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
Steyn nails it. If you read between the lines, he says Bush fails to lead domestically. The entire problem with the GOP.
I have already read that I need to "get a life" (channeling Helen Thomas, who wrote me the same thing) and I "don't understand the office of the presidency."
Bush 1 gave us a Dukakis administration, including raising taxes, a humdinger recession, courting the gay vote, and gutting the military in the name of We Won the Big One - No More Enemies.
Bush 2 gave us six years of open borders, hope for amnesty under the new Congress, promiscuous spending, premature celebration (Iraq), a pro-abortion Supreme Court crony-nomiee (pro-lifers are "terrorists"), constant support of the worst and most disgusting liberals (Spectre, Fat Teddy), and constant undercutting of real conservatives while supporting RINOs.
Actually, another poster made a very good point, which was that the Dems and the left really rallied behind the war against Hitler only after Hitler attacked Stalin, and that to them, a lot of WWII was about supporting Russia.
But I think that what you say about the evolution of the two parties is correct, although I'm not sure the libertarian-leaning wing is representative of a realistic conservative party. That is, libertarians are essentially into the dissolution of all government, which while it may sound great on paper, simply doesn't work. A friend of mine, referring to anarchists (the left-wing version of the curve represented on the right by libertarians), "anarchy is the government of Heaven." In other words, only a society where everyone is already good and already subject to a divine law that they have internalized can run as an anarchist/libertarian society. And of course, since that's not going to happen anytime here on earth and most people have had enough experience of themselves and their neighbors to know this, I guess it's no wonder that these candidates don't reap a lot of votes...
btttt
What you remember is a media that was pro-American. Sure, America was different, but it wasn't necessarily better. Racism was common. Women were second class citizens - they couldn't get professional jobs, buy houses or cars, and dared not report rapes. Discrimination against many ethnic groups was common - Italians, Poles, Chinese, etc.
Abortions still happened, but in back alleys. Addicts, alcoholics and the mentally ill were locked in prisons or state hospitals.
There were Communists actively working to subvert the US gov't. And there were crooks in office.
We didn't read about all of that in the papers, or see it on tv, but it was there.
We can't solve problems without facing up to them. Of course, right now, we can't even agree on what the problems are.
All ages have their problems. In some ways blacks are worse off now in consequence of Johnson's Great Society fraud than they were in the first half of the 20th Century. Despite the racism, black families were more or less healthy and intact. Harlem was flourishing and safe.
Feminists are perplexed to discover today that many women are giving up on the "freedom to achieve" outside the home and are returning to the role of homebound mothers. It isn't a bad, repressive, or unfulfilling life simply because it involves changing diapers in lieu of climbing the corporate ladder or filing appellate briefs.
You're idealizing Reagan beyond reality. He declared amnesty for illegals, and in a sweeping fashion. Bush doesn't want to do that. As Gov. of CA, Reagan signed the most permissive abortion laws of any state. Reagan appointed Sandra Day O'Connor to the Supreme Court. He also ignored the Islamic threats that showed up at Khobar Towers and Achille Lauro.
Reagan is one of my all-time favorite Presidents. But the major way he gained success was to limit what he tried to do to just a few priority issues. Bush is doing the same. If Communism hadn't fallen (after he left office), Reagan would have been remembered as ordinary. Bush is taking the same risk with Iraq and the middle-East. He may or may not be successful in the end, but he's following the pattern.
(And, oh, if he only could speak eloquently!)
I heard him the other day being interviewed by a local radio host here in Denver. It was a few days after the election. He started out with a few jokes, but during the bulk of the interview he sounded quite subdued and almost sad.
Did you see this article:
Personally, I'd take her by the left leg and throw her down the stairs (Nursery Rhyme Police)
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1740485/posts
And, also, this related article:
The nursery rhyme police - parents to take lessons in reading and singing
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1739465/posts
And Mrs Hughes said the state would train a new 'parenting workforce' to ensure parents who fail to do their duty with nursery rhymes are found and 'supported'.
And "Blacks" are not worse off than they were then. There are many middle and upper class Black families that have achieved successes they would not have been permitted in thee '50s. I will grant you that the welfare recipients - many of whom are Black and live in inner cities - are worse off. Welfare reform is helping, but it's a problem still needing solutions. But that's not the Black population - it's a subset.
Very few women are giving up on the "freedom to achieve" outside the home and are returning to the role of homebound mothers. Many women are taking time off from their careers to raise their children full time, but they are by no means "homebound" as women often were in the yore of your dreams, and most have careers before and after the major childraising years.
Agree with you there. Growing up in southern California during the late 40's and 50's in Pasadena, we had a completely different set of ethical and moral codes to follow than we do now. In fact, I don't see any codes at all now. History is going to be our harshest critic.
It's been trending that way since he penned America Alone, I think, and the election didn't help.
There are a couple of different issues on the plate here. First is the notion that Bush or any other President is solely responsible for the size of government. The Executive is actually mostly a cheerleader in matters fiscal, and the lengths to which any President has to go to get "his" budget passed is a case in point. Another case in point is the fact that Ronald Reagan also ran on a small-government platform and was really quite sincere about it as evidenced in his contemporary writings. And government grew.
The real difficulty is that the purse strings, and hence the size of government, are held in Congress by people with a vested interest in getting government to do something for their constituents, with the stakes being the primary ones for any politician - their re-elections. There are a lot - a majority, I think - of good reasons for placing this power in that organ but cutting the size of government takes a distant rear seat because of it. The question is simply whether the voters will accept less in the way of federal programs in their direction in the interest of cutting the size of government, and it takes a brave and potentially suicidal politician to try to accomplish that.
The voters have to force the issue by electing officials who are conservative in this area in practice. This past election we didn't do that. For those conservatives who are sitting back in self-satisfaction telling themselves that they just taught the government a lesson, they're right, but it was the wrong lesson.
The second issue revolves around a pervasive feeling that we've lost the war in Iraq that has very little to do with any actual events on the ground. The media have framed this election as a referendum on Iraq and the radicals within the Democratic party have cooperated by resuming their old role of a stern parent shaking a finger at a wicked America that has grown too big for its boots, much to the delight of our enemies. If now Syria and Iran and North Korea are emboldened it is at the prospect of having allies in Congress more interested in humbling their own country than in governing.
An awful lot of people felt similarly that our "loss" in Vietnam was the end of the Cold War with the Soviets reigning victorious, only to be bitterly disappointed when events proved otherwise. Many of those same people are behind the current deliberately contrived malaise with respect to Iraq. They'll be wrong this time too - but the Vietnamese people payed a terrible price last time and the Iraqis look to this time. Not the happiest position from their point of view, but hey, the Dems feel good about themselves just as they did in '75.
Steyn seems dark because I think he sees the possibility of the war being fought closer to our shores by enemies growing in numbers and in the power of their weapons, and on behalf of a Western culture that has essentially refused to fight when the prospects of victory are high, to paraphrase Churchill, and so are faced with fighting when the prospects of defeat are growing. That tends to sober one.
Who said "Life is a comedy to him who thinks, a tragedy to him who feels"? Maybe that's the distinction I'm getting at.
A society can take that analyzing of problems to an extreme and everything is turned into a problem, offense, and a syndrome--which is the state of affairs we are in now. And we all know how people with a leftie mindset want to solve societal problems, offenses, and syndromes real and imagined--more government. See post above regarding the nursery rhyme police in England. The leftists here and abroad have set up a society where many people are no longer in intact families. Single mommy has to work and child has very little to no daddy influence and maybe very little or decent mommy influence. Child doesn't flourish and his options are limited. He might turn to illegal activities. He's a burden on society. How do we solve this growing burden on society? More government programs and solutions. It's a horrible downward cycle, and I think Mark Steyn believes that it might be very hard if not impossible to overcome when coupled with external and internal enemies who are anticipating and/or plotting your demise.
I think Mark Steyn falls into the category of a warm-hearted and caring thinker. He and others are trying to sound the alarm but the ship is too big and he sees the iceberg getting closer and closer.
I never meant to imply that I thought gov't was the solution to any problem! Society does have problems, and sometimes laws are needed to fix them. But that's a far cry from a nanny gov't solution.
But we do need to have dialogue about what is really a problem and what is not. Per your example, I'd say the number of children in single parent families (esp. where the mother is little more than a child herself) *is* a problem. I'd also say that it's not a problem that gays can't marry.
The gov't has had 40 years to prove they can't fix the problem of single parent families. All of us have to figure out how to fix that problem.
In the example I gave of gay marriage, if we agree it isn't a problem, our laws are sufficient.
But in both cases, we either need to discuss it, or leave it up to gov't officials to decide. I'd rather discuss it.
No, I didn't think you were implying that government was the solution but when lefties over analyze and make everything a syndrome, more government is always their solution. The first chapter of solving a problem in their book is usually a study of it, undewritten by taxpayer money, and after the study is concluded that's when you really hear the big sucking sounds.
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