Quotulatiousness

March 10, 2021

How wide is the gap between extreme partisanship and sectarian violence?

Filed under: Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Sarah Hoyt says she really didn’t want to write this post, and I completely understand why she feels that way:

The next American Civil War will be fought in a lot of places, in sudden flare ups and unexpected bursts of rage. But where most casualties will occur is in the home.

America’s civil war will be fougnt many places, but mostly in living rooms: siblings against each other, parents against children, children against parents, husband against wife, wife against husband.

If you live with a convinced leftist, how safe is your life, should the balloon go up?

And before you say “The first civil war was also between brothers!”

Sure, it was. There were mixed families. Mostly upper crust mixed families. But the war was largely a regional war, the country riven on regional lines.

Now? Bah. Now it’s a war of ideology. A war of beliefs.

And a lot of people are sleeping with the enemy, hanging out on weekends with the enemy. Visiting the enemy. Having lunch with the enemy.

At this moment a lot of you are sitting back there and going “My wife/husband/elementary school friend is not an enemy. Sure, he/she/it drank the Marxist koolaid from a hose but in every day life, in our normal interactions, in non-political things, we are very close, the best of friends.”

And maybe you are. Maybe you can trust them with your life.

But I will remind you we live in a nation where the capital is surrounded with razor wire to defend themselves from people who voted for the guy. I will remind you there are troops occupying our capital and that our secret services have so far been corrupted they keep inventing internet conspiracies (or probably referring to their very own black ops) to justify it.

I will remind you that your favorite progressive has allowed himself to be moved from “strong welfare net” to “we need full on communism, with favored races” within the last 12 years (or was indoctrinated into that state in schools.) I will remind you — and the conversations related back to me don’t help me think otherwise — that your favorite leftist thinks you’re racist/homophobic/evil. NO MATTER HOW MANY indications to the contrary.

And I can hear you sniffling: “But I love him/her/it/fuzzy.” Well, yes, and ten years ago that would have been me. I had very good friends I just classed as political idiots. I don’t wish the last 10 years on anyone, but at least they’re not living with me, 90% of them don’t know where I live. And I’ll be out of here in hopefully no more than 4 but maybe ten months, and maybe we have that long. Also, most of my close friends/acquaintances aren’t likely to cause any damage, being … not the type. On the other hand two dozen of them (easy) are friends with people who WILL.

Now to be clear: do I expect all of you in mixed political families to be in danger?

No. Any number of your spouses, relatives and friends are leftist because that’s “what good people are.” And they will turn on a dime, too, if half the crap about what the left has been doing for the last couple of decades comes out unvarnished and unspun. (The left knows it too. They’re perhaps more scared of these people than they are of us.)

Others are leftist and might hate your guts if things go hot, but simply don’t have it in them to hurt anyone. These are the “slippery” ones, because if you had asked me, even two years ago, if the media and the left (BIRM) could spin these people into wishing death on someone for not wearing a mask, when the person is not sick; there’s no proof of asymptomatic transmission (there’s reports from China but NOWHERE ELSE); and the actual disease (it’s not hard to find) might be a little more lethal than the flu but only at ages past about 80, I’d have said “no. They’re politically insane, but not stupid.” However they are “group oriented.” Turns out the type of gaslighting we’ve been enduring works really well on people who live for others’ opinions. (Which explains whey Southern Europe is still mired in the fricking crazy. Uniformly. And why women in general are more susceptible to the completely irrational gaslighting than men.) And they already believe a bunch of crazy crap. The reason that they think QANON is right main stream, it’s because it’s the mirror image of their actual main stream.

Are you sure they’ll remain inoffensive if the ballon goes up and the gaslighting switches to “If you know a Trump voter, he/she is dangerous?” How about “Turn them in, so they can be sent somewhere nice for their own protection?”

Look, guys, I hope none of this is ever needed. I still have friends on the other side, I’m just not in touch and we work on the very long finger. And there are people I no longer consider friends but whom I like very much who are buying into the entire insane bull excreta of “attempted coup” and evil “white nationalists.”

But like Peter Grant, I think we’re way past the ballot box, and just waiting for a precipitating incident.

I desperately hope she’s wrong about this, because an actual shooting war in the United States would be a disaster for western civilization.

Update: It’s apparently time to Immanentize the Eschaton!

I’m of the firm opinion that the Progressive Left believed that once Obama won his second term they were set. The eschaton night not be immanent, but it was imminent. Hillary was going to be another “great leap forward” towards the heaven on Earth promised by Karl Marx. […]

“Politics” it is said, “is the art of compromise.” “War,” said von Clausewitz, “is politics by other means.” I have repeated and repeated the observation that has made itself manifest in the nearly 18 years I’ve been writing this blog: Charles Krauthammer noted in 2002 that “To understand the workings of American politics you have to understand this fundamental law: Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil.”

You don’t debate with evil. You don’t negotiate with evil. You don’t compromise with evil. You don’t tolerate evil. You DESTROY evil. You pat it on the head until you can find a rock big enough to bash its skull in.

And control of the culture, education, and the government makes for a big damned rock.

Here’s the tinfoil yarmulke part of this essay: The preparations are underway. When debate and compromise are no longer possible, then force is the only thing left. They know it, and they’re projecting it on their enemy, us.

The Progressive Left has created and exercised its Sturmabteilung (yes, I know I risk Godwinization, and they loathe such comparisons, but this one’s apt. Their outfits are black instead of brown, but the actions are the same.) They’ve been set loose in the Pacific Northwest and some other cities and have been allowed to riot, commit arson, loot and occasionally murder with little to no legal consequence (violence, after all, being free speech you know.) Andy Ngo has studied Antifa, itself with roots in radical Socialism, in depth, and says that they are preparing for war, generously supported by the more mainstream Progressive Left. Black Lives Matter, an organization founded by two open Marxists, is also part of the preparations, but these are in my opinion just the Progressive Left’s “useful idiot” shock troops – the first to go against the wall after the Revolution.

February 24, 2021

QotD: Margaret Thatcher

Filed under: Britain, History, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I know I’m supposed to hate Margaret Thatcher. I know that someone with my politics is meant to detest her as a union-busting, milk-snatching, women’s-lib-baiting, Belgrano-sinking, Section-28-devising, society-destroying nightmare. I know that when Gillian Anderson was cast as Thatcher in series four of The Crown, I should have played up a shudder of disgust at Gillian Anderson, who is good, playing Thatcher, who is bad.

But here’s the thing: I don’t hate Thatcher. It’s not that I’m a huge fan of her legacy or anything (although anyone who thinks that industrial relations were doing fine before her or that the Falklands were some kind of unjustified expedition is clearly a fantasist), it simply doesn’t matter whether I like her or not because she is just too interesting.

Thatcher wasn’t the first woman to lead a country, but unlike her predecessors, Indira Gandhi in India or Isabel Martínez de Perón in Argentina, she didn’t arrive sanctified by a political dynasty. She was, as Prince Phillip snobbily points out to the Queen in The Crown, a grocer’s daughter. In real life, such condescension came strongly from the Left. The Blow Monkeys, one of the bands involved in the Red Wedge tour to support Labour, released an album called She was only a Grocer’s Daughter in 1987; and even though several pop songs fantasised about her death, that never seemed quite as ugly as supposed defenders of the working class announcing that Thatcher was just too common to rule.

Sarah Ditum, “How Thatcher rejected feminism”, UnHerd, 2020-11-15.

February 17, 2021

QotD: Protectionists, left and right

Filed under: Economics, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Conservatives who embrace protectionism thereby embrace both the fear that businesses, entrepreneurs, and workers in their country are simply not up to the task of competing against foreign rivals, and the belief that among the steps in making their country “great” is for their own government to restrict the freedom consumers in their country.

“Progressives” who embrace protectionism share conservatives’ low opinion of their country’s businesses, entrepreneurs, and workers, but also mistakenly believe that protectionism “sticks it to” corporate oligarchs when, in fact, it creates corporate oligarchs.

Don Boudreaux, “Quotation of the Day…”, Café Hayek, 2018-09-10.

February 10, 2021

“Did you know that seventy years ago, our grandparents were having an underpolarization crisis?”

Filed under: Books, History, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Scott Alexander reviews Why We’re Polarized by Ezra Klein, beginning with the underpolarization crisis of the mid-20th century:

In 1950, the American Political Science Association “released a call to arms … pleading for a more polarized political system”. The report argued that “the parties contain too much diversity of opinion and work together too easily, leaving voters confused about who to vote for and why”. Everyone agreed with each other so much, and compromised so readily, that supporting one party over the other seemed almost pointless.

In 1976, three years after Roe v. Wade, Democrats and Republicans were about equally likely to support abortion restrictions. That same year, a poll found that “only 54% of the electorate believed that the Republican Party was more conservative than the Democratic Party”; 30% thought there was no difference. As late as 2004, about equal numbers (within 5 pp) of Democrats and Republicans agreed with statements like “government is almost always wasteful and inefficient” and “immigrants are a burden on our country”. Between the late 60s and early 90s, Democratic presidents deregulated the airlines and passed welfare reform; Republican presidents pushed immigration amnesties and founded the EPA.

What happened between then and now? Klein has two answers: a historical answer, and a structural answer.

The historical answer is: the Dixiecrats switched from Democrat to Republican.

When the North won the Civil War, it had grand plans to remake the South into a paradise of racial equality and universal love. After Lincoln’s death, his successor Andrew Johnson decided this sounded hard and gave up. Within a few decades, the South was back to being a racist, paramilitary-violence-prone one-party dictatorship. That one party called itself “Democrat”, but had few similiarites to the Democrats in the North. The Southern Democrats (“Dixiecrats”) and northern Democrats disagreed on lots of issues, but the South hated the Republicans so much after their experience with Lincoln that they caucused with the northern Democrats anyway. This turned into a stable coalition, with northern Democrats agreeing to support the South against civil rights for blacks, and the Dixiecrats supporting the northern Democrats whenever they needed something.

But since the Democratic party contained both northern Democrats (relatively liberal) and Dixiecrats (relatively conservative), it didn’t want to take a coherent party-wide stance on liberalism vs. conservatism. And by the median voter theorem, that meant the Republicans also didn’t want to take a coherent stance on liberalism vs. conservatism. So both parties ended out centrist and identical.

In 1964, the Civil Rights Act threatened the Dixiecrats’ key issue. It wasn’t quite as simple as “Democrats were for it, Republicans were against it” – in fact, 80% of Republicans and 60% of Democrats supported it. But that year’s presidential election pitted heavily pro-CRA Democrat Lyndon Johnson against anti-CRA Republican Barry Goldwater, beginning Southerners’ defection to the Republican Party.

Klein says this successfully got all the conservatives on one side of the aisle and all the liberals on the other, allowing polarization to begin. Essentially, he believes polarization is a natural process, which the odd coalitions of the early 20th century temporarily prevented. Once the coalitions were broken, it could begin to do its work. He spends the rest of the book talking about why exactly polarization is so natural, what aspects of modernization have made it worse, and what sort of feedback loops make it keep going

February 8, 2021

QotD: The deeply rooted anti-Americanism in Canadian politics

Filed under: Cancon, History, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… in 2011, the only time Conservatives have managed to win a federal majority in the last three plus decades, they ran one of the most effective campaigns in recent memory against Michael “just visiting” Ignatieff by waging a patriotic campaign against him. In Ignatieff the Conservatives had the perfect rival to attack; a patrician member of the Laurentian new class. But the campaign against Ignatieff wasn’t just effective because it successfully portrayed him as an elite, it was effective because in attacking the time Ignatieff had spent aboard and at Harvard especially, they actually managed to make the Conservatives the champions of Canada, and the Liberals the more American party.

Ben Woodfinden, “True North Patriotism and a Distinctly Canadian Conservatism”, The Dominion, 2020-10-20.

February 4, 2021

Ace reads the upper middle class out of the conservative movement

Filed under: Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At Ace of Spades H.Q., Ace himself explains why he doesn’t consider anyone who evinces loyalty to “the mores of the upper middle class” to be in any way, shape, or form “conservative”:

Never once do these bougie “cons” notice that the class whose class markers they are so eagerly collecting like Cub Scout merit badges are entirely created by progressives.

I’m going to say this more straightforwardly than I’ve ever said it. I’ve hinted around it, I’ve never said it straight up.

But here goes:

People loyal to the mores of the upper middle class are left-liberal. Period.

They should have no place in the leadership and “thought” leadership of any “conservative” movement. They are not conservative.

They are all pro-gay marriage.

They are all pro-abortion.

They are all in favor of shipping out every single working-class job to China, and, for those few remaining jobs which must be performed in America, shipping in workers from the third world to displace Americans.

They are all supporters of a soft version of the SJW progressive stack. They all believe in “White Privilege,” for an obvious reason — as the rich children of the prosperous upper-middle class, they’re actually the ones born to privilege, but they wish to obscure that fact. So they buy into the left’s claims about the “White Privilege” of 63% of the country, instead of focusing on the wealth privilege of 10%.

Jake Tapper will entertain he shares a kind of privilege with two thirds of the country but he will never acknowledge his real privilege, one shared by only 10% of the country.

And the social-climbing “conservative” media class is almost entirely born from the same prosperous class. They too do not want to talk about real privilege.

I always want to ask these guys, so desperate to peonize the working class: How far back in time do you have to go to find an ancestor who had a job which caused callouses to form on his hands?

Was it two generations ago? Three? It’s obvious the “conservative” media class has never had to work a shovel in their lives. The toughest job they’ve ever held was working in their dad’s law office, or valet parking Beemers at the country club.

And yes, they support the leftwing SJW claims about race. Bullshit like “minorities can’t be racist,” or at least not racist in a way that should be held against them.

That’s why they all rushed to defend notorious, swaggering racist Sarah Jeong, and refuse to even acknowledge the eyebrow-singing anti-white racism seen every single day in the media.

To acknowledge there’s such a thing as “anti-white racism,” and that it ought to be condemned, is, they’ve decided, an “alt-right” idea, and the alt-right is a lower class phenomenon, and, as I’ve noted, they really, really really need you to know they are not lower class.

The only way in which they are arguably “conservative” is that … they are in favor of oligarchical fascism directed by the billionaires signing their paychecks.

Which is of course not “conservative” at all. But that’s the one category in which they can make an arguable case for their “conservatism” — in always championing the Ruling Class’ right to rule over the downscale Dirties.

Is that the “conservatism” we want? A gonzo left-liberalism which is also thoroughly anti-republican, anti-egalitarian?

Also at Ace of Spades H.Q., OregonMuse quoted this rather timely Barry Goldwater statement:

I have little interest in streamlining government or in making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size. I do not undertake to promote welfare, for I propose to extend freedom. My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them. It is not to inaugurate new programs, but to cancel old ones that do violence to the Constitution or that have failed their purpose, or that impose on the people an unwarranted financial burden. I will not attempt to discover whether legislation is “needed” before I have first determined whether it is constitutionally permissible. And if I should later be attacked for neglecting my constituents’ “interests”, I shall reply that I was informed that their main interest is liberty and that in that cause I am doing the very best I can.

January 10, 2021

Has the United States reached the same tipping point Canada reached in 1982?

Filed under: Cancon, Government, History, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

David Warren considers the 1982 tipping point in Canada to have been the implementation of Pierre Trudeau’s Constitution:

Queen Elizabeth II signs Canada’s constitutional proclamation in Ottawa on April 17, 1982 as Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau looks on.

There are two principal political parties in modern America (in which I include up here). In the Natted States, the population is divided roughly equally between those of “progressive” and “regressive” habits of mind; in the Canadas, the former have come to dominate.

The tipping point was reached much earlier up here, and the new “metapower” (Foucault’s term) was seized, politically, from within the Liberal Party. The strategy was to disenfranchise the “conservative” half of the electorate, by undermining all national institutions, and hosing down Canada’s previous identity. I’d count, say, 1982, as the point of no return. That identity was replaced, definitively, under a revised Trudeau constitution, with a new “multicultural” identity, in which citizens were themselves redefined, from free persons whose rights were inalienable, to interchangeable clients of an omnipotent State, which could dispense rights whenever it was in the mood — and withdraw them whenever the mood changed; however frequently.

This is the Democrat strategy in the larger, and still less amenable, country next door. As Andrew Breitbart and Antonio Gramsci might agree, this is an essentially cultural process. Politics are visible at the tip of the iceberg, but “progress” requires a more thorough “cleansing,” of old cultural norms. The cancer metastasized more from Hollywood, than from Washington DC. The takeover of the Democratic Party as the vanguard “agent of change” was only part of the institutional takeover of America. As important was the takeover of the mass media, and even corporate boardrooms. Those who weren’t “progressive” would now be “cancelled”: must cease to be.

All cultural change has a religious dimension. The Democrat representatives of the “powers and principalities” mentioned by Saint Paul, are characteristically godless, themselves. But they depend on a massive, core constituency of low-information, low-intelligence, easily manipulated urban voters.

Those who can still see the stars at night tend to remain in the ancient, God-fearing default. In the cities, where the masses may not grasp that milk comes from cows, let alone that someone must milk them, the belief that the economy is based on government cheques is more common. That is the god of the populous cities, and for most city-dwellers, not voting for their “godless god” of progress, seems a kind of heresy.

The idea that such heretics should be deprived of their freedom, starting with freedom of speech, does not appeal to the “rural” voter, including people like me — a “country hick” type who paradoxically lives in the city. The idea that laws and constitutions should be flexible, to accommodate the latest schemes of a progressive technocratic élite, doesn’t flourish among us country bumpkins. But to the efficiency experts in the city, what is our problem?

November 11, 2020

QotD: Appeasement and shifting allegiances between the wars

Filed under: Britain, Germany, History, Quotations, Russia — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Although it was in every way more pardonable, the attitude of the Left towards the Russian régime has been distinctly similar to the attitude of the Tories towards Fascism. There has been the same tendency to excuse almost anything “because they’re on our side”. It is all very well to talk about Lady Chamberlain photographed shaking hands with Mussolini; the photograph of Stalin shaking hands with Ribbentrop is much more recent. On the whole, the intellectuals of the Left defended the Russo-German Pact. It was “realistic”, like Chamberlain’s appeasement policy, and with similar consequences. If there is a way out of the moral pigsty we are living in, the first step towards it is probably to grasp that “realism” does not pay, and that to sell out your friends and sit rubbing your hands while they are destroyed is not the last word in political wisdom.

George Orwell, “Who are the War Criminals?”, Tribune, 1943-10-22.

October 21, 2020

“Canadian conservatism often suffers from a unique form of self-loathing”

Filed under: Books, Cancon, History, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In his latest essay for The Dominion, Ben Woodfinden reviews an old book by Peter Brimelow and how it influenced the Canadian conservative scene at the time and why the book’s insights mattered so much to Stephen Harper:

Published in 1986, The Patriot Game captures the ideas and sentiment of an entire generation of Canadian conservatism. One quick note on Brimelow. He’s a controversial figure and has been called a “leader within the alt-right.” He’s also the founder of VDARE, an American anti-immigration website. I’m not getting into a back and forth with anyone about how best to describe his views, I’ll just say that none of this means his older work like The Patriot Game should be discounted or ignored, especially given the influence it’s had.

The game Brimelow is describing is the manufacturing of a new national identity that was undertaken by what he terms “Canada’s New Class.” This is a term he borrows from Irving Kristol. It refers to Canada’s politicians, civil servants, academics, business elites, writers, and journalists, who have a disproportionate influence shaping public discourse and national consciousness.

The manufacturing of a new national identity by this class, centred on the Liberal Party, was one that both rejected our heritage and replaced it with a self-serving and contradictory ideology that serves the interests of this New Class. The strategy of the Canadian New Class throughout Canada’s history has been “to concentrate rents from a resource-based economy in Central Canadian hands.”

The nationalism they manufactured to do this was an entirely artificial one, built around multiculturalism, bilingualism, anti-Americanism and heavy federal government involvement in the economy. At its core Brimelow’s argument is that 20th-century Canada is the creation of the Liberal party, but ultimately that it is fake and built to serve the interests of the New Class. This was done especially by placating Quebec at the expense of the West, and attempting to construct a new national identity that could unite English and French Canada.

This game played by Canada’s elite to enrich them and their bases of support in places like Quebec not only took money from the West and transferred it elsewhere, it dragged down the Canadian economy by crippling it in overbearing and burdensome regulation and the heavy hand of government involvement.

The most interesting, and clarifying part of the book to me is Brimelow’s description of the identity and nationalism that he thinks the Liberals consciously destroyed and then replaced with their own. Brimelow thinks that the New Class are consciously and actively anti-British, not just anti-American, and that this new identity was built as both a rejection of British heritage and the cultural affinities English Canada has with “North American identity.”

According to Brimelow “All of Anglophone Canada is essentially part of a greater English-speaking North American nation … Canada is a sectional variation within this super nation.” Our British heritage is at the core of who we are along with our common Anglo affinities with Americans, and this new national project is doomed to failure. Brimelow suggests that “Canada’s fundamental contradictions cannot be resolved in the present Confederation” and while English Canada is currently in a strange period of identity agnosticism, it will eventually recover and “assert its North American identity.” This process will only be accelerated by regional tensions within Canada that expose the futility of this new Liberal national identity. Modern Canada, in short, is a fraud and doomed to failure.

September 27, 2020

QotD: The persuasive power of the newspapers

Filed under: Britain, Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

It is a standard part of the mythology that newspapers tell their readers what to believe — and the readers believe them. This is why the left keeps shrieking about the barons controlling the press, it could only be that poisoning of the minds of the proletariat which keeps said left from sweeping all before it in politics. The actual study — you know, science — of how this works is that newspapers follow the prejudices of their readers. The Sun is not socially conservative and rightish in its views because Rupert Murdoch is so but because a large portion of the British working class is so.

Or, as we might put it, the reason the left doesn’t sweep the board with the votes of the proletariat is because large numbers of the proletariat think the left either don’t represent them, or are aware that the left are nuts.

Tim Worstall, “This Will Be An Interesting Test – Geordie Greig To Daily Mail Editor”, Continental Telegraph, 2018-06-08.

August 18, 2020

Political polarization, or why Liberals and Conservatives really don’t understand each other

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

John Miltimore discusses the findings of Jonathan Haidt on the differences in moral worldviews of conservative and liberal Americans which seem to explain why communication across the political “aisle” is so difficult:

Jonathan Haidt at the Miller Center of Public Affairs in Charlottesville, Virginia on 19 March, 2012.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

During a TED talk a number of years ago, Haidt shared his discovery that contrary to the idea that humans begin as a blank slate — “the worst idea in all psychology,” he says — humans are born with a “first draft” of moral knowledge. Essentially, Haidt argues, humans possess innate but malleable sets of values “organized in advance of experience.”

So if the slate is not blank, what’s on it?

To find out, Haidt and a colleague read the most current literature on anthropology, cultural variations, and evolutionary psychology to identify cross-cultural matches. They found five primary categories that serve as our moral foundation:

  1. Care/harm: This foundation is related to our long evolution as mammals with attachment systems and an ability to feel (and dislike) the pain of others. It underlies virtues of kindness, gentleness, and nurturance.
  2. Fairness/reciprocity: This foundation is related to the evolutionary process of reciprocal altruism. It generates ideas of justice, rights, and autonomy. [Note: In our original conception, Fairness included concerns about equality, which are more strongly endorsed by political liberals. However, as we reformulated the theory in 2011 based on new data, we emphasize proportionality, which is endorsed by everyone, but is more strongly endorsed by conservatives.]
  3. Loyalty/betrayal: This foundation is related to our long history as tribal creatures able to form shifting coalitions. It underlies virtues of patriotism and self-sacrifice for the group. It is active anytime people feel that it’s “one for all, and all for one.”
  4. Authority/subversion: This foundation was shaped by our long primate history of hierarchical social interactions. It underlies virtues of leadership and followership, including deference to legitimate authority and respect for traditions.
  5. Sanctity/degradation: This foundation was shaped by the psychology of disgust and contamination. It underlies religious notions of striving to live in an elevated, less carnal, more noble way. It underlies the widespread idea that the body is a temple which can be desecrated by immoral activities and contaminants (an idea not unique to religious traditions).

[…]

What Haidt found is that both conservatives and liberals recognize the Harm/Care and Fairness/Reciprocity values. Liberal-minded people, however, tend to reject the three remaining foundational values — Loyalty/betrayal, Authority/subversion, and Sanctity/degradation — while conservatives accept them. It’s an extraordinary difference, and it helps explain why many liberals and conservatives in America think “the other side” is bonkers.

August 5, 2020

Red Toryism, limited government and other Canadian political sinkholes

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government, Politics — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In his latest article in The Dominion, Ben Woodfinden talks about the political void where most Canadian conservatives keep their notions about what “conservatism” actually means in the Canadian context:

Parliament Hill in Ottawa.
Photo by S Nameirakpam via Wikimedia Commons.

This passage is from the Red Toryism essay:

    Modern Canadian conservatism champions “small government”, seemingly without having any theory of what the state is actually for. Absent such a framework, it is difficult to identify governing priorities let alone to develop a philosophically coherent blueprint for action. When Conservatives get elected, they often have no idea of how to achieve the “fiscal responsibility” they preach. A series of ad hoc actions and policies follow, and the predictable result is failure to roll back the state in any significant or lasting way.

This, predictably, did not please everyone, and in a political landscape where we often still think that the divides between left and right are really about “big” versus “small” government, this was to be expected. But a conservative theory of government needs to escape this paradigm.

While conservatism is a broad tent, one unifying feature should be a commitment to limited government. But limited government is a term that often gets conflated with ideological “small government” that sees most of the modern state as illegitimate, and would eliminate most of it and leave the state to provide just the most minimal night-watchman functions. But small government, while a valid view to hold, is not limited government, and conservative government cannot just be about small government.

Limited government means constitutional government that is accountable and constrained by the rule of law, and while there are aspects of the modern state that need to be reformed, tamed, and limited, conservative government cannot just be about trying (and failing) to shrink the state. Conservatives have too often, I think, adopted the rhetoric of small government, without actually being true believers, and in the process they find it very difficult to actually reform and shape the state because they have put little thought into what government actually ought to be about.

Let me give you an example. Recently my friend Asher Honickman and I wrote a column for the National Post calling for a “parliamentary revival.” One specific and important reform we want to see is an expanded House of Commons to 500 MPs. More MPs would make for better party, and parliamentary government. But multiple people, including well connected conservatives, privately told us that while they think this is a good idea, one reason it won’t happen is because conservatives will just look at it through the lens of more spending of tax dollars on politicians. Instead the conservative impulse is to just try and shrink the size of legislatures to save a little bit of money.

In this case small government ideology actually gets in the way of reforms that would help make government more accountable, and limited. MPs should be held accountable and have their spending and salaries heavily scrutinized, but the cost of 150 more MPs would be nothing in the grand scheme of things.

This misses the point. More MPs would make for more accountable and better parliamentary government, and allow parliament, instead of both the bureaucracy and judiciary to increasingly take over more and more of lawmaking and governing that should be done by elected officials. The choice isn’t between more government or less government, in this case it’s a choice between who you’d rather be governed by; MPs who can scrutinize the government more, legislate with more freedom, and who you can hold to account, versus unelected bureaucrats with minimal oversight and limited accountability to elected officials.

In short, a conservative theory of governance should prioritize limited government, but in some cases this might require an attempt to strengthen (and more spending) on certain parts of government to constrain other parts.

It’s a rare Canadian conservative who’s willing to be quoted as saying that any part of human life is not automatically part of the remit of the federal government … how do you carve a “limited” government philosphy out of that?

July 1, 2020

QotD: The Quebec play (that never works) (for long)

Filed under: Cancon, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Certain things recur eternally, in time with the rhythm of the seasons. Flowers bloom in spring. The swallows return to Capistrano. And the federal Conservatives prostitute themselves for the Quebec-nationalist vote.

Well, that’s a bit strong. Prostitutes, after all, expect to be paid. Whereas the Conservatives’ periodic efforts to sell themselves, their principles and their country to people with a proven lack of interest in all three are as notable for their unremunerativeness as they are for their self-abasement.

The Conservatives have been trying this same act now for several decades, most notably — and destructively, to both country and party — under Brian Mulroney, but in their different ways under Robert Stanfield (“deux nations“), Joe Clark (“community of communities”) and even Stephen Harper (“the Québécois nation” resolution).

Occasionally, they manage to attract some attention in the province that has remained largely indifferent to them since 1891. If they are particularly extravagant in their offerings, as under Mulroney, they may even win their votes — but only for as long as it takes to sink in that there is no support in the rest of Canada for what they are proposing, and no possibility of their being implemented.

At which point the whole exercise sinks in a heap of dashed expectations and accusations of bad faith, leaving the country divided and the Tories in ashes. Until, inevitably, some genius gets it into his head to launch the whole routine again.

Andrew Coyne, “It’s that time again, when Conservatives say anything to woo Quebecers”, National Post, 2018-05-16.

June 30, 2020

“It all counts for nothing, because the Conservatives themselves are useless”

Filed under: Britain, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Most Canadians, reading that headline, will assume that Sean Gabb is talking about the Conservative Party of Canada (and he’d be 100% correct in that case), but he’s actually talking about Britain’s equally useless equivalent under Boris Johnson:

Prime Minister Boris Johnson at his first Cabinet meeting in Downing Street, 25 July 2019.
Official photograph via Wikimedia Commons.

According to The Daily Mail, Madeline Odent is the Curator of the Royston Museum in Hertfordshire. This museum is funded by Royston Council. In the past few days, Mrs Odent has taken to Twitter, giving expert advice on how to use household chemicals to cause irreparable harm to statues she dislikes.

It is, she says, “extremely difficult” to remove the chemicals once they have been applied. She adds that “it can be done, but the chemical needed is super carcinogenic, so it rarely is.” Again, she says: “We haven’t found a way to restore artefacts that this happens to.” Her last reported tweet features a picture of Winton Churchill’s defaced statue in Parliament Square, and says: “Stay tuned for our next edition, where we’ll be talking about marble memorials of racists.”

The newspaper and various people are calling for the woman to be sacked. It is, I allow, surprising for someone to hold a job that involves conserving the past, and then to advise an insurrectionary mob on how to destroy the past. This being said, and assuming the story is substantially true, Mrs Odent is less to be blamed for giving her advice than those who employed her as an expert on conservation and its opposite.

We have had a Conservative Government since 2010. We have had a Conservative Government with a working majority since 2015. For the past six months, we have had a Conservative Government with a crushing majority. It all counts for nothing, because the Conservatives themselves are useless.

Political power is not purely, nor mainly, a matter of being able to make laws. It is far more a matter of choosing reliable servants. Before 1997, we could suppose, within reason, that these servants were politically neutral. They often had their own agenda. They could use their status as experts to influence, and sometimes to frustrate, laws and policies with which they disagreed. But there were not self-consciously an order of people devoted to a transformative revolution. The Blair Government broke with convention by stuffing the public sector with its own creatures, loyal only to itself. This is to be deplored. On the other hand, the Blair Government did have a mandate for sweeping change, and it is reasonable that it should have given preference to employing those who could be trusted to further both the letter and spirit of this mandate. The Conservatives have had enough time to make the public sector into at least an obedient servant of those the people keep electing. Instead of this, they have spent this time employing and promoting people whom Tony Blair would have sacked on the spot as malicious lunatics.

June 18, 2020

The fall of olde timey “liberalism”

Filed under: Books, Britain, Education, History, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

David Warren on the way “liberalism” was dissected, consumed, digested, and excreted by progressivism:

From different angles, from Tocqueville to Schumpeter to a thousand reporters on the ground, it has been observed that liberalism defeats itself. I mean by this real liberalism, not the poison candy version that is offered to children by our academic Left. The real thing celebrates liberty as the central political good, and equality of opportunity versus equality of result. It frees up economies and societies, by cancelling hidebound rules and regulations. When much younger and under the influence of my father and his war-veteran generation (his was World War II), I considered myself a “liberal,” for views that activist mobs would now consider to be deeply “conservative,” or as they say, “fascist.”

Opposition to totalitarianism was a key to that generation. They weren’t shy about using arms. A true liberal was an enthusiast for the War in Vietnam, and other global initiatives. Liberals were “open society” in an explicitly anti-communist, 1950s way. They loved “civil rights,” and opposed the Nanny State, although incoherently. They wished to accommodate the women’s movement. Their instinctive suspicion of social programmes, and revulsion for “ideology,” were slipping away; or had already slipped, to a longer historical view.

To be tediously economic, they were intoxicated by the view that, “now we are rich we can afford to have some fun.” They had long been bored with the absolute moral judgements that their ancestors (to whom neither divorce nor contraception were thinkable) took for granted — based on a Protestant Christianity that had been abandoned by sophisticated intellectuals a century before. “Church versus State” was no longer an issue, and because it wasn’t, morality became a statist “construct,” even without action from the Marxists.

When Ross Douthat writes a book on “decadence,” he is treating it as a temporal trend: something that comes and goes through the decades. His arguments are themselves decadent: something for the chattering classes to play, in the spirit of badminton. It is a topic for upmarket wit; no horror lurks beneath it. The old Gibbonesque “decline and fall” narrative has evaporated with classical culture, and been replaced by a dry happyface from which the wrinkles of serious history are botoxed. The “whig view of history” survives, but only by cliché.

What isn’t defended, is soon killed off, in nature but also in metaphysics. Leftism flourishes today, not because it has won any argument, but by eating everything on the liberal side. Even the word, “liberal,” went down with a soft burp. It now represents the denial, or reversal, of everything that liberals once stood for. Gentle reader may prove this to himself, by reading old magazines.

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