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Thursday,
March 5, 2009
Subj: Conservative Think-Tanks afflicted by
Pournelle's Iron Law? 8-(
That's what this article seems to indicate:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/01/magazine/01republicans-t.html?_r=1&hp
>>Talk to despairing Republicans in Congress these
days, however, and you will hear little reverence for these brainy
institutions, which one senior aide recently described to me, acidly, as
a bunch of “moribund blogging societies.” Twelve years of Republican
power in Congress — along with eight in the White House — seem to have
had the effect of sapping the vitality and antiestablishment moxie from
the movement’s venerable policy centers, which now spend a fair amount
of time holding wonderfully esoteric brown-bag lunches about
pharmaceutical prices or the British economy while, just down the
street, conservative lawmakers are huddling together for warmth.<<
The piece goes on to tout Newt Gingrich's
organizations as the places from which "the conservative movement’s
intellectual and strategic thunderbolts seem to be emanating".
My problem with Newt is that he keeps talking as if
conservatism were an ideology, on a par with all the other ideologies
running amok in the world, and as if All We Have To Do Is Just out-ideologize
all the other ideologues -- that is, craft a Republican Party ideology
that is more congruent with the "American ideology" than the Democratic
Party's ideology. If that attitude becomes the most-widely-accepted
meaning of "conservative" for the next decade, amongst American voters,
then we non-ideological conservatives are *truly* lost!
The author of the piece, of course, has no clue that
non-ideological thinking might even exist. He thinks only in terms of
government-loving vs government-hating ("progressive" vs "conservative",
in his lexicon), more-militant vs less-militant, and more-coherent vs
less-coherent.
The article's description of Newt's hyperactivity
reminded me of the old saying about the four kinds of military officers --
specifically the part about a "brilliant and energetic" officer being what
you want for Chief of Staff, but *not* for Supreme Commander, because as
Supreme Commander he'd drive the troops crazy. For Supreme Commander, you
want "brilliant and lazy".
How would Fred Thompson have worked out, as a
"brilliant and lazy" prospect for Supreme Commander, to go with Newt's
Chief of Staff? Alas, Fred seems to have been *too* lazy.
Politics is not military, anyway.
Eric Cantor, the new Republican Whip, sounds
promising, though.
Rod Montgomery
You could say much the same about Rush Limbaugh, who hasn't until
recently thought of himself as a thinker, but rather as the Pipe Major
charged with doing a daily concert. Pretty well the same thing can be said
of Sean Hannity. They're on public view all the time, and they have to
have something to talk about that will keep their listeners not only
listening but fired up, tuned in.
Russell Kirk knew better, which is one reason he gave up doing a regular
column. If you don't have something to say, you may be tempted to just say
something, because if you don't, people will forget you are there. I suppose
the extreme case in point is Twitter, although I confess I have never seen a
single Tweet; but from what I see in discussions of Twitter (some of them of
course parodies) I can't imaging wanting to have a Twitter following. It's
hard enough coming up daily with something I imagine may be interesting to
readers. Alas, if I don't manage something, the subscriptions and renewals
vanish -- just as, if The Heritage Foundation can't find something to
publish, people stop donating to it.
But conservatism isn't an ideology. Sometimes, as in the Seventy Years
War AKA the Cold War it was necessary to stir up emotions, and that was a
very difficult thing to do: Containment was not an exciting strategy; it
was, however, expensive, and we found it necessary to defend actions and
practices that we hated.
The Strategy
of Technology, of being a step ahead in the Technological War at all
times, of making certain that the Marshal of the USSR could never tell the
Polit Bureau that if they launched the war next week, the USSR would be
terribly damaged but there would be no remaining opposition to world
communist rule -- explaining the importance of that wasn't so much difficult
as a continuous requirement. Technological Warfare is constant, and it's not
that hard to fall way behind a determined enemy. Alas, the
Protracted Conflict (by Strausz-Hupe, Possony, and Kintner) required
more than just technology. For containment to work, communist expansion had
to be contained, because each new victory strengthened the expansionist
elements in the USSR. The result was that conservatives had to make common
cause with Cold Warriors who had other agendas -- who were, as it turned
out, ideologues.
I recall being in a national TV debate with Allard Lowenstein and
McGeorge Bundy: Allard said "Jerry, you want to win in Viet Nam and get out.
I just want to get out. But your friends over there want to lose it and stay
in. And they're running the war."
I had no reply to that. As it happened, by the time we abandoned Viet Nam
in 1975 the Soviet State had begun its decline, and even misinterpreted
their "victory" in Viet Nam to mean they now understood how to deal with
such matters, and went into Afghanistan; with disastrous results. Ideologies
make it very difficult to interpret world events. Seen through the lens of
ideology, disaster often looks like victory for while. Yet sometimes
conservatives have no choice but to choose sides with ideologues.
It is ever thus, and perhaps it must be.
I certainly would have been more comfortable with Fred Thompson, with
Newt as Speaker, than I am now; but then I was more comfortable with Clinton
as President and Newt as Speaker than I was during most of the Bush era.
Daily political messages get more attention than attempts to look at
things in deeper perspective, and ideologies are always more popular than
principles. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be per omnia
secula seculorum.
(and see mail)
=========
On the daily political news: The newly appointed head of the FDIC
tells us that the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, one of the
better products of the Roosevelt New Deal, is nearly broke. This predictably
generates a great deal of commentary from the financial community (example).
It's not the first time, of course. The FDIC keeps getting nearly broke,
and needs bailouts. It has happened before, and it will happen again. If
there is one institution guaranteed a bailout, the FDIC is it.
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