tag:www.thedonovan.com,2010://1/tag:www.thedonovan.com,2008://1.9955- 2010-02-07T17:15:22Z Comments for Musings on the election We're the Military and Airpower Guys of Jonah Goldberg of National Review Online + a stray we found wandering around looking lost. All original material JHD, BHD, JR, WT, and KA 2003-2010 Movable Type 4.12 tag:www.thedonovan.com,2008://1.9955 2008-11-06T12:54:33Z 2008-11-06T14:01:48Z Musings on the election The Armorer http://www.thedonovan.com
Not your fault I am not finding anything humorous today. I know you don't agree with [my] theory of US history but yesterday the 2nd Republic committed suicide and the 3rd was born. It will not be a republic long.
To which I respond:

Or, yesterday we finally got over a lingering bump in our road, that needed getting over, and it is, in fact, an opportunity.

All nations change over time, they have to.

And change usually concerns those most invested in stability (i.e., us conservatives).

The youth don't know any better, as their timeline is so much shorter (and that leads to their impatience, too), and we're reluctant to try new things unless absolutely forced, because we've suffered through some unintended consequences of change for change's sake, so there's always tension between the comfortable elders and the youth. 

There has always been resentment between haves and have nots, and that isn't going away regardless of who's in charge.

If Iraq hadn't improved and the economy hadn't imploded, it might have gone the other way.   But they did.

But the Republicans sucked at the game this time around.  In fact, they usually do.  Not because of bad ideas or no ideas (plenty of that, though, too, what with been-in-power disease) but because they weren't organized, disciplined, and motivated.  So they didn't just lose, they got beat. 

The Founders wouldn't recognize this place ten years ago, much less this week. I don't believe (with the exception of the Judges, where over time, the Courts have really expanded their power, (starting with Marbury v Madison) President-elect Obama is going to make ultra-huge changes - there are a lot of institutional things which will slow it up - as there was for Reagan, Clinton, and Bush. There is a lot of friction and inertia in the system.
 
More importantly perhaps, there is also this - as long as conservatives make our major foci military service and business, the people who make their major focus non-military government service, academia, and the law,  well, they are going to pwn us.

Because they're shaping the narrative in ways we aren't.

More simply - as the Evans-Novak Report put it:
This is the legacy of the Bush era: a Democratic President and overwhelming Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress--propelled in large part by an unpopular war in Iraq, a GOP culture of incompetence, and a philosophic and ideological shallowness.
Emphasis mine.

Regardless, whoever won this election was going to find themselves having to make decisions that were going to be painful, in one way or another.

We aren't a nation of frontiersmen or hardscrabble farmers anymore, with an expansible border and cheap land to move to (let's not get into the Native American issue), and expanding our population by people who wanted that kind of oppotunity, and the freedom to exploit they didn't have in the turgid societies of Europe (and we got those who wanted to bring their failed revolutions herer, too).  In that regard we are more and more like Europe - we have a greater number of comfortable people, or unadventuresome people, a greater number of people who both want (and have accepted the conditioning) to be told what to do, as long as they have some bread and a circus for entertainment.

Oddly enough, smart immigration policy, if accompanied by judicious assimilation, rather than the establishment of unmoving ethnic enclaves, which is what Democrat politics and policies aim towards - a tossed salad, not a stew, if you will - that is where you can keep an infusion of entrepreneurial spirit alive, leveraging people's desire to be able to rise above the status of where they came from.

Interestingly enough, I see a lot of Democrat social policy (not all, but a good chunk) as aimed towards making it easy for people to stay in stasis, vice enabling them to move up.  Both parties have plenty of policy designed to protect their own elites, but a fundamental difference in economic outlook animates things - the Left proceeds from the mercantilist assumption that the economic pie is fixed, and that anything you get is obtained at the expense of another - hence their desire to take from those who have to give to those that don't, and that the elites have the answer about how to go about it.  The Right sees it from a perspective that the pie is expansible, and that a lot of little decisions generally sum up better than a few big ones.  Both sides, in their extremes, fail. 

Thus the fight occurs in the middle.  But the Right needs to do a better job of Gramsci's "Long March Through The Institutions" if we're going to make our ideas resonate with the younger folk.  And we have to change.

There is a *lot* of conservative impulses in the youth, the "millenials."  But they're also married with a greater level of comfort with diversity and tolerance than that attritbuted to the Republicans and conservatism.

This thing has run on long enough as veered off focus.

Discuss among yourselves, if you bothered to read this far...
]]> tag:www.thedonovan.com,2008://1.9955-comment:80176 Comment from Robin Radlein on 2008-11-07 Robin Radlein By John of Argghhh! on November 6, 2008 10:02 AM
Heh. That reminds me of a bit of lyric from one of my favorite musicals...

Wasn't that usually followed by cries of "Sit down, John"?    ;^)

I just wanted to chime in how invigorating this discussion is.  Folks like you are where I find my hope.

I think one of the things that is a reflection of these slow changes to the Republican party is a loss of focus.  We are still good at standing for the big things - national defense, a healthy, growing economy, personal responsibility respect for the consitutional responsibilities of government - but there was no real reassurance that the leaders charting the course had concrete plans to achieve them, and circumstancial evidence that they didn't.    The Contract with America so many years ago was a great idea.  Lay out concrete plans to achieve the goals you have identified.   Not only promise to do them, but work to make it so.  It might have succeeded if that plan had continued to be followed.  Instead, so many of the bright young idealists that started that way became as entrenched in the old mode as the folks they replaced.   That may be one of the best arguments for term limits- it brings in new players that still have that revolutionary fervor.  They still remember that why they are working for something may be more important than how they get it.

Time to get back to work before someone notices I am enjoying myself.  Thanks for your indulgence.



]]> 2008-11-07T19:27:23Z 2008-11-07T19:27:23Z tag:www.thedonovan.com,2008://1.9955-comment:80157 Comment from jordan on 2008-11-07 jordan
Conservatism by it's very nature rejects extremes.  The principles of limited government (or realistically, minimizing government expansion) and fiscal responsibility haven't been followed under Bush or by the GOP in many years.  They got comfortable, and Bush didn't believe enough in these principles to fight against the D.C. hordes that pushed the other way.

The other thing is constitutionalism.  The idea that government only has that power which the people grant it, and that in the national chain of command, the people are at the top, and they send down marching orders to the president and other elected officials.  

We have a president now who has in the past advocated turning that on it's head.  In a 2001 interview, Obama said that had been a "blind spot" among the founding fathers, and that resulted in the flawed Constitution we have today.  He said the Constitution didn't enumerate enough positive duties for government, like what it can do to and for the people, and focused only on what government CAN'T do.  The idea was to restrict government power to prevent the rise of tyranny, of centralized rule or the infrastructure that would enable it., which is more important today than ever, but that seems to have eluded the "Constitutional professor".

Obama thinks government authority should broaden, and under him that'll happen.  It's a fundamental disagreement.  Do you want government to package and provide meaning and purpose to your lives, taking up things like child care, retirement plans, healthcare and college tuition which people previously worked out on their own?  Stuff like that sounds good until people see 60% of their income go to government.

Republicans also let go of their America-first approach, being careless about the border, fighting attempts to regularize and restrict illegal immigration,   Those are things conservatives would view as essential for the maintenance of a viable, sovereign nation.  That's been lost, but those are the things conservatism is supposed to stand for.  What are we doing about it?  

Young guns like Mike Pence and Eric Cantor are casting aside the old guard GOP leadership.  They opposed the ridiculous bailout.  They would stand against big programs like the gargantuan medical bill that gives even well-to-do retirees free drugs.  They want common sense border security and a cautious approach to "peacekeeping" and "nation-building" and "peace corps-type missions."  They're charged up, ready to take over, and the country needs them.

Conservatism is a powerful and profound school of thought that has the advantage of actually working when properly applied.  It views human nature realistically, and understands that prosperity depends on encouraging a culture of individual innovation and leadership, and avoiding anything that dampens it.   It recognizes that the highest common good comes from a system that rewards hard work, not punishes it, and motivates individuals to succeed, not stifle it in some misguided notion that it's "selfish" and "not in the interests of the collective".

But those are things that actually ARE ultimately in the interests of the collective, resulting in the highest standard of living for the largest number of people, with the resources to provide a solid safety net when needed.  If you unleash that potential, you're serving the greater good.  When you smother it, you're interested in centralizing and consolidating power, not making life better for the average person.

]]> 2008-11-07T14:33:26Z 2008-11-07T14:33:26Z tag:www.thedonovan.com,2008://1.9955-comment:80151 Comment from BillT on 2008-11-07 BillT http://www.thedonovan.com ..we have such faith in purity of process and motives when they arise in relation to causes we support.

You're just saying that to get me to admit that Canadian beer is really, really worth the trip to Quebec.
]]> 2008-11-07T07:25:31Z 2008-11-07T07:25:31Z tag:www.thedonovan.com,2008://1.9955-comment:80149 Comment from Justthisguy on 2008-11-06 Justthisguy http://enemiesofthelibrary.blogspot.com I had a really eloquent comment ready to go here, but as soon as I hit "preview", my system locked up such that control-alt-delete did nothing, and I had to hit the power switch and start over. Sigh. Mayhap I'll have the same thought again. 2008-11-07T04:50:17Z 2008-11-07T04:50:17Z tag:www.thedonovan.com,2008://1.9955-comment:80147 Comment from Argent on 2008-11-06 Argent http://insanityblog.com/
The victimhood with the MSM is a very good point by Alan. It has to stop. There's nothing wrong with seeing the bias and faults in MSM but you've got to go past it and that includes stopping the blame the MSM for everything game. It also means moving forward with alternatives to the MSM problems. Like blogs for instance. In other words do something about it instead of whine I suppose. Not easy no no I'd not say it's easy but you gotta work on it. You should know from your old printing press rebellion days how influential and important an issue media is.

It's something I have struggled to understand. Which is why am I seeing so much of the accused 'left' behaviour in conservatives? Victimhood, conspiracies, high debt, socialist bailouts, big government. What do you guys really want to stand for?

]]> 2008-11-07T03:32:47Z 2008-11-07T03:32:47Z tag:www.thedonovan.com,2008://1.9955-comment:80138 Comment from bad cat robot on 2008-11-06 bad cat robot http://snarkpatrol.blogspot.com
But enough about that.  More importantly, the election made me sick.  I'm not sure how exactly, but Tuesday the symptoms first became apparent, Wednesday was painfully worse, and this morning breakfast refused to stay where it was put.  I have an appointment with my doctor in a few hours.  How this is possible when everyone knows Americans don't have proper healthcare is beyond me.  And the Messiah hasn't even taken office yet!  A miracle! 
]]> 2008-11-06T22:37:31Z 2008-11-06T22:37:31Z tag:www.thedonovan.com,2008://1.9955-comment:80131 Comment from Alan on 2008-11-06 Alan http://www.genx40.com "...the impeachment only centered on the perjury charge..." - we have such faith in purity of process and motives when they arise in relation to causes we support. ;-) 2008-11-06T20:47:44Z 2008-11-06T20:47:44Z tag:www.thedonovan.com,2008://1.9955-comment:80128 Comment from BillT on 2008-11-06 BillT http://www.thedonovan.com
"It takes a Carter to get us a Reagan"...
]]> 2008-11-06T20:24:12Z 2008-11-06T20:24:12Z tag:www.thedonovan.com,2008://1.9955-comment:80125 Comment from BillT on 2008-11-06 BillT http://www.thedonovan.com
Among other things, which were promptly submerged by the "Who did he do and when did he do her" imbroglio. But the impeachment only centered on the perjury charge.

Pass the waffles, please?
]]> 2008-11-06T19:53:15Z 2008-11-06T19:53:15Z tag:www.thedonovan.com,2008://1.9955-comment:80121 Comment from Alan on 2008-11-06 Alan http://www.genx40.com "...he was impeached because he perjured himself before a Federal judge..." If you review the time I think you will find social conservatives noticing an opportunity rock to throw on the infidelity point that triggered the process on the perjury...not to mention the opportunity to attack an opponent. By importing personal sexuality and undermining the office of the President as acceptable tactics, the Republican leadership chose the low road and enriched talk radio's fodder to facility the creation of the red state v. blue state paradigm (sorry for using "paradigm"). Now, in contrast, the Republicans need to push the "One Country, Country First" agenda. There has to be hope for something better if you are going to make a story compelling for the long term. Both Reagan and Clinton (at the outset) captured that. Obama has, too. Don't push the people through fear and outcasting as was the plan when "the Moral Majority" met "the Rovians". Attract them with positive ideas. You may be surprised but conservatives actually have some attractive ideas. [/ maple slurp] 2008-11-06T18:37:28Z 2008-11-06T18:37:28Z tag:www.thedonovan.com,2008://1.9955-comment:80120 Comment from BillT on 2008-11-06 BillT http://www.thedonovan.com the Clinton impeachment was hardly "boys will be boys".

But he wasn't impeached because of a sex scandal -- he was impeached because he perjured himself before a Federal judge.

...there are many fine gay conservative, or atheist/agnostic conservatives out there.

My point. The Republican Party leadership is moribund. It should be pushing the people who hold to their principles rather than those who merely "fit the mold."

And I won't tell my Jewish conservative friends you omitted them.



]]> 2008-11-06T18:21:31Z 2008-11-06T18:21:31Z tag:www.thedonovan.com,2008://1.9955-comment:80116 Comment from Casey on 2008-11-06 Casey http://www.thegantry.net/blog
Larry Craig, for example, got so much flak not so much for seeking gay sex, but running as a straight conservative. Same thing with Foley, chair of House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children. As several folks have pointed out, the page was of legal age in DC where the events took place. Strictly speaking, Foley didn't break the law.

But... He did behave inconsistently with how he presented himself to his constituents. That was the real sin.

Republians will continue struggling with this as long as they insist on allowing only straight Christians to represent them. People will present themselves in that light just to get elected, while many Democrats don't care.

Before anyone freaks, what I meant was there are many fine gay conservative, or atheist/agnostic conservatives out there.


]]> 2008-11-06T16:58:42Z 2008-11-06T16:58:42Z tag:www.thedonovan.com,2008://1.9955-comment:80108 Comment from John of Argghhh! on 2008-11-06 John of Argghhh! http://www.thedonovan.com
You see, we piddle, twiddle, and resolve
Not one damn thing do we solve
Piddle, twiddle, and resolve
Nothing's ever solved
in Foul, fetid, fuming, foggy, filthy Philadephia!"]]> 2008-11-06T16:02:41Z 2008-11-06T16:02:41Z tag:www.thedonovan.com,2008://1.9955-comment:80105 Comment from Fishmugger on 2008-11-06 Fishmugger Right now I'm betting on the Blue Dogs to tip the scale and keep some of the legislation honest. With so much power in Pelosi, Read and now Obama's hands it will be a rare individual not to use that power to advance their agenda while bashing the Reps into oblivion. I remember the good old days when the Dems had an unfettered run of 40 years and the Reps would just sit around and twiddle. 2008-11-06T15:45:29Z 2008-11-06T15:45:29Z tag:www.thedonovan.com,2008://1.9955-comment:80102 Comment from John of Argghhh! on 2008-11-06 John of Argghhh! http://www.thedonovan.com
]]> 2008-11-06T15:30:37Z 2008-11-06T15:30:37Z tag:www.thedonovan.com,2008://1.9955-comment:80100 Comment from Alan on 2008-11-06 Alan http://www.genx40.com
This "bump in the road" is a perfect opportunity for conservatives to reflect on McCain's campaign message - Country First.  For 20 years there has been a fostering of the idea that the Republican party or whatever you decide falls into "conservative principles" comes first so that the democratic process of an election turns into an act of treason for some this week.  Get rid of the "Gotcha" politics of both parties, focus on the positive and the real: the Clinton impeachment was hardly "boys will be boys".  Get rid of the victimhood of "MSM bad" and acknowledge the role contol of the mainstream media has been a conservative success - I have news for you: Rush is the MSM, too.  Acknowledge that America is not a nation that is center-right but is right-centre-left.  Acknowledge that arguments like "whole life" are actually compelling but that means you have to include stewardship of the environment and care for the old and incapacitated as well as life before birth.

Taking the disciplined high road is the way back to power - and I am not even a social conservative, a Republican or even American ! The world needs US conservatism.  But US conservatism has to also acknowledge the world.]]> 2008-11-06T15:17:12Z 2008-11-06T15:17:12Z tag:www.thedonovan.com,2008://1.9955-comment:80099 Comment from RetRsvMike on 2008-11-06 RetRsvMike
inertia in an institution designed not designed for it is a horrible thing: the Executive Branch.

inertia in an institution whose very reason for existence IS inertia is a magnificent thing: the Judiciary.

what i'm getting at is this...   with a legislative majority in both houses, with a man of their own in the White House, with a split viewpoint Judiciary, THEY won't be able to resist the temptations of ANY of the impelling forces that THEY will be subjecting THEMSELVES to.  THEY will be all trying to overcome the inertia in so many friggin' directions that THEY won't be able to get all the vectors pointed in the same direction. 

net result: continued Legislative inertia (which is a good thing), continued Executive inertia (which is a bad thing, since obviously one must expect the Executive to actually be able to DO something), and a question remaining as to how much space the Judiciary will provide (and in which direction) for the few directed Legislative vectors to move.

an analogy involving multitudes of monkeys and a football comes to mind, and it doesn't involve typing Shakespeare....
]]> 2008-11-06T15:13:07Z 2008-11-06T15:13:07Z tag:www.thedonovan.com,2008://1.9955-comment:80096 Comment from BillT on 2008-11-06 BillT http://www.thedonovan.com
Every time the Repubs had a strong political leader, the Dems and MSM took advantage of every gotcha moment that occurred. If a Repub and a Dem were both caught in a sting, the Repub got castigated and the Dem got a pass -- and the Repubs refused to fight the injustice.

Repubs in a sex scandal? Throw the bassets out!

Dems in a sex scandal? Boys will be boys.

The good thing that came about as a result of this past electoral cycle is that the MSM didn't even maintain the pretense of being unbiased, and the country saw it. There's no way they can regain the credibility they squandered without daily proddings of the Forty-Fourth Pres to make good on his promises -- and questions about why he hasn't delivered.

And it'll get interesting, because he won't deliver.]]> 2008-11-06T14:31:19Z 2008-11-06T14:31:19Z