Fundamental Concepts – Guess what Conservatives? We can't win [Weirddave]

Earlier this week, Drew M wrote another chapter in his long running “Let It Burn” saga, Can The GOP Be Reformed? Some Say No, Others Are Wrong. It's a good essay, I encourage anyone who missed it to take a moment to read it, because I'm about to take issue with it.

The issue I have with Drew's thread has nothing to do with it's content. I happen to think that his observations are spot on, and I agree with them. The GOP isn't a conservative party. It isn't going to ever be as conservative as he, and I, and I suspect most of you, would want. The United States will never be as conservative as it should be, and in fact it never was as conservative as we like to pretend. Even if one views the Constitution as the greatest governing document devised by man, which it is, it still has its flaws, and from the day it was ratified efforts from all sides have been ongoing to change or modify its provisions. The problem I have with Drew's essay is that I think he misunderstands the role that we absolutely HAVE to play in the system.

First, lets dispense with the canard that Conservatives need to just step back and let the worst happen. Let the inevitable collapse occur with an eye towards rebuilding a more traditional, freer, country from the ashes.

I can think of no situation in the history of mankind where societal or governmental collapse was not followed by a tyrannical government. Remember, oligarchy is the natural state of mankind, once all of the underpinnings of American law and government are destroyed, an oligarchy WILL form to reestablish “order” and to provide “security” for the people. Betting the house that we'd be able to form a successful, American version of the White Army to prevent this strikes me as gambling against very long odds indeed. I understand the seductive nature of let it burn, really I do, and sometimes in frustration or cynicism I waiver towards it's siren call, but ultimately I think it's a fool's gambit. That's not a world I want to live in or want my children or my grandchildren to inherit. Life there is nasty, brutish and short.

Now here's a good idea. If the GOP no longer represents the values of a significant portion of it's members, those members should form a party that does. The two parties could then duke it out for the hearts and minds of the right side of the population, with one emerging triumphant. Assuming that it's the breakaway Conservative party, we would then be able to steer the country back in the direction of prosperity and freedom. Sign me up! Except....

I don't think we have the time. The Republicans deposed the Whigs in six years. But without an issue as divisive as slavery to drive the confrontation, I think it would take much longer than that. We don't have six years. A President Hillary or Warren with a Dem controlled House and Senate would probably cause a collapse in six months. Unfortunately, a serious attempt at forming a third party right now would do nothing but bring about the let it burn scenario.

It's hard to argue against the thesis that the GOP is useless. Citizen push back against the leftist policies of the current Democrat party have given the GOP strong majorities in the House and Senate, and they've done nothing with them, squandering the leverage given them by the Constitution to control the budget, showing their belly on illegal immigration and refusing to even consider using Constitutional measured to bring an out of control Executive to heel. It's hard to see how anything is going to change in the next two years either.

On the other hand, it's easy to forget or overlook things that the GOP has accomplished, either intentionally or unintentionally. For the former, we need look no further than gun rights, which are the best in 40 years. If the burning times ever do come, you can thank your lucky stars the GOP never went full squish on these, as you'll probably be depending on one to survive. In the later camp is global warming. Suppose Gore had won in 2000, and instituted cap and trade and a whole bunch of other nonsense. Not only would the economic growth of the 2000s not have taken place, but we'd be in a world where the 18 year halt in rising global temps would be touted every day as justification for some new government program or another. “We acted on global warming in 2000 and stopped it!” would be the left's first line of defense against any push back from conservatives, and it would be very hard to refute.

Our role, as William F. Buckley so succinctly put it, is to stand athwart history, yelling "Stop!". All of the natural forces of history and humanity are constantly working against us. The natural state of mankind is poverty, with a small wealthy elite ruling over the masses. We have a system of government that is based upon individual freedom and responsibility, but like everything else, it's constantly reverting to the mean. Entropy in politics is no less real than it is in the universe. We can never stop it, but we have to work very hard to slow it down. We send conservative Republicans to Congress. Over time, as they get seduced by the DC political class, we replace them with others. Lather, rinse, repeat. This is our way of slowing the Overton window. If we can do that, if we thwart not just the natural tendency of human societies to revert to the mean but also those people who actively work to subvert the system and accrue power to themselves, then once in a while, every generation of so, an inflection point arrives where things are so bad that we actually have a chance to jump start the system again. Reagan was one such point, but what great conservative policy victories did he hand us? He didn't eliminate any government agencies, even though he promised to (bet he would have if he'd had the House). He got suckered into a bad immigration bill that's set the stage for so many of our problems today and he frankly got rooked by Tip O'Neill on spending cuts. Why then do we revere the Reagan presidency? He stood on principle and won the cold war. His conservative policies jump started the economy for 20 years, making the country prosperous enough to support collectivist garbage. He revitalized the concept of conservatism as a vibrant, viable option, such that it only took two years of Democrat malfeasance for the country to give the House to the Republicans in 1994 to put on the brakes. The 1994 conservative wave doesn't happen without Reagan, and without it we would have gotten Hillarycare. How much worse a shape would we be in today if that financial albatross had been hanging around our necks all this time? We got a 16 year reprieve from nationalized healthcare by electing the GOP in 1994, even though the vaunted “Contract With America” was for the most part a paper tiger.

The good news is that as long as we are able to stave off total collapse, we are guaranteed to get these inflection points, because the policies of the Left create them. 2016 is just such a point. I don't see things getting better in the next 2 years, in fact they'll get worse (maybe much, much worse). A President Cruz, or Jindal, or Walker or Perry could very well engineer the same kind of turnaround that Reagan did.

No. We don't win. That's the tough part in all of this. We can never win. The forces of entropy are always going to be working against us. Any victories we get are eventually going to be undone. Obamacare came along and made the victory over Hillarycare moot, but that victory did buy us 16 years. All we can do is slow things down and every so often pump some more energy into the system, keeping it going. Our job is to be the adults in the room. We have to get up every Saturday morning and cut the grass. No matter how good a job we do, cutting, weeding, trimming and edging, next week the grass needs to be cut again. And the following week, and the one after that. Forever. When we die, our kids have to cut the grass, and their kids, and their kids. The grass never stops growing, the same job always has to be done again next week. If we give up, slack off, stop cutting the grass, pretty soon we don't have a nice lawn, we have a weed choked lot. I don't want to live in a weed choked lot, so I cut the grass. It's boring and redundant and frustrating, but I do it. My (metaphorical) neighbors across the street don't bother, and their lawn looks like [crap]. Our political opponents don't bother, and their country looks like [crap]. [crap] has one thing going for it: It's easy. It requires no work. I don't want my country to look like [crap], so I do the work. It's Sisyphean, so I'll close with Camus:

I think the error with this essay is a lack of historical context. And that can be uncomfortable viewing, but the end result is hopeful.

To start with, conservatives today are not like Goldwater conservatives, because the world is a very different place today than it was then. Nobody but radical leftists (well, maybe Putin) is upset that the Soviet Union collapsed.

The radical leftists in the US back then were *so* far left that they supported Soviet gulags, and wanted a US even more brutal, like Red Khmer Cambodia. They were hardcore fanatics like Angela Davis. The worst that can be said of today’s leftists, with a few exceptions, is that they are more like Mensheviks. Weakling socialists with profoundly naive and stupid ideas.

The Democrats have become little more than the part of sin, from the seven deadly sins to petty nuisance sin. That is their campaign platform, with no deep thought behind it.

Conversely, Republicans are now divided into the various flavors of conservatism, which overlap considerably, and the Whig-style Republicans, the current leadership, who have power but no will or spine.

With continued erosion, there really is no future for the Whigs. One way or another, they and their cronies have no future in the Republican party, because though they have deep pockets, their only platform is to stop conservatives from ascending to power, just to protect their cronies.

If Jeb Bush is elected, the truth is that he will carry the day with fewer than 10,000 wealthy contributors. Literally nobody other than they wants what he wants. There is no joy or hope in that. “Jeb will fill a much needed gap” is hardly a winning campaign slogan.

Yet the time of the Whigs is running out. With each election, at all levels, their numbers are decreasing. This last election, the Empire struck back, but it is losing the war. And the fewer there are, the more concentrated the efforts of conservatives are against them.

I, too, have a vision for the renewal of the Republic. Seemingly, one less Sisyphusian than other approaches. Or perhaps, a realistic way of making the other needful things less impossible.
We must tame “the media.” Lots of luck, right? But what if a civil suit could bring it to book? That wouldn’t even require a single Republican politician. What would such a suit allege?

The Associated Press, and its member news outlets, together represent a monopoly. Although the various news outlets package the product differently and in that sense are competitors, “the news” is a product of wire services (particularly but not exclusively the AP), and that product is the result of a conversation among the “competitors,” which inevitably - as Adam Smith told us in Wealth of Nations - has resulted in “a conspiracy against the public, or some contrivance to raise prices.”

The conceit that journalism is objective is no part of the First Amendment and is not necessary for its rationale. Neither the First Amendment nor the rest of the Constitution implies a corresponding duty on anyone to tell the truth or to be objective. The constitutional regime places the onus on the reader to transcend Adam Smith’s warning (in Theory of Moral Sentiments:
"The natural disposition is always to believe. It is acquired wisdom and experience only that teach incredulity, and they very seldom teach it enough. The wisest and most cautious of us all frequently gives credit to stories which he himself is afterwards both ashamed and astonished that he could possibly think of believing."
For that reason, a monopoly on journalism, or on a reputation for objectivity, is anathema to the First Amendment.

Monopoly journalism naturally conspires against the public by exaggerating the virtue of journalism and journalists, and denigrating the competing claims to importance by entrepreneurs and others who work to a bottom line:
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds.
Journalists behave as critics, indeed as cynics; they despise the Theodore Roosevelt dictum above and far prefer the opposite, cynical formulation that “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that.”
This tendency extends to systematic promotion of Democrats as “liberal,” “centrist,” or “moderate” and the denigration of Republicans as “right wing” or “extreme.” It extends to the systematic denigration of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, converting the name into a byword for “smearing" Democrats by telling the truth about them. Systematically, the journalism monopoly promotes fraudulent narratives which not only have been revealed to be false with the passage of time but were never supported by serious evidence in the first place. The Duke Lacrosse case, the Zimmerman case, the massive campaign against Sarah Palin, the list is endless and extends back through the valid claims of Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Communist influence in the government and through the Alger Hiss case.

The federal government, and certainly the FCC and the FEC, have no authority to place the imprimatur of the government on political speech/press, nor to regulate political speech or press at all.

It may be reasonably claimed that money is not “speech” - but there is no case that money is not essential to the workings of a press for ink, paper, reporters’ salaries, newspaper distribution, and for new printing presses. It follows that “Money is the Press” - and any regulation of political money is abridgment of the freedom of the press. “The press” in constitutional terms is not a right only of the AP and its member newspapers, but it is a right of any citizen who even might want to operate a newspaper, magazine, radio station, or TV station. Any other interpretation is elitist and proposes that journalists are either priests or noblemen.

The justification and reason for the existence of the wire service was the economic distribution of news over very expensive telegraph bandwidth. The cost of worldwide data transmission bandwidth is now negligible in comparison, and the wire services are therefore in on sense “too big to fail.”

As to the question of the constitutional status of modern publicity technologies the Constitution explicitly contemplates the promotion of “science and useful arts.” So although there is no case that the framers specifically accounted for the telegraph, the telephone, the radio, the television, or the computer and the worldwide web, if those technologies require regulation not contemplated in the First Amendment it is incumbent on the Congress and/or the States to amend the Constitution to authorize such regulation.

the Constitution would not have been ratified, in the opinion of James Madison, John Jay, and Alexander Hamilton, had they not had the right to publish the Federalist Papers under the pseudonym “Publius.” And according to the Ninth Amendment,
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people. There is therefore no case for the claim (central to “Campaign Finance Reform”) that no one who indulges in freedom of the press may do so anonymously.

For all these reasons the courts should delegitimate the wire services, granting crippling damage judgements against the AP and the other wire services, and their memberships.

Let’s ask ourselves the obvious question - in the event of a genuine, it-all-hits-the-fan situation, who do we think the military is going to support?

Obama and his cronies?

The military in which 85% of the personnel hate the guy’s guts? The military that he and his cronies have spent the last 6 1/2 years belittling, denigrating, insulting, and emasculating? The military whose morale he has destroyed through social engineering (gays in the military, etc.)? The military whose personnel he cannot even gin up enough respect for to salute them back when they do their duty? The military in which chaplains who speak in Jesus Christ’s name (who the large majority profess to believe in) are hounded and drummed out? The military which has a C-in-C who curries and caters to the Muslims that we have spend the last ten years fighting?

THAT military?

The ones who took an oath to protect and defend the *Constitution*, not the President personally?

Do we *really* think that military is going to just go along with rampaging through American neighbourhoods arresting gun owners or people who disagree with the President or whatever else?

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