Quotulatiousness

October 18, 2013

Republicans and conservatives

Filed under: Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:18

In The Atlantic, Molly Ball looks at the split between the GOP establishment and the increasingly angry conservative base:

On his radio show recently, Glenn Beck urged his listeners to “defund the GOP.” Sarah Palin has threatened to leave the Republican Party; Rush Limbaugh calls it “irrelevant.” The Senate Conservatives Fund has targeted mainly incumbent Republican senators for defeat. Erick Erickson, one of the right’s most prominent commentators, wonders if what’s coming is “a real third party movement that will fully divide the Republican Party.”

Conservatives have declared war on the GOP.

Tired of feeling taken for granted by a party that alternately panders to them and sells them down the river, in their view, Tea Partiers and others on the right are in revolt. The Republican Party itself is increasingly the focus of their anger, particularly after Wednesday’s deal to reopen the government, which many on the right opposed. Now, many are threatening to take their business elsewhere.

“Conservatives are either going to split [from the GOP] or stay home,” Erickson, the influential editor of RedState.com and a Fox News contributor, told me. “They’ll first expend energy in primaries, but if unsuccessful, they’ll bolt.”

Erickson, a former Republican elected official in Georgia, stressed that he wasn’t advocating such a split, only foreseeing it. “I think the GOP is already splitting,” he said, with grassroots activists feeling “played” by elected officials’ unfulfilled promises to defeat Obamacare.

The calls for a split mark a new, more acrimonious chapter in the long-simmering conflict between the Tea Party and the Republican establishment. Steve Deace, an Iowa-based talk-radio host, said his audience has never been angrier. “They’re tired of electing a bunch of Republicans who care more about what the media thinks about them than what the people who elected them think,” he told me. “Why do I care whether John Boehner or Nancy Pelosi is the speaker of the House? Why do I care whether Harry Reid or ‘Ditch’ McConnell is the Senate majority leader? What changes? Nothing changes.”

Of course, most of this is froth and fuming — they won’t split the party or form a new one. Why is that? It’s because the GOP and the Democrats have got the system rigged so that only those two parties ever have a real chance at getting candidates elected to state or federal office. In some states, third parties have to petition for ballot access every election for every individual candidate. This doesn’t sound too unreasonable, except the threshold for gathering signatures is incredibly high in many cases (or time-limited, or rigged in other ways), so that without an active, fully staffed party organization only the top few positions can be realistically contested. Only GOP and Democratic candidates are included in polls, debates, and other electoral events covered by the media, so as little “oxygen” as possible is given to outsiders, independents, and third party candidates. Stories like this recent one in Reason happen just about every year in most states.

Having done their part to make the existing duopoly the only game in town, the conservative faction of the Republican party may gripe all they want, but they’re not seriously going anywhere.

October 17, 2013

The internal struggle for the Republican party

Filed under: Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:13

At Ace of Spades H.Q., Drew M. explains why the struggle within the GOP won’t be over quickly:

Part of the on-going GOP vs. “Tea Party” civil war is an insistence by the GOP that the tea party needs to focus more on Democrats than conservative “purity tests” […].

This illustrates one of the big problems in the current battle, Republicans still don’t get the nature of the insurgency movement. The “tea party” isn’t about going after Democrats, that’s the job of the GOP, conservatives are increasingly focused on policing the GOP.

For too long the GOP has wooed conservatives by talking tough but acting very moderate when elected. I think you can trace it back to George H.W. Bush breaking his “no new taxes” pledge. Conservatives rallied around the elder Bush and put aside their distrust and dislike of him mostly out of respect for Ronald Reagan only to find out he was exactly who he thought they were.

Last night on the podcast we talked about how a lot of these differences were papered over during George W. Bush’s tenure. I argued to a large extent that was a result of 9/11 and the subsequent War on Terror. I said during the 2004 elections that had it not been for national security I would have wanted W. to face a primary challenge from the right and I think he might have been.

Conservative voters are feeling neglected betrayed and unappreciated by the GOP (and I think for good reason). Instead of telling conservatives to suck it up and fight Democrats, Republicans are going to have to treat conservatives as voters they have to woo. Maybe instead of telling conservatives to shut up and fight Democrats they should spend sometime telling conservatives what the GOP has done for them (and, “but the Democrats really suck” isn’t good enough). If the GOP has been so good for conservatives (and I mean small government conservatives here), it shouldn’t be hard to come up with a long list of positive achievements. Of course, there will be an alternative and likely longer list of GOP actions against small government conservative interests.

May 12, 2013

Modernizing the “rules for radicals”

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:20

James Delingpole suggests that the Saul Alinsky playbook needs a bit of updating for the current radicals (that is, not the broadly left-wing radicals of Alinsky’s day):

Why do we need some new rules? Because the old ones were written in the 70s by a Marxist community organiser called Saul Alinsky. He had some useful ideas, many of which we can steal or adapt. But some of them are ill-expressed or incoherent. Eg Rule 10 “The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.” I think he could have omitted that one, don’t you, without jeopardising his place in history as a great revolutionary thinker?

Who are we? Not the same as the radicals of Alinsky’s generation, that’s for sure. Alinsky’s radicals were broadly on the left: Che admirers; Black Panthers; communist revolutionaries; hippies; communitarians; environmentalists; radical feminists. The hegemony which they were trying to destroy was, very loosely, a conservative one.

Today, though, the positions have reversed. We new radicals are broadly — but not exclusively — of the right, not the left. Many of us would describe ourselves as conservatives, classical liberals, libertarians, UKIPers, Tea Partiers. Revolutionaries, yes, but in the traditions of Burke, Wilkes, Cobbett, and, indeed, the Minutemen and the Founding Fathers, rather than of Marx and Lenin. Some of us might not even think of ourselves as righties, but that’s OK, it’s the direction of travel that matters not the labelling.

We’re against: arbitrary authority; big government; high taxes; overregulation; corporatism; cosy stitch ups between the banksters, the lawyers and the political class; the EU; the UN; identity politics; eco-fascists; elf-n-safety; wind turbines; quantitative easing…

We’re for: empiricism; sound money; free markets; liberty; small government; low taxes; deregulation; cheap energy; rigour; meritocracy; integrity; equality of opportunity, perhaps, but most definitely not equality of outcome.

We’re on the right side of a culture war which currently we’re losing. Why are we losing? Not because we’re bad people. Not because we don’t have all the truth, all the logic, all the arguments on our side. We’re losing because, thanks to Alinsky, the enemy has a forty-year head start on us. They’ve got the techniques. All we’ve got is the moral high ground — except, the way Alinsky’s acolytes have brilliantly spun it, we don’t get to enjoy the benefits even of that.

July 11, 2012

Crony Capitalism: the issue that unites the Tea Party and the Occupy movement

Filed under: Business, Government, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:17

Matthew Mitchell at the Mercatus Center:

Despite the ideological miles that separate them, activists in the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movements agree on one thing: both condemn the recent bailouts of wealthy and well-connected banks. To the Tea Partiers, these bailouts were an unwarranted federal intrusion into the free market; to the Occupiers, they were a taxpayer-financed gift to the wealthy executives whose malfeasance brought on the financial crisis.[1] To both, the bailouts smacked of cronyism.

The financial bailouts of 2008 were but one example in a long list of privileges that governments occasionally bestow upon particular firms or particular industries. At various times and places, these privileges have included (among other things) monopoly status, favorable regulations, subsidies, bailouts, loan guarantees, targeted tax breaks, protection from foreign competition, and noncompetitive contracts. Whatever its guise, government-granted privilege is an extraordinarily destructive force. It misdirects resources, impedes genuine economic progress, breeds corruption, and undermines the legitimacy of both the government and the private sector.

[. . .]

… regulations can be especially useful to firms if they give the appearance of being anti-business or somehow pro-consumer. Regulations are often supported by strange bedfellows. Bruce Yandle of Clemson University has studied the phenomenon extensively:

The pages of history are full of episodes best explained by a theory of regulation I call “bootleggers and Baptists.” Bootleggers … support Sunday closing laws that shut down all the local bars and liquor stores. Baptists support the same laws and lobby vigorously for them. Both parties gain, while the regulators are content because the law is easy to administer.[25]

The moralizing arguments are often front and center in regulatory policy debates, while the narrow interests that stand to benefit from certain regulations are much less conspicuous.

May 3, 2012

Reason.tv: Brian Doherty on Ron Paul’s Revolution

Filed under: Economics, Liberty, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:39

“Ron Paul invented the notion of a populist, activist, modern movement thats transpartisan” says Reason’s Brian Doherty

Brian Doherty sat down with ReasonTV to talk about his new book and how Ron Paul has changed politics in America. Doherty wrote about the evolution of the libertarian movement in his 2007 book “Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement”. He has been following and writing about Ron Paul and his movement since then. Doherty examines Ron Paul’s influence in a new book out May 15, “Ron Paul’s rEVOLution: The Man and the Movement He Inspired”.

November 29, 2011

Comparing the Tea Party and Occupy movements

Filed under: Economics, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 16:04

H/T to Jon, my former virtual landlord, for the link.

May 13, 2011

To no great surprise, Ron Paul announces his presidential bid

Filed under: Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:30

He may not expect to win (he doesn’t have the support of the GOP backroom), but he will almost certainly make the race more interesting:

U.S. Representative Ron Paul, who has been called the intellectual godfather of the Tea Party, said Friday that the “time is right” for him to try once more to seize the Republican nomination for president.

The Texas Republican and anti-war libertarian announced his third White House bid on ABC’s “Good Morning America” program, saying he is already seeing unprecedented grass-roots support for his long-held calls to reduce the federal debt, government spending and the size of government.

“Coming in No. 1 in the Republican primary is an absolute possibility many, many times better than it was four years ago,” said Mr. Paul, an obstetrician who ran unsuccessfully as a Republican in 2008 and as the Libertarian Party nominee in 1988.

January 31, 2011

QotD: A hopeful view of Egypt’s way forward

Filed under: Liberty, Middle East, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 17:32

The Old Media — not to mention Hillary Clinton’s comic relief State Department — apparently don’t have a clue what’s really going on. Conservative talk radio already assumes that the whole thing has been orchestrated by militant “Islamists”, in particular, the 80-year-old Muslim Brotherhood. Whenever you see that word, mentally remove the first R to get a clearer picture if what they’re really up to.

The Botherhood of Man is gonna gitcha if you don’t look out.

But I digress.

America’s home grown would-be dictators clearly believe “It can’t happen here”, as demonstrated by their reactions — dazed at first, then hysterical — to the far gentler rise of the Tea Parties and the results of the 2010 election, which they are trying to believe never happened. They’ve spent all of their time since, not changing so that they won’t be despised any more, but trying to shut their critics up by destroying talk radio and requiring individuals to have Internet permits.

[. . .]

Out of sheer habit, if nothing else, it is very difficult not make the same mistake as the pundits and politicians. As Robert A. Heinlein observed, every revolution is a freak. By definition there can be no rules to govern or even understand them, and we must avoid thinking collectively about them. There are as many reasons to rebel as there are rebels, and that’s the only important truth we’ll ever glean from them.

It’s also very difficult to say from what we know now, and I could easily be wrong (I have been before), but it seems to me that this is not a fundamentalist uprising like we saw in Iran a generation ago — although the fundamentalists are desperately trying to coopt it — but an essentially secular revolt by the productive class against both fundamentalism and the fascist management states that dominate the region.

L. Neil Smith, “Egyptian Tea Party”, Libertarian Enterprise, 2011-01-30

November 3, 2010

Liberty: consistency matters

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:13

James Delingpole, after suddenly discovering a man-crush on Marco Rubio, outlines how the Tea Party can still succeed:

[. . .] I’d suggest that the key lesson of yesterday’s mid-terms is this: it is simply not enough to stick a Tea Party label on any old candidate and hope that the US electorate’s growing antipathy towards Big Government will take care of the rest. Christine O’Donnell was more than proof enough of that. Not only did her candidacy allow the liberal MSM to tar the entire Tea Party movement as the natural home of anti-masturbation ex-witches and other fruit loops. But it demonstrated a worrying complacency and ignorance within the Tea Party movement about what it stands for and what it ought to stand for.

Christine O’Donnell puzzled me . . . if she’d actually been a witch, then her anti-masturbation activities made no sense. I’ve met lots of witches, and it’s hard to imagine any of them being anti-sexual in that kind of dogmatic manner. I didn’t follow the story, but I assume that she lost on the basis of both accusations influencing different voting groups.

So, if O’Donnell and other marginal candidates can’t depend on just wearing the “Tea Party” label to get elected, what do they need to do?

The Tea Party does not stand for: banning lesbian or sexually active single women from teaching at schools; discouraging onanism; banning abortion; keeping drugs illegal; God; organised religion generally; guns; or, indeed, Sarah Palin.

The Tea Party stands, very simply, for small government. So long as it understands this, a presidential victory in 2012 is guaranteed. If it forgets this — or doesn’t understand it in the first place — then hello, a second term for President Obama, and bye bye Western Civilisation.

In other words, Delingpole is calling for the Tea Party to be true to a minarchist vision: the least possible government to get the job done.

If you are against Big Government, you are for liberty. If you are for liberty you are also for free citizens’ right to choose whether or not they get out of their trees on cannabis, or indeed whether or not they have the freedom to terminate unwanted pregnancies or never, ever, go to church and in fact worship Satan instead.

Liberty is not a pick and mix free-for-all in which you think government should ban the things you don’t like and encourage you things you do like: that’s how Libtards think. Libertarianism — and the Tea Party is nothing if its principles are not, at root, libertarian ones — is about recognising that having to put up with behaviour you don’t necessarily disapprove of is a far lesser evil than having the government messily and expensively intervene to regulate it.

November 2, 2010

James Delingpole: “Thank God for the Tea Party!”

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Government, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:02

James Delingpole clearly wishes he could vote in today’s American elections:

Arriving back at Heathrow late on Sunday night I felt — as you do on returning to Britain these days — as if I were entering a failed state. It’s not just the Third World shabbiness which is so dispiriting. It’s the knowledge that from its surveillance cameras to its tax regime, from its (mostly) EU-inspired regulations to its whole attitude to the role of government, Britain is a country which has forgotten what it means to be free.

God how I wish I were American right now. In the US they may not have the Cairngorms, the River Wye, cream teas, University Challenge, Cotswold villages or decent curries. But they do still understand the principles of “don’t tread on me” and “live free or die.” Not all of them, obviously — otherwise a socialist like Barack Obama would never have got into power. But enough of them to understand that in the last 80 or more years — and not just in the US but throughout the Western world — government has forgotten its purpose. It has now grown so arrogant and swollen as to believe its job is to shape and improve and generally interfere with our lives. And it’s not. Government’s job is to act as our humble servant.

What’s terrifying is how few of us there are left anywhere in the supposedly free world who properly appreciate this. Sure, we may feel in our hearts that — as Dick Armey and Matt Kibbe put it in their Give Us Liberty: A Tea Party manifesto — “We just want to be free. Free to lead our lives as we please, so long as we do not infringe on the same freedom of others”. And we may even confide it to our friends after a few drinks. But look at Australia; look at Canada; look at New Zealand; look at anywhere in the EUSSR; look at America — at least until things begin to be improved by today’s glorious revolution. Wherever you go, even if it’s somewhere run by a notionally “conservative” administration, the malaise you will encounter is much the same: a system of governance predicated on the notion that the state’s function is not merely to uphold property rights, maintain equality before the law and defend borders, but perpetually to meddle with its citizens’ lives in order supposedly to make their existence more fair, more safe, more eco-friendly, more healthy. And always the result is the same: more taxation, more regulation, less freedom. Less “fairness” too, of course.

November 1, 2010

QotD: The emergence of the Tea Party movement

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:06

There’s something else that’s been making me very happy lately, and frankly I don’t give a chipmunk’s cheeks who knows or what they may think about it. After years, decades, what even seems like centuries of unremittingly putrescent political news, we are suddenly all witnesses to the spectacular emergence of the so-called Tea Party movement.

The Tea Parties are just one of a number of historically pivotal developments (including the Internet, conservative talk radio, and perhaps even on-demand publishing) that became necessary to get over, under, around, and through the Great Wall of the Northeastern Liberal Establishment and its numberless, faceless hordes of duly appointed gatekeepers.

In that sense, the Tea Parties are exactly what the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the New Left always aspired to be and never really were.

Just like each of those other developments, the Tea Parties are essentially a medium of communications. So far, they are leaderless and centerless (and at all costs, must remain that way). They have no founders, and no headquarters. They have no constitution, no by-laws, and no platform to argue over endlessly. More conventionally-minded politicrats might view all of these qualities as weaknesses, but they would be mistaken. As presently (un)constituted, Tea Parties can’t be taken over by high school student government types or mercenaries from the major political parties, who have nothing better to do with their lives.

I would point out, especially in the light of the recent Bob Barr embarrassment, that this arrangement is inexpressibly better suited to libertarians and to libertarianism than any formal, hierarchical structure copied from the other political parties (and I have been doing exactly that for almost thirty years) but that would be a digression.

L. Neil Smith, “My Tea Party”, Libertarian Enterprise, 2010-10-31

Gallup calls current polling data “unprecedented”

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:23

The US midterm elections are often taken as a poll on the performance of the President, so the Gallup organization is saying what many Republican and Tea Party speakers have been saying for weeks: Barack Obama is dragging down his party:

Gallup models the number of seats a party will control based on that party’s share of the national two-party vote for the House of Representatives, using historical voting data in midterm elections from 1946 to 2006. The model takes into account the majority party in Congress entering the elections.

Gallup’s historical model suggests that a party needs at least a two-point advantage in the national House vote to win a majority of the 435 seats. The Republicans’ current likely voter margin suggests that this scenario is highly probable, making the question of interest this election not whether the GOP will win the majority, but by how much. Taking Gallup’s final survey’s margin of error into account, the historical model predicts that the Republicans could gain anywhere from 60 seats on up, with gains well beyond that possible.

It should be noted, however, that this year’s 15-point gap in favor of the Republican candidates among likely voters is unprecedented in Gallup polling and could result in the largest Republican margin in House voting in several generations. This means that seat projections have moved into uncharted territory, in which past relationships between the national two-party vote and the number of seats won may not be maintained.

The other thing to keep in mind is that polling isn’t quite as definitive as pollsters would like you to believe: voters sometimes conceal their actual voting intentions. The most recent example of this was the Toronto municipal elections, where polls consistently had Rob Ford and George Smitherman in a statistical dead heat, but the actual result was a 12 point lead for Ford.

H/T to Ace for the link.

October 26, 2010

Did we just witness the start of “Tea Party Ontario”?

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:53

Steve Paikin looks at the unexpected toppling of incumbent mayors across Ontario yesterday:

Did we just have our own “tea party” Ontario?

All over the province, incumbents were feeling the wrath of the electorate.

In the capital city, Rob Ford cruised to victory, besting George Smitherman by more than 90,000 votes. His margin of victory was bigger than David Miller’s when he “swept” into office with his broom seven years ago.

But it wasn’t only Toronto. Incumbent mayors lost in Hamilton, Ottawa, Burlington, Vaughan, London, Thunder Bay, and Sudbury.

In Mississauga, where Hazel McCallion is accustomed to winning with more than 90% of the vote, she only won re-election with 76%.

[. . .]

A few weeks ago, none of these results was seen as obvious.

[. . .]

The conventional wisdom in local politics is that name recognition counts for so much. The power of incumbency is fantastic.

Not last night. If anything, the opposite was true. If you were in, you had a target on you. And precious few escaped it, including many incumbent city councillors in Toronto.

A stunning night for upsets. A big night for turnout (more than 50% in Toronto…twice the normal turnout rate).

An Ontario Tea Party would be a good idea . . .

April 21, 2010

Is the Tea Party movement racist?

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:44

An interesting article at the Wall Street Journal on how a charge of “racism” works, even when there’s no actual racist action involved:

Blogger Conor Friedsdorf notes that there is a heads-I-win-tails-you-lose quality to the Blow approach [. . .]

Or, for that matter, to any nonpolitical institution that aspires to become more inclusive. Imagine Kelly O’Donnell questioning a black man in a largely white company or university or country club or suburb the way she interrogated Darryl Postell. She would come off as clueless and prejudiced — as, come to think of it, she does. (Kudos to NBC for airing this revealing though embarrassing footage.)

The political left claims to love racial diversity, but it bitterly opposes such diversity on the political right. This is an obvious matter of political self-interest: Since 1964, blacks have voted overwhelmingly Democratic. If Republicans were able to attract black votes, the result would be catastrophic for the Democratic Party.

[. . .]

These charges of racism are partly based on circular reasoning. Among Blow’s evidence that the tea-party movement is racist is “a New York Times/CBS News poll released on Wednesday [that] found that only 1 percent of Tea Party supporters are black and only 1 percent are Hispanic.” Other polls have put the black proportion as high as 5% (and, as Tom Maguire notes, Blow misreports his own paper’s Hispanic figure, which is actually 3%). But with blacks constituting some 12% of the population, there’s no question that the tea-party movement is whiter than the nation as a whole.

Yet to posit racism as an explanation is to ignore far more obvious and less invidious causes for the disparity.

H/T to LibertyIdeals for the link.

February 11, 2010

Sarah “Barack Hussein” Palin and the Tea Party

Filed under: Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:01

Steve Chapman looks at Sarah Palin’s Tea Party performance and finds a certain Obama-ness to it all:

The tea party movement started as a welcome protest against the alarming growth of federal spending and federal control. It had a strong anti-statist flavor, or seemed to. But judging from the applause for Sarah Palin at its convention, the movement’s suspicion of government power is exceeded only by its worship of government power.

[. . .]

When it comes to economic affairs, the tea partiers agree that—as Palin put it—”the government that governs least, governs best.” When it comes to war and national security, however, her audience apparently thinks there is no such thing as too much government.

The conventioneers applauded when Palin denounced Obama for his approach to the war on terrorists. Why? Because he lets himself be too confined by the annoying limits imposed by the Constitution. “To win that war, we need a commander in chief, not a professor of law,” she declares.

[. . .]

The advantage of having a former law professor in the Oval Office is that he doesn’t have to be tutored in such elementary realities. But Palin evinces a bitter resentment of any information that contradicts her blind faith in a benevolent, all-powerful security regime. She’s more than willing to trade liberty for safety.

That went over conspicuously well in Nashville, where tea partiers cheered a leader who places excessive trust in government, disdains constitutional freedoms, and promotes a cult of personality. So remind me: What is it they don’t like about Barack Obama?

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