities they are afforded to lift themselves up, and make a better life for their children, by hard work and determination to succeed. However, it appears to be a brute fact of human psychology that where a culture of entitlement prevails, gratitude even for charitable assistance will not emerge. In part, of course, this is to be explained by the fact that upward social mobility is dampened in circumstances of a culture of entitlement. This is the phenomenon known as welfare dependency.
I observed its soul-destroying effects on many non-immigrant families in West Virginia as I was growing up. You see, dependency is an equal opportunity soul destroyer. And this, in turn, leads to resentment as people persuade themselves that the reason they are not getting ahead is that those who are already better off are cheating or manipulating the system to hold down people at the bottom of the ladder (who are dependent on entitlements). So the culture of entitlement ends up reinforcing the attitude that impedes the gratitude that enables immigrants to become Americans. ...
Not everything that does business under the label “multiculturalism” is bad, but much of it is. Much of it functions to discourage patriotism and national unity. Much of it fosters attitude and impedes the gratitude that we have always relied on to put immigrants on the path to becoming Americans.
|posted by Jim on 5:55 PM|
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Friday, December 09, 2005
"Tengo una bomba"
What if the Kansas City, Kansas, student suspended for speaking Spanish was saying, "I have a bomb" in Spanish, the school didn't investigate and another Columbine tragedy happened? Lawyers would be lining up to sue the school, and thus local taxpayers, for millions of dollars in damages.
Instead, the school took preventative action and its reward is a civil rights lawsuit. The Spanish-speaking student's father. a naturalized American citizen, evidently learned only one thing in citizenship class: if you are offended, run, don't walk, to the nearest courtroom.
|posted by Jim on 4:07 PM|
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Tuesday, December 06, 2005
Never Complain, Never Explain
Rick Perlstein’s essay on the clash between conservative principle and some conservative's practice thereof is a longish complaint that conservatives are not always angels.
During the 1960's, liberals ran the country via their control of the then-three major news networks, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Hollywood, the Supreme Court and both the U.S. House and the U.S. Senate.
Still, the “New Left” proudly rooted for America’s enemies (“Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh. The NLF is gonna win.”) SDS bombs and Black Panther Molotov cocktails were used to underscore their complaints that the United States was far too conservative.
How is this era remembered on the Left? Not with embarassed shame but with loving nostalgia. In Field of Dreams, we are reminded that: “[I]f you experienced even a little bit of the sixties, you would understand." In Running on Empty, we get to follow a lovable family on the run from the FBI for blowing up "a napalm lab to protest the war."
Unfortunately for Perlstein's thesis, there are no film tributes to conservatives who behave badly, like Tom Charles Huston, or, for that matter, film tributes to true conservative luminaries like William F. Buckley, Jr. or Paul Weyrich. Disgraced Congressman Duke Cunningham, a hero as a combat fighter pilot, will not grace the dais of a tribute dinner any time soon. Can the same be said of Jane Fonda?
The politics of personal destruction were grounded in the New Left’s credo of “by any means necessary.” Richard Nixon occupied the chair that beloved Bobby Kennedy deserved. So Nixon had to go. Now House Majority Leader Tom DeLay has proven he can tie the Democrats up in knots. Therefore he must be destroyed. Forgive conservatives for not racing to join the lynching party just yet.
|posted by Jim on 5:44 PM|
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