An Awkward Fact About Life

There is this internet poster floating around on facebook right now, quoting Sandra Fluke as saying, "Nobody - politicians, bosses, or anybody else - should be able to block your access to essential care."

This sounds lovely, and as far as it goes I don't think anybody would disagree with it - except perhaps Obamacare's sponsors, what with its boards to determine "appropriate levels" of whatever - but if I learned nothing else in school I learned that you need to define terms, and one term in particular is left awfully vague here: "access".

So how does one get "access" to "essential care"?  As it turns out, "essential care" is a thing provided by other people, who have spent large sums of money and long hours of work in training to acquire knowledge that will allow them to take care of you.  Like most other people with jobs, they in return expect to be paid for their services.  What is "access" to healthcare, then?

Money.  Someone has got to pay for these things.

Now, it may be that we as a country or a society have the resources to provide "your access" if you cannot do it yourself.  This is a point worth debating.  But if it is decided that we do not have this, or should not do this, nothing is being "blocked".  Nothing is being "denied".  You did not have it to begin with.

So, let us please conduct this debate on the terms of reality.  You do not have any "right" to the services of someone else whom you cannot recompense.  (It is a more interesting question whether the ability to help another in need brings a duty to do so with it: I would argue it does, but only clearly on a personal level.  Social answers to the question are murkier.)  You cannot proclaim that I, as a teacher, am obligated to help you, who cannot afford a school, simply because of your need.  (You may by all means ask for help, and if possible I should do what I can: but this is charity, not a right of yours.)

(If we are going to provide "essential care" publicly, we should, by the way, do just that.  Public schools may be rather a mess in this country, but their purpose is at least clear.  A public hospital system, I am inclined to think, would also be rather a mess, but at least we would know what to expect.  The current mess of trying to play silly games by over-regulating and (necessarily) increasing the cost of insurance is the most absurd way possible to go about fixing whatever problem exists.)

What Price Freedom?

Yes, this post is going to be about guns.

Let me start by stating three obvious things:

First, if the gun had never been invented there would be no mass shootings using guns.  Similarly, if guns were effectively removed from a society completely, the same would result.

Second, guns are not the only weapon which have been used in mass attacks - other weapons have ranged from fertilizer-based "IED"s to planes.

Third, if a civilian - say, one of the teachers who died in this most recent shooting - had been armed, trained, and firing back, the casualties would have been far lower: resistance would at least have slowed to gunman.


The Facts (As Best as I Can Tell)

It is sometimes supposed that, since modern weapons are so much more effective than 18th century weapons, different principles must apply.  Here is an example of the question, posed in large friendly letters (but unfortunately without saying, "Don't Panic").  In fact that comparison gives about the highest possible potential for a musket, which - due to size and muzzle reload - would not actually have been at all a practical short-range weapon.  It would be more accurate to compare the potential of a semi- or full-automatic weapon with the damage of a saber or bayonet, which would make the contrast even more stark.

In countries which have followed this logic, it is certainly the case that mass attacks with firearms are much rarer.  Not unknown, as events in Norway last year showed, but relatively rare.  And attacks made with other weapons do less damage - as argued by a CNN piece here.

On the other hand, the numbers of guns in a country does not demonstrate any particularly strong correlation to overall murder rates.  If we can trust wikipedia more or less here, we find that the highest homicide rates belong to countries with underdeveloped economies and infrastructure.  Although the page on number of guns is probably less accurate, these countries with high murder rates are fairly low on the list of gun possession - which seems to be more strictly a count of all guns, but this does not really affect the point.  This lack of correlation is summarized by the Guardian here.

That point is this: while modern weapons make the potential for catastrophic crime much higher, they have little effect on people's willingness or ability to kill each other.

The Alternatives

There are two reasonable solutions proposed.  The first is that more people should probably go armed; the second is that as much as possible no one should be armed.  Either one, if carried out extensively, would probably have some good effects.  The first principle, deterrence, seems intellectually unpopular today, but its common sense is, I think, obvious: the armed woman is in less danger - being herself more dangerous - than the unarmed man.  The second, although it has seen success in countries with strong centralized governments and populations willing to accept regulations, is not really in line with traditional American thinking on weapons.  Further, gun control may not be the only issue in play: various outlets have recently highlighted problems with American attitudes and methods for dealing with mental issues present in many shooters.  All of this is seen argued, for example, here.

The American Legal Situation

The American nation, founded as it was as a direct result of revolt against previous government, was naturally more concerned with maintaining independence and its citizens' rights than with potential problems that might arise with higher technology - and also belonged thoroughly to the school of deterrence.  It is worth noting two things about the American Revolution's armies.  First, the revolutionists immediately went and found all the cannon they could, in order to face the British troops on equal footing.  Second, the guerrilla tactics used in the southern and western arenas were possible due to better marksmanship - and sometimes, with early rifles, better weapons - than the official army.

This experience and concern naturally led to the inclusion, very quickly, of the Second Amendment to the Constitution.  True, its reasoning is somewhat oddly phrased, not to say ambiguous (does the "Security of a free State" refer to foreign aggression, tyrannical government, or both?); the early modern reliance on militia seems strange to most of us in Western culture - but it should be noted that this is after 150 years of one war or another has made the part-time soldier seem obsolete.  Not exactly a ringing commendation of our cultures.  But its requirement that, "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed," is clear.  Together with the Fourteenth Amendment, which places similar restrictions on individual state governments as the Constitution and its first amendments placed on the Federal government, there is virtually no way an American governmental body above the county level can legally restrict any weapons.

This is to say, unless the law is changed - in this case, an amendment would be legally required, though I belong to that class of people who suspect this requirement will be ignored - the recourse in the United States has to be to deterrence; disarmament is not a feasible option when others can freely find weapons.

Future Possibilities

The question remains whether gun control is in fact an effective solution.  I find myself sympathetic to the argument; and in fact I have never felt any need to carry weapons myself.  On the other hand, it has the difficulty of the universal negative - it is hard to "prove", that is, enforce - and it still leaves the question of the citizens' relationship to government.  I will honestly admit that I see governments, in the US and across the world, growing and regulating and intruding, and I believe eventually this will provoke revolt.  In that case, I would like to have the recourse to defend myself - from one side or the other or both.  And in the meantime -

Well, Japan and Switzerland have comparably low rates of violent crimes.  What I believe this really points at is the necessity of a cohesive society; the US is currently looking at unintegrated "multiculturalism".  (Yes, I am suggesting that the crime rate would probably fall if English was the official language of schools and the Constitution was taught as the next best thing to a secular gospel.)  I also suspect the necessity of strong local - that is, available - government.  The modern trend is towards top-heavy micromanagement, when what I would really like is for city hall to be on top of things.

And Picking Up Speed

My favorite piece of political writing is a poem by Kipling, "The Gods of the Copybook Headings".  I do not know his motivation for writing it, but I can hardly imagine it was not intended as political, or at least societal, commentary.  I normally post the entire thing before elections, though I did not this year.  You can go read the whole thing, but I will excerpt the ending stanzas:

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

 As President Obama has won re-election - I do not know if votes have been fully counted, but Governor Romney has conceded the election, and I assume he knows the writing on the wall better than I do - the immediate question is, "So what now?"

I had thought Romney would likely win the presidential race; I under-estimated - this is based on exit polling - how determinedly liberal the majority of young voters appear to be.  Some of this is probably the climate I mostly live in: the majority of my friends are conservative; the majority of my co-workers are not, but that is a much smaller group; DC is of course staunchly political and, believing in government, tends very liberal, but that makes predicting overall trends difficult.  All of this is without taking into account the habits of those who vote by party, with no regard to issues - a trend which historically seems to have favored the Democrats, for reasons beyond my knowledge.

Still, there were some indications that this would happen, even in my experience.  A sampling: several liberal friends thought - or just assumed - that the Democratic candidates won all the debates, even while most news sources thought they favored Republicans.  Political bases like to have their ears tickled, and the President's party apparently succeeded.  A casual acquaintance argued, with a straight face, that because a "great president" like FDR could not resolve a depression quickly, we should not expect President Obama to have done much either.  This is what bad history gets you.  (Is there a good biography of Calvin Coolidge?  It should be required reading for all high school students.)  And finally, the most emotional issue - that of sex and avoiding its real results - obviously was much more motivating to the liberal side.

It is this last that concerns me most.  By any reasonable standard, we are a libertine society and becoming more so; and the President's policies encourage this beyond reason.  Not only do the shapers of thought think we are supposed to accept abortion, and embrace the "diversity" of immoral lifestyles - notably homosexual and so-called "transgender", but the people in those categories are a tiny minority compared to those doing what used to be called "living in sin" - but now we are supposed to pay for the contraception and abortion which these people use to avoid the responsibilities their lifestyle ought to bring them.  And religious groups which object - remembering that this country was founded in a series of attempts to preserve religious liberty makes this more of a travesty - get the tiniest of protections from such governmentally-imposed thuggery, and private believers get none at all.  This has been said repeatedly and loudly, and the majority of the media - who ought to be hounding such abuse - have ignored it.

That is the most disturbing long-term trend.  But as a moral issue, some will argue it should be kept out of politics.  I defy anyone to manage to run a government with no moral ramifications, but for the sake of argument I will move on to the next biggest problem, the one that originally motivated my interest in politics: our national finances.  They are a mess.  We spend more than we have, borrow more than we can afford, and when it is suggested that we maybe stop with the money-wasting, we just re-elected a president whose party thinks the bright idea is to "tax the rich" more.  Never mind that "the rich" already pay most of the taxes, and by percentages more than their share; never mind that taking the money from the haves will only result in a society where - as the USSR found - there "are no rich no more" (except the political elite managing the extortions).  We like austerity and responsibility no more than the European states that are already foundering having followed the same path we pursue.  And for the future?  The government's bailout/buyout of GM has produced a stagnant (at best) company.  The investment in "clean energy" that the President's party pursued has resulted in a series of failed companies, while proved methods of energy production - and the prosperity they might bring - are rejected: and all this in a recession, where the short-term problems are the most pressing.

All this demonstrates is that we have rejected responsibility and freedom.  The trade-off, apparently, is supposed to be security.  A "security blanket" for the less fortunate.  The powers that be sell us on domestic libertinism by assuring us that at least our defense spending will be fine.  We have mostly forgotten what the wise men of old said - which one exactly said it first is not clear - that the nation which trades liberty for security will have neither.  What the conservatives have been shouting - not nearly loudly enough, apparently, nor from high enough rooftops - is that the whimsically-justified government may start by "helping" the unfortunate and sponsoring "noble" causes, but it depends on the views of the elite - and if those change, well, all the infrastructure is in place to produce fascism and tyranny.  A government equipped to play bodyguard is equally well equipped to play prison guard - let's call it house arrest

This is why, among other things, I - despite being conservative - was not particularly bothered by that stupid HHS pamphlet advertising right-wing groups as security threats.  They are "security threats" to a modern nanny-state.  They are armed - as allowed for in our very Constitution, among other reasons, to be a threat to would-be tin gods - and it is anybody's guess how long it will be until continued usurpations by the Federal government drive them to action.  I put it at 30 years, give or take.  The question is, though, are they truly threats, or patriots?  It will be impossible to tell until it happens, and maybe after.  Our Civil War, the one we already had, was a mess of arguments; I tend to think the Union was less wrong, but I am not comfortable in passing judgment categorically.  King George's government no doubt warned him - or the relevant ministers - that the hotheads in Massachusetts and Virginia were a threat to the peace of his dominion.  History by now has largely agreed that it is those hotheads who were - with qualifications - in the right.  But of course, it is easier to accept that a successful rebellion long since over was justified than it is to look forward to a (probably badly provoked) revolt and find the situation appealing.

That is a long-term prediction: that we are bound for another civil war, this one provoked by the impossibility of surviving in the real world as a "liberated" society, and the resentment that that will generate.  (And to be honest, my evaluation would be the same - though this piece might not have been provoked exactly - should Romney have won: he seems to me a manager, not a reformer.  I might up my projection to 40 years - or he might have been better than I imagine.)  In the short-term, the question is what to do about the next election.  After 2008, I was of the opinion that the Republican party is doomed.  They had reduced themselves to a series of candidates parroting Democratic and liberal lines, with just enough defense, America, and God panacea thrown in to placate the base.  After the last two elections, I am not so sure.  The Republican's energized base has become (or returned to) those holding right-wing, small-government, social conservative views - the (oddly villified) Tea Party.  On the other hand, the political future may well belong to the libertarian conservatives; in which case, the Republican party will continue to lose votes in upcoming years, until a shift takes place - suddenly.

I do not know if the two-party system can be truly broken.  It has been a feature of American politics since the beginning of the country.  I am not even sure it is a bad thing - like democracy, it might be one of those things that is worse than any system except all the others.  What I would like to see, though - two parties or twenty - would be a de-emphasis on party.  The most likely way to break the two-party stranglehold?  Take party names off ballots.  Get the state governments out of party politics.  If you want primary electiona, take all the candidates, put them on a ballot, and take the top five as the candidates for the general election.  (This is an off-the-cuff suggestion.)  As it is, the two major parties are invested and intertwined in the system in a way that prevents significant change, or at least makes it more difficult.

Regardless of the system, important things can be done, whether you agree with my evaluation or dislike it.  Pay attention to local politics.  Go to school board and city hall meetings.  I admit, to my embarrassment, that I did not do significant research on the city elections for Alexandria - something I can change and improve next time.  Run for office.  Ask candidates questions.  And, yes, pray.  Truth be told, the re-election of President Obama does not really worry me - I worry not that much anyway, but by faith I know God reigns, and if the Apostle Paul could tell his congregations to pray for the Emperor Nero, and Christ could tell his disciples to pay their Roman occupiers' taxes, I can survive and even rejoice under a less-than-ideal government.

Bankers are All the Same

No one, to my knowledge, has remarked that the modern rhetoric about "capitalists" and "one-percenters" and "monopolists" and "big money" is remarkably similar to Medieval denunciations of the Jews - and for the same reason: people with the money inspire resentment, justified or unjustified.

Of course, I will not just leave that statement hanging there.  There are qualifications that must be made.  "Capitalists" are not widely regarded as guilty by association in the death of Christ.  (The death of Iraqi civilians, on the other hand...)  "Big money" is not disliked on racial grounds, mainly (though there are the wild ranters out there).

I suppose it is an improvement that we are lining up targets by class rather that race.  No one can change their genes, but class distinctions admit change and improvement with hard work.  On the other hand, many of the tomato-throwers would hastily mutter about "not fair" and "born to wealth", and propound theories about how the wealthy are lucky - so if they are right, there has actual not been any moral improvement in whom we choose to abuse.

It is certainly good that Wall Street bankers are not subject to exile by whim or having their gold teeth pulled, but the tax rates levied for daring to be wealthy are just as high now as then.  (Okay - probably not actually as high (though I do not have the knowledge to confirm this), but proportionally to the rest of the population, I'm sure they are comparable.)

You can draw from this comparison two possible morals.  On the first hand, you can say, "Huh", and possibly feel at least a little sympathy for the Medieval town's crowd of Jew-abusers.  Or if not sympathy, at least understand them better.  On the other hand, you can do your best to make sure the modern debate - and this is the far more important part - stays civil and lawful.  "Occupy Wall Street", however unsuccessful, made about as much sense as "Burn out the infidel bankers!" even if it was after all a bit less destructive (except, you know, in Oakland, where they managed to shut down the port briefly).

Identity and the State

President Obama made headlines recently for a speech in which he emphasized the societal foundation of any person's success.  Unfortunately for him, though I believe revealingly, he fell victim to the soundbite era: "If you’ve got a business - you didn’t build that.  Somebody else made that happen."

"And Mr. President, if you become the president, who made that happen?"  This would be a weak question: I believe that Mr. Obama's strongly stated beliefs originate in his own experience, that of accepting and working in the machine.  I suspect his irritation - at "guns and religion", at those challenging ACORN and other interest groups, at the steadfast unwillingness of the American people to give in to his vision - is honest, that it is the bafflement of one who has accepted a view of the world and found it not held as widely as he expected.

On a superficial level, the President's viewpoint is attractive and reasonable.  It contains some idea of a community, working together, holding to a common good; it presents some echo of the polis which, idealized by Plato and Aristotle and Cicero (if in different ways), resounds through the centuries of Western history and still informs the world today.

But Mr. Obama's view has a weak point: a crisis of mis-identification, or at the very least a crucial identification which he has failed to convince the United States' people is either crucial or a true identity - and perhaps more damningly, he has failed to understand that the point is still under debate.

For Mr. Obama, as for much of the academic, legal, and political elite he has grown to belong to,  the people, and specifically the will of the people, is identified with the government instituted by the people.  He does not follow the earlier understanding, where the government was the representative of the people; or even the older idea that the government stands above the people (by breeding or divine will - or both) and is therefore responsible for them.  A representative who represents poorly can be changed.  A father, judge, or a commander, held up as such by the thinnest string of theory or tradition, can be called to account and shamed - or deposed.

Instead in this modern conception, the government cannot be held in check by theories.  A government defined as "the people's will" simply by the fact of its existing as the government has nothing that can be called up against it except natural or divine law, and those having been busily undermined in the name of "reason" and "tolerance" and "relative morality" because everything originates with the people's will - which is, as we already found, simply the government.

I believe President Obama is confused by backlash against his policies.  As the chief executive, he appears is the supreme embodiment of the popular will which is to be enshrined, and he has been busily enacting all the policies he knows are best.  The fact that law and tradition stand in his way is not to be considered an obstacle, in his view: laws change.  In the President's view, I suspect reality changes.  He does not understand, does not know what to do with, a people who believe in lasting truths, in an actual rule of law because it is the law, in not a good or good policy or today's best option but in the Good.

Yet this philosophical confusion is not really the most damning indictment of his speech and his policies.  After all, if he is right - that is to say, if my speculations about Mr. Obama's worldview are correct, and that worldview is itself factual - then he is doing the right thing, and is merely a poor politician, or at least a tactless one.

The worst problem with his attempted solutions is that even on his own terms, it ends up either backwards or tyrannical.  If we take the more positive view, we stop to ask him who these people were that helped.  Certainly, a state of peace is maintained by the government, the servants of the people: the soldiers, police, road crews, and so forth.  But these are for maintenance only.  The next question leads us to the practical problem faced by these bureaucratic-faced dreamers: who takes us beyond subsistence, and who pays the ones who help us to subsist.  The awkward fact that President Obama has yet to acknowledge is that it is the successful men - the Mr. Romneys and Mr. Gateses and, yes, Mr. Obamas of the world - who help the rest of us: by paying outsize shares of taxes, by hiring and training workers, by providing necessities and comforts and then even luxuries.

This puts us in their debt: it is not right to go demanding that "the rich" pay "their fair share" when they already pay, relatively speaking, that and more; when they not only provide those moneys to the government but in the private sectors hire and pay us who are not so wealthy - and to return to the public arena they largely, for good or ill, provide our government from their number.  It may happen, in this day or in a time of war or or stress, that we need not only a normal contribution from these men but an unusual one: but justice demands that, even if we ask it, we ask it - however formally and with whatever force of law behind it - recognizing that we take from them for a common good or need, and not as if demanding a debt owed to us personally.

This is the charitable view: that President Obama, used to seeing so much given out regularly, has forgotten it is given, and sees it only as taken and that by right.

The uncharitable view - which I hesitate to ascribe to him, but you will see argued by others, I have no doubt - is one that reduces to serfdom any private person who is not himself an agent of the government.  More than mere forgetfulness, or blowing on some wind of the age, this would assert that the government has the right and duty to demand whatever is "necessary" - and has forgotten the older theories of reciprocal duties, so that now all is owed to the government, and the government's dole is charity.  And here we find the sinister descendant of what I mentioned above as Mr. Obama's probable political philosophy: we observe that the government has become the State, and the Will of the People, and the actual people reduced to so many resources to be commanded to produce.  No doubt Mr. Obama considers his a benevolent guidance, but he gives no indication that he sees any right of anyone to disagree with that guidance.

Words With the Meaning Removed

"[FDR] knew that fascism is capitalism without boundaries, that both fascism and communism (with a small "c") are apolitical, and that economics trumps politics every time."
- Bonnie Blodgett for the Twin Cities Star-Tribune

First, let me admit that Blodget does have the right of the case, in material terms, in one particular.  She has figured out that "reckless spending at all levels of society" is largely to blame for the current fiscal problems and credit crunch.  The bubble always bursts.

You would think this would probably make her a Tea Partier - but you would apparently be very, very, wrong.  Actually cut spending?  Maybe reduce taxes to encourage the economy when the spending cuts start making us able to afford it?

Nope: Blodgett just wants to hammer "the [Republican] elite" some more.  After all, if it was not for their "spin", everyone would know overspending is bad.  (Again, I do not want to be too hard on her, because it sounds like she really would make a good Tea Partier if she had any idea what the current argument was actually about.  Her factual deductions are reasonable, but her causes are wildly misunderstood.  The temptation is to blame "the mainstream media", but since my acquaintance with CNN is maybe monthly 10-minute segments at McDonald's, and any other television even less, I would be talking about I-know-not-what.)

But the real problem here, as cited at the top of this piece, is that Blodgett has no idea what her vocabulary means.  Facism as apolitical?  Name the world's three most (in)famous facists: that would be, yes, Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco.  Facism is not just political but overwhelmingly political.  It is totalitarian; it is total control.

Communism can claim to be apolitical in final goals; but it would be more accurate to call even that goal anti-political.  And in the reality, outside of small communes (largely protected by the rule of law imposed by traditional societies) or the interactions of families and friends, communism has never attained to any "height" beyond socialism - to the point where the two in practical terms are synonymous, though conceptually different.  Socialism, as I used to assume everyone knew, means the state has control of the means of production (either by ownership or heavy regulation).  Anything that involves the state is political by necessity and definition.

Capitalism, on the other hand is only incidentally political.  Of course it is more comfortable and possible in some political climates than others, but a capitalist, considered only as a "capitalist" and thus speaking only with regard to the economy, is unconcerned by anything about government that does not affect his market; I suppose this does make him a bit heartless but it does not make him particularly political.  But in conversation, on the one hand, "capitalism" is (mostly Leftist) short-hand for "people who are more successful than I think they ought to be", or sometimes, "not paying me what I think you should".  (Okay, I guess maybe it is more commonly, "You don't pay that guy what I think you should.")  On the other hand, we use the word capitalism more technically to refer to the system of a free market which is essentially unregulated.  Of course, this means a capitalist economist will stand against, politically, socialism, fascism, mercantilism, etc. - any system designed as or with elements of a "command economy".  A capitalist is therefore likely to support some political views and reject others.

What one real problem is, of course, is so-called "crony capitalism", where the businessman goes to Washington to get regulations passed that favor him, or to pull down contracts by quietly greasing palms.  This practice is apparently as old as civilization itself - but it is worth pointing out that in a deregulated market it would be nearly entirely pointless.  "This legislation would really help my business, and I'm carefully not mentioning that it would hurt my competitor."  "And you want us to regulate the market why?"

Blodgett ends up blaming risky finance not on, for example, government regulations enforcing and subsidizing cheap loans, but on "deregulation".  She talks about rises in campaign spending, but does not ask who is spending, or on whom.  "Economics trumps politics", she says, while protesting that the economics winning the political argument are bad economics, "reckless spending".  She clearly is looking to beat up on the crony capitalists, but does not realize how the environment of regulation enables interference with governance (after all, the government started the interference first).

Off the soapbox.  What I am trying to point out here is that even trying to analyze this piece is almost pointless.  The words are misdefined and then misused even in their redefinitions; isolated examples and broad generalizations are used to evoke a worldview, rather than an argument; logic is attempted but muddled beyond recognition.  I am sure there are better examples, maybe even good examples, of writing making a similar point, if I only knew for sure what the point was.  There are probably equally horrible examples of work attempting to make an opposite case.  But my point is that this column of gibberish got published, and that fact means that American journalism, particularly the Star-Tribune, ought to be ashamed of itself.

Pragmatic Politics?

Rev. Doug Wilson, whose blog I read regularly, has recently been writing a bunch of posts arguing that a vote for Mitt Romney, presumptive Republican presidential candidate, would be immoral.  Meanwhile, my roommate Trent, who recently moved his blog, has been proclaiming up and down for I believe the entire last year or more that Romney will win the nomination (check) despite being a poor-to-middling candidate (I agree with reservations, having been myself most taken with Santorum) who will lose in November (the jury is quite obviously out) - and that he, Trent, would vote for him, Romney, anyway on the basis of pragmatism.

Rev. Wilson's position is basically that Romney has no principles whatsoever and that moderation is not the way to go.  Despite his dismissal of the point, I cannot help but think that he would consider things a little more seriously if he did not live in Idaho.  Meanwhile my roommate, like many people voting for Romney, will be (presumably) voting for him as the not-Obama - strangely like many people voted for Obama as the not-Bush, except that Obama's economy is at least as bad and no one with a major media voice - except, sometimes, FOX - is blaming him.

I tend to side with my roommate on this one.  Not for lack of principles, as Rev. Wilson suggests must be the case, but perhaps for a different set of priorities.  Let me review the bidding.

The incumbent President has the solid backing of his party and all the votes that entails.

The Republican candidate - we can assume it is Romney - has the only natural voter base to challenge Obama.  Two notes here: First, this is the reason I am still convinced that, had he won the primary, Santorum (or, to take even more of an outlier, Ron Paul) would have been a creditable challenger.  He would have the party machine behind him - and either of those two men would have the further advantage of being more clearly men of some principles (whatever their failings).  Romney is for all practical purposes, by damning reputation if not actual fact, nothing more than a good politician.  Granted this is better than being a proven outright liar - or at least overseer of liars - like the current President.  There is, I believe, a moral difference between Playing The Game and The Big Lie.  Second, either way, the way forward will lie in Congress.

For good or bad - I think it is mostly bad - we have a two-party system.  I believe the Republican party, at least in its modern incarnation, is on the way out.  Its base is already split between managerialists and what we call the Tea Party - which is to say, limited government Constitutionalists - while the Democratic party drifts determinedly Left.  But for the time being, the GOP is the game in town.  When the ChiSox and the Braves are playing in the World Series, everybody loses no matter who wins, but the games still get played.  (Insert your own most hated teams to achieve the desired effect.)

Now, maybe the time has come to step out of the game.  Maybe we are looking at the Black Sox, and an accounting must be made.  There is only one problem with taking that line now.  It is far too late in this cycle to form any alternative scheme, short of getting a Medal of Honor winner - or other person who simply cannot be ignored - to run.  Is this happening?  Does Rev. Wilson have the clout to make that happen?  If the litmus test was the immoral mainstreaming of the Republican party line as he makes out, then the alternative plan should have been begun the moment the returns revealed McCain won the last primary - or before.  Say, somewhere about the time the first Bush reneged on taxes.  Pick an event you dislike.

The saying runs that offering criticism is easier than offering solutions.  Filling a pointless dot in on a ballot is even easier.  Nevertheless, if you want to turn down what appears to be the only viable candidate, it is, in my opinion, incumbent on the one going outside the system to have an alternative plan.  Rev. Wilson, as far as I can tell, has no plan.  He has decided that Romney is not moral enough to vote for - I wonder what he would make of the apostle Paul's advice with regards to the emperor Nero? - and that is that.  Whom he will actually vote for, I do not know: he, I would guess, does not know either.

In summary, Rev. Wilson is trying to make into a moral judgment something that is a practical problem.  I am not saying there are not moral issues at stake.  Obviously there are.  What we are looking at is application of the morals.  That there are no good solutions at present is as obvious as the problems.  To plagiarize or at least appropriate Aquinas, one of the conditions of a just political policy has to be that it actually stands a chance of working.  Electing Romney might happen; Romney elected with a competent and responsible Congress as well would likely be reasonably effective; Romney elected with another overspending farce of a Congress might be willing to pull a Coolidge and start vetoing things.  Electing [unknown] will not happen in today's media climate; even a competent and responsible Congress will clearly get nothing done in the face of a re-elected Obama's intransigence.

I, for now, unless I am persuaded to do something else, am planning to vote for Romney.  I do not trust him; I do not trust power; and I think the important thing is Congress, anyhow, since they pass the laws (though things like that goofy HHS mandate should be alerting us that not everybody thinks so, and by "not everybody thinks so" I mean "President Obama thinks he can just issue orders which amount to law", which is why a second term in office could end in more disaster than we have seen already).

The Hard Heart of Conservatism

"...If there were a king over us all again and he sought the counsel of a mage as in the days of old, and I was that mage, I would say to him: My lord, do nothing because it is righteous or praiseworthy or noble to do so; do nothing because it seems good to do so; do only that which you must do and which you cannot do in any other way."

- the advice of Ged the Archmage to the future king Arren in Ursula K. LeGuin's The Farthest Shore

The great rhetorical Achilles' heel of conservative reasoning is that almost by definition it subscribes to the aphorism of some supposed sage, "If it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change."  By trivial example this can be shown an untenable philosophy if subscribed to as a Kantian imperative.  If I have by habit drunk a glass of red wine each night with dinner, there is still no harm in drinking a glass of white, or shocking all traditionalists whatsoever by sampling the hard cider, or even abstaining from alcohol altogether.  The conservative therefore who defends the current status quo, whatever it may be, finds himself faced with trying to explain away particular supposed injustices for which a progressive (no matter when or in what form the progress is advocated) purports to have a solution; the conservative who argues against measures already implemented in the name of progress finds himself arguing for a hypothetical - a tricky proposition at best - or else dismissed as nostalgic, no matter how accurate his analysis of the problems brought on by the newfangled ideas.

But despite the rhetorical difficulties, the wonder of the human condition is that life goes on: sometimes better, sometimes worse; sometimes with more variation and sometimes with less; sometimes with tragedy and sometimes with wonder.  All the brilliant policies of all the brilliant men brought together in all the superlative conferences and committees in the world (quite often, I must confess I find them, summing to far less than the total of the parts) have not managed to account for the mysterious ways in which humanity moves.  To take but one example, economists of great renown are reduced either to noting the obvious facts of life - that I can charge a higher price for Chinese silk than for American wool, or that a man who can write makes in general more than one who cannot - or to propounding the most absurd theories - as when they suggest a government with no actual money and a vast debt can improve a nation's status by borrowing still vaster sums of money.  (If by some miracle - which I doubt - that last is accurate, the absurdity of the theory is not reduced, but the absurdity of the world may be greater than we like to admit.)

All of the evidence suggests that we have very little idea what we are doing when we attempt to alter things, that it is easier to disrupt normal lives than to improve them intentionally, and that the most unfailing of natural laws, outside of the law of gravity, which attends human activity is the one of unintended consequences.  All of this I take as evidence supporting the presupposition of modern so-called conservative thought: that the government should do nothing that is not necessary.  The difficulty of course is that it is hard to tell what is necessary; it is harder still to restrain humanity from attempting much more.  Any fan of baseball recognizes the sinking feeling that arrives when you realize that some journeyman outfielder with half a bat is determined to swing for the bleachers rather than go through the trouble of working the count.  Of course he occasionally comes through, but most of the time - there's the dejected walk back to the dugout after the third strike, or the half-hearted jog down the first base line as the ball floats into the night sky for an easy fly ball out.

This is all to say that when I call myself a conservative I mean that I start with the self-evident proposition that the government does not in general know what it is doing or what the sum of the consequences will be; I draw the conclusion that it is best to restrict the government.  This results in the conservative saying to the anonymous man in pain, "I do not know what it is best to do for you; I certainly do not know whether what is good for you is also good for your friend down the street; therefore I refrain from issuing directives."  The liberal may or may not agree with the premise; however, he says, as allegedly FDR said, that doing anything about a problem is better than doing nothing; that it even makes more sense to try a bunch of things at once and hope some of them work.  The conservative restricts government because government is human and therefore fallible; the progressive tries to work through government because government has power and therefore the possibility - which most progressives see as a likelihood, if not an inherent tendency - to do good.

The conservative view then ends up seeming clearly the more cynical, the less (with apologies to Bush II) shallowly compassionate, the more, as I titled the post, apparently hard-hearted.  And yet, it is also more realistic: all of the programs and redistributions of empowered government have not ended poverty, or reduced familial traumas, and there is no evidence to suggest they ever will.

So we return to necessity.  (I am coining a word: I am a necessistist.)  What is necessary?  There we can begin a debate; but at the moment we do not have such a common starting point.  We have a progressive movement advocating the use of power "for good" and then the doing of anything that seems to be a good idea; and a reactionary conservatism, feeling itself under pressure, retreating even past its foundations to the (almost equally absurd) point of fighting to do an actual nothing.

You Are Taking My Money

Or, "Well, not that different I guess."

One of the things I find most perplexing about the recent HHS debacle is how, after an absolute minimum of pull-back by the administration, most liberals I know went right back to the "oppressed women" screed, despite the fact that objectively (as opposed to formally or technically) nothing has changed with regards to the issue of freedom of religion.  To forestall some comments, yes; I posted before saying I found the manner of the legal protection of religious freedom potentially problematic, logically speaking.  I also added subsequently that intentionally and contextually, it would be hard to improve on the amendment as written.  And even if I did find it objectionable, the fact is that it remains the first law of the land (and favorable to me), and so should not be run over roughshod by a bureaucracy empowered by an (itself probably unconstitutional) law - much as I, despite the significant amounts of alcohol consumed in my life, and the absurdity of most US drinking laws, still would do my best to stay within those laws.

But let us pretend for a moment that the Health Services contraception mandate was not opposed on the basis of any religious objections or Constitutional concerns.  Let us pretend that some of the forms of contraception and infanticide covered by it do not touch on any vexed moral questions - and however clear your own opinion, what else are we supposed to call, politically speaking, an issue where half the country disagrees with the other half?  Let's say, for the sake of argument, that I don't even object to what you are doing myself and am just being a mean old Scrooge.

I still get a say in the law.  I can still object, with perfect justice, to something I dislike.  "How so?" you scream in outrage.  "It's my body!" Well, of course it is.  I don't care what you do with your body.  (I mean, obviously, within limits.  I don't want you and your body to kill me, or steal from me, or... I could go on for a while.)  But the part I get upset about is when you try to use my money to do something I don't want to happen.  Oh, it's not my money?  It's just a government handout?

Where do you think the government get the money?  That's right, me - and a bunch of other people.  (And you - but if you're just spending "your share", why does the government need to have it in the first place?)

So in conclusion - forget you and your panicking about "rights" you need somebody else to pay for.  Your rights are not in danger.  No one is trying to tell you you can't do it yourself.  But you are taking my money, and I don't want you spending it like that.  I need exactly zero justification beyond that to present a perfectly reasonable objection.

Putting the Worst Face on It

Or, I promise to write about something else next time.

As I have made clear recently, of the major candidates for President of the United States beginning in 2012 - which I currently estimate as current president Obama, and challengers Romney, Paul, and Santorum - I am most sympathetic to Santorum, with Paul running a close second and Romney a distant third.  Practically this matters very little at the moment as I am not registered with any party affiliation at all, but there it is.

The reasons for my attraction to Paul and dislike for Obama should be clear to anyone reading this blog; I will not go into them in detail here.  Romney I distrust as a consummate politico, though I have little objection to his current "face".  Why Santorum?  There are three main reasons.

In the first place, I agree in large part with Santorum's presuppositions and, unsurprisingly, also most of his political conclusions.

In the second, he is of all the candidates - and this includes Paul - the one most open about what he believes and has done.  Even if I disagreed with him substantially, I could respect him for that, as I hold Biden or Nader in relatively higher regard than our current actual President, given what I know of them.  Santorum is the only candidate about whom I can confidently say that the reasons for voting for him are the same reasons as those for voting against him.

And in the last place, Santorum is the candidate most maligned and misrepresented both in the mainstream press and by my recent favorite whipping boys, the internet liberals.  After my last post, I wanted to let the subject drop, but then the ugly side of uncivil discourse raised its head again.

I have The Daily What in my feed for a number of reasons - tech stuff, nerd news, cool videos of Messi, random trivia - but when it comes to political discourse they exemplify the failures of the collective liberal internet.  Here is the post in question.

Let's look through what this supposedly informative post does to Santorum.  It takes little analysis to conclude that the entire post is made from a viewpoint of supporting Obama.

First, the graphic presents a good picture of Obama and a bad one of Santorum.  (Thus my headline.)  We like to think superficialities like that don't matter, but we know they really do make a difference.

Second, Santorum's positions are given either the worst possible spin, or misrepresented entirely.  Look:

• "Rape victims should make the best of it," is what is quoted.  This is part and parcel of the steadfast refusal to admit the humanity of unborn children, on which point myself and others have said so much as to make further commentary here fruitless.  But not even a tiny effort is made to understand Santorum - the poster is only interesting in discrediting him to like-minded people.
• "Free prenatal testing leads to more abortions," is, I am forced to assume by the tone of the post, held up for ridicule.  Yet we live in an age where "sex-selective abortion" is the new big PC worry, and where mothers are encouraged to abort "defective" or handicapped children.  How exactly is Santorum wrong on this one?
• "Contrary to the Constitution, the separation of church and state should not be absolute," - oh wait, I just wrote about that.

To review, a la fact checkers: the three positions mentioned are, for the first, presented with bias; for the second, Santorum's position is factually correct; and for the third, he is being provably misrepresented.

Now it is important in civil discourse to be as accurate as possible and - perhaps more importantly - to assume the best when possible.  Thus I largely keep silent on the record of Obama's administration.  But I am losing patience, and feel called on to demonstrate what could be done.  If I wanted to apply an "internet conservative" approach to the President, I would discuss in detail at least the following two things, which - unlike the attacks on Santorum - are beyond disproof.

• The administration itself, if not Obama himself, is fundamentally dishonest.  The Obamacare package was rushed and bullied through Congress and we still don't know the half of it; bad enough, but that is politics.  Worse, the package was reputedly passed on the back of an executive promise to issue an order mandating protection for those not wanting to be forced to pay for abortions: even if not, the Constitution and all of American law is rife with such protections.  Obama still has not, to my knowledge, given such an order, and in fact - well, you've maybe heard of the HHS mandate which is both diametrically opposed to the alleged promise and in clear defiance of American traditions.  His so-called compromise is anything but.
• The administration has made investments - in, most notably, Solyndra - driven by ideology, cronyism, or sheer bad judgment.  Meanwhile, such economic progress as has been made has been made in the interval while the freshly reinvigorated Republicans in Congress have tied the administration's hands to prevent any of the neo-socialist bailouts that didn't help the mess in the first place (thanks Bush - or Keynes?  FDR?).  And the lesson goes unlearned by either Democrat bigwigs or the administration itself, while the Republican candidates, noticing facts and listening to constituents, are all doubling down with promises to continue the approach and in fact go farther.

You may justly say that I am clearly biased myself.  Very good - I admit it.  I admit it blatantly and without shame.  In case you have not figured this out yet: in the modern American political continuum I count myself - however inaccurate the name is objectively - as a conservative.  What you cannot demonstrate - and I will publicly correct myself, on this blog or wherever else you may comment, if you can demonstrate it - is that anything I have said here is factually incorrect.  If I have accused someone incorrectly, I will not only correct myself but apologize.

Bring it.

Did Santorum Just Disqualify Himself?

It is being trumpeted by the internet liberals everywhere that Santorum is just confirming his dedication to turning America into a theocracy.  Take this:

"I don't believe in an America where the separation of church and state are absolute," he told 'This Week' host George Stephanopoulos. "The idea that the church can have no influence or no involvement in the operation of the state is absolutely antithetical to the objectives and vision of our country...to say that people of faith have no role in the public square? You bet that makes me want to throw up."

Now Santorum's use, as a Catholic, of "the church" is troubling.  It brings to mind images of medieval Roman triumphalism.  On the other hand, let's go find the linked ABC transcript and see what the context is.  Ah, he continues:

This is the First Amendment. The First Amendment says the free exercise of religion. That means bringing everybody, people of faith and no faith, into the public square. Kennedy for the first time articulated the vision saying, "No, faith is not allowed in the public square. I will keep it separate." [quotes added] Go on and read the speech. "I will have nothing to do with faith. I won't consult with people of faith." [again] It was an absolutist doctrine that was abhorrent at the time of 1960. And I went down to Houston, Texas 50 years almost to the day, and gave a speech and talked about how important it is for everybody to feel welcome in the public square. People of faith, people of no faith, and be able to bring their ideas, to bring their passions into the public square and have it out.

Well that's not so bad, is it?  I get a say, the Muslim across the parking lot gets a say, the atheist down the road gets a say - sounds pretty much like the American ideal Santorum is defending.

Here is a newsflash: this should not be surprising to anyone paying attention to Santorum except the ones already determined to shout him down because he is openly religious.  Is his position as a Catholic antithetical to everything Kennedy presented himself as, as someone who said faith does not matter?  Yes, yes of course.  But then, Kennedy was hardly a moral exemplar - do we want to make him our model?

But the article I cited quotes Jefferson, citing him against Santorum as follows:

...I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should "make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.

A very minimal knowledge of history will be sufficient to dismiss this as a counter-argument.  The worry at the time of the Founding was the use of state power to oppress dissenting religions.  Certainly a state church - as in England - could provide the excuse.  Certainly a "universal" church, as the Roman Catholic was claimed to be over Spain, could provide the incentive.  But the drive of the amendment in question was hardly to abolish belief, but to protect it.  It is noteworthy that the state churches of the States were in no wise disestablished by the Constitution - merely the case was made that in the new united country, a federal state church was beyond a laughably bad idea.  Maryland was Catholic, Massachusetts officially Puritan, Pennsylvania tolerant, New York still Dutch and reformed, or else Anglican, but mainly cosmopolitan, Rhode Island dissenting but free.

Further amendments and the flow of history abolished these State establishments or let them gently into the night, but to suggest the Constitution or the Founders were against religious influences in toto is absurd.  This is the context Jefferson spoke from: one in which the greatest fear was a religious establishment forbidding other public religious expression.  Would they have looked with any greater favor on a "secular establishment" being permitted to dismiss religion from the public square instead?  This is what Santorum is protesting against: the movement over the last century to put religion in its place and dismiss its expressions from politics and public functions.  What we saw with the Kennedy candidacy, what was then a lingering anti-Catholicism which forced a (badly behaved and mostly nominal) Catholic to all but publicly disavow his faith, we now see as a general anti-religiosity.  Are you inclined to doubt this?  Consider, Santorum cannot even point this out, state this hypothesis without being quoted out of context and vilified.  I see your fears of so-called "theocracy", manufactured without context and with prejudice, and raise you public discrimination (however extra-legal) again religious opinion.

Infanticide and the Pater Familias

If every child conceived and then killed by abortion had been allowed to live another year before being murdered, not only would the epidemic of infanticide which already exists be essentially unchanged in its character, the moral stakes would be clear to all, beyond muddlement.  We know better than to kill six month old children.  We know that even in infancy the nature of a person - that he or she is a person - does not change.  To question this seems absurd: am I unable to be identified with myself in college?  In highschool?  As a five year old?  I have pictures, memories, of all those times, and so do many who know me.  Why then can I not reasonably identify with my unborn self?  (I have pictures of that too.)  As a young adult, my rights go unquestioned: but go back far enough in my life, and I have people telling me they mysteriously vanish.

When?  Oh, um... well, definitely sometime before, um... let me get back to you on that one.  I have a partial-birth abortion advocate on line two and my argument feels kind of queasy right now because I don't quite know how to draw a definite line between my much more civilized opinion and whatever he wants.

In short, the denial of the personhood of the unborn person is arbitrary: while cloaked in sometimes valid-seeming babble about viability and the survival (to take the highest the case is put) of the mother*, these serve merely to obscure the issue.  That issue is that a person, a unique human being, is  under certain conditions - which they can not, as a criminal could, be held responsible for - considered liable to the whims of another person in all things, even on the question of life and death.

This is not consistent with the developed theories of natural law morality as put forth either by Christian culture or the Enlightenment, which both insist on the universality of human rights, whether considered God-given and obvious or merely patterns that can be deduced.  As far as I know they are not consistent with any such theories of universal morality.  Whether or not such other constructions provide justifying exceptions is beyond my knowledge; that such exceptions, if they exist, are not logically consistent I am confident.  (And in fact, a double-standard exists legally: while maintaining a bizarre "right" to kill a child outright, various products, most notably alcohol and tobacco, carry warnings against risks to the unborn child.  Obvious morality cannot be brushed so easily out of our consciousness.)


What might serve to justify abortion is an ancient principle long since rejected in theory: we might recognize it best in feudalism or the rights of the pater familias.  In either case, a power of life and death was given up in many cases to a person with some legal responsibility over or for others.  This aspect of feudalism - like many others - is seen as backward and barbaric by most modern commentators, but it is the Roman custom which really draws their ire, as an example of subjugatory patriarchy.

Yet under what other logic can you justify the common refrain, "Leave my body alone!"?  A moralist railing against the capricious whims of the patrician slave-owner or concubine-keeper would be met equally vehemently by an appeal to the custom and to the fact that slave or woman was dependent on him for such well-being as he or she had, and therefore was subservient to him - thus ignoring equally with the abortion advocate the fact that another human is affected by his decisions.

In case you have not yet noticed where I am going with this, let me state my thesis plainly: a justification of abortion can logically only be that of the hypothetical justification of the worst excesses of any other time when some people have power over others by accident of culture or nature.  It is nothing more or less than the justification of power: I have power to do this, therefore I may.

* It is an unfortunate fact that it may sometimes be necessary to take measures to save one person's life, measures by which another person must die.  Where the line lies in medical ethics I am not prepared to dispute, but it is obvious that this is not the situation I am addressing.  Exceptions can be made to a negative: it is very difficult indeed to make exceptions to a positive, as the legal strategists trying to limit abortions bit by bit have found.

Political Narrative

Various Democratic outlets – most obnoxiously the "Barack Obama" profile on Facebook – have recently been touting the idea that Obama has turned the economy around and created jobs.  Based on what I remember of news reports, if I were a Republican politocrat, this is what I would be trying to sell as the 'real story':

Bush and Obama followed conventional wisdom in giving huge stimulus payments out (have to admit to Bush involvement, or anything you try to sell will be hammered flat by the media, never mind the Democrats; but emphasize that no one except hard-line conservatives objected) with a net result of approximately nothing, and huge overpayments of corporate bonuses and so forth.  (Drag in the recent bad investments of the Obama administration to strengthen the point.)  Obama also passed huge spending bills that went so far past the point of common sense that the American people had enough and voted the legislature full of Republicans.

With Republicans in office, they've squashed spending bills, refused to pass exorbitant budgets (and only passed enough for the government to get by).  With the market left alone, now we are on the road to recovery – and the only challenge left to overcome is the effects of the implosion of the similarly overspent European zone.  Emphasize the difference in Republican policy; emphasize the similarity between the Euro-crisis and what Obama wanted.  By all means do not pass another stimulus yourself at this point or your talking point is gone (and in all likelihood the recession extends, but that is an economic point rather than a political one).

Would this narrative hold up to a rigorous vetting?  I am honestly not quite sure, although I think it reflects broadly the actual outline of events over the past few years – and at all events it is more plausible to common sense than the Democratic or any other big government platform.  Granted, accepted "wisdom" does not match common sense on this one (spending your way out of a recession is directly opposed to the principle of not spending more money than you have).

The Stupidity of Abortion

The thing that irritates me most about the self-righteous pro-abortion crowd, who somehow want us to identify the killing of unborn children as an essential part of "women's rights", is their near-complete disregard for reality.  The average pro-abortion liberal, who plans to vote for Obama no matter what because all the Republican candidates are pro-life, takes a stand as though he recognizes in himself the second coming of Gandhi or MLK Jr., while it would be more accurate to assign him the moral and philosophical stature of the hidebound slave-owner refusing to vote for "abolitionist" Lincoln – and perhaps even less scientific credibility than that fine hundred-fifty year old gentleman.

He, after all, at least had a centuries-old belief in "inferior races", apparently borne out by the obvious superiority of his culture.  The modern advocate of "abortion rights" is forced to steadfastly ignore everything the human race has ever known about the conception and growth of children in order to make any sort of case.

Of course, I am assuming that the killing of human beings is wrong.  If that is indeed so, as we almost all believe, the case for abortion breaks down from the beginning.  Attempts to avoid the vise founder on the fact that any requirement for humanity conceivable beyond simple physical humanity depends on judgment.  When a practical authority of one group to judge another as a lesser party is established, the precedent renders a free, much less a moral, society untenable.  If, on the other hand, morality is non-existent in any kind of objective form; if the "right" to abortion really is merely a social preference, a convenience, then its supporters have no case to make against those who would rather ban the practice, except mob opinion.  A popularity contest, if you will.

Speaking of popularity contests, the presidential candidate Rick Santorum has been roundly criticized for his stance on abortion, as he is willing to deny its validity even in cases where pregnancy is a result of rape – and more controversial still, in cases where the mother's life is in danger.  Yet the absurdity of the spectacle should be obvious: people willing to kill or let be killed hundreds of thousands of children are protesting that someone might die.  Santorum at least makes it clear that he knows what he is advocating: the average abortion advocate wanting to crucify him displays a complete ignorance of the reality being debated.

We start, as I said before, with the assumption that killing another human is wrong in and of itself.  We may admit, if pressed, that certain situations may necessarily justify, or perhaps excuse, killing: self-defense, perhaps; or the punishment of a murderer or rapist.  Yet the run of the mill advocate of abortion does not even go so far as to admit that abortion involves death: facts are ignored.  The argument given is not often that the death of an infant is the lesser evil (though this argument seems at least plausible in the "mother's life" scenario – no doubt why it is the focus of the abortion activist who could clearly get no logical traction elsewhere).  No: the normal argument is that it is not our business, a defense many wife-beaters would no doubt also like to have applied to them.  Those who come closest to admitting the inherent evil still hedge, talking about how killing the child is better than forcing it to live in poverty and misery (the programs these same people tend to advocate to relieve poverty and carefully shield people from misery are apparently not applicable to babies and mothers), which brings us right back to one part of humanity deciding another part should be deprived of rights.

If the mainstream apologist for abortion would admit to the truth – that a human being is killed – and still say they considered it acceptable, we would all know what the stakes were.  Instead, they ignore the facts and the big picture, and end up looking ignorant – either deceived or self-deceived.

In Which I Become the Professor Kirke at Length

I am seeing a bothersome trend in recent conversations with liberal friends.  Today – the back-breaking straw that provoked this post – someone was expressing a desire to move to not-the-USA – a typical election year sentiment expressed by worried people – if Santorum was elected as president.  The stated reason?  He is an extremist.  The nature of extremism?  That he thinks all contraception should be illegal.  I seriously fear someone has conflated personal belief with likely legislative agenda.  The position of the Catholic church is well known; I have not heard Santorum make any motions towards trying to impose that on the USA by law.  If he has said such things, I apologize for my skepticism.

At any rate, at face value the lack of perspective embodied by that complaint is stunning.  I noted that Santorum, even if he did try to ban contraceptives, would get nowhere; the objection was dismissed.  But consider: the issue is obviously an unreality in the political climate, and I doubt he could persuade even half of the Catholic Republican congressmen to get behind such legislation.  Even bans on the most heinous forms of abortion have been fought tooth and nail: to attempt to replicate Catholic doctrine in secular law would quite likely result in an attempted impeachment on grounds of gross overreach or something.

If, as I instead suspect from conversations with others, this was nothing more than a polite way of complaining that Santorum is pro-life and against abortion, then any of the Republican candidates – except Governor Johnson, if he is still (however technically) in the running – are equally "extreme", and so are something like half the people in the United States.  Which is of course another topic, and other people have said in so many words that this is the one reason they could not vote for a Republican candidate who would, at the very least, not veto anti-abortion legislation.

The counter-attack, the fact that Obama's agenda has been on the whole quite leftist, tends also to get nowhere.  If you take that tack, then either "leftist" gets defined in global terms, and Obama's policies end up looking center-ish; or the right is labeled "extreme" and discounted... and Obama's policies end up being the only thing "legitimate" so how can they be extreme themselves?  For an example of common reasoning: Obamacare was a good thing; the Democrats lost seats because of the Tea Party; but there is nothing reasonable to complain about; therefore, the Tea Party are dangerous idiots – and in the worse cases of logic-failure, people end up thinking that the fiscal-responsibility wing of the Republican party (which is what the Tea Party, on the whole, is) can be discounted entirely in the political calculus.  These are not the worst examples of inability to add two plus two and get four that I have seen.  The connection between the passage of the (deeply flawed) healthcare bill and the almost immediate success of the Republican party is not made or ignored.  For a party that by and large professes to practice relativistic ideology, the overall tone of opinions on other parties' views is incredibly dismissive when not downright incoherent and pleased with themselves for being ignorant of their opponents' supposed ignorance.

On Identifying as a Conservative

Chesteron once wrote, in a line which ought to be famous, that he spent a part of his life as a Socialist – this was the era of the Boer Wars – mainly because the alternative was not being a Socialist, which was worse.  Somewhat ironically, now that Socialism is the order of the day in much of the Western and Westernized world, I find myself adopting a similarly uncomfortable position politically: I call myself a conservative, because the alternative is not being a conservative.

Truth be told, my conservatism rests on two main tenets, with perhaps a third.  In the first place, I believe abortion is wrong; in the second, I believe in fiscal responsibility, which is to say I believe that governments, much like everybody else, should not spend money that they don't have; and last, I believe in the rule of law – or to be less approximate, I believe we are bound by law.

To believe abortion is wrong is not something I see any way to open to debate.  A fetus, which is to say an unborn human, is a unique human being, speaking scientifically.  Any consistent structure of human rights, whether inspired by religious or logical considerations or both, falls apart if a human being can be denied those rights without personally forfeiting them by evil action.  Even cases where there are no options, the "health of the mother" argument – these cannot be viewed as anything more than the lesser of two evils, much like a war.  I would be more open, perhaps, to other liberal arguments if there were any significant lobby of otherwise political liberals willing to denounce this murder.

The second tenet is similarly not really open to debate.  To live perpetually in debt is a recipe for disaster.  True, conservatives have been not much less culpable in the realm of government over-spending, but they have been somewhat less culpable (or perhaps liberals have been more culpable, would be a more accurate phrasing) and tend to at least pretend that it matters.  If only to satisfy their electoral bases.

Finally, I believe that laws are binding – and the basis of the United States' laws in the Constitution.  Progressive liberalism has stretched and bent and now quite often largely ignores the limits of that document, as populism turns more and more to the center for handouts, and the lower federated governments are themselves largely quite content to let such expansion go unchecked.  Even if progressive socialism were an ideal we should aim at – which I admittedly do not think is the case – it is not one that has been brought in honestly.  It would take a distortion of ideas and ideals and history to make out the Constitution as a modern progressive document.

This is not to say that I identify unreservedly with all "conservative" causes.  To take one example, I tend to think that the United States is currently overextended militarily.  Consider, for example, the quite long listing of our military bases.  But there are mitigating factors: how many of these bases date from the Cold War?  And if the US had not maintained a Western military threat then, who would have done it?  Certainly our fair share of military actions and then some were mishandled, from the Korean War on down.  Next question: how would withdrawals affect political equations across the world?  Are there threats a US presence reduces, and if so who would replace us?  It is a tricky question, although it ought to be answered.

But on the initial three factors listed, the progressive liberals seem to stand consciously against them, and for want of a better identifier, I have to say, "I am a conservative".

The Internet Liberal

I used the term "internet liberal" on facebook yesterday; a friend said he'd be interested in reading a further elaboration on the coinage.  Since I have a blog, this post was pretty much inevitable.

At the most basic, the internet liberal is simply a liberal who is on the internet.  It goes further than that, in that most of the internet which is not specifically dedicated to ideology is nonetheless dominated by at least quasi-liberal social mores.  Some of this is simply demographics, I suspect: conservatives seem, on the whole, more liable to limit their children's internet time, and thus on the whole I suspect conservatives grow up to have less of an attachment – and less of a presence – on the computer.  (The major exception seems to be in the political sphere, as especially demonstrated by the various right-wing blogmedia groups.)

These habits and expectations are, roughly, tolerance as defined by the modern left wing, and a mostly unquestioned acceptance of social democratic political ideals.  Europe is everybody's favorite place on the internet; America is an ignorant backwater.  Insulting homosexuals (or calling them wrong, or even asking the obvious question, "So wait, if you guys get 'married', which dude is the 'wife'?") is a major offense, as is, quite often, insinuating there might be actual physical differences between men and women when it comes to achieving careers (or on other liberal-sensitive issues).  Abortion is mostly accepted without question and any questioners abused with the usual nonsense about "women's reproductive rights" (to immediately deny the child a chance to ever reproduce).  Religion, especially Christianity, is assumed to be an enemy of science.  In short, the usual denizen of the internet is practically a left-wing stereotype: Occupy Wall Street is mostly viewed as well-intentioned (even when actual methods and results are questioned) while the Tea Parties were roundly mocked.

I exaggerate, a little, in that in most cases the conservatives are at least allowed to have their say, as long as they don't seriously transgress these bounds of liberal taste.  But in short, the liberal on the internet tends to view the argument as over, left-wing progressivism as a clear winner, and anyone who disagrees as the person who is really being "tolerated".

The irony, of course, is that the internet in its modern incarnation is, in most of the world, a shining example of practical conservative laissez-faire policy at work – and where it isn't, or where those liberties are threatened, the internet mobilizes  and complains and spreads the news.

True, the necessary infrastructure is provided by others, by ISPs and webhosts, but as government analogues go, they do pretty much nothing beyond keeping things running while you pay your taxes, I mean bills.  Most importantly, when contrasted to the social democratic government ideal, regulation is practically nonexistent – notoriously, even various illegal materials (either immoral or violating, say, copyright law) are freely available and not hard to find.

If you questioned one of these internet liberals and pointed out this contrast, I suspect the usual response would be something like, "But in the end, the internet doesn't really matter, nobody's life is ever going to be at stake because of something I write on my blog".  It's a good point, as far as it goes – but confident behind that objection I suspect it will be almost impossible to get them to listen to the one point the conservative movement keeps trying to hammer home: there is no – none, zilch, nada, zero – proof that the liberal social democratic regulatory state actually improves things overall even when the outcome does matter (for a thorough exploration of this, see Amity Shlae's book The Forgotten Man).

The internet as an example of a contrary model working (even as a limited test case) still hasn't made a dent in the indoctrinated liberalism of these people.  That's why I talk about the "internet liberal": they're the one class of liberal who really ought to know better, and do know better when it comes to their private hobby horse (the internet), but they refuse to see beyond that.

The Mud-Slinging Will Bring Down Perry in 3... 2... 1...

If you haven't seen this ad yet, watch it now so you have some idea what I'm talking about:

If you don't feel like watching the 30 seconds, here's the beef: Perry says, in almost precisely as many words, that something is wrong in America when homosexuals can serve in the US military openly, but Christian children can't openly celebrate Christmas in schools.  Let's get the obvious out of the way first: in the current media climate, this was an absolutely suicidal ad to run: even if it somehow won the governor the primary election, after that MSNBC or somesuch would just loop this 24/7 and Obama wouldn't even have to campaign.

So on to the more pertinent question: what exactly is wrong with what he said?  Imagine if he had instead said any of the following were heinous:

"...that Christians can serve openly in the military, but gay teens have to worry about bullying in schools."  Media darling.

"...that gays can serve openly in the military, but Muslims have to worry about discrimination."  Again, mad media props would be forthcoming.

"I'm gay, but I think it's absurd that we have convinced the military to let us serve openly while Christian kids have to worry about not being allowed to pray."  The mainstream media – I guess – would be dumbfounded.  Sort of like they ignore the Log Cabin and other homosexual (or women's) conservative groups.  (Note: I am not suggesting that Perry is a homosexual, if for no other reason than I try not to offend people.  This is a purely hypothetical scenario.  Why do I feel like this CYA disclaimer is necessary?)

And on the facts of what Perry said, it's really not that outrageous.  Recently courts (and the threat of the courts) have been limiting, or trying to limit, not just "official" school prayers, but prayers by anyone associated with a school – even student groups.

As for what he said about the importance of faith (especially Christian faith), we may have "moved past it" in much of the public mind but he's following a long American tradition, going back to Lincoln... the Founders... the colonists... the point is, are we now going to discriminate against a man on the basis of finding his religious faith uncomfortably real?  What's the real difference between that and discrimination against someone because we find ourselves uncomfortable around a flaming gay?

Right... religion.  Christianity is one; being gay isn't.  Which brings me to a constitutional point.  The relevant text would obviously be the First Amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

I can see several possible interpretations of this:

Historically speaking, it recognized that religion (meaning as such the various Christian sects, though the extension to other religions follows logically) is a unique category of behavior, and speech; and that given religions exist, we treat the nature of the subject with respect, but studiously avoid all legal favoring of any one religion.  (Incidentally, this renders the National Cathedral an extremely curious artifact, let alone trying to figure out which clergyperson should be allowed to officiate there.  Why do we have the thing, anyway?  Not that it's not impressive.)

A more modern interpretation suggests that religion is to be removed from the "public sphere" entirely.  Driving this are various ideas, from explicitly anti-religious sociology to a reasonable reticence in offending others to a growing casual unbelief.

However, on strict textual grounds, it would seem (and this is the third option, which is both straightforward and tolerant) that while religion is explicitly barred from receiving favored treatment, all speech is still protected – and this includes religious speech.  Which brings me back to the point I think Perry was trying to make.  We preach tolerance, especially for historically persecuted groups... but still prove intolerant of other groups.  The fact that they've been historically favored (in this country) doesn't excuse this behavior.

A secular country – assuming that's what the USA is, and we can make a plausible argument this is true at least in modernity – has to, almost by definition, regard religious speech as just another kind of speech.  To do otherwise is to either legitimize the supernatural in public affairs, or to declare itself not secular (which is to say, sticking to common things) but expressly anti-religious.

Anti-religious?  Not a reasonable option.  I would feel extremely confident in arguing that in the state of Alabama – to pick on the "Bible Belt" – far more death threats are issued each year over the Iron Bowl than over matters of faith or any discrimination "ism".  Obviously we need to ban football from schools.  Or maybe just 'Bama fans, I'm not sure.  After all, we're kicking Christian prayers out while championing idiots suing Catholic universities for not being Muslim...

Moderation, Tolerance – and Reality

A liberal friend was lamenting on facebook today the state of affairs where Newt Gingrich is a moderate.

Frankly, and as a conservative, I'd have to agree.  There's no question he fits the category reasonably well: his own views seem to be more or less in line with a conservative ideology, but he doesn't seem to be over-committed to any of them, is in many ways a "DC insider", and has proven more than willing over his political career to play ball with the big-government kooks.  Hardball, sometimes, but Verlander doesn't stop being a pitcher because no one can hit him.  When conservativism (at least supposedly) favors small government, that all makes him either a hypocrite or a moderate or perhaps both – but I'm feeling polite.

And this is one of the guys supposedly headlining the supposedly conservative Republican candidate selection?  Sheesh.

There's a simple problem with moderation: some topics simply don't allow for it.

If my family are pacifists, and your family believes in a universal draft, and we agree to "compromise" and just draft one person per family, that's not a compromise – your agenda has won in principle, and the rest, as Churchill said, is just haggling about the price.

If some crazy professor thinks we should force abortions to prevent population growth, and some priest thinks abortion is evil – occasionally a medically necessary evil to save more life, but still not a good thing – and the "compromise" is that people can kill infants if they want to, that's not a compromise: the side that thinks killing the babies is okay has won in principle, and the only question is who gets to decide who has to die.

Are we seeing the problem here?

Sure, there are issues on which compromise is possible, but in order to compromise some level of agreement is necessary.  If, for example, I think a car is worth five thousand dollars, and the dealer thinks it's worth sixty-eight hundred, we can eventually compromise, perhaps at six thousand.  But it's only possible because we both agree the car is worth something.  If I'm a Luddite who thinks cars are a deception of the devil, the car has what can only be described as negative value, and any possible sale – even if I were to frustrate the dealer so much he convinced me to buy the car for $1 – is a net win for the dealer who thinks it's worth something.

If you say you think that all violence is always wrong, and I'm in favor of executing petty thieves, but you get argued into justifying self-defense, you've lost the logical argument – only the degree is in question, not the fact of retribution.

Which is why recent politics show up as a lot of nonsense.  For example: One side – supposedly extreme – wants to stop spending money we don't have.  The other side – supposedly backed up by the ivory towers – wants to spend even more money we don't have than we're already spending.  And the supposed "compromise" positions have, at their most conservative, suggested that we should spend less money that we don't have than we're currently spending, but really there's nothing wrong with spending money we don't have… which is a net win for the people who want to spend money we don't have.

In case you've somehow missed the point to this point, here's the short version: if the choices are "all" and "not any ever", "some" is not a compromise: it's a logical victory for the side of "all" and future choices will move further and further towards "all" unless actively overturned.  Political Exhibit A?  Growth of the United States Federal government since... let's say since World War One at the absolute latest.

Occupy?

The events at the various Occupy Wall Street protests have made me realize something: I can find it hard to evaluate events objectively when I find myself either opposed to someone's opinion, or even apathetic.  The bald fact is that I have very little sympathy for the OWS folks, for any number of reasons: here are some of them.

In the first place, their grievances are, for the most part, wildly generic, and run in one of two general channels: either the rich should get less, or the poor should get more; in either case The Government should make sure something equitable happens.  (The Tea Party complaint, that the government needs to stop the "bailouts" and super-regulatory state which ends up encouraging these (often publicly-financed) bonuses), is occasionally heard even at OWS but is antithetical to their main complaints.  To illustrate: the Tea Party wants to stop bailouts, period; the OWS folks, even those concerned about the issue, are more likely to try to pass regulations making it illegal to accept bailout money.  The Tea Party would limit government; OWS, the private sector.)  As I happen to believe that less government, beyond necessity, is usually better, and I tend to think that the necessary amount of government is kind of low, ideologically I have no common ground.

In the second place, the nature of the protests has been ridiculous, and not defensible as "free speech".  Camping, as in NYC and elsewhere, is not speech.  It doesn't even fit any reasonable definition of "assembly".  Shutting down a port, as in Oakland, is not speech.  (And what exactly was the Oakland port doing wrong, anyway?)

In the third place, I find the protests – at least as covered in the media – to be disturbingly unpolitical.  There is no agenda.  There is no political organization on any meaningful scale.  There is not even a denouncement of the current political organization, beyond a few particular policy differences.  I'd prefer to deal with out-and-out communists, totalitarians, or shariaists, from an ideas standpoint.  You can't argue with, "Everybody should have food," when the proposed mechanism to make this happen is, "Somebody (meaning somebody else) should figure out how."  Which is to say, the protestors demonstrate a dependent mindset in many ways, which I find childish if not repellant.

At the same time, we are hearing reports of police brutality, in varying degrees; what is hard to tell, very hard to determine, is whether this "brutality" is being provoked – I won't say justified, but at the same time there are also reports of criminal activity (from drug use to thefts to rapes) which would demand a police presence, and I get the impression that the police are largely not welcomed.

If police – or other government force – is being employed illegitimately, this is bad and should stop.  At the same time, I'm finding that I have trouble caring, not because I think the protesters are wrong, exactly, but more because I far as I can tell their wasting time and space and media attention on ...exactly what, anyway?  As regards the protestors, I'm apathetic.