Politics & Culture

The Establishment vs. The Tea Party; Or, Why Word Choice Leads to an Irrational Narrative

No Comments

The lion’s share of internecine Republican warfare rests on a problematic assertion: That there’s a qualitative difference, ideologically, between the Tea Party and the so-called Establishment.

I’m not so sure that there is.

What’s the major difference between Tea Party and Establishment Republicans? Only one real distinction comes to mind: Experience.

The Tea Party is upset because they see what they believe is an America under siege by the forces of collectivism and fiscal profligacy. Agree or disagree, but their lament is at least coherent. They want change, and they want it now, and they don’t want it watered down.

The Establishment, by contrast, is probably more Right than Center, but years of observing the Buckley Rule — achieve the most conservative candidate or position that’s possible and don’t die for lost causes — has opened them up to compromise and incrementalism. You might not, for example, get an immediate change in entitlement spending, but you might get a bending of the curve downward with folks like John Boehner and Mitch McConnell in charge.

Thus, the struggle between Tea Party and Establishment is probably less about ideology — I think everyone’s fundamentally on the same page — than it is about tactics. The Tea Party folks, because they’re mostly not accustomed to holding significant elective office, fail to understand that you can’t just stomp your feet and get your way. The Establishment folks, because they’re more interested in playing chess with the Democrats than checkers with their co-partisans, seem tone-deaf to the implications of sacrificing an occasional pawn.

It’s convenient to fan the flames of internal discord by alleging a difference in value systems between these two wings of the GOP. In truth, the differences aren’t all that significant, and with a bit of time and good will, we could end up with a GOP that’s got a passionate base with a bit more wisdom, and an elected class with a bit less risk aversion.

As long as we stop letting MSNBC and The Nation set the terms of the discussion.

Politics & Culture

Credit Where It’s Due, to @RepJustinAmash

No Comments

A few weeks ago I posted a somewhat negative essay detailing my concerns about my Member of Congress, Rep. Justin Amash, and his public response after his removal from the House Budget Committee.

I didn’t actually catch it until two days ago — my house line usually gets robocallers, so I rarely listen to the messages — but Congressman Amash called my home, personally, to offer a gentle defense.

Part of his message cut off, and regardless it’s a bit unseemly to analyze a private call in a public forum, but I would be remiss if I failed to note the good-faith effort Amash made to address the concerns of one of his constitutents. Not many in his position would bother to take the time.

One of these days I’ll have to attend a local town-hall forum and talk to him in person.

Politics & Culture

Credit Where It's Due, to @RepJustinAmash

No Comments

A few weeks ago I posted a somewhat negative essay detailing my concerns about my Member of Congress, Rep. Justin Amash, and his public response after his removal from the House Budget Committee.
I didn’t actually catch it until two days ago — my house line usually gets robocallers, so I rarely listen to the messages — but Congressman Amash called my home, personally, to offer a gentle defense.
Part of his message cut off, and regardless it’s a bit unseemly to analyze a private call in a public forum, but I would be remiss if I failed to note the good-faith effort Amash made to address the concerns of one of his constitutents. Not many in his position would bother to take the time.
One of these days I’ll have to attend a local town-hall forum and talk to him in person.

Politics & Culture

Knock It Off: An Open Letter to @RepJustinAmash

No Comments

Dear Congressman Amash:

Greetings from one of your constituents, a long-time resident of Kent County, Michigan.

I’ll be blunt. Congressman, we need to talk. I think you need an intervention.

When Rep. Ehlers retired at the end of the 111th Congress, the people of the Third District faced a three-way contest for the Republican nomination.  In that race, I supported Bill Hardiman, an experienced leader with a good read on the pulse of our community. Alas, Hardiman and Steve Heacock — another respectable candidate — split the grown-up vote, letting you squeak by on the vapors of the Ron Paul Revolution and the advocacy of fired-up youth who thought Facebooking votes is a sign of virtue.

You are from West Michigan. You know as well as I do that the people here — the actual voters, not the Country Club Republicans here who pull the strings — are a sensible lot. We don’t like unnecessary and counterproductive conflict or obviously self-aggrandizing behavior. We favor quiet competence over flashy showmanship, which is why we have a long track record of electing men like Vern Ehlers, Paul Henry, Hal Sawyer and Gerald Ford to the House of Representatives. That’s why giants of the Senate like Arthur Vandenberg hailed from Grand Rapids, too. We favor substance over symbolism. We like our leaders to matter, and we reward them with re-election when they do.

During your first term, your whole communication apparatus seemed to consist solely of Facebook and Twitter. You’ve been the black sheep of the 112th Congress, bucking leaders so often on so many issues that people stopped trying to persuade you about anything. No one heard much about you, except for odd commentary about you being the lone Republican dissenter on bills — with your dissent rooted in distinctly Libertarian interpretations of the Constitution that differ in important ways from the ideals of mainstream contemporary conservatism.

(Seriously? Voting “present” on defunding Planned Parenthood or NPR because the operative legislation might be a bill of attainder? And then apparently believing that out of all the members of the House, you alone have the penetrating insight into the Constitution to see a bill of attainder for what it is? Chutzpah!)

It wasn’t until you got the boot from Budget that people really started to notice you. And we noticed because you decided to break your radio silence with a series of blistering, ill-formed attacks on the House GOP leadership.

Word on the street among your real-life constituents (as opposed to your make-believe constituents at Reason): You’ve embarrassed us. Your reaction to being removed from Budget has all the hallmarks of a temper tantrum, complete with idle threats against the Speaker and infantile protests that you’re the only one out there who’s actually a conservative — that the rest are spineless Beltway types who’ve failed the Reagan Revolution.

As John Stossel would say: Give. Me. A. Break. A real leader wouldn’t conspire over an ill-fated coup against the sitting Speaker; a real leader would have met privately with the Speaker to smooth things out in private, without affecting an air of entitlement about something as inconsequential in the long run as a committee seat. In fact, this whole Budget kerfuffle should never have happened — first, because you shouldn’t have treated the party that elected you as if it were some sort of annoyance to be dismissed at will; and second, because when you finally felt the consequences of your behavior, the right response was to seek redress of your grievances in private.

What do you expect when you’re an unreliable member of the caucus who snipes from afar? Do you think you’ll be coddled and empowered? Did you really expect Speaker Boehner or Leader Cantor or Chairman Ryan to say, “Hey Justin, thanks for being a great Monday-morning quarterback whom we can’t count on when the chips are down; how’d you like a raise and promotion?” Politics is, and always has been, about the art of balancing the possible against the ideal. Open revolt and unreliable allies make it harder to tip the scale closer to that ideal, so effective leaders will minimize this disruption for the benefit of the greater good at the expense of the black sheep.

With Barack Obama in the White House and Harry Reid calling the shots in the Senate, the power of the House of Representatives is circumscribed by reality. Yes, the House GOP should fight for the best deal possible on every issue of public policy that comes up for debate. But the best deal possible in this climate isn’t going to be the most ideologically pure solution. That’s just reality. We can lament it all we like — and boy, do I lament it! — but we cannot escape it. To think that the House alone can force fiscal sanity upon the nation by simply digging in deep enough is, I believe, delusional. You know: Baby, bathwater.

Worse, our focus as a party and as the conservative movement is substantially harmed by the infighting that arises from battles to prove who’s purest. We need to fight Obama and Reid and Pelosi, not each other.

Congressman, on a purely personal level I don’t much care if you oppose the House leadership. I don’t care if you write 10,000-word essays on Facebook about your votes. Just as I am not a fan of childish dissent, I’m also not a fan of lock-step conformism, and I believe that Libertarians have just as much right to seek to influence public policy as conservatives and liberals. I’m not asking you to change your beliefs or to stop articulating your personal perspective — I am, however, asking you to change your behavior and your voting pattern. I’m asking you to recognize that you represent the people of the Third District — a people who aren’t doctrinaire liberarians — and to behave in a manner that seeks our best interests and reflects our innate dispositions. We didn’t elect you to be Ron Paul’s designated heir.

Please don’t act as if you’re some sort of martyr being silenced by a corrupt establishment. You’re not, and protests to the contrary reflect poorly on we hard-working folks in West Michigan who yearn for leadership instead of drama. Actions have consequences, and the consequence of abandoning your party and your leadership is that you’re not going to be granted access to the levers of power. Them’s the rubs. Deal with it and quit the public whining and sniping. Please.

One more thing. With the 2010 redistricting, your constituency has changed. Not many local politics watchers are confident that the Second Coming of Ron Paul will be able to hold this re-formed district in the long haul. You were damned lucky that the local Dems had a bloody enough primary season that Steve Pestka was mortally wounded before the fight began. Next time, you might not be so lucky; already, locals are showing their decided lack of amusement in your antics. I’ve even heard whispers of a primary challenge in 2014.

There’s a battle afoot, in Kent County as well as other communities across America. Sometimes the struggle is pitched as “Tea Party versus Establishment,” but this characterization isn’t quite right. It’s more like a struggle between the pragmatists and idealists. The idealists have made inroads recently, but the pragmatists are fighting back.

Congressman Amash, I implore you: Stop being a source of distraction and an agent of fragmentation. Given the choice, the people of the Third District would rather see you be a loyal Republican over a dogmatic Libertarian. We want news about you to be positive — that you’ve written a great bill or brokered a valuable deal. We grow weary of headlines about you launching coup attempts and declining to support conservative causes over pet Constitutional theories that only you seem to find.

We want a Member of Congress who fights for us. For all of us. You have the potential to get there — but will you be a leader or a bomb-thrower? I’m praying for the former.

Regards and best wishes,

P.S. — If Speaker Boehner ever does decide to visit Grand Rapids, he’ll have a warm welcome by a whole lot of us, even if you decide to sit at home and play on Facebook.

Politics & Culture

The Fortnight in Politics: Right to Work, Fiscal Cliff, Sandy Hook, Susan Rice Withdraws, Amash Gets Spanked

No Comments

It’s been a month, hasn’t it? The astonishingly mild 60-degree winter in West Michigan serves as a counterpoint to the depressingly extreme politics beyond the Grand Rapids area. Several news ledes warrant a quick review.

Right-to-Work in Michigan

Big Labor picked a fight of their own choosing. Michigan’s One Tough Nerd, Gov. Rick Snyder, decided to fight back, after trying for most of his term to keep labor issues off the table entirely.

Michigan, as a labor-heavy state and birthplace of industrial unionization in the U.S., has long enjoyed a peaceful if uneasy truce in state politics over labor issues. Mutually Assured Destruction, of a sorts. This truce was broken last year, when Bob King — elected in mid-2010 as president of the United Auto Workers — saw the “tea” leaves in Wisconsin and tried to prevent a similar showdown in the Wolverine State.

Backed primarily by the UAW, Michigan unions pushed hard for Proposal 2, a 2012 ballot initiative that would have enshrined a full-throated right to collective bargaining within the state constitution. The proposal failed, equally hard; it went down 57/42 in a state that gave Barack Obama and Debbie Stabenow healthy re-elect margins. King recently suggested that he felt the fight was necessary to protect organized labor. Fair or foul, King knew that if he proceeded with Prop 2, that the Legislature would follow with an RTW initiative. Thus, Prop 2 having been resoundingly defeated, the Legislature acted, and Snyder signed the bills. Despite the drama of union thugs raining down upon the Capital, the entire ordeal unfolded quickly and without too much messiness. And to think — RTW could have been avoided had the UAW kept its powder dry. That’s gotta sting.

The Big Labor argument boils down to this: Since everyone who works in a given union shop enjoys the benefits that accrue to the collective bargaining agreement, allowing non-dues-paying employees to enjoy those benefits amounts to unfair free-riding. (The nature of the free-riding mechanism is always merely asserted, never explained.)  The counter-argument is equally simple: Employees should not be forced to pay to join an organization that doesn’t reflect their values. The whole RTW issue would play out differently politically if the unions weren’t basically the chief fundraiser for the Democratic Party.

The irony of it all is that when it comes to abortion — when a human life is at stake — Dems plead for “choice” but when it comes to working conditions, they suggest that “choice” is an evil. Funny, isn’t it? And by funny I mean idiotic.

The Fiscal Cliff

As of this writing, semi-secret discussions between President Obama and Speaker Boehner continue. There are some indications that the GOP would be willing to accept higher rates on millionaires in return for significant spending concessions and meaningful entitlement reform. The White House doesn’t seem all that eager for a deal, on the assumption that if it waits long enough, Republicans will eventually cave.

I have no clue how this will end up. I do know that irrespective of any specific policy or spending proposal currently on the table, the United States remains on a fiscal trajectory that, in the long run, will prove ruinous. We simply cannot continue to spend like drunken sailors — the IOUs will one day come due, and when that happens, the adjustment pain will increase for every fiscal year we delay serious action.

Obama’s single-minded insistence on higher taxes for the “wealthy” is somewhat difficult to fathom. Surely POTUS is aware that even at 100 percent tax rates on all incomes above $1 million, the Treasury would only net about $616 billion — which, according to John Stossel writing in Forbes, amounts to a paltry one-third of the deficit. And that assumes that the wealthy wouldn’t change their behavior to mitigate their tax liability or change their behavior to reduce their financial risk, and that the lock-up of that money wouldn’t engender a significant economic contraction that lessens the size of the tax base.

The real problem is spending. As I’ve said before, when your entire political-economic platform consists of playing Santa Claus to the nation, it’s hard to accept when the bill comes due that your magic credit card has been maxed out. The Dems genuinely have no alternative strategy for addressing high spending and over-generous entitlement programs. Until they do, the plan of “tax the rich” and “leave Medicare alone” will do little but increase the price future generations will have to pay.

I hope the House GOP caucus sticks together and demands substantial structural reform. I’ll forgive tax hikes if it means we can finally get the spending beast under control with real — not paper, not baseline — reductions in discretionary and entitlement spending.

Sandy Hook Shooting

Last week’s shooting is a tragedy of the first rank. As of this writing, it seems that a young man with a history of mental illness stole some guns from his mother, killed her, forced his way into Sandy Hook Elementary and started firing. Dozens died.

The media’s instinct is to “not politicize” the tragedy, which is code for tut-tutting anyone who dares suggest that gun control ought not be on the agenda.

Time and again, we see mass shootings and then in the aftermath, it becomes clear that various taxpayer-funded social-services entities adjudged the danger but failed to act. Instead of directing one’s ire toward gun owners, perhaps we should start to hold the various psychologists and social workers to account, whose negligence allowed a dangerous mentally-ill person to roam free. I’m not entirely serious about this, but it does seem odd that we’re quicker to blame an inanimate object than the specific counselors and therapists who fell down on the job.

The gun-control argument is interesting, in one sense. Proponents suggest that there were no guns, then even a perpetrator suffering from mental illness would end up wrecking less carnage. Perhaps that’s true, but I’m skeptical. First, there are just too many guns in the U.S.; you couldn’t confiscate them all, even if such were permitted by the courts and Congress. Second, a person bent on committing violent crimes might use a gun if he can find one, but if he can’t, he might resort to something else. There’s a reason why bombings are popular in countries with tough gun laws — just ask the Irish. Bad people will find a way to do bad things. Instead of trying to whack at the hydra’s head of weapons choices, perhaps we should re-think our approach to treating mental illness. Particularly when the patient’s suicidal or homicidal ideations are obvious.

Susan Rice Withdraws

Sparing her boss the drama of a confirmation fight, U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice has asked that her name be withdrawn from consideration to serve as America’s next Secretary of State. Press reports suggest that Sen. John Kerry may well end up being the nominee.

Rice angered Republicans when she went on a whirlwind Sunday-TV interview circuit, weeks before the election, and repeated blatantly false talking points about the attack at the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya — an act of premeditated terrorism that left Ambassador Stevens and several other Americans dead. The White House still hasn’t gotten its story straight about what it knew and when it knew it, regarding the attacks in Benghazi and Cairo.

Rice disqualified herself through her intransigence about those interviews. Her withdrawal marks the first good sense she’s demonstrated in this debacle. 

Justin Amash Learns the Price of Radical Individualism

The Second Coming of Ron Paul has been on a roll. After spending a first term in Congress as the black sheep of the Republican Caucus —

(The Weekly Standard) When I asked fellow freshman Republican Renee Ellmers of North Carolina about Amash, she laughed nervously. “He doesn’t play nice with others,” said Ellmers, a Tea Party conservative popular with the House leadership. … For the Republican establishment, Amash may be more an amusing spectacle than a serious threat. After the first ask, the GOP leadership doesn’t bother whipping Amash on votes. Committee chairs have learned he’s not likely to budge and usually don’t try to negotiate with him. No congressman is an island, but Amash comes close.

Michael Warren’s story in The Weekly Standard is worth reading in full. It tells the tale of a first-term Congressman who’s drinking up the hard-core Libertarian limelight and casting ideologically pure votes in that vein with no regard for party discipline or constituent instruction. And then he has the balls to say he was purged because he was too conservative? I throw the B.S. card on that one.

Amash won because in 2010, the grown-up vote split between two experienced, seasoned primary candidates. Amash got the Paulite wing, and the youth vote.

After 2010, the redistricting changed the district to include a much deeper swath to the south. If the Democrats get their act together, a seat that’s been a mainstay of men like Gerald Ford, Paul Henry and Vern Ehlers could very well flip blue.

Politics & Culture

Love, Lust, Life, Loss … and TV

2 Comments

Years ago, during a signature-karaoke-song email thread, the ever-sensible PPQ nixed the idea of me adopting Iris as one of my three go-to selections. As I recall, she opined that lyrics suggesting that “yeah you bleed just to know you’re alive” were pretty much the domain of frat boys who wanted to sound sensitive so they could get laid after the party. Luckily for me, at that point I wasn’t acquainted with Hinder, so I may have been inadvertently spared the full flowering of PPQ’s divine wrath that would have followed a selection even worse than Goo Goo Dolls. (Seriously. Most of Hinder’s ballads feature lyrics that read like bad love poetry from an angsty high-school sophomore boy with self-esteem issues. Better Than Me; QED.)

Anyway. Tonight, as I was washing dishes, my mind wandered to the latest TV show in my Netflix queue — The Vampire Diaries. I’m just getting into the third season; the fourth season is currently airing. TL;DR version is that it’s a CW series in the “teen drama” and “supernatural” category, so you’re guaranteed lots of intense but superficial emotion, copious amounts of PG-rated skin and sometimes byzantine subplots driven by teenage impulsiveness within the season’s story arc. And there are vampires, werewolves and witches. But I like it, just like I enjoy Supernatural, the last series I watched.

As I thought about the latest episode I watched and after PPQ’s injunction popped into mind, I asked myself why I like this particular TV genre. Some of it is technical, of course. Supernatural did a great job of character development over the last seven seasons — just compare Sam from the pilot to Sam of today to respect the smooth way actor Jared Padalecki grew the character — with a series of ever-more-complex story arcs that provided just the right balance of plot twists with overt humor and frequent good-natured violations of the fifth wall. The Vampire Diaries features an astonishingly good actress in Nina Dobrev, who pulls off some really subtle performances as Elena/Katherine, coupled with the deft work of actor Ian Somerhalder in portraying the gradual re-engineering of his character Damon.

But there’s something more afoot, too, and I think it has to do with the raw, obvious emotion in these shows.

In bygone days, people escaped to popular entertainment — novels, operas, music, plays, motion pictures — as a defense mechanism of sorts. Sure, your life sucked, but you could temporarily decamp into a fictional world as a way of finding solace from the day’s worries. When a favorite character in a novel grieved over a death, you grieved too, because odds were good that you had experienced the death of a loved one and could relate. When a character fell in love, you fell in love too, because you had your own experiences with love and loss and the peril of forbidden romance in a more class-conscious society. These forms of entertainment reinforced and legitimized the feelings people normally experienced, and in so doing, provided a safe harbor for channeling their real-world responses to emotionally charged situations.

Today, though, a large number of people are coming of age in that upper-middle-class milieu so coveted by advertisers and so catered-to by the entertainment industry. This demographic endures parachute parents, tiger moms, play-date calendars for toddlers, safety helmets for tricycles and awards just for showing up. These kids have enjoyed easy, safe lives of material abundance and a near-complete absence of adversity. But just like a kid raised in San Diego has no concept of a bitter Minnesota winter, these kids really don’t know the pain that comes from hardship or capital-U Unfairness; when it’s always sunny in Lake Wobegon, a cloudy day is an eminently theoretical construct knowable only in the head but never the heart.

If an escape from adversity and a re-direction of emotion marked the whole point of the pop-entertainment enterprise of yesterday, what marks it for today? Put differently, could a show in the same vein as The Vampire Diaries make cultural sense a generation or two ago?

Perhaps the pursuit of “teen entertainment” isn’t so much an escape anymore as much as it’s a chance to live vicariously, to grasp at the highs and lows that viewers’ otherwise safe lives deny them in the real world. When “love” has no barriers and no risks, when the audience has little or no experience of privation or sickness or death, then these subjects aren’t things you escape from — they’re things you seek out as a novelty, “to bleed just to know you’re alive.” If your idea of love hails from the hookup culture, the idea of dying for your beloved signals a degree of deep emotional attachment they’ve never seriously encountered. If your idea of loyalty begins and ends with the Bro Code, then duty is an idea, not an experience. If you’ve never lost a family member, then watching gut-wrenching goodbyes on TV is your only surrogate for an experience as old as humankind.

I once heard an older friend remark that she didn’t need romance because she had cable. Instructive, that.

There’s a world of difference in sympathizing with a character because you’ve experienced the emotion being portrayed, versus allowing the thrill of the imagined emotion to substitute for actually having lived it. I didn’t understand death, no matter how many times I saw it rendered on the big screen, until my grandfather died. I didn’t understand love until the first time I willingly sacrificed for another. I didn’t understand lust until, after seeing the head beside mine on the pillow the morning after, I felt the pang of regret. So when I watch these shows, it triggers empathy. Been there, done that.

For too many, though, it’s not “been there, done that” — it’s merely substitution for the real thing. They’ve never known love or loss or regret, so they get their adrenalin kick from the TV, form-fit the experience to their own lives, and call it good.

Which is probably why some people are genuinely touched by Hinder lyrics.

Philosophy, Politics & Culture

Of Bread, Circuses and Ovaries

No Comments

The 99 percent. The 47 percent. Sandra Fluke. Cardinal Dolan versus Secretary Sebelius. Single women giving 68 percent of their vote to Barack Obama. Each of these talking points waltzes around a thorny problem for American governance: The challenge of entitlement reform in a culture with far too many fallen soldiers in its “little platoons.”

The GOP consultant class, diving into the post-election crosstabs, are trying to make rain for themselves by noting “unexpected” electoral trends, like the rate of single women going for the Democrats. Although I certainly applaud their zeal to keep themselves employed, their potential future employers ought to ask, How did you clowns not see coming a trend as old as the Roman Empire and as evergreen as Tocqueville?

It’s a commonplace for economists to claim that people are fundamentally rational. In the aggregate, people tend to make prudent short- and long-term choices that redound to their own advantage. That’s why economics works fairly well as a predictive theory.

Concurrently, sociologists have lamented since the Moynihan Report the fracturing of the American family. The two-parent family, with a working father and a homemaking mother and a typical family size above the population-replenishment rate, is transitioning. Single parenthood, divorce, the sociocultural legitimization of same-sex attraction — these pressures have modified the political and economic calculus that the average citizen must factor. Cultural conservatives have done much to decry these shifts but precious little to change them apart from sitting on the sidelines offering boos and hisses.

Thus, the question: If it’s culturally and economically viable for a single female to thrive on her own terms — as promiscuous or as chaste as she wishes; married or unmarried; barren or fecund; straight or gay; obligated to her family or not — then what’s her Plan B when family and network support aren’t up to the task?

I’m not talking about the morning-after pill. Human society has always emphasized intergenerational support as a mechanism for protecting against illness, injury or old age. Within kin networks, in your youth you relied on your parents and grandparents, and in your old age you relied on your children. Extended family helped, too, and in many places affinity groups — churches, benevolent associations, labor unions — pitched in to cover gaps. Once upon a time we called these institutions “civil society.”

The atomization of the family and the turn toward more robust and unhindered individualism turned this model on its head. For many, many people — and most especially, single females — Plan B isn’t family or a social network, but the promise of baseline support from the government.

Yes, many Republicans mouth their outrage at this turn of events. Yet whether the sound bite is Romney’s 47 percent remark or Rush Limbaugh’s idea of a “nation of takers,” the reality is that a sizeable proportion of the population has no other reliable catastrophic fallback. No savings, no spouse, too small of a family. Only Big Government is positioned to fill the gap, and without that backstop, a person’s just one step away from the abyss with no safety net at the bottom.

And you know what? This trust in providential government is rational. Trusting the government to care for you, when you have no one else who will, provides psychological comfort. It’s also economically rational. Thus, voters will support politicians who protect their Plan B.

The conservative talking-points on Big Government ring hollow with folks who trust Uncle Sam to catch them if they fall. Part of this disconnect might be simple cognitive dissonance: People support “caring government” for others as a sign of enlightened social compassion without acknowledging that their support is partially selfish. Sometimes — look, for example, at the Occupy nonsense — a trust in government is a convenient outlet for envy.

In any case, a message of “smaller government” that “gets out of your life” appeals to people who follow the older life plan of larger families, connected local networks and wealth-building thrift. If you don’t have that infrastructure behind you, all you’re hearing is “we’re taking away your safety net, you leeches.” Appeals to fiscal restraint become too academic, too coldly calculating to resonate — especially when the “other side” argues that that the cost savings will simply revert to the wealthy.

The Republicans have a real rhetorical deficit on this point. I worry, though, that the Democrats have an even worse problem: Eventually, someone’s going to have to pay the bill. When you offer bread and circuses on the public dime, the public is going to demand that you get the dimes from somewhere. When the sources dry up, so also does the public benefit. When that happens ….

Democrats have been disingenuous about entitlement reform. It’s as if they believe they can find ways to fund a generous welfare state indefinitely, contrary to the experience of social democracies across Europe. Raising taxes on the wealthy won’t cut it, and they know it, but just like the Republican refuse to concede that that they’ve lost the culture war, the Democrats refuse to concede … math.

We’re therefore facing the odd problem of two major political parties cum ideologies that could be positioned to take up a reform mantle within their scope of interest, but instead pick incoherent fights with straw men.Republicans should probably lay off the moralizing about the shift away from the Eisenhower-style family. Democrats should probably stop lying about entitlement spending.

Either way, the next few decades will prove fascinating. The premise of American government rests on intermediary institutions and federalism to check the popular excesses that appear at the federal level. The more we take knock down those barriers, the more likely it is that our worst impulses will be unimpeded by our best instincts.

Philosophy, Politics & Culture

Post-Election Reflection: 10 Ideas for Conservative Renewal

1 Comment

Another election, another set of mixed messages from the electorate at large. And another round of self-flagellation by the Conservative Commentariat coupled with ill-advised gloating from the Left.

Core message: No cause for alarm, but there’s clearly opportunity to ponder course corrections and work on infrastructure. We need to get past the “America’s a center-right Reaganesque country” wishful thinking and take seriously the challenges presented by contemporary progressive ideology. We also must heed John Paul II’s sage counsel at his own election: Be not afraid. For with John Boehner in the House, the relative risk of untrammeled liberalism remains low. We didn’t get the win we wanted, but we did get status quo.

The comments that follow are shaped, in large part, from reading the last few days’ commentary from sources as diverse as FireDogLake, NRO, RedState, Salon, Talking Points Memo and Weekly Standard. The two Jays — Cost and Nordlinger — and The Three Wise Elders of Moe Lane, Peggy Noonan and George Will have contributed disproportionately to the analysis that follows.

  1. Don’t blame Romney.  Mitt Romney wasn’t a bad candidate. He ran a decent campaign. Some on the Right didn’t like him — such is an inevitability — but his campaign wasn’t a disaster. So don’t blame the Romney/Ryan ticket for losing. They ran a solid and honorable race. The GOP cannot move forward if scapegoating the nominee substitutes for genuine soul-searching.
  2. State-level organizations need fresh blood and a healthy dose of pragmatism. The GOP’s U.S. Senate holding in 2013 will consist of 45 seats. Conventional wisdom is that had Lugar not been successfully primaried by Mourdock, Indiana would have been a safe Republican seat. Had Akin not put his foot in his mouth, he probably would have easily trumped McCaskill. In 2010, the GOP put forth exceptionally weak candidates in Sharron Angle, Ken Buck and Christine O’Donnell. With better candidates, the GOP could easily have tied or even eked out a slender majority in the Senate by this point. The problem in these races isn’t the alleged “Establishment Republicans” intervening but rather of weak conveyors of candidates at the state level. For every satisfactory challenger to the status quo like Marco Rubio, you get the self-proclaimed witch that’s Christine O’Donnell. Worse, there’s every sign that that Tea Party has simply tried to insert itself into local politics at the precinct level, working their folks into the GOP’s base, so the GOP will continue to field subpar candidates as long as seasoned veterans and neophyte firebrands continue to battle in a way that leaves the Buckley Rule in tatters. State leadership really needs to recruit strong candidates and get them on a pathway to nomination victory early. Internecine warfare at the state level gives us a candidate-selection system that’s basically a giant Roulette wheel: You might get good, you might get bad, but no one knows until the primary’s over. (And like any game of Roulette, the House — the DNC — has an edge.)
  3. Nurture local volunteers. GOP efforts on election day, frankly, sucked — for the second presidential cycle in a row. The GOTV effort was dwarfed by the Obama campaign. This problem starts at the precinct and county levels. Too many Republicans prefer faux grassroots office over actually doing the hard work of building coalitions. When my own county GOP organization refuses to return phone calls and emails, and campaigns that do call (thank you, Pete Hoekstra) nevertheless don’t seem to align skills/experience with the nature of their requests, the question is: WTF? Maybe it’s a West Michigan thing, but it really seems like we have a substantial barrier at the grassroots level, with local GOP potentates acting complacent in their self-importance while the Dems run organizational circles around them. Case in point: My paperwork to be a precinct delegate this year “didn’t get filed” because I’m in the same precinct as the county chairman and he wanted to cast a ballot for his wife for some nominated office or something. But in our precinct, there was no effective GOP presence. No flyers, no door-to-door, no one to challenge Democrat yard signs in public easements. You’d think the precinct with the county chair could at least maintain a degree of visibility despite our overwhelming +D territory.
  4. The consultants deserve the boot. The scandal over Project ORCA and dumbfounded reaction of the RNC and the Romney campaign over actual voting results — when the Dems were basically dead-on accurate — suggests that the Republicans need to set aside the self-proclaimed smarter-than-thou campaign consultants and assemble leadership teams more nimble and less prone to score-settling. The performance of folks like Rick Beeson and Zach Moffatt this cycle, and Rick Davis and John Weaver for McCain, is beyond shameful. We don’t need consultants, we need candidates who know what it takes to win.
  5. The GOP needs better data scientists.  I pity Neil Newhouse, the veteran GOP pollster; he seems like a sharp fellow but he hasn’t kept up with the times. Polling science isn’t what it used to be, and the GOP has clearly fallen far behind — they can’t even gauge the nature of the electorate, let alone its behavior. Mike Flynn argues that the institutional blindness of the Romney campaign came from its focus on metrics irrespective of the world behind those numbers. I find his point persuasive. Team Obama put its data scientists at the heart of the campaign and built everything else around them; Team Romney put the consultants at the heart and they cherry-picked the polls to meet their metrics and in so doing, lost sight of the real dynamic within the campaign.
  6. Conservatism needs to move beyond binary policy preferences. The very chaos of the Democratic coalition is, in a sense, also its biggest strength: You can deviate more from the party platform and still be a “good Democrat” to much greater degree than within the GOP. Nowhere is this trend more obvious than on gay marriage: The Dems favor it, by and large, but opposition isn’t a disqualifier (q.v., black preachers); on the GOP side, vocal opposition seems to be something of a litmus test, especially among the cultural conservatives. What galls about this is that “strengthening marriage” as a campaign slogan is exclusively about gay marriage — whereas in truth, the problems with marriage as a sociocultural institution run far deeper than that and are rooted in shifting norms among heterosexual youth such that gay marriage isn’t even a dot on the radar screen. Or take environmentalism: Many like to dismiss global warming as a “hoax” but why bother picking a fight about science when you could follow Roger Scruton’s brilliant advice about promoting conservation rooted in loving where you live? If the GOP adopted Scruton’s advice wholesale, we’d probably neutralize “environment” as a political issue within a fortnight. Policy positions should not be distilled into a false binary-choice slogan about about some isolated aspect of a larger and more complex issue.
  7. Think carefully about turnout in light of state and local ballot proposals.  People who are less inclined to vote for individual politicians may nevertheless be induced to vote because of specific ballot initiatives and referenda. In Michigan, for example, we had six significant proposals that drew voters, and Grand Rapids — the state’s second-largest city — included a controversial marijuana-decriminalization proposal that ended up passing. Gay marriage won at the ballot in four states. Guess who showed up to vote? Republicans really need to get ahead of ballot initiatives.
  8. Articulate a coherent, positive message. It feels like the GOP is the party of “no” — no new ideas, no bold policy innovations, no willingness to work for the best interest of the common treasury. Conservatism in the Goldwater-Reagan era, bolstered by National Review and Firing Line, rose to the defense of a conservative movement that articulated bold visions and the polices to execute them: Defeat the Soviet Union, lower taxes from 70-percent highs, deregulate massive investments like telecoms and the airlines. Yay for us, we did it: The Soviet Union has been consigned to the ash heap of history, many industries have deregulated and tax rates are relatively low. So what’s next? No one knows. A vision that’s “smaller and smarter” doesn’t actually mean anything in the real world. A vision to defeat America’s enemies abroad in 2012 doesn’t mean staring down Brezhnev, it means fighting dozens of terrorist movements across the globe, but no one wants to do the work that such an effort would entail. Lowering taxes incessantly does have a minimal ceiling given that we can’t effect a zero-percent rate. So, what’s the vision? What’s the reason to vote for Republican’s that isn’t, fundamentally, a reaction against a progressive initiative? When will Republicans define their own platform instead of defining it against the opposition? The GOP can’t win when it’s presenting to the electorate nothing more than a referendum on progressivism without any real, substantive, positive alternative.
  9. Evacuate the bubble. Having despaired of the left-leaning influence of major cultural institutions like the mainstream media and Hollywood and the Ivory Tower, conservatives opted to erect something of an opposite number. Instead of moderating the left-wing pull of these institutions, we built our own in opposition. Thus, instead of pulling the major news networks and newspapers more toward the center, we relied on Fox News and The Washington Times and the WSJ editorial board to serve as balance. Instead of fighting for conservatism within the classroom, we built Ave Maria University and Liberty University. Instead of mainstreaming Republican sensibilities within Hollywood, we get 2016: Obama’s America. The inevitable outcome is that too many conservatives don’t need to fight for their beliefs anymore — they can just sit in the echo chamber. Of course, the rest of the country still gets left-leaning content, so we really haven’t solved the problem. I’d rather see MSNBC and Fox News both go away if it meant that the mainstream press operated from a more fundamentally balanced perspective.
  10. Stop giving shade to irrational policy preferences under the Tree of Conservatism. I’m still at a loss to understand why some particular policy preferences are considered conservative. It seems like certain groups — like evangelicals — have had their beliefs canonized, despite the very legitimate problems that these beliefs incur vis-a-vis pure conservative principles. For example, it’s more conservative to reform the institution of marriage (possibly, to include same-sex marriage) than to hold to a sectarian vision from the Eisenhower years that clearly doesn’t hold any longer. It’s more conservative to focus on fair-use conservation than to reject all environmental policy. It’s more conservative to tax at the “right” rates than to play a screwy game of tax tiers and sundry credits and deductions. It’s more conservative to embrace the entrepreneurial spirit of immigration through smart regulation than to demonize “illegals” with a broad brush. It’s more conservative to bolster federalism and local control than to consent to the federalization of policies that some conservatives favor. The GOP, as the conservative party, must elevate conservative principles — but those principles shouldn’t be retrofitted to legitimize policy preferences that aren’t authentically conservative just because coalition members favor them for non-ideological reasons.

Ten theses. Ten ideas for course correction for the GOP and the conservative movement. I make no claim to being a Wise Guy who knows what’s best. I do pay attention to many different sources and see too much sophomoric reasoning substituting for informed policy-making and too much inside-the-bubble wishful thinking substitute for honest analysis.

I don’t think the GOP is in decline. I don’t think the Dems are on a long upswing. I think right now, the GOP has ample opportunity to fine-tune its operations and re-think some pernicious policy preferences that don’t really belong to conservatism.

More than anything, I think John Paul the Great was right: Be not afraid.

Personal, Politics & Culture, Writing, Editing & Journalism

Assorted Reflections and Updates

4 Comments

Today’s excursion into pithy commentary:

  1. National Novel Writing Month has commenced. I’m stretching my legs a bit to write a sci-fi story. My goal is to have the science be accurate but in the background; I’m really aiming for a commentary on human social evolution that just happens to bet set forward in a non-archetypal future. NaNo requires 50k words. I’m aiming for 90k, because I’d like to brush up the first draft and possibly shop for an agent or publisher. High goals, but hey. Defecate or get off the pot; I’ve been meaning to write a novel for years so why not now?
  2. To that end, I’m not only participating in local write-ins this November, but I’m also hosting one. On Saturdays at the food court at 35 Michigan. We had the first one yesterday and a baker’s dozen attended. It was great. The Starbucks baristas were friendly, too.
  3. So just about every female I’ve seen under the age of 30 seems to be wearing skin-tight clothes (including, most frequently, black leggings) paired with boots that frequently rise above mid-calf. Fashion is one thing; lemming-like wardrobes is another. At least the cellulite brigade hasn’t hopped on the bandwagon yet.
  4. Many of the regular patrons at my local cigar shop are Freemasons. They’re a cheerful, civil lot. Apparently they’re barred from asking people to join up, but they’ve hinted that perhaps I could ask questions about joining up. Alas, the Catholic Church still considers Freemasonry a grave sin. I chatted up another regular about it — a local priest, as it happens — who was quite happy to share his (utterly orthodox) knowledge of the Vatican’s perspective, with an added challenge to “return the favor” by encouraging the masons to consider membership instead in the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church. Hmm.
  5. I refreshed my HP TouchPad to the latest release of CM9. Much improved over the version I had installed earlier this year. I also downloaded a desktop-sharing app that works flawlessly with my Win8 PC at home. Meaning, I can keep working on my novel in Scrivener on my tablet without any loss of data or continuity.
  6. Halloween was somewhat underwhelming. My office door was decorated on my behalf. I ended up doing last-minute NaNo planning with Brittany, Steve and PJ at Wealthy Street Bakery. Very helpful.
  7. The election looms. I’m planning on watching the returns with Tony in (of all places!) Southfield. He needs to fly to California early the next morning from DTW, so we’re going to watch early returns at Churchills’ cigar shop there and enjoy a fine dram of Scotch or two.  I’m cautiously optimistic that Romney will eke out a win, and I may be working Tuesday morning as a poll challenger at one of the most heavily Democratic precincts in West Michigan. Hmm.
  8. Speaking of the election, there’s been a lot of background noise about Nate Silver, the NYT blogger/prognosticator who’s been consistently “predicting” an Obama win. The whole situation annoys me. Look, as a full-fledged member of the American Statistical Association, I can say for certainty I know what Silver’s doing — he’s assessing the probability of a binary outcome, based on various undisclosed polls as inputs into his model. That’s fine. As a full-fledged member of the Society of Professional Journalists, I can say for certainty that if journalists could do stats American reporting would be of uniformly higher quality. That said, the fundamental problem with Silver’s analysis is that he’s basically got a garbage-in/garbage-out thing going. I don’t question what I understand his methodology to be; I do question the radical differences in polling that feeds his model. Polling in this cycle is all over the map. Throw crap in, you’ll get crap out, no matter how carefully you run your probability estimates. So a pox on everyone’s houses.
  9. Oh, and on top of it, American politics isn’t accustomed to a binary probability estimate for presidential elections. So moving in that direction, given that the inputs are more volatile than people give them credit for, seems like a misapplication of models. But hey, if Silver wants his 15 minutes of fame, he’s certainly earned it.
  10. I swapped out the stereo on my Jimmy a few weeks ago. The operation took longer than it should have — I needed to buy a wire harness — but I managed to get the job done without damaging anything. Yay, me.
  11. Tony I went on a brief casino trip a few weeks ago to Harrah’s Joliet and met Mark and Keren of the 360 Vegas podcast. An uproariously good time was had by all.
  12. Life at the hospital continues to pay lip service to the Chinese maxim about interesting times. I’m now officially a business analytics analyst in the Information Services team. The transition continues to unfold, so stay tuned.

November, already. Ugh. But hey — the holiday season’s a-comin’. Be glad, and rejoice.

Politics & Culture

Roads are for Drivers @MDOT_West

No Comments

Today in sunny Grand Rapids our community enjoys an annual burst of athleticism known as the Grand Rapids Marathon. This event — snaking its way through the downtown area, along the river along Kent Trails — is good for Grand Rapids, good for public health and good for the local economy.

It’s not good, however, for drivers.

In recent years more and more events in the urban core require road closures. Sometimes these shutdowns are limited and reasonable; sometimes they’re not. The G.R. Marathon falls into the latter category.

I reside in the South Hill neighborhood, on the southern end of the near-downtown area. The city is divided by the Grand River and there are only a handful of bridges that connect downtown to the West Side. If you want to get to the upper West Side — Walker, for example — you can either take I-196 (good luck at the cloverleaf at US-131) or use the surface roads.

The major surface roads leading to the Upper west Side include Butterworth, Lake Michigan Drive, Fulton, Bridge and Leonard. That’s it; those are the feeder roads. Otherwise, you’d have to swing in from the southwest (via Wilson) or the north (the Ann/Alpine toward Three Mile area). So if you’re starting in the southeast part of downtown, or anywhere south of Fulton, you have several solid options of using the surface roads to get to the West Side.

Except, of course, when MOST OF THEM are closed because of a marathon.

You heard that right. Today, Butterworth, Lake Michigan Drive (via Pearl) and Fulton were closed to through traffic. The two northernmost surface roads, Bridge and Leonard, were clear; if you know the side streets of the lower West Side you could snake kitty-corner through the area after crossing the bridge on Pearl. I had to take Wealthy to Market, then Market to Bridge, to get to my destination that was near Butterworth.

So you might be thinking; Dude, why are you all crabby about a half-day road closure that happens once per year? Well, let me count the ways:

  1. There was no routing info available at the road-closed signs. You had to hop from road to road until you found one that was open. Note to the City and to MDOT: If you’re going to shut down major roads such that you’re effectively cleaving the city into two, at least provide alternative routing info. What if someone had an emergency?
  2. If it were just the marathon, that’s one thing. But it’s also parades, the Fifth Third Riverbank Run, Festival, blah, blah. Roads are for vehicular travel. We’ve seen too many closures, too often, in recent years.
  3. The City of Grand Rapids and Kent County seem hell-bent on shooting drivers in the foot with various left-wing harebrained schemes related to bike travel and public transportation. For example, Division Avenue — the one and only major north-south surface road cutting through the urban core — was put on a “road diet” last year; between Wealthy and Michigan, it’s been cut to one lane in each direction with a bike lane added. Guess what you don’t see? Cyclists on Division. But the Wealthy/Division intersection has led to me getting sideswiped more times than I can count because drivers aren’t expecting a major road with two lanes beginning around 84th Street to suddenly collapse to one lane right when you get downtown (where two lanes are the most needed). So they swerve to cut you off. Just like with the asinine two-lanes-feeding-one-lane-traffic-circle in place at Wealthy and Jefferson. Heaven help us if 131 ever shuts down and traffic has to reroute through side streets; Division is no longer equipped to handle the traffic, and there’s no obvious alternative route. (The special-interest boondoggle that is the Silver Line — with a dedicated bus lane — is a whole ‘nuther rant.)

Don’t misunderstand — I’m a fan of the Marathon. I’m a fan of major events, considered individually. But I’m not a fan of drivers more and more frequently taking it in the shorts because civic leaders transform our thoroughfares into parking lots at whim or treat our roads as the object of social engineering experiments.

Leave drivers alone.