House of Eratosthenes

…and ironically, the one part of it they are unable to handle, is the part after which they are supposed to have been named. That thing where we all get together and contribute our interests and our preferences, where we all take part in deciding, the “democracy.” Commentator Robert Mitchell opines over at the Hello Kitty of Blogging:

The Democrats are unable to handle Civilization. They are tribals, and as such, the answers must come from the Chief. You have come up with an answer, but are not the Chief, so you must be challenging him, and must be destroyed, for the safety of the tribe, or you must become the Chief…

Pack animals, in other words. Wild dogs. Rats, maybe.

Blogger friend Phil contributed the following excerpt from the current issue of Imprimus, commentary from William Voegeli, Sr. Editor of Claremont Review of Books:

All conservatives are painfully aware that liberal activists and publicists have successfully weaponized compassion. “I am a liberal,” public radio host Garrison Keillor wrote in 2004, “and liberalism is the politics of kindness.” Last year President Obama said, “Kindness covers all of my political beliefs. When I think about what I’m fighting for, what gets me up every single day, that captures it just about as much as anything. Kindness; empathy—that sense that I have a stake in your success; that I’m going to make sure, just because [my daughters] are doing well, that’s not enough — I want your kids to do well also.” Empathetic kindness is “what binds us together, and…how we’ve always moved forward, based on the idea that we have a stake in each other’s success.”

Well, if liberalism is the politics of kindness, it follows that its adversary, conservatism, is the politics of cruelty, greed, and callousness. Liberals have never been reluctant to connect those dots. In 1936 Franklin Roosevelt said, “Divine justice weighs the sins of the cold-blooded and the sins of the warm-hearted in different scales. Better the occasional faults of a government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.” In 1984 the Democratic Speaker of the House of Representatives, “Tip” O’Neill, called President Reagan an “evil” man “who has no care and no concern for the working class of America and the future generations…He’s cold. He’s mean. He’s got ice water for blood.” A 2013 Paul Krugman column accused conservatives of taking “positive glee in inflicting further suffering on the already miserable.” They were, he wrote, “infected by an almost pathological meanspiritedness…If you’re an American, and you’re down on your luck, these people don’t want to help; they want to give you an extra kick.”

Small-d democratic politics is Darwinian: Arguments and rhetoric that work — that impress voters and intimidate opponents—are used again and again. Those that prove ineffective are discarded. If conservatives had ever come up with a devastating, or even effective rebuttal to the accusation that they are heartless and mean-spirited: a) anyone could recite it by now; and, b) more importantly, liberals would have long ago stopped using rhetoric about liberal kindness versus conservative cruelty, for fear that the political risks of such language far outweighed any potential benefits. The fact that liberals are, if anything, increasingly disposed to frame the basic political choice before the nation in these terms suggests that conservatives have not presented an adequate response.

Can’t agree with that last part. I’ve seen too many liberals, as they watch their own arguments utterly and ultimately dismantled and ground into dust under the hard boot-heel of reality, double-down as opposed to retreating. Whether the refudiation fits on a bumper sticker or not, doesn’t seem to have anything to do with it at all. Anyone can recite, by now, “no global warming in eighteen years.”

The problem is, I think, discussing a group of people as if it’s an individual. The criticism of conservatives therefore becomes a tautology; it’s always true, no matter what, and so it proves nothing but it can’t be credibly opposed either. Somewhere there’s a conservative who’s cold-hearted and cruel, isn’t there? At least just one?

“A democrat is a fella who’s so nice he’ll give you the shirt off someone else’s back.” Anyone can recite that, too. People did, once. And, this realization did keep democrats out of the halls of power. At least the Senate and the White House, about half the time. The difference between then and now is not that people have forgotten this, but that for the last few years the feeling has set in that there’s something right about this, that if the other guy has a shirt in the first place, he must have swiped it from some fourth party.

So where do we go from here? Voegeli continues:

Given that liberals are people who: 1) have built a welfare state that is now the biggest thing government does in America; and 2) want to regard themselves and be regarded by others as compassionate empathizers determined to alleviate suffering, it should follow that nothing would preoccupy them more than making sure the welfare state machine is functioning at maximum efficiency. When it isn’t, after all, the sacred mission of alleviating preventable suffering is inevitably degraded.

In fact, however, liberals do not seem all that concerned about whether the machine they’ve built, and want to keep expanding, is running well. For inflation-adjusted, per capita federal welfare state spending to increase by 254 percent from 1977 to 2013, without a correspondingly dramatic reduction in poverty, and for liberals to react to this phenomenon by taking the position that our welfare state’s only real defect is that it is insufficiently generous, rather than insufficiently effective, suggests a basic problem.

The basic problem is that liberals, far from representing the feelings of human compassion when the basics of life become rare luxuries, actually represent the opposite: The Weltanschauung that enshrouds humanity as a natural consequence of abundance. The feeling that the cupboards are going to be full for awhile, there are no natural predators, and a functional tethering to reality has become optional.

The thing that therefore has to be done is for each individual to demonstrate to the collective, his worthiness for receiving his due allocation from the common store. Don’t ostracize me; ostracize that other guy instead.

In this way and so many others, whether they’re consciously aware of it or not, they are the opposite of what they claim to be. As Ludwig Von Mises put it,

The champions of socialism call themselves progressives, but they recommend a system which is characterized by rigid observance of routine and by a resistance to every kind of improvement. They call themselves liberals, but they are intent upon abolishing liberty. They call themselves democrats, but they yearn for dictatorship. They call themselves revolutionaries, but they want to make the government omnipotent. They promise the blessings of the Garden of Eden, but they plan to transform the world into a gigantic post office. Every man but one a subordinate clerk in a bureau.

“Pack animals, in other words. Wild dogs. Rats, maybe”
*ahem* Lemmings?
- CaptDMO | 11/02/2014 @ 10:31

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“The democrats Are Unable to Handle Civilization”Sunday, November 2nd, 2014

“The democrats Are Unable to Handle Civilization”
Sunday, November 2nd, 2014