Samizdata

George Will, dorky docent of American conservatism, detects a return to the libertarian stylings of Barry Goldwater at the Republican national convention.

Four decades after a Republican convention in San Francisco nominated Sen. Goldwater, sealing the ascendancy of conservatism within the party, his kind of conservatism made a comeback at the convention here. That conservatism – muscular foreign policy backing unapologetic nationalism; economic policies of low taxation and light regulation; a libertarian inclination regarding cultural question – is not fully ascendant in the party. But the prominent display and rapturous reception of Rudy Giuliani and Arnold Schwarzenegger demonstrated that such conservatism is not an insurmountable impediment to a person reaching the party’s highest echelons.

For structural and probably cultural reasons, it is highly unlikely that America will ever have anything other than a two-party system. For this reason, pragmatic libertarians will have to learn how to work the two-party system. For all their manifest shortcomings, the Republicans seem to be a more hospitable environment at this point.

But the domination of the Republican Party by cultural conservatives did make some other conservatives — libertarians and religious skeptics, among others — feel uneasy, even unwelcome. Being derided as RINOs — Republicans in name only — did not help. And the dominance of the cultural conservatives gave force to the Democrats’ and media’s caricatures of the Republican Party as a brackish lagoon of intolerance, a caricature that, like all caricatures, contained a trace of truth.

For all the rending of garments coming from the Democrats and the secular left, I see remarkably little in the way of actual state action implementing the allegedly theocratic cravings of the social conservatives since their rise to influence in the Republican Party. I certainly disagree with them on a number of points, but a careful reading tends to show that a great deal of what they want falls into the area of civil society, not state action. They have, of course, been infected to some degree with the virus of statism, but cries of alarm from the statist left that the Christian conservatives are attempting to implement state-mandated mind and social controls smack more of projection than anything else. Much of the social/cultural conservative agenda is defensive and reformist – they are animated by a desire to roll back what they see as a state-facilitated and noxious cultural of radical relativism and secular radicalism. Even their current flagship issue – the “defense of marriage” – boils down to preventing change from being imposed by state organs without democratic approval.

Interesting times, my friends, interesting times.

ADDENDUM: A few additional thoughts whilst standing in line for lunch.

In discourse, terminology is destiny. As a legal drafter, I always go first and foremost to the defined terms of a contract, regulation or policy. In bashing out the paragraph above on cultural or social conservatives, I mistakenly adopted some of Will’s terminology.

The bugaboo of the left (and their organ the Democrats) in the US is the “religious right,” and my comments in the paragraph above are directed primarily to this bugaboo. Aside from religiously driven moral concerns, though, the major driver of real social/cultural conservatism in this country is the puritan streak that has been handed down through the ages as the antithesis of the hedonistic American thesis.

In recent decades, this puritanical impulse has been mated to the statist impulse, yielding such unholy offspring as the radical environmental movement, the anti-smoking crusade, the nascent anti-fat crusade, and of course the drug war. You will note that the puritans reside comfortably all across the political spectrum in America, and have had a much greater impact on state activities than religious devotees. Neither the Republicans or the Democrats has really made any effort to take on the puritans, who in many ways have become a major bulwark for the cult of the state.

Does anyone believe that Michael Moore actually had this conversation?

I mean, with an actual live human being, and not just in his own head.

Well, since people don’t want to talk about the really big issues (the mainstream media v. blogdom cage match), we might as well give ’em what they do want: the Kerry kerfuffle.

For agonizingly detailed analysis of the blow-by blow, then either Power Line or Captain’s Quarters is probably the place to go.

My take:

Personally, I don’t give a rat’s ass what Kerry did as a soldier in Viet Nam all those years ago, just as I don’t really care what George Bush did as a pilot in the National Guard. Both seem to have served adequately well, and I would be perfectly happy to let sleeping dogs lie. I am perfectly willing to stipulate that nothing either man did as a soldier has any relevance to their race for President.

End of story? Not really, because the Kerry kerfuffle is not really about what John Kerry did as a soldier. As far as I can tell, the Swifties are not accusing him of war crimes (Kerry handles that all by himself, not that anyone believes him). They are not even accusing him of incompetence, really. Even by the Swifties’ account, he brought all his men home, killed a few bad guys, and generally carried out his mission as well as most young officers. Plenty good enough.

No, the current controversy is not about what Kerry did as a soldier, its about what he has done as a politician. Kerry’s career as a politician predates and encompasses his brief military career. He was an anti-war activist before the war, something of a glory hound during the war, returned to anti-war activism after the war, and has been a professional politician just about ever since.

Once you put the Swifties’ attack on Kerry in this context, they raise some very troubling questions. Kerry’s entry into the military, framed as it is by anti-war and anti-military activity, begins to look like opportunistic ticket-punching. His medals look like more of the same, especially when you look at how they have been used by him as props for his political career ever since (he famously pretended to throw them over the White House fence, only he did not, and now hangs them on the wall of his office). Indeed, Kerry has built his career on the foundation of his four months in-country, and has done so in a way that highlights what many see as fundamental character flaws. Kerry has very characteristically tried to straddle the fence on Viet Nam, claiming on the one hand to be a war hero and on the other to be an anti-war activist.

The Swiftie attack is not on his service as a soldier, it is about how he has used that service (cynically and opportunistically, in their view) to advance his political career. The Swifties are saying that the anti-war side of the straddle disqualifies him from leading America in the current war, which is a purely political argument that does not touch on Kerry’s service as a soldier.

They are also saying that the war hero side of the straddle is a fraud. Note that their quarrel is not really with what he did on the ground, it is with what he claims he did (in the military paperwork that resulted in his medals, and in his admittedly exaggerated accounts since then). What happened in the actions that resulted in his medals will be hard to sort out, but I would say the Swifties have landed some telling blows. Principally, Kerry has abandoned “Christmas in Cambodia,” the critical turning point that allowed his brave soldier and anti-war activist personae to co-exist.

Good lawyers know that nothing is more important than framing the debate. The Swifties, in their rage at Kerry for, in their view, stabbing them in the back, have not done a very good job of clearly framing this debate as being about Kerry the Cynical and Opportunistic Politico, rather than being about Kerry the Brave and Noble Swabbie. That will probably, in the end, rob their campaign of much of its power.

The folks who want Kerry to take power want to frame the debate as being about Kerry’s service as a soldier, so they can delegitimize and confuse the issues raised by Kerry’s career as a politican. Just because the mainstream media, who are pretty comprehensively in the tank for Kerry, are falling for and enabling this strategy, does not mean you have to.

Any regular reader of Samizdata.net has probably noticed that I am no enthusiast for the democratic process, which I just regard as little more than a system of legitimising proxy mugging. I can see a role for democracy as a countervailing force even in a limited-government minarchist state, but as currently practiced it is rarely more than just a way to try and appropriate the money of others, impose restriction on competitors and generally add the force of law to personal prejudices in ways that conflate state and society to the profound determent of the later.

However I could not help but laugh when I read how the Democratic Party, who by their name one might assume were very keen on democracy, have been pulling all manner of legal tricks to keep socialist Ralph Nader off the US Presidential ballots. I expect the Republicans might try the same sort of thing against the turgid US Libertarian Party if they ever become a significent threat (not something I can see anytime soon).

But then that approach to choice is American as apple pie in some circles… “You can have any colour, as long as it is black”. This is why so much effort goes into the making the small differences between the two parties in the US seem VASTLY IMPORTANT TO THE FATE OF THE WORLD… otherwise people might start to think it actually does not matter a damn which particular lying parasite gets sent to Washington DC and that election day would be a pretty good time to go to do something really important, like maybe go to the beach or look at the cost of relocating to New Hampshire where voting really might cause something interesting to happen.