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Andrew Klavan talks a lot in this essay about how the “right” needs to adjust and handle strategy after losing to Obama this week. Of course, mention of “right” immediately begs the question of where classical liberals/libertarians – that I consider to be progressive in the best sense of that misused word – stand. Despite such caveats, this is an interesting essay to read over a coffee. (I disagree with him on religion.)
For me, one thing about this election is clear, and the same applies to Europe. We now have so many people dependent, in whole or part, on state welfare (not just the poor, I am talking about a whole clutch of vested interest groups ranging from farmers to defence contractors to recipients of subsidies and soft loans) that there are not enough people who can see their self interest to vote for small government to swing an election. But this is hardly a new problem. Back in the 70s, Margaret Thatcher and her colleagues such as Nigel Lawson and Sir Keith Joseph were talking about the “ratchet effect” of socialism and big government. And policies such as sales of public housing and privatisation were, in a way, attempts to create a new bloc of voters who favoured free enterprise, property ownership, and the like. The trick for opponents of Big Government on both sides of the Atlantic is to do the same again.
Big state cronyism is a bad thing, economically, socially and ethically but it is not Soviet Communism. Get a grip, people. Nor is it possible for a big, strong and basically rich country to be destroyed and annihilated by one bad Administration though it is very bad. No country gets annihilated just like that. Heck, even Belgium cannot destroy itself.
– Helen Szamuely Nor is it the case that the American people, as this bizarre Economist blog claims, “endorsed macroeconomics”. They just voted very marginally for known dull over unknown boring, neither of whom would have enough power to implement a root-and-branch plan of reform. That is presumably why neither man had much of a plan to do so. Drift continues, roughly in the same direction.
The Republican party fucked this up all by themselves – they could have made clear points to rebut the arguments that led my family members to making rational decisions to vote Obama. But they didn’t.
How hard would it have been to say “OK, we all know that entitlement spending is unsustainable. We also know that whole generations have made retirement plans that depend upon those entitlements. So we’ll guarantee to maintain them for anybody over (whatever age) but things must change for people who are younger.”
How hard would it have been to say “Abortion is a divisive issue, but the law is settled. America faces far more pressing challenges, right now, so I pledge not to mess with abortion – there are more immediate matters that demand my attention.”
Apparently, it was too hard. That’s what happens when a political party becomes nothing more than a cynical, office seeking, machine. It tries to pander to too many special interests and ends up satisfying none sufficiently
– Commenter ‘The Other Rob‘, discussing why the Stupid Party (USA branch) lost to the Evil Party (USA branch)
The Republican party saw an authoritarian, fiscally profligate, regulation crazy President whose flagship program was ObamaCare and who worked tirelessly to expand the remit of the state… and decided that what they needed to do was run a candidate whose entire political career featured expanding the remit of the state and … RomneyCare. Moreover they choose a candidate whose positions on civil liberties was every bit as odious (if not more so) than the dismal Obama.
So unsurprisingly to anyone thinking clearly, the Republican failed to retake the White House.
Good.
So let me repeat what I said in 2009 in ‘An appeal for disunity‘:
2009 is going to be an interesting year, particularly in the USA. Big State Democrat Barack “The One” Obama crushed Big State Republican John “I Support the Bail Outs” McCain and this means the country is going to have a new president whose politics make him the most committed statist since LBJ. The country was given a choice between statism and statism and it voted for… statism.
Well to quote Mencken, the American electorate are going to get what they voted for good and hard, because this is also the year the global economy is truly going to crash, big time, plunging us into a recession and indeed a depression that will last longer and be driven deeper by the policies being implemented by governments on both sides of the Atlantic.
And this presents friends of liberty with a great many opportunities.
Never has there been a better time for cleaning house. The usual excuses given for pragmatic ‘broad church’ politics no longer apply on the so-called ‘right’… no amount of unity will change the fact that regulatory tax-and-spend politicians will be in charge for the next few years regardless of what people of a classical liberal disposition do. And so I would strongly urge such people to get into politics like never before, not primarily to fight the statist left just yet, but to create opposition parties that are actually worth voting for.
In short, I am calling on anyone who believes in liberty and limited government to reject all thoughts of party unity and work tirelessly to drive the statist right from their parties.
I am not calling for the ‘libertarianisation’ of the Republican party along the lines I would actually like, just for the party’s rationalisation. I am in essence calling for a nominally conservative party to become… conservative. The simple fact is that people can be fellow travellers on a path that leads to liberty without all marching in ideological lock-step. It just boils down to asking the question “do you want the state to have less control over people’s lives or more control?” If a person can honestly answer that they think the state is too powerful and needs to be reduced, that is a fellow traveller.
This is the time to apply that test to Republican politicians, every last one of them… and drive any who fail that simple test out of the party by whatever means necessary. Now is the time for a figurative internal ‘Night of the Long Knives’. This is the opportunity to destroy a great many political careers and remake the Republican Party into the party of constitutionally limited government and to start fighting the culture war that the party should have been fighting since the day Ronald Reagan left office with his job only half done.
It’s like deja vu all over again only this time the global economy is well into melt down and the money printing driven ‘recovery’ in the USA is taking it over a fiscal cliff.
Ok Tea Party, start your engines in earnest this time. Get nasty, really nasty. And all you Republican apparatchiks? Help the Tea Party drive the Big Government Republicans from office and drum them out the party, because not only are they The Enemy, they keep loosing elections and that can negatively impact your precious careers and that, even if you are almost all amoral scum no better than the Democrats you purport to oppose, should get your undivided attention.
“The People have spoken, the bastards.”
– Attributed to Dick Tuck.
Patrick Crozier, Michael Jennings and Brian Micklethwait are currently sat around my television discussing the election. We plan to stay here eating pizza and drinking beer for as long as we can stand. I will be posting some sort of running commentary in a hastily prepared chat room. If you want to join in, give yourself a username and leave the password blank.
I mean, really, why does everyone believe the president is the leader of our country? What he is, is the head of our government, i.e., he is the leader of the least part of our country. We have two groups in America: the people who work hard and create businesses and jobs and all the things that make our country great, and the screw-ups who get in the way of that. Government is by far the greatest force of the latter. So why do we as citizens think the guy we put in charge of the government and all the bureaucrats — “King Idiot,” basically — is our leader? That’s like saying a pothole is in charge of the road.
– Frank J. Fleming
I stuck that paragraph up here just as soon as I read it, and before I had read the rest of Fleming’s piece. But honestly, every paragraph is SQotD material. Read the whole thing.
Goodness, who could have guessed that an official announcement telling people hit by a natural disaster to come and get oodles of free stuff, then telling the resulting crowd that their turn would not come for eight hours would cause any trouble?
A Cuomo-administration source blamed the mix up on the military.
“They told us. We simply conveyed the information provided by them,” the source said. “We had nothing to do with the execution. We didn’t select the sites. It wasn’t our trucks. It wasn’t our people. It’s not our fault.”
Cuomo’s office took the offer off its Web site later in the day.
Heaven preserve public order from its defenders. Still, one must admit that without the government and the military there would be anarchy on the streets.
At least the citizens were protected from ‘price gouging’.
You may have heard that the Yanks are having some sort of election.
You may have even heard that a minor celebrity called Lena Dunham made a political advertisement in support of the candidacy of Mr Obama. This production gave rise to hostile comment from Mr Romney’s supporters, which the Democrats claim was motivated by prudery but the Republicans claim was motivated by disquiet at Ms Dunham’s apparent assumption that the main hope of American maidens is to receive their lord’s seigneurial favour and be kept by him thereafter.
Admit it, though, the ad is funny. She has great comic timing, and the way she rattles out her spiel at speed while still managing to do recognizable parodies of the way people really talk shows she has all the observational skills one would expect from a talented scriptwriter. That is an aspect of the ad which has received less attention than it should. Ms Dunham’s particular gift is meant to be that she can write a script that reflects how women live today, on the understanding that ‘women’ means urban American women of her own class and race.
So Lena Dunham the great observer went out and observed this. Listen from 0:30 for the next five seconds:
It’s a fun game to say, “who are you voting for?” and they say, “I don’t want to tell you,” and you say, “No, who are you voting for?” and they go, “Guess.”
So even among the sort of people who Lena talks to there are enough Romney voters who don’t want to say so for her to find that coy response worth parodying? That could explain certain oddities in the polls.
“Aside from his mom jeans, tiny feet, and short-stride shuffle, Romney is a dream candidate. On paper, at least. He’s a good family man, a pillar of his community, and he has a résumé thick with business and political accomplishments. In the flesh, though, he appears to be missing the gene that makes someone interesting. Or engaging. Obama, on the other hand, comes across as a brainy, slightly aloof groovester. Like Romney, he is a good family man. Plus, he has one hell of a life narrative and, to the objective observer, a solid track record over the past four years. But for a man who so inspired hope in 2008, Obama has fallen short on selling himself and his achievements. He’s failed to do what the marketers advise all successful people to do these days—brand himself.”
– Graydon Carter.
I love that line about “a solid track record”, which nicely overlooks the high unemployment (not fully reflected in the official data), Keystone, Solyndra, the healthcare “reforms”; Libya, the GM bailout, the mess of Dodd-Frank, “You didn’t build that”; Fast and Furious; the refusal to look seriously at the debt/deficit problem apart from talk about tax hikes….
Why do I bother looking at the thoughts of a person such as Carter? For a start, it is good to regularly check what such people think. Like it or not, these people reflect a powerful strand of opinion that exists in Big Media, in the academic world, among policymakers, and so forth. And he is sufficiently plausible to have a level of credibility: not all his views are daft. For instance, he is right, later in the article, to point out that the Obama administration has been pretty easy on the big banks.
A problem with publications such as VF and the people who read them is that they often get swept up in the whole “glamour” of power, just as they do with the glamour of actors, business tycoons, sportsfolk and so on. And for all that they claim to be cynical, cold-eyed observers of such people, frequently putting the boot in to certain targets, at core there is a remarkably starry-eyed belief that only if we are governed by very cool, supposedly clever, people such as us, that all will be well. It is a conceit that seems to take a long time to die.
Maybe Mr Carter should read Gene Healy’s book about the “Cult of the Presidency”.
And a question that such people should ask themselves is this: if Obama has such a “solid record”, how come there is a chance he is going to lose next week, and why is this supposed genius at connecting with the people not doing so today? Why has this combination of Cicero, Jesus and Jefferson failed to work the magic this time around? But to ask such a question, and deal with the answers, is probably a step too far for Graydon Carter.
Here is Roger Kimball, ruefully reflecting on Hurricane Sandy. For Kimball, the meteorological just got very personal:
Well, it was grim, Hurricane Sandy. We were prepared for something bad, but this storm, as we were warned, turned out to be like nothing I had ever seen.
Like nothing I’ve ever seen, that’s for sure. Little old England is a hurricane backwater, thank goodness.
We went back to our neighborhood this morning – it was a circuitous route, given all the downed trees and power lines. It was a devastating scene. Many houses were simply bashed in, crushed by the power of the waves. Even more (like ours, alas) were seriously flooded.
I’m sure there’s a moral here somewhere, probably having to do with hubris, nemesis, or some other unpleasant Greek offering. Or maybe it has to do with that old quip, Do you want to make the gods laugh? Tell them your plans.
Now for the Big Cleanup!
I’ll say.
A few thoughts.
Casualties seem, given the scale of the storm, to have been mercifully light. If so, that proves that the best defence against this kind of thing is to be as rich as you can before disaster strikes. Rich people are able to see what’s coming, to duck and weave, to tell each other what to do, and then to look after each other. Natural disaster is not followed by epidemic disease, the way it is liable to be among very poor people.
Samizdata has lots of American readers, including, presumably quite a few who have suffered directly from this storm. Commiserations from all of us, and here’s hoping you pull through in decent shape. If you have been seriously mucked about by this storm, you might want to ignore the rest of this and if you did I would entirely understand.
But I have to ask. What effect might all this have on the election? → Continue reading: Hurricane Sandy and its consequences
The US Supreme Court is going to be discussing the legal doctrine of first sale today, in a case that has something to do with school textbooks but will ultimately have further repercussions. Your right to first sale means that you are allowed to sell on books and DVDs that you bought. However publishers are attempting to license, rather than sell, such materials, and these end user license agreements seek to prevent such selling on.
I find it hard to agree with either side in the debate. On the one hand, if you want to sell on a book that you bought in a book shop, this should not be answered with violence. On the other hand, if you write a book and want to sell it on the condition that the buyer does not then sell it on to someone else, this should not be answered with violence. What if you attempt to make this agreement and the buyer then breaks it? Refuse to deal with that buyer again and tell all your friends. Not practical? Consider alternative business models. The state should neither uphold nor prohibit specific business models, and I suspect it should not be involved in contract enforcement either.
For a publisher there are plenty of non-violent solutions, such as encryption, digital rights management, watermarking, subscription services or being so awesome that everyone wants to throw money at you.
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We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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