A Second Hand Conjecture

If you care any about the future of the Republican party and conservatism in general, you need to be reading The Next Right.

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Synova wrote a little post that gets halfway to where I would come down on this perennial parlor game of  the John Galt general strike. Sy recognized that to be successful, such a revolt would realistically be a miserable experience for a society, resulting in bloodshed and economic ruin. But she does not depart from Rand in assuming that the eventual outcome would be desirable. I’d advise the ancient wisdom that if the means are clearly evil in a political project, one should become immediately skeptical of the alleged justice of the ends.

We should also be skeptical of the social assumption for Galt, that there is a definable and rigid division among men into a minority of Platonic creative guardians, and an empowered majority of proletarian oppressors and their craven political servants — and that these factions could have accurate self-recognition of their social roles. I would contend that anyone who thinks of the majority of the people as disposable abstracted parasites, under a constitutional order that explicitly derives its governing powers from the majority consent of the governed, is never selling you anything that’s going to arrive in a happy place.

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(photo: Ian Murchison | website)

The nationalization of Fannie & Freddie is often presented as a crisis of faith for the political right, due to its manifest incompatibility with the advertised belief in the “free market.” However, Sunder Katwala at NextLeft cleverly recognizes that it also presents a challenge to orthodoxy on the left, given that the insisted purpose of the nationalization isn’t government ownership, but to rescue businesses for a stable return to the private sector.

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photo: Chris Dunn

The Moderate Voice takes a good and short look at McCain’s politics and notices a compelling absence of social conservative moral lectures, as well as a preference for stressing the characteristics of conservatism that Americans find most appealing: limited government and national security. Jennifer Rubin might add that McCain’s emphasis on pragmatic realism in international affairs, is also the only acceptable antidote to a politics of ambiguous hope from Obama. McCain’s secular politics and taste for moderate political compromise represented vulnerabilities in the nomination fight, but they can become powerful electoral assets in the general election, if he can use them.

(HT: Donklephant)

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Jim Hollrah makes the interesting argument that the repeal of coat-n-tie dress codes at American colleges was the beginning of the New Left’s ruination of the academy, and the prerequisite for the revolutionary student politics of the 1960s.

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It seems Daniel Hannan has been getting some email of the “what the heck is wrong with you?” variety over his support for Barack Obama. Today he argues that he’s thrown his support behind the rather vague candidate because of his policy vacuity and favoritism for style over substance:

Isn’t it possible to argue that we want a relatively supine president, at least in the sense that a strong legislature is preferable to a strong executive, and that strong states are preferable to both?

The Republican heyday was arguably the last three decades of the 19th century, when they controlled 14 out of 16 congresses and generally held the White House, too. The party of that era believed in building up Congress at the expense of the presidency. Who were the presidents of that time? James Garfield, Benjamin Harrison, Rutherford B Hayes. (Rutherford B who? Exactly.) Yet these were the years when the US grew from a weakling among nations to a colossus.

To put it another way, I’d rather have a president who was decorative than one who was over-active. And Obama is certainly decorative.
(The Daily Telegraph)

Never mind the fact that the congress is very likely to be retained by the Democrats in 2008, and that a weak president led around by Nancy Pelosi, isn’t something anyone right-of-center should dream of. But there is nevertheless a certain logic to this from Daniel’s point of view.

Daniel is afterall unpersuaded that Iraq is an issue of any real significance to the national security of the United States, and he is highly sympathetic to Ron Paul’s isolationist views. When you don’t need or want a strong foreign policy, you don’t need or want a strong presidency occupied by a sharp and experienced leader with loads of specific plans. The bigger the boob, the less the interventionism, you might say. Marshalling public and political support for an aggressive foreign policy is no task for a man more comfortable weighing the advice of image consultants than that of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Therefore it might be an interesting political question to ask how many other current Republican Ron Paul supporters could be persuaded to vote similarly, were Obama facing an advocate of a vigorous foreign and national security policy.

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