Getting Old
Browsing AmSpec’s blog, I came across this item from our old friend R.S. McCain. His point seems to be that he is older than Ross Douthat and Jonathan Chait, and no one would contest this. As far as I can tell, the only other thing he says worth noting in response to Ross’ column is his approval of this blindingly stupid TPM post, in which the author seems to be unaware that Ross doesn’t actually think Dick Cheney should have been the Republican nominee, or at the very least he hasn’t the foggiest what it is that Ross was actually arguing. Ross’ column was a thought exercise, which can be difficult for people who do not think.
Douthat’s column wasn’t all that clear about it being a thought experiment until a few paragraphs in, which is a bit odd for the newspaper column form. I was a bit bemused myself until that point.
This is the important part of what RSM wrote.
“Whether or not a conservative resurgence is likely, it can only be accomplished by those who begin with the assumption that it is possible, and then work tirelessly to turn possibility into reality.”
Amen. I think there is way too much hand wringing coming from some paleo and reform circles. “Oh my. The forces are weighed against us. Whatever will we do?”
Self examination is helpful. Many policies need to be changed. Movement conservatives need to be re-educated on many issues. But I really don’t see where all this public fretting gets us. It plays into the liberal narrative. It accepts many of their assumptions as givens. (Even if true I am not sure where publicly conceding that get us. It is the kind of thing that should be said behind closed doors.) If the political landscape is changing against us, then we should get busy and try to change it back. What is the alternative? Giving up? Despair?
For example, even if excessive spending didn’t cost the GOP the election and I mostly agree with that. Excessive spending is bad. Less spending is good. We want to get to the point of less spending. At some point we want to get to the point of constitutional levels of spending which would be radically less. So you argue in favor of less spending even if the formulation that big spending cost us the election isn’t true. Do we concede more spending? I really don’t get it. How is that different from moderate pragmatism?
Richard Spencer gets it right here at TakiMag.
http://www.takimag.com/sniperstower/article/cheney_for_president/
“Whether or not a conservative resurgence is likely, it can only be accomplished by those who begin with the assumption that it is possible, and then work tirelessly to turn possibility into reality.â€
Of course, this is the heart of the issue: RSM, for whatever reason, doesn’t seem to grasp that Ross is one of the foremost optimists who believes that the resurgence *is* possible, and in his way Ross has been doing as much work to help bring it about as anyone. RSM just doesn’t like Ross’ proposals–not so much because he has better counter-proposals, or can explain what is wrong with any of Ross’ proposals, but because they are proposals made by some 20-something kid who went to Harvard. The shtick gets pretty old, as I was saying.
I see what Richard is driving at, and I can agree with some of what he says. Yes, Ross avoids mentioning the war and its deleterious effects on the GOP, but then it may be that he assumes that in discussing Cheney the pro-war element is obvious. Second, Ross is probably not mentioning the war because he understands, as I think we all do, that the GOP was bound and determined to nominate a pro-war candidate. There is no meaningful difference between Cheney and McCain on Iraq, and most Republicans *still* don’t regard Iraq as a liability. They are utterly wrong about this, but this comes back to my point elsewhere that the GOP remains blind to the real reasons why it lost. It would have remained blind to them whether it had nominated Cheney (in this counterfactual) or McCain.
This is a larger blind-spot of most Republicans, and one which I would add Ross is less susceptible to than most, but it seems to me that Ross does not mention Iraq because it serves no purpose in the argument he is trying to make. That is, he is trying to make a point about the most current debate re: torture: Cheney and McCain did differ on the use of torture, and the public was denied a full debate prior to the election on this question, which probably would have occurred in the implausible counterfactual Cheney vs. Obama showdown.
Richard’s points about Bush’s government expansion are all perfectly good, but the people trying to cast Bush as some free market bucaneering type are all progressives. By that point, Richard is no longer responding to what Ross was saying. And, yes, I get that Richard doesn’t like Ross’ agenda, and I don’t like large parts of it, either, but the GNP agenda is very far in the background of this column and not really relevant to it.
Additionally, when Richard says that the word solidarity is “pinko” he isn’t doing himself or his own agenda any favors. This is an important term in Catholic social thought and has an impressive pedigree on the European Catholic right in the late 19th and early 20th century. There are obvious applications of an idea of social solidarity in arguments against mass immigration, the harm this does to American labor and the social stratification it creates. Was Lech Walesa a “pinko”? I hope we can all agree that the question answers itself.