House of Eratosthenes

I was over reading in “The House” and I ran across the line “Republicans don’t need to broaden their base…”

and I thought to myself….

No…. they need to deepen it.

— Blogger friend Phil.

I just heard Joe Scarborough on the radio, and I guess he has a book out about how Republicans can get back into the swing of things. To his credit, he does not belong to the Meghan McCain camp of “Keep The ‘R’ But Lose Everything Else”; but from his comments, I don’t think he is altogether correct either. I view him as a tent-embiggener, and I think the former Congressman Scarborough would agree with me on this.

This is not to say I think all his points lack merit. Quite to the contrary: Some of what he says really has to be taken seriously. His emphasis seems to be on localizing control as opposed to keeping the decision-making power at the higher levels and then pushing for “morality policing”; on this point, I agree. He pushes for a moderation in tone, a less cantankerous tone of discourse, which I also think is a good idea. On this point though, he’s drinking kool-aid. As I pointed out earlier, it has emerged as a favorite left-wing tactic, both in cloakrooms at capital buildings and in water-cooler chats among ordinary wage slaves, to declare the conversation has become uselessly heated and then falsely blame the conservative for starting it…either the discussion itself, or the inferno of unfriendly remarks that erupts within. (More often than not, the liberal has taken the initiative in both of these.)

So Scarborough’s advice is a mix of the healthy and the not-so-much. What I think he has done, is construct a house with some good architectural ideas and a sturdy foundation, on a site of shifting sand.

Scarborough argues that right-wingers seeking to recapture Ronald Reagan’s box office mojo need to embrace environmentalism (they should be “Going green for God”); acknowledge the permanence of troubled entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare (“Everyone is going to have to give until it hurts”); and pursue a humble foreign policy (except when they don’t: “Most Republicans, including myself, were steadfast in their support for the war” in Iraq).

On contentious social issues like abortion and gay marriage, the heirs to Edmund Burke and William F. Buckley Jr. should push for decisions to be made at the state level — not necessarily because localized decision-making provides better answers but because “that is the only way to protect the advances conservatives have made over the past generations.” Most of all, Scarborough counsels, conservatives need to channel their inner Gipper by “following the advice of Jesus and the example of Reagan, by trying more often to turn the other cheek” during fractious policy debates.

So he’s been duped into a lot of things here. That it has become antithetical to Republican-ness to “turn the other cheek” infers, or at least implies, that we have a lot of Republicans out there seeking revenge against perceived slights, and doing the party harm by being seen seeking this revenge. That may be happening here and there, but if one is embarking on a quest to find vengeful people who never heard of turning the other cheek, one can hardly do better than making a bee-line for the nearest gathering of hardcore left-wing liberals. On the radio, I hear him implore the conservative movement to show better support to the New England intellectual-snob set; we should be asking ourselves how welcome Buckley himself would feel in modern conservative ranks.

Again: He’s drinking kool-aid, without knowing that’s what he’s doing; and in so drinking, he takes the defensive prematurely. Conservatives need to make people feel welcome? Conservatives do? How ya figure? Take a look at what I need to do for liberals to show me contempt, and engage their blizzard of “You’re So Stupid” attacks. Some would say I have an unusually natural way of attracting such an onslaught; and in some ways they could be right. But from all I have managed to observe, it really doesn’t take much. I’m a six-foot-tall straight Protestant white guy who hasn’t served in the military and still possesses all his limbs.

From that starting point I don’t need to do an awful lot to bring on pit bulls. Failing to support fully-taxpayer-funded abortions on demand from sea to shining sea — that is plenty enough to throw the feeding frenzy into high gear. Or, I could fail to get behind an initiative to forever banish intelligent design from all schools public & private. Or…I could support these things, and just be a little bit pokey about it. It’s not that I’m placed under a magnifying glass for being a white male; I can see from the experiences of Clarence Thomas, Alan Keyes, Condoleeza Rice and Sarah Palin that my white-male-ness in fact spares me from some of the worst of the viciousness. But my point isn’t the intensity of viciousness, it’s the ease with which one becomes a target of it.

America has a party that is obsessed with properly qualified membership, and once that party’s decided you’re on the outs, you’re on the outs for good. That party is not the Republican party.

Republicans need to confront some phony “truths” that Scarborough, judging from what the former Congressman has seen fit to bring to my attention, is failing to confront.

There is no need to prove that conservatism has something to do with a “big tent.” Conservatism is a big tent by its very nature. The notion that some among us possess a group membership that makes them better than anyone else, is a hallmark among those other guys who want to sieze control of the tax code so they can loot from the undesirables and ply a bunch of phony “government program” benefits onto the desirables. True, conservatives would like to do something similar with businesses — to the extent you think it’s a phony-government-program-benefit to lower taxes, that is true. But what color is a business? Anyone of any color, gender or sexual preference can start a business.

Conservatives need to confront some mistakes in the national thinking that even the Great Ronaldus failed to confront. That the guy who wins, is the guy who can show off a veneer of patience, cheerfulness, good humor and cheer, for example. Reagan won that one by being that guy.

You want some “rising star” to emerge in 2012 and pull that one off against Obama?

Best wishes to ya. You won’t see my weekend-beer-money in the kitty. I’ll be sitting that one out.

No…the thing that has to be challenged, is this notion that a position on the ideological spectrum makes you cheerful and patient. This profound absurdity has been allowed to endure plenty long enough, I’d say. We’ve got to get rid of it. NOW. If we don’t, someone is going to come up with the bright idea that we have to stop the women from voting in elections — they are, without a doubt, the demographic that predominantly finds this appealing — and I don’t want to see things diminish to this point. Women should be allowed to keep voting. And to make sure they don’t lose this right, it has to be shown that they can be allowed to vote, without the country being condemned to repeating some terrible, awful mistakes. And let’s be honest, that has yet to be demonstrated.

Not that a whole lot of men aren’t also falling for it. But it doesn’t matter. It’s just a fact: Your decision to support Cap-n-Trade, or Universal Healthcare, or a Second Stimulus — or to oppose those things — none of this makes you a Good Person^TM. Nor do such declarations of ideological positioning make you a rotten nasty person. These are debates about policy, and they should be treated as such.

The identity politics is also something Scarborough seems to support, or at least, fails to oppose with the level of vigor I’d find encouraging. If you’re from Delaware, a conservative spokesman from Missouri can support your interests just fine and dandy, better than our Vice President Mouthy Joe. If the Delaware guy somehow can’t see that, the problem belongs to the Delaware guy. Any conservative kingmaker who’s got some say in making-or-breaking the spokesman from Missouri, needs to stand up for that principle rather than trying to soothe the agitated feelings by embarking on some journey to find a New Englander saying the same stuff.

Why? Because that’s called prejudice. And conservatives are supposed to be united in opposing it, in all its forms. That means opposing identity politics in all its forms.

Scarborough’s examples do little to highlight this critical distinction. So here’s another one: Voter ballots printed up in Spanish.

That is a pickle. The easiest way to embrace the Scarborough-big-tent-ism is to select a path identical to Meghan-McCain-big-tent-ism: Crank up the presses por favor! Because pushing for a truly conservative point of view would be excluding people. Conservatism has to waver. Perhaps this is why I’m not hearing of Scarborough highlighting this particular issue. There’s a lot of heat there, so who could blame him?

But the kind of conservatism that is really on the line here, has nothing to do with excluding people. It has more to do with an intellectually honest argument about what equality really is. What’s being discussed is a country’s right to have the one thing that has been best proven to make all countries strong, and to weaken them when it is taken away: A culture. France has a culture. Spain has a culture. Lots of countries in Africa have a culture. Great Britain and Canada could have a culture…if they wanted it…

Why can’t the United States have one? That’s the question that should be asked. And even in these racially-sensitive times, it shouldn’t be that tough of a point to argue. I asked, a few paragraphs ago, what color is owning-a-business? Well, what color is English? Other countries get to define, and defend, their culture; the United States should be able to do this too.

Gay marriage, that’s another one. The lazy, predominant, wafting, prevailing theme is that it’s some kind of a civil rights issue. We all have to bless same-sex marriage or else people are being denied their constitutional rights to love each other. Just a little bit of honest, responsible thinking will reveal this is wombat-rabies bollywonkers crazy. The issue is the civil rights of the churches, who would surely be litigated into non-existence in an all-gay-marriage nation for refusing to conduct same-sex wedding ceremonies. What if we take the “don’t do it, and say we did” route in legalizing same-sex marriage? Those who want to get married are denied nothing. Marriage is all about elimination of options for the individuals who enter into it; it doesn’t grant anybody any “rights.” What it does is eliminate the rights. Like any other declaration of something in front of a community of witnesses, just like any other signature, it exists for that very thing — to eliminate options that would otherwise be open to one party, for the benefit of other parties. In the case of marriage it is a mutual exchange, but that doesn’t mean someone’s been deprived of civil rights just because the state hasn’t been muscled into re-defining something.

With regard to Phil, I don’t know if he agrees with all my points here — they aren’t my most politically-correct ones, some of them could be quite controversial. But I’ll definitely place my stamp of approval on what he said. In fact, broadening the tent is not only different from what Republicans need to do, it does great harm. These ideas about embiggening, far too often, result in a subtle collapse of some of the principles conservatives are supposed to be defending.

Clearly, from the lesson that was taught last November, the goal should be how to define that line that separates conservatives from liberals. Perhaps that’s why it rankles me so much to hear people talk about letting more people in. If you do that just to make the tent bigger, without safeguarding the principles, that’s when the tent pole snaps. I think the message needs to be “no, conservatives aren’t eager to include more people, but we aren’t eager to exclude people either; it’s those other guys who are passionately engaged in doing both of those.” That really is the point that has to be made. Anyone, regardless of place of birth, color of skin, sex or creed can adopt the right principles and be a conservative. But you must adopt them.

You have to adopt the right principles to be a liberal too. But nobody notices that, even though the challenge is stiffer on the liberal side because it’s enduring. Be a liberal, so that liberals will let you in their “big tent,” say all the right things so that they let you in…and you’ll get in. But thirty seconds later you have to prove your devotion all over again. It’s never enough. Deep down, they know it to be true. Listen to them argue sometime. Even the ones that run things, even Barack Obama Himself, they never have any confidence that their Good-person-ness has been validated with any permanence and the whole thing’s a done deal. The sloppy, obsequious arrangement has always looked to me rather like eating egg drop soup with chopsticks, with your pants on fire. The desperation to keep on proving inner personal decency over and over again, persists, becomes cyclical, then dizzying. It’s beyond distracting. It’s how they manage to stumble upon their very worst ideas.

Do we need an example of that? Look no further than the idea of supporting Sotomayor. There’s nothing to recommend her to the Supreme Court, and contrary to popular belief, she has speechified about the “Wise Latina” not just once, but repeatedly.

It’s not a silly idea to argue that this is racism. It is the very definition of it. What’s a silly idea is to seat her on the Supreme Court. There’s no reason to do it, none whatsoever, except to “prove” that whoever’s making the decision possesses some streak of innate personal goodness, that that person himself doesn’t really believe is there.

Prove it. For thirty seconds.

FWIW… C-SPAN has a great “In Depth” interview up with Scarborough on his book. I’ve watched it; it’s excellent. As you indicated, I think Scarborough gets a lot of things right and a few things wrong. But he gets more stuff right than wrong.

But you probably shouldn’t watch the C-SPAN piece, Morgan, as That Woman You Love To Hate… Ms. Peggy Noonan… does the interviewing. Your head might explode and we don’t want THAT now, do we? 😉
- bpenni | 07/18/2009 @ 13:05
People…people who love to hate people…are the loneliest people…in the world…

And to find some examples, m’friend, you don’t need to be looking at me. You’ve got a couple of pals, Ms. Noonan and Mr. Frum come to mind, who are far better specimens of the love-to-hate-people phenomenon. Poor Peggy barely has time to pick up the pieces of her head from the last time it went kablooey, before it’s time to erupt all over again.
- mkfreeberg | 07/18/2009 @ 14:39

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