US Politics Mega-thread - Page 4941

On September 10 2016 00:45 KwarK wrote:

They should be but that doesn't mean she's pushing for a nuclear war with Russia. All attacks should be judged individually. A hack doesn't merit all out war. If there was proof Russian state actors deliberately caused a meltdown at a nuclear power plant that wiped out a city, well, that probably would. In the same way that if a German soldier strays into Belgium that's probably no big deal but if a million of them do then we should probably look into that. Context matters. Hillary thinking that cyber attacks are like physical attacks does not mean she wants a war with Russia unless she also thinks that all minor physical attacks merit a war with Russia.

2016 is the Flight 93 election: charge the cockpit or you die. You may die anyway. You—or the leader of your party—may make it into the cockpit and not know how to fly or land the plane. There are no guarantees.

Except one: if you don’t try, death is certain. To compound the metaphor: a Hillary Clinton presidency is Russian Roulette with a semi-auto. With Trump, at least you can spin the cylinder and take your chances.

...

If conservatives are right about the importance of virtue, morality, religious faith, stability, character and so on in the individual; if they are right about sexual morality or what came to be termed “family values”; if they are right about the importance of education to inculcate good character and to teach the fundamentals that have defined knowledge in the West for millennia; if they are right about societal norms and public order; if they are right about the centrality of initiative, enterprise, industry, and thrift to a sound economy and a healthy society; if they are right about the soul-sapping effects of paternalistic Big Government and its cannibalization of civil society and religious institutions; if they are right about the necessity of a strong defense and prudent statesmanship in the international sphere—if they are right about the importance of all this to national health and even survival, then they must believe—mustn’t they?—that we are headed off a cliff.

But it’s quite obvious that conservatives don’t believe any such thing, that they feel no such sense of urgency, of an immediate necessity to change course and avoid the cliff. A recent article by Matthew Continetti may be taken as representative—indeed, almost written for the purpose of illustrating the point. Continetti inquires into the “condition of America” and finds it wanting. What does Continetti propose to do about it? The usual litany of “conservative” “solutions,” with the obligatory references to decentralization, federalization, “civic renewal,” and—of course!—Burke. Which is to say, conservatism’s typical combination of the useless and inapt with the utopian and unrealizable. Decentralization and federalism are all well and good, and as a conservative, I endorse them both without reservation. But how are they going to save, or even meaningfully improve, the America that Continetti describes? What can they do against a tidal wave of dysfunction, immorality, and corruption? “Civic renewal” would do a lot of course, but that’s like saying health will save a cancer patient. A step has been skipped in there somewhere. How are we going to achieve “civic renewal”? Wishing for a tautology to enact itself is not a strategy.

Continetti trips over a more promising approach when he writes of “stress[ing] the ‘national interest abroad and national solidarity at home’ through foreign-policy retrenchment, ‘support to workers buffeted by globalization,’ and setting ‘tax rates and immigration levels’ to foster social cohesion." That sounds a lot like Trumpism. But the phrases that Continetti quotes are taken from Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam, both of whom, like Continetti, are vociferously—one might even say fanatically—anti-Trump. At least they, unlike Kesler, give Trump credit for having identified the right stance on today’s most salient issues. Yet, paradoxically, they won’t vote for Trump whereas Kesler hints that he will. It’s reasonable, then, to read into Kesler’s esoteric endorsement of Trump an implicit acknowledgment that the crisis is, indeed, pretty dire. I expect a Claremont scholar to be wiser than most other conservative intellectuals, and I am relieved not to be disappointed in this instance.

Yet we may also reasonably ask: What explains the Pollyanna-ish declinism of so many others? That is, the stance that Things-Are-Really-Bad—But-Not-So-Bad-that-We-Have-to-Consider-Anything-Really-Different! The obvious answer is that they don’t really believe the first half of that formulation. If so, like Chicken Little, they should stick a sock in it. Pecuniary reasons also suggest themselves, but let us foreswear recourse to this explanation until we have disproved all the others.

More to the point, what has conservatism achieved lately? In the last 20 years? The answer—which appears to be “nothing”—might seem to lend credence to the plea that “our ideas haven’t been tried.” Except that the same conservatives who generate those ideas are in charge of selling them to the broader public. If their ideas “haven’t been tried,” who is ultimately at fault? The whole enterprise of Conservatism, Inc., reeks of failure. Its sole recent and ongoing success is its own self-preservation. Conservative intellectuals never tire of praising “entrepreneurs” and “creative destruction.” Dare to fail! they exhort businessmen. Let the market decide! Except, um, not with respect to us. Or is their true market not the political arena, but the fundraising circuit?

On September 09 2016 10:32 Introvert wrote:
I've been pretty busy (good thing, because this election cycle sucks) but I thought I'd comment on that Claremont piece because apparently it got a lot of play. I read the first few paragraphs one night and, not seeing anything of value, went to sleep. But it lists so many of the pro-Trump positions and lights a truly magnificent fire to a field of large and imposing strawmen.

I will skip around but I have made a good faith effort to not leave anything out that would be important for the arguments being made.



This is in fact histrionic. Every presidential election we are told that this is it. That was said in conservative circles in 2012 for sure. It was less pronounced in 2008, but I think that's because few really knew Obama and it seemed like whoever came after Bush was going to lose (and the cherry on top was that McCain was/is terrible to conservatives).

Well, in my estimation this is not the end. I could comment on why, but I think it should be obvious that, even if you disagree, one could understand why someone else (such as myself) doesn't see this as being "it." Indeed, why is this it? What makes this election different than the one eight or four years ago? Hillary will certainly continue to the progressive policy implementation, will continue to expand the power of the executive branch, and will make a mess of the world. But that doesn't mean this is it. One must keep in mind that the progressive project has been in the works for over a hundred years.To say that this election will be the final touch or the only chance to reverse it is wrong. It might take a hundred years to undo.

Indeed, we are headed for a cliff. But we aren't at the edge yet.

This is a very large strawman. There is lots of urgency. This is in fact why conservatives held their nose and voted for McCain and Romney. This is how the GOP gets their money and support- from conservatives convinced we are fast closing the cliff-road gap. This part is so dishonest. Now there may be some intellectual who would rather have their sweet think-tank bubbles, but this is not the view of the majority. I myself have expressed, shall we say, displeasure at the current Republican party for all that it does (or, often, does not do). But this case he makes sounds exactly like the case made by GOP politicians every time an election comes around.

Indeed, there has been precious little done besides slowing the advance. This is a common alt-right argument, which refuses to recognize that conservatives have been out for power for those 20 years. It isn't the same as the "dorm-room Marxism," because, imo, conservative ideas have been tried, and do work.

On September 09 2016 12:43 xDaunt wrote:


I agree that the author is histrionic in the opening paragraphs, and it's my least favorite part of the article. Keep in mind that he is the first to admit that he's a pessimistic outlier among conservative intellectuals.

But I think that he is directly on point in that last paragraph in the passage that you cite. If you're a social conservative who holds socially conservative values, you absolutely will see the country as being already off the cliff and on the express elevator to hell. Traditional sexual morality is all but dead. The pro-choice vs pro-life debate is over; all that's left there is the beating of a dead horse. Traditional Christian values are on the retreat across the board. There's no way around the fact that social conservatism has been routed. Its Judeo-Christian foundation is in shambles.

And I've only mentioned the social issues. You can pick any of the other items on that laundry list, and the unavoidable truth is that the country is either rapidly moving away from the conservative position, or at best, conservatism is holding its ground. Critically, there is no advancement of a conservative agenda anywhere to be seen. The exceptions to this are in trade policy and military policy, which the author reject as still being good for the country (and I agree with him on this point).



I disagree. I think the author is right on point. And I think that you're missing his point. His concern in the article is not a specific set of republican politicians or candidates (nor is it really about Trump). Oh no, his indictment is far more damning than that. What he's really arguing is that mainstream intellectual conservatism -- the very foundation of the republican party itself -- is intellectually bankrupt on account of the utter failure of conservatives to both 1) create an agenda that actually tackles the large problems that the country is facing, and 2) even advance its own, highly-limited agenda over the past generation. The author is making the big picture argument.



So let's get back to the author's point: How many times must traditional conservatism be rejected at the ballot box before we question its political legitimacy and viability? At what point does it become a failed ideology?