A Reminder
Dr. Fleming has some thoughts on the election as it comes to a close, and sums up the main conservative objection to Obama:
He is an enemy of anything good that has ever been done in this country or this civilization, and when he is elected, I hope that all those Silicon Valley libertarians who supported him will live to see their property confiscated and their kids sent to reeducation camps. Yes, that is mean-spirited and unChristian but it is unsettling to realize that you have lived among such monsters for so long without grasping the depth of their depravity and stupidity.
I would add a few observations here. It is a measure of how profoundly wrong this administration and McCain have been on critical questions vital to our country’s welfare that Obama’s candidacy, much less his Presidency, is even remotely possible. Whenever anyone contemplates the worst aspects of a future Obama administration, he should remember that Bush, McCain and their allies share in the blame for it. Just as they bear responsibility for the consequences of their policies long after they have departed from the scene, they bear the burden of responsibility for the political consequences of their failure, which include making someone of such genuinely atrocious views, particularly as it concerns human life and dignity, electable and broadly popular. That much may be obvious, but it should be kept in mind.
It has fascinated me, in the original sense of the word as a mixture of wonder and terror, to watch legitimately outraged critics of the torture regime or unjust war suddenly discover moral ambiguity and gray areas when it comes to Obama’s indefensible record on abortion. This is one of the few moral outrages left in the world that is discussed as if it were an unfortunate accident; it is something, to listen to the standard pro-choice argument, that should be reduced in number while simultaneously given full legal protection and government support. Why an outrage against human dignity committed by the government is more outrageous than one permitted and defended by the government has never been clear to me. One crime is justified in the name of necessity, the other in the name of autonomy, but both are crimes against human dignity, which has been and must be one of the fundamental goods that our civilization defends. If we deny the sanctity of life itself, is it any wonder that we devalue and dehumanize others?
Libertarians who support Obama are more amusing. Obama is a supporter of the PATRIOT Act and warrantless wiretapping, the bailout and vast new entitlement schemes, all of which expand the reach of government and trample on our liberty. At every turn, he has favored centralism and expansion of the power of the state. The natural response to this is that “the Republicans are no different,” which is by and large true, but it is not much of an excuse for siding with someone who in virtually every respect promises to repeat the mistakes of this administration while possessing few redeeming features that I can see. Even balancing against this the recognition that someone as dangerous and reckless as McCain must never be allowed to wield executive power, there is not really anything positive that can be said about the likely future President.
That’s not the ‘main conservative objection to Obama’, because most conservatives aren’t raving loons.
Obama isn’t even the most liberal Senator. They said the same of Kerry, on a similar bit of cherry-picked ‘evidence’.
Obama’s Senate record isn’t much different from Clinton’s. But I’m guessing Dr. Fleming just likes ranting about ‘reeducation camps’, and doesn’t really care who the Democratic nominee actually is.
What is the objection, then?
From the conservative perspective, “anything good that has ever been done in this country or this civilization” would tend to match up pretty closely with what left-liberals oppose and want to change. It may overstate things a bit to say that he is the enemy of “anything good,” but I don’t think there would be much hesitation on his part to say something similar of a fair number of national Democratic politicians. This is not a question of whether Obama is more liberal than other members of Congress. It’s a question of the substance of his views, which I think most conservatives would characterize in terms similar to those that Dr. Fleming used.
Daniel, could you highlight “anything good that has ever been done in this country” from a conservative perspective? Because it sure seems like most of the major political accomplishments of the Twentieth Century–the Progressive Era, the development of substantive Due Process, the expansion of the Equal Protection clause, women’s suffrage, and end to Jim Crow laws, women’s lib–were (are still?) regarded as little short of disastrous by many conservatives.
The “or this civilization” clause, in fact, reminds me that for a lot of conservatives, we’ve basically been on the wrong path since the 95 Theses.
(I’m not trying to be snarky; I’m just curious about the conservative perspective. I don’t share it, but I would like to come to a respectful understanding of it.)
I would also suggest there’s a human dignity argument in women’s autonomy, though I’d like to think about that a little bit more before advancing it in debate.
I’d argue that there’s a human dignity element to permitting abortion as well,
What is the objection, then?
I don’t know that there is a ‘main conservative objection to Obama’. My point, perhaps poorly phrased, is that Dr. Fleming’s ravings don’t qualify as a candidate.
From the conservative perspective, “anything good that has ever been done in this country or this civilization†would tend to match up pretty closely with what left-liberals oppose and want to change.
Oh, please. Thomas Jefferson had kinder language for George III, and that in the midst of armed conflict.
The “or this civilization†clause, in fact, reminds me that for a lot of conservatives, we’ve basically been on the wrong path since the 95 Theses.
I recall at least one essay by a Catholic conservative maintaining that to be literally true.
For most Protestant conservatives, it seems the crucial wrong turn was the Enlightenment, culminating in the French Revolution. It was then that revealed religion itself was challenged, mainly by Deists. Atheism made some appearances, but didn’t really become popular until Darwin.
Wow. I have a conservative friend who recommended you to me, Daniel. For the last week or so I’ve been reading you mostly approvingly, even if I could tell that we had some fundamental disagreements about, well, what the goals for society are. And I found your arguments against Palin and Palinism thoughtful and honest, as I agree wholeheartedly that expertise and knowledge are valuable traits in a leader. Ditto your critiques of the Republican Party. But I don’t think I can really take you seriously after this post. You went from reasonable to “jumped the shark” here.
You quote a guy who says that Obama is “an enemy of anything good that has ever been done in this country or this civilization” and, rather than disagree and shred it to pieces as hyperbolic nonsense as I expected you to, your only comment is that McCain and Bush are to blame for making his presidency possible. I admit I was surprised to find rhetoric that makes the most vile racist and (literally) murderous stuff I’ve seen people say about Obama look tame approvingly quoted here. “Enemy of anything good that has ever been done in…this civilization”? Why not just call him the anti-Christ and be done with it.
Do you really think Obama is going to have government agents going into the homes of Larry Page and Sergei Brin to take their furniture and appliances and clothes so that he can make America more fair? You really endorse that nonsense? The reeducation stuff too? I had no idea Obama was another Kim Jong-il. Thanks for alerting me.
Oh and I also completely disagree with you on abortion, and I’m confident my opinion of your opinion on the issue is reciprocated.
It’s November 1, not April 1, so I must assume this post was not a joke. Shame, that.
I had the misfortune of reading this post very soon after reading the post about “Obamaguity”. Now, I’m confused: Is Obama somebody who “never takes a stand” and is “going to yield to established policies and interests” and turn on his progressive supporters? Or, is he the property-confiscating Socialist that Dr. Fleming is warning us against? Maybe he’s both, and the established interests in this country are secretly in favor of having their property confiscated by the State. Too bad for McCain that he isn’t in on the secret. Though, on second thought, I’ve heard Comrade Buffet speak out in favor of higher taxes on the wealthy.
Less sarcastically: Any serious points Dr. Fleming may be attempting to make about the state of the nation, about the choice of Palin, or about why one should vote for John McCain, are overshadowed by his talk of re-education camps and Socialism. It’s the sort of rant you might see coming from the more unbalanced people at “The Corner”.
One observation: Larison, for the most part, bases his evaluation of how Obama will behave if President on things that Obama has said or actually done. While I sometimes think he takes Obama’s words/actions too seriously, doing so helps avoid wandering off into flights of fantasy. Fleming explicitly goes down the “don’t believe anything Obama says, I know what’s in his heart” path of lunacy, and it shows.
‘What is the objection, then? ‘
Are you kidding? He’s not a white man with the letter R trailing his name. Anything else is just the same shit they toss at any democrat candidate amplified because we’re a bunch of racist assholes. Most liberal evah, going to raise your taxes and redistribute your wealth, going to mandate abortions and force one gay marriage per family. The closer we get to the election the more you’re becoming Hannity-lite. This Fleming character sounds like Chicken Little. ‘He is an enemy of anything good that has ever been done in this country or this civilization’. wow. Something like that needs to be mocked. Repeatedly.
I’ve come to respect this blog very much. But Dr. Fleming’s rant does in fact remind me of the hysterical writings over at the Corner. Obama is the enemy of anything good that has ever happened? Wow. Is Obama the enemy of the fight to end slavery? To end desegregation? Either Dr. Fleming disagrees with the implicit assumption in my questions that those where good things or he’s clearly become hysterically irrational.
Do I think Obama is going to confiscate people’s property and send their children to reeducation camps? Obviously not, and some higher taxes aside nothing remotely like that will happen for all of the reasons I have been laying out elsewhere. For that matter, I don’t think Dr. Fleming believes those things are actually going to happen. He was expressing the degree of his dissatisfaction with people, particularly on the right, who would vote for Obama. In addition, I don’t think Obama has any intention of doing such things. He is a left-liberal, albeit far from the most liberal in Congress, with all the baggage that entails and that is quite bad enough without needing to exaggerate it.
What he proposes to do and what he does actually believe, going on nothing more than his record and his proposals, seem to me to be antithetical to a large part of what conservatives consider good. His tendency to accommodate with entrenched interests confirms this, since most of the interests he will be accommodating are also antithetical to what conservatives would try to preserve or restore (e.g., property rights, limited, constitutional government, traditional Christianity, etc.). He isn’t uniquely awful in this regard, but that isn’t saying much. However, I already suggested above that Dr. Fleming’s phrase overstates things, and I should have said as much in the first place.
It is also almost certainly the case that many of the things Obama supporters regard as good things that have happened in the history of our country and civilization are regarded by traditional conservatives as disasters, mistakes or at best mixed blessings.
I would be curious to know what these disasters were that mark the mantle Obama is claiming as anti-Western Civilization. Anti-conservative, certainly, but that’s a different argument. Western Civilization to my thinking is primarily scientific and technological progress, and the kind of egalitarianism that offers everyone that chance to participate in the fruits of that progress with hard work. There is no doubt that Obama embraces these ideals and should prove capable enough to effectively promote them. To suggest that he’s an enemy of this civilization seems to me unhinged.
I guess what I’m saying is, I’m shocked to see these conservative views expressed on this conservative blog. :-) Actually though, values like “property rights, limited, constitutional government, traditional Christianity” are almost antithetical to what I think of as Western Civilization (including Christianity if “traditional” would refer to the various crazies I grew up around). This would appear to be a pretty hefty core of disagreement. But then, again, doesn’t the fact that we are so deeply divided call for the kind of ecumenical (or “non-partisan”) approach that Obama aims at, so that we are actually capable of acting at all? Or, I guess we could just spend the rest of our lives threatening to move to Canada or inventing lists of people that the President supposedly murdered, as each of us may prefer.
BlizzardofOz: Western Civilization predates the Enlightenment.
The controversy over abortion is whether it is a moral or a legal issue. As a moral issue, it is fine to get on one’s high horse and proclaim all abortion to be a terrible sin against humanity. But to use the power of the state to compel a woman to carry within her body a life she has no desire to nurture or bring into this world is not the kind of power any person should have to face, or relinquish to the state. To make abortion illegal would not be to stop it from occurring. Barry Goldwater, the father of the modern conservative movement, felt that the state had no right to tell him or his family what it could or couldn’t do with their own bodies, and he arranged for his own daughter to have an illegal abortion in the mid-1950s. That is the genuine conservative position. Your position is not conservative at all, it is theocratic, advocating the use of the power of the state to enforce a religious belief of yours about the sinfulness and immorality of certain acts on those you are unable to persuade by argument and example. So let’s not pretend you have some genuine claim to the mantle of “conservativism”. You would like to institute a form of theocracy, modelled I gather on the Byzantine Empire, rather than a nation of free men who can make moral choices without the compulsory intervention of the state.
If Daniel Larison does not have some genuine claim to the mantle of conservativism, your claim is even less, conradg. Barry Goldwater is a libertarian. It is “conservatism” to use the law to prevent unjust acts from taking place. It is your assertion that Mr. Larison cannot defend his position on abortion–I could make the counter-assertion that you do not know this, and moreover, you are willfully ignorant as to what the reasons are for the immorality of abortion.
For choices to be ‘moral’ they must be in accordance with Natural Law. That you cannot grasp the precepts of Natural Law regarding abortion does not mean they do not exist.
btw, how are property rights consistent with traditional Christianity, in that Jesus specifically said that rich men cannot get into the Kingdom of heaven, and that if you have two coats, and your neighbor has none, you must give him one of yours? Christianity is geared not towards this world, but to Heaven. As for opposing taxation, Jesus said, “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and give to God what is God’s.” So what exactly does traditional Christianity have to do with preserving individual property rights, when the goal of your life is to take up Christ’s cross and follow him? As you must be aware, Jesus also told people to leave their worldly family, and follow instead their heavenly father, so what exactly does conservativism have to do with actual Christianity? Also, Christianity has nothing to do with either democracy or constitutional government. Christianity, to the degree that it cares at all about matters of government, endorses monarchy and kingship. Jesus himself was said to be “King of the Jews”, not Prime Minister. And until very recent times, Christianity was entirely happy with monarchies of all kinds, blessing them with the mantle of Christ’s blessing. So what does traditional Christianity have to do with limited constitutional government at all? It’s rather obvious that Christianity as a political movement is all about theocracy, preferably of the monarchist kind, and that is pretty much what the hardcore “conservative” Christians want to institute in American, such as your misaptly named “Constitutional Party”, who you have cast your Presidential vote for.
Tedschan,
You can claim all you like that Goldwater is a “libertarian”, and not a true conservaitve, but that is just narcissism speaking, and defining conservatism to be whatever you hold dear, rather than acknowledging it has some existence as an historical movement, and that Goldwater is acknowledged by one and all to be the political originater of its modern revival in America. That he is not considered a conservative by you and those who now have control of the movement simply means that it is no longer a conservative movement at all, it is a theocratic movement that wishes to control people’s lives through compulsory moral interventions by the state to “prevent unjust acts from taking place”. This is a crazy definition of conservatism, as if it were the role of the state to correct any and every kind of “injustice”, even those occurring inside a woman’s body. This is far more a form of socialism than anything contemplated by Democrats.
It’s certainly fine for you to argue that abortion is a moral crime that will be paid for by eternal damnation in the life to come. It is another thing entirely to use the power of the state to compel a woman to carry a child to term when she has no wish to use her body for that purpose. The conservative state exists to balance the interests of the polity. An unborn fetus is not a part of the polity, plain and simple. It has no interests apart from the mother’s interests, in the same way that the mother’s kidney’s have no interests apart from her own. Not until a child is born and is out of it’s mother’s womb does it have legal rights of its own. This is just the simple facts of life.
Now, as for “natural law”, this is of course a moral issue, and I might or might not agree with some of what you would have to say about it. As a legal matter, however, I see no basis for making your version of “natural law”, into the legal law of the nation, backed by the compulsory force of the state.
I have to say I was surprised by this post. After following a link from Andrew Sullivan’s blog several weeks back, I’ve been reading this blog with great interest. I’ve found it refreshing to read a conservative view of Obama that amounts to more than NRO’s guilt-by-association gibberish or equally ridiculous allegations of ‘socialism’. However, the snippet that you quote — which supposedly enunciates the main conservative objection to Obama — is nothing short of spittle-flecked lunacy. How you think it could encapsulate anything but the author’s own absurd views or, under the most charitable analysis, his taste for juvenile hyperbole leaves me massaging my temples in disbelief.
Until I read it myself, I’d have thought such trash was below the dignity of this blog. Not so, apparently. More’s the pity.
As for your views on reproductive rights, well… phew. It goes without saying that you’re entitled to your view, but your words on this subject seem manifestly lacking in the evenhandedness, civility, and intellectual generosity that, up until now, I’ve associated with your writing.
conradg:
Goldwater was the politician associated with the conservative movement, but that does not mean that he defined it, nor was the only origin of it. How many of the other ‘founders’ were libertarian with regards to abortion?
An unborn fetus is not a part of the polity, plain and simple.
It’s as much a part of the polity as the mother.
It has no interests apart from the mother’s interests, in the same way that the mother’s kidney’s have no interests apart from her own.
Kidneys are parts of the mother’s body. The embryo is not, having a distinct genetic and ontological identity unto itself.
Not until a child is born and is out of it’s mother’s womb does it have legal rights of its own. Obviously because its rights have not been recognized by the government. Doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t have legal rights.
etc. etc. etc.
However, the snippet that you quote — which supposedly enunciates the main conservative objection to Obama — is nothing short of spittle-flecked lunacy.
Of course, anything incomprehensible to the reader regarding morals or politics must be due to a mental defect on the part of the one writing or speaking. How else can one explain differences on moral positions except through someone else’s lack of reason.
The Enlightenment lives.
Of course, anything incomprehensible to the reader regarding morals or politics must be due to a mental defect on the part of the one writing or speaking. How else can one explain differences on moral positions except through someone else’s lack of reason.
The Enlightenment lives.
Oh please. The quote in question talks about reeducation camps and property confiscation, and then heightens the handwringing by describing Obama-voting libertarians as ‘monsters’ guilty of depravity and stupidity. Let’s not pretend that it’s an even remotely sensible commentary on the situation. It’s teenage melodrama.
Nice strawman, though.