Posted on 11/19/2006 2:39:53 AM PST by Tom D.
'Free to lose' isn't good philosophy for the right wing
November 19, 2006 BY MARK STEYN Sun-Times Columnist If Milton Friedman had to die, then a week after the defeat of a Republican Congress that had apparently forgotten every lesson Friedman taught in Free To Choose is eerily apt timing. As it happens, had ill health not intervened, Professor Friedman would have been disembarking round about now from a National Review post-election cruise with yours truly and various other pundits and commentators.
Instead, we were obliged to sail without him, and in the days that followed I found myself wondering what the great man would have made of the most salient feature of our deliberations: On the one hand, there are those conservatives for whom the war trumps everything and peripheral piffle like "No Child Left Behind" can be argued over when the jihad's been seen off. On the other, there are those conservatives for whom the war is peripheral and, insofar as it exists, it doesn't begin to mitigate the abandonment of Friedmanite principles on public spending, education and much else. There is a huge gulf between these two forces, to the point where the War Party and the Small Government Party seem as mutually hostile as the Sunni and Shia on their worst days. If the Republicans can't reunite these two wings before 2008, they'll lose again and keep on losing.
Take, for example, Ward Connerly, whose Michigan ballot proposition against racial quotas was one of the few victories conservatives won on Election Day. (Needless to say, most GOP bigwigs, including washed-up gubernatorial loser Dick DeVos, opposed it.) In a discussion of conservative core values, Connerly suggested it wasn't the role of the federal government to impose democracy on the entire planet. And put like that, he has a point. However, I support the Bush Doctrine on two grounds -- first, for "utopian" reasons: If the Middle East becomes a region of free states, it will have been the right thing to do and the option most consistent with American values (unlike the stability fetishists' preference for sticking with Mubarak, the House of Saud and the other thugs and autocrats). But, second, it also makes sense from a cynical realpolitik perspective: Promoting liberty and democracy, even if they ultimately fail, is still a good way of messing with the thugs' heads. It's one of the few real points of pressure America and its allies can bring to bear against rogue nations, and in the case of Iran, the one with the clearest shot at being effective. In other words, even if it ultimately flops, seriously promoting liberty and democracy could cause all kinds of headaches for the mullahs, Assad, Mubarak and the rest of the gang. However it turns out, it's the "realist" option.
The president doesn't frame it like that, alas. Instead, he says stuff like: "Freedom is the desire of every human heart." Really? It's unclear whether that's the case in Gaza and the Sunni Triangle. But it's absolutely certain that it's not the case in Berlin and Paris, Stockholm and London, Toronto and New Orleans. The story of the Western world since 1945 is that, invited to choose between freedom and government "security," large numbers of people vote to dump freedom -- the freedom to make your own decisions about health care, education, property rights, seat belts and a ton of other stuff. I would welcome the president using "Freedom is the desire of every human heart" in Chicago and Dallas, and, if it catches on there, then applying it to Ramadi and Tikrit.
Meanwhile, from the War Party's point of view, the Bush Doctrine is beginning to accumulate way too many opt-outs. For example, a couple of weeks back, U.S. forces in Baghdad captured a death squad commander of Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army only to be forced to release him on the orders of the prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki. When I had the honor of discussing the war with the president recently, he was at pains to emphasize that Iraq was "sovereign." That may be. But, at a time when a gazillion free-lance militias are running around the joint ignoring the sovereign government, it seems a mite pedantic to insist that the sole militia in the country that has to obey every last memo from Prime Minister Maliki is the U.S. armed forces. Muqtada al-Sadr is an emblem not of democracy's flowering but of the arid soil in which it's expected to grow. America would have been better off capturing and executing him two years ago.
That's not the worst mistake, alas. The crucial missed opportunity (as some of us pointed out at the time) occurred five years ago, back when the president still had his post-9/11 approval ratings. You can't hold them forever, obviously, but, while he had them, George W. Bush could have used them for a "teaching moment." As we can see in Europe every day of the week, Big Government is a national security issue -- for all the reasons Milton Friedman understood: In diminishing individual liberty, it transforms free-born citizens into nanny-state charges to the point where it imperils the existence of the nation. If ever there was a time for not introducing a new prescription drug entitlement, wartime is it. Yet the president and Congress apparently decided that they could fight a long existential struggle abroad while Big Government continued to swell and bloat at home.
It has been strange for me in these days since the election to spend so much time with so many figures I admire and to find that each group barely recognizes each other's concerns. The War Party is the War Party, the Small Government Party is the Small Government Party, and ne'er the twain shall meet, apparently. That way lies disaster: You can't be in favor of assertive American foreign policy overseas and increasing Europeanization domestically; likewise, you can't take a reductively libertarian view while the rest of the planet goes to pieces. Someone in the GOP needs to do what Ronald Reagan did so brilliantly a quarter-century ago:reconcile the big challenges abroad with a small-government philosophy at home. The House and the Senate will not return to Republican hands until they do.
©Mark Steyn 2006
The trouble with this column - its failure to come to terms with the concerns of small government conservatives - shows in Steyn's failure to acknowledge that Friedman was opposed to the Iraq invasion. (He said so very explicitly in an interview this past July, which is on the internet) Instead of just ridiculing that position, Steyn needs to treat it as something worthy of arguing with, maturely. He's not going to persuade people of the intellect of Prof Friedman by put-downs. Friedman had it wrong, I agree, but he was a brilliant man and he was committed to freedom, so you can't dismiss his positions with snide asides, you have to engage them.
Excellent article.
Thanks for posting.
Thanks for the ping. Steyn's always a joy to read!
And right on the money as well.
Reading that at first I felt anger. "Myth"? How dare you?
Then reality set in.
At 60 years of age, I remember an America quite different and morally stable growing up as a young boy in the 1950's.
It's an effin mess today, and I wonder how responsible is my generation?
History will look back at the flower children and the VietNam War...the Woodstock Generation and Im afraid they will be judged accordingly.
I hold back on criticizing radical Muslims sometimes now too... there's an overlay of feeling that on some basic level, we've lost. Same with some of the higher ideals of being conservative - our Pubbies threw away principle to get security for themselves - and a few friends... and lost. Maybe Steyn's right - maybe people would rather opt out of the dignity freedom brings - and settle for the bullied slave structure of dependence. Or maybe Steyn's just reacting to the death of a great man ... Let's hope it's the latter.
IMO, you have a poor understanding of the Office of the Presidency. Get a life...or get a grip.
We should invoke Godwin's Law for all you immigration groupies.
What is it that you perceive President Bush is not telling us?
The vast majority of Muslims don't follow radical jihad and "death to infidels" crap.
I'm sure the three of us realize that without the President gravely stating it in a fireside chat.
Sorry, I was just thinking of WWII in general - the Japanese should have been included in that. But my point was that the only thorough defeat was under a Dem president, which I think is rather hard to explain.
My big problem with pursuing "self-determination" abroad is that, witness Iraq, most Muslims will self-determine immediately to adopt sharia and enslave themselves again. It was a bad move to let them enshrine sharia in their constitution, although the only thing I can say in defense of Bush et al. is that it has taken everybody awhile to learn and understand what Islam really is (a tyrannical religious-political system) and at that time, most folks hadn't really grasped it.
Theoretically, it is not legally possible or permissible to sell yourself into slavery. But many of the people we liberate or people who live in the free world seem ready to do just that.
There's an unwritten bargain between the President and the Congress. The President fights the terrorists, and the Congress fights big government. The President's done his end of the bargain, but the Congressional Republicans have performed abysmally, at times even obstructing the War President with cries about terrorists' rights. The only reasons that Congressional Republicans could give to vote for them are: (1) supporting the President against our enemies abroad and (2) the Democrats are even worse. Republicans generally took (1) off the table, at times even acting like liberal Democrats on the defining issue of our time. And the Democrats refused to articulate (2) believably during the campaign season; the Republicans surely wouldn't. Republicans gave American no good reason to vote for them--many defeated incumbents spent their campaigns gloating about odious pork-barrel corrupt spending.
President Bush isn't the problem; he's practically the only elected official in Washington with ANY of our interests at heart, and the time has come for those on this forum to reserve their vitriol for the big-government Congress-creeps who act ambivalent in the war on terrorism yet represent RED districts. Sure, the President's made many mistakes, but Congress has made almost every bad one far WORSE--especially the terrible boondoggle of a Medicare entitlement.
Good points. I think that to a great extent people were simply voting against a Congress they do not feel has served either them or their president well. And it's true, the theoretically GOP Congress has been an obstructionist force from the word go. The Dems couldn't be any worse.
That said, I think Bush should have been a little more aggressive and given out the message that he wasn't going to play with people who didn't support him. However, at the same time, that's just not something that is in his personality, and while he could have been more aggressive in both dealing with the GOP and using his veto pen, it was simply something that wasn't going to happen.
"""I dunno. I'm not particularly religious, but I'm also socially conservative. One does not have to be religious to believe that abortion is both the taking of innocent life and thinly veiled eugenics, that marriage -is- supposed to be about providing a stable platform for children, etc. etc. """
I agree. I'm a not very observant Jew, but a strong believeing one, and I agree with you about abortion, in fact, I think that anyone, libertarian, conservative, or otherwise, who is concerned about individual freedom, should always give the unborn the benefit of the doubt. If they are not sure when it becomes human, assume that it happens sometime before birth, and is therefore entitled to live.
I swear, the next time any whining feminist tells me that the right wing wants to get into her bedroom, I'm going to ask her why anyone would want to get into her bedroom.
But, I agree with Steyn. If the liberty abroad, and the liberty at home conservatives cannot find common ground, the Reagan/Gingerich revolution is over, and won't get re-started for a long time.
Perhaps, but the immigration groupie would be you pal.
Sorry, I meant Japan, too, but I was just thinking of WWII in general. Your point is well taken, however; many Dems and leftists did support the war effort primarily because Stalin was being attacked. Maybe they'd support the US now if France were being attacked...(well, by more than a few thousand teenage thugs every Muslim holiday).
Your mentor, Helen Thomas, told me to "Get a life" when I wrote her. Try arguing the idea instead of ad hominem.
"thorough defeat [of Germany] was under a Dem president, which I think is rather hard to explain"
Maybe not so hard if you accept the notion that the Republican party of today IS the Democratic party of pre-1970. JFK's 'ask not' is a mantra for small government and individual responsibility. The Democratic party of today is a Labor party.
I suppose under that scenario, the only real conservatives of today are the paleos, ala, Barry Goldwater and Ron Paul, which leans into the realm of libertarianism... But that's just speculation.
This doesn't really represent the major division among republicans.
The divide is between large government, pro globalist, apathetic towards family values business types and small government, america first, family values voters.
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