Month: November 2006

Sheena Easton demanded an entry.

Another classic:

"In great contests, each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be wrong. God cannot be for and against the same thing at the same time," – Abraham Lincoln, memorandum dated September 30, 1862.

My italics. But they are a remarkable three words. One of the principles ultimately at stake in the relevant contest was slavery – something which Lincoln indisputably opposed. And yet skepticism restrained him even then from invoking God’s sanction for his actions. Can you imagine what today’s absolutist conservatives would now say of him? And the moral equivalence they would accuse him of?

A fine mess.

He is, in my opinion, the dark horse for 2008. Here’s a case for why.

A case study in press cruelty and over-reach.

Here’s an attempt to find a correlation between coalition troops levels and Iraqi violence. It’s hard to find any. But that could merely mean that we never saw anything like the massive force that would have a real impact. I fear merely adding 20,000 troops will be insufficient – within the parameters already tried and already failed. Adding 100,000 would be different. But we don’t have 100,000 easily transferred. Given limited resources, what should we do? Bruce Rolston argues for adding 8,000 more troops to Afghanistan instead. His argument is worth listening to.

A reader writes:

I am a recent and avid reader of your blog who has never written to any political figure before. So why you and why now? I have always considered myself a staunch liberal (i think that affirmative action has a place in society.) Yet, recently I have realized that many of my generation (I am 25) who loved the "liberal" Clinton 90’s believe in low taxes, balanced budgets, and free trade. Combined with a belief in gay rights my "liberalism" sounds not unlike your "conservatism." The kicker is that my foreign policy guru is Fareed Zakaria, former-Reagantite and a longtime friend of yours.

I think that many of my generation are like me; we long for a moderate, fiscally responsible domestic policy while advocating and international and realist foreign policy that will keep us the greatest nation in the world. (Yes, for us, Clinton was most of that.)  Whether you agree with that or not I certainly agree with another of your readers that you may have hit upon a new ideology that defies current definition.

I liked Clintonism (although I don’t like affirmative action). But Clintonism was made possible in part by Gingrich. Clinton before 1994 was not as helpful (apart from the EITC and budget reform). But the reader is right. What I hope to do on the blog in the next few months is chart a new political direction that focuses on sensible small-c conservative reform: of gerrymandering, pork, entitlement excess, corporate welfare, immigration chaos, poor intelligence, and a realist attempt to get Iraq right. Let’s leave the labels behind. There is a lot the vital center can agree on.

A reader writes:

It’s quite depressing. My vote for Jim Webb was my first vote for a Democrat for national office, and I cast my vote knowing that the Dems wouldn’t be any more "small government" than the GOP, but hoping that perhaps the number of centrist Democrats that were being elected would pull them away from the precipice of leftism.  Well, early indicators suggest the Democrats are prepared to do just what they said they’d do (higher taxes, pull away from the war, no new, engaging ideas), while the Republicans, instead of being taught a lesson, are circling the wagons, promoting yet more Bush cronies (Martinez, anyone?) and digging up relics from the past like Lott and Baker to do damage control.  (Who’d have thought that the Bush 41 gang, which once experienced its own revolt from small government conservatives, would now be the lesser of many evils?)

I’m not old enough to remember the early ’70s, but if I had to guess, I’d say that period in American history was a lot like this one for small government types. Both parties were essentially big government. The president was a Republican liberal who tried to pass off bigotry as conservatism and tried to spend his way out of every problem. The nation was involved in an endless war for which there was no solution yet no one would admit as much.  And the only hope small government conservatives had was to hope that the parties would act as a check on one another’s authoritarian impulses and that the country would survive because of gridlock. 

At least back then there was a budding small governmentism on the horizon (Goldwater, Reagan). Now, I fear that there is none. As much as I love Rudy and hope that he’s the next president, even I am forced to admit that he doesn’t come from the same Tory strain as Goldwater and Reagan. And the other likely future POTUS, McCain, has displayed his big government sympathies before. I think America may be entering the sort of period that California and Britain are now experiencing, where the best we can hope for in our leaders is immoderate centrism (Blair, Cameron, Schwarzenegger) that ends up looking a lot more like traditional conservatism in practice, despite not being rooted there in principle.

Not quite "Morning in America," but I suppose we’ll survive.

(Photo of a reincarnated head of Richard Nixon from the great "Futurama," the once and now future cartoon series from Matt Groening et al.)

A case-study in how to get it right. Why can’t the GOP make this a critical issue for the country? Support voter intiatives in each state to reform the system? It seems to me that for the Republicans to cover from their new image as the party of sleaze, they need to do more than re-hire Trent Lott. They should become reformists – of the rotten system. If they backed a ban on pork and a battle against gerry-mandering, they could do well. McCain?

I’ll be reading and signing books this evening at 7 pm at Lambda Rising on Connecticut Avenue just north of Dupont Circle in D.C.