| This
week:
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
Sunday
TOP |
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.
===============
The Art of the Steal
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 well
in 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.
==================
Thursday TOP
Current Mail
|
