A conservative writes

[Gob]

By Rod Dreher Senior editor, The American Conservative

In the aftermath of defeat against a vulnerable president, an inquest is under way in the "Grand Old Party".

Surveying the smoking rubble of the Republican Party's election hopes, the right-wing talk radio giant Rush Limbaugh made a declaration.

"Conservatism, in my humble opinion, did not lose last night. It's just very difficult to beat Santa Claus."

Read those two sentences carefully, for they tell you a lot about the massive psychological problem the Republicans face - and why it will be extraordinarily difficult and painful for them to deal with reality.

On his popular radio show, the highly influential Limbaugh explained in detail how the election results prove that the American people have become weak-minded, jelly-spined degenerates.

Why, they even allowed themselves to be bought off by a welfare-state liberal Democrat who promised them the moon!

Though it is hard to see how one builds a successful democratic political movement around blaming the demos for its collective stupidity and bad character, one must concede that Limbaugh may be right.

That is, it is always possible that the people of any given polity could have become so corrupted by greed, sloth, spite, or by all manner of vice, that its judgment fails. Boobs and knaves win elections all the time; sages and gentlemen lose.

Democracy means only that the people are sovereign; it does not mean that they are infallible.

Limbaugh's analysis will surely find many sympathetic ears on the American right.

The problem, obviously, is this self-serving conclusion frees us conservatives from having to examine critically our own principles, arguments, and strategies.

However grounded in reality, self-righteousness rarely leads to clear thinking about the way out of a slough of despond.

Compounding the problem is the Limbavian dogma, widely shared on the ideological right - Conservatism cannot fail, it can only be failed.

It is interesting to contemplate how conservatism, or Limbaugh's version of it, can ever fail?

If conservative candidates or conservative policies are rejected by voters, or conservative government shipwrecks itself with bad policy or plain incompetence, (case in point: the disastrous Bush administration) - well, isn't that a pretty clear sign of failure?

It is far easier to dismiss voters as fools and unsuccessful GOP candidates as wretched sinners unworthy of conservatism.

It was only yesterday, it seems, that frustrated American liberals salved their wounds after electoral thrashings by convincing themselves that voters were too bigoted or stupid to know what was good for them.

Back then, it was so clear to conservatives how misguided and self-defeating the liberal pity-party was.

Along those lines, I'm old enough to remember when American conservatives snickered at delusional campus Marxists who believed communism - holy and immaculate! - had not failed, it had simply never been properly tried.

Roman Catholicism holds a doctrine declaring the Church to be the "spotless bride of Christ". To be sure, Catholics recognise that this is a theological claim, not an empirical one.

Limbaugh and millions of grassroots conservative militants approach politics as if it were a dogmatic religion. For them, conservatism is the Spotless Bride of Ronald Reagan and nothing about it can be falsified.

If voters reject the religion of conservatism, it's because they are too sinful to see and embrace the truth.

That, or particular conservative politicians and strategists lack faith. Activist American conservatism has a name for such slackers and heretics: RINO, which means "Republican In Name Only".

To be denounced as a RINO by the likes of Limbaugh is to be identified as a snivelling outcast who, if it were possible, would have deceived the elect into soul-destroying compromise with liberals.

To treat politics as if it were a kind of religion is to make a category error. It is also to lose touch with reality.

An extreme example. During the French Revolution, Robespierre, who was no Christian but who did have a fanatical religious temperament, conceived of politics as a high-pitched pageant of purification.

As he saw it, the Revolution was eternally threatened by enemies - none more deadly than the wicked artificers he might have deigned Revolutionaries In Name Only.

That business did not end well for anybody. Granted, the Republican Party is not facing its own version of The Terror.

The point is simply that imputing politics with moral grandiosity and quasi-religious fervour makes deviation from ideology an extremely risky proposition.

Several more moderate Republicans lost their political lives to hard-right Tea Party primary challengers, who later proved too radical to win in Tuesday's general election.

"I went to bed last night thinking we've lost the country," said Limbaugh, on the day after. "I don't know how else you look at this."

So a plain-vanilla Republican like Mitt Romney losing a close election to Barack Obama amounts to the Conservative Apocalypse? Good grief. Where does this pants-wetting hysteria end?

The true-believing conservative grassroots and leaders like Limbaugh have constructed a perfect system of epistemic closure.

Under their framework, there is no need to rethink what conservatism means or how conservatives behave in light of new facts or changing circumstances.

And how circumstances have changed! Eight years ago, same-sex marriage was toxic at the polls. This year, voters in three states - Maryland, Maine, and Washington - legalised it.

What's more, the "McGovern Coalition" - the melange of white liberals, college students, young adults, racial minorities, and labour - upon which Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern built his catastrophic 1972 campaign, has now become the majority.

In the wake of Obama's triumph, political professionals of both the left and the right credit this trend, and warn that it is unlikely to reverse itself.

The demographic tide, which includes a dramatic waning of religious faith among younger Americans, is coming in too fast.

The Republican Party is becoming a perversely rigid sect, more concerned with being militantly correct than being pragmatic and successful. With each passing election cycle, their purity will become the purity of the desert.

There are many American liberals who counsel conservatives that all would come right for us again if only we would jettison our principles and become liberals.

No, thanks. Conservatives must be conservative, but we must also recognize that conservatism is not an ideology, but a way of approaching the world, the chief virtue of which is prudence.

As the great modern conservative Edmund Burke taught, the act of governing - indeed, "every human benefit and enjoyment" - requires compromise.

The talk-radio Jacobins and the suburban sans culottes may not like that kind of treacherous talk, but it is the essence of the conservative political temperament.

Burke once observed that "a state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation."

He might have said the same thing about the Republican Party. Then again, the old boy was probably a RINO.

[dgs49]

In an election that was this close, one can find a dozen different factors which, if reversed, would have brought about the opposite result.

Were Hispanics the deciding demographic? Blacks? Women? Pissed-off auto workers and their sympathizers? I've heard that 3 million fewer REPUBLICANS voted for Romney than voted for McCain in '08. Who would have imagined that, given the "enthusiasm gap"?

But one fact (or set of facts) remains, and Rush is righter than he is wrong: The Democrats promise almost unlimited "goodies" from the Government, and whether you are a retiree, an unemployed person, a government worker (at any level), a "working class" person with few prospects, a welfare queen, a student looking for help with the cost of education, or a "black" or Hispanic person worried about being a victim of discrimination, the Democrat party perennially dangles goodies in your face, and the Democrats have basically locked up huge majorities of these demographics simply by pandering to them with OPM.

In order for a Republican to win a national election, s/he will have to win about 75% of EVERYONE ELSE, which is a tall order indeed. It's unfortunate that the deck is so grossly stacked against the productive people who merely want the Federal Government to perform its Constitutional functions and not waste their money.

[Scooter]

Spoken like the pitiable sore loser that you are.

[Big RR]

Well i would guess the repubs could show why these "goodies" were bad and should not be funded in favor of giving tax breaks (talk abut pandering). But they haven't. And FWIW, what you term "goodies" are seen as justifiable government expenditures by many, including many who will never see one of them themselves.

[dgs49]

Big RR. One need only look to the United States Constitution (and read the fucking thing) to understand why these goodies are not the province of the national government, and ought not be funded.

The pathetic little man who wears the Big Bird suit on Sesame Street earns more than three hundred thousand dollars annually. And we are told that they need taxpayer money to survive.

Exhibit A.

[Grim Reaper]

Basically what dgs49 is complaining about is that the Democratic Party has been paying attention these last few decades while the Republican Party is increasingly operating from the 1950s.

It's one thing to stand strong with your convictions and another thing to shatter yourself due to an extreme unwillingness to compromise on anything.

[Scooter]

Instead of introspection, the rabid reactionary right continues to paint themselves as buffoons. The latest from Karl Rove is that Obama won the election by, wait for it, suppressing the vote. As if it was the Democrats that created voter ID requirements that were impossible to meet, abolished early voting, and sent out armies of vigilantes to challenge anyone at the polls with brown skin.

The pathetic desperation to rationalize their own failure is fun to watch.


This would be Dave's cue to chime in agreeing with him.

[rubato]

Big RR. One need only look to the United States Constitution (and read the fucking thing) to understand why these goodies are not the province of the national government, and ought not be funded.

The pathetic little man who wears the Big Bird suit on Sesame Street earns more than three hundred thousand dollars annually. And we are told that they need taxpayer money to survive.

Exhibit A.

If you were any good at what you do you might make that much too!


yrs,
rubato

PS less than 10% of PBS funding comes from the government. In other words other people think big bird is worth at least $270,000.

[Big RR]

Big RR. One need only look to the United States Constitution (and read the fucking thing) to understand why these goodies are not the province of the national government, and ought not be funded.

The pathetic little man who wears the Big Bird suit on Sesame Street earns more than three hundred thousand dollars annually. And we are told that they need taxpayer money to survive.

Exhibit A.

well, you can read the "fucking [constitution] thing" all you want; I'll stick with the US one that doesn't mention fucking at all. And in the US Constitution I don't see any reason not to fund these "goodies" (as you call them)--nor do congress or the courts for that matter. As for your Exhibit A, I sincerely doubt a "little man" whether pathetic or not, portrays Big Bird; and $300,000 annually for holding a significant part in a daily/weekly show (I don't know how many episodes are filmed a year, but I'd bet it's substantial, 20=30 or more) is not all that generous when compared with other acting gigs (didn't the entire starring cast of Friends and Seinfeld make around a million dollars an episode near the ends of their respective runs?); you have to pay for quality--or at least that's what I see conservative commentators say when the CEOs of firms which make their money from government procurement contracts (like Haliburton) make many times more than that suckling on the same government teat.

[Grim Reaper]

and $300,000 annually for holding a significant part in a daily/weekly show (I don't know how many episodes are filmed a year, but I'd bet it's substantial, 20=30 or more) is not all that generous when compared with other acting gigs

And the guy in the suit has been doing this for just over four decades now. He's been Big Bird since the beginning.

Meanwhile Mr. Romney earned $21.6 million in 2010, while being of even less value to the American people than Big Bird.

[Gob]

By its 40th anniversary in 2009, Sesame Street was the fifteenth-highest rated children's television show in the United States. A 1996 survey found that 95% of all American preschoolers had watched the show by the time they were three years old. In 2008, it was estimated that 77 million Americans had watched the series as children. As of 2009, Sesame Street has won 8 Grammy Awards and 143 Emmy Awards—more than any other children's show.

As author Malcolm Gladwell has stated, "Sesame Street was built around a single, breakthrough insight: that if you can hold the attention of children, you can educate them". Gerald S. Lesser, the CTW's first advisory board chair, went even further, saying that the effective use of television as an educational tool needed to capture, focus, and sustain children's attention. Sesame Street was the first children's show to structure each episode, and the segments within them, to capture children's attention, and to make, as Gladwell put it, "small but critical adjustments" to keep it. According to CTW researchers Rosemarie Truglio and Shalom Fisch, Sesame Street was one of the few children's television programs to utilize a detailed and comprehensive educational curriculum, garnered from formative and summative research.

The creators of Sesame Street and their researchers formulated both cognitive and affective goals for the show. Initially, they focused on cognitive goals, while addressing affective goals indirectly, in the belief that doing so would increase children's self-esteem and feelings of competency. One of their primary goals was preparing very young children for school, especially children from low-income families, using modeling, repetition, and humor to fulfill these goals. They made changes in the show's content to increase their viewers' attention and to increase its appeal, and encouraged "co-viewing" to entice older children and parents to watch the show by including more sophisticated humor, cultural references, and celebrity guest appearances

[Andrew D]

Big RR. One need only look to the United States Constitution (and read the fucking thing) to understand why these goodies are not the province of the national government, and ought not be funded.

Actually, dgs49, for years, you have provided no evidence that you have ever read the Constitution with even a modicum of care. And as to those few parts which you apparently have read, you have evidently never given any serious thought to what others -- others who have studied the Constitution with far more care than you (and, for that matter, than I) -- have concluded from it.

But you are welcome to prove me wrong.

You say that

whether you are a retiree ... the Democratic [fixed that for you] party perennially dangles goodies in your face ....

If you want to be taken at all seriously, then:

(1) Identify the case in which the Supreme Court upheld the Social Security Act;

(2) Articulate in specific terms, with appropriate citations, the reasoning which the Supreme Court employed in reaching that conclusion; and

(3) Demonstrate in specific terms, with appropriate citations to the relevant authorities, exactly why that reasoning is wrong.

If you can do that, then your opinions may deserve to be taken seriously. ("May" because, after all, Social Security is only one of the plethora of things which you claim are unconstitutional.)

If you cannot, then your opinions will deserve to be relegated to the dung heap where, as far as one can tell from what you have posted until now, they so richly deserve to be.

[Sue U]

Aw, lighten up on Dave, Andrew. I'm pretty sure butthurt isn't covered by Obamacare.

[dgs49]

Big RR (and others):

I direct your attention to Article I, Section 8 of the COnstitution. Look at it. It is a list of the powers of Congress. They are all logical, necessary, and directed at the PUBLIC good. Consider also that the Founding Parents took the time to enumerate these specific things, and did not JUST say, "Congress shall have the power to enact legislation and splend money to promote the general welfare," which is basically what "Progressives" pretend that they did say. Manifestly, they did not.

Once you have understood the import of Section 8, peruse on down to the Tenth Amendment, which provides that the powers not specifically granted to the Federal Government (Congress) are reserved to the states and the people.

Therefore, if you are aware of a law - let's say, the Social Security Act - that does something not listed in (or even inferrable from) Section 8, then you can, by your very own logical analysis, rightly conclude that that law is unconstitutional.

"Progressives" like to pretend that ordinary humans couldn't possibly understand what the words of the Constitution mean, and they refer you to tomes of judicial cases and opinions purporting to prove, basically, that what you are reading doesn't actually mean what it says. You will note that they NEVER start the discussion by quoting the actual term being "interpreted," but rather they refer you elsewhere - certainly noplace in the Constitution or its amendments. Note Andrew's posting above. Does he try to argue that the Constitution includes a provision for a compulsory retirement program? Of course not. the COnstitution does no such thing and he knows it. He wants me to look around for a 100-page Supreme Court opinion that comes to his desired conclusion.

Name another area of "interpretation" in which people seriously contend that you look someplace other than the original text to ascertain the intended meaning. The very idea is ridiculous.

I do not dispute that the decisions "proving" these ridiculous propositions and approving the laws in question are current and binding; I merely point out that they are plainly wrong.

The Catholic CHurch used to get a lot of heat from the Prods for discouraging believers from actually reading the Bible, asking them to rely instead on their catechisms and whatnot. Well, they were right. Any serious inquiry must START with the original text, then, if the text is unclear one might look elsewhere - to a published scholar or whatever. But the Constitution is not unclear, and it is only ambiguous to those who insist that it MUST be ambiguous. Don't drink that Kool-Aid.

As I said above, productive Americans want only that their Federal Government do the things that the Constitution provides. If they limited themselves to their Constitutionally-authorized functions, our taxes could be cut in half (literally) and the budget would still be in balance.

Finally, I would like to point out one simple aspect of Article I Section 8: all of these provisions are for the PUBLIC good. None of them benefits any individual citizen. There are no farm subsidies, no retirement or disability payments, no student loans, no subsidized housing - none of it. The federal government is a PUBLIC institution, never intended to confer cash or other benefits on INDIVIDUALS.

[Scooter]

"The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States..."

Absolutely NOTHING in Article I, Section 8 even remotely suggests that this statement is limited by the enumerated powers that follow.

This is, of course, settled law. U.S. v. Butler, and all that. You know Dave, those cases that have been pointed out to you a million times, and whose reasoning you couldn't begin to pick apart, because you haven't read them (or your own Constitution, for that matter).

What is laughable is that you continue to hold yourself out as having studied law, when this and a multitude of other incidents, including your moronic foray into patent law yesterday, are proof that you couldn't possibly have set foot in a law class.

[Grim Reaper]

Therefore, if you are aware of a law - let's say, the Social Security Act - that does something not listed in (or even inferrable from) Section 8, then you can, by your very own logical analysis, rightly conclude that that law is unconstitutional.

Right. Yet these things that are so amazingly and clearly unconstitutional have never been struck down.

It's almost like everyone else who studied the constitution came to a different conclusion from yours.

[oldr_n_wsr]

Aw, lighten up on Dave, Andrew. I'm pretty sure butthurt isn't covered by Obamacare.

Why not?

[Sue U]

Aw, lighten up on Dave, Andrew. I'm pretty sure butthurt isn't covered by Obamacare.

Why not?

No effective treatment.

[Lord Jim]

Finally, I would like to point out one simple aspect of Article I Section 8: all of these provisions are for the PUBLIC good. None of them benefits any individual citizen. There are no farm subsidies, no retirement or disability payments, no student loans, no subsidized housing - none of it. The federal government is a PUBLIC institution, never intended to confer cash or other benefits on INDIVIDUALS.

Dave, we've had this discussion before...

It seems to me that this bright line you want to draw between "public" versus "individual" benefits is a completely false dichotomy....

In fact quite the contrary; the two frequently have a symbiotic relationship...

There are a whole host of ways in which the way "public" benefits are achieved are through the mechanism of "individual" benefits....

It's a "public" benefit not to have food riots; one way to achieve this is to make sure that "individuals" are not facing starvation....

It's a "public" benefit (in fact there are several public benefits) to having a better educated population; one way to achieve this is to provide grants and loans so that more "individuals" can achieve a better education....

Now, we can argue (I certainly would) about whether or not individual existing federal programs are the best way to obtain these public benefits, or whether some would be more efficiently administered by states and localities, or whether some need to exist at all, or to what level they should be funded, etc....

But this notion of yours, where you seem to see one set of "public" benefits existing totally separate and apart from another set of "individual" benefits, in my view completely misstates the relationship between the two.

[Joe Guy]

There would be no "PUBLIC" if there were no individuals.