Civil Rights or Marketing?

Hrcfashion

A reader writes about the Human Rights Campaign’s commercial ambitions:

Your reference to the HRC’s commercial appeals reminded me of another annoyance. They sell their lists of members to make extra cash. I signed up in 2004 as a supporter of any campaign to push back against inequality, which was the pitch they made when Hrcdog they solicited my membership in the midst of the Republican election-year assault. I signed up and became a member over the phone, contributed several times, and the confirmations would come back in the mail with a slight misspelling in my name. About a month later, my mailbox started getting spammed with gay culture magazine subscription offers and other lifestyle driven marketing approaches, all sent to the same misspelled name on my HRC membership. These weren’t very effective on me because I’m married and straight.

I thought I was joining a political organization pushing for equal rights, only to find out that I was joining a marketing segment defined around a gay lifestyle. This seems a strange way to approach political organizing.

Not if you see them for what they are: a corporation designed to milk the gay market for money to hire more fundraisers and marketers to milk more gay pockets. It’s a racket with a plush new multi-million dollar headquarters and salaries that would make corporate America blush. Have they actually done anything for gay rights? After a couple of decades observing them, my own view is: nada. Their main activity in the 1990s was selling the Clinton administration to gays. The reward was some jobs and sinecures for their own clique. And the reason they got along so well with the Clintons is that the Clintons are all about raising political money as well. You can see all HRC’s consumer products – jewelry, designer fashion, candles, cuddly toys (as the "equality dog" above) and on and on – here. It all helps achieve what HRC is all about: the money. They get tens of millions of dollars a year from well-intentioned gay men and lesbians. They’ve been doing it for years. And what have we got? Nothing. Wake up, guys. Give your money to people who actually fight for gay equality.

A Whig or a Tory?

A reader ponders his own political identification:

Like you, I identify as a conservative. My conversion from high school and college radical was mainly in reaction to other student radicals, who seemed divorced from reality and Tcscover_41 in love with their own rhetoric and that of their heroes. Yet I did not find much comfort in the so-called campus conservatives, who seemed even more intellectually vacuous, even dishonest.

My own beliefs about conservatism and the ideas which I hold dear are constellated around the idea of the primacy of the individual. Yet the individual does not exist outside of the context of society, so that the good of the individual must be balanced against the needs of society and his fellow man as a group (perhaps as a group of fellow individuals, but a group nonetheless). However, in finding this balance, the individual must be favored, or at least protected. This is what I think was the intention of the founders of our government in their design of the Constitution.

One of your most interesting assertions about your idea of conservatism is that it should be skeptical, both of change and of tradition. Today, as I read Hayek’s essay "Why I Am Not a Conservative", I felt as though I had found someone who understood and elucidated my position, and I noted that his position seemed quite similar to yours:

"The liberal differs from the conservative in his willingness to face this ignorance and to admit how little we know, without claiming the authority of supernatural forces of knowledge where his reason fails him. It has to be admitted that in some respects the liberal is fundamentally a skeptic – but it seems to require a certain degree of diffidence to let others seek their happiness in their own fashion and to adhere consistently to that tolerance which is an essential characteristic of liberalism."

In the succeeding sections, Hayek goes on to describe his discomfort with calling himself a liberal because of modern usage and because of Continental Liberalism, which he disavows. Instead, he describes himself as an "Old Whig", yet wonders if this is an effective label, given its obscurity.

You may well have covered all this in your book, which I have not yet read.

Well, read it. My own position is an essentially Oakeshottian one, which doesn’t actually help many people, does it? Hence my book. But in Hayek’s terms, I am a liberal. I don’t see tradition as dispositive; I see it as the essential material for the pursuit of existing cultural and political intimations. Tradition is another name for contingency. I eschew the word liberal because for a century at least, it has been coopted by statist, high-minded busy-bodies who see nothing wrong with the world that government and a few big brains can’t fix. That’s about as far fom my own perspective as can be described. I’m a believer in individual freedom, small but strong government, free speech, free trade, secular politics, and the pursuit of happiness (including religious bliss). My difference with Hayek is Oakeshott’s. I think Hayek elevated the market to an ism; he made a system out of an anti-system. Oakeshott brilliantly avoided this trap. And his essay on Hayek (collected in the Rationalism essays) is well worth re-reading.

I wrote "The Conservative Soul" both as a conservative indictment of Bush Republicans and as a way to sum up a political philosophy that has no home in America right now. It’s an epistemologically and philosophically conservative defense of liberal society. So call me a Tory Whig, if you must. There are more of us around than you think. And we are all currently refugees.

A Political Katrina?

Cheneymandelnganafpgetty

Add them up. We witness another horrifying suicide bombing in Iraq, murdering dozens of Shiite pilgrims. There is damning evidence that U.S. attorneys were leaned on by Republicans before the elections to bring cases against some Democrats – and the ones who refused were then fired. The vice-president’s closest aide has been found guilty of perjury over whether he and his boss tried to discredit a critic in the summer of 2003 with respect to pre-war WMD intelligence. The guiltier parties – Rove and Armitage and Cheney – are still in power. We now see shameful neglect of injured veterans under the very noses of the defense secretary. On the intellectual front, we have now seen a conservative icon reveling in bigotry in full view of the national media and at the same podium and on the same day as Giuliani and Romney. Any one of these stories individually is damaging. Together, they exert a hurricane-strength storm on the Bush administration and the conservative movement.

More important, these developments re-enforce and amplify the arguments that defeated the Republicans last November. They have no control over a war they started and no way to bring it to an end. The reasons they started it look a lot more dubious now than they did then; the circumstantial evidence for Cheney’s willful misleading of the American public before the war is mounting. Their treatment of the troops has been sickening from the start: they sent too few with insufficient body-armor and now give the wounded shamefully bad treatment. They are ruthless operatives who abuse the system for partisan ends (DeLay and Domenici). They are nasty bigots (Coulter) or theocons sympathizing with Islamists (D’Souza). They are perjurers (Libby) or cowards (Rove). Our future fiscal health is far, far worse than it was in 2000. Climate change looks more and more real and they have no serious policy to deal with it.

Now realize that no major Republican candidate has the backing of the base and the elites. There is no incumbent. The eclipse of old-style, limited government, realist, inclusive conservatism by the new pro-torture, left-baiting, homo-hating, debt-building, war-losing apparatchiks of the Rove machine could lead to most moderate Republicans and Independents voting Democrat or staying home next year. Of course, many things can happen before then. I’ve learned not to make predictions. But this feels to me like an implosion. Part of me wants to help rescue what’s left of the right; part of me thinks that the only way to rescue the right is to allow it to continue committing suicide. Only once the GOP wakes up and realizes it has become a nasty rump of Dixie will some see how deep the damage of the Bush years goes.

One thing I suspect, though. Only Hillary can save them now.

(Photo: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty.)

The GOP Nominees

Matt has a pretty sharp take:

Given that they’re all viewed skeptically by cultural conservatives, the only possible way for any of them to campaign for the nomination is with an escalating race to the right on national security, even though Iraq just led the GOP to disaster last November. Which vulnerable state that Bush won in 2004 is rendered more secure by making the Republican Party less committed to social conservatism but more committed to the Iraq project? Ohio? Virginia? Missouri? Nevada? Iowa? I don’t see it. But only a real conservative Christian can afford to put even a ray of sunlight between himself and the president on the subject of Bush’s massively unpopular war, and the cult of celebrity has left the GOP’s top-tier field without one.

Hopelessly Past It

Here’s David Frum’s refreshing take on the new FNC "conservative comedy half-hour". I believe him, but I’m still not going to watch. And here’s his worry:

The Daily Show and now Steven Colbert have taught a generation of college students that Republicans are ridiculous, absurd, hopelessly past it. And their work has had an effect: today’s 20-somethings are more Democratic than any equivalent cohort since World War II.

Sorry, David, but this seems a little over-generous to the very talented Stewart and Colbert. It is George W. Bush and Dick Cheney who have taught a generation of college students that Republicans are ridiculous, absurd, hopelessly past it. A comedian, however talented, is only as good as his material. It’s been a good few years for comedians.