Die, Conservatives, Die!

That’s the message of George Packer in a long New Yorker piece on “The Fall of Conservatism.”

Lefty bloggers are all agog over this piece, and conservatives certainly agree in part. Obviously political conservatism in the United States is in eclipse right now.

Packer argues that conservatism has always been a divisive force. It began with the Southern Strategy of Richard Nixon and Pat Buchanan in the 1960s.

“From Day One, Nixon and I talked about creating a new majority,” Buchanan told me... “What we talked about, basically, was shearing off huge segments of F.D.R.’s New Deal coalition, which L.B.J. had held together: Northern Catholic ethnics and Southern Protestant conservatives—what we called the Daley-Rizzo Democrats in the North and, frankly, the Wallace Democrats in the South.”

Conservatives might be surprised to learn that the conservative movement was not about Kirk and Buckley, Goldwater and Reagan, but instead a election strategy cooked up by Richard Nixon, he of wage and price controls and “we are all Keynesians now.” But you find this meme popping up a lot in liberaldom.

Liberals courageously stood up to the Solid South in the 1960s, the narrative goes, and passed the landmark civil rights acts over their dead bodies. (Actually Republicans voted about 80-20 and Democrats about 60-40 in the House and 70-30 in the Senate on the Civil Rights Act of 1964.) The Democrats’ reward for that was that they lost the South. The evil Richard Nixon crafted a Southern Strategy to attract racist southern whites and so the conservative movement was born.

We pass quickly over the Reagan years with the usual talk about mainstreaming the “positions of the right-wing fringe” and staffing the government with “doctrinaire conservatives” and recommence the narrative in 2001 when Vice-President Dick Cheney decided on confrontation, according to liberal former Senator Lincoln Chafee.

“We would seek confrontation on every front. . . . The new Administration would divide Americans into red and blue, and divide nations into those who stand with us or against us.”

You can see the point here. Conservatives are a disruptive force that have hindered the natural evolution of beneficial governance and lack a serious attitude to governing.

But Packer has a point. The conservative movement had an agenda of economic reform, winning the cold war, and rolling back the administrative state. Republicans found, after the 1994 election that Americans were not interested in rolling anything back.

So, while allowing welfare reform, Democrats were able to cold-cock Republicans on school choice, on Social Security reform, and are still committed to enclosing the entire health care sector in the grip of the administrative state.

Until the American people are ready to reform the administrative state, there really is no point in electing Republicans. In that sense, George Packer is right. Republicans have “run out of ideas.” Because Republicans are not particularly interested in running with ideas to grow the government.

Turning the Terrorists

Young men are natural-born killers. They love to fight and to kill. That is why it is young men who think up millennarian schemes and revolutions, and causes based on blood and killing.

Lee Harris has written about this persuasively in Civilization and Its Enemies. The great task of civilization, he writes, is to turn the “eternal gang of ruthless men,” the natural-born killers, into the benign and productive Western team.

In a long article in The New Yorker Lawrence Wright, author of The Looming Tower, suggests that the terrorists of Al Qaeda are beginning to turn from terror.

Partly, of course, this is because the young firebrands of thirty years ago are now older and wiser. Partly this is because the Egyptian government has done a number on the hundreds of Islamic terrorists they have held in jail for years and years.

Partly this is because of a rivalry and jealousy between Islamist leaders Sayyid Imam al-Sharif (aka Dr. Fadl) and Ayman al-Zawahiri.

Partly we are talking about a general revulsion over the killing of innocent women and children.

Then there is the shame that Egypt experiences as countries like India and China, probably poorer than Egypt a generation ago, are overtaking it and showing the bankruptcy of the terrorist program.

For what, after all, have the terrorists achieved, except to create a bloodbath and provoke the Great Satan to meddle deeper and deeper in the Middle East?

But if the terrorists are turning away from indiscriminate violence, it can be nothing but good.

Eevil Wal-Mart and Healthcare

Wal-Mart is sinking its eevil corporate fangs into health care, and nobody is doing anything to stop it.

But don’t worry, someone will notice pretty soon.

Wal-Mart is hated by every liberal because Wal-Mart moves heaven and earth to prevent the unionization of its employees. You can understand Wal-Mart’s position on this. Why would they want to turn their associates into surly unionized auto workers or even surly unionzied DMV workers. Or totally ineffective unionized education workers.

And did you know that Wal-Mart has a waiting period for part-time employees before it offers them health insurance? It’s an outrage!

Now Wal-Mart is moving into health care. It is gradually expanding its generic drugs program, offering a three-month’s supply of most generic drugs for $10, according to financial columnist Jim Jubak.

But the big move by Wal-Mart is its in-store health clinics where the standard charge is $45 per visit, cash or credit, but no insurance.

In other words, Wal-Mart is applying its Always Low Prices, Always business model into health care. And they are moving into electronic health records too, so that your records will follow you around from Wal-Mart to Wal-Mart.

The big payoff is that all the other players are sitting up and taking notice.

The best thing about letting Wal-Mart do it is that the company won’t have to fix the health care system all by itself. Wal-Mart’s entry into this field has already galvanized competition from retailers such as Target... and CVS Caremark...



Some, like Target, are matching Wal-Mart step by step. Some are arguably ahead of the giant retailer. Clinic operator MinuteClinic is a CVS subsidiary that operates more clinics than Wal-Mart has opened to date.

Meanwhile the politicians are offering more subsidy (McCain) or compulsion (Obama and Clinton). As we know, subsidy and compulsion have been a great success in education, health care, welfare and everything else in which the government is involved.

You can be sure that Wal-Mart will get the blame for this eevil corporate scheme. Whatever it is that they have done, and nobody is yet sure what it is.

Meanshile we can all enjoy it as the bloated health-care industry starts to squirm.

Obama's Iran Gaffe

When a Republican makes a gaffe it’s usually a career-ender. Or at least it makes him a laughing-stock forever. But usually the gaffe is not really a mistake. It is usually something that liberals insist you are not allowed to say.

But for Democrats the rules are different. Take Obama’s Iran gaffe. Back in July 2007 on the infamous YouTube debate Obama agreed with a lefty questioner and said he would meet with the leaders of Iran, Venezuela, North Korea, etc., “without preconditions” in the first year of his presidency.

Then, as Charles Krauthammer relates,

On Sunday, he declared in Pendleton, Ore., that, by Soviet standards, Iran and others “don’t pose a serious threat to us.”

Iran was “tiny,”he said. Yet a day later, Obama said something completely different.

The next day in Billings, Mont.: “I’ve made it clear for years that the threat from Iran is grave.”

The reason that this is a problem is that it makes nonsense of any sort of consistent narrative about foreign policy. What does Obama believe? How will he formulate foreign policy? This sort of chopping around suggests that he doesn’t know what he is talking about. As the postmodernists say, you gotta have a narrative. (Actually they don’t. They say that power is justified by a narrative.)

The thing is, if Obama were a Republican he would be toast. But because he is a Democrat, and this year’s media Great White Hope, he gets a pass.

I’d say that the DriveBy media would do themselves a favor by being as tough on their guys as they are on the racist, sexist, homophobic opposition.

Because Sen. Barack Obama just isn’t ready for prime time, and it shows.

A Word from Tom DeLay

We haven’t heard too much lately from Tom DeLay, the architect, after Newt Gingrich, of the Republican capture of Congress in 1994. We know he’s a passionate conservative, but we haven’t heard too much of what he is doing.

In a recent op-ed, DeLay urges conservatives to get moving. There are plenty of good ideas floating around, he writes, and a few bad ones too. But whatever the ideas “Our core principles of order, justice, and freedom do not change.” Here’s his advice to Republicans running this year.

Republican incumbents and challengers running for Congress this year can translate the values of order, justice, and freedom into five basic principles for conservative government: winning the war; rewriting a 21st century tax code; redesigning government, according to constitutional precepts; restoring the federal judiciary to its proper and constitutional place; and, cultivating our society’s culture of life.

Let’s face it, he suggests, the future is wide open to conservatives.

Questions like “What does victory in the war on terror look like?” and “If we had to create a health care or retirement system from scratch, what would it look like?” will never be asked, let alone answered by liberals.

Why is this so? Why don’t liberals swoop down and grab the best ideas of conservatives instead of barking and snapping at every proposed conservative reform like the dog in the manger? It’s a good question. My own view is that liberals are too focused on personal agendas, particularly the chimera of “creativity,” to think seriously about political ideas.

Meanwhile conservatives can get busy.

Without the responsibilities of a majority party, minority Republicans in the House can work with leading conservatives from around the country to devise specific reforms of our health care, immigration, budget, energy, and tax systems. They can force the Democrats to go on the record about the war on terror, marriage, and the proper role of faith in the public square. Through the vote you regain your stature and credibility. Meanwhile, individual candidates from around the country can interpret conservative principles to best suit their own districts.

When will this all come to fruition? My answer is: sooner than you think. So there is no time to be lost.

The Next Batch of Rejects

A generation ago, in 1980, I went to the Republican precinct caucus to nominate George Bush for president.

But there was a bunch of unfamiliar faces there. People who looked like they ought to be Democrats. And they were all for Ronald Reagan. It turned out we were all for Reagan.

The Reagan Democrats were the last lot expelled from the Democratic Party. In 1960 the Democratic Party was unequivocably the party of the working stiff and the lunch-pail crowd. By 1980 it had become the party of elite liberals and identity client groups. University professors obligingly produced a political philosophy of identity. It more or less amounted to the marginalization of mainstream America as racist, sexist, classist, and homophobic.

In an Orwellian twist, this meant that Americans who didn’t think exclusively in terms of race, gender, class, and sexual orientation were in fact the racists, sexists, etc.

Not surprisingly, most people didn’t take too kindly to this. They still don’t.

It seems that this year the Democrats are intent on expelling the last few remaining old-line Democrats, the ones that believe in God and the First Amendment. For it seems that while the post-Sixties Democratic Party could tolerate having a few religious crazies and gun nuts around if they kept quiet, the new Obama Democrats really can’t be bothered to be polite to them any more.

“Change,” it seems, means completing the transformation that began with a bang in 1968 when the “kids” took over and marginalized the mainstream FDR coalition.

This year is shaping up to be a bad year for Republicans, and deservedly so. So the special conditions of this year’s election may mask the underlying trends. The moment of truth will come in 2010 and 2012, when the American people have to decide if they really want the federal government to be exclusively a government of liberals, by liberals, and for liberals—and their client groups.

My nickel says they won’t.

Message to BillG: Try Freedom in Education

Billionaire Bill Gates made a fortune in the software business, doing stuff without permission, exercising his God-given talents and revolutionizing business and society.

But when it comes to philanthropy, it’s same old, same old, according to Neal McCluskey from the Cato Institute. Gates’ strategy for education, partnered with Eli Broad of KBH Homes, is all about big government.

[A] forum sponsored by their $60 million Strong American Schools initiative last Wednesday made clear that when it comes to education, they’re backing a tired, big-government loser.

Oh dear. You’d think the new generation of philanthopists would have learned something from business. Unfortunately, it seems to be that you don’t mess with government or you’ll get your head handed to you.

How about freedom in education? At least Sen. John McCain seems to be taking some baby steps in that direction.

“[A] public education should be defined as one in which our public support for a child’s education follows that child into the school the parent chooses,” McCain’s education statement declares.

Maybe our education Pooh-bahs should learn from our economic competitors.

In education, the ascendant South Koreans consume more private schooling than the people of any other industrialized nation. Even parents in the world’s poorest slums know the score. Ongoing work by British researcher James Tooley in impoverished places like Ga, Ghana, and Hyderabad, India, find poor parents turning in droves to for-profit private schools in order to move their kids ahead.

You can read more about James Tooley here.

Could it be that we can actually trust parents to educate their children without the detailed day-to-day supervision of the state?

Probably we’ll have to, because in another generation the government education system will have run down some more, delivering less and less at a cost of more and more.

By then, educating your own children will not be just a choice, but a matter of survival.