View 645 October 18 - 24, 2010 (original) (raw)
This week:
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
Sunday
Thursday, October 21, 2010
The Goal
When I was active in Republican Party politics -- I was a county chairman at one point -- I was not part of the Country Club leadership. I got into the game as an activist for Goldwater and had some influence over the Washington State delegation to the Republican National Convention. In those days conventions actually selected candidates; they weren't just a coronation ceremony for the winner of various primary elections. Many convention delegates were selected by state conventions, not primaries, and Washington was one of them. It cast its votes for Barry Goldwater, in defiance of the Republican national leadership and the Rockefeller Republicans. Rockefeller was Governor of New York state, and was the leader of the Country Club wing of the party. Same wing that in 1996 ran Bob Dole, the only man in the Party that Clinton could beat, and thus threw away much of what Reagan had built.
True to type, many Country Club Republicans cut the ticket in 1964. They preferred moderation -- which is to say cooperation with the Democrats in ramming through Johnson's Great Society -- to the populist principles of Goldwater and the "country wing" (as opposed to the Country Club wing; pardon the confusion) of the Citizens for Goldwater. In 1964 the Republicans carried California for the Senate, electing Reagan's friend George Murphy. The presidential election was a disaster, but it did lead eventually to Reagan as Governor of California and then President. It didn't lead to much change in the Country Club leadership of the Party. Newt Gingrich did that, but after his resignation the Country Club came back with a vengeance.
So in Alaska this year the Tea Party played by the rules. They ran a conservative candidate against an incumbent Country Club Republican Senator, and they won. Whereupon Senator Murkowski decided to run a write-in campaign in the general election. This is absolute repudiation of any vestige of party unity. Had a losing Tea Party candidate done that the establishment would have been horrified. The Republican leadership had a different notion. They allowed her to resign from a purely Party committee, but she remains the ranking Republican on the Energy Committee. She has not only cut the ticket, she is actively campaigning against the Republican nominee in a crucial Senate election -- and the Country Club has left her in place as their ranking member on a key committee. In other words, as usual, the Country Club is not playing by the rules; they expect conservatives to support them, or at least not actively try to destroy their candidacies, but when it's their turn the rules don't apply.
So what is the Tea Party to do?
Best advice: work harder and win. This is a crucial year. Don't waste energy on anger and thoughts of revenge. Don't daydream about third parties. Just get back to work.
The eventual goal is restoration of the Old Republic. That won't fully happen, but it is a vector; it's the right direction, and much of that is attainable. The goal is reviving the principles: limited government, leaving more to the states, stop the bleeding, stop the spending, get past the notion of government as the dispenser of entitlements, promote more responsibility. To get there will require some cooperation with the Country Club. Cooperation is not submission. In a family quarrel, least said, soonest mended.
Reagan understood that. Reagan's problem was that when he took office, the United States had a mortal enemy, the USSR, with 26,000 deliverable warheads aimed at the United States. The Seventy Years War was real, containment was in danger, and there was an existential threat not just to the Old Republic but to the United States as a nation. While most of the ruling class of the USSR was sane in the sense that they looked out for their own interests, the peculiar structure of the USSR required them all to pretend to be good communists, and to defer to the bizarre notion that if a series of nuclear wars ended with half the world population dead but the other half safely communist, this would server the ends of history. It would be worth it. This gave us a military strategy: threaten the ruling class itself. Make certain that the Nomenklatura understood that whatever happened they would personally not survive if it came to the ultimate conquest. Meanwhile, so long as the US could contain communist expansion so that war did not feed war and conquest did not feed conquest, the economic absurdities of the USSR structure worked at undermining Soviet capability. Mistletoe killing an oak, rats gnawing cables in two, Moths eating holes in a cloak, --- It wasn't a a dramatic strategy, but it did work. It just took time, and keeping on that target was politically costly. Reagan wasn't able to rebuild the Party. His energy was used up by the Cold War. He could stay on the vector, which is summarized in "government is the problem." while continuing to keep a government strong enough.
Strong enough: on no morning can the true believer communists on the PolitBuro ask "Comrade Marshal, if the war starts next week, can we win?" and get an unambiguous "Yes" answer; while every attempt at expanding the empire by anything less than total war costs more than it gains. And slowly, slowly, the answer got closer to "The capitalists can defend against our attacks, and we would be destroyed. They would not be. They would survive and we would not. All our policies are in vain. We have failed." Reagan lived to see that victory. It was costly, and left the Country Club in control of the Republican Party, because the Cold War had taken nearly all of Reagan's energy. He was elderly when he began, but full of energy; but after the assassination attempt, he was not the same man he had been. Those who knew him saw the effects. He couldn't save the West and rebuild the Republican Party at the same time. In 1984 he chose Bush I as Vice President because Bush was firm on the Cold War, and could be trusted in that. Rebuilding the Party had to be left for someone else.
I didn't set out to write a theory of history. Over time the liberal principles came back into vogue. The idea that there are "social problems" which can be "solved" by government took over in both parties. We had the creepy "big government conservatism" that continued to add "government solutions" without regard to principle. In 2007 the nation had enough of the Country Club. The Creeps were thrown out, but the result wasn't reform. Pelosi and Reid came in. More of the liberal policies were tried. The result has been more disaster. And the Tea Party.
This election may be the key to rebuilding the Republican Party. This time the only existential threat to the United States is our own government, which has been on the road to a fundamental transformation to a nation of subjects with entitlements, not free citizens with responsibilities. We need to get off that road and on another headed in the right direction. That is the goal. Taking revenge on those who put us where we are is not.
==================
Wikipedia is on balance a great treasure, but it has to be used with care. It is reliable on some matters, and somewhat less so on others, and often a source of error on controversial matters. The Wall Street Journal has an editorial on WikiPropaganda (link) illustrating the point with the story of AGW, in which a Manmade Global Warming Believer Partisan was for a long time an administrator determined to delete all signs that there was less than a general consensus on the truth of AGW, promoting Michael Mann, and being sure to present all pro-AGW theories as undisputed facts. This has changed, but the story is interesting -- including the fact that it took years to correct. As the editorial notes
All of this was an embarrassment for Wikipedia as it became more widely known, and last year it stripped Mr. Connolley of his administrator rights. He nonetheless continued his campaign, and last week Wikipedia's group of seven dispute arbitrators banned him from the topic entirely. They also banned other posters who had turned Wikipedia into their global warming propaganda outlet.
This is reminiscent of the Climategate emails, which showed global warming evangelicals using their academic positions to subvert peer review and close publications to dissenters. Wikipedia's 310 million unique visitors were also being fed only the Connolley-Mann line. That's not a scientific "consensus." It's censorship, and Wikipedia deserves credit for finally, if belatedly, stopping it.
Bully for them.
Wikipedia is not a good place for scientific debate. When it comes to AGW, not many places are. I try to keep things rational here. Sometimes I succeed.
===============
Now for something completely different.
The Wall Street Journal buried back on page D6 has an interesting article about a pair of architects who intend to improve the Barnes, having been employed by those who stole it. The article is entitled "The Barnes in a New Light", (link). Before you read that, read about Barnes himself, and what he intended when he built his school -- not a museum, but a school for teaching his unusual theories of aesthetics. It was intentionally allied with Lincoln University, an historically black college, in accord with Barnes' theories of equality. He intended the school to be not merely a memorial, but an operating school which allowed some visitors, provided that they came on his terms and saw his collection in the way he had intended.
The problem was that Barnes was the world's greatest art collector. He accumulated the most valuable collection of impressionist and "modern" (for his times) art in the world. Everyone wanted it, every museum executive thirsted for it. They offered every honor and inducement they had, but Barnes wasn't interested in that. He did not intend his collection for mass viewing, and one reason he did not give his school and collection to any existing institution was that he was pretty sure they'd sell it off for its enormous value; he had a pretty good idea of how such institutions operate. Moreover, Barnes hated the Philadelphia elitists and specifically intended that they never gain advantage or control of his art collection; indeed the Barnes Foundation was in every sense intended as a poke in the eye of the Philadelphia establishment. The whole idea was an anti-establishment art institute near Philadelphia. How good an idea this is, and how good his ideas on the subject were, is not under discussion here. The point is that he lived in what he thought was a free country, and was wealthy enough to hire the very best legal talent to set up his Foundation the way he wanted to prevent the establishment from stealing it.
Eventually the establishment used the courts to steal the collection, of course, in the name of "the people". That story is told in "The Art of the Steal" which is summarized pretty wellin this trailer. Watch that, then read the Wall Street Journal article. Draw your own conclusions about our intellectual elites.
An incomplete history of the Foundation and Barnes is given on Wikipedia.
==================